Captain Serrano 2 - Sporting Chance

by Moon, Elizabeth

  Lorenza raised her eyebrows at him, slowly. "Now, Piercy, you know that's not fair. I have nothing against military women; I have the highest admiration for their courage and their dedication. But this woman was no longer military; she left under a cloud"

  "She was cleared," the Crown Minister said. Lorenza wondered why he was being stubborn. Did he know something she should know?

  "I understand that her own familyher own well-known familydidn't stand behind her. That tells me something. Even if she was cleared, they may know something that never came out in court. It wouldn't be the first time."

  "True." He was retreating; he had turned his attack to the ham, and then to the rice pilaf.

  "Berenice says Bunny's daughter Bubbles started acting odd after spending time with her on Sirialis. Wanted to change her name, or something."

  "Bubbles has been acting like a fool since she hit puberty," the Crown Minister said, and took a long swallow of his wine. "It wouldn't take a yacht captain to send her off on another tack." That struck him as funny, and he laughed aloud. Lorenza didn't smile, and he ran down finally. "Sorrya nautical joke."

  "My point is that it's now perfectly clear she did something underhanded to influence poor Cecelia. And now she's stolen the yacht. Just what you'd expect."

  "Do you ever visit Cecelia?" the Crown Minister asked. She almost smiled at his transparent attempt to change the subject and make her feel guilty.

  "Yes, occasionally. I'm going tomorrow, in fact." She had not been able to resist, after all. Twice now she had sat beside the bed, her soft hand on Cecelia's unresisting cheek, and murmured into her ear. I did it. I did it. That was all: no name, only the whisper. It excited her so she could hardly conceal it all the way home. And now she could be the one to tell Cecelia that her precious yacht captain had stolen her yacht . . . that she had been abandoned once more. If she had had any hope left, that should finish it. Lorenza let herself imagine the depths of that despair . . . what it must be like to have one's last hope snuffed out by a voice in the darkness. She was very glad she had specified that Cecelia's auditory mechanisms should be left intact.

  Chapter Ten

  "This is the craziest idea I ever heard." Ronnie glared at Brun. "You want to take a sick, paralyzed old lady up in a hot-air balloon, then bang around in a shuttle, thenand what are you going to do when you get to Rockhouse Major?"

  "I'm not going to Rockhouse Major." Brun glared back. "Dad's yacht is at Minor; that's all you need to know."

  "A balloondammit, you can't fly a balloon like a plane. They just drift. How can you possibly be sure you'll even get thereor do you expect me to chase you across country on foot with Aunt Cecelia over my shoulder?"

  "No, of course not. And yes, I can aim a balloonthere are ways. They're clumsier than planes, but quieter and much more difficult to find on scans designed for planes and shuttles. I can be there within fifteen minutes of a set time, and close enough that you won't have to run any races."

  "So what do you want me to do?"

  "You visit heryou have a regular pass."

  "Yeah, but they're still watching me." Less warily since Serrano had run off with his aunt's yacht, but still watching.

  "That's fine. They can watch you all they want. What's your regular visiting day?"

  "Saturday, of course, when I have a half-day off. You know this already"

  "Yes, but I'm checking my own plans. Your mother visits on Tuesdays, and your father on Thursdays, and you on Saturdaysand you almost never miss"

  "I liked her," Ronnie said. He noticed the past tense, and wished he had said "like" even though it wasn't true. No one could like that limp, unresponsive body in the bed. And he had only Brun's conviction, formed in that one visit, that Cecelia-the-person still lived inside her inert shell, to give him hope.

  "So while they watch you, and her, it's just routine. They expect you."

  "I still can't walk out with her"

  "You won't have to. All you have to do is get her unhooked from the bed, and outside. Like this" Brun flipped open her notecomp and showed him the plan. She had it all down, all the medical background, sketches of wires and tubes and things he didn't want to look at. What to do in which order, what he would have to take with him. Suggestions for making sure the bothersome attendants didn't interrupthe thought of another way himself, and realized he was being drawn in. It still looked ridiculous, but Ronnie didn't argue. He didn't have anything better to offer. He didn't have anything at all. And the longer they left Aunt Cecelia trapped in her helplessness, the worse for her . . . he could hardly believe anyone could stay sane month after month.

