Why were there only five crew? The master had presented his mate and engineer; the marines had rounded up the navigator and helmsman. There should have been six—as Kris and Zayterland already knew—and the logs clearly indicated six from the state of the consumables and environmental records, as Wagner recognized. Bolted, sir! His second helmsman had bolted on Qazvan—no time to engage another one. Did the lieutenant know what it was like standing watch-on-watch so many days running? Certainly, he did. Certainly he understood being shorthanded on such a tight schedule with a fragile, valuable cargo—and on and on . . .
Kris listened with half an ear and fidgeted. It was of course all a complete crock of shit. The Emirate of Ivoria looked after the traffic the Andaman slaver guilds ran through Winnecke 4 all the time. Qazvan was a Bannerman colony—clearing customs there meant nothing—less than nothing, given how much the Bannermans dealt. And no one in their right mind would be trying to peddle expensive Maxor ingredients for perfumes on a dismal hole like Outremeria. The whole ship reeked of slaver, probably literally if she were to open her visor, which she was under orders not to do. Even the vessel’s purported name, the Intrepid Fawkes, had an odor to it.
So Kris fumed and waited, waited and fumed some more. The only good thing about keeping her visor closed was that she didn’t have to worry about controlling her expression or quelling the stream of obscenities she was muttering under her breath. But Wagner, listening to the master’s prattle, nodding and trying not to repeat his questions too often, was having a rough time of it. Clearly he’d expected to catch a slaver red-handed with a boatload of sobbing slaves, ever so grateful to be rescued. Not this nervous, talkative, dandyish supposed master of a merchant vessel who seemed to have everything genuinely in order. He didn’t want to believe the stories he was hearing, but the wealth of data being dumped on him was wearing him down, especially because it all checked out.
Kris let loose another jet of invective. Sure everything’s gonna look jake, you idiot. Did they think slavers were that stupid?
At length, Chief Zayterland reported in. They had surveyed the mess just aft of the bridge—Kris had walked through it on the way here—the crew spaces along the waist and the crew’s head forward, the master’s berth right aft, and the hold. There was cargo in the hold that matched the manifests; the stamps and seals all checked out. They were still going over the engineering spaces. So far, everything was copasetic—a word Kris had never heard before. But she gathered it was not good, at least from her perspective. They couldn’t seriously be thinking of taking the oily little shit at his word?
Could they? The tenor of the room had changed since the chief arrived: the master had been looking increasingly sullen these past three-quarters of an hour; now he seemed to have relaxed slightly. That would be the case even if he was innocent as the driven snow—no, not snow dammit. What was it that Huron liked to say? Anyway, innocent. But innocent wasn’t all she thought she was seeing: there might be a gleam of triumph too. The captain had told Kris to give Lieutenant Wagner the benefit of her lights, though he hadn’t said Wagner had to ask for them, or act on them if he did. And it didn’t look like he was going to. Well, fuck it—enough was enough.
Wagner wasn’t wearing armor but he did have an ear bug, and Kris used her suit comms to ping it. “Can I talk to you, sir?” He shot her a harassed look. “Privately?” The lieutenant moved his lips in irritation but did not open them. “Maybe have the Chief take the crew back to engineering or the hold or someplace—make ‘em show her the compartments or anything.” Kris tried to make the suggestion sound helpful, not exasperated, and couldn’t tell how well she might have succeeded.
Without giving her another look, Wagner handed the tablet back to the master. “Chief Zayterland, would you kindly conduct the master and his crew to the engineering spaces and see that they give you access to all the core files and mod-recs? The records here appear to me not to match what I saw in our sensor data. Gunnery Sergeant, accompany the Chief with your section, please.”
Zayterland gave the lieutenant a sharp look and Thompson rumbled, “Against orders to leave you and the Midshipman unescorted, sir.”
“Quite so, Gunny,” Wagner replied testily. “Leave two men and carry on.”
“Aye aye sir.” He told off two men, then he and Chief Zayterland ushered the master and his crew off in the company of the other marines without another word.
Kris popped her visor with a relieved sigh as Wagner stepped over. “What is it?” His agitation made him snappishly familiar but Kris refused to take umbrage.
