by Jaleta Clegg
"I came to tell you what happened," she said, eyes darting around as if she were afraid of being caught in a trap.
"So sit down and tell me," I said, not very graciously making space on my bunk.
She perched on the very edge, ready to run. "I heard your argument earlier, the one with Jerimon."
"What does it have to do with that?" I said, waving at the door.
She twisted her hands in the tail of her long shirt, another one of mine that I hadn’t ever worn. "He made Habim do it, Jerimon made him. He kept pushing at him, asking him questions. Habim just snapped. He had to do something to calm back down. Jerimon kept after him, even after I told him to stop. He wouldn’t listen." She stopped, darting swipes at her eyes.
Why would Jerimon go after Habim? What possible reason would he have for driving Habim into a frenzy? Or had Jerimon not thought about what might happen? No, I discarded that idea. Jerimon had changed over the last year. He thought a lot more deeply and deviously now. He knew what would happen, or at least he had a good guess.
"You’re going to turn us in, aren’t you?" Ginni stared at the floor, still twisting her hand in my shirt.
"Why did Habim pick that access panel?" That puzzled me. It wasn’t an obvious panel, it was the bottom of one of Jasyn’s murals. And wiring wasn’t Habim’s choice. It was also the one access port that didn’t hold a critical interface. All of the circuits were secondary, not essential to operating the ship. Inconvenient if ruined, yes, but not necessary.
"He doesn’t understand wiring," Ginni said and looked at me with huge scared eyes. "He was going to take the engine apart. Jerimon stopped him, blocked his way. Jerimon opened the hatch for him and dared him to fix the wires."
"Why?" Why push Habim over the edge like that? Why make me so mad I locked myself in my cabin? Jerimon was up to something, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like it when I found out what.
"Habim didn’t mean to break anything. Jerimon kept pushing him until he couldn’t stop himself anymore. Sometimes he has to take something apart. Or he gets really scary."
"Did Habim kill one of the Sidyama?"
Ginni nodded. "He was dragging me by my arm and wouldn’t let go. Habim told him to stop. He wouldn’t listen. I tried to tell Habim no, but he won’t let anyone hurt me. He only hit him once. I don’t know if he killed him or not. We started running. They would have killed us for fighting back.."
"Where is Habim now?"
"Sleeping. He always does if he has a fit. He hasn’t had one in almost a year. He won’t wake up for hours."
"Then let’s settle this right now." I crossed the cabin and punched the door control.
"Settle what?" Ginni sounded young and scared, but she was right behind me.
I walked into the lounge. Jerimon was still in the chair. Jasyn was in the galley, her back to me. Clark picked slivers of glass out of Jerimon’s arm. The pad spread on the table was red with blood.
Clark glanced up at me. "Someone’s going to get reamed out."
I marched around the table and took the chair across from Jerimon. Ginni hovered over my shoulder until I yanked the remaining empty chair out. She took the hint and sat.
Jerimon stared at his arm, his face pale and set. He didn’t look at me. Clark plucked at the laceration on his arm. Jerimon winced.
"I think that’s all," Clark said. He put down the tweezers he was using and picked up a tube of wound dressing.
"You want to start explaining?" I said, glaring at Jerimon.
"I think I landed on the light that broke."
"That isn’t what I meant and you know it."
Jasyn slammed a pot onto the table, splashing steaming liquid out. Jerimon pulled his arm back. Clark shifted the med kit out of range.
"If you’re going to fight, at least do it in private," Jasyn said, glaring at me. "Just say it, Dace. Just tell Jerimon to his face what you think of him so we can all go back to the semblance of peace around here."
I was really tempted to bring up all of the times she had thrown things at the walls when she fought with Clark, but I liked living unmaimed too much.
"We’re all here, except Habim," I said, ignoring her glare. "Do we turn Habim and Ginni in or not when we land? Jerimon told me at length that I was borrowing trouble even considering not turning them over to the authorities."
"What, exactly, will happen if we do?" Clark asked Ginni.
