by Holly Lisle
CHAPTER 4
Kagen
KAGEN WAS HEADING into the mess hall with the rest of Crew Three when Melie, who was Crew Two Gold, pulled him aside and waved the rest of his unit on.
“Congratulations,” she said. “You passed Crew Two eligibility, and I’ve chosen you as Crew Two Green. You’re the first person I’ve seen in ages who passed Crew Two eligibility the first time through.”
He had just finished decontaminating the shuttles after unloading the final twenty-one units from each of them, and had showered the stink of burning humans off of his skin. And had been trying to decide whether to give Burke another chance or to tell him he’d failed and wait for another passenger to pass the eligibility exam. It had been a brutal day.
And suddenly it was better.
“Someone moving up, or someone moving out?” he asked.
“Both.” She grinned. “Willett passed his Captain’s exam and got his license while we were on Cairefon, and the last Spybee we passed had a stack of offers for him. He’s going to captain a TFN starcruiser for a salary that makes my eyeballs bleed. So everyone whose tests and promotion points are in order step promotes. You were short your time in grade for promotion, but you did well as Three Gold and the captain himself approved my request to move you to Two Green.”
The captain himself. This was the sort of attention Kagen had been working for since the first day he worked as Three Green. If important people noticed him, and sided with him, The Dream would become real.
“Thank you,” he said. “Are you staying on as Two Gold?”
“Not a chance. Mash goes Gold tonight.” And then she said, “You’re the first one we’ve had in a while who got through the exam on the first try. I’ll bet you’re aiming for higher.”
“Captain,” Kagen said. “I at least want to qualify on the captain’s exam. I want to get my own ship.”
“Me, too.” Melie smiled. “Skip mess with Three. You’ll eat next hour with Two. Right now I have just enough time to introduce you to the Sleepers.”
They left mess together, and for the first time Kagen found himself facing the always-locked exit to the top-level private ship gravdrop. Melie palmed them through.
“I still find the Sleeper bays unsettling,” Melie told him. “You’ve only seen them from the shuttle bays below. Looking up, it’s all darkness and the bottoms of walkways. You won’t understand how... big... this all is until you’ve seen it from the inside.”
He’d never been through the second doors before, so she pointed out landmarks he needed.
“Crew One duty room,” she said, and pointed down the corridor to the left. “Don’t go in there. It’s the jump room for whichever Crew One pulls third-hand standby when we’re on alert. And on your right is the owner’s quarters,” she said and pointed to a dimly lit corridor. “If you so much as walk down that passage, you’re out on the next world we hit, no matter what sort of world it is. Don’t get curious, don’t forget.”
They reached a crossing passage with signs saying SLEEPERS LEVEL ONE, and Melie pointed to the palm-lock that opened the Sleeper bays.
“As soon as you accept the crew position, your palm code will be added to Level Two areas,” she said, and pressed the palm-lock, The door slid open.
Before him lay rows of containers stacked floor to ceiling on either side of narrow corridors. They were, he realized, more complex versions of the storage units he’d been using for the last several years to bring the Condemned up from the surfaces of the worlds with which the Longview contracted.
“What are all the extra connectors on the containers?” he asked.
She turned and gave him a long stare and a slow head-shake. “Don’t. Ask.”
“You know and can’t tell?”
Her voice dropped so low he had to move his ear to just centimeters from her lips to hear what she was saying. “I don’t know. Nobody knows. Not even the captain. I think they’re something the owner invented for sorting the Condemned, figuring out which ones will be the most valuable where, and then marketing those people directly to the worlds that will pay the most for them. According to a name I can’t mention, the Longview’s owner is the richest Death Circus franchisee in existence. My source says by about twenty times. And the Longview buys the most Condemned, but percentage-wise sells the fewest. So the ones the ship sells have to be going for unbelievable prices. Have to be. Because this is also the biggest and most expensive Death Circus ship in existence. And it pays crew the best.”
Her lips pressed against his ear. “In here, if we’re quiet, we can mention this,” she told him. “If you’re not in the Sleeper stacks, though, say nothing. Ever.”
