Derelict For Trade Read online

  "We’d just get referred to the Monitors," Van Ryke said.

  "Or picked up by them," Wilcox muttered.

  Jellico gave one last glance at the chrono and shoved himself gently up from the table, catching hold of the hatchway. "If they’re not back in... half an hour, Wilcox and Stotz, you go get them. Ya, I want you on the com. Cofort, are you still going up to the Spin Axis?" He looked across the mess cabin at Rael for the first time during the discussion.

  "Yes," she said. Craig felt her tensing beside him—as if she were bracing herself for an argument.

  But he gave a short nod and said, "Weeks, if you go with her, maybe the two of you can shorten the time you’re needed up there. You’ve helped in the sick bay before—just do what she asks you to."

  "Glad to help," Jasper said with his shy smile.

  Jellico jerked a thumb at Jan Van Ryke. "I want you along with me,

  Van. I need your assessment of Ross. Something’s missing, and I can’t put my finger on what. You too, Craig, for the physician’s point of view."

  His hard gray gaze lifted, as if by chance, to Rael’s face again, and he hesitated, as if about to say something, but quite suddenly he turned and vanished.

  For a time Rael stood where she was, watching the hatchway. Tau was also still, observing. He could heard the captain’s voice in the corridor outside, giving orders to Mura and Ali Kamil, and then he was gone.

  Rael Cofort flexed her hands, then suddenly looked up to meet Tau’s gaze. He didn’t say anything, or look away. There was nothing to say. She did not try to hide her emotions; she understood that he knew what was going on. She also understood his compassion—and his determination not to make the mistake of trying to interfere.

  She smiled, gave a slight shrug, then she too vanished through the hatchway.

  A few minutes later Tau propelled himself through the outer lock after Van Ryke and the captain, then pushed off to sail down the corridor to the maglev halt. With some amusement he watched Van Ryke’s big form maneuver with grace around the corners and up the last corridor.

  They settled into a pod, Van Ryke’s bushy white brows soaring as he

  scanned around them. As might be expected, the pods were all full of a variety of spacers all determined to get some kind of business done before the last of the diurnal emporia closed—either that or were about to embark on what passed for an evening’s conviviality in a habitat.

  Unfortunately it also precluded any kind of private talk. Tau wanted to find out more about what the captain wanted him looking for—though he decided as they sped along that maybe observation without any previous expectation coloring his views might be the most valuable.

  There was no one in the Way of the Rain-dappled Lilies; this was where the highest Kanddoyd officials lived. Tau looked forward to the spectacular view of the inside of the habitat that this particular area was said to offer.

  Ross was present. Tau had heard about the Rose Garden, but at least by the time the Kanddoyd who greeted them had ushered them inside the legate’s domicile, he was not to be found studying his holographic plants.

  The office was recognizable as a standard Patrol captain’s office, right down to the regulation desk. Nothing was out of place, nothing looked amiss. Even the windows were blocked, giving the room an atmosphere of focus and efficiency. Ross himself was seated behind his desk, neat in the black and silver uniform of a Patrol officer, his long face alert.

  "Captain Jellico," he said as the three Solar Queen's men walked in.

  "I’m glad you’re here—it saved me having to request an interview." He looked down at a flimsy. "I’ve received a surprising number of complaints, mostly rowdyism and illegal trespassing, about your crew. Can you explain that?"

  "It’s why we’re here," Jellico said, handing Ross the printouts that Tang Ya had prepared, plus a tape spool.

  Ross set the spool in a slot, where it could be automatically downloaded, as he perused the printout in silence. When he looked up, he frowned slightly, but otherwise there was no expression at all on his face. "How did you get this information?" he asked.

  "Illegally," Jellico said.

  Ross dropped the papers, which took a long time to settle to the desk.

  Tau watched them in fascination as the legate stared at a point in space midway between his visitors, then looked up again. "I can stop the transmissions—in fact, I will send a coded ’gram to HQ." He halted.

