by Dan Thompson
Captain Gallows arrived late for dinner, and as each junior officer finished their meal, he politely dismissed them. By the time he was halfway through his steak, only he and Elsa remained. Sensing some subtle signal, the steward departed as well.
“We arrive in the morning.”
“Yes, and depending on the winds, they may be getting there as we speak.”
“Good, then you can claim your prize and be on your way.”
She smiled at him. “Something like that.”
He did not return the smile. “No, precisely like that. I’m unloading some recently acquired cargo and taking on a consignment that has been cleared for resale. I expect an eighteen-hour turnaround, and when those eighteen hours are up, you will be off my ship.”
She shrugged. “I’m sure that once we rendezvous with the Sophie’s Grace …”
“No,” he cut her off. “Ship or no ship, you will be off mine at the end of our cargo loading. If the rest of your team hasn’t made it yet, your choice will be between the transfer point’s habitat locker and an emergency vacuum bag, thrown from the airlock by my own two hands.”
“I have Chessman’s authority.”
“No. You have a piece of paper from a faceless man who is not here. This is my ship, my crew, my authority. Oppose it at your peril.”
She frowned but nodded. “I see. Thank you for making it so clear, Captain Gallows. I will not question your orders again.”
“Good,” he replied. “Then you are dismissed. I expect you to spend the rest of your evening packing.”
She allowed herself a small grin. Packing, indeed.
Nick secured the end of the strap with a second square knot and gave it a tug for good measure. Winner was as secure as he could make her. He had put her into the lower-deck passenger-cargo cage and tied her to the starboard side of it with heavy-duty cargo straps rated for 15,000 newtons. Those straps were not going to give out. He had debated stretching her out flat on the deck, but he did not want to waste the time clearing out the entire locker first. Instead he had secured her ankles first and then her wrists, leaving her kneeling, held up by her arms pulling up and back. It was hardly ideal, and he knew it would likely cause circulation problems if left that way for too long, but it would do for the moment.
He had tied her dressed to get it done quickly, so now he had to cut away the clothes. He had no prurient interest in this. Rather, he knew better than to assume she had had just the one weapon. Using a pair of safety shears from his kit, he started with the pants, cutting up one leg, through the waistband, and then down the other. Underneath, he found two more knives, one strapped to the outside of her left calf, the other to the front of her right thigh. After removing them, he checked the pants again. The right-hand pocket was completely open to the inside, allowing her to reach in to that upper knife.
The jacket and shirt came next, yielding two more short blades, a pair of spiked steel knuckles, and a pair of throwing knives tucked into the back of her racerback bra. He cut the bra away to be safe but found no threat beneath it. He paused over her underwear. Looking at her wiry build now, he knew that she was the same girl he had seen fight so viciously in the ring. For that, he had some respect for her and wanted to leave her some dignity, but he also knew enough to fear her. When he had cut those away, he saw he had been right to. Tucked inside, stitched into the elastic of the waistband in back, was a tiny four-centimeter saw with a single finger-ring as a handle. It was far from lethal, but with time, it would have easily cut through these otherwise indestructible straps.
He finished it off by running one last strap around her torso, high under her arms, and pulled it back through the gaps in the cage siding behind her. It was tight enough to keep her from moving much, but it still gave enough leeway that when she woke, she would be able to stand. Her ankles and wrists were not going anywhere, but she would at least be able to remove the pressure from her shoulders and knees.
Finally, he locked the door and went over to the drive station to check their status, but there was none. The console had power, but the drive did not show ready. For that matter, the reactor did not show as being online either. He tapped out a few queries, but got only error codes.
He tapped on his headset. “Stefan, the girl is secure, but there’s something wrong down here.”
Stefan came down the stairs a few moments later, wearing a fresh undershirt and with his uniform jacket hanging loose with only his good arm in the sleeve. He looked over at Winner and grinned. He took a step closer and kicked at the metal mesh. It rattled loudly, but Winner did not stir.
