by Ginger Booth
“Hadron, squared away yet?” she asked over her comms.
The hunter Selectman replied, “Much as it can be. The container is in an uproar.”
That operation was the hangup. He took two of his most trusted hunters, Don and Nora, to arrest Selectman Benek in the farmer box. With four containers for accommodations, the Denali naturally sorted themselves by caste. Their comms relied on Thrive, so Sass was able to put the farmers under interdiction, unable to call out and warn any co-conspirators.
“Maybe you could question Benek in front of them,” Sass suggested. “Give them a show.”
“Tarana asked that I wait,” Hadron said, unsure. “But I think you’re right. Anyway, secure down here. We’ve blocked the only exit.”
“Good job, Hadron. We’ll begin up here. Sass out.”
She would have preferred to arrest Tikki and Zan before the shuttle returned and alarmed them. She kicked herself several times for telling Zan earlier that Nico headed downriver, when obviously he returned with critical equipment from Sylvan One.
Will they resist? Hard to predict a man who had nothing left to lose. So offer them a prize for good behavior. Zan slipped into his cabin, not the bridge.
“Heading out now, Kaol. Go.” The security officer was positioned in Eli’s cabin.
“Aye, sar.”
Kaol slipped through the shared bathroom connecting Eli and Tikki’s cabins – once his, as well. He banged open the door and brought the lights up to full, training a stunner on his childhood sweetheart.
Under the sudden onslaught of light, the housekeeper sat bolt upright from his covers, blinking groggily at the business end of the gun. His eyes drifted past it to Kaol in shock.
“Tikki, you’re under arrest for the murder of a crewmate. Surrender.”
The geisha’s open hands floated up, then landed on his ornately tattooed bald scalp. He gulped, and murmured, “Kaol, I’m so sorry.”
“No talking!” the hunter barked. “You’d only lie. And I’d believe you, damn you!”
Kaol secured the prisoner, trussed and seated on the floor with no comms devices within reach. He’d already cut this cabin off from external computer comms an hour ago. “Computer, crewman Tikki is now a prisoner, and relieved of all authorizations, by order of security.”
“I am sorry,” Tikki repeated. “It’s just –”
“Shut up! I know why you did it. I knew it was you all along.” Kaol commed the captain. “Secure here.”
“Help!” gurgled her reply.
Sass had walked across the corridor in officer country to knock on Zan’s door.
“Zan? May I come in?” Darren next door was forewarned to stay inside his cabin until she gave the all-clear. Sass still had no idea which of the injured Denali in the hold might be in on this plot.
The polite response on Zan’s part would be, “Come on in!” Instead he immediately yanked open the door, blaster in hand.
Sass had the stunner ready, and shot first. But she missed, even at point-blank range. Zan was just too good at this game. For years he was Ben Acosta’s canny strongman in the increasingly wild frontier of the Pono rings. He dodged behind the door. Then lightning-fast his free hand shot out and twisted the stunner out of her grasp before it recharged for a second shot.
And his blaster came up in her face.
She pursed her lips. “Mutiny, too? You realize if you kill me, I’ll be alive again to testify. So will Floki.” She leaned forward to deliver that last in a hiss of fury. He swallowed. Encouraged that she was getting to him, she mused, “What will Ben think?”
He yanked her arm down, then spun her around to get a choke-hold around her neck with the elbow attached to his blaster hand. He used his other hand to keep her arm twisted painfully behind her shoulder blades. “Tarana abandons Sylvan.”
“I agree. But it’s her call. And I make a crappy hostage,” she pointed out.
“Not you. Nico Copeland. Call him up to your cabin.”
Smart move. Nico gave leverage over Spaceways. “No.”
He frog-marched her across the quiet carpeted hall to her own door. “Open it.”
“Me captain. Me give orders. You obey. Computer, seal my cabin. Ow! Bastard!” He’d wrenched her twisted arm up further, enough to dislocate her right shoulder. “Computer, revoke all –” But he tightened his choking arm to practically cut off her windpipe.
“Zan, this is over!” she croaked. “You can’t win!”
“No. I can’t lose.”
“Surrender! Ben will forgive you!” I won’t.
