He shot me a grin over his shoulder. “Exceeding expectation, Cap.”
“Chief? Any problems with the course Mr. Reed has laid out for us?”
“None. Capacitor is full. We’re going to carve it down a bit but we should be able to get most of it back before we need to jump again.”
“We can jump any time now, Captain,” Al said.
“Thank you, Ms. Ross. Mr. Reed, ready about. Hard a-lee.”
He punched it and the stars shifted around us.
Chapter 37
Dark Knight Station: 2376, March 25
Pip, Mr. Keehn, and Mr. Penna met us at the dock. Pip looked fully recovered. Keehn and Penna looked contrite. “Gentlemen, it’s great to see you,” I said.
“Sorry to miss the movement,” Mr. Penna said, his gaze fixed on the lock just above my right shoulder.
“Couldn’t be helped. Your crew did a great job. You’ve trained them well. Kudos to Mr. Larson for his quick thinking and Mr. Schulteis for his attention to expanding his skills. I’m sure all three are waiting to tell you all about it.” I looked at Mr. Keehn. “Glad to have you back.”
“Thank you, sar,” he said. “Would it be all right if I went aboard now?”
“Of course, Mr. Keehn.” I stepped off the ramp and stood beside Pip. “We’ve got a lot to talk about. I’ll fill you in as soon as we’ve checked in with Oscella.”
He put a hand up to his mouth and stroked it down his chin. “Yeah,” he said. “Lemme just say—in regard to Captain Oscella? Three words. Big brass ones.”
“What?”
“You’ll see. You’re heading there now, I suspect?”
I nodded. “I had a message from her on the way in.”
“You’ll see,” he said again.
“Oh, we have a new can. I have no idea what’s in it. There’s probably a manifest in your inbox.”
“Where’d it come from?” he asked.
“I’m going with cargo faeries.”
“Cargo faeries?” he asked. “You feeling all right, Captain?”
“Eh. So-so, really.”
“Anything you want to talk about?” he asked.
“Yes, but not here. Ideally over a couple of Clipper Ship Lagers somewhere.”
He frowned. “I’ll drink to that,” he said, but he didn’t smile. “First round’s on me.”
The chief came out of the ship and walked down the ramp toward us. “Pip, you missed all the fun.”
“Wasn’t my fault,” he said. “Blame that medic.”
The chief just laughed. “I’m sure she was a tremendous help in getting you back on your feet.”
Pip shrugged. “I’ll catch you when you get back. You’re gonna love the story she has to tell.” With a jaunty wave, he climbed the ramp and disappeared through the lock.
“What was that about?” the chief asked.
“Got me. I don’t know what’s happened here but it was enough to impress Pip.”
“That’s a pretty low bar.”
It’s hard to put my finger on, but being back on Dark Knight Station felt like coming home in a way. It might have been the accumulated stress of having armed hijackers aboard the Chernyakova. It might have been that I felt much more at ease in the Toe-Holds. The danger wasn’t over. The bomb in the HVAC still represented a serious threat. One I didn’t know how we would deal with. That should have made me nervous. Instead, the chief and I strolled through the passages and throughways of the sprawling station as if nothing was wrong.
I did a little window shopping on the way, noting that I’d forgotten to change into civvies. I honestly hadn’t noticed until I caught a look at myself in the glass. I glanced at the chief and noted she hadn’t either.
“We didn’t change,” I said.
She gave me a side-eyed glance. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“Our clothes.”
She snorted, but offered no additional commentary.
We turned the last corner and looked down Main Street toward the security barracks.
“That’s new,” the chief said, nodding at the fusactor building across the way.
The whole top of the building sported blue walls. As we got closer, I could see them flutter a little as the air currents wafted by. “Tarps?” I asked.
“That’s what it looks like.”
“Not exactly a lot of shielding,” I said.
We walked past a newsie stand and the chief’s entire face crinkled from the grin. “I don’t think it was intended to keep anything in.” She pointed at the stand.
“We’re Growing Up!” blasted across the front display. A picture of the blue-clad building flashed up, followed by a teaser paragraph announcing new construction.
“It’s to keep eyes out,” the chief said.
I looked at the stand and then at the building. “Pip said Oscella had a story to tell.”
“I’m looking forward to hearing it,” the chief said.
We continued down Main Street and walked into the station security office. The officer behind the entry nodded to us. “Captain Oscella’s expecting you.” A door buzzed to the left. “Go straight through there. Up the ladder, she’s the door at the end of the passageway.”
Her office hadn’t changed. She rose, a smile stretching across her face. “I saw that you’d docked. I’m sorry we didn’t prevent that hijacking. They got in before we realized what was happening and you were gone before we could respond.”
I shook her offered hand. “It worked out. Odd things happen when somebody’s trying to force you to do what you were going to do anyway. What’s with the building?”
“Cover story,” she said. “Gave us the opportunity to block off the view so we could work up there without anybody seeing exactly what we were doing.”
“You seem pretty relaxed for somebody sitting on a nuke,” the chief said. “Should I assume it’s no longer a threat?”