“Forget about her,” Nick said. “She’s secure.”
“Well, shit. After all this, she doesn’t look so tough.”
“Tough enough,” Nick replied with a nod toward the pile of weapons he had pulled from her.
“I suppose.”
“But she’s secure for now, so get over here and look at this.”
Stefan gave it one more kick but then left the locker behind. He leaned in close over Nick’s shoulder. “Well, the drives are offline, but that’s to be expected, we’re at a dead stop.”
“It’s not just that they’re offline. It’s like they’re not there. The same goes for the reactor and the gravity pulse drive.”
“What do you mean, not there?”
Nick pulled up a longer status report and pointed to it. “It’s like they’re not installed. Or at the very least, they’re not responding.”
Stefan looked past the cargo locker to the reactor. It had a few status lights glowing on it, but they were all green. “The reactor looks fine. Is it the console, or did something happen during the down-tach?”
Nick shrugged. “I don’t know. Perry was the one down here when that happened.”
Stefan reached up to tap his headset and winced as his shoulder raised. “Damn it. Perry, come on down here.” He leaned in to look at the console more closely. “Have you tried resetting the console?”
“Not yet. Should I do that first, or do you want to wait for Perry?”
Perry wandered in, settling that question. He glanced over at Winner in her cage. “I finished my sweep. The rest of the crew is all tucked away where they belong. The kid was at the door ready for a shouting match, but nothing seems out of sorts. What’s the story here?”
Nick pointed to the console before him. “I’m not seeing either the drives or the reactor from here. Did anything strange happen during the down-tach?”
“Not really. I mean, I did it quick and sloppy, but we weren’t near any gravitational sources. I figured it wouldn’t matter.”
“It shouldn’t,” Nick replied.
Stefan frowned. “Nick, you go ahead and reset this one. Perry, you go up to the bridge and see what you can pull up on the systems console.”
A few minutes later, the outlook was grim. “I see the reactor,” Perry called, “but I don’t see the drives.”
Nick ran the queries again after the engineering console rebooted. “I don’t even see the reactor, here.”
Stefan frowned. “Then we can’t up-tach.”
Nick shook his head. “There should be some kind of alternate control panel on the sail generator itself. You know, for emergencies.”
“Well, then it looks like we’ve got ourselves an emergency. The only question is, how did this happen?” He looked back toward Winner, still lying unconscious. “Do you think she could have done it somehow?”
“I don’t know. If she went for the bridge first, then she never would have had the chance.”
“And if she didn’t go there first?”
“With Perry down here, sabotage would have been pretty tricky. Then again …”
“Yeah,” Stefan replied. “Underestimating the bitch has not been a winning strategy.”
“That’s pretty much what I was thinking.”
“Well, we’ll give her a couple of hours to wake up and then question her.”
“And in the meantime?” Nick asked.
<
br /> Stefan sighed and reached for his headset, wincing again as he raised his arm. “Perry, come on down to engineering again.” He lowered his arm and turned to Nick. “You two start looking for this emergency panel, and I’m going to get an hour or two of sleep. I’m fucking exhausted.”
“And then? You really think we can manage the sails from the auxiliary board?”
“We don’t have a choice,” he grumbled. “Between the weather, this crap with the drives, and the fact that we’re now down to one navigator, it’s going to be slow. Getting up to half-sail would be nice, but I’ll take quarter-sail if need be.” He checked his watch. “You know, if we’d only had good winds, we’d be there by now.”
“Will the Grizzly wait for us?”
Stefan growled in response. “After this much trouble, they’d damn well better.”
Chapter 26
“Enjoy the small victories when they come your way, but remember that they were small.” – Peter Schneider
MICHAEL HELD CARLOS’S LOCKPICKER in his hand. “Error mode three,” he read aloud.
“Damn,” Carlos said through the gap in the pipes. He flipped through a small paper notebook. “All right, let’s try the modes from the Catai manufacturers. Slide the side switch over to D.”
