by Dan Thompson
“Any companionship?”
She shrugged. “He’s been known to keep a girl from time to time.”
“Crew?”
Davies shook her head. “Not since I came on board.”
“Oh?”
She shrugged. “I came on board with Pentice Marshall. She’s no longer here, but I think you knew her.”
Elsa nodded. “We served together years ago. Good jumper.”
“Well, our dear captain took a liking to her, but she made it clear to him that she does not like men, let alone men with big meaty paws. She told me immediately, and when the captain came at me a few days later, I told him no with pretty much the same language.”
“And the others?”
Davies grinned. “Never seen so many of my sister dragons on one ship.”
“And he accepted it?”
She shrugged. “I’m sure he knew most of us were lying. Our lead gunner, Terri Quinn, is the only lesbian on board as far as I know. I’ve never leaned much one way or another myself, but he never pressed after that. It’s been portside girls and the occasional ride-along since then. It’s been a couple of months since he brought one on board, so he’s due for another before long.”
Elsa nodded. “I see. And the jokes from the crew?”
“They happen. It’s never to his face, of course.”
Elsa considered it. She moved a salt shaker across the table with all the precision of a chess player. “And would you characterize these jokes as signs of disrespect or signs of a jovial crew?”
Davies fixed her gaze on the salt shaker. “We’re hardly jovial, but any disrespect has its limits.” She met Elsa’s eyes. “When it matters, a ship needs discipline and structure. I’ve seen to that, even if our captain takes the occasional nap.”
“Is the crew cohesive?”
“Cohesive enough for most things, but we’ve only had two real fights in the three years I’ve been on board. We did all right in the first one, but we’ve had a lot of turnover since then.”
“Gallows’s picks?”
“A couple, maybe, but mostly we take the crew we get. For all the Grizzly’s teeth, we’re not the best earning ship in the organization.”
Elsa grinned inwardly at that. Until the ship’s recent demise, that honor had been held by her own Blue Jaguar. “Does that bother you?”
“I don’t want to complain, ma’am. Yoshido gave me an officer’s berth when no one else would take me.” She sighed and looked out the porthole at the black void. “I guess I’m …”
“Bored?”
She shrugged. “I suppose that’s as good a word as any.”
Elsa nodded. She had several ideas on how to liven things up on the Grizzly. She spared a glance to the captain’s empty chair. All she had to do was trim away a little fat first.
Michael sat on the toilet, tapping his foot nervously. He was still fully dressed, but with his outer office locked away from him, the only other place to sit in his cabin was the bed. In his current situation, that only made him feel more hopeless.
He got up and paced out through his cabin and back, and then again.
Damn it. He still had no ideas of what to do. He was almost dreading Richard’s next call because then he would have to admit his failure.
He was on his third pacing circuit back into the bathroom when he saw the movement beneath the sink. He blinked a couple of times, but it really did look like a section of wall was moving, undulating like some dancer’s belly. He glanced at the rest of the wall, but the tiled pattern held steady.
For a moment, he flashed on the possibility that he was about to be flooded with some horrific back-pressure from the sludge tanks down in environmental, but that seemed unlikely. Even if another member of the crew had managed to escape and sabotage something, the water recycling seemed like an odd place to start.
Finally, he knelt down and put his hand against the wall. It moved.
He pushed on it. It yielded.
“What the hell?”
“Skipper?” It was Carlos’s voice.
“Yeah. What are you doing?”
He heard a muffled laugh. “I’m coming through the fucking wall, that’s what I’m doing.”
Michael laughed. He had been stupid. While the Sophie did not have convenient crawl spaces that could allow him to escape, one could still open up the pipe access between cabins to talk to the person on the other side.
“Can you help, sir?”
He nodded and felt foolish for it. “What do you need?”
“I’m all the way through to the access panel on your side, but I can’t back the bolts out from my side. Do you have any tools?”
He had Malcolm’s old utility knife. He fetched it and came back. “I have a knife.”
“Good. The bolts on your side should be hex heads with straight slots.”
Michael felt around the wall and traced the seam to a corner. He peeled back the covering and found the bolt. Sure enough, it had a straight slot. He started twisting it out with the blade, careful not to slip and cut anything. It was not the best tool for the job, but before long the bolt was loose enough to work it with his fingers. He proceeded to do the other three bolts, and within minutes the panel popped out into his hands.
He looked through the access space, and through a cluster of pipes, Carlos’s hand extended. “Nice to see you, Skipper.”
Michael took the hand and gave it a firm squeeze. “I must say, Carlos, you’re the best thing I’ve ever seen in the plumbing.”
“It’s good to see you too, Skipper.”
“Excellent idea going through the plumbing. I’ll have to tell Richard. He might be able to reach Winner that way.”
“You’re in contact with Richard?”
Michael nodded, but the angle he was at made his neck hurt. “He hacked the intercom and has been trying to reach the rest of the crew.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I guess you’re both full of good ideas.”
“No, it’s not that …” Carlos trailed off. “You’re sure he hacked it?”
