Nyb Pim stared at him, unblinking. “I would imagine.”
“Are you prepared to take the pilot’s chair?” Drake asked.
“No, I’m not prepared. I wish I had a few more days in the sick bay.”
“Doesn’t seem to be a rush,” Tolvern said. “We can use Capp through to the red dwarf system, then bring Nyb Pim around later.”
Drake shook his head. “The pilot has other ideas. A looser second jump so we can haul Captain Kidd through with us. Capp can’t do it, only Nyb Pim.”
“What are you worried about?” Tolvern asked the Hroom. “The trips, the detoxing?”
“It will be a fast transition,” Nyb Pim said. “I’ll need to be mentally alert.”
Tolvern had another concern, now that she thought about it. “Is your nav chip on?”
“It was disabled when I was arrested.”
“Doc can turn it back on,” Drake said. “But you’ll need time to run diagnostics and download the current map set before you interface with the nav computer.”
“That shouldn’t take long,” Nyb Pim said. “Half an hour, maybe.”
Which didn’t leave them much time, she noted. Nevertheless, the three of them fell into silence, with the captain staring hard at his pilot.
“You want to know why,” the Hroom said at last. It was not a question.
“I want to know the why of a whole lot of things,” Drake said. “You say the attack that put me before the tribunal was not an accident. That the Royal Navy removed something from the wreckage. That you voluntarily became a sugar eater. Yes, I find myself curious.”
“There is a cure for the sugar eaters.”
“A what?” both Tolvern and Drake asked at the same time.
“Better call it an antidote. Something taken into the body that blocks the absorption of sugar into the Hroom brain. Renders it as harmless as soda water. You administer a single dose, and a Hroom will never again swoon, whether he’s an addict or not.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Tolvern said, skeptical. She glanced at the captain, who was frowning, then back to Nyb Pim. “Are you sure?”
“I’m not making it up,” the Hroom insisted.
“I didn’t say you were,” she said. “But maybe someone told you that, and you wanted to believe.”
“I’m no enemy of humans,” Nyb Pim said. “After my family broke apart, I was raised by human missionaries. I joined the Royal Navy of my own free choice. Of course I look at the decay and destruction of my native civilization with sorrow. But this began long before I was born. Generations ago, now. It seemed inevitable. The human race is young and energetic. The Hroom are tired and ancient. The sugar wars were both sign and symptom of the disease.
“The decay could not be fought,” Nyb Pim continued, “only managed. Some of us could take our place within the new human order. I understood the missionaries—their goal was to keep more Hroom from becoming eaters. I never dreamed there would be an antidote.”
“I still don’t believe it,” Tolvern said. “If such a thing were possible, the whole sector would know about it.” She looked to the captain for help, but he was stroking his chin thoughtfully.
“I learned of it hacking into the network,” Nyb Pim said. “And I knew at once I had to bring it to light. And I knew people would want to stop me. Humans would stop me. No human would want such a thing to be known.”
“We’re not all slavers,” Drake said quietly.
“No?” Nyb Pim said. He fixed his big, dark eyes on the captain.
“Who invented this so-called sugar antidote?” Tolvern asked, still suspicious. “A doctor, a scientist? Who can corroborate your story?”
“Nobody can corroborate it, not any more. The researchers are dead, murdered, as are many others who learned of its existence. The antidote was taken from the merchant ship that Captain Drake is accused of destroying, and its existence covered up. From there it went to Henry Upton, on its way to Hot Barsa. There is a small group of free Hroom living in the jungles there. Renegades and refugees. I arranged to be taken as a slave to the planet where I could be rescued by them.”
“How would you manage that as an eater?” Tolvern asked. “You wouldn’t want to be rescued, not if it meant taking you from the sugar. You’d have confessed the whole thing to your new masters.”
“Maybe,” Nyb Pim said. “I had to take the risk. We had to know where they were hiding the antidote so we could raid the lab and liberate it.”
