By Darkness Forged (Seeker's Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper Book 3)

by Nathan Lowell

  “There’s a caretaker. A woman, older than springtime, younger than winter,” the chief said. “Comes across as a little dim, bumbling.”

  “Doesn’t help me,” Oscella said. “That describes about a third of our population.”

  “Point is that if I wanted to hide somebody—just temporarily—for safe keeping, that would be ideal if she was in on it. Care and feeding would be pretty easy. There’s probably a head nearby. Nobody has any cause to be in there until the auction comes around except for cargo handlers who might want to turn in a new piece of abandoned cargo,” the chief said. “They could keep him there almost indefinitely.”

  Al nodded. “Good choke point. I assume the freight doors don’t open from the outside?”

  Oscella shrugged. “No idea. Not my bailiwick.”

  “How do we get him out?” I asked.

  The chief looked at Oscella. “You don’t need probable cause here, do you?”

  Oscella shook her head but frowned. “Not technically. We operate almost exclusively in the public spaces. We’ll break down a door if we need to, but if we show up, they’ll know something’s up.”

  “All right. Back to chicanery,” the chief said. “Where are the cargo loading doors?”

  “They’re actually in the chandlery,” Riordan said.

  Oscella looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

  “It’s where they run the auction,” he said. “They open one of the doors, wheel out a crate. Everybody bids. Winner has to drag the crate off—or pay to get it hauled. Since the chandlery is right off the docks, it’s easy to move cargo out of there.” He glanced at Oscella. “I drew crowd control a couple of times.”

  “Uh huh,” she said. “But that answers the question. Why do you want to know?”

  “Because I want to know where my escape route goes,” the chief said. “If we can trick our way in through the front, I want to be able to get out the back, preferably where there are lots of witnesses.”

  Oscella nodded. “We can help with that much, I think.”

  Riordan looked up. “They found him. Kondur.”

  “Auto-doc?” Oscella asked.

  “Yeah. Right around the corner from the maintenance station where we found Villarosa.”

  Oscella took a long, considering look at the chief, then me, then Al. “I don’t want to know who or what you are. I’m pretty sure you’re not all what you’re claiming to be. But you’ve been on the beam from the beginning. Right now, I need to go make sure Kondur’s taken care of. If there’s anything you need, call me.” She stood and motioned to Riordan. “If you’d walk us out, Captain?”

  I stood and led the way out of the wardroom and down the passage. I got everybody logged out. “Thank you, Ms. Oscella. I’m sorry, I don’t actually know your rank,” I said.

  “I should be thanking you,” she said. “It’s captain. I should have reined in Lawrence long ago, but didn’t have the legs to do it. Between your chief engineer and his outburst, he’s going to be washing dishes at Kondur’s office from now until doomsday.”

  I chuckled at the image. “Why washing dishes?”

  “We don’t go in much for incarceration here,” she said. “Unless the infraction is a capital offense, almost everybody gets either public service or banishment.”

  “Kondur’s office is public service?”

  “He’s the boss. I’m not going to tell him otherwise,” Oscella said. She shook her head. “He’s a funny guy, Kondur. You look at him and you see a thug, almost a warlord. Then you find out he’s funding a school for orphans to give them a basic education and also funds their advanced training when they have to go off-station to school.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “They have to come back and work here one stanyer for every year they’re away.”

  “What? Indentured?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “No. That’s the hell of it. Just come back, get a job. Work here for a stanyer for every year you were gone. I’ve never asked him about it. We don’t exactly rub elbows.”

  “He does this for the orphans,” I said.

  “Yeah. Not exactly a thug’s behavior,” she said.

  “Well, he’s getting a trained, loyal workforce out of it,” I said.

  “Some of them, yeah. Some do their time and move on.” She shrugged. “Some use it well. Some squander it. Some blow it. Mostly they’re just humans.”

  “I’m not belittling his philanthropy. I think it’s great. I also think it’s smart.”

