Jewel

by Veronica Tower

  “Do you want to talk about what you’re running from?” Erik asked her.

  Jewel instinctively tried to pull back from him, but he maintained his grip on her hand so she was forced to stand her ground and answer him. “No. I definitely do not think this is the proper time to hold a discussion on our respective pasts.”

  To emphasize the fact that they had work to do, she shook free of him and strode up to the first of the cells or vaults built into the wall. It opened easily at her touch, revealing that the space within was completely empty.

  “I was wrong,” Erik admitted as he stepped up beside her. “This isn’t a prison cell. What do you think they were planning to store in here?”

  “I don’t know,” Jewel admitted. “How many of these chambers do you think there are?”

  “That depends on how many decks they converted, but there are easily thirty or forty of them on this level alone.”

  There were, in fact, forty-two chambers laid out twenty-one on a side, with another set of forty-two in the center of the ship and a third set of forty-two on the port side of the vessel. It took a long time to look in them all and longer yet to check the matching vaults on the next two levels down.

  “Have you found anything yet?” the captain asked them over the com. Lazy she might be, but that vice did not make her particularly patient with her subordinates.

  “No, Ma’am,” Erik told her, “but this is the last refurbished deck. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “I don’t believe in luck, Mr. Exec,” the captain told him. Her dry voice was beginning to really irritate Jewel.

  She opened the latest set of vault doors—the one hundred ninety-third that she had personally opened.

  She stopped, momentarily startled to find the room filled with cargo containers. Each container was about a meter high and two meters long. The boxes were stacked three high and she assumed, based on the measurements of the vaults, about four deep, putting twelve of them in each storage unit.

  “You might have to alter your beliefs, Captain,” she called out, “because we’ve just found something.”

  “Give me a moment, Captain,” Erik said. He stepped up beside Jewel. “Can we slide one of those containers out of there? It’s stacked to the ceiling. I don’t think we can open it unless we get it out into the corridor.”

  Jewel shook her head. “I wouldn’t even want to try. These units must be heavy or the colonists wouldn’t have had to use that cargo loader to move them.”

  “What did you find?” the captain prompted them.

  “You’ll have to hold another few minutes,” Erik told her. “I’ve got to get a loading truck down here.”

  He ran off to do exactly that, returning after ten minutes, driving one of the tractors from the cargo bay. It was old-fashioned—no hover pads beneath it—instead driving on durable treads. There were two prongs in front of it that could be raised and lowered by controls in the cab of the vehicle. It took Erik about forty-five seconds to line it up, then he speared a cargo container, backed it out into the main bay and lowered it to the ground.

  He snagged a tool to open the container from beneath the seat and jumped off the cab. It wasn’t locked—just sealed—and it only took about ninety seconds to get the lid off. Jewel helped him shift the cover so it slid to the ground.

  “What’s in it?” Captain Kiara asked again. If she’d been impatient before she was almost furious with her sense of urgency now.

  “I have no idea,” Erik said.

  But Jewel did. Mouth agape in wonder, she pulled out a handful of the stuff on her glove. It was green in color and had the consistency of thick grainy jelly. “Stars above us,” she whispered. “This is raw armenium!”

  Chapter Six

  Captain Kiara impatiently drummed her fingers on the tabletop, but Jewel knew she was no longer in a hurry to leave the Valkyrie System. The captain had heard the siren call of gold—or in this case armenium—wafting across the void of space, and like the legendary Odysseus she intended for nothing to stop her from reaching her prize. Of course, Odysseus had had the foresight to pour molten wax into the ears of his crew so that they couldn’t hear the siren’s song and could help him resist the maddening impulses. In Kiara’s case, her crew was actually urging her on.

  “Raw armenium!” Peron repeated for about the thirty-seventh time. “Jewel, I know you and I didn’t hit it off quite right, but I want you to know I’m prepared to forgive you for everything and marry you when we get back to Arch.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement,” Jewel told him before rolling her eyes at Erik. At least Peron’s intentions were slowly becoming more honorable, however ridiculous they still sounded. When he’d first broached the subject he’d only wanted to treat her to a hedonistic weekend at the Moons of Elaison.