“They finding anything?”
“The cargo, yeah. It’s in the hold—marked and stamped and sealed. His docs are all in order. They scan as authentic too.”
“They check for hidden compartments?”
“Of course they checked, Kris!” Wagner’s eyes flicked sideways to see if either of the marines had registered the gaffe. It didn’t seem like it. He lowered his voice anyway. “Look, the chief’s an expert, okay? She knows what to look for!”
She’s not an expert on ‘flechettes’—you guys never caught one before. “I know,” Kris returned in the same low whisper. “But they’re real slick about hiding compartments on these boats.”
“How d’ya know?”
I know cuz I’ve been stashed in ‘em. Not often, just a couple of times when Trench had moved her through a port where customs wasn’t rigged. But how could she explain that to Wagner? “Umm . . . ya gotta trust me?”
“Trust you?” Wagner’s eyes darted aside again. “For gawd’s sake, you have any idea what they’ll do to me if I screw this up? If we go breaking bulkheads here and this guy really is what he says, I’ll be lucky if all they do is make me a permanent scavenger for cleaning the heads!”
“But you gotta know this is all ratshit!”
“I don’t know that at all! We’ve got nothing on him.”
Dammit! “Okay, I read that. Sorry—sir. But look—” Wagner narrowed his eyes and Kris went on before he could speak: “Call Commander Huron.”
“Commander Huron?”
“Yeah, he’s intel, not just ops. Get him to talk to these guys—review the data. Betcha he finds something.”
The lieutenant’s lips clamped down: that would be admitting defeat—that he couldn’t hack it after all. “I’ll think about it. I gotta go talk to the Chief.” He started to leave, then stopped and looked back at Kris. “Don’t do anything, alright?”
Kris bit her lip. “Nosir.”
“Okay. I’ll see what the Chief thinks.” He turned, and with one of the marines following, walked down the passageway toward the main junction that led to the hold and engineering.
Kris watched him go with her stomach working itself into a hot, tight, angry knot. This was fucked. They had to be transporting someone and she had to be prime, the way they were flying. They’d had hours to stash her and fuck the logs around, though from the way the master was acting, she was pretty sure they hadn’t expected to be run down—they’d thought they had the legs of the battlecruiser.
Which told her what? Nothing useful. Every ship had different hidey-holes. On Harlot’s Ruse they were in Trench’s quarters; it saved time and people always suspected the holds.
What was the master’s berth like on this boat? Small for sure, but . . . She tapped her helmet and nodded to the remaining marine. “The lieutenant’s pinging me. I gotta go see. Stand by here.” Then she hurried aft without giving him a chance to react. He didn’t question or follow her, but outside the hatch to the master’s berth there was another marine standing guard. They weren’t risking anything being disturbed. Made sense—but did it apply to her? She walked purposely towards the hatch.
He stopped her. “Sorry, ma’am. No one’s allowed back there.”
Shit. Her suit pinched her again and she winced. “I know. I’m not gonna touch anything. I just need to get back there for a minute.”
The marine tugged one side of his mouth into a ha
lf-grin. “Suit not workin’ right? There’s another head up forward.” So the master’s berth did have its own head. Interesting. And since he apparently thought . . .
Kris made a face. “First time I’ve had the goddamned thing on. It’s um—not fitting.”
“Can’t help you with that. Go up forward.” The grin flirted with the other side of his mouth.
She could tell he’d recognized her accent and she knew his: Maxwell, in the Inner Trifid. One Outworlder smirking at another. “I’ve been forward. No joy. Look, I’ll just be a minute, I swear. C’mon, before my teeth start floating.” Kris caught his eye and held it. “Or you want me to just drop down here and piss on your feet? Cuz if I have to—” The marine moved his jaw restlessly. Kris reached for her suit seals. “Fine, have it your way. I hope you like gettin’—”
He jerked his head toward the hatch. “A’right! Go on. Just get it done before that prick lieutenant comes back again.”
“Thanks,” Kris smiled. “You’re a winner.” She ducked past him before he could say anything else.