“Then what?” Drake asked. “You’d free the slaves of Hot Barsa? What would keep the Royal Navy from landing a hundred thousand marines to put down the revolt?”
“A hundred thousand men cannot control fourteen million square miles of jungle and swamp. Meanwhile, we’d find a way to smuggle the antidote offworld. Soon we’d have a dozen rebellious worlds. I see your troubled look,” he added, looking back and forth between the captain and the commander. “You could never tolerate such a thing.”
“There are millions of Hroom living on human planets,” Drake said. “A widespread rebellion would be an ugly thing.”
“Now you see what I mean. Every human is a slaver.”
The thought of a general slave revolt terrified Tolvern. Even on Albion itself, where there was hostility to slavery as opposed to free labor, there were several million slaves. On the sugar worlds, eaters outnumbered humans eight to one, and if the free Hroom working for the York Company were counted, the ratio was more like ten to one. The same pattern played out through the several dozen inhabited systems in this part of the galaxy. Put all the humans together—Albionish, Ladino, and New Dutch alike—against a renewed Hroom Empire, no longer crippled by billions of sugar eaters, and the scenario turned scary.
Tolvern had always thought Nyb Pim one of the crew, as loyal to the navy as anyone else. Now she looked at him with fresh eyes. He was an alien intelligence from a vast, ancient people. In comparison, were humans young and energetic, or small and vulnerable?
“Captain,” she said. “We should talk in private, don’t you think?”
Drake ignored her. “I don’t understand why the navy would destroy the merchant ship and pin it on me. If this antidote truly existed, few people would have balked at the death of a small number of civilians to see it destroyed. We were fighting the Hroom at the time. We needed every advantage.”
“Peace talks had already begun,” Tolvern said. “Maybe the admiralty was worried the empire would send another fleet in anger if they found out.”
“Except they didn’t destroy the antidote,” Drake said. “Nyb Pim says it’s on its way to Hot Barsa. They killed the scientists and researchers. Why not destroy the antidote, too?”
“I don’t know the answers to those questions,” Nyb Pim said. “That wasn’t my concern, so much as getting my hands on it and seeing it spread far and wide.”
“And you’re still determined to do it?” Drake asked. “Recover the antidote, I mean?”
There was a firm set to the captain’s mouth that Tolvern recognized and a flinty look in his eyes. It was the same look he’d worn as they’d overtaken the pirate ship. The same look as when he’d led them at the Battle of Kif Lagoon, where Drake and Rutherford had annihilated a much larger Hroom force. That look normally stirred her blood, made her feel she would follow him to victory against overwhelming odds. At the moment, she found it alarming.
“Captain,” Tolvern tried again. “You’re not considering—?”
“The antidote is gone for now,” Nyb Pim said. “Henry Upton was either destroyed or taken in tow to Hot Barsa. But where? We can’t exactly search millions of square miles of cane, swamp, and jungle.”
The captain shook his head. “Actually, you’re wrong. I know exactly where it is.”
The other two leaned forward in anticipation, but before Drake could elaborate, Jane’s voice came through the general com link. “Thirty minutes to jump.”
“The rest will have to wait,” Drake said. “We need that nav chip on
.”
The three of them rose.
“Tolvern will take you to the sick bay,” Drake said. “At no time will you stroll about unescorted like you did when you showed up in engineering, is that understood?”
Nyb Pim’s mouth drew into a straight line, the lips tight. “Yes, sir.”
“I trust you as my pilot, but I do not in any way trust that you’re cured of addiction. That makes you a danger to yourself and to us, and that’s where my loyalty to you ends.”
“Yes, sir,” Nyb Pim said.
“To be clear, anyone who passes you a single grain of sugar will be shot, and you will condemn yourself to slavery. This time for good. Not that I expect either of those facts to keep you from dipping into the white stuff should the opportunity present itself.”
Indeed, from the way the Hroom’s tongue passed over his lips, she could see that the mere talk of sugar had him thinking about it again.