  “Why smart?” she asked.

  “What’s better for a station? A bunch of untrained, unskilled labor or a bunch of trained, skilled labor?”

  “I’ll give you that.” She paused at the foot of the ramp. “What are you going to do about your missing crewman?”

  “I’m going to go check in with the brain trust in the wardroom and see what they advise. Why?”

  “Keep me in the loop, would you?” She looked up and down the gallery, anywhere but at me. “We owe you and your brain trust. We’d probably still be looking.”

  “Will do. When you see Kondur, tell him ‘Maggie says hi’ for us.”

  “What are you going to do about the pirates?” she asked.

  “What pirates?”

  “The ones you’re going to trade with.”

  “I plan to sail out, swap cans, and sail back with as little trouble as possible,” I said. “I’d really like to take my whole crew with me, but that’s a bias I have about not leaving people behind.”

  She chuckled and held out a hand. “Nice to meet you, Captain Wang.”

  “Likewise, Captain Oscella.”

  “It’s Louisa,” she said.

  “Likewise, Captain Louisa.” I smiled at her. “Call me Ishmael.”

  “Thank you, Ishmael. You didn’t answer the question. What are you going to do about the pirates?”

  “They’re not really in my remit, are they?” I asked. “I mean, sure, they blow up stations, extort goods, and are—by all accounts—snappy dressers, but my job description is basic captaining and providing value for my shareholders.”

  She stared at me for several very long moments. “You don’t mean that.”

  “Well, I do, actually. Most of it anyway. The snappy dressers part was hyperbole.” I shrugged.

  “You’re going to let them get away with it?” she asked. “Blowing up stations and the rest?”

  “I didn’t say anything about that. You asked what I was going to do about it. What I’m going to do is my job and leave the pirates to the people whose job it is to make their lives hell. Or maybe end.”

  I could see in her eyes when the reality of what I wasn’t saying struck home.

  “It’s not your job,” she said.

  “We understand each other, I think. My job is to fly the ship. To deal with cargoes and taxes, payrolls and discipline. I take care of the crew and the ship and the goods entrusted to my care.”

  “And you fly with some rather astonishing crew,” she said.

  “Did you know about The Ranch job?” I asked.

  She shook her head and her eyes turned to stone. “No, but I knew Cecilly Varney.”

  “Chief Stevens is an amazing woman. I’m going to lose her soon, I fear. She’s heading back to the academy to teach starship engineering.”

  “What will you do after that?”

  I shrugged. “Nothing different. I’ll just keep doing my job.”

  She stared into my face, her gaze going back and forth between my eyes like she was trying to read something written there. A bemused smile blossomed even as her frown deepened. “Safe voyage, Ishmael.”

  “Good luck with Kondur, Louisa.”

  She laughed and stepped away. “I’m going to need it.”

  She started down the gallery. “You’re going for Carstairs?”

  “Recon first, then decisions.”

  “I’ve got your back,” she said.

  “Much obliged.”

  I turned to wa
lk back up the ramp only to find Al standing in the lock with a goofy grin pasted on her face.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Flirting with the head of station security?” she asked.

  “Me? Hardly.” I looked down the gallery where Oscella had Riordan and Marshall trotting along at a goodly pace.

  Al snorted. “Well, she was thinking real hard about flirting with you.”

  I laughed and pushed into the ship. “Ship and station don’t mix. I tried that once. Once was enough. Where’s the chief?”

  “Gone to her stateroom to draft some messages. What are we going to do about Pip?”

  “I think we’re going to go back to the abandoned cargo warehouse and look for lost cargo.”

  Chapter 27

  Dark Knight Station: 2376, March 12

  I stuck my head into the galley on my way up to the cabin. “Thank you, Ms. Sharps. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

  “Have we heard from Mr. Carstairs, sar?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’d hoped station security might have had some answers.”

  “We’ve filed the necessary reports, Ms. Sharps. I believe he’ll turn up sooner rather than later and we’ll be able to sail with a full complement.”