“Ok. Now key in mode, seven, three, dash, seven, six, dash, one, zero, four.”
Michael punched in the keys. He was getting the hang of it. “Now enter?”
“Yeah.”
The busy icon started animating again. “How long?”
Carlos yawned. “An hour, maybe two. Those three manufacturers must have over a hundred models between them.”
Michael stifled a yawn of his own. He was surprised at how tired he was getting after having slept away most of the day. Carlos must have been in even worse shape. “Look, you grab a nap. I’ll stay up and keep an eye on this.”
“Are you good, Skipper? I mean, can you make it?”
He nodded. “Sure thing. Besides, if nothing else, I’ve got some light reading I can do.”
Carlos gave a snort but made no other comment. He disappeared from the pipes, and after a few minutes, Michael could hear him snoring. The lockpicker had updated its busy icon with a progress bar: 2%.
Michael stood and paced around for a bit to get his blood flowing again, but with nothing to do but wait, he was feeling sleepy. He had been joking about the light reading, but now he figured he might as well. Given that he was not trying to read himself to sleep, he broke from his usual pattern of picking a random entry. Instead, he picked up the final journal, opened it to the first page, and began reading.
He had seen a few of these before, but he read them again. He even read the ones about him as a baby. Apparently, he had started teething early and took a liking to the plastic insulation around the half-inch power lines. Sophia had claimed this meant Michael was going to excel in engineering. Peter had been more worried that Michael would find a live line somewhere in the Kaiser’s crawlspaces and electrocute himself. Then, around the time the lockpicker was showing 63 percent, Michael came across a surprising entry:
Today was a first for me. I bailed Malcolm Fletcher out of jail. I’ve bailed out crewmates before, and once my cousin Violet from the Bucking Bismarck, but never someone who wasn’t crew or family. He had gotten into something of a brawl with the captain of another privateer ship, the Reilly. Normally, of course, I’d have expected his first officer to get him out. I haven’t needed that yet myself, but I’ve heard it’s happened more than once with my brother Hans.
Well, as it turns out, his first officer had been involved as well. Heck, to hear the tale, Malcolm had gone looking for this guy with half his crew in tow. Gunter Farlin, that was his name. Anyway, by the time Tsaigo station security broke it up, every senior officer on the Hammerhead was in lockup, and none of the other crew could access the ship accounts.
I don’t know if the Hammerhead lower decks were scraping together the cash for it or not, but Sophia dropped a few not-so-subtle hints that I might intervene. She could have done it herself, of course, but she said that little Mikey was being fussy, so she wanted to stay on the ship. I’d seen him sleeping not ten minutes before that, but I didn’t press the issue. Sophia has been avoiding Malcolm for the last year or so, and I don’t think she wanted to see him again, at least not in the security lockup.
So I went down with Charlie Burnet as my backup, but the bureaucratic molasses at that security office rivals the damned CCS&M review board. At least, that’s what I thought at the time. In truth, they didn’t want to release Malcolm and his men until Farlin and his crew had pulled out. I actually saw them being released. The Reilly had sent down one of their junior officers, a tall blonde woman named Watkins, to bail them out.
Of course, her request was processed right away. When Farlin came out, he looked pretty bad, with a black eye and one hell of a bruise on the right side of his neck. Two other guys came out with him, his first officer Carruthers and this other guy, all lanky and pale. He was young, but his hair was already mostly white, with just a hint of red in the back. Malcolm must have gotten him pretty good, too, because he had stitches in a slice down the side of his left eye. Hans always said the ladies like scars, but that’s because his is all cute and little. And on his ass.
Anyway, by the time they finally processed Malcolm and his officers out, Farlin and the Reilly were long gone. I tried to tell him, but he gave me a quick thanks and took off for the docks.