  Everyone else seemed to be in just as good a mood—smiles and laughter all around. Even Ana Yang appeared to have overcome her anger and found at least a courteous nod for Jewel from her seat across the conference table. And Emanuel Warrant seemed downright overjoyed with her.

  “Tell me how much it is,” Peron begged again. “I want to hear the numbers.”

  “All right,” Captain Kiara interrupted him. “Let’s call this meeting to order.” She looked around the table at her gathered officers. Erik, Warrant, Peron and Yang. Plus the ship’s doctor, Gunther Brüning, and for some reason, Jewel’s roommate, Ship’s Steward, Vega Costa. And Jewel, of course, who had somehow earned everyone’s gratitude because she knew what raw armenium looked like.

  The officers quickly settled down so that the captain could speak.

  “Thank you,” she said with uncharacteristic courtesy. “Let’s start as Mr. Peron requested, by going over the numbers. They’re good, people, really good, but not quite the incredible bonanza that you’re all expecting.”

  That little announcement sobered everyone up pretty quickly.

  “Ms. Aurora,” the captain said, “the floor is yours.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” she said. “I think what you’re all interested in is the raw numbers—how much is this find on the Genesis worth, and I have to tell you that we don’t know for sure. What I can do is describe the factors that will come into this decision and suggest a probable range and some complications.

  “First off, this is not the armenium we use in our ships. That’s a refined product, gold in color and highly toxic. While we assume that the raw stuff isn’t good for us we don’t actually know how bad it might be either.” She remembered impulsively scooping up some in her hand and was grateful she’d been wearing gloves.

  “How much is it worth?” Peron prodded her.

  Jewel shook her head. “We don’t know.”

  Disagreement broke out immediately around the table.

  Jewel raised her hand to try and hold back the comments. “We don’t know,” she repeated, “because we don’t know how pure our ore is. In the Confederation, refined armenium is selling at just over two thousand solars per ounce—about twelve times the current price of gold. We don’t know how pure our ore is and we don’t know how much pure ore it takes to produce one ounce of refined armenium.” That wasn’t true, of course. Jewel was intimately familiar with those ratios, but she had no intention of admitting to possessing such specialized knowledge to a group of spacers on the Fringe.

  Again everyone began talking over her.

  “But.” Jewel tried to be heard anyway. “But!”

  Erik stood and banged on the table. “Come on people, this is no way to handle a meeting. Jewel has the floor!”

  Everyone quieted down again.

  “Thank you,” Jewel said. “If we make a very conservative assumption of say, fifty pounds of ore per ounce of refined fuel…”

  “Fifty pounds!” Peron exclaimed.

  “That’s just for the sake of argument,” Jewel said. “We don’t know what the actual number is. It might be ten pounds, it might be one pound, it might be a hundred pounds.” On average, Jewel knew that
the actual figure was ten pounds, but again she couldn’t admit to knowing that, could she? The only people who possessed such knowledge were Cartelites and Armenites. If her crewmates began to suspect she was a Cartelite they could earn themselves a small fortune in reward money by turning her over to her parents or their agents. Jewel wasn’t one hundred percent certain what would happen to her then since she was no longer a virgin and could be rejected by the Armenites, but the penalty was going to be stiff for breaking a trillion dollar armenium contract. It wasn’t just her parents she would have to worry about. The government would almost certainly get involved. Everyone would want a pound of flesh in revenge of the fortunes she’d just terminated and the damage she’d done to the Cartelite economy. A lifetime of hard labor was among the more pleasant penalties she could imagine.

  “But—”

  “Mr. Peron,” Captain Kiara cut in, “let her talk.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Jewel said again. “So if we assume that fifty pounds of ore converts to one ounce of refined fuel, then we’re talking about roughly ten ounces per container. There are twelve containers per compartment and twenty-two filled compartments on the Genesis. That means that ore—once refined—would eventually have a market value of 32,400,000 solars.”

