by J. S. Morin
“Thanks,” Carl shouted up, just before the door slammed shut.
“What was that all about?” Roddy asked.
Carl rubbed his chin between thumb and forefinger. “I think the girls were about to come rescue me. How sweet.”
“Without me?” Mort asked. “Are they daft? That Navy ship has Navy sailors on it, maybe even marines. I don’t know one science gun from the next, but numbers alone favor the Navy.”
Carl just shrugged. “Well, Mort, we’ll cruise for an hour at standard depths, then you can tear the star-drive to shreds and drop us nice and deep.”
Mort clapped his hands and rubbed them together with glee. “Can’t wait.”
# # #
In a past life, the Mobius had been a diplomatic vessel. That was the reason that every crew member had their own living quarters instead of shared bunks, and it also accounted for the fact that the Mobius had a conference room. Esper had been aboard over a week before the room’s existence had come up in passing. Up until that point it had been the scary door halfway between the common room and the cockpit that no one seemed to use. Now that she looked closely, there was a discolored rectangle on the steel of the wall next to the door where someone had pried away the placard that said what lay beyond.
Of course, what lay beyond was nothing a self-respecting diplomat would ever have tolerated. Without apparent need for a meeting room that didn’t have a holovid and refrigerator, Carl and his gang had piled it high with every useless object aboard that they couldn’t bear to part with. It was a teenager’s closet, stuffed to bursting, except that instead of a square meter of floor space, the conference room comfortably seated twelve. Esper rolled up the sleeves of her coveralls, took a fortifying breath, and set to work.
Within a few minutes, the corridor to the cockpit was barely traversable and Esper was out of breath. She had already removed a guitar case, a hammock, several plastic crates stuffed with exotic clothes, a set of four lawn chairs, the mat and padded protective gear Tanny used for sparring, several outdated datapads, and an easel. The pile just kept going, but she was working on creating a path, not a wholesale excavation.
The cockpit door opened and Mriy stuck her head out. “What are you doing out here? I thought you were asleep.” It all came through in clear English, with a funny growling accent. Her new translator-charmed earring was working.
Esper sighed and slumped against the wall. “Couldn’t sleep. We almost got caught today. I got my first taste of being a real live criminal.”
“You kidnapped a boy,” Mriy replied. “You made yourself a criminal that day.”
“But that didn’t feel criminal,” Esper said, brushing a stray lock of sweat-stained hair out of her way. Her braids were coming loose. “I was rescuing Adam, even if I didn’t follow the law to do it.”
“You broke a law, and your old pack shunned you,” Mriy said. “You have a new pack now, and you don’t need to worry anymore. But why dig in the spare room? Go watch a holo if you can’t sleep.”
“I’m worried we’re not doing the right thing with that box we’re transporting,” Esper said. “I’d feel better knowing what was in it.”
“Probably not,” said Mriy.
“Well, that’s just it!” Esper said, pointing a finger at Mriy. “Everyone thinks there’s something horrible and illegal in it, and wants to just stuff their hands in their pockets about it. Not knowing doesn’t make it right. What if it’s a bio-weapon, or plans to a space station’s defenses, or stolen military tech, or—”
“Or someone’s museum piece, or a sculpture, or an heirloom dagger,” Mriy countered. “If we don’t open it, it can have anything inside.”
Esper furrowed her brow. “What kind of twisty-brained notion is that?”
“Carl’s.” As if that explained everything.
Esper crossed her arms. “You do realize that Carl’s tongue is a shovel for tossing around huge piles of bull-poo?”
Mriy gave a halfhearted swipe with one paw and withdrew to the cockpit. “Do whatever. You won’t open it without Mort’s magic, and I wouldn’t wake Mort if the ship was on fire. Roddy climbed in and buried the box; let him climb in and get it out in the morning.”
“I just need to look at it,” Esper said.
“Just keep the noise down. I’m trying to sleep.” The cockpit door clanged shut.
