Shooting the Rift - eARC

by Alex Stewart

  Rollo stopped limping as soon as we passed inside, although he kept his arm around me until we reached one of the sofas scattered through a communal area the same size as the one the crew of the Stacked Deck occupied. Ertica and Baines were already there, almost lost in a space meant for so many more people, and they both looked up as we entered.

  Rollo dropped onto the couch with a contented sigh, and patted the upholstery next to him. “Plenty of room for a small one, if you want to keep on snuggling.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, remaining on my feet.

  Ertica looked daggers at her deckhand. “Give it a rest, Rollo, he’s only interested in girls. Why else would he keep hanging around the bitch who dragged us in here?”

  “I’m not prejudiced.” Rollo shrugged, and grinned at me. “You know where I am if you ever change your mind.”

  But my attention was already entirely on Ertica, which, given that she apparently wore even less in the privacy of her own quarters than she did outside, was hardly surprising.

  “She didn’t react when she touched you,” I said, remembering how Jas had intervened to lead her away after the altercation with Deeks. “Is she immune to your tweak, or can you control it?”

  “Straight to the point,” Baines said, the first time I’d actually heard him speak. His voice was deep and gravelly, with a trace of an accent I couldn’t place—a legacy of whichever backwater world he’d left decades ago, in early adolescence. “Not something you often see in a Guilder.”

  “A bit of both,” Ertica said, ignoring the pair of them. “League grunts have a broad spectrum antitoxin tweak, but I can vary the potency myself if I want to.” She shrugged, which set up some briefly distracting oscillations. “I wouldn’t have much of a love life otherwise, would I?”

  “Well, there have been a couple of guys—” Rollo began, before falling silent again in response to a glare from his captain.

  “If you can’t say something relevant, don’t say anything at all.” She turned back to me, her voice becoming almost strangulated with the effort of trying to sound hospitable. “Can we offer you some tea? Or something?”

  “Tea,” I said. “Why not?” Whatever they wanted, or, more likely, Ertica wanted, it was clearly going to take some time before she came to the point. No reason not to be comfortable while I waited to find out what it was.

  “Tea. Right.” Baines sighed, and began to boil a kettle.

  Simon. A message appeared in my ‘sphere, from Clio if the tag was to be relied on. What’s happening? You’ve been in there five minutes already.

  Nothing, I sent back. Just having tea.

  Tea with Freebooters? This time I had to imagine her incredulous expression for myself, which I did without too much difficulty. Just don’t let her stir it with her finger.

  I’ll be careful, I promised.

  “So.” I seated myself at a vacant table, and tried to sound focused and businesslike, which was a lot harder than it sounds under the circumstances. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

  Ertica smiled tightly. “You really are new to the Guild. Otherwise your first question would have been ‘What’s in it for me?’”

  “You’ve already offered some tea,” I said. “We can move on from there once I know exactly what you want, and how badly you want it.”

  Her smile became a little more genuine. “That’s more like it,” she said. “Spoken like a real Guilder.” She glanced up as Baines put a couple of mugs of tea on the table between us; they were overly full, and slopped slightly, leaving rings on the fake wood grain of the plastic surface. “Thanks, Hiro.”

  “Cookie?” I asked, pulling the ones I’d scored from Wymes out of the pocket I’d stashed them in. They hadn’t crumbled much, and weren’t particularly fluffy. “No chocolate ones I’m afraid. Too liable to melt.”

  “Aren’t you full of surprises.” Ertica looked at them suspiciously, and let them lie unmolested on the tabletop; a reaction which, now I came to consider their condition more carefully, I could hardly blame her for.

  “Ooh, a jammy one.” Rollo bounced up, grabbed it, and subsided onto the sofa again, in one fluid movement.

  “Isn’t everyone?” I asked, responding to Ertica’s question, and ignoring her excitable subordinate; which seemed to be the strategy of choice among his shipmates.

  “In my experience.” Ertica nodded, and sipped at her tea. Somewhat reassured, I ventured to take a mouthful of my own, and found it no less drinkable than I’d expected.