The captain turned to her now. “Watch him carefully. Keep yourself armed at all times. If he does anything that puts your or anyone else’s life in danger, take immediate action. Lethal action, if necessary.”
“Yes, sir. I won’t mess around.”
She fixed Nyb Pim with a sharp look that would hopefully let him know that she was serious, and would thus dissuade him from any funny business the moment such a thought crossed his mind. For now, he looked as harmless as a gangly, overgrown child, but she remembered how he’d flung himself at the door to his cell.
She would not take him or his addiction lightly.
Chapter Sixteen
Tolvern scanned the bar for Capp and Carvalho but couldn’t see them anywhere in the sweaty, spice-smelling crowd that danced and swayed to the music pounding through the bar speakers. It mingled with the sound of the rooftop bars on the buildings to either side, which one could reach via rope-and-plank bridges that served as roads at night time. It was claimed that crocodile-like creatures came out of the river at night, and it wasn’t safe below.
Didn’t seem to be safe above, either. San Pablo was a low-gravity world—felt like about sixty percent, from what her bones were telling her—and giant, winged shapes soared in the crimson sky overhead, each with a wingspan of fifteen, twenty feet. They had faces like bats and feathers like birds.
An oily film coated her tongue from the charcoal fires and burning petroleum that permeated the air over the city. It was so thick, humid, and pungent that she could scarcely breath. And the heat! It was sweltering up here and suffocating down below.
There were still Hroom on the planet—the entire eastern continent was still theirs—and where the humans had built, they reused the relics of the aliens who had come before. The port of San Pablo itself was built atop an ancient Hroom metropolis, and everywhere you looked you could see spectacular stone ruins. One of their vast ziggurats—a temple of some kind, the captain had told her upon their arrival—loomed above them to the north. To the west, toward the river, lay the red palm forests that surrounded one of their ancient palace complexes, its courtyards visible if you stood in a certain place.
With the golden sun dropping over the red-forested mountain range opposite the river, the rooftop terrace presented an amazing view, but none of the humans or Hroom at the bar paid it any attention. Wrong crowd for that, she supposed.
“Hey, Commander!” Capp called.
Tolvern sighed with relief to spot Capp and Carvalho and made her way over. The pair sat near the edge of the building, away from the dancing, where it was quieter.
They’d changed out of space garb. Carvalho wore black leather pants and a vest with no shirt under it, which showed off his bulging muscles. He wore gold hoops in his earlobes and dark eyeliner. Capp wore tight pants and a leather vest of her own that was unzipped to show her cleavage. Carvalho draped an arm over her shoulder, his hand resting casually against one breast.
Tolvern glanced down at her own simple jumpsuit. Not a uniform, exactly, but it sure looked like one compared to what these two were wearing.
Thanks a lot, Captain, she thought as she stiffly took a seat next to them.
Drake, Barker, and Oglethorpe were out having fun at the spaceyards, haggling over repairs to Ajax, which they’d left in orbit above. She’d thought to go with them. But when Drake had heard that Capp had invited her into town to join her and Carvalho, he’d told her to go keep an eye on the pair.
Capp looked her over. “So this is what passes for casual where you’re from?”
“Where I’m from is the Royal Navy. I don’t get out much for shore leave, so I don’t have much use for casual clothing.”
“That your idea, or the captain’s?”
“I don’t have much use for it,” Tolvern said. “Anyway, the captain usually stays on ship, too, unless he can go hunting.”
“Hunting?”
“Big game, mostly. I’ve been with him a few times.”
“And how is it, anyway? The hunting? Has Drake got a big shotgun, or what?” Capp grinned at Carvalho, who flashed a toothy smile.
“Like I would know,” Tolvern said with a snort.
“You should. I can see you want to jump him.”
“No, I don’t. That’s against regulations.” Tolvern glanced significantly at Carvalho, though she was aware that making an issue of it now made her look childish.
Capp slapped Carvalho’s thigh. “Go get us something to drink. We’re bloody thirsty, here.”
