It was a con. Had to be. And he was the mark. Tempting though it might be to simply out the players and shut the operation down then and there, Drew was curious to see just how far his crew of bad apples were capable of taking this charade. Was there a common goal at the end of it? He decided to play along and find out.
“Tell her from me that she won’t have to worry about dealing with any more Rangers until she’s good and ready to fry their butts herself,” Drew promised, on his way to the tube car. As the door slid open for him, he turned and added, “But also tell her that Bonelli is mine.”
Ruby flashed him a proud smile. “Yes, sir, Chief!”
Then the tube car door closed between them and her earlier words sank in: “Hull integrity dropping?” Drew pressed the button for L Deck. Gavin Holchuk would have to wait.
Chapter 15
“Where the hell is he?”
Doc Ktumba glanced up briefly, shook her head, and returned to examining the patient. “He’ll be here when he gets here, Gavin. Meanwhile, perch somewhere, will you? You’re wearing a trench in my floor.”
But he couldn’t stop pacing. “When will you know?” he demanded.
“Where is Teri?” she countered impatiently.
“She’s finishing up in the aft cargo hold.”
The Doc turned and stared at him incredulously. “Her first inspection, and you left her alone on a ship full of Nandrians sleeping off a victory party?” she scolded.
“You know me better than that. Robbo and Lu are with her. And Yoko.”
The Doc stifled a laugh. “The Überrat will protect her, all right.”
“Hey, never underestimate an Eligible rodent.” A pause, then, “Well?”
Ktumba breathed an exasperated syllable. “She isn’t Madeline, Gavin.”
“Are you sure?”
“The first thing I did was a DNA comparison. You’re not even distantly related. Now go away and let me work.” In a more charitable voice, she added, “I’ll have the results of the biotests in half an hour. Townsend should be available by then. Why don’t you go check on Teri?”
He looked past her, at the girl lying so pale and still on the examining bed. Only a quiet chorus of electronic beeps emanating from various monitors indicated she was still alive.
Teri had found her in the forward hold of the Nandrian ship, bound and gagged and slung like a hammock from one of the duct pipes. The girl’s clothing had been torn and there were scrapes and bruises all over her body. Tears had dried on her cheeks. Tendrils of dark hair were sweat-plastered to her face. A slight Human female, caught in the insanity of tekl’hananni — it was a miracle she’d even survived. Holchuk’s first thought on emerging from the shock of seeing her there had been to talk to Nagor, but the Chief Officer had been sound asleep. Then he’d contacted AdComm, and learned to his disgust that the station manager was dead to the world as well.
At least Teri hadn’t fallen apart on him. He’d feared she might, mainly because she claimed to have been some kind of celebrity in her previous life and seemed to resent having to tote her own luggage; but she’d surprised him, bless her. Together, they’d lowered the girl to the deck, removed the bindings from her wrists and ankles and the tarry substance from over her mouth, and brought her to Med Services.
The girl had been so light in his arms, so sweet and young, with an innocence that he hadn’t seen, or even dared to think about, in far too many years. She was somebody’s precious daughter. She looked the right age to be his daughter. And she’d been through so much…
“Gavin, it isn’t her,” the Doc repeated firmly.
Of course, it wasn’t. After all this time, how could he still believe in those kinds of coincidences?
“Then who is she, Doc?”
“I promise you, we’ll find out. But not if you don’t let me work.”
Holchuk raised his hands in surrender and headed back up to A Deck.
***
Teri was waiting for him beside the archway to docking module 4, hugging her compupad to her chest and frowning uncertainly.
“Trouble with the Nandrians?” he asked. There shouldn’t have been — knowing that she might have to deal with members of Nagor’s crew, Holchuk had introduced Teri as his mate, giving her Fifth Shield status and himself the right under Nandrian law to take action against anyone who harmed her.
“No,” she replied. “But you’ll never guess what the cargo is in the aft hold.”
The aft hold wasn’t as well-lit as the forward hold, nor as clean, although it seemed to contain just as many stratium storage cubes. Their pale, squat shadows hugged the deck, freckled by pieces of dirt and scattered bits of debris. As he followed Teri through the gray-on-gray maze, Holchuk could feel things flatten under his boots with a soft, almost apologetic crunch. It was a discomfiting sensation.
There was also a pungent smell in the air, as though something had broken open or spoiled, and he was opening his mouth to ask Teri what it was when they suddenly emerged into an area containing a dozen cages.
Some were constructed of metal bars and mesh, some of a bamboo-like material. None of the cages was taller than his waist, and all but a couple were occupied. He could feel the sad eyes of the Nandrians’ silent captives on him long before he could see them.
“The Nandrians are transporting animals to be sold as pets,” said Teri. “Rob is looking them up on the database right now. According to the manifest, this shipment is to be delivered to an exotic animal broker on one of the alien worlds.”
Holchuk could tell from the glance she threw him then that they had both had the same unsettling thought.
“And look,” she said, dropping abruptly to one knee. She plucked something off the deck and handed it to him. It was a splinter of the bamboo-like material, trailing a long fiber that had become trapped in a crack at one end.
