Tanager's Fledglings (The Tanager Book 1)

by Cedar Sanderson

Her response came back a long moment later. He wondered if there was a problem. “Negative, Captain. Are you able to remote and assist?”

  Jem lurched out of his chair. He had the autopilot set, but now his heart was pounding. Had the extra acceleration been too much for the old ship? He ran for the engine compartment. Eby was on his heels, yelping with excitement. The little dog thought it was a game. Jem was just glad he was still in his stale and rather dirty shipsuit still. He’d been looking forward to changing...

  He slid through the door and nearly collided with Jade, who was walking calmly across the compartment.

  “Whoa there!” She stepped backward, and he managed to stop without knocking them both over. Eby frisked around her feet before flopping in a belly-up position. Jade bent to rub his belly. “Sorry, Cap’n. Din’t mean to worry you.”

  She held up the clipboard she was holding without missing a skritch on Eby’s favorite spots. Jem took it and read it. He looked up from the paper to stare at her. She looked up and nodded. There was no need to talk, and probably good reasons not to. He pulled the stylus from the top of the board and wrote his question under her note telling him the ship was bugged.

  She let go of Eby, who huffed a sad sigh and rolled over, realizing tummy time was done. Jem remembered the ball, and fumbled in his pockets for it while Jade was writing. Eby ran after the thrown blue orb with small howls of delight. Jade chuckled. “Happen his noise makes it hard to think straight!”

  Jem caught her drift, that it would also make it hard to be overheard, and read her note. They took turns throwing the ball, and writing, for several minutes before they had a plan for eliminating the bugs hammered out. He’d pointed out that when they entered foldspace they would be out of range, and she agreed but made her own point that they didn’t know how far a range they did have, how much recording space they had, or, well, who was listening. Jem thought about Moskvin and the long quiet hours he’d spent in his cabin and made a face. Jade thought if no one had been in the engine room - they hadn’t, to the best of his knowledge - that it could be a safe space, but she didn’t want to risk it.

  It was, Jem reflected as he climbed back up to the bridge at a much more sedate pace, going to be a very long few hours until they were in foldspace and could do something about the bugs. For one thing, it meant that Jade was irrevocably onboard until the next system. He could have gotten her off in-system, if he’d had a chance to talk to her and find her untrustworthy. Now, he was committed to a course. Fair winds and following breezes, he muttered to himself. One of Walter’s favorite aphorisms. Jem had had to look it up once he learned how to do such things. He still didn’t understand why naval, rather than aviation, culture had adhered to space and star travel. It seemed to him that flying was more akin to what they did, than sailing between stars. Walter had given him a dirty look and assigned a project designing a solar sail-powered ship to Jem when he brought it up, though. Jem hadn’t complained about it again, even if it still made no sense. The solar sail was an elegant design, he had to admit. Impractical, but still.

  He sat quietly in the bridge monitoring processes he normally ignored, thinking. Jade was an unknown quantity. The manner of her arrival in his life seemed, now that he was finally away from the fear and confusion, suspicious. Veo had been preparing to lock him up, throw away the key, and take the Tanager. Then Jade showed up and they basically waltzed out of prison hand in hand. It was too easy.

  Jem frowned at the control board. On top of it, Eby had abandoned him to play with Jade. He wasn’t sure if the puppy liking her was good, or meaningless. Dogs and small children, the legend went. He shook his head, thinking. ‘Focus. First the listeners from Tianjin, then Jade.’

  Which meant that his gut was trusting her about the electronic devices onboard. He guessed that was based on how he felt about Veo, who was that sort of sneaky conniving bastard. Which reminded him...

  Jem opened up the controls. If they had been monitoring all his keystrokes he was screwed, anyway, so a little more revelation of the Tanager’s secrets wasn’t going to make that worse. The scanning sensors he was about to use were not normal for a trader to have. Walter had walked him through the use, but refused to explain how they had been installed on the Tanager. Or even where they were, which Jem knew was going to be an issue eventually. Nothing lasted forever without maintenance. Active scanning was detectable. This wasn’t, or at least not by most ships, Walter had explained. Jem grimaced. He wasn’t fond of ‘magical’ methods, but it did work. Walter had never been challenged, and it was the first time Jem had risked it.