The master’s birth itself was almost exactly what she expected: a narrow galley-shaped space with a sleeping niche on one side—the bunk was still extended—and a table on the other, retracted, with a row of consoles linked to the bridge displays in the bulkhead and a dumbwaiter, not an actual mess port. There were a couple tall cabinets at each end and a few shallow ones up against the overhead.
What she did not expect was the head: it had a shower, and not just any shower. Most ultrasonic weightless showers had barely enough room for a single person to turn around in. This one, by that standard, was positively sybaritic: you could easily get two people into it—if they were fond of each other. You might find a shower like this on a big boat that had room and resources to burn, but it seemed distinctly out-of-place on a corvette. She knelt to examine the stall more closely.
The combat armor had a basic sensor suite: standard ESM and optical gear. The optics covered from near-ultraviolet to short-wave IR, were filterable and had up to 25X magnification. She closed her visor, activated the suite and inspected the shower walls, the hardware, the seams, the surrounding bulkheads, the deck. Nothing.
Well, that was no big fucking surprise. Chief Zayterland’s people had done the same thing and with much more sophisticated hardware. They had sounders and scanners and gawd-knows-what else. If they couldn’t detect anything, her suite sure as hell wasn’t gonna find it.
But it wrong. Just fucking wrong.
Kris sat back on her heels, thoroughly discontented. She was wasting time. That goddamn marine was gonna come back here any second. The shower was clean inside and her scan suggested it hadn’t been used in a while. She leaned in, zoomed to max, set the filters to UV and flashed the seam around the bottom. Hot damn! Was that dust deep in the minute crevice? An ultrasonic shower shouldn’t accumulate dust in the seams—unless it hadn’t been used in a long, long time.
Had this thing ever been used? Should she test it? She leaned farther in to inspect the controls. They looked perfectly normal, of course. Her gloved hand stopped short of the actuator. There was dust in that seam. She looked down. The drain. A real shower had to have a real drain. She knelt over it. Every suit of combat armor carried a plasma knife and a multi-bladed survival tool in the thigh pockets. She took out the survival tool, flipped open a flat blade and pried at the drain cover. It yielded without much struggle. The drain went down only a few centimeters before a right-angle bend. That didn’t seem right either. She shined her UV and IR lamps down the drain and snapped a composite.
Dust sparkled. Lots of dust. Dust took forever to accumulate on a starship. The shower was a fake.
She crawled out. Now all she had to do was find the releases. There oughta be two and they couldn’t be farther apart than a person could reach. The obvious place was the outside corners on the base. She felt around but her gloves were too thick. Backing up, she put her helmet to the floor and studied the corners. There was a very faint depression in each, like a mold mark. She put her thumbs against them and pressed. Nothing. She pressed and held. There was a faint hissing noise and the shower floor raised a couple of centimeters.
With a sudden shock, Kris realized she had no idea who or what was waiting down there. She scuttled back, drew her sidearm, cocked it and then, drawing a tense breath, swiftly levered the floor up, swinging her pistol into the opening.
A gasp and a muted girlish yelp. Then nothing. Heart pounding high in her throat, Kris risked a glance over the rim. There was a well below, about a meter deep, with a young girl in a light EVA suit curled at the bottom of it, both arms shielding her face. A helmet lay next to her with a couple of air bottles.
“Hey!” Kris called softly. “S’Okay. Come on up.”
The girl cowered and Kris heard a faint whimper. The suit speaker would be distorting her voice and she was still pointing a gun at her. Idiot! She opened her visor and pulled the gun back. “S’Okay,” she repeated. “Everything’s jake now. You can come outta there.”
The girl looked up—she had startling green eyes in a smooth young face, deathly pale. “S’kay?” she whimpered, her full bloodless lips barely moving.
Kris reached out a hand. “S’Okay. C’mon.”
The girl ignored her hand, regarding it with suspicion, but rolled into a crouch and eased to her feet. As her head cleared the edge, Kris heard a grinding thump from behind; the girl shrieked and dropped. Kris spun just in time to see a body squirming from a tight slot where the bunk had been—the thump was it falling to the deck—a body with a sidearm in its right hand. She got a hasty impression of a thin angular face, sallow from years on-ship, steel-gray hair cut close and heavy, sweeping eyebrows above narrow blue eyes, wide in astonishment.