They were drifting along at an astral depth of 7.72, and their pilot was sleeping. At that moment Esper discovered one benefit to ignorance. If she knew just how many kilometers the Mobius was leaving in their wake every second, she might throw up. Instead, she trusted that the ship had some sort of warning thingy that was loud enough to wake Mriy if they ended up aimed at a planet or a star. She made a point of remembering to ask Mort one day whether hitting planets or stars was even possible where they were in the astral. Then she reminded herself pointedly not to talk to Mort about any such thing, just in case it was.
With a crawlspace along the top of the pile, Esper squirmed into the erstwhile conference room. The overhead lighting was just centimeters above her as she made her way across boxes of plastic, cardboard, and various metal and composite materials. No two boxes were quite the same size or shape, so the stacks were irregular and often precarious. After one slid beneath her weight and dropped her half a meter onto an upturned polycarbonate canoe, she suddenly wished she had worn her combat getup instead of coveralls.
“There you are,” she said to their mystery cargo when she caught sight of the box. It was wedged in between a broken holo-projector and auto-walk exerciser. “You’re coming with me.” She wouldn’t have blamed the scanning techs if they hadn’t even tried to check the cluttered room.
It took nearly half an hour to extract the box. Light as it was, the passage had been awkward enough forward and empty-handed. Wriggling backward, carrying the box, and favoring her ribs where she’d fallen on them, Esper felt lucky to have made it out in one piece.
She was sitting at the common room table, staring at the box, when the rest of the crew began to wake.
Roddy was the first up. He stumbled bleary-eyed into the kitchen area, cracked open a beer, and poured in into the coffee machine before he took note of Esper. “Bleeding Christ, kid, what’re you doing with that thing?”
Esper opened her mouth to chide him for blasphemy, but gave him a droopy-eyed smile instead. “Thinking. Thinking what we almost got busted for.”
“You mean besides a shipment of black-ops grade military weaponry?” Roddy asked as the coffee machine gurgled and protested.
“That’s disgusting.”
Roddy shrugged, poured himself a mug, and took a long draw from it. “Takes getting used to. I’ll give you that.”
“And it can’t be good for the machine.”
“Who do you think fixes the damn thing?” Roddy asked. “Or anything around here, for that matter?”
“Well, Mr. Fixit, how about a hand figuring out how to open this thing?”
“Not on your life,” Roddy replied.
“What?” Esper said. She found a respite from her sleep-deprived sluggishness as she straightened in her seat. “I mean, after yesterday, you’ve got to be wondering.”
“Nope. That was reasons one through a hundred why we don’t wanna know. If Carl wasn’t such a slick-talking glove-salesman, we’d all be locked up about now. Or the commando squad would have most of us dead in a firefight. No thanks. I’ll stick with keepin’ my head down and waiting to get paid. Besides, that things got a molecular lock on it. No opening it without the code.”
Esper rinsed the coffee pot three times before daring to brew another batch with water. She settled back in to stare at the box. Her eyelids slouched as she followed the lines of the glyphs, wondering what impossible magic Mort would declare them to be to get out of helping her. Fuck Roddy. A sudden guilt swept over Esper as she realized how malign her thoughts were turning. She needed sleep; she wasn’t herself.
The rest of the crew trickled in, asked about
the box, and went about making their breakfasts around her. She could barely recall the conversations as they occurred.
“Morning everyone,” Carl announced as he emerged from his quarters, last to wake. “The day is fine, and we are fast, free, and … profitable. Damn, blew it there.”
“Fortunate?” Roddy offered.
“Fully funded?” Mort suggested.
“Felons,” Esper muttered.
Carl looked to the box on the kitchen table. “What’s that doing out here?”
“She wants to open it,” Roddy said.
“No way,” Carl replied. “Bad business. One of the reasons we’re getting almost forty … thousand … apiece for this job is that we’re not asking any questions. The only thing that box can have inside is a bunch of questions.”
“I’m with Carl on this one,” Tanny said. “Business is business.”
“Thirty-five, seven,” Roddy interjected. “That’s the cut, not forty.”
Carl turned to Roddy. “Our last job didn’t clear half that before the split.”