  “We’re rich,” Peron shouted again, and from the looks on just about everyone else’s faces, it seemed pretty clear that they agreed with him.

  “No, we’re not,” Jewel said flatly. “There are dozens of problems we’d have to overcome to sell this ore, but frankly, even if we overcome them we can’t hope to generate anything like thirty-two million solars in revenue. That’s the price of refined fuel sold to the consumers—people like us. We are talking about selling unrefined ore to a refiner. Assuming we can do that, we’ll be lucky to be able to get ten or twenty percent of the final distribution price.”

  Peron surged to his feet again. “Ten percent? That relationship’s off, baby.”

  “Why wouldn’t we be able to sell it to a refiner, Jewel?” Ana Yang asked.

  The single biggest reason was because Jewel refused to have anything to do with it, but she couldn’t tell everyone that. “Because the refiners are all members of the Armenite Hegemony or the Cartel Worlds. The Cartelites have, in some cases, two hundred standard year relationships with the Armenites and every reason to support their continued monopolization of the armenium trade. It would be highly dangerous for us to let them know we’ve found a cache of the raw material.”

  “Highly dangerous for us, perhaps,” Doctor Brüning repeated. It was the first time he’d spoken since Jewel had entered the room, and other than the captain, he was the only one who didn’t look like he was already celebrating their good fortune. “But not, I think, so dangerous for you.”

  A cold feeling of dread crept into Jewel. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  Dr. Brüning stood, commanding the attention of everyone in the room. He was an unhealthily overweight man with oily skin and a body odor that his deodorant never quite completely masked. “I mean,” he grandly announced, “that the Cartel Worlds are well known for their ruthless business practices with outsiders, but they’re also known for taking care of their own.”

  That was one of those truisms that sounded good to people on the outside but which in practice didn’t mean what everyone assumed. Cartel families were far more ruthless amongst themselves then they ever were with their customers and neighbors. It all came down to what you thought they meant by taking care of their own.

  “And that matters why?” Jewel asked him.

  She expected Brüning to try something funny but was still surprised at the speed with which his fingers reached out and ripped the patch of artificial skin from her left temple. There was a collective gasp from around the table as Jewel’s three implanted biochips were uncovered publicly for the first time since she’d nearly killed herself getting them shut off. She knew only too well what everyone saw. Three apparent diamonds of impressive size and perfect purity peeking out from within the light brown flesh of her temple—except that anyone looking at them knew they weren’t diamonds. The jewels were extremely sophisticated computers wired directly into her neural pathways to bolster her own mental processing and give her, literally at a thought, access to the sys-net wherever she went. And the technology was extravagantly expensive—tens of millions of solars expensive—making them as important to the Cartels as a symbol of Cartelite wealth as they were useful for their extraordinary speed and processing power.

  “You’re a Cartelite?” Yang asked—a disturbing mixture of horror and awe inscribed upon her face.

  “I’m in love again,” Peron quipped. “Marry me right now, Jewel.”

  “Of course I’m not a member of the Cartels!” Jewel lied.

  “There’s no point in denying it,” Brüning said. “We can all see the proof that you are implanted in your face.”

  Jewel stood up to face him. “You ought to be praying that I’m not a Cartelite right now. How did you find out about these stones anyway?”

  “I’m the ship’s doctor,” Brüning laughed. “I noticed the patch of artificial skin right away and surreptitiously scanned you when you sat for your routine medical evaluation when you joined the ship.”

  “But that’s unethical,” Jewel protested.

  Brüning laughed at her.

  “Jewel, why would you hide this?” Warrant asked. “I mean, a Cartelite, a member of one of the great families? What the hell are you doing out here with us?”