  “Then what’s your surprise?” I asked. “Why am I here?”

  “We need a favor,” Ertica said, putting her mug on the table, next to her metaphorical cards. “What’s left of our ship’s been impounded; which is only a technical inconvenience, as it’ll never fly again anyway. So when they let the rest of you go, we’ll be stuck here. Indefinitely.”

  “Years, probably,” Rollo put in. “Even if they don’t press—” He went quiet at a glare from Ertica.

  “What charges?” I asked. “You must have convinced them you’re not the spies they’re looking for, or they’d have sent you straight to Freedom for a detailed debrief instead of putting you in here with us. So why did you try to make a run for it?”

  “Who says we tried to run?” Ertica asked.

  “You did, when you arrived here. ‘Mistress of a gutted hulk,’ remember? They wouldn’t have had any reason to open fire if you’d just let them board like the rest of us.” I didn’t see any point in admitting I’d watched the whole thing through the Stacked Deck’s sensor suite; if they thought I was more astute than I was, they’d be less likely to try something underhand for fear I’d spot it. Although these were Freebooters I was dealing with: pirates, liars and thieves, if Clio was to be believed, so underhand probably came with the job description.

  “We weren’t spying,” Ertica said, after a moment’s hesitation, “but we did have an extra item among the cargo. Two hundredweight of refined sugar.”

  “Which isn’t exactly legal?” I asked. Some worlds regarded the stuff as a health hazard, particularly where a substantial part of the population had transgenic tweaks to speed up their metabolisms; overuse by a handful of them could even lead to addiction and psychosis.

  “That’s a bit of a grey area,” Baines put in. “Some places it is, some places it isn’t.”

  “One of the places it isn’t being Freedom, I take it,” I said. Unlike the Commonwealth, which had a one-size-fits-all approach to the legal code, the League let its member systems run their own affairs pretty much as they liked, so long as they subscribed to a few core principles, and paid their fair shares of the budget for things like the armed forces and the official riftcom network.

  “Most of the League worlds, if you’re going to get technical,” Rollo said. “Which drives the price up nicely.”

  “Why take the risk?” I asked. “Farland were paying over the odds for this job anyway.” And much good it had done them, as things turned out, with their precious cargo impounded as soon as it arrived. No doubt a platoon of lawyers would be on a nice little earner for the next few years sorting out the ensuing squabble about who was liable for the financial fallout.

  Ertica shrugged, with the same disconcerting effect as on the previous occasion. “I’m a Freebooter. It’s in my nature.” She studied my face for a moment, realized I wasn’t buying it, and sighed. “All right, then, the truth is we were desperate. The Farland contract came along just in time to keep our ship from being repossessed, but it would only have bought us a breathing space. A quick, clean smuggling run on top of that would have got us out from under. And it would have worked perfectly if that stupid bitch hadn’t been exposed as a Commonwealth agent, and got us all caught up in a spy hunt.”

  “All right.” I’d had enough practice at lies and misdirection in the last few weeks to be fairly sure there was a backbone of truth to that, at least. “You’re busted, stranded, and probably looking at jail time. And I’m concerned about this becaus
e . . . ?”

  “I don’t know, actually.” Ertica shrugged again, but this time I ignored the result; it was too erratic to be a genuine tic, and too frequent to be entirely unintentional, and I wasn’t quite young or naive enough to be bamboozled into thinking with my hormones. But if she thought I was, fine; I’d grown up being underestimated, and knew how to turn that to my advantage. “Perhaps because you thought Numarkut was civilized.”

  “I won’t make that mistake again,” I said. “But I still don’t see what I can do help you.”

  “It’s simple enough. We need a ride. You’ve got a ship. Talk to your skipper, see what it’ll take for him to give us passage. I’m sure we can work something out.”

