Gito and Shariba-Jen exchanged looks. “Come on, Jen,” said Gito. “Let’s go ‘prove our worth.’ Let’s see if she likes it when the toilet tickles her every time she squats to pee.”
“I wouldn’t advise that,” recommended Robin. “Perhaps we should rethink our strategy.”
“Nah,” said Gito. “The crazier she gets, the more advantage we have.” He grinned and hurried off, followed by the expressionless robot.
Robin shrugged and hurried after Ota and Captain Campbell.
The Captain climbed up through the Operations Bay, onto the Ops Deck, and from there up to the Command Bridge, swearing a blue streak that spanned seven different languages, including the Old Tongue, Diplomatic Phaestor, Dragonic, Neo-High German, Interlingua, Interstellar Binary, and Object Pascal. Ota followed, without comment and without apparent understanding. Nevertheless, several of the Captain’s more colorful euphemisms left the bioform distinctly uncomfortable.
Star-Captain Campbell flung herself into her Command Seat unhappily. “Idiots, thieves and imbeciles. They attack us from without. They attack us from within. Thank the stars I’ve never allowed myself to trust another person long enough to let him, her, or it, get close enough to do any real damage. We’ll hire a while new crew if we have to—and that includes you too, Ota. Don’t you give me that look. Okay, yes, so I rescued you from a death worse than fate on Thoska-Roole. Don’t let it go to your head. I can just as easily jettison you and all the rest. I have a business to tend to. I didn’t turn in my Guild Insignia so the rest of you could get rich by feeding off the bones of my flayed corpse. I expect a little loyalty, a little unity, a little cooperation, goddammit. And what do I get? Malfeasance, nonfeasance, incompetence, and unreasonable requests! This has all got to stop! What do I have to do to get things back to normal around here anyway?”
“You could start by lowering your voice,” suggested Ota. “The paneling on the walls has begun to blister.”
Neena Linn-Campbell gave her First Officer a skeptical look. “I thought bioforms didn’t make jokes.”
“Only in self-defense,” Ota replied.
“All right,” Campbell said. She damped her anger and slowed her words. “Talk to me.”
“Have you considered the possibility of bankruptcy?”
“No. I did that once. I didn’t enjoy it. I don’t want to do it again.” Then she stopped and looked at Ota with sudden graveness. “We do have other alternatives, don’t we?”
Ota held up a hand and rotated it in a gesture of uncertainty; palm up, palm down, palm up again.
Neena Linn-Campbell raised an eyebrow. “That bad, huh?”
“We have assumed more debts than we should.”
“Mm.”
“We’ve missed too many opportunities, Captain. We missed several chances to pick up charters on Thoska-Roole—”
“You may remember, we had other concerns at the time.”
“I don’t question that, Captain, but—”
“What would you have had me do—risk having the ship seized?”
“No, ma’am. I just wanted to point out had we picked up those cargoes, they would have covered the cost of this jump. The failure of the Zillabar charter to pay their fees in full, plus our failure to pick up paying cargo for the jump back to Burihatin has left us in a serious debit situation. In addition, the failure of Sawyer and Finn Markham, and Lee-1169, to rendezvous as promised has left us with passengers aboard who cannot pay for their passage as expected—not to mention the fact that we remain heavily invested in pfingle eggs which currently sit aging in a Burihatin warehouse.”
Ota shook its head unhappily. “I don’t see a way for us to escape this financial trap. Freebooters working without Guild Insignia don’t have command the same kind of rates as Guild licensed vessels. It worries me.”
“We’ve experienced worse,” Captain Campbell said.
“Not in my memory,” Ota retorted.
“Mm. You might have a point there.” Abruptly, she shook her head. “Look, if we can deliver the pfingle eggs before they hatch, the payment for that cargo should resolve our problem.”
“I wish I shared your certainty, ma’am. I don’t trust our supplier to have actually sold us three-month pfingle eggs. I’d sure hate to have them hatch while in transit.”
