by Judith
Before Chekov could find something else to complain about, Krulmadden smoothly popped through the airlock under his own power. He tried a few kneebends, then pounded his fist against his chest so his rings clanked against his tunic’s hard scales. “Ah, the invigoration of real resistance!” He clapped his hand enthusiastically against Sulu’s side and the helmsman slammed into the corridor bulkhead.
Krulmadden scowled as Sulu fought to keep his balance. He turned to Chekov. “A few months in real gravity and you behave like true shipmates. But in meantime, what you need is ... exercise! Ur’eon exercise!” He laughed at the uncomfortable expressions on his new shipmates’ faces. “You may think of that as an order.”
Following Krulmadden’s doubletime march through the Queen Mary’s corridors reminded Chekov of being a cadet [72] again, and he had hated being a cadet. The only good thing about that status was that it had led to the day he had become an ensign. But he knew that was exactly what he and Sulu had become again—cadets in Krulmadden’s private navy. The shipmaster was making a pointed show of the control he wielded over them.
But still, there had to be limits. “Excuse me, Shipmaster,” Chekov said, puffing as he eyed the third set of steep, interlevel ladders Krulmadden intended to lead them up, “but are there no turbolifts?”
“No room for drive tubes! No power!” Krulmadden grasped the rung of the ladder inset in the corridor wall. “Has the f’deraxt bred the spine out of its mammals as well as the brain and heart?” He leapt up the ladder, hand over hand, singing boisterously in a language Chekov had never heard before.
Chekov stared at Sulu. “I think perhaps it is a form of torture we are unfamiliar with.”
Sulu looked up the ladder. “I think we’re going to need a new plan.”
Krulmadden’s voice thundered down from above. “Waaaaiting, little mammals!”
Sulu began to climb. Chekov waited for the way to clear so he wouldn’t suddenly be crushed by Sulu falling at 19.5 meters per second, and then he followed, already feeling blisters form on his hands.
From the sloping angle of the ceiling on the next level, Chekov concluded they had reached the main hull’s top deck. Surely Krulmadden wasn’t intent on taking them up to the warp pod, but Chekov wasn’t even sure what the shipmaster’s motives were for bringing them this far.
Krulmadden slowed his pace as he directed them along a curving corridor leading to port. Chekov, inhaling deeply to catch his breath, could hear Sulu breathing hard behind him. But when Krulmadden stopped by a set of doors and turned back to see how his new shipmates were doing, the huge being had not even broken a sweat.
[73] Krulmadden placed one hand on the doors and leaned against them, waiting for Sulu and Chekov to catch up with him. “So my little mammals, do you have any idea where we are on this jewel of mine?”
“Top deck, main hull,” Chekov wheezed, putting his hands on his knees to ease the strain on his back.
“Port side,” Sulu gasped. “And we went through one-and-a-half circuits of the deck below us.”
“Good, you pay attention.” Krulmadden looked at the door panels beneath his hand and when he returned his gaze to Sulu and Chekov, he wasn’t smiling. “Have you noticed anything else ... unusual about this ship?”
“Besides no turbolifts?” Chekov asked.
“Very few doors,” Sulu said. “Is the hull hollow?”
Chekov carefully watched Krulmadden for a reaction. If the Queen Mary were less massive than its apparent volume indicated, then it would be capable of greater acceleration than a potential enemy might expect. But the subterfuge would only work once and a large enough sensor array could detect a significant mass/volume discrepancy.
“On contrary,” the shipmaster answered. “Is quite full. But of what, you need not know for now. Is enough simply to know not everything here is as it seems. And so is much danger ... and destructions.” He paused, but neither human interrupted. “Thus, all that remains ... is to know if you are as you seem.”
It was a threat, Chekov knew, and whatever happened next, Krulmadden had ensured that both humans would be too exhausted to try and make their way back through the ship to the shuttle. There was no choice but to continue with whatever the shipmaster had in mind.
“I don’t understand,” Sulu said. “You said you recognized us in the tavern.”