  Van Ryke said, "I am assuming that if what we’ve found out is true, even your secure line has probably been compromised."

  "And the message will never get there, yet I’ll receive an acknowledgment," Ross said. For the first time there was some animation in his lean countenance. "If that is so, it would explain a number of anomalies that are side issues to what you have here. But that can wait. What I’ll do, then, is send a spool up with the next guard rotation, and it can be radioed not to HQ but to the legate at. Sheng Li." He named a system on the space lanes between Mykos and Terra. "They’ll send it from the Patrol ship. I’ll have them jump out to some random coordinate outside Mykosian space before they send, to be safe."

  "We’ve probably been seen coming here," Van Ryke said with his easy smile.

  Jellico said, "You might send one from here as well, just in case."

  Ross blinked, then said, "Yes. Just an order to stop the transmissions of the lost and abandoned lists. I’ll send a message to Trade HQ about the insured ships as well." He gave a slight, wintry smile. "As there’s been nothing to do here for the past number of years, my appearing to perform the minimum required of my post will seem in character."

  "How long have you been stationed here, Captain, if I may be permitted to ask?" Tau spoke up. "I thought regulations were specific about rotating people in and out of hostile environments. A habitat would be listed as hostile, wouldn’t it, as it is so alien to our kind?"

  "Four years," Ross said. "That’s reg. But I’ve been here almost sixteen. They apparently don’t get to us this far out as often as they ought to."

  Tau nodded, but he made a mental note to do some checking in the public records.

  "Back to us," Jellico said. "What are our chances of demanding an investigation?"

  "You can," Ross said, "but I can’t, acting alone. A court of inquiry at this level must involve all three races, according to the Compact of Harmony."

  "So," Jellico said, "we do it."

  "You can," Ross said, "but it’ll break you. In fact, I strongly suspect that if all this is true, it is the single reason why you have not been dealt with more summarily until now.

  If Flindyk really is the. mastermind of this conspiracy, then he would like nothing better than to fight you in court. You don’t have proof of his culpability, which means investigation."

  "What’s wrong with that?"

  Van Ryke raised a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. "I should have thought of the obvious."

  Ross gave that slight, pained smile again. "I think you see it. Shver justice is summary. Kanddoyds, who oversee most of the civilian cases, can take years to solve the simplest case."

  "Wouldn’t the investigative committee be made up of all three races?" Tau asked.

  Ross turned to him. "Yes, but you have to understand that anything to do with the Kanddoyds is going to take ages to resolve, by the most complimentary, indirect methods possible. Everything is done to save face—I expect the decision is probably arrived at and accepted before it’s actually heard."

  "Of course," Tau said. And suddenly from his studies a chilling analogy emerged from memory: that both Kanddoyds and Shver culled their defective newborns, as did many races with population problems. But while the Shver were plain about it, making the decision and quickly carrying it out, the Kanddoyds made an elaborate festival of it, calling it the Time of the Celebration of the Perfect-Born. It amounted to the same thing, except where the Shver injected the cullees before the family, so at least it was painless, the Kanddoyd culls were borne away in silen
ce and quiet, so no one ever knew who did it or what was done.

  Tau felt his guts gripe at this unexpectedly sinister side to the seemingly friendly race. And Flindyk has reputedly become more Kanddoyd than human, he thought.

  Jellico said, "If we request the investigation, then we’d be required to testify, wouldn’t we?"

  "Correct. You’d have to stay at your own expense, unless I arrested you and impounded your ship."

  Van Ryke shook his head. "Flindyk could easily spin this out ten years if he wanted."

  "Meanwhile we’re stuck here, and not necessarily safely," Tau said. "So what can we do?"

  Ross tapped together the printouts, and laid them in a sealed file. "You may be certain that I shall do my own investigating, though it will have to be slowly and with care."

  Jellico gave his curt nod. "Thanks, Captain. If you need us, you know where to find us."

  He flicked glances Tau’s and Van Ryke’s way, and in silence the two officers followed their captain out.