  "When, then?"

  "Festival of the Air, of course." He felt himself flushing. He'd been so miserable he'd forgotten that annual celebration was almost upon them. "Plenty of confusion in the airfor some reason the wilder sorts are thinking of dropping in on the starchier resorts and sanctuaries in the area. Can't think why." She grinned. "And no, it's not traceable to me. Nowlet's get busy. You'll have to practice getting a flight suit on me when I'm lying limp."

  Oblo had managed to load the yacht with a surprising number of amenities. Toiletries, leisure clothes, entertainment cubes, and a cube reader. Music disks and players. Despite the bare bulkheads and naked decks, the lack of furniture, ample bedding, and bright-colored pillows made comfortable nooks for lounging and sleeping. Heris asked about the pillowsshe could not imagine Oblo sneaking through the docks with big puffy orange and puce and turquoise pillows under his armsand he gave her his best innocent glare.

  "Bare decks get cold, Captain. You know that." Then a sheepish grin. "And besides, these pillows . . . they were sort of . . . lying about somewhere . . ."

  "Somewhere?" She could feel her eyebrows rising.

  Now he stared at the overhead. "To tell you the truth" which meant it would be his fiction. "They belonged to someone Meharry and I kind of blame for that girl Amalie's death." Possibilities ran through Heris's mind, and she settled on the obvious.

  "That therapist?"

  He grinned as if he was glad she'd figured it out. "Yeah. Had this big room with lots of pillows in it. Needed cleaning, they did. Cleaners picked them up, delivered them. We sort of . . . liberated them on the way back." As a specimen of Oblo's vengeance, this was mild. Heris decided to let it go.

  "You know it was wrong," she said.

  "So was getting Amalie killed and Sirkin hurt," he said, with no remorse. "Captain, it was the least we could do." About what she'd expected; she managed not to laugh until he was out of her office.

  So far the voyage was going well. Skoterin had not protested when she realized they were not, in fact, ferrying the yacht a short distance. She had been glad of a longer job, she said, and she trusted the captain. Heris found that amazing, but then so were the others trusting her. She got along well with the others, though she was younger by some years than anyone but Sirkin. Heris wondered if that would turn into anything. She couldn't remember what Skoterin's preferences had beenif she'd ever known. Not that it mattered, really. As long as they both did their work. Sirkin she saw on the bridge; she was happily absorbing all Oblo and Guar could teach her about the new navigational equipment. Haidar reported that Skoterin was as efficient as he remembered. All she had to worry about was the mission itself.

  "I wish there were a way to be sure the Crown offer was faked," Heris grumbled. "Then we wouldn't have to bother with this ridiculous rendezvous. What if the prince doesn't show up?" She had never enjoyed covert ops, and didn't now. Petris ignored that, and kept rubbing her shoulders. Oblo had the bridge, with Arkady Ginese to second him; nothing would get by those two. She and Petris had retired to her cabin, where they turned up the thermostat and lowered the lights so that they could enjoy the rest of the shift out of uniform. Surely this time nothing could interrupt them, not in FTL space.

  "What kind of job do you think we can get as cover if we need it?" he asked. His hands slid lower; she wondered if he really meant to continue a
serious conversation or if this was just another form of teasing. She was almost afraid to try the response she was eager to make; the obstacles to their pleasure had gone far beyond a joke. What would happen this time if they started something? She felt she would die of frustration if they didn't.

  "Soft side of legal, I expect." Heris did not meet his eyes, and leaned back against him. Maybe he would take the hint and continue without talking about it. Petris shifted her in his arms, and she quit thinking about future problems. Present pleasure was enough for now. Apparently he thought so too; he quit asking silly questions. And nothing interrupted them, though she didn't think of that for some time.

  But afterwards, they came back to it. A small tramp cargo ship couldn't simply idle along from place to place; it had to have cargo, and destinations. Otherwise, as they knew well, the authorities would have questions, backed up with force.