He huffed a bitter laugh. “No one will forgive me. Doesn’t matter.” He leaned his lips to her ear. “Open the cabin door before I start blasting off your hands and feet. You think I haven’t watched? I know exactly how long it takes you to regenerate a hand.”
Days, and it hurts. Sass believed him. C’mon, Kaol! She hoped her trust in her security hunter was not misplaced. Can’t be. And Tikki won’t fight him. Can’t. I’m good. “Clay’s in there. Helpless. You think I’d give you Clay?”
Just then Kaol reported success. She managed to croak, “Help!”
“Who was that?” He wrenched her arm up further, burning agony.
The engineer’s cabin door opened behind them. “What’s going on here?” Darren demanded. “Zan, unhand the captain! This is mutiny!” He belted this out loud enough to rouse the sleepers on the catwalk, too.
Oops. Sass winced. Darren must have thought the ‘Help!’ plea was aimed at him, or perhaps to anyone within range.
Zan pivoted them around, to bring his blaster to bear in Darren’s direction. Then in blindingly quick succession, he fired at the engineer’s door. He spun Sass outward like a swing dancer, to fling toward the catwalk. Without warning or balance, she bounced off the bulkhead and hit the floor hard, unable to break her fall on the dislocated arm. Zan took three leaping steps and grabbed Darren by the neck.
And he fell twitching to the carpet. Darren stood armed with an electrical source wire. One well over 240 volts, judging by how badly Zan seized.
Sass managed to lever herself off the floor just as Kaol ran in. “Cover the hold!” she barked at him. “Darren, you need to tie him up.” She tossed him some bungees she brought for the purpose. Then she tried to reset her own shoulder socket.
She gave pointers along the way as Darren hogtied the powerful Zan. Doubtless this was a first for the engineer. Once that was accomplished, Kaol glanced back, and summoned her to join him.
He handed her his stunner. “I’m right-handed,” she murmured softly in objection. With her left, she doubted she could hit anyone.
But that wasn’t his intent. He seized her shoulder and her upper arm, felt around a bit, then turned it and yanked.
Sass screamed in pain, loud enough to carry to anyone somehow still sleeping on starship Thrive, not her finest moment.
Kaol ignored this, and painfully probed her shoulder. “Is that good?”
She worked the joint to find that he had, in fact, fixed it. “Could have warned me.” She handed him back his stunner, and wondered where hers had gotten to.
“Tikka Gena,” Kaol remarked, pointing across the hold. The physiologist emerged from the crew cabin next to Tikki’s. She was beyond stunner range.
Sass’s eyes narrowed. She opened a comms channel. “Tikka, return to quarters.” She hadn’t bothered to alert Tikka or Zelda, hoping they’d stay out of this. But the other woman didn’t acknowledge she’d spoken. She might have left her comms at her bedside.
“Drop it!” rang out a man’s voice from the other end of the hold. One of the injured levered himself up on an elbow. He pointed a blaster at the physiologist. Sass hadn’t seen that Tikka Gena was carrying. But she cautiously held out a stunner, and laid it down on the catwalk. Another burn patient groaned with the pain, but reached out to take custody of the gun.
Kaol grimaced. “In the hold! Lay down your weapons NOW! Tikka Gena! Hands up, against the wall!”
The original two patients, the blaster and the stunner, didn’t comply, but at least their weapons were trained on Tikka instead of them. Sass sighed. “I’ll go. I’m self-healing.”
“Ship needs a captain, sar,” Kaol countered. He strode forward first, in the ridiculously exposed position of trying to cover himself against dozens of people blocking the catwalk and hold, all awake now, an unknown subset hostile and possibly armed.
I sure didn’t see Tikka Gena as one of them, Sass mourned.
Darren sidled to her and awkwardly offered Zan’s blaster and her own stunner. She accepted both. “Should I drag Zan into his cabin? For storage.”
“No. If you could cover him. Um,” she handed back her stunner. “Don’t get hurt, OK?”
With that, she slipped forward and pivoted to study the patients paving the catwalk to the left. A dead end passing in front of the ventilation ducts, terminating in a ladder no one used, this cul de sac was a favored spot. She met their eyes. “We’re apprehending the saboteurs who burned you. Understood?”