He caught up with me about six hours later. He had already transferred the bail money back to me, but he wanted to give me a printed payment-proof. I told him it wasn’t necessary, and we went through the usual niceties. Very stiff and formal, but we did them all the same. Sophia sends her regards. He wishes us well. I don’t like being in the middle on this, but it’s probably for the best.
I did ask him why he’d gotten into the fight, though. I mean, the Hammerhead and the Reilly are both privateer ships, loyal to the Confederacy. I wondered if they were squabbling over prize money or something. He said that wasn’t it, but when I pressed, he said that he was making a list and that the Reilly was on it. He says the ship is dirty, and when he can prove it, there’s going to be a reckoning.
I suspect he’s erring on the paranoid side, but with more and more systems declaring for the Caspians, I can’t really blame him. Still, it’s enough for me to post a company advisory about the ship. If we’re not going to pull back, that’s the best we can do.
Michael fought between the humor of Malcolm getting tossed in security lockup and the chill of Peter running into the crew that would heartlessly kill him a few months later. Given his current situation, the latter won, so he read over the description of Gunter Farlin and Elsa Watkins again. He had seen her registry photo from that era, and while Peter’s limited depiction of her was accurate, it hard reconciling the ruthless predator he had met with someone as bland as “a tall blonde woman named Watkins.”
The official photos of Farlin clearly had not shown the bruising that Malcolm had inflicted, but Michael took some pleasure in knowing that Malcolm had dished it out when he could. Carruthers had later been in command of the Reilly when Malcolm finally tracked her down. The pale, lanky kid was something of a mystery. If he ever got access to Malcolm’s chess files again, Michael would have to scan through the files on the Reilly’s crew to look for him. Of course, like Farlin’s bruising, the scar from that gash would not be in the photo records. But the coloring probably would.
It was an odd coloring, pale with white hair, but not from age. The lingering red in the back was probably the original color. He could look for that in the photos as well. It didn’t sound like he was a proper albino, though Michael had heard about a few skin diseases that could cause some weird discoloration. The last engineer on Malcolm’s old Hammerhead had a rich olive brown skin, except for her right arm, which had turned almost as pink as Michael’s childhood sunburns. Michael had asked why the doctors couldn’t fix it—he ha
d indeed become a good engineer and at the time thought anything could be fixed—but she had explained that the “fix” was some kind of gene expression therapy, but she had not reacted well to it.
Something about that twigged a memory, but he was not sure what. He checked the lockpicker again: 67%. He thought about reading the next journal entry, but the memory at the edge of his brain kept nagging at him.
He paced some more. Was it something about the skin disease? The lanky pale guy? Richard was pretty pale as well, but Michael had never asked him if it was his natural coloring.
And then it clicked: the picture of the kid with red hair, the fading red hair on that Reilly crewman, the stitches next to his left eye, and the scar next to the left of eye of his tall, pale first officer. Richard was not merely one of the hijackers. He was Stefan Carillo.
Michael shook his head for a moment. Was it too much of a leap? Or was it quite natural that a year after stirring the hornet’s nest that was Elsa Watkins, one of her surviving crewmates would show up on board as a hijacker with a support team waiting to be picked up two ports down the lane? He could not think of a way to know for sure, but his money was on the latter.
The lockpicker was up to 70 percent, and Michael was sorely tempted to wake Carlos with this latest revelation, but he did not. If Stefan Carillo were on board, then this was no simple hijacking, and before Michael starting making plans based on that, he wanted to be certain.
Elsa walked onto the Grizzly’s bridge in the final stage of the down-tach maneuver. Captain Gallows had the con while the second officer, Mr. Martins, stood by his side.
“Captain, Mr. Martins,” she greeted them.
“My lady,” Martins replied.
Gallows glanced at her but said nothing.
“Thirty seconds to down-tach,” the navigator said. “Tach-nav beacons show us in the green.”
“Acknowledged,” Gallows replied. “Take us in with a slow profile. Pilot, stand ready for maneuvers and watch for possible traffic.”