  "It would be simpler if we had two ships," Heris said finally. She rolled over and stretched. "We could transfer cargo from one to the other, as ifwhat is that?" Her convulsive lurch upset Petris, who had been curled over watching her stretch; they collided, and then Heris was out of the bed, clutching the sheet, and pointing at the bulkhead above him.

  "What?" Petris glared first at her, then at the bulkhead. Then his gaze sharpened. "Idon't have any idea." He edged away from the bulkhead, and got off the bed.

  "It's alive," Heris said. She was aware that her voice had squeaked, and still hadn't returned to normal. The thing was just lighter than the bulkhead, a dull creamy white, as long as her hand. It had long antennae; she could just see them wiggling.

  "And there's more than one of them," Petris said. He pointed. Out of the crack between bulkhead and bunk, two more of the things crept.

  Heris had wrapped the sheet tightly around herself; now she leaned closer. "Six legs . . . antennae . . . you know what it looks like? It looks like an albino" Something skittered down her leg, from under the sheet, and tickled her toes as it ran over them. "COCKROACH!" She was out of the sheet before she knew it, and across the room. Shuddering, she looked back. Petris, on one foot, looked around like someone who had forgotten what the other leg was for. Neither of them had anything handy for whapping a cockroach, because ships didn't have cockroaches. Ships were routinely cleaned out before and after each trip; everyone feared vermin.

  "Albino cockroaches?" Petris said, still on one leg like some kind of exotic bird. "Do they . . . I mean, what do they eat?"

  Heris headed for the shower. "I don't know, but they're filthy. It's disgusting. On my ship!" She strode into the shower and bounced back out. "They're in there, too!"

  "They like warmth, I recall," Petris said. He was back on two feet, but looked anxious. "We turned up the heat in here"

  "And what if they're all over the ship?" Heris asked. She had a nightmare vision of a full-bore inspection arriving to find her and her first officer and lover stark naked amid swarming albino cockroaches. Could she claim they'd eaten her uniform? And would they?

  "They probably are," Petris said gloomily. He shook out his shirt before putting it on. "And they probably breed. Where could they have come from? None of us had been out of Station quarantine."

  "That's why the redecorators didn't want us on the ship," Heris said. She remembered the frightened look on the woman's face. It made sense if she was afraid of being caught with illegal biologicals. "They put them here."

  "But why?"

  "I . . . don't know. But we had best find out. Perhaps they're used in some stage of the process."

  "It can't be legal." Petris shook out his shoes, one by one, before putting them on. "It's against all the regulations I ever heard of to have biologicals on a Station or a ship. Except for the registered ones, like you told me Lady Cecelia had."

  "I wonder." Heris checked her own clothes carefully before getting back into them. "At least we now have a cargo."

  "These? They're not cargothey're a reason to quarantine us." He sounded horrified at the thought. Heris felt the same way but struggled to think past her revulsion.

  "Yes, but . . . let's assume the decorators keep them, and put them here. That means they're valuable to the decorators. That might mean they're valuable to another firm doing the same work somewhere else."

  He looked dubious. "I don't see how. First we'd have to catch them, confine them somewhere, take care of them. We don't even know what they're for."

  "Can you catch one?" Heris asked, pointing to the cluster that still clung to the bulkhead over the bunk.

  "Me?" He looked at her. She looked back, pointedly. "Oh, all right. If they're poisonous or something, though, you had better figure out how to save my life, or I'll haunt you."

  "I should figure out first what to keep it in . . . let me thinksomething in the galley should hold it. And we'll turn the temperature down, in case they're more active in warmth. If I remember, most insects are."

  Once clothed, she found the pale cockroaches just as disgusting, but less frightening. If they attacked, they'd hit her clothes and not her skin. She shuddered, remembering the touch of those legs. With the thermostat down, she had an excuse for shivering.

  "I suppose you want me to stay here while you fetch a cage?" Petris didn't sound happy about that.

  "I can stay," Heris said. "Get a food container with a tight lidexcept we'll have to ventilate it somehowI wonder what size holes these things can crawl through."