"The Sidyathari have been after us for months. We stowed away to get to Brugundhi. I was hoping they wouldn’t follow."
"And you think they won’t keep following?" Jerimon said, directly to me.
"Onipas is quite a distance from the Sidyatha," I said.
"What if they do?" he persisted. "Are you just going to keep running and hope they don’t catch up?"
"Like you did with the Sessimoniss?" I shot back.
"I thought you said you were over that."
I wanted to hit him for sounding so reasonable.
"Stop it!" Jasyn ordered.
"What’s your game, Jerimon?" I said. "You’ve done nothing but cause problems since we picked you up."
"Causing problems is your department," he said, sounding a lot like his old self.
"Who’s paying you?" I demanded.
"You’re paranoid," Clark told me. He finished doctoring Jerimon’s arm and gathered up the med kit. "But not without cause. You may as well answer her, Jerimon. None of us are going to get much peace until you do."
"No one’s paying me, Dace." He ran his good hand through his hair. "Not even you."
"As soon as we get cash flow, we’ll fix that," Jasyn said.
"I’m supposed to trust that?" I said.
"You sure you don’t want turned in?" Clark asked Ginni. "You stay on the ship, you have to listen to them."
He surprised a laugh out of her. She smothered it quickly, hiding her mouth under her hand as if she were ashamed of her smile.
"Back to the real issue," Clark said. "What do we do with Habim and Ginni? Habim needs constant supervision, tonight makes that obvious."
"He wouldn’t if he understood," Ginni said. "He needs to know what’s going to happen to him. He needs to know someone understands. Then he won’t have to take things apart all the time." She glanced at Jerimon and dropped her gaze to the table. "And he doesn’t like people asking him questions, demanding he answer things. That always upsets him."
"So, what did happen tonight?" I asked Jerimon. "What game are you playing?"
"It isn’t a game," he said, standing up. His chair scraped loudly across the fibermat on the floor. "Good night," he said to the group at large.
He didn’t go into his cabin, he went into the only empty one, the one on the end nearest the cargo hold. He shut the door and the lock light glowed red.
"You must be tired," Jasyn said to Ginni. She held out her hand to the girl.
"I’m sorry about what happened," Ginni said. "Habim isn’t like that usually. Only when something bad happens. He’s been upset."
"So have the rest of us," Jasyn said. "I’ll help you check on him." She steered Ginni into her cabin and closed the door.
Clark leaned back, pushing the med kit to one side of the table. "Jasyn wanted me to talk to you. You’ve been really hard on Jerimon."
"And he hasn’t been honest with us," I answered.
"I overheard some of what he said to you earlier. I think you were right to slap him. Jasyn’s trying to protect her little brother, though."
"If he weren’t her brother, he’d be long gone by now."
"True. But he is her brother and she isn’t reasonable about him. And if you weren’t paranoid about him, I’d check you for a pulse." He paused to grin. "That didn’t go over well," he said to himself. He switched to a more serious face. "About Ginni and Habim, that is going to be a bit of a problem. Harboring fugitives isn’t a good career move."
"I can’t turn them in. I don’t think Ginni did anything wrong, other than trying to be herself. And Habim i
sn’t a murderer, no matter what the Sidyama say."
"Ginni isn’t just like you," he said. "But, I agree with you, for whatever that’s worth. We may have to turn them in, sometime in the future."
"As far from the Sidyatha as we can get." I ran my finger over a flaw in the table top, a streak of darker green that shouldn’t have been there. We got the table cheap because of that. One flaw and it was considered junk. Much like people. "Lowell still owes me."
"Ginni really got to you, didn’t she?" Clark knew what contacting Lowell would cost me. Lowell wanted me in the Patrol, under his control. I hated giving him any kind of leverage.
"What do you think we should do?"
