“I need to get back to watching the lock,” he said. “Have a good meeting, folks.”
Kira took a careful sip of the espresso, then followed Ramirez’s example. There just wasn’t enough of the rich liquid for sipping.
“That’s different,” Konrad said. “I like it.”
“Old family tradition,” Zamorano told them. “Slight differences in pressure and temperature from most espresso machines; creates a richer brew.”
“Thank you for sharing,” Kira said. “I appreciate it.”
“Always. You are on my ship; I am your host. Can I get you anything more?”
“More espresso?” Konrad asked hopefully, and Zamorano chuckled.
“I’ll start another round,” he agreed. “It will take a few moments.”
There turned out to be a specialty machine with six spouts tucked into a cupboard in the kitchen. It folded out and Zamorano filled it with water, carefully turning off one of the spouts, and then set it to brewing with several spoonfuls of coffee.
“So, Em Riker, what do you want with the humble captain of a humble ship?” he asked.
“You saved my people’s lives, Captain,” she told him. “I’d like to repay that, if I can. I’m also here looking for transport and wondering if you can help.”
“Hence trawling your way through the bars and coffee shops of the dock district,” the captain observed. He saluted her with the espresso cup he was about to fill. “I did some poking after we met, Em Riker. You’re walking a careful line between avoiding attention and finding what you’re looking for.
“And we’ve already seen at least part of the reason demonstrated.”
“So we have,” Kira agreed. “Lieutenant Sanna said you’d be released from lockdown quickly enough?”
“It’s a formality and both she and I know it,” Zamorano told her. He brought a tray of espresso cups over to one of the tables, gesturing for everyone to sit. “I give it another day at most. It was pretty open-and-shut. You were there.”
“I was, and I appreciate your intervention,” she replied. His casualness about having killed two people, though, didn’t fit his intended image of a “humble captain of a humble ship.” “We all do. So…I know how you can help me, Captain, but I’m wondering how I can help you?”
“I can think of a few ways,” Baile Fantasma’s Captain said. “But my helping you may well incur additional favors, so why don’t you tell me what you want and I’ll assess if I should be upping my favor?”
Kira swallowed the second espresso, putting the tiny cup down and leaning back in the simple wooden chair, studying the man across the table from her. Like the two subordinates she had met, Zamorano was dark-skinned and sharp-featured. He had a ragged mostly-white beard and short-cropped, likely dyed, pure black hair, and his brown eyes danced with amusement at her.
He was utterly relaxed, as if the result of this conversation was utterly meaningless to him—which was either a fantastic negotiating trick or a sign that he was not a merchant captain.
Or both.
“I need transport for the four of us and a sixty-cubic-meter runabout shuttle,” she told him. “To the Crest, with all paperwork registered, clean, unquestionable. We want to avoid any kind of attention, official or otherwise.”
“And you want to do so quickly; otherwise, you’d have talked to the transport broker,” Zamorano observed. “They could book that for you, but you’d be looking at two, maybe three weeks. There aren’t a lot of slots for someone hauling both a shuttle and passengers.”
“Exactly.”
He smiled.
“I can do that,” he told them. “Let’s say…standard cubage and passenger rates per nova, plus fifty percent. It’s an awkward trip, hitting the Crest from here, and I might not be able to fill the rest of the cargo.
“We need to make it look good if you want to avoid those questions.”
That was pricey…but not unreasonable for the speed and oddity of her request. In hindsight, Kira should have just planned to dump the runabout—but she couldn’t do that with the shuttle full of armor and guns.
“That’s fine,” she told him.
“But that’s not my favor,” Zamorano said with a smile. “I’ll do that and I’ll fill the hold as best as I can. I’ll make a profit on that and I will be easily able to find work to get me out of the Crest.
“But even that is a favor to you, not me,” he continued. “So.”
“So.” Kira held his gaze levelly. Her companions were silent around her, though she drew support from Konrad’s presence—not least out of the certainty that if he did disagree with what she was doing, he’d have pinged her with a headware message by now.