Krulmadden ran his tongue over the diamond set in his incisor, and said very carefully in his best Standard, “Don’t you find it convenient that I, a shipmaster in need of crew, and you, [74] crew in need of a ship, found each other on such a large planet in such a big galaxy?” He scratched at the corner of his eye. “Why were you in the tavern? So far from home?”
Chekov and Sulu exchanged a look: The strategy was in Chekov’s hands.
“We were ... looking for a ship.”
“Why?”
“We have none.”
“Why?”
Chekov was in no mood for this. “Because we are no longer in Starfleet.”
Krulmadden stared at Chekov without blinking. “Why?”
“Because they called us worldkillers,” Chekov said angrily. “I thought the great Krulmadden was supposed to know everything.”
“How else to know than by asking questions? And now, a final one: Are you the worldkillers they say you are?”
Chekov hesitated before answering. Which would an Orion shipmaster prefer to have serving on his ship? Two brutal, reckless criminals that Starfleet had condemned by innuendo if not by courts-martial, or two wrongly accused officers who felt their honor had been smeared? He didn’t know the answer, so he told the truth.
“No. The charges are false.”
Krulmadden raised his thick black eyebrows. “Famed Starfleet is wrong?” He bit his knuckle and growled softly.
“Not wrong,” Chekov said. “They just do not understand what truly occurred.”
The shipmaster drummed his fingertips against the doors he leaned against. “What do you intend to do about it?”
Now that Chekov had established the plan, Sulu joined the conversation. “There is nothing more we can do about it. We resigned when that became obwious.”
“Surely, you have ... feelings about the way Starfleet has treated you?”
Chekov grimaced. “That is why we were looking for a ship.”
Sulu smiled tightly through clenched teeth.
[75] “Any ship? Or one ship in particular?”
“The type of ship we could find in a tavern. On Rigel VIII.”
Krulmadden took his hand from the doors. He had made his decision. “The thirst for revenge can be as invigorating as the resistance of true gravity. I welcome you as crew on the jewel of all the stars.”
“I thought that’s what you did after the fight in the tavern,” Sulu said, still wary.
“All that fight told me was the seriousness of you. I didn’t need to know your anger with Lasslanlin and Artinton. I needed to know your anger with Starfleet. Too many spies have tried to board this ship in past.”
“And what would have happened if you had decided we were spies as well?” Chekov hated unanswered questions.
“Then, my little mammals, you would have gone through these doors.” Krulmadden smoothed his beard. “But, instead we shall go through those.” He pointed to a second set of closed doors farther along the corridor. “Come.” Krulmadden put his hand to his chest and began to croon again as he led the way.
As Chekov passed the doors Krulmadden had leaned against, he looked at the marker on them. But he couldn’t read the Trader’s Script. Sulu could. “Recycling room,” the helmsman said.
Krulmadden stopped by the second set of doors and punched in a security code, using his massive body to block his fingers from Chekov’s eyes.
“What does this one say?” Chekov asked, pointing to the marker on the new doors.
Sulu shrugged. “Cargo storage, I think.”
The doors slid open and a warm breeze filled with a heady scent of rich cinnam
on and other less familiar spices spilled past them. The room beyond the doors seemed huge.
“You read the Trader’s Script well,” Krulmadden said as he stepped aside and motioned for Sulu and Chekov to enter. “Indeed, this is part of my jewel’s greatest cargo. Which you are welcome to enjoy.”
Sulu entered first and Chekov saw him suddenly freeze only a [76] few steps inside. Beside Chekov, Krulmadden laughed. “Ah, yes, quite a sight, are they not?”
Chekov stepped forward, feeling the weight of Krulmadden’s hand patting him on his back.
“We do things differently from Starfleet onboard Queen Mary, “the shipmaster said gleefully. “You will be paid first and work tomorrow!”
Chekov peered into the vast room over Sulu’s shoulder. “What is this?”
“The exercise I promised you!” Krulmadden laughed. “True Ur’eon exercise! Come, come, you are f’deraxt’la no more.”