Roddy held up three hands while standing on the fourth. “Don’t look at me. I’m with you on keeping our eyes out of that thing.”
Mriy yawned, revealing bloodstained teeth from her breakfast. “Open it. Don’t open it. As long as we get paid I don’t care.”
Mort pursed his lips and tapped them with a finger. “I admit I’d like to know.”
“Come on, Mo—”
“But I don’t see a pressing need,” Mort continued over Carl’s objection. “Besides, looks like a bloody mess of science sealing it shut.”
# # #
Esper woke with a kitchen towel under her head and a pool of drool by her mouth. The box had been pushed to the edge of the table where she had fallen asleep. She didn’t remember dozing off, but the evidence was overwhelming that she had. The common room was quieter than she could ever recall it being; it was eerie.
A finger rubbed across paper—the turning of a page in a paper book. Not many people would have recognized the sound, but the One Church had always favored paper Bibles. Blinking back the gummy feeling in her eyes, Esper glanced around to find Mort sitting on the couch, a huge tome spread across his lap.
“Oh, you’re awake,” he said, stating the obvious. He took a red cloth ribbon and tucked it between the pages before shutting his book.
“Since when do you read books?” Esper asked.
“My dear girl, I’m a wizard,” Mort replied. “I just normally keep my reading to my quarters, where there are fewer jelly stains. You’d been acting peculiar though, so I shooed everyone out and kept an eye on you.”
Esper wiped at her mouth with a sleeve, wondering just how undignified she had looked sleeping at the kitchen table. Then she considered her present company, and wondered why she worried about that sort of thing anymore. “I’m fine. Thanks.”
“Oh, I know that, but you needed the sleep and I didn’t mind having both quiet and a couch at the same time,” Mort replied. “Besides, I recognized the symptoms instantly. The rest have grown a bit dense about this sort of thing, but I still know the signs?”
“Symptoms?” Esper asked. “What is it you think I’ve got?”
“A conscience.”
“Oh.”
“It’s treatable,” said Mort. He waved his hand around, indicating their general vicinity. “They all manage. Beer treats the symptoms, but money pulls it out by the roots.”
“You think getting paid will stop me caring what we’re delivering?”
“Do you think we wouldn’t deliver it if we knew?”
Esper swallowed. “I hope it would depend what’s inside.” She studied the wizard a moment, wondering what bait she could put on a hook to snag his conscience. Conscience and guilt were the surest weapons against evil. They compelled a good person to do the right thing when the wrong choice seemed easier. They made righteous actions feel good and immoral ones feel bad, and kept souls on the path of salvation better than any amount of coercion or fear ever could. But this time, the sin of Pride might serve better. “But it doesn’t matter anyway, since we couldn’t open it if we tried.”
Mort snickered. “Don’t give me that hangdog look. Reverse psychology, the scientists call that one. But wizards learn that trick young. The simplest of magics is turning someone’s own mind against them. You think I’m so desperate to prove myself that I’d open it just to show that I could? Of course I could figure a way into it. I don’t doubt that for a moment. The challenge holds no thrall over me.”
“It’s a dinosaur egg,” Esper blurted.
Mort narrowed his eyes. “What’s that now?”
“That safari park had dinosaurs,” Esper said. “The guide was—”
“Carl told me there were no dinosaurs,” Mort said. “Just run-of-the-mill megafauna. Stupidly huge animals, but just regular ones.”
“Technically ‘dinosaurs’ are from Earth. That was Carl’s excuse. These were Vi Tik Naa sauropods, just like dinosaurs in every way … except technically not dinosaurs. Anyway, our contact was the safari guide, and the box was hidden buried in the park. I can’t be sure, but my guess is that it’s a dinosaur egg.”
Mort eyed the box. He eyed it long and hard, and Esper let him do so in peace. If scientists held that the human brain was a biological computer made of neurons and lobes and cortices, what did wizards think went on inside their heads? Whatever alchemy was gurgling inside Mort’s skull, it reached some conclusion.
“If it’s a dinosaur egg … you got any problems with us delivering it?”