Michael shifted to make his neck more comfortable. “Well, I’m sure I talked to him. How would he have done it if he hadn’t hacked it?”
“I don’t know.” Carlos shook his head. “I can’t believe Dieter sold us out.”
“What? You think it was Richard instead? I can’t believe that either.”
“But they were the only ones on duty last night. It makes sense it was one of them.”
Michael sighed. “Or both. Richard was the one who recommended Dieter. Hell, he found over half the crew, but I have a hard time believing they could have been planning this from the start.”
Carlos sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe neither of them are in on it.”
“It would be a tough go for the hijackers to cover both navigation and engineering with only three people. Richard, Dieter, or Vivian would be the right choices.”
“But none of them seem the type, do they, Captain?”
“No, at least no one more than the others. What about Dieter? Have you heard anything from him through the wall?”
“Not a peep. If he’s in there, he’s sound asleep.”
“Or dead.”
Carlos grunted. “I had thought of that.”
“Damn it,” he said. “I only wish I knew where we were going.”
“That I can help you with, sir. Hang on.” Carlos disappeared for a moment but then returned with a pad. He held it up to the pipes and gestured at the display. “We’ve almost doubled back to a spinward course, slightly north, about two hours past our closest approach to Ballison.”
“Can you guess the destination? And for that matter, how the hell did you log in? My pad is dead.”
He chuckled. “I figured as much. I didn’t really log in, you see. I left a monitor process running on the navigation station.”
“What?”
“Yeah, it’s … hell, I do it on every ship I serve. I like to check up on things when I�
��m off shift, but the other navigators always get pissed if I’m peeking over their shoulders, so I set up a background task on the nav station. When the sails fire up heading out of port, it opens a connection to my pad and gives me a full navigation window. It’s fairly unobtrusive, and as long as I don’t change course, no one’s the wiser.”
Michael’s mouth fell open. “So, you do have navigation control? You could change our course?”
“I suppose I could, but it would show up immediately on the navigation station and the console down in engineering. After that, they’d figure it out in five minutes and kill that monitor task.”
“Yeah, you’re right. What’s the destination?”
“I can’t quite figure. The closest thing on that vector is halfway to the Catai, maybe four or five weeks at top speed. They must be planning a course change.”
“Or they’re headed to something not on the charts. Maybe a private transfer station or another ship?”
Carlos nodded. “Yeah, probably some kind of transfer station. Ship-to-ship rendezvous in open space is pretty tricky without a decent-sized mass for navigational reference, but there’s all kinds of loose rocks out there. I know I’ve been to a few out-of-the-way spots in my days, you know, on some less reputable ships.”
Michael grinned, thinking of some of the dumps Malcolm had used. “So have I. Well, whatever it is, I don’t intend to let them get there.”
“So, what are we gonna do, sir? I’ve got my lockpicking tools, but I haven’t tested the door yet.”
“Lockpicking? That was you?”
Carlos gave him a little smile. “At your service.”
Michael chuckled. “Well, I’m damn lucky to have you.”
Carlos’s smile faltered. “Shit, Skipper, to be honest, it wasn’t luck.”
“What do you mean?”
Carlos sighed. “An old friend asked me check in on you.”
“Captain Wallace of the Johnny Rose?”
“No, actually a Navy guy by the name of Reese Powell. I think he’s actually an admiral these days if you can believe it.”
Michael blinked several times in surprise. “I’ve never heard of him, but ... Carlos, you never struck me as an old Navy man.”
Carlos laughed. “Oh, fuck that, Skipper. Me and regulations? No, I was never in the Navy.”
“Then how do you know this Admiral Powell?”
Carlos shrugged. “He’s kind of my brother-in-law, or at least he was.”
“You never told me you had a sister.”
“Oh, I don’t. I married the admiral’s little brother twenty, maybe twenty-five years ago.”
Michael tried and failed to hide his shock. “His brother?”
“Yeah, Quentin. It was doomed, of course, but it took us three years to figure out.” Carlos sighed. “Then the damn fool went and got himself killed in the war before we ever filed for divorce. Reese and I hadn’t really been all that close before, but ... you know, you lose somebody like that, and it stays with you.”
Michael tried to take in it. “So then, you’re homosexual?”
Carlos found his humor again. “Fuck yeah, Skipper. You mean you didn’t know?”
“No, I ...” he trailed off. Honestly, the thought had never occurred to him.
“Surely you’ve heard the expression ‘gay as a blue dragon,’ haven’t you?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
Carlos rolled up his sleeve and stuck his tattooed arm though the gap in the pipes. “And you never thought to ask about the ink?”
Michael looked at the tattoo again, seeing the blue-scaled dragon coiled around Carlos’s forearm. “I didn’t know that it meant anything. I mean, my father’s last cargo master was gay, and he didn’t have any tattoos.”
Carlos shook his head. “Well, I do, so I figured it was fucking obvious. But whatever, just know you’ve got a friend somewhere out there, and he asked me to see if you needed a hand.”