Then Chekov saw what had stopped Sulu dead and he realized the true nature of the monster they were forced to deal with if they were ever to clear their names.
In a long row of small cubicles stretched against one wall of the immense cargo hold were more than twenty Orion females. Their green skin glistened and their long black hair shone in the blue glow from the repulsor fields that ringed each open doorway, keeping them in place as inhumanly as any chains or irons.
Krulmadden was more than just another Orion pirate. He was the worst kind: an outlaw whose hideous crime had been condemned on each world of the Federation and was believed to have been forced into extinction. But perhaps evil was more powerful than even the Federation had realized. Because Shipmaster Krulmadden was a slaver.
And now, Chekov thought in rage, so are we.
SEVEN
Kirk remembered the Farragut, the first real ship he had served on—a Constitution-class starship like the Enterprise. He had been a green lieutenant and the Farragut was to be his first deep-space mission. The endless week between receiving his orders and finally arriving aboard her had been filled with his dreams of the new life of exploration and excitement that awaited him: first contact with alien worlds, going eye-to-eye with the Klingons, saving colonies, securing the frontiers. Then Kirk had run straight into what his father disparagingly called the “new Starfleet” and had spent his first six months managing supply crates in the Farragut’s cargo bay. He found it somehow fitting that he had returned there now, in spirit, if not in fact.
Surprised that he had retained so much of an almost fifteen-year-old skill, Kirk deftly managed the controls of a Mark IV Tractor Web to receive, sort, and secure the rapid stream of cargo crates being loaded onto the freighter, SS Ian Shelton. It helped that the old Mark IV was virtually identical to the one he had operated on the Farragut. His familiarity with it was how he had managed to swing the job of stevedore in the first place, jockeying the transfer of cargo from Intrator II’s commercial spacedock to the freighter which was stationkeeping 200 meters away.
As Kirk worked the controls, the voice of the Orbital Transfer Controller came over the communicator link on the Mark IV’s console. “How are you doing in there, Shelton?”
“All conditions are nom—uh, everything’s okay so far.” Kirk still had to concentrate to keep from falling into the old patterns of speech. He wasn’t looking forward to another unveiling as had happened with the rockriggers, even though, despite his beard and longer hair, he knew it was inevitable. He had been surprised to find out how small a universe it was within the boundaries of Federation space.
“Sure you don’t need a break in the flow to sort things out?”
“Keep ’em coming,” Kirk said.
He could hear the grin in the Controller’s voice. “Okay, hotshot, let’s see if we can go for a new record.”
The crates began floating through the open cargo-bay doors of the Ian Shelton at ten-second intervals, almost twice their previous rate. They were standard, interstellar modular crates whose polyhedron-angled sides were designed to prevent shifting during transport and which were just as easy to handle in microgee or with tractor webs as the less stable, cube-shaped crates still used for strictly planetside shipment.
“Hey, Shelton,” the Controller asked jovially, “sure you don’t want us to slow it down to give the computer a chance to take over?”
“Slow it down?” Kirk asked, trying to sound puzzled. “I’m still waiting for you to speed it up.”
The Mark IV’s main projectors were arranged around the cargo-bay opening and along one bulkhead to produce a three-dimensional grid of tractor beams through which the crates moved. An inertial feedback circuit told Kirk the mass of each crate as the web acquired it so he could spread the density of the cargo throughout the hold as the crates were stacked, to keep the freighter’s lines of thrust balanced. If the cargo had been completely uniform, or each crate had been outfitted with a reliable transponder to identify its contents, or there had been enough time for a sensor system to evaluate the crates for a computer that could stack them a thousand different ways in [79] memory as it searched for the most stable order, then Kirk’s job could have been automated. But the real world of interstellar trade was not so orderly, so the almost infinite flexibility of a living mind was required. Along with absolutely no distractions.