A few nodded. A few slumped back to lie prone. A couple more just eyed her warily. But none pulled out a weapon. Good enough. Her back itched the moment she turned it on them. Kaol was halfway to Tikka Gena by now, closing on the blaster-bearing patient. The man dangled the blaster by its nose out into the clear portion of the walkway. Kaol stooped and snatched it up. He’d already filled his holsters while Sass’s attention was elsewhere, so he proceeded bearing two blasters for the moment, with nowhere safe to put them down.
Sass elected to take station at the catwalk corner by the galley, giving her a wide view of the hold below and the patients behind Kaol’s back. Suddenly one of the injured below rolled onto his front and paused to take aim at Kaol with a stunner. Sass shot the deck in front of him. He dropped the stunner and rolled away from it, head in his arms.
“Everyone!” she called out. “You will be heard. But this ends now! Each of us deserves a chance to survive this damned planet! There is no escape from this ship. We’re three hundred meters up. Nowhere to run. Do you understand me?”
Kaol finally reached Tikka Gena. He pulled her arms down behind her, then shoved her into Tikki’s cabin to finish securing her.
Freed from covering Kaol’s back, Sass leapt into the hold and collected the dropped stunner. She got the academic’s name. His arms were swaddled from burns. “Does anyone else have a weapon they need to surrender?” she boomed out.
How the hell did any of them have weapons in their sickbeds? She winced. Tikka Gena. “Does anyone else need to surrender at this time? No? Good. Rest and get well.”
She jumped to the catwalk, an awkward maneuver with so many bodies in the way. She looked both ways, and decided to start with the easy ones. Zan could wait. She commed the Selectmen below. “Tarana, Hadron, I think we’re OK up here. Four prisoners. Commencing interrogation. Sass out.” And she strode toward Tikki’s cabin.
“Captain?” Nico interrupted over the comms, with a quaver in his voice. “Can I bring Floki out now? And start fixing him?”
Her heart twinged. “You can work on him in the engine room. Fetch your tools first, before anyone sees what you’ve got.”
“What’s gonna happen to Uncle Zan?”
“Yet to be determined, Mr. Nico. Carry on.”
41
Tikki began, “I’m guilty. I did it. I never thought it would go so far… Captain, Kaol had no part of this. Please believe me.” His beautiful liquid brown eyes pleaded with her.
Sass had brought the trussed Tikki into Eli’s cabin to question first, leaving Kaol and Tikka Gena in the other room.
“I believe him,” she clarified. “I need names. All of them.”
Tikki shook his head. “We used a cell structure. I only know the cells I’m in. Benek was our leader. Zan, Benek, and Giari. You don’t know him. A cosmo lead technician. He died in the…explosion. Captain, that was never supposed to reach the academic platform! Or I swear, I would’ve ratted them out myself!”
“You’d draw the line there, would you?” Sass countered. “But you were OK with murdering your crewmate. Rendering Floki helpless and stuffing him into an empty fuel barrel. Then blowing up his ID so we thought he was dead!”
Tikki looked thoroughly disgusted and ashamed. “I powered him off. Just to catch a minute to think when he discovered us. Then I didn’t know what to do. He could incriminate all of us.”
Sass believed him. Crimes tended to snowball out of control like that. “So you’re the one who disabled him? Who shoved him into the barrel?”
“Zan and Giari,” Tikki admitted. “I – It wasn’t murder. Not exactly. You can just turn him back on, right? We needed to keep him quiet for a while. But he has automatic backups to the ship AI. I had to silence him. Temporarily.”
“For your information,” Sass shared, “Nico cannot ‘turn him back on.’ Floki’s body is entirely corroded from the vog. But we’ll see if Nico can retrieve more memories.”
Tikki shook his head, grief-stricken. “I care about Floki. I didn’t want to hurt him. Just shut him up a bit.”
“I get that. More names.”