  Which was more than I was. Given the amount of antipathy I’d already witnessed between Guilders and Freebooters, I couldn’t see Remington exactly falling over himself to do her any favors: but, at that, the Stacked Deck probably represented the best chance they had of cutting a deal with someone. They certainly wouldn’t get anywhere with Deeks and his chums, or the other Guilder crews interned here, and the shipping line employees were, if anything, even more hostile.

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said, after pausing just long enough to look as though I’d been giving the absurd proposal some serious consideration, “but I can’t promise anything.”

  “Good enough.” Ertica nodded briskly. “Have you finished your tea?”

  “More or less.” I ignored the implicit dismissal, and sipped at it, finding it had gone cold while we talked, which hadn’t exactly enhanced the flavor. “What’s the rest of this rock like? You’ve seen a lot more of it than I have.”

  “Not that much,” Rollo said. “Just the infirmary and the brig.” He gestured expansively at our surroundings. “And this bit. Which I can assure you is way better than both.”

  “I can believe that,” I said. I took another sip I didn’t want. “So not much chance of getting orientated.”

  “None at all,” Baines put in. “I tried tapping a node from the hospital, to get a map, but it’s completely secure.”

  How secure? I sent. There are usually holes if you know where to look. So, it might be possible to tap a node, if I could somehow get myself sent to the infirmary. Which didn’t sound like much of a plan, but it was the closest thing to one I’d been able to come up with since our arrival: unless you counted continuing to hang around Jas with my fingers crossed as a positive course of action.

  Not here. Baines clearly felt the need to prove the point; perhaps his pride had been hurt by his failure to mesh. It’s got all this military grade stuff around it. He kicked a file across to my ‘sphere, and my heart leapt. He’d recorded his attempt to mesh in, and the security protocols which had prevented him from doing so.

  Looks pretty solid, I conceded, with a nod. But he hadn’t had my sneakware, or my knack for adapting datanomes on the fly. I’d need to take a long, careful look at this, but it was just possible he’d handed me the key to the node.

  All I had to do now was find a way to get near the lock.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  In which I become embroiled in a timely altercation.

  As I’d expected, Remington didn’t exactly leap at Ertica’s proposal.

  “What’s in it for us?” he asked, and I found myself suppressing a smile at the echo of the Freebooter’s words. There could be no doubt at all that John Remington was a typical Guilder.

  “She was a bit vague on that side of the deal,” I admitted. “But it pretty much boiled down to ‘name your own price.’”

  “Which pretty much guarantees she’s got no intention of paying up once she’s got what she wants,” Remington said.

  Rennau nodded in agreement. “Of course she hasn’t, she’s a Freebooter.” The three of us were conferring in a quiet corner of our accommodation area, to which Remington had led the way as soon as I returned from the Freebooters’ quarters, ignoring the curious glances of our shipmates. Clio, in particular, had seemed relieved at my safe return, although quite what she imagined might have happened to me I had no idea.

  “Is there anything they can offer that we might want?” I asked. Not that I cared particularly either way: from where I was standing it looked as though they’d brought their misfortune entirely on themselves, and I didn’t think I was going to lose much sleep at the idea of them finding out actions had consequences. Nevertheless, I felt grateful to Baines for the information he’d given me, even though he’d been unaware of its value, and I suppose I thought I owed them something in return.

  “Like what?” Rennau snorted derisively. “They’ve only got the clothes on their backs. And damn few of those, in one case.”

  “Information, maybe?” I was reaching, I knew, and tried not to sound like it. “If they were smuggling, they must have connections, here and on Numarkut. Could any of those be useful to us?”

  “Gangsters and organized criminals?” Remington shook his head, smiling at my naivity. “We only deal with those through the local Guild reps. Who’ll have far better connections than a bunch of chancers like that.”

  “Fair enough.” I nodded, unable to find a hole in his reasoning. “She made it pretty clear that they think we’re a long shot, anyway. I don’t suppose they’ll be all that surprised to find out we’re not interested.”

  “Even if we were, they’ve broken the law here. We could hardly tell the League we’re taking them with us in any case,” Remington pointed out.