“The deck is littered with these,” she explained. “We figure they’re what’s left of one of the cages. And those fibers? They look an awful lot like cloth strands, don’t they? The girl’s clothing was in tatters when we found her. What if the Nandrians tried to cage her, but she broke out, destroying the cage — and her clothes — in the process? Gavin, what if—?” Her voice failed as she looked up at him.
Slowly he shook his head, feeling as though a wormhole were trying to open inside his stomach. This wasn’t right. The Nandrians were warriors, yes; but, as Nagor had told him on more than one occasion, they were traders, not conquerors, and certainly not slavers. The Great Council would never have approved Nandor’s application for membership if its citizens preyed upon other worlds, other sentients. Members also had to have a peaceful home world. That was why the Nandrians had tekl’hananni — forty Houses continuing a millennia-old power struggle out in space with full-contact contact, regulated by officials on neutral observation ships. Holchuk shuddered as the thought occurred to him: If the Nandrians could make war and call it a sport, what was to prevent them from having another name as well for the buying and selling of slaves?
“Gavin? Are you okay?” Teri was watching him, her brows knitted with concern.
Holchuk met her gaze and felt his heart constrict. It had been a long time since anyone besides the Doc had given a damn about his welfare.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” he growled. “If she had to break out of a cage, that could account for a lot of her scrapes and bruises.” For a moment, he tried to visualize himself attacking one of those cages from the inside, with his shoulders, hips and feet. “All right, let’s gather up some evidence,” he concluded. “The boss man has delusions of cophood, so nobody’s going to be shopping in here for a while. He’ll probably order both these holds sealed off until everything in them has been inspected and analyzed seventeen different ways.”
“That poor girl isn’t going to die, is she?”
“Anything is possible, Tiger.”
“Good news, people!” Robbo called to them from the hatchway. “They’re pets. None of those specimens belong to any species classified dangerous or sentient on the Galactic Database.” One of them chose that moment to yawn, and Holchuk found himself staring at an impressive array of sharp teeth. That explained why Robbo was keeping his distance. Yoko had probably shredded his shoulder trying to get away. Überrat, indeed!
“O’Malley, get in here and help Teri gather evidence,” Holchuk decided. “I’m going down to AdComm to file our reports.”
“Copies to Disease Control and Customs? Townsend’s going to love that,” Robbo commented wryly as they passed each other.
“Yeah,” Holchuk muttered. O’Malley was right, of course. Was the girl a stowaway, or was she contraband? Until either Nagor or the girl was awake and willing to talk, there was no way to know what had actually happened aboard the Krronn.
As the tube car started its descent, Holchuk activated his wristcomm. “AdComm, this is Holchuk. Is the boss man awake yet?”
“Walking and talking,” came Ruby’s reply. “Isn’t he with you? Okay, sorry, stupid question. He’s probably gone to L Deck.”
Cursing under his breath, Holchuk punched the override button on the tube car control pad and selected Deck L instead. What was ‘Snooper’ up to now? he wondered darkly.
Chapter 16
L Deck was a hodge-podge of workshops, lockers, warehousing, and factory floor, where parts and ‘hot spares’ were stored for all the technology on the Hub, and where the engineers and tech-types tended to spend much of their time. Sandwiched between the gravity field generator and the primary utilities deck, it was also the Achilles heel of the Hub. One direct hit to L Deck would not only knock out all the primary life support systems, it would also pretty much destroy any chance of repairing them. Worse, anyone caught on L Deck during the attack would either be blown out into space or, if the gravity field held, be crushed as the remaining decks collapsed onto him.
Naguchi had wandered all over Daisy Hub, including to L Deck, but Naguchi had been an engineer. Townsend was nothing definite yet, except a proven liar. So what the hell would he be doing down here? Holchuk wondered as the tube car slid past the stenciled letter L on the wall of the shaft and gently came to a halt.
The door slid aside, revealing some sort of meeting taking place. Townsend and two other men were involved in an animated discussion in the center of the deck, occasionally gesturing toward something that looked like a door panel, painted in colorful stripes. The molecular paintbrush thing? That was what had been so damned important?
“Hey, boss man!” Holchuk called out, striding angrily toward them. “Didn’t you understand my message? I’ve got an emergency waiting in Med Services and—”
They turned as one to look at him, three faces so somber that at the sight of them he almost misstepped. Townsend, Spiro Gouryas, and Devanan Singh. If even Singh had lost his smirk, there had to be something seriously wrong.
“What’s going on?” Holchuk demanded, suddenly feeling less certain than he sounded.
Townsend nodded briefly to the engineer, as though giving him permission to speak.
“It’s our hull integrity, Gavin,” said Gouryas. “In the past standard year, overall hull strength has dropped by nearly twelve percent. We’re currently holding at 88.35, but unless we do something to get it back up close to a hundred, the damage will become irreversible.” The engineer let out a long-suffering sigh. I kept warning you about this, it seemed to say. Now will you listen?
“Come have a look at this panel, Gavin,” Singh said, gesturing him closer. “It’s made of the same alloy as the exterior hull plating on starships. All we used on it was the Muralist’s paintbrush and an ordinary hammer, in that order.”