"I think we should go to Onipas and see what happens. It’s far enough out, news doesn’t spread that fast. I’m not sure the Sidyathari will bother to chase them now that they’re outside of the Sidyatha." He flipped the latch on the medkit closed. "If they kicked the Patrol out, they’re only a step away from seceding from the Empire. If that’s possible." He frowned at the medkit. "I heard rumors on Parrus, at the base, that worry me. Things are happening along the outer fringe. They said the governor of Lukatey Sector defied an Imperial order. And the Emperor did nothing about it. And there are rumors that the Federation has doubled in size lately."
The Federation was a loose group of a dozen or so systems outside the Empire. They were supposed to be a separate government, but the general opinion was that they were just a better organized group of pirates.
Clark yawned as he gathered up the medkit. "I’ll talk to Jerimon, but I doubt it will do much good. Just try to avoid him, if that’s the only way to keep peace."
"Avoid someone on a ship this size. What do you think I’ve been trying to do?"
Chapter 10
The next two days into Onipas were two of the longest of my life. Jerimon was studiously ignoring me, even when we had to be within two feet of each other. I watched him, especially when he didn’t think I was looking. He looked worried. The smile he wore, the jokes he told, didn’t fool me. They were only a mask. Something had happened to him during his year of jail time. He really had changed.
Habim fidgeted a lot, his hands windmilled constantly, his reaction to the stress on the ship. He disassembled and rebuilt everything that was safe to dismantle while we flew. He fixed all the plumbing fixtures in all the bathrooms. And cleaned all the filters, twice. Jasyn had a fit when he dismantled the cooking unit, until he put it back together in less than an hour. Everything worked, including the temperature gauge that hadn’t since before we bought it.
Clark ran interference. He did his best to keep Jerimon away from me. He wasn’t successful. The ship was just too small. And even Clark was having a hard time keeping his temper.
Ghost played with string and followed me around. She ripped the edging off one of Jasyn’s cushions in a fit of boredom. Jasyn scolded her. Ghost blinked at Jasyn then sauntered away, leaving the frayed edging in a pile on the floor. She tried to dig up the plants. Ginni scolded her until she hid somewhere in my cabin for the rest of the trip.
It was a relief when the alarm finally sounded for reentry into normal space. There was a scramble to put things away and get into the cockpit. I was first, sliding into the pilot’s seat as the second alarm sounded. I hit the button that told the ship someone was there and the alarm shut up. Jasyn took the seat behind me. Jerimon took the copilot’s chair.
"Habim was having problems," he said, his attention more on the controls than me. "Clark stayed to help Ginni with him." He was acting like he expected me to throw a tantrum.
"Reentry in thirty," I said. I could be professional, I could pretend he was someone else. As long as he played along, everything would be just fine.
Jasyn reached across the cockpit to the scanning boards. The Phoenix slid smoothly through the jump point, a second of momentary disorientation and the universe was right side out again.
I powered down the hyperlight engines while Jerimon slowed us. Jasyn ran the scans to fix our position. The ship was working perfectly, the indicator lights all stayed green. Everything read in the normal range.
"Change heading to zero five, up fourteen," Jasyn said. "I’ve got a reading on their beacon." She turned back to the communications board while Jerimon and I made the corrections to the course. "Onipas Control, this is the Phoenix," she said. She waited a moment and repeated herself. And again. And again. Ten minutes crept by.
"No answer." She ran through the standard frequencies. Nothing but static on any of them.
My stomach was tying itself in knots. Of course something bad had happened on Onipas. Everything else had been going so well. At least better than it normally went for me. It would be just my luck that something was wrong on Onipas, like a plague that wiped out the whole population or a pirate attack or—
"Stop twitching," Jerimon said, "you’re driving me nuts."
"Something’s wrong," I said.
Jasyn repeated the call again and waited for an answer that didn’t come.
"Nothing’s wrong," Jerimon said. "You’re being paranoid again."
"So where are they? Why don’t they answer?"
Jerimon didn’t have an answer for that. We kept our heading for the planet. We didn’t have a lot of choice about landing. We were low on several fluids. A week straight of hyperlight flight was hard on the engine.