The man sprang obediently to his feet. When he was gone, Capp pulled her chair over to Tolvern’s. She glanced at a pair of Hroom arm wrestling at the next table, then leaned in with a conspiratorial look, putting a hand on Tolvern’s knee like they were old pals.
“You come to keep an eye on me, or you looking to get laid? Couple of blokes been checking you out since you came in, but you gotta loosen up, if you know what I mean.”
Tolvern resisted the urge to ask who and where, even as she knew Capp was full of it. Instead, she shrugged. “Neither. I got sick of babysitting the pilot, so I jumped at the chance to come down and grab a drink. Relax a little.”
“Ah, he ain’t so bad, anyhow.”
“Nyb Pim?” Tolvern asked.
“Aye. I didn’t think nothing good of him when he showed up on the bridge. Figured he’d be a real arse, look down on me and all, but nah, he’s a good bloke, considering. What, being an alien and all.”
“Got us here all right,” Carvalho said, returning with three glasses that looked too big to possibly hold distilled liquor, “an’ I figure this is where some of us wanted to be all along. I might just stay if this rum is any good.” He took a big swig. “And it is!”
A roar disrupted the scene, a disturbance at the next table over. Two men poured sugar onto the ground, and several Hroom threw themselves down to scarf at it with their long tongues snaking out like anteaters devouring termites.
A man staggered past, crashing into tables. Someone gave him a kick to the backside as he stumbled through, and this brought a laugh. Thus proving that humans didn’t need sugar. The liquid stuff that had been around since time immemorial seemed to do the same trick.
Tolvern took a drink. The rum burned going down, and she told herself to take it easy. She’d make a roaring fool of herself if she wasn’t careful. Then these two would go off to work God knows what mischief, while she did her own stumbling into tables.
“Whadya think?” Capp asked. “The black fellow or the big pile of muscle over there?”
“For her or you?” Carvalho said.
“Got my eye on someone else if you don’t satisfy me,” she said. “For Tolvern.”
“Black fellow is better looking,” Carvalho said. “That other bloke is missing half his teeth. Course, he does have them muscles you was talking about, and the commander is so bloody stiff she might need some muscles to loosen her up.”
“Anyhow, look,” Capp said. “They both got ladies checking ’em out. Whadya think, is our girl here better looking?”
“Hard to say. She a
in’t exactly dressed up to get lucky, if you know what I mean.”
Tolvern had been blushing through this, feeling awkward as they discussed her so casually. She’d been sure they were inventing both men from whole cloth to get her to look, but at the mention of the other women involved in this supposed competition for attention, she glanced over.
Both of the men were sitting at the bar, huge tankards of beer in hand. One was dark and lean, the other had a shock of red hair, a beard, and muscles. The one with the beard wasn’t missing any teeth that she could see. Both men looked plenty handsome.
Tolvern took another drink of rum. “You’re full of it, both of you. They’re not looking this way.”
“Course they wouldn’t be, with you all zipped up like that,” Capp said. “Come on, you’re pretty enough. Even if you ain’t looking—’cause I know you got your eye on that big-game hunter of yours—it don’t hurt to have fun, does it?”
She reached over for the zipper of Tolvern’s jumpsuit and tugged it straight down. It was playful enough, and not mean spirited, and Tolvern had downed just enough rum that she was no longer feeling so uptight. The other woman unzipped her suit halfway to her naval, until a strip of bare flesh passed right between her breasts.
“Well look at that,” Capp said with another grin. “Ain’t even got a bra on. You’re ready to take it all off. Just need permission, eh?”
This made Tolvern feel self-conscious again. She had a slender, almost boyish figure, with small breasts. Didn’t really need a bra. Not the envious combination of lean and yet still curvy that Henny Capp seemed to carry effortlessly. Most of the men glancing this way, she now noticed as she was looking around the bar, were looking at Capp, not her.
She zipped her jumper back up with an exaggerated sigh, trying to cover her embarrassment with a look of indifference. She didn’t zip it all the way, but mostly.
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