  “They’re already pissed...” he muttered mostly under his breath.

  The problem with using scans to detect spacecraft in space was, well, space. Even as close as they were to the station, relative to the whole system, with Jade’s boosts to the engine they were away further than he’d planned. And that meant a lot of room was empty behind his tail. Also, there were flanks, the possibility of ships that had been lurking at the limits of foldspace. Jem twitched the gains a little, but he’d learned that if he wasn’t careful, he’d be looking at any junk or rocks instead of actual ships. It had limits, Walter had been clear on that. It really wasn’t magic. He could look for exhaust ions, but that didn’t help if the engines were cut and a scout was drifting and lurking.

  In addition to the false negative returns, he’d expect false positive returns. Other traders in-system just like he was, the annoying tugboats the Tianjin station insisted on... Jem stopped and stared at his display for a long moment. Of course, the tugs.

  It had to be the tugs. No one ever looked twice at them. They were visual clutter, there to be annoyingly in the way and accepted as the price of being in this system conducting one’s business. Jem switched off the scan. He had seen enough of nearspace to be sure that there wasn’t anything there, other than the three tugs he’d been ignoring. His intuition verified, Jem took a closer look at them. One was relatively near, the other two were further away, trailing him. Which meant that the near ship was most likely the listener, but...

  Jem zoomed in his display and made a note of the ship’s name and pertinent numbers. The little craft were not meant to pull the speed a trader’s ship - even an old slow one like the Tanager - did. Although after today he might have to reassess his constant bitching about her abilities. Maybe Walter had just wanted to be slow. To have others underestimate him.

  Which made sense to Jem. Traders who made their living through intimidation had very little return business and acquired a certain reputation. One that led to them living up to it when they couldn’t make a living the legitimate way. Better to be thought placid and lethargic, but trusted. That trust was why the captain of the Oathkeeper had relied on his version of the events on Tanager and indicated a willingness to follow suit. Jem made a note in the log of the scan results, the position and identifiers of the tug, and started a search bot to see if Walter had encountered this one in the past. While that search was running, Jem pulled open the black marked entry for the first tick against Tianjin’s records. And then, while he was deep diving in the archives anyway, he initiated another search bot.

  Sending a search through his entire library, he’d discovered after a small time collecting data chips, ‘books’ and whatever information he could get his hands on, was tricky. Jem’s thirst for knowledge had long ago extended far past history to news, gossip columns, agricultural data, and anything that could be connected to trade. Supply and demand meant he had to know what was going to be demanded. Searching that information with automated computing meant he could help Walter, who had actually gone so far as to shake his head when Jem presented him with the first report, and then, slowly, to nod. “Buy it, boy,” he’d said. Jem had, and had made a tidy profit. It wasn’t infallible, but the search bots were a big help. He had to set it up to be open enough to find the information he wanted, but not so broad as to include so many returns that he couldn’t sort through them. With Jade, he wasn’t sure he’d get
anything back at all. It was worth a try, some information was better than no information. He wound up running a search on her name, which he thought was a pseudonym, another linking her name to Moskvin, and then, his fingers hovering over the board for a long moment, one linking her name to the Tanager. It seemed odd to him that she was able to walk onboard his ship and make it do things he didn’t know it could do.

  That done, he returned to the files on the Tianjin incident. It had happened before he boarded the Tanager, he noted. He’d always known that Walter didn’t like the station, which is why they had done very little exploring on it. Dock, sell, take on cargo, jet for the stars. Jem had assumed that this fast turnaround was partly due to the regulations surrounding visitors, and partly just time-is-money. Tianjin didn’t have an open market like, say, Tassie did.