  Peron suddenly sat up straight. “Hey, I’ll bet you’re the reason we crash translated into this system. You used that bioware to crash our systems. You already knew about the armenium and used us to discover it for you.”

  Jewel sank back into her seat and dropped her face in her hands. She’d prepared a story for this eventuality, but now that she actually had to use it she worried that no one would believe it. But she had to face this. She stiffened her spine and took the accusations head on. “Nice fantasy, Peron, Unfortunately, none of it is true.”

  “Your face tells us otherwise,” Brüning said.

  Jewel sat up and ran her fingertips over her implants. “You don’t actually think these are real, do you? If the Cartel Worlds knew about this system and wanted to exploit them, they’d drop a fleet of expert miners on Valkyrie—not finagle a broken-down cargo transport to just chance upon it like this.”

  Emanuel Warrant and Ana Yang both nodded thoughtfully, as if they thought what Jewel had just said made sense.

  Unfortunately, Erik couldn’t let the matter drop. “This is what you’re running from, isn’t it?”

  Jewel suppressed a rush of rage at his indiscretion. “No, Erik, I am not a runaway Cartelite playing crew on a tramp freighter as some sort of bizarre, spoiled socialite game.” She hung her head in apparent defeat and started to spin her story. “I was born on Alexandria. It’s a dominion of Luxor in the heart of the Cartel Worlds. My parents were small-time entrepreneurs with a mix of con artist stuck in.”

  There had actually been a case like the one she was describing, so her story should carry an authentic ring. Still, it was difficult for her to read whether or not the other people around the table believed what she was saying or not. The only vibe she could readily pick up on was hostility—definitely less desirable then the giddy pleasure they’d been showing when she’d entered the room.

  “They were trying to swing the big deal,” Jewel explained, “and needed to pass themselves off as being higher up the social and economic ladder than they could ever hope to be. So they had me implanted with these inert stones.”

  “Inert?” Ana asked.

  Jewel nodded. Since her bioware was shut down, this was almost a true statement. “They’re fakes. I was still a child when they did it, but that didn’t protect me when the scheme fell apart. There are all sorts of laws and regulations protecting the Cartel families and aping them in this fashion was a huge violation. I had an uncle who realized what was happen
ing and got me on a starship headed for the Confederacy before my parents’ house of cards completely collapsed. The Confederacy laws technically protected me, but the Cartel has a very long reach and I found I couldn’t make a living in the civilized planets. They kept stirring up trouble for me.”

  It was a sad reflection on the reputation of the Cartelites—the ruling families of the Cartel Worlds—that no one sitting around the table found it difficult to believe that the Cartels could be so vengeful. They were greedy, nasty creatures utterly devoid of human compassion, or even genuine charity. It was one of the lesser reasons that she’d run away from home…

  “So you can’t help us sell the armenium,” Captain Kiara said. She didn’t look disturbed—probably because she had already guessed Jewel’s plan for what to do with the raw fuel.

  “I didn’t say that,” Jewel said. “The Cartels are the only legal distributors of armenium, but a lot of other businesses and governments would love the opportunity to study the raw fuel. Hundreds of billions of solars are spent on industrial espionage every year, and a significant proportion of that has to be directed at the armenium trade. So if we can find an interested party, we might actually make much more than the ten or twenty percent we could potentially eke out of the Cartels anyway.”

  Around the table, people began to relax again. “And you could do that for us?” Warrant asked. “Sell it to someone outside of the Cartels?”

  Jewel shrugged. “As far as I know it’s never been done before, but I’d certainly be willing to try. Of course, it’s all much more complicated than we’re suggesting. This ship, its cargo and our salvage is really owned by Backwater Ventures, Inc., and the final decision of what to do with anything we find will be theirs. I doubt very much that they will want me to be involved at all in whatever deal they end up making to sell the armenium ore.”

  “That assumes, of course, that we still have the stuff in our holds when we report back to Arch,” Captain Kiara noted. “I have full authority to sell our salvage before we return home so long as the company gets it seventy-five percent.”