She pulled back. “We’re gravdropping down to Level Ten. I’m just going to show you Ten Port and Starboard today. It’s the smallest level, and you’re new. You and I will do status sweeps on Ten together twice. Then you’ll do ten on your own, and your Gold will make sure you didn’t miss anything. Then you’ll do Ten on the first day of the week and Nine on the third. You’ll have a lot of other duties, too, but this is the most important one.”
They gravdropped slowly down through the rows and stacks, and Kagen spotted green lights on some, yellow lights on a few, and red lights on many. He pointed them out.
Melie said, “Green means we have at least one bidder for that unit. We off-load those to the world that has bid the highest by the time we reach it. Yellow means the individual in the unit is new. Those will go red or green eventually. The study guides say going red means no one has bid or signaled interest... but sometimes they go red within a few hours of the Condemned’s arrival, and sometimes they go green, then go red. And sometimes they’re red for years.”
“So green is usually Class A, red is usually Class B?”
“Good. I didn’t have to tell you that. You did the extra levels of the exam study.”
He nodded. “Figured I might not need them for Class Two, but that I’d need them for captain.”
She grinned. “Actually, according to the captain, that part of the course you only need to qualify for owner. That and having just buckets of money. But I studied them, too.”
“Is the owner considering selling?”
Melie shrugged. “I don’t think so. And I don’t know anyone who’s bought a Death Circus franchise. But the captain said the owner added ownership training to each level of the testing so we’d understand what we were doing. The captain said as far as he can tell, no other Death Circus franchisee offers this.”
Kagen filed that information away.
They hit Level Ten and pushed out of the gravdrop to the lowest walkway. All the way down, Kagen had been watching the rows upon rows of long containers disappearing into the darkness, and he’d been trying to count. Trying to get a sense of how many Sleepers the ship carried. He couldn’t. Not even a rough guess.”
“How many are there?” he asked her.
“I don’t know. None of us do, and we all want to. That is another piece of information the owner keeps off the records.”
“You could always count the units.”
She laughed. “No. We couldn’t. And if you decide you like being here, and you want to earn a captain’s license without having to sell your soul and indenture your body, you’ll leave this alone. It’s one of the stipulations of service, which you’ll get later today. You get to see this first so you’ll understand the scope of your new duties. And then you have two options. Agree to the terms and accept Crew Two, or move to passenger status and get off the ship at the first world that fits your Acceptable Alternative stats.”
“That seems extreme.”
“Remember when I said the owner is doing something different here?”
“Yes.”
“The stipulations you’ll agree to regarding sharing information about this ship and what’s on it are part of that. And realize that the owner is not playing. We veridicate after every off-ship we do, and if we don’t pass veridication, we’re not allowed back on the ship. We sl
eep in whatever Needle we end up in until some other ship will take us.”
“That’s harsh.”
“It is. Don’t count, don’t dig for information you’re not permitted to have, never get drunk or drugged and run your mouth when you’re on an away team or on leave. Crew positions on the Longview pay five times more per level than pay on any other Death Circus ship, and officer positions pay ten times more. But that’s just the start. If you do the owner’s recommended investments, you can increase your pay way over that.” She glanced sidelong at him. “And before you ask, you’ll get the information pack with the recommended investments if you accept Crew Two placement. I’ve been Crew Two for my full six years now, I’ve done the recommended investments, but went in for more than the recommended amount, and with my Crew One raise—even assuming I wash out of captain training—I’ll have enough money to buy a small in-system personal ship by the end of my Crew One minimum term. I can do better if I stay the maximum, and much, much better if I make officer.”
Kagen heard the screams of the burning behind him. Before him, though, lay the clean, silent deeps of space. The possibility of his own ship within reach in twelve years, if he could make the grade, get the promotions, and keep his crew record clean.
Freedom, space, a way to get away from the regulated worlds and move out from under the ever-watching eye of the Pact, and away from slaver worlds, and maybe set up on an indie world as a transport. Or a privateer.
The Dream, and everything it took him away from, was sliding into reach.