“You!” he hissed. Kris slammed her visor down and swung her gun up. A flash, a terrible hammer blow that snapped her head back as she fired twice reflexively; shocking blindness. Swearing exploded, dimly heard through the bell-like ringing in her skull. Her vision came back all warped amid oscillating bands of light and dark. She made out blood streaming from a furrow down the length of his forearm, the gun wavering in his hand, his blue eyes on fire with hatred more than pain.
She fired twice more. The first shot smashed against the bulkhead; the second went right through the snarling, thin-lipped mouth, spraying teeth out the back of his head in an explosion of atomized tissue and skull fragments. Blackness overwhelmed her, and she slumped.
Yelling, banging, the crash of many boots. Someone shaking her shoulder violently. “Knock it off,” Kris swore at the distorted face—Wagner’s face, she knew, though her eyes refused to focus. Her head hurt like it was being pounded on all sides; the shaking was an agony. “She’s down there.” Kris twitched a hand at the shower stall. Wagner started to rise and Kris clutched after him. “Don’t!” she gasped through the fierce reverberation stabbing her ears. “She’s bad freaked. Get the Chief—”
She closed her eyes tight against hot waves of nausea that were surging up against the pain in her skull; cold sweat broke out on her cheeks and scalp and her hands tingled. There was the strangest feeling of unnatural weight in her lower body, and she wasn’t quite sure what her legs were doing. She heard orders she did not understand, and someone else was kneeling before her, removing her helmet—that hurt as they roughly moved her head—and peeling back one protesting eyelid.
Kris batted at the offending hand. “M’Okay. Back off, will ya?”
“Like hell you are—ma’am,” the marine grunted, brushing aside her feeble attempt to interfere. He noted the unequal pupils and the thick, slurred voice, almost unintelligible, placed an ampoule against the base of her throat and popped it. A wave of intense cold swept through Kris, seeming to erupt from her forehead and flowing down to her knees. She emitted a kind of yowl, a sound of feral protest, but the nausea was fading fast as the drug hit her bloodstream, and the pain, while still intense, had stopped its horrible ebb and flow. Her vision was s
till distorted and full of lurid electric green spots with yellow haloes around them, but at least it wasn’t doing that awful fucked-up swooping thing so much and she could feel her hands and legs again.
The marine looked into her eyes with great satisfaction and grunted. “Better. Ya don’t ever wanna puke in your armor, y’know. It’s a real bitch to clean out. Squeeze my hand.” He put his right hand in hers, and she clamped down for all she was worth. “Good.” He pulled his hand free and got to his feet with a stern warning not to try to move for at least five minutes—longer if her vision hadn’t cleared up by then—and she could expect to have a screaming headache. Once she’d been through a full scan back on the ship, they’d probably give her something for it. If the nausea came back bad or she started to have vertigo again or felt like she was going to blackout, she was to ping him instantly or he wouldn’t answer for the consequences.
Kris tried to thank him, but all she could do was mumble and he was leaving anyway. Two men were pulling the corpse, its lower face a grisly ruin, from the narrow slot behind the bunk—incredible anyone could fit back there—and putting it in a body bag. The chief must’ve gotten the girl out—she had a confused impression of people talking and stepping over her legs—and Huron was next to her. She hadn’t noticed him until now.
He put a hand very lightly on the shoulder of her armor and she reached across with her other hand and squeezed it.
“Take it easy, Kris,” he said very low. “That was a hell of a pop you took.” He held up her helmet where she could see it without moving her head. There was a spider web of cracks the size of her palm in the visor just over her right eye. If he’d thought to set his gun to fire a burst . . .
Which reminded Kris of what she’d wanted to tell Huron when she first saw him. She scanned her eyes left and right; they seemed to be alone. “Corcoran,” she told him under her breath.
“What?”
“That guy. Ravel Corcoran.”
Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks Page 28