“What do you want, Captain Zamorano?” she asked.
“Three things,” he told her. “The same thing, really, but to three people. I need letters of introduction.”
That was…dangerous. Kira Riker didn’t know anybody she could write useful letters to.
“He knows.” Konrad’s warning was unnecessary, but Kira appreciated it anyway and squeezed her lover’s thigh under the table.
“To whom?” she asked softly.
“Sonia Stewart. Jade Panosyan. Henry Killinger.”
The three names hung in the air like the Sword of Damocles. Konrad was right.
The Queen of Redward.
The Crown Zharang of the Royal Crest.
And…a dead Apollo nova combat group Commander?
“Henry Killinger is dead,” Kira pointed out rather than engaging with the fact that the person she was pretending to be wouldn’t know the other two.
“Henry Killinger would be very pleased to know you think that, Kira Demirci,” Zamorano said quietly. “He’s currently buried up to his neck in about eleven kinds of treason and isn’t talking to strangers.
“I really need him to talk to me. I also would very much like to have a conversation with Jade Panosyan.” He waved a hand in the air. “Sonia Stewart is more of an opportunity than anything else. I don’t think I’m going to have many encounters with people close to her inner circle this far away.”
“How long did it take you to work out who I am?” Kira asked softly.
“I haven’t trusted the name someone gave me in over forty years,” Zamorano said bluntly. “You should have done more to adjust your face, Em Demirci. My headware flagged you the moment you ducked into the bar. That death mark drew our attention.”
The mess was silent.
“You’re no merchant captain,” Konrad finally said as Kira was still thinking. “And this ship…What the fuck is SolFed Intelligence doing out here?”
“Oh, well done.”
The silence continued for a few more seconds, then Zamorano chuckled loudly.
“I am not fully up to date with events in the Syntactic Cluster,” he noted. “I was aware that K79-L had fallen into your hands, Em Demirci. I was not aware that Em Bueller had fallen into your hands with her. A good choice, it seems.
“I was aware of John Estanza’s death. You have my sympathies.” He shook his head.
“And yes, Em Bueller is correct. I, this ship and every member of her crew are operatives of the Solar Federation’s Interstellar Intelligence Service. The records on Baile Fantasma are correct, if you’re wondering. She is two hundred and eighty-six years old.”
The spy snorted.
“I’m a bit younger than she is, but I’ve come just about as far,” he told them. “I’m Earthborn, which makes being out here an…experience, let me tell you. But…”
He shrugged.
“SolFed tries to keep an eye on everything everywhere,” he noted. “With a three-thousand-light-year sphere of generally accepted civilized space and an unknown number of colonies beyond that sphere, believe me when I tell you the effort is futile.
“This ship represents a significant percentage of IIS’s assets in this region.”
“And you don’t mean the Crest Sector,” Kira murmured.
“No,” he agree
d. “This IIS operation region is four degrees of the Rim. A little over one percent of a region of millions of cubic light-years. Apollo and Brisingr fall into the region. As does the Syntactic Cluster. We have… Let’s just go with ‘far too few’ assets to even maintain intelligence updates across the Rim.”
“Why are you telling us this?” Konrad challenged.
“Because you guessed,” Zamorano said with a chuckle. “And because you, Kira Demirci, can give me documents that will get me connections to those three people. I don’t think anyone else in the galaxy could get me all three—and I’ve been trying to find a way to connect to Killinger for a while.”
“But he’s dead,” Kira reiterated.
“He faked his death,” Zamorano told her. “Easy enough when a hostile intelligence service is doing their damnedest to kill every Apollo ace who isn’t directly related to a member of the Council of Principals. After faking his death, he went underground.
“I have reason to believe he is gathering a private fleet of warships as the various systems concede to Brisingr’s demands and officially decommission their nova fleets.