  Except that it had. Longer ago than Jem had been alive. Jem double-checked the dates and who had written the entry. Ok, Walter had been alive, but must have been a kid himself. Jem read the entry through twice, trying to read between the lines. No harm had been done to the Tanager herself, or her crew. The entry didn’t name or specify who the crew had been, just that ‘crew was escorted to dock under guard’ and ‘Captain protested formally their exclusion from the market.’ There was nothing substantive in the log, but a tiny footnote link took him to... Jem sucked his breath in, hard. He looked around the bridge, feeling rather like the walls had eyes and were leaning over his shoulder. He closed the file window but didn’t dismiss it. When he was sure they weren’t looking, he’d review this. History didn’t touch on them, now, and why had Walter not included this in his studies of the station? Reviewing station history, particularly logs of the Tanager’s stops, had been part of his earliest education once he’d learned to read.

  Jem skimmed through the log to the next recorded stop at Tianjin. It had not happened for two cycles, and it didn’t mention the open market day or a booth, the way the previous one did. It simply recorded two cargoes offloaded - Jem noted the patronym of one indicated it was the same client he worked with - and one taken on. But again, there was the asterisk with a link.

  He clicked, and nothing happened. Jem blinked. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Broken links led to an error page. He clicked again, and a screen popped up overlaying his file window. Captain’s access only? This was something new, and disconcerting. He reached for the screen to offer it his biometrics, when the sound of a cleared throat behind him make him startle so hard he almost fell out of his chair.

  He spun around to face Jade. “Um, ah...” he stuttered. She lifted an eyebrow in a wordless query, and Jem had a flashback to Walter standing there catching him goofing off. In that instant, something else clicked into place for him. Jade’s face had always seemed off kilter in some undefinable way, and now he knew what it was. He blurted out what was in his thoughts before he could stop himself. “How old are you?”

  Jade blinked and frowned. She held up the box that was in her hands, wires looped messily over the top of it. “Afore we chat, we need to...”

  “Oh, right, sorry,” Jem found that he was still stammering. He half-turned away and swiped his display closed. At least he hadn’t been projecting it to the main screens. “Is that, um,” he peered at the box she was holding as he stood. It just looked like a black box, with an open top which was mostly obscured by a noodle-tangle of wiring. The wires were multi-colored and didn’t seem to have any organization.

  “Happen so. Or not.” She shrugged, handing it to him.

  Examining it more closely did Jem little good. He knew the basics of maintaining and building simple electronics but most of the time they outsourced it when on station, and kept back-up boards to plug in if something stopped working. He handed it back. “What, ah, what next?”

  He kicked himself. He sounded more like a clumsy boy than the ship’s captain. He cleared his throat and added, “we reach foldspace in two hours.”

  She nodded. Keeping her silence, she led him to the galley, where she put the box on the table and then asked aloud, “Cuppa Java?”

  Jem started to nod, feeling tongue-tied by all the silence and awkward dialogue, then remembered their unseen listeners. “Ah, yes, please. Would you like me to show you how to operate the maker?”

  “That’d be happy-making.” She sat and watched him, and Jem started telling her how it worked and what he was doing, keeping up a patter of meaningless chatter to occupy the listeners if they were indeed paying attention. When the first cup was done, he brought it to her. She had connected her tablet to the box and pointed at the display before taking the cup. He looked down at a rough plan of the Tanager, with five blinking orange lights on it. One was in the cabin where Gyro’s body was - Jem gulped, that was not a chore he was looking forward to - one was in the garden, and three were in the outer hold. Probably... He held out his hand to zoom the screen, then caught himself. “May I?”

  She nodded at him over the rim of the cup. “Damme but th’s prime Java!”

  Jem felt a flush rise to his cheeks. She sounded very sincere, even if he was deducing what she was saying in spite of her heavy accent half the time. He zoomed in on the hold. Two on the hatches, coming and going. One in the middle of the floor, which seemed odd but it might have been placed on cargo before that was removed. None of the lights seemed to be moving. He pinched the screen back to normal size. She set her cup down with reluctance and nodded at him.

  He fetched his own cup and took a sip. He’d set the machine to produce drinkable coffee, not so hot it would leave a contact burn, unlike the machine Walter had used when Jem first boarded. The warm, rich liquid with just a hint of bitterness felt good. He had needed this. His stomach growled as the coffee hit it, and Jem realized he had no idea how long it had been since he’d eaten anything. “Um, are you hungry?” He asked Jade.