“We’ll stash them in the aft cargo bay and monitor them continually. If we detect any undue activity, we’ll jettison the whole cargo.”
Ota remarked blandly, “I have heard that once the first pfingle hatches, the rest will hatch within 30 seconds. That would mean blasting open the aft cargo doors in a deliberate act of explosive decompression. Shariba-Jen has informed me that while such an act would entail considerable risk, and in fact might cause significant structural damage to the stern of the vessel, we should have a fairly good chance of surviving an emergency jettisoning of the cargo. But only, of course, if we can detect the hatching of the first egg in time.”
“Mm, yes.” Captain Campbell considered that. “I wonder if we might install the whole thing in an external bubble. Would that give us an additional margin for error?”
“I’ll have to ask Shariba-Jen, as well as EDNA.”
Star-Captain Campbell sagged in her chair. “I had no idea that it would cost so much to shake free of Regency interference.”
“It would have cost us more to maintain our Guild membership.”
Star-Captain Campbell looked to Ota, surprised. “I had no idea that you thought that way. I thought you disagreed with my decision.”
“On the contrary, Captain. You just never asked me for my opinion.”
“Well. Thank you.”
“Besides, as a freebooter, it offers the rest of the crew the opportunity to renegotiate our profit position with you.”
Captain Campbell stared at Ota for a long moment. “Et tu, Ota?”
Ota nodded meekly. “You have always encouraged me to express more independence.”
Captain Campbell closed her mouth. She held her hands up in front of her in a broad gesture of deference and respect. “Then I have only myself to blame.” She turned away abruptly. “EDNA? You have something to say?”
The ship’s mind answered softly. “We will arrive at Burihatin in eleven minutes. We should begin preparations to drop out of otherspace.”
Neena Linn-Campbell nodded. “Do it,” she ordered. “Me and my big mouth.”
“Pardon?” asked EDNA.
“Nothing.”
The Fourteenth Moon
Burihatin’s forty moons took their light from the star and their warmth from their gigantic parent. With patient tending, several of them had attained environments capable of supporting life comfortably.
The fourteenth moon had a sizable ocean of nearly-fresh water, a thick breathable atmosphere, and lush forests girdling its equator. It would have enjoyed a reputation as a garden-world, had it not also had unpleasantly warm seasons, a gravity high enough to cause serious heart spasms, and a radiant sky of sulfurous yellow. Most visitors, and many inhabitants, wore biomedical monitors and personal gravity-suits on the surface of the captive world.
The inhabitants of Fourteen called their world Dupa—named after Dupa the Peril, a nasty goblin of some forgotten ancient mythology. In the same Pantheon, Burihatin represented the monster that lived under the world. Seen from the surface of Dupa, Burihatin loomed as an oppressive surface, alternately lambent and gloomy, as Dupa swung patiently around it.
The great disk of the world-monster filled the sky like an ever-present threat, by turns appearing as a descending ceiling, an impenetrable wall, and even a terrifyingly distant floor. Burihatin the beast lurked too large and too close for the inhabitants of Dupa to believe that the sky of their world also presented an access to the stars. Sometimes it shone as a disk, sometimes as a half-sphere, sometimes as a crescent, and sometimes only as a great blackness in the void—and always with the sharp line of the rings cutting brightly across its hemisphere. At this moment, Burihatin app
eared as a half-world, split almost equidistantly into portions of darkness and light.
Beneath this towering sky, unbroken forests of blacktrees sprawled across the continents. Like one gigantic creature, the lush vegetation wrapped itself around the land in a constricting strangle of sprawling limbs. The trunks of the great trees curled around and upward, defining huge dark spaces within the body of the forest. The leafy canopy of the woods hovered overhead, almost a separate ecology unto itself, a dark ceiling covering everything so thickly that the forest floor remained untouched by the light of Burihatin’s sun. Below, the magic of the weald took on a somber unholy quality.