“But since he’s officially dead, he is being utterly paranoid about who he makes contact with. You don’t find Henry Killinger. His people find you.”
“And you think he’ll listen to a letter from me?” Kira asked. She’d flown with Colonel Henry Killinger. He’d been a close friend of Colonel Jay Moranis, her nova group’s commander and mentor.
“I think he owes you his life at least twice over,” Zamorano noted. “I think that might buy us a conversation he and I need to have.” He shrugged. “With both Stewart and Panosyan, I know a letter from you will open a door, but with Killinger, it’s only a chance—and at that, it’s still worth getting you into the Crest to me.
“So. I know who you are and can guess why you need to be in the Crest without anyone knowing. You now know who I am and what I want. We put money on it, so no one else asks questions, but it’s really down to whether you’re willing to write those letters or not.”
“You already saved my life,” Kira pointed out. “And if I can’t trust SolFed Intelligence to get me into a system without drawing attention, a whole bunch of urban legends and case studies I’ve read are wrong.
“So, let’s do it.”
24
Baile Fantasma was sadly lacking in gold-plated butler robots or any other outright magical tricks that legend might have expected from a ship built in the Solar Federation.
Of course, the general rule was that for every ten light-years a world was from Earth, tech was a year and a half behind on average. Economic development often lagged even further, but the general rule said that a ship built today in Guadaloop was the equivalent of a ship built two hundred–plus years ago in Tau Ceti.
And Fantasma was almost three hundred years old. The ship had probably been heavily updated in hidden sections, but Kira and her people were genteelly restricted to the passenger sections and the cargo compartment she was parking their shuttle in.
“You down and locked, Basketball?” Martinez’s voice asked in her head the exact moment she’d shut down the engines.
“I am,” Kira confirmed. “Is there a safe path out?”
“Highlighted on the deck in lights,” the freighter officer told her. “Keep to the path, Basketball. I’ve got a couple standard TMUs floating into that cargo compartment.”
“Got it, Baile Fantasma,” she said. “Watching the lights.”
A Ten Meter Unit—or Ten Meter Equivalent Unit sometimes—was the heir to the standardized cargo containers of old Earth. Five meters high, five meters wide, and ten meters long, every cargo ship in the universe was built to handle them.
Baile Fantasma had four cargo holds, cavernous spaces attached to the “bottom” of the ship, that were ten meters high, ten meters wide, and twenty long—officially, though any hold always had a few extra centimeters for maneuvering. Hold One now had Kira’s runabout parked at the far end, but that still left enough space for Martinez to slide multiple stacks of cargo containers into the hold.
There was nothing so luxurious as air or even gravity in the container hold, but Kira’s shipsuit was capable of handling the lack of both of those. The designated path was lit up in bright yellow on the floor, leading from her shuttle’s exit ramp to an airlock that presumably provided access to the habitable portion of the ship.
Still, Kira paused on the path to watch the containers come in. Each had its own small set of Harrington coils, controlled by remote from the cargo handler’s office, and they came in one at a time.
The first TMU was visible in the light from the planet behind it at the open entrance to the hold. Kira watched as it slowly rotated in place to align with the opening and then slid forward. There were literally centimeters to spare on three sides of the container as it slid broadside toward Kira.
It rapidly came to a complete halt, five meters from the back wall and barely a meter from Kira’s shuttle, and then silently locked down into its slot. The bottom half of Kira’s view of the hold was now blocked by it, but she could see another container aligning itself with the entrance.
Her shuttle was taking the space of two of the containers—more for safety than anything else—but Hold One would still take six two-hundred-and-fifty-cubic-meter cargo containers, stacked in three rows, each two TMUs deep. The other three holds would take eight, presuming Zamorano had acquired enough cargo to fill them.
The ship would have a fifth hold somewhere that was designed for less-standardized cargo. That one would be pressurized and gravitized by default and would often be used as a gymnasium if it was only half-full.