  He came back with a canister whose top had a dozen perforations; Heris wondered why, then it occurred to her it looked like a giant salt shaker. Perhaps that was how Cecelia's cook had covered pastry with powdered sugar.

  "We had similar things back home," Petris said, as he smacked the open end of the canister down over the nearest cockroach and carefully slid a flat piece of metal under it to trap it. "Farmers hate 'em toothose ate crops, clothing, pillows, rugs"

  "Rugs?" Heris stared at him. "Likethe carpet that used to be here?"

  "We didn't have real carpet; we had rugs woven of plant fiber and animal hair. Some handwoven, and some factory-produced. But yes, they ate holes in rugs. And upholstery. Old-fashioned books, too, especially the bindings. My uncle said it was the glue. And they'd make a mess of data cubes left lying around, even though they couldn't eat them. They'd leave their . . . mess . . . on them, which glopped up the cube readers. Why?"

  "Because . . . that may be why the decorators have them. I hadn't really thought about it but . . . the stuff the decorators take out of a shipall the wall coverings and carpet and upholsteryhas to go somewhere. They'd pay to have it processed in the Station recycler, and then they'd have to pay to replace that with new material. Imported or fabricated, either one. Let me run the figures . . ."

  This was something she could work out, once she thought of it. And the specifications were in the contract she'd brought along. She called them up. "Lookhere's an estimate of square meters, times minimum thickness of carpet, of wall covering, of upholstery. Which comes to" She looked at the volume result. "And they're required to give chemical compositionorganicsso in case anything's volatile, what kind of outgassing the ship's environmentals will have to handle. Interesting."

  "What?"

  "If they're honest, given the density and composition, the volume of material they'd have to have processed onstation or transport would cost them" She called in the financial subroutines. "Too much. Plus replacement. I'll figure that both ways, local processing and importation. No, three waysfrom planetary sources and importation from more distant sources." The result exceeded the bid on Cecelia's job.

  "Can't be," Petris said. "You've made a mistake somewhere."

  "I might have," Heris said. "But if I didn't, and if these disgusting insects were put here for a reasonand if they eat rugs and pillows and upholstery"

  "They eat them," Petris said, with distaste. "They certainly don't manufacture their replacements. It might be cheaper to have them gobble up the client's old stuff, but unless they can be cooked into delicious banque
t meals, I don't see how that helps." Then his face changed expression. "Unless, of course, they're cooked into something elsethe new furnishings."

  "That's sick," Heris said. "Besides, how could you get them all back out?"

  "It would explain why they risk breaking the vermin laws, if it did work."

  "And it gives us something to sell," Heris said. "Both the information and the . . . er . . . samples."

  "It certainly establishes us as outlaws," Petris said. "Selling vermincarrying them loose on a spaceship?"

  "Not loose if we can capture them," Heris said. "I don't want any more surprises."

  Capturing the clots of pale cockroaches in Heris's cabin turned out to be easy, but everyone soon knew that those had not been the only ones aboard. Although their pale color made them hard to spot in some locations, they were obvious in the galley when someone flipped the lights on and they scuttered for dark corners. They swarmed to every food spill, and for a while food spills were more common. Even Heris, who had convinced herself they were harmless, dropped a mug of soup when one ran up her arm. Eventually the crew learned to tolerate the sight of themor at least not drop thingsbut no one liked it.

  "What's this thing?" asked Nasiru Haidar one day, carrying the tiny object gingerly between thumb and forefinger. "And I already know it's not a droppingI've learned to recognize those."

  Petris peered at it. "Egg case, and it's already hatched. Or they have. So they're fertile."

  "How fast do they reproduce?" Nasiru asked.

  Petris shrugged. "I have no idea. Where I grew up, the entire life cycle of some insects was only 20 planetary daysand our days were close to Old Earth days, they said."

  "And these insects were mature when introducedpossibly more than ten days before we undocked. So they could have laid eggs immediately they came aboard"

  "It's possible that we undocked with only egg cases," Petris said, "and all the cockroaches on the ship are those who came with us as eggs."