Strange creatures prowled through Dupa’s bleak night, howling mournfully as they moved through the forests. During the long dark days, a separate pantheon of beasts reigned. Creatures of all sizes and shapes leapt and slithered and crawled and fluttered and slunk through the gloom. They chittered and shrieked and hooted and groaned. They hunted and killed and fed and fought and died. Some of them even lived long enough to mate and raise the next generation of breeders and feeders.
Tiny clusters of domes, lay spotted across Dupa’s continents. Most of the major cities and towns sprawled out in the rocky barrens, safely distant from the predators of the forests. Only a few tiny settlements huddled among the towering blacktrees; their safety came from the jungle and the separation they maintained from the larger cities. In the cities, the Regency still held most of the authority. In the jungle . . . no one did. For many inhabitants of Burihatin, the dangers of the jungle remained preferable to those of the Regency.
Now—a single antigrav sled came racing across the roof of the forest. Slicing its way through the air only a bare two meters above the canopy of the jungle, it left behind itself a wake of swirling leaves and waving branches. The escapees and their hostage sat grim-faced behind the clear windshield of the open craft. The air screamed past them, tugging constantly at their clothing.
“Take us higher, dammit!” shouted Lee to Sawyer. “You’ll hit something!”
“We have to stay low, so they can’t scan us. I know this world. The Regency has got spyfrogs everywhere.”
“Well, then—take us lower! Let’s drop down to the forest floor. They can’t monitor us there. You can weave in and out through the trunks of the trees.”
Sawyer looked to Three-Dollar. He inclined his head toward Lee-1169. “What kind of medication have you got him on? And where can I get some? Did you hear what he just suggested? I should have hallucinations so bizarre.” Looking back to Lee, he said seriously, “What you suggest won’t work. The last person who tried to drive an antigrav sled through the blacktrees left a smear a half kilometer long.”
“Well . . . I don’t like this at all,” replied Lee. “It scares me. It feels unnecessarily dangerous.”
“I’ve done this before,” Sawyer said. “Trust me.”
“The last time we trusted you, we all ended up in jail.”
“Everybody makes mistakes,” Sawyer answered back. “You did when you trusted Finn and I for the first time. Now we have to get you out of the mess you made for all of us when you did that.”
Lee blinked. He shook his head. Sawyer’s logic remained unassailable and bizarre. He turned away grumpily. He couldn’t win this argument. And he didn’t want to distract the man while he needed to keep his attention on the task of piloting the antigrav sled.
Sawyer called back to Three-Dollar. “Check the blindfold on the Zillabitch.”
“She can’t see a thing,” replied Three-Dollar. “I doubt she can hear much either.”
“Good,” said Sawyer. “Time to zig again.” He swung the sky-raft hard to starboard, bringing it directly on course for the distant wall of half-Burihatin that filled the horizon. The sharp angle of the planet’s rings demonstrated their latitude on the moon. Sawyer grunted and pointed ahead. “Do you see that?” he asked Lee. He indicated a towering plateau that reached up out of the forest like a gigantic monolith.
“We’ll land there?” asked Lee.
“We’ll stop there.”
Lee glanced sideways to Sawyer. “It doesn’t look very secret to me.”
“You have an astute eye,” Sawyer remarked drily.
Lee scowled. Sawyer’s refusal to provide clarity about their destination had begun to seriously annoy him.
Sawyer backed off on the throttle then, slowing the sled to an easier pace. He took it lower, allowing the craft to brush the very tops of the trees, weaving gently around the taller protrusions of vegetation. “All right,” he said, calling to Lee and Three-Dollar. “You’ve heard of the unnatural protrusions of rock that dot this part of the continent, the columns called Dupa’s Warts? We head for the easternmost wart. Except for that singular distinction of Dupagraphy, it has no other distinguishing quality. The other columns farther west hold the honors of height, width, and size, both greater and lesser than this one. This wart cannot even represent an average of all the warts. It has no distinction at all except its location. Nevertheless, it has some use to us as a landmark.”