Kirk involuntarily tensed when he heard the cargo-bay control room doors slide open behind him. Keeping a mental picture of the positions and masses of almost sixty crates in his mind at once as he tried to stack old ones at a rate exceeding the arrival of new ones, he didn’t dare turn around to see who it was. A split second of hesitation on his part could lead to crate collision, cargo loss, and even hull damage. Why do I get myself into these situations? Kirk asked himself. It was one thing to go all out when the safety of his crew or his ship had depended on it. But for a ten-credit-an-hour job?
“Don’t look up,” a voice behind Kirk said. It was Anne Gauvreau, the ship’s captain and his employer of the day. From the corner of his eye, he saw her standing by the console to look through the cargo-bay viewport. Then he heard her whistle.
“When Control said we were taking on cargo at one per ten, I thought they were joking.”
Kirk made a noncommittal noise. His board showed the rate was already up to one crate every eight seconds. As far as he could see, in less than a minute there were going to be only two ways out. The first was to start stacking the crates without worrying about their mass. There was a possibility that the stacking density might balance out by chance, but if it didn’t, then he’d be personally responsible for keeping the freighter in orbit for hours while he reshuffled the cargo.
The board showed a shipping rate of one per seven and Kirk knew he had reached his limit. No matter how uncomfortable he found the decision, he had to choose the second way out. The bottom line was that it wasn’t his ship. He had to admit defeat. It’s only a job, he told himself. He wasn’t convinced.
“Come in, Control,” Kirk called out to the communicator.
“Give us a break, Shelton. You don’t have to rub it in.”
Kirk didn’t answer. He hadn’t expected that reply. And then [80] he saw that no new crates were floating into the bay, though the manifest screen indicated there were still several hundred to load.
Kirk took the chance. “Orbital Transfer Control: What seems to be the trouble out there?”
The Controller took his time answering. “Uh, seems we got a burned-out impeller coil at the transfer bay, Shelton.”
Because he wasn’t on an image link, Kirk smiled. Now he remembered why he got himself into these situations.
Gauvreau leaned forward to the console’s communicator. “Orbital Transfer Control, Captain Gauvreau here. Tell me, do you happen to know why the coil burned out ... ?”
The Controller was surprisingly contrite. “Because we couldn’t keep up with the rate at which you were receiving cargo.”
Gauvreau tapped her fingers on the console. “If I’m not out of here in two and a half hours,
the business office is going to owe me some hefty penalties.”
“We’ll get back to you when the repairs are finished,” the Controller said glumly.
Kirk heard the channel click off. He forced the smile from his face and looked up at Gauvreau with earnest concern. For a moment the freighter’s captain had an expression of stern concentration. “Offhand, Leonard, I’d say you were one lucky bastard.” Then she laughed and Kirk joined her.
“So what do you figure?” Gauvreau asked once the tension of the near-disaster in the cargo bay had been dissipated. “I’d say you were about two more seconds away from a chain-reaction pile-up that would have sent crates through the wall of the ship.”
“Well, not exactly two seconds,” Kirk began.
“Let me rephrase that,” Gauvreau interrupted. “Through the wall of my ship.”
Kirk tried to keep the smile from his face but had little success. “When I called Control, that’s when I was going to ... admit defeat and have them shut down the stream.”
[81] “One per eight on a Mark IV,” Gauvreau said, shaking her head. She looked back out through the viewport. “You know, with the penalties they’re liable for if I don’t break orbit on schedule, they’re going to be rushing that impeller repair. So I’d take care of that holding pattern you’ve got in there while you’ve got the chance.”
Kirk turned back to the console and without the confusion of new crates arriving every few seconds, the stacking procedure was simple. He kept a few unusually massive and unusually light crates floating in temporary stacks and assigned the rest to a final storage configuration.
When he had finished, Kirk kept his hands on the controls, fully expecting the Controller to inform him that the coil had been replaced about one second before the first crate came blasting through the bay doors. At least with the extra time Kirk had had to straighten out the hold, even at one crate every five seconds he could handle the rest of the flow simply by keeping everything in temporary stacks. There would be room enough according to the manifest.
Gauvreau read the mass display of the final stacked crates appreciatively. “Good arrangement,” she told Kirk. “Don’t know how you built that pattern so quickly.”