Michael gave a laugh. “Well, yeah, I do. I need a lot of hands.”
“The rest of the crew?”
“Yeah, but to get to them, we need time, and we’re heading for that rendezvous at a good clip.”
“I know,” Carlos replied. “It’s a terrible thing for a navigator to say, but we could really use a tach storm about now. A big one.”
Michael nodded. “And with at least one navigator unfamiliar with the ship, they’d be weaving all over the place.”
“Or plowing forward at quarter-sail. That wouldn’t be so bad either, especially if the storm had some eddies to skew us off the line. I don’t suppose those fancy tach scanners of yours can summon up something like that?”
Michael shook his head. “I confess I’m still learning what they can do, but I doubt they could … wait a minute.”
“Huh?”
“If we could only ...” Michael’s mind was racing. “How much access do you have through that thing? Can you take over the main navigation station?”
Carlos looked briefly at the pad and jabbed at a couple of options. “Yeah, I guess I could, but why? Whoever is at that thing will see what I’m doing like I was poking at it over their shoulder.”
Michael nodded vigorously and bumped his head on the bottom of the sink. “We’ll need to make some kind of distraction for the switchover, but I think we can manufacture that storm after all.”
Chapter 23
“Always make the smart choice. If it’s available, that is. Sometimes ... hell, sometimes you’ve got no choice but to be stupid.” – Malcolm Fletcher
DIETER WOKE FACE DOWN on the floor of his cabin. At first, he did not know where he was, and the pain in his head made him not want to know. The carpet against his face was rough. In fact, it was rougher than the plush hotels he liked to stay in on station. He moved his neck again, and his head exploded in pain, far worse than any hangover he had ever inflicted on himself.
He dared to open one eye, and what he saw brought it all back. His sitar lay before him, the neck snapped off at the base. The last time he saw it, Richard Mosley had been holding it wrong. Come to think of it, he had been holding it like a club.
Dieter raised his hand to his head and felt a bump on his forehead, perhaps six centimeters across. The resonating kaddu of his sitar had a matching dent the size of his forehead. He could not remember what had happened, but he could put it together. Richard had clearly attacked him with his own sitar. But why?
He rolled over, and pushed through the pain enough to sit up. Apart from the maimed sitar on the floor, the cabin was in good order. He stood, bracing himself against the wall, and walked to the door. It would not open. He pressed the button several times but only got the beep of a bad lock code.
He staggered back over to the intercom and punched in the code for the captain’s office. He got the same error buzz as the door had given him. He went down the list of other parts of the ship: bridge, environmental, engineering, galley … even Richard’s cabin. None of them worked. He stabbed his finger at the computer screen, but it did not even light up.
Whatever was going on with the rest of the crew, he could see he was on his own for now. He made his way to the bathroom and looked at himself the mirror. His forehead was red on one side and purple and swollen on the other. What he really needed was some ice, but that would be in the galley or the little sick bay. He looked at the sink. Cold water would have to do.
A few minutes later he was much more comfortable, lying on his bed with a cold, wet washcloth pressed against his forehead. The mangled remains of his antique sitar still lay on the floor.
Dieter did not know what was happening on board the Sophie’s Grace, but one thing was certain. Someone was going to pay for what had been done to his sitar.
Michael stared at their distraction, waiting in pieces for final assembly. “How bad is it going to be?”
Carlos voice came quietly through the hole beneath the sink. “Not as bad as it will look, but it’ll still sting like a motherfucker if it gets in the
ir eyes.”
“Good enough.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to do it?” Carlos asked. “After all, my door opens right into the hall, so it’s an easier throw for me.”
“No,” Michael replied. “I still have the best shot of getting it down the cross-corridor, and you know your little navigation hack better than I do.”
“Good evening, passengers,” came the voice over the intercom. It was the same one from the morning announcement. “By now I imagine you’re all getting a little hungry, so we’ll be stopping by soon with a snack. However, do not think to abuse our generosity. If you resist, you will be stunned. Plus, no food. So, think about how hungry you will be when you wake up.”
“That’s it,” Carlos said. “Remember, not too full.”
Michael jumped up, grabbed the cup from the sink and filled it with hot water. Then he grabbed the lid they had fashioned and taped it on with their active ingredient pointing down. He carried it to the cabin door just as he heard motion on the other side.
“Stand away from the door,” said the intercom. It was a different voice, and he assumed it was coming from someone in the office outside the cabin door. The warning was meaningless. There were no cameras in his cabin, so they could not know where he was. He stood square before the door, arms raised, with his hands behind his head, the cup of hot water held firmly in his right hand.
The door opened, and in a very brief moment he saw three things. First, there was a plate of food on the floor, something meaty and brown. Second, a rod extended from the plate back toward his desk where the youngest of their hijackers crouched, ready to push the food in. And third, another of the hijackers was crouched in the doorway to the corridor, half-concealed behind the door, with gun raised, pointing directly at Michael.
“I want to talk to whoever is in charge,” he demanded.
“Get back!” shouted the one with the gun.