  No one spoke until they reached the maglev concourse. This time they waited for several pods until they found one that was empty. As soon as it started to move, Jellico turned to Tau. "Your impressions?"

  "I want to check the Patrol’s public records to make certain, but I’ll just bet that this man was not the kind to interfere if things seemed fine on the surface."

  "You mean he’s part of it?" Van Ryke frowned.

  "No, I don’t think so at all," Tau said. "Of course I could be wrong—I’ve been fooled before—but I do think he’s by nature a depressive personality, a trait worsened by this habitat. When humans first tried to live on them, there were numbers of people who developed adverse psychological conditions."

  "So if you look at the record what do you expect to see?"

  "That his predecessors who were very active spent their four years here and rotated back, and those who were more hands-off stayed longer. I’ll further wager that Flindyk has enough control over com to see that Ross’s requests for transfer have never gone through."

  Jellico nodded. "From what I know of Patrol regs, after the four years in a hostile environment, a request for transfer would get high pri. This far out, though, if there was no request—or even a request to stay on—nothing would be done. It’s expensive to send a ship out this far."

  Tau watched his captain, saw the characteristic drumming of his fingers—lightly, so that there was no reaction in the micrograv—which meant that he’d reached a decision. Van Ryke looked up expectantly. "And so, Chief?"

  "If Ross can’t solve this," Jellico said, "we will."

  20

  "You've been what ?”

  "Challenged to a duel," Dane said.

  They were crowded into the tiny space between Dane’s and Rip’s cabins. Dane backed into his room, snagging ahold of his bunk to keep from bouncing gently against the wall. He looked out at the three faces: Tau’s unbelieving, Van Ryke’s mildly surprised, and the captain’s angry.

  "That’s it," Jellico said, his gray eyes lambent points of silvery light.

  "Get all our crew together. We’re blasting out."

  "Can’t, Chief," Van Ryke murmured. "Can’t pay our shot."

  Dane watched the captain’s jaw work as though he were aching to say, "Watch me."

  Another silence ensued, this one more tense than the first one after Dane’s announcement. Dane knew the captain could get them out of the lock; with his piloting, they could probably outrun those unwieldy Shver dreadnoughts they used as Monitor Patrol ships—but once they were

  outside, they wouldn’t be able to run up to jump speed before the defense guns could blast them into atoms.

  Which was probably just what Flindyk was hoping for.

  Jellico gripped the ladder so hard his knuckles went white, but when he spoke again, his voice was utterly emotionless. "I will not stand by and permit that scum to annihilate one of my crew." He turned his head, pinioning Dane with his cold, hard gaze. "You did not provoke this."

  It wasn’t even a question.

  Dane knew that if he had, he would have been given at least a fair hearing, but nevertheless he was glad to be able to shake his head. "Came up behind me. I didn’t even know he was there until he started spouting the ritual challenge at me."

  "He what?" came a new voice.

  Everyone looked up—or what they were used to thinking of as up when they were dirtside—to see Ali Kamil hanging by his knees from the ladder to the next level, floating with his arms wide, a curious grin on his handsome face.

  "Thorson," he said, "how about some details? What exactly happened?"

  Dane shrugged, repressing a spurt of annoyance at Ali’s drawling assumption of superiority—as though he had all the answers. He’d do that before a firing squad, Dane thought with a faint return of his old amusement. Out loud, he said only, "Nothing to report. Rip and I checked the mail drop, found nothing, started out, saw no one. Suddenly this Shver is behind me—I feel a bump on my arm, and he starts in with the challenge. His brethren were with him, and they hemmed us in, or we would have tried to get away, and hang ’honor.’ "

  "I don’t see much honor in one of those two-ton heavyweights taking on a human who can barely walk in their cursed heavy gee," Stotz said sourly from his perch in the ladder well to the lower level.

  "It’s a frame-up," Tau said, frowning. "We all know it. Why should Dane have to go out there at all?"

  "Because it’s a legal requirement," Ali said from above. "Same as being arrested."