  “Good,” she said. “I’ll have Ms. Adams clear up the wardroom in a few.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Sharps, and my compliments on the cookies.”

  She beamed and I beat feet. I wanted to grab a couple of those cookies before they went back to the galley. I took enough to share with Al and the chief. It didn’t really surprise me that they’d both grabbed a few for themselves.

  “Where are we?” I asked, plopping into my chair and wishing I’d brought some coffee with me.

  “We still haven’t gotten the can tied on,” Al said.

  “I’ve sent a few messages.” The chief shrugged. “I need at least a couple of days in system for confirmations to get back.”

  “What are we going into?” I asked.

  She looked at me and tilted her head to the side for a moment. “I know people who can deal with the mega’s infestation. Unless we can get Pip back—and we’re still operating on an assumption that hasn’t been confirmed—we need to come back with the can from Telluride.”

  “We still don’t know that there isn’t a bomb, either,” I said. “Only that it hasn’t been used to extort Kondur.”

  She nodded. “Agreed, which raises another point. Even if we get in, find Pip, get him out, we don’t know who else might be involved or where they are. We’re going to have to try to find a bomb that we’re not sure exists.”

  Al let her head fall against the chair back. “Unless we find one, we won’t know if there is one.”

  “That’s the problem,” the chief said.

  “How do we logic ourselves out of this?” I asked.

  The chief shook her head. “We can cut it off at the root but we don’t know where the branches are.”

  “We need to find the bomb and hope there’s only one,” Al said.

  The chief’s tablet bipped. She frowned and pulled it out. The frown deepened as she read the message. “Kondur’s conscious and wants to talk to us right now.”

  “I guess we’ll find out what the message was,” I said. “In his office?”

  “Still in the aid station auto-doc.” She held up her tablet. “I have the location.”

  My tablet bipped and I wasn’t sure I’d like what I was about to see. I flipped open the interface. “Oscella,” I said. “Wants to know if we can help find a bomb.”

  Al sighed. “I guess that answers one question.”

  “Which one? Why Kondur wants to meet or whether or not there’s a bomb?” I asked.

  “Both, actually,” she said and pushed up from her chair. “Shall we go?”

  We got to the aid station and found a cordon of station security personnel around the outside perimeter. Inside we found a battered-looking Hervé Villarosa standing beside an auto-doc with an even worse-looking Verkol Kondur propped up in it. Oscella joined us a few moments later.

  “Thank you,” Kondur said. “The captain here tells me you knew where to find me.”

  The chief stepped up beside the auto-doc. She reached toward him but rested her hand on the side of the pod. “You really need to fix your security.” She glanced at Villarosa. “No offense.”

  Villarosa shrugged. “None taken. We were sloppy.”

  “Maggie, listen. They’re going to knock me out again in a few ticks. I still need a few more repairs. You were right, this was a warning and they told me there’s a bomb. Here. That they’ll blow the station if you don’t do exactly what they say.”

  “We figured that much,” the chief said.

  “But you have to do what you need to do. Do what you can. We need to stop them.” His eyes rolled back in his head and he relaxed back into the pod. “I was a fool.”

  I thought he was out but he opened his eyes and looked at me. “They sent a message for you, Captain. They have a pip. I don’t know what that means but they said you will.”

  “Message received,” I said. “Rest. Heal.”

  He went under in a heartbeat. The med-tech came in and began shooing us out. “That’s it. No more. I wouldn’t have gone along this far for anybody other than the station owner and I shouldn’t have done it for him.” He pressed a few keys and the auto-doc closed around Kondur. “Out. Nothing to see here.” He glanced at Villarosa, who still leaned against the bulkhead, his massive forearms crossed over his chest. The bandages on his face and scalp, the dark bruising on his face and arms did nothing to make him look any less menacing. “I’ll get you a chair. It’s going to be a while.”

  Villarosa nodded.