“My cell,” he admitted. “Tikka Gena. And a couple cosmos, Dial and Karim. We didn’t do much. None of us wanted to hurt anybody. We just wanted Sylvan to fail. Denali needs to evacuate to Mahina. But they won’t listen to us. They confiscate all our income in taxes. They sent us to Mahina to become the experts. Then we had no say in whether Sylvan or Mahina was a better idea. They said we went to the Pono rings to support the Sylvan colony. We tried to tell them that we changed our minds. But captain, you don’t know what politics are like on Denali. They get together, in person, and reach a consensus. And then nothing you say can derail them. Lemmings. It’s not like Mahina, where people have freedom. Where it’s OK to be different.”
Sass sympathized with his frustration. But attacking a crewmate crossed the line. “What will they do to you? Tarana and the Selectmen.”
Tikki blanched. “Doesn’t matter.”
“What do you mean by that?”
He shook his head, eyes tearing. “I’m doomed anyway. Since a volcano destroyed my life in Denali Prime. I’m too old for a boy geisha. Waterfalls was never my home.” He shook his head bitterly. “Never should have been a geisha in the first place. What do I have to go back to? A whorehouse on MO? Hoping to sneak enough secret tips to pay for Yang-Yangs, so I can eek out prostitution for years more? My life isn’t worth a damn, Sass. I was willing to throw it away to make sure Denali kids make it safe to Mahina. Denali sucks.”
His self-loathing was palpable, radiating out in waves. Sass’s brows lowered, compassion moving her. “What would you have been? If it weren’t for that volcano. You were bred as an academic. Not a geisha.”
“Doesn’t work like that,” he explained. “I was only six. They bred me for mathematical aptitude, sure. But what is that? Facility with symbols and abstract thinking. And then life happens. Your math teacher is cold and likes another kid better. Your art teacher is warm and full of life, and tells you that your blobs of color are brilliant. Symbols and abstraction underlie everything, if you think that way. I have no idea what I might have been. But Waterfalls assigned me to geisha after primary school. I appealed. I wanted to be a technician. But Denali Prime only took its best back. I wasn’t that. And Waterfalls saved its best roles for its own cosmos. Mahina – you’ve got so much freedom compared to us. You don’t know what it’s like.”
“Mahina hasn’t been that way very long,” Sass told him. “But it’s getting better. What else is planned? Sabotage-wise.”
He shook his head emphatically, his expression nauseated. “I told them I was out. My whole cell. This had to stop. The academics burning…” He squeezed his eyes shut, and another tear pressed out. “Tikka Gena, Dial, Karim, all four of us. We were done.”
“And what did Zan say to that?” Sass pressed.
Tikka raised his eyes to a bulkhead. Sass gave him a moment to think. �
��He said Tarana wasn’t giving up. And we’d all die here to save Denali. We were heroes.”
“And Benek?”
“Didn’t talk to him again. And Giari was dead.”
Sass considered whether he might have anything else useful. “What further could they do?”
“That was only one barrel of fuel,” Tikki pointed out. “And it exploded way farther than we expected. There are plenty more barrels.”
“And the drugs?”
“Tikka Gena. Wanted to kill her for using onion juice and implicating me.”
“Cables and ropes?”
He shook his head. “Not us.”
“You said cells. How many people?”
His eyes grew evasive. “I don’t know for sure. At least fifteen or twenty. I don’t know which cells had sub-cells.”
Sass’s eyes narrowed. “Which of your people do you suspect leads a sub-cell? Tikki, I remind you that lives are still on the line here. If you don’t spill everything you know, you’re responsible if any more of them die.”
“Karim. I don’t know that for a fact.”
“And –” A comm call interrupted from Darren. She held up a hand for Tikki to wait.
“Captain, did you know your antlers are blinking?”
“No. I’ll be right there.”
“Sass!” Ben greeted her instantly when she called back from her office. The analog moose-bot ansible didn’t interface with their digital comms. She needed to sit in front of it. His message hadn’t said much, just that it was urgent, and he needed to speak to Tarana as well. “No Tarana?”
“Awkward at the moment.” Sass wasn’t eager to extract the First Selectman from her box tacked onto the bottom of the ship just now. “What’s the big news?”
He leaned forward on his forearms solemnly. “Selectman Gorey pulled the plug on Waterfalls. Summer’s just begun and the heat is killing people. They’ve asked for all available assistance. Sass, I won’t be able to retrieve you, for months at least. I hope it’s going well?”