  Looking quickly from Stotz to Ali, Dane felt his sense of up and down shift; suddenly they were at either end of a room, and he was lying on the floor. Vertigo tugged at his guts, and he had to lean against the wall and force himself to orient again.

  "So what do we do?" Rip asked from his doorway. "We can’t let Dane go back there and get murdered."

  "If you all will grant me a few moments"—Ali’s drawl was more pronounced than ever—"I believe a solution is possible." He waved his arms grandiloquently.

  Wilcox made an impatient movement copying Ali, and said, "Well, enlighten us!"

  The others laughed—except for Van Ryke, who sighed, looking up at Kamil as though at an erring child. He was about to speak when Jellico said suddenly, "Get down here, Kamil. Or at least orient yourself the same way so that smart mouth of yours is below your eyes, where it belongs."

  Ali grinned and with a careless flick of his feet loosed himself from the ladder and floated gently to the deckplates in the midst of the little group.

  "Here," Van Ryke said, opening his door. "We’ll have another meter of space if we step this way."

  They moved to his cabin, some going in and some standing just outside. Ali perched on one of the cargo master’s tape storage bins, crossing his legs. "Now, Viking," he said instructively, "begin again, from the point at which your challenger touched you—or, more correctly, forced you to touch him, however inadvertent it was. What exactly happened?"

  Dane shook his head. "I felt a pressure on my right arm. Turned, saw that big long knife that the Shver citizens wear. He’d bumped against me with that knife—"

  "Bumped against you, or hit you with it?" Ali asked, his posture still relaxed but his gaze intent.

  "Made it so that I hit him."

  "Was it still in its sheath, or out?"

  "Sheath, I think," Dane said, after a moment’s thought.

  Rip nodded corroboration. "I would have remembered if it’d been out, with that serrated edge—"

  Ali waved this away with an airy, impatient gesture.

  "Dane, my innocent," he said, "a new lesson I am about to follow myself." He raised a long forefinger.

  "Cough it out, Kamil," Steen said with a pained look. "Quit the playacting."

  "What is it," Ali addressed the air in patently fake sorrow, "about navigators that makes them so distrustful of their fellow beings—particularly the very engineers who propel the ships they guide?"

  "We’ll debate philos
ophical etiquette later," Wilcox said with a grim smile. "Get on with your solution, or are you just gassing?"

  "Not at all," Ali said, becoming slightly more serious. "When we first got here, I downloaded what I could find about dueling, as I thought—things being what they were— if any of us were to be challenged, it would probably be yours truly. I felt I owed it to my crewmates to be prepared for any contingency. When I found myself confined to quarters, I pursued it further, this time out of interest. Our friends the Shver are a very interesting culture. Within the context of their militancy, they can actually be quite subtle."

  While Steen and Ali had been talking, Van Ryke had called up some files on his computer. Jellico divided his time between scanning those and watching the talk. Now he gave a faint nod.

  Ali grinned. "I can save you the search—what’s going on is this. Deliberately crossing into another Shver’s personal space is a dueling offense—as would be expected from even those used to a heavy world. Gravity is gravity, and stopping, starting, and especially falling are no light matter—"

  Rip groaned. Van Ryke coughed, hiding a laugh.

  Ali continued as if sublimely unaware of the reaction to his pun. "—so they are careful to stay out of one another’s personal space unless they have to fight for some political or social or familial reason that cannot be aired in public. Hitting someone with the shauv knife is the usual means of challenging someone for reasons that the challenger cannot, or does not, want to explain."

  "Ah," Van Ryke said. "Now I think I see. Go on, my boy."

  Ali nodded. "Now, there are further refinements. To hit someone means something different from permitting oneself to be hit, if you see what I mean. Hitting someone means you have a legitimate grief. To permit oneself to be hit is a little more mysterious; it can mean that the challenger has been forced into the duel."

  Dane nodded slowly, faint hope entering his tired brain for the first time since that dreadful trip to the mail drop. "I see, and there’s also the sheathed blade and the bare blade, which I do remember reading."