She nodded and waved us into her guest chairs. “Have a seat.” She took her own chair behind the console and leaned back. “I know the general High Line perception of the Toe-Holds is that we’re a backwater, but you don’t survive out here, thrive out here, without learning how to deal with the people who just want to burn it all down.”
The chief leaned forward in her seat. “So? Tarps to block the view. Faraday cage to block radio?”
Oscella nodded. “Yeah. It had to be running off a radio-based trigger, but we couldn’t be sure of the frequency so we blocked them all. Once we had the bomb isolated, we brought in some imaging equipment and took a look inside. The radio was easy to find, but we couldn’t be sure that cutting the radio out of the system wouldn’t set it off.”
“You weren’t worried that the Faraday cage would?” she asked.
“No. If you’re sitting on a bomb, you don’t want it to go off just because your radio lost power. Having the receiver active but receiving no signals can’t be a trigger unless you’re planning on leaving immediately. A simple timer works better for those situations.”
“You sound like you’ve faced bombs before,” I said.
She laughed. “Several times every stanyer. The only people who have more experience with bombs is High Tortuga. You’d be surprised how often somebody thinks it would be a good idea to cripple the banking system for the entire annex.”
The chief shook her head. “Doesn’t surprise me in the least.”
Oscella grinned. “In any event, not that many people have the knowledge or wherewithal to build a nuke. The design has been around for centuries but the technology to build them hasn’t gotten any simpler or become any more readily available. You really have to know what you’re doing to make one and you have to have—and be willing to spend—the credits to do it.”
The chief leaned back and steepled her fingers in front of her face. I recognized the pose and waited for her train of thought to pull into the station, but Oscella continued.
“Anyway, once we knew what was inside the case, we were able to get into it and remove t
he reaction trigger so that even if the detonation signal got through, it wouldn’t have a trigger to operate. After that it was pretty simple to take the unit apart, pull the bomb out, and rebuild the unit.” She shook her head. “The bomb itself was inside the cooling coil. That HVAC unit was fully functional. It looked and acted just like the others.”
“How are you going to find the trigger man?” I asked.
“We found one. When Dumaurier replaced that hacked sensor, he also put a trace-call into the network. When they tried to re-hack it, he traced the location, sent it to us. It was one of his network monitors on the far side of the station. We dragged the guy in. Turned up the trigger when we tossed his quarters.”
The chief’s eyes narrowed. “He still alive?”
“Yeah,” Oscella said. “Why?”
The chief looked at me. “Ishmael, would you be a dear and disappear for about five ticks?”
Oscella’s eyebrows rose so fast, I thought they might have attained escape velocity.
I nodded. “Of course, Chief.”
I walked out of the office and left the building. Main Street seemed almost painfully prosaic. People walked, sometimes hand in hand, sometimes in groups, often just as individuals strolling or striding along the path. Each of them fully engaged in a life that teetered on the knife’s edge. I wondered if they knew how thin that edge was or how near they walked to catastrophe.
I leaned against the building, as much to get out of the traffic lane as support, and let the memory envelop me, of that day, that evening, that single event that had nearly ended my life and taken Greta’s. The knife’s edge, indeed.
Oscella’s almost cavalier attitude should have made me—at least—uneasy. “Oh, well. Another bomb. Best deal with it.” I marveled that my inner self wasn’t screaming “Are you mad?”
Something about the previous few days seemed to have desensitized me. Or perhaps reset my brain. Watching those idiots threaten my crew did it, perhaps. I had been less worried about one of them doing something on purpose than that they’d do something stupid out of ignorance. I still couldn’t really believe Snake never understood that I’d effectively disarmed him—or didn’t understand that taking the ammunition out of the weapon made it nothing more than a high-tech club.
A colder side of me could understand why that crew had been selected. When you’re engaged in criminal behavior with unstable characters, getting rid of problem members of the crew had to be difficult. You couldn’t just fire them. Killing them outright sends a bad message to the rest. Dropping them quietly out of air locks brings too many people into the mix. Whoever had done it must have seen it as a particularly clever ploy.
The critical side of my brain kept telling me I should have just rounded them up and stuffed them out the air lock myself. It would have been easy enough. I certainly couldn’t have kept them. The ship had no brig and I couldn’t think of a compartment I could have used as one.
I closed my eyes and rested my head back against the solid metal building. The image of David Patterson came unbidden. His eyes staring, tear-tracks across his face and snot crusted under his nose. Probably drowning in his own fluids as the sarin attacked his lungs. Betrayed by his own people. I took a couple of deep breaths and something inside started to uncoil.
Mal Gaines’s question rose in my mind. “How did it make you feel?”
I thought back to the Lois, to working on my ratings, to the friendships and camaraderie I’d enjoyed there. A level of connection I’d not felt before. My cynical self tried to tell me I hadn’t felt it since. Then I thought about the Tinker and remembered the Agamemnon. Even the family I’d left on the Iris.
I didn’t have to go very far down that hole to bump into the Chernyakova.
“Ready?” The chief startled me.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I am. You all done with Oscella?”
She nodded.
“Do we need to wait around?” I asked.
“For what?”
“For your people to pick up the device and the trigger man?”
She gave me a glance and a small smile. “No.”