Still, Kira’s math said that Baile Fantasma only had nine to ten kilocubics of cargo space in an eighteen-kilocubic hull. Most freighter designers aimed for a seventy-five percent ratio of cargo space to overall hull space, which suggested the IIS ship had probably been designed around four-to-five kilocubics of machinery and living space.
Which left another four kilocubics, give or take, of volume that she couldn’t account for. Zamorano almost certainly had schematics saying they were taken up by absolutely innocuous things.
Kira, on the other hand, knew damn well who she was flying with.
“So, anything about this ship screaming 'love me, love me’ to the engineer?” Kira asked Konrad as she dropped onto the bed in their guest quarters.
“The fact it’s still flying after two hundred and eighty-six years, without a single system even suggesting that it’s overdue for maintenance or otherwise rusty?” her boyfriend asked. “Also, the mattress is already scanning your back and calculating the optimal level of elasticity for you.”
Kira glanced down at the normal-looking bed.
“You’re kidding, right?” she asked. Self-adjusting beds were common enough, but they usually took a few minutes after you lay down to find the right balance.
“Nope.” Konrad pointed to a small dot above the bed. “Scanner is right there. It’s scanning us both whenever we’re on the bed, sitting or lying down, and constantly adjusting.”
“That’s not three hundred years old,” Kira said.
“Forty or so, I’d guess, at most,” he agreed. “Probably self-maintaining to a large degree, like most of the ship. There’s a reason there’s only three people aboard—and space for us.”
She paused thoughtfully.
“I…honestly thought we just hadn’t met the rest of the crew,” she admitted. “Zamorano has been sufficiently closed with us, in some ways I could buy him hiding us away.”
“Maybe,” Konrad said. “But I’d also buy this ship being mostly self-maintaining. There’s a lot of small stuff that has artificial stupids in it that you wouldn’t expect. I suspect there’s a fleet of self-repair drones that are being kept out of our line of sight, because no tramp merchant ship out here would have them.
“But let’s be honest: most sub-twenty-kilocubic ships can be flown by three. Or one. It’s the maintena
nce that becomes a problem, if you don’t have repair drones or something similar.”
“You think the ship is smarter than we expect?” Kira asked.
“I think this ship is more anything than you expect,” he replied. “I’m not going to go poking and see if I can chat with the computers; let’s put it that way. I’m not sure I’d like what I found.”
The implications of that were…scary. Rumor had it that SolFed had small-scale true AI, but that rumor had been present for a long time and Kira had never heard of anyone having proof. Complex artificial stupids that could fake sapience for extended time periods? There were even a few of those in the Rim.
Not many, though. Not least because faking sapience beyond what was needed for customer service wasn’t actually useful in most contexts. True AI would, in theory, be enough more flexible to add value on its own—but the few experiments she’d heard of in the Fringe had been closer to asteroid-fortress-sized than ship-computer-sized.
“Step carefully, my love,” Konrad said after a moment. “Today, Captain Zamorano is a useful ally, but his sole job is information-gathering for the Solar Federation. I imagine he has strict limits on what he is allowed to do—and those limits could easily end up with us getting cut adrift at a very awkward moment.”
25
“Would you like to join me on the bridge, Em Demirci?”
Captain Zamorano’s question interrupted Kira’s breakfast on the second—and last—day of their short trip. She looked up at him in surprise and arched an eyebrow.
“And here I thought you were keeping us out of all of the scary parts of the ship,” she observed. “Are we there yet?”
“We’ll be novaing in about ten minutes,” the IIS agent told her. “I figured you’d be more concerned about getting a look at the Crest than you were at seeing a pair of trade-route stops.”
“I would certainly like to get a look at the system,” she agreed. She glanced over at Konrad, who gave her a tiny go-ahead gesture.
“May I bring my coffee?” she asked after a second, gesturing at the Americano on her table—a diluted espresso that had turned out to be Baile Fantasma’s crew’s caffeinated drink of choice.
Fortitude (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 4) Page 14