  The tech turned to us. “You’re still here. Do I need to call security to throw you all out?”

  Oscella raised her hand. “I’ll handle it.”

  He swallowed once and nodded.

  Oscella made shooing motions with her outstretched arms. “Move along, citizens. Nothing to see here. Move along.”

  I thought the grin she wore might split her face but we all shuffled out of the aid station and back into the passageway.

  Oscella moved us down the block, away from the security perimeter, and into a huddle. “I could really use your advice.”

  “There’s probably a bomb. It’s probably a nuke. It’s probably somewhere safe for now, but undoubtedly uses a remote trigger,” the chief said. “I think there are three things that need to happen and I’m not sure we can do them all.”

  “I’m listening,” Oscella said.

  “If we can find the bomb, we can neutralize that threat. That assumes only one bomb on a remote trigger,” the chief said.

  “How do we find it?”

  “Radioactive leakage. We should be able to detect it unless they’ve done a professional job of shielding. I have reason to believe they have not.”

  “I won’t ask,” Oscella said. “What do we need to do?”

  “We believe the bomb is probably hidden in the abandoned cargo warehouse, along with Pip.”

  “Why there?” Oscella asked. “Couldn’t it just be stashed someplace in a grav trunk? In somebody’s room?”

  “It could be,” the chief said. “It would leave a trail back to whoever paid the storage fee. Even if faked, it’s going to be there. Shipping a crate to the station with a hold for pickup instruction means the station stores it, the only back trace is on the bill of lading. Those aren’t worth much out here if you want to fake it.”

  “Can’t argue that,” Oscella said with a rueful grimace.

  The chief started to say something but stopped. “You have patrols?”

  Oscella shrugged. “Of course.”

  “You have radiation detectors?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can you issue one to each of your patrols?” the chief asked.

  Oscella pondered that for a few heartbeats. “I think we have enough, but this is a big station.”

&nb
sp; “Your patrols cover a lot of it, though, right?”

  “Yeah, but it’s not like we cover the whole thing every day. We don’t go into a lot of spaces at all. Shops, hotels, private facilities. Not everything here belongs to Kondur.”

  “I’m just trying to rule out places. Every place your people can cover is one less place for us to worry about.”

  “We need to keep this quiet,” Oscella said.

  “Panic?” the chief asked.

  “That’s my concern.”

  The chief nodded. “I understand.”

  An idea kept trying to bubble up in my brain. I kept trying to focus on the conversation but that tickle kept coming back. “Smoke alarms?” I asked.

  The chief’s eyes widened. “You have a network of alarm sensors?”

  “Sure. Smoke, fire, heat, carbon monoxide, oxygen, carbon dioxide, the usual stuff. It’s spelled out in the building codes.”

  “Do you specify a model in your codes?”

  She shrugged. “Not really, but the chandlery only stocks one model.”

  The chief frowned. “Can you show me the relevant code requirement?”

  Oscella laughed. “If I can’t, there’s a big problem.” She pulled out her tablet and started flipping through the screens. It took almost a whole tick but she finally held her tablet out to the chief. “There it is.”

  I glanced over but only saw a wall of text filling the screen.

  The chief paged down and down and down. “There,” she said, stabbing the screen with a forefinger. “Perfect.” She held the device so Oscella could see it. “Shipboard, all the usual stuff includes radiation levels—particles and wave forms. This looks like somebody copied the code from a ship-standard environmental sensor.”

  “So the station is already wired for it?” Oscella asked.

  “Well, probably wireless but yeah. Same idea. Who monitors that network?”

  “Every zone has an environmental monitoring station. Twelve zones. Twelve stations,” Oscella said.

  “Where’s the nearest?” the chief asked.

  “Near the docks.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Oscella led the way with the chief striding along beside her.

  Al caught my arm. “Skipper, I’m going back to the ship to ride herd. Fortuner’s got the watch but with everything in the air ...” She shrugged.