  She laughed at him. “Ya eat sommat, boy. I kin eat, too.”

  Jem didn’t try to cook. Now that his body had been reminded, he was desperately starving. His stock of pre-made meals was good, since there had been time while in transit from the Black Station to do some cooking and freezing for later, and Moskvin’s idea of teaching him to cook had been large portions. He put two in the warmer. Jade wandered into the kitchen, carrying her coffee cup, which had been refilled, and she looked around. Jem opened his mouth to ask her if it had changed since she saw it last, and then closed it with an effort. He couldn’t just talk to her.

  “We, um, used to share meal prep.”

  She looked at him, doing the eyebrow thing again. He suppressed his urge to squirm and apologize. “Walter and I.” Jem explained, “but he decided I cooked better, so it was my job. I don’t mind. Now that I’m captain.”

  She nodded like that had made perfect sense to her. “If’n I try a hand, will offend?”

  Would it offend him? Jem shook his head, hoping he’d interpreted that correctly. “Not at all. I just started to experiment with new recipes but someone else’s cooking is bound to be interesting and different.”

  She grinned, her teeth flashing wide against the darkness of her skin. “Allus nice to eat someone else’s work.”

  Jem pulled the packet out of the warmer. “Um, this one is lasagna. Which is an Old Earth...”

  She interrupted him. “Gimme. I know it. An’ I know it’s good eats.”

  She knew what a dog was. She knew what lasagna was. He handed her the packet and pulled his own portion out. It wasn’t that food had changed, with the diaspora from Earth to other planets. It was simply that methods had changed. In the long haul of the first wave colonization, sparse ingredients, altered cooking methods, and limited caloric diets had created entirely new cultural tastes which still lingered on. Even the later waves passing through foldspace had not brought the old foods with them. Some places, yes, but... Jem cooked from historical books. He wasn’t even sure he was getting things right, sometimes, being unable to try a dish on a human that had eaten it before.

  And he couldn’t ask Jade about
it, not yet. This inability to talk freely was wearing on his nerves and his temper. He checked the time. They’d eat, and then they would burn the hell out of the bugs on his ship. Jem wolfed down his lasagna, not even Jade’s presence slowing him down. He went back and got more. His body had not been happy with him, and now he felt the need for fuel. Once his second portion was gone, he filled a spill proof mug, and left dirty dishes in the sink with a firm command from Jade to “go Captain while I clean.”

  He’d not protested. They could set up a chore roster later. Right now, he wanted to get safely out of the system. Back in the bridge, he scanned for the tugs, leaving his previous work alone for the moment. The one that had been hovering to port was still there, keeping pace with them. But one of the trailing tugs had poured on the juice and was coming up straight in his wake. Jem frowned. They couldn’t stop him. So what was the point? He’d have folded and gone before either could catch the Tanager, as close as they were to the point.

  Chapter 24: Bug-Be-Gone

  Jem toggled the switch, and the Tanager slipped into foldspace. He let out a long breath, feeling himself relaxing, and the soreness of his muscles reminded him he’d been tense for a very long time. It seemed almost anti-climactic, this quiet transition, but they weren’t done yet. He wasn’t going to try and sleep until the bugs were off his ship.

  Jade was finishing up their few dishes when Jem came back into the galley. “Give me a minute.” She spoke tranquilly over her shoulder. Jem stood there staring at her back. She put the last plate in the cupboard, dry, and turned to him. “Ready, Captain?”

  “Uh,” Jem said. He opened his mouth and closed it again.

  Jade smiled at his obvious discomfiture. “The accent is useful. I’ve learned that it causes my enemies to underestimate me.”

  Jem shook his head. “I keep coming up with more questions for you. I need to start a list before I forget some.”

  Jade laughed out loud, a contagious belly laugh that started Jem going, too. She took him by the shoulders. “I promise...” she giggled. “If you make a list, can I add things to it?”