Lee nodded. “That I can understand. We start from there and fly a certain distance in a certain direction, right?”
“Nope. Sorry. We land there and abandon the raft. I’ll program it to head north for an hour, then take itself down into the trees as low as it can, find a place to park and wait for a recall signal.”
“And what do we do?”
“I don’t know about you, but I intend to empty my bladder.”
“And after that?”
“I’ll have something to drink, so I can empty it again at our next stop.”
“Do you never answer a question honestly?”
Sawyer pretended to consider the question. “Even if I told you what we had to do next, you wouldn’t believe me. So I choose not to waste the words.”
Dissatisfied, Lee turned away, grumpily. “You don’t look happy,” he remarked to the TimeBinder.
“Neither do you,” Three-Dollar replied blandly.
“Does this tracker’s intractability bother you as much as it bothers me?”
Three-Dollar patted Lee gently on the shoulder. “No, it doesn’t. Indeed, I envy you in that. I have a much larger and darker worry.” His face became uncommonly glum. “I’ve tried continuously since we landed. I’ve listened and listened across all the bands.” He lowered his head sadly. “I cannot detect the presence of a TimeBinder on this world. The TimeBand still remains here on Dupa, I can sense that much, but no one wears it. I fear that Zillabar’s agents may have finally succeeded in assassinating the TimeBinder. Perhaps they have even obtained custody of the TimeBand. If so, then we may have lost our last hope.” He let his breath out in a somber exhalation. “I cannot think of any other explanation. When a TimeBinder dies, his successor puts on the band immediately. If the band remains unworn, perhaps that means that it lies waiting for Zillabar to claim it.”
The Messenger
Otherspace unfolded. A tiny ship, shaped like a watermelon seed came spitting out of nothingness. It shot through the darkness of realspace toward the distant jewel of The Golden Fury, decelerating only at the last possible moment.
The speedboat Marauder came alongside the much greater starship, waited for the security scanners to complete their various tasks, then slid easily into a docking port. Transfer tubes connected themselves. Things clanged, hissed, wheezed, puffed, and banged, all in the process of linking, securing, and testing the connections. The intelligence engine of the larger vessel accepted the responsibility of equalizing the pressures and the flavors of both enclosed atmospheres, and additional noises became noticeable as this occurred. Shortly, the process concluded and the intervening hatches slid open, and a single black-clad Phaestor youth came climbing out of the vessel.
He spoke to no one. He nodded perfunctorily to the commander of the docking crew, but exchanged no pleasantries and offered no gossip. He kept his face carefully blank. He handed over his security pass without comment and waited p
atiently while the representative of the Elite Guard confirmed his identity. At last, the security officer handed the pass back and nodded him through.
The channel to the anteroom opened to a personal security scanning chamber. From there, the messenger obtained access to the main body of the vessel. He carried a security case and strode directly through to the command center of the Imperial starship.
Upon arriving at the command bridge, he saluted the officer on duty and asked for an immediate audience with the Captain. The vessel’s executive officer reported blandly that Captain ‘Ga Lunik still remained in dreamtime.
The messenger did not react to the unfamiliar name. He merely stood on the golden balcony and waited.
“Will you take refreshment while you wait? We can offer you a delicious variety of spices. On the orders of Captain ‘Ga Lunik, the Lady’s kitchen has become available to all of her senior officers.”
The messenger ignored the offer. “I have a message that the Captain will wish to hear immediately.”
“Perhaps you didn’t hear me,” the executive officer replied. “Captain ‘Ga Lunik lies in dreamtime. We have orders not to disturb him.”
“Disturb him anyway,” replied the messenger.
The executive officer debated with himself whether or not to argue the point. Before he could decide, the messenger added, “Do so on the direct authority of a representative of Kernel d’Vashti.”
“Very good, sir.” The executive officer felt relieved not to have to make this decision himself. He nodded to his assistant to take command and hurried off immediately to the Captain’s chambers.
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