Holchuk stepped forward, and stood staring in disbelief. The alloy had been specially engineered for space travel. It was many times stronger than steel and shouldn’t even have registered the simple kinetic force of a hammer. But this door panel was wrecked. In places, it was only dented, in others almost punctured. And, he couldn’t help noticing, the worst-damaged parts had been ‘painted’ the deepest color — the color of space that the Muralist was so fond of.
“Damn,” he whispered.
“The atomic composition of the material hasn’t changed,” Gouryas explained, “but the molecular latticework has been altered. Metaphorically speaking, the device turns diamond into coal. They’re both pure carbon, but they deal with light in different ways. And whereas a diamond is one of the hardest materials in existence…”
“Scary, isn’t it?” Singh added.
“Thanks to the Muralist, there are a total of twenty-five soft spots on the Hub, fifteen of them on perimeter bulkheads,” continued Gouryas. “Nobody knows at this point whether the effect can be completely reversed, but I have all my techs working around the clock to determine how the device operates. My theory about this is that the color change is coincidental. I think the ‘paintbrush’ could have been originally intended as an industrial tool, or even a weapon.”
It had come from the Nandrians, Holchuk realized. No wonder they’d become so excited about the Muralist’s little masterpieces. What he’d done was the equivalent of turning a laser rifle into a lamp stand. And of course, the Nandrians would never insult a customer by pointing out that he’d made such an error. Instead, they’d probably set up a betting pool, giving odds on how long it would take their Human friends to discover the mistake themselves — and whether they would survive the lesson.
Townsend’s face had acquired a strange, lopsided smile. “Monkeys with typewriters,” he murmured.
“Typewriters?” asked Singh.
“Antiquated text printing devices, manually operated,” Townsend explained.
“Why give them to monkeys?”
“To see what they’ll do with them, Mr. Singh. Maybe compose poetry. Or maybe use them to bash in the heads of other monkeys. Either way, they’ll be showing you just what kind of monkeys they are.”
Abruptly, Holchuk went cold all over. “Are you suggesting that the Nandrians purposely traded a potentially lethal device to us in order to test us?” he said.
“It wouldn’t be the first time one group of people has covertly taken the measure of another, Mr. Holchuk. Assume for a moment that I’m right. You’re our expert on Nandrians — what would they be most interested in knowing about us?”
Quickly, Holchuk reviewed his mental database. The Nandrians already knew a great deal about Humans. They knew that Humans were intelligent and curious, and compulsively drawn to unravel mysteries. They had had occasion to witness Human courage and resourcefulness. They had also seen and heard examples of Human creativity, which they respected, just as the crew of Daisy Hub respected the Nandrian code of honor and the numerous rituals that went along with it. What, besides that, did the Nandrians truly value, highly enough to test for it without another’s knowledge?
“Loyalty,” he said at last. “They’re warriors, and the most valuable thing to a warrior, next to his own strength, is being able to depend on his allies.”
“But they’ve been trading with Humans for years. Why, suddenly, would they feel the need to test our loyalties?” Townsend wondered. “Unless— Holchuk, could they be planning an offensive?”
“Absolutely not. The Galactic Council would revoke their membership if they became aggressors in a conflict.”
“What if they weren’t the aggressors? What if they were expecting an attack and—?”
Holchuk stifled a laugh. “You’re joking, right? The Nandrians?”
Townsend sighed. “Point taken. All right, then, someone must have done something to make them doubt us. Gouryas, you said that the Muralist began using the device about a station year ago. What else was going on around that time?”
“Khaloub arrived, and—”
“The Meniscus Fiel
d generators were being installed,” Singh cut in. “The first mural appeared just after they came online.”
Townsend’s expression became thoughtful. “Interesting. The generators weren’t purchased by anyone on Daisy Hub. Earth Council bought them and placed them here and on the Zoo. Had anything like that ever happened before?”
“No, and with luck it’ll never happen again,” declared Singh with a vehemence that surprised the new station manager.
“Is that how everyone feels?” Townsend asked.
“It is now,” said Gouryas. “We welcomed it at first. We thought we’d get to play with it, you know? Learn how it works, maybe even improve on it. Then the Nandrians warned us about the security protocols. And, Mr. Townsend, I can’t speak for the others, but I felt cheated. Not by the Nandrians. By Earth. As you said earlier, we’ve been trading with the aliens for years. Anything they’ve sold us has always come without strings — no restrictions, no warranties. Then Earth does a deal with the Nandrians, and suddenly, we’re not allowed to touch. It’s not right. Aliens might not be aware of that, but Earth Council should have known better.”
“He’s right,” Singh chimed in. “Somebody should have realized that you can’t install a new technology on a hub full of techs and engineers and expect them not to at least be curious about it.”
Feeling even more cynical than usual today, Holchuk found himself entertaining a sudden thought. “Maybe someone did realize it, Dev. Maybe that’s why it was put here.”
“What are you saying?” demanded Singh. “That Earth Council wanted us to play with that field generator?”
Townsend was nodding now, his face a grim mask. “I think that may be precisely what they had in mind, Mr. Singh.”
The Genius Asylum: Sic Transit Terra Book 1 Page 11