“I’m planning on doing a normal four-day layover. I don’t know if Pip has a cargo yet, but that should give him time.”
“It’ll give me a chance to go through environmental with hot water and disinfectant.”
“Disinfectant? You expecting hijacker germs or something?”
“No, but sarin plays hell with some of the organics in there. I want to scrape it down, clean up any potential problems, and reset the area with fresh materials.” She shrugged. “It’s probably not necessary, but I’ll feel better about it.”
We walked a while without speaking.
“You seem different,” she said. “You all right?”
“Yeah. No. I don’t know. Seeing Patterson was a shock. Seeing him dead was ...” I shrugged. “I don’t even know how to describe it.”
“Anticlimactic?” she asked.
“Something like that. For so long he’s been the boogeyman. The danger in the dark. Then Pip convinced me to come out here and find him.”
“Confront your fears,” the chief said. “See him as human.”
“Think Pip was thinking that deep?” I asked.
She threw back her head and laughed. “Oh, hell, no.” She stared me straight in the eye. “But you are.”
“I don’t think Pip’s all that bad,” I said.
Her jaw dropped and she stopped right in the passageway, spinning me to face her. “How can you say that?”
“He’s never had friends. I might be the only one he’s ever known. It’s probably why we bonded on the Lois. Yeah, he’s a prankster. He’s been a lot darker lately, but I don’t think that’s even something he’s aware of.”
“Are you kidding? He’s got family from Impromtu to Chiba. They run probably the single largest private shipping company in the Western Annex. The Carstairs brand is bigger than anything in shipping by a factor of two and I suspect the only company that’s worth more is Usoko Mining. Manchester, Mellon-Merc, Pravda—none of them are close.”
I shrugged. “Family is family. I didn’t have much of one. Getting to know my father this late in life has been interesting and—in a certain sense—challenging.”
I turned to continue walking toward the ship.
“His family is huge,” the chief said.
“Yeah, but you don’t really get to pick your family, do you? They’re the people who accept you for who you are, for the most part. I know there are exceptions.”
“Your point?” she asked.
“Friends are the people who pick you because they want to. They accept you for who you are, not what your relationship with them might be.”
She frowned at me but kept walking.
Chapter 38
Dark Knight Station: 2376, March 26
As soon as I got back to the ship, I had Al pass the word that we’d be docked for the full four days. I felt a collective sigh pass through the crew at the news. It hadn’t been the longest trip we’d ever made by a long shot, but I couldn’t remember a more stressful one. The reality didn’t set in for me until the second day, when I realized nobody was threatening the crew, the ship, or me.
I sat in the cabin and looked at the shearwater on the bulkhead. My hands started shaking so bad, I had to put my coffee cup down so I wouldn’t spill. The cabin door stood open and Pip took advantage of it by strolling in and taking up residence in a guest chair.
“Do you have any idea what was in that can?” he asked.
I shook my head and pressed my palms on the desk. “What?”
“Two hundred metric kilotons of refined tellurium.”
“Did you sell it?” I asked.
“Sell it? No, I came to find out who it belongs to. There’s a bill of lading showing the can came from Telluride but no delivery address.”
“It’s ours.”
He blinked. “Where’d you get it?”
“Traded a bag of
magic beans for it.”
“What’s in that coffee?”
“Nothing, but I wouldn’t mind a shot of rum.”
He glanced at the chrono. “At 1030?”
“It’s five o’clock somewhere.”
He got up, closed the cabin door, and returned to his seat. “Wanna talk about it?”
I shook my head.
“I’ll stay and irritate you until you do,” he said.
He surprised a laugh out of me and I felt the spasms releasing me. “He’s dead. Patterson.”
Pip sat up straight in his chair, staring at me across the desk. “David Patterson?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you do it?”
“What? Kill him? No. What the hell?” The idea that he thought I might be capable of it left me shocked and appalled. “What kind of man do you think I am?”
He settled back, a smile playing around the edges of his mouth. “Well, I happen to know you were hijacked, flew out into the Deep Dark at gunpoint, and swapped that can of trash for a can of treasure.” He shrugged. “I’ve heard that you visited the mega, turned over the hijackers to persons unknown, and thwarted a nerve-agent attack.”
“Not in that order,” I said.
Pip laughed. “Fine. Not in that order.” He paused to look at me. “I didn’t hear that Patterson was the deader. I thought it was just one of the hijackers that got caught in the crossfire.”
“The people behind the hijacking gave the gang a canister of nerve agent. Sarin. Of the eight people aboard, the guy they had guarding environmental never crossed my path. I never knew he was aboard until they started dragging the body out and his smoke mask fell off.”
“Smoke mask?” he asked. “Like at the academy?”
“Yeah. That’s what tipped me off that they were planning on gassing us. The lot of them started carrying around their masks.”
“But a smoke mask won’t protect against nerve agents.”
I nodded. “The only one who died was Patterson. He was the one with the canister.”
“How badly did somebody want him dead?” Pip asked.
“They wanted the ship. I suspect that whoever hired him saw it as a good way to fire him.”
By Darkness Forged (Seeker's Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper Book 3) Page 29