  “Not without putting them under Guild protection,” Rennau agreed. He exchanged a brief, amused glance with the skipper. “Like that’d ever happen. Guildhall would piss themselves laughing if we even asked.”

  “Even so.” Remington looked thoughtful for a moment, wondering if there could possibly be an angle he’d missed, then shook his head. He turned to me. “Next time they invite you to tea, tell them they’re on their own. Unless they can come up with a concrete proposal that’s clearly to our advantage.”

  “Right.” I nodded too, in complete agreement. But I couldn’t help feeling a little regretful nevertheless.

  I got very little sleep that night. I couldn’t resist taking a quick look at the data I’d got from Baines as soon as I got back to my room, and, as I should have anticipated, quickly became so engrossed that the passage of time barely registered; it was almost morning by the time I’d finished examining it. Even so, I felt surprisingly energized as I grabbed some toast and coffee: every step felt as though I was back in Aunt Jenny’s guest room, bouncing me off the floor a tiny bit higher than it should have done.

  And with good reason. The more I’d worked on it, the more sure I’d become that I could actually get away with cracking a node if the opportunity presented itself. The sneakware I’d put together to get into Jas’s visor would mesh neatly with the outer protective layer, and I’d been able to construct some datanomes mirroring the protocols Baines had recorded lurking deeper inside the system with very little difficulty. I still might need to do some quick modifications on the fly, but I was good at that sort of thing, so it shouldn’t be a problem. All I needed was some kind of excuse to visit the infirmary.

  And that, of course, was where the whole thing fell down. I’d need to create some plausible-seeming accident, which would require my hospitalization, but still leave me well enough to function when I got there. And not have anyone suspect that I might be faking it, or raise any doubts about the seriousness of my injuries.

  So I went for a run as soon as I’d finished breakfast, hoping that something might occur to me, and that even if it didn’t I’d be able to dissipate some of the energy still coursing through my system. I’d been hoping Jas might be on guard duty, but there was no sign of her at either pressure door, and I completed a couple of circuits of the cavern completely wrapped up in my own thoughts.

  The second time round I caught sight of Clio and Ensign Neville, who for some reason had become inextricably linked in my mind with the image of a hamster in a League Navy uniform, s
eated on a bench beside the fountain in the central garden. They seemed to be deep in conversation, although Clio wasn’t quite engrossed enough to miss me as I passed through her peripheral vision.

  Hi, I sent, not really expecting a reply. I wasn’t disappointed either; she simply turned back to Neville and laughed at whatever inanity he’d just emitted. Fine, I wasn’t exactly in the mood for conversation myself.

  “Looking for your new best friend?” Recalled to my immediate surroundings, I realized I’d slowed down as I approached the Freebooters’ quarters, and glanced at it automatically as I did so. Deeks was standing in my way, one side of his face still swollen and red where Ertica had kissed it. His eyes narrowed. “You seem to be spending a lot of time with the ‘booters.”

  “They had a business proposition,” I said, thinking it was none of his damn business, but determined to be polite anyway. One advantage of an Avalonian upbringing, at least in certain social circles, was the ability to seem affable to people you’d rather scrape off your shoes.

  “Guilders don’t do business with Freebooters.”

  “No, we don’t.” I nodded, in polite agreement. “Which is why we’re not interested.”

  “Good.” He relaxed a little, some of the hostility draining out of his posture, while curiosity gradually got the better of him. “What sort of business?”

  “You know better than that,” I said, keeping the tone light. As a rule, Guilders weren’t that big on sharing job opportunities, unless there was something in it for them. “Besides, you wouldn’t be any keener on taking them up on it than we were. Trust me.”

  “If you say so.” He didn’t seem all that convinced, but that wasn’t my problem. “So you were just passing by, then?”

  “Got a message to deliver.” I caught a flicker of movement inside the Freebooters’ quarters, and the first faint glimmering of an idea began to take shape. I allowed the merest hint of a challenge to enter my voice. “Unless you’ve got some objection to me having a quick word with your girlfriend.”