Esper sighed. “I think when you agree to deliver something no questions asked, you know you’re hauling something illegal. Unless someone’s making the galaxy’s most expensive omelet, we’re basically just taking it from one zoo to another.”
“Let’s have a look, then,” said Mort.
Esper nodded and didn’t say a word. She kept the smirk off her face until Mort was looking the other way, bent over inspecting the carved glyphs on the box. He squinted as he examined them, traced them with a finger, and muttered to himself beneath his breath. Esper wondered how much of it was for show.
“Professional job,” Mort said, sitting back and scratching his chin. “I’ll give them that much, whoever warded this thing.”
“That a problem?”
Mort snorted. “Look up on top of the fridge, there’s a black marker up there. Grab it for me.”
Esper did as he asked, and found a disreputable old marker atop the Mobius’s refrigerator, sticky with some food-based substance. On a hunch, she looked close at the refrigerator door, and noticed faint remnants of old messages scrawled on the stainless steel and mostly wiped away: “Out of cheese,” “Touch the cake and die,” “Green bottle is for med scan, DO NOT DRINK,” and several others. She handed the marker to Mort.
Mort popped the cap and sniffed the exposed tip. “Love that smell. Nothing natural about it, but science gets one right once in a while.” He proceeded to start drawing on the box.
“What are you doing?” Esper demanded, horrified. She hadn’t given it much thought, but she had assumed he was going to take notes or work out whatever wizard’s did for magical mathematics. Defacing their cargo had somehow not occurred to her.
“Making a few modifications,” Mort replied. His tongue poked out the corner of his mouth as he worked. The lines held no meaning for Esper. The patterns of the glyphs were one sort of gibberish; the graffiti Mort added were another sort. The result looked like a street map of an old Earth city, before enlightened city planners discovered grids and right angles.
“There we are,” Mort said, capping the marker, which he slapped down onto the table with a satisfied grin.
“Now what?” Esper asked. “It’s still sealed.”
“I gave that some thought,” Mort replied. “I could break it open, but damn me if I have any idea how I’d get it back into one working piece. But then I realized …” Mort lifted the box, which turned wispy and insubs
tantial in his hands. “ … that I don’t need to harm it at all.”
Left on the table was an egg, resting atop the towel Esper had used for a pillow. It was cream-colored, flecked with blue, and the size of a loaf of bread. She reached out a hand to touch it but stopped short. Whoever was to receive it might scan the egg, and she might leave traces of her DNA on it.
Mort set the box down, which turned solid once more, and hefted the egg. “Lotta trouble for this little critter,” he said. “Lighter than I’d have imagined for a dinosaur egg, but what do I know about dinosaurs.”
Esper looked on in horror as Mort casually turned the egg over, looking at every side of it and running his hands across the surface. He could drop it. He could break it. He was leaving his DNA all over it like a bear rubbing on a tree to leave its scent. “Wipe it off. Put it back in the box, quick.”
“So, it was an egg,” Roddy said. Esper and Mort turned to see the laaku mechanic loitering by the cargo bay door.
“How’s it that you can open and shut that door without us hearing you?” Esper demanded, flushing with embarrassment.
Roddy waggled the fingers of his upper hands beside his head. “Magic,” he replied. “Or maybe I’ve got a bunch of secret tunnels only I know about. Or maybe … I’m not a stampede of elephants through the ship like y’all are. For a hunter/gatherer species, you humans are shit all at moving quietly.”
“Don’t tell Carl,” Esper implored. “We’re going to put it right back. No one else needs—”
The door to Carl’s quarters opened. “Mort, what’s going on out here? Lights in my bunk went out and I can’t get them back on.”
“Probably temporary,” Roddy said. “Mort’s done some shit with magic that Mobius wasn’t shielded for.”
“Is that an egg?” Carl asked.
“I’m not supposed to tell you that,” Roddy replied. “But yeah.”
Carl shrugged. “Could be worse.” The door to his quarters slammed shut.
“That’s it?” Esper asked.
“What’d you expect?” Roddy asked. “That he was going to airlock you or something?”