Onipas grew larger in the viewscreen. It was a mottled green and blue orb, swirled with patterns of white clouds. Its single moon swung past, an airless ball of cratered rock. The planet below looked deserted. There were no patches of light on the nightside to indicate cities. The day side looked primitive, no traces of roads showed on the scans.
"Are you sure we’re at the right place?" I asked.
"This is Onipas," Jasyn said. She tried the call again. It had been almost an hour with no reply. We were all a bit startled when we got one. The com crackled to life.
"Who’d you say you were?" a voice drawled.
"This is the trading ship Phoenix Rising," Jasyn said.
"You aren’t on our regular schedule," the voice answered through what sounded like a yawn. "The supply ship came three weeks back. We weren’t expecting another ship for four months." Another yawn.
"I can’t pick up your landing beacon," Jasyn said.
"That’s because there ain’t one," the voice said. "It’s the middle of the night here. You’re just going to have to wait until morning. I can guide you down then. Can’t land in the dark." There was a shuffling noise over the com. "Give me four hours." The line went dead.
"How far out is this place?" Jerimon asked. "No landing beacon? No ship for months at a time?"
"Frontier," Jasyn said. "Onipas was settled less than a hundred years ago."
"No landing field," Jerimon said.
"If it bothers you, let Clark land," I said.
"I can do it," Jerimon said, sounding offended.
"If you’re through fighting," Jasyn interrupted, "I’ve got the orbital coordinates. And a fix on the com signal."
I shut my mouth and concentrated on getting the ship settled in orbit.
The hours crept by. The star was in the middle of an active cycle and the radiation stream pelting the ship kept pushing us off course. It took three of us in the cockpit. Jasyn kept one eye on the nav coordinates while she ran the scans. I kept the stabilizers balanced and the radiation shield set. With every burst of radiation I had to increase the shield power. The lights dimmed each time so I had to push the level back down after the burst passed. Jerimon had to keep nudging the ship back onto course. We were running low on secondary fuel. I watched the gauge slide into the red zone.
"Much more of this and we’re going to be in trouble," I muttered.
"Do you always look on the pessimistic side?" Jerimon tapped the thrusters, the ship slid sideways a fraction of a degree.
"It’s where I usually end up."
"Time’s up," Jasyn muttered. "Where are they?"
We
kept orbiting. The com stayed quiet except for the static bursts caused by the radiation from the star. I looked at the planet on the viewscreen. The star rose over the rim of the planet, a burst of light painting the globe in vivid color. As we swung fully around the day side of the planet, the com crackled back to life.
"Phoenix, you there?" the same voice drawled.
"We’re still holding," Jasyn said.
"Great. How big’s your boat?"
"Small freighter," Jasyn answered before I could say something rude. She listed the tonnage and weight of our ship.
"We don’t have any landing pads here," the voice informed us. "And not much for support cradles."
"We can handle it," Jasyn reassured him.
"If you say so. Follow the com signal down." The com system beeped.
"I hate doing this," Jasyn said. She sighed and worked on getting a tight beam connection established.
I hated going in blind as well. After standing watch for over five hours, we were all getting a bit cranky. Playing games with a beeping com wasn’t going to be easy or fun.
"Starboard just a bit," Jasyn said.
Jerimon twitched the thrusters.
"Slow us," Jasyn ordered. She sat back, earphones muffling the beeping. She had her eyes closed, listening to the signal.
It went on for what felt like hours. Jerimon nudged the ship forward and back, to starboard and port. I kept us stabilized as the atmosphere thickened around us. We hit several bands of winds that shoved us off course. We had to drop altitude and cast around for the beam again.
"I got visual," Clark said behind Jerimon. He slipped in while we were fighting the winds. "We have a field and four hand beams. Watch the rocks."
We slowed the ship as much as we dared. The space between the lights looked level enough, but since it was covered with plants, I couldn’t tell for certain. We were within fifty feet when Jasyn pulled off the earphones.
