by Eric Flint
One of the first things she learned, sitting and listening to them, was just how they passed across the frontier. It was a huge area of space, and a clever—or lucky—skipper could avoid coming in detection range of Imperial Space Navy ships. There were patrols, and their routes were randomized and secret. The sector was renowned for several invading raider fleets having attacked worlds of the Duchy of Galm, as well as considerable smuggling, and was thus heavily patrolled.
Apparently that secret could be bought, and had been. The Bolivar dropped into orbit around a dead sun and waited among the frozen worldlets for a patrol to pass—a patrol they knew was coming, and where it was going to. There was no need to dodge the watchmen, when all they had to do was corrupt someone who knew what the patrol routes and times would be. Thus the Bolivar passed across that poorly defined bit of space that divided the Empire from the star-swirl toward the galactic center, into an area of dead worlds, blasted ruins, and poorly mapped stars.
The ship was doubtless heading for one of them. It was, judging by the crew’s wary behavior and the readiness of the ship’s guns and missile pods, plainly somewhere they thought was dangerous. That might be wise, but Goth decided to help them hurry up. Power to the air recycler was controlled by a simple cutoff switch, to allow it to be removed or worked on. It was up in the power conduit access near the engine room. Goth could have built one, but she settled for simply switching the circuit to the indicator light that showed it had power. Normally it glowed when it had power. Now, it glowed when it didn’t.
That of course did not apply to the ship’s own air-monitoring system, which started flashing warnings. “Captain, we’re getting air-quality warnings,” said the nervous crewman on watch, waking the sleeping captain with a call to his cabin on comms. Goth couldn’t hear his reply, but it was enough to have him calling various other crewmen from their beds, including a rumpled Forz and Felap. The two of them and the ship’s second engineer started checking. They soon found that the air recycler was without power.
“Oh. Well. That’s simple then. We’ll just give it an alternate power source,” said Felap. He sounded quite relieved.
That got him slapped on the ear from the second engineer. “You’re as dumb as a dung-grubber, Felap. Do you know how much power that takes to run?”
“Uh. No.”
“Well, I do. We’ll have to open the conduit hatch,” said the engineer, hastening in that direction.
So they did, as Goth watched from no-shape. “Well, that’s got power,” said the engineer, looking at the happily glowing telltale light. “We’ll have to open the conduit. There must be a break somewhere.” He was grumpy and worried at the same time, as well he might be. It was a horrible, awkward job, as Goth knew from helping Captain Pausert, but the ship couldn’t run long without recycled air.
As soon as they got started on that, Goth flipped her switch. It would take a little while before the air quality was back to normal, and the air-quality warning stopped. None of the three working on undoing the bolts and moving the panels and testing the current induction went to check the recycler again.
Goth ’ported the power wrench when Forz put it down, and changed its direction setting and torque so it tightened instead of loosened. So the next bolt he put it on tightened and snapped with a scream of metal—and a scream of rage from the engineer. “You idiot! Now we’ll have to drill that one out and we don’t have time on our side!”
He hit Forz, and Forz hit him with the power wrench. And Goth got knocked into the wall by the captain coming down the gangway at a run—and hitting both of them. And kicking Felap for good measure. Goth took her bruises away and left them to it.
She was listening on comms when Forz—with a swelling black eye—reported to the captain on the bridge. “I don’t know what we did. We opened the conduit up, and by the time we got to the recycler room, it was working again.”
“I was about to call you. The air-quality warning light has been flicking out. So it’s getting back to normal.”
“There must be a short or a break somewhere that we fixed accidentally. It’s worrying, Captain,” said Forz, sounding scared enough for Goth to almost feel sorry for him.
But not sorry enough not to wait until he was fast asleep, when she disconnected the monitoring system input. All the ship repair she’d learned from Captain Pausert and Vezzarn was proving useful. As she knew it would, that had the control panel flashing dire warnings and sounding an alarm, because as far as it was concerned the ship was becoming an airless vacuum.
The crew all went running for the airlocks, for the spacesuits. The ship’s automatic doors hissed closed, sealing Goth off on the bridge. The yelling and panic were pretty noisy even by the Leewit’s standards, Goth thought. The Leewit would have been impressed by the swearing, too, when Forz couldn’t remember the access code to open the bulkhead doors. The captain had to put in the override from the bridge, and Goth learned that code too.
The engineer, seeing the recycler power light off, had promptly flipped the switch, cutting power to the recycler. Goth plugged the air-quality monitor back in—which, seeing as the recycler had only been off for moments, promptly stopped the alarm. Skaz and Jines in the meanwhile, in total panic, had climbed into the airlock, ready to abandon ship…out into the airless vacuum of space. Fortunately for them, they couldn’t remember the outer airlock code and had demanded it over the intercom—and were getting a bawling out by the captain instead.
The bulkhead door opened and Goth walked down to where the engineer, his second, and Felap—who was more hindrance than help, as usual—were frantically opening the conduit covers again, as the air recycler wasn’t running because it had no power. Goth let them get all of it opened up, before flipping the switch again.
The engineer was slightly more thorough than his junior officer, and came back to check the switch. He swore and promptly flipped it off again, and ran to check the recycler. Goth had to work pretty quickly to get the original switch in place before he came back. It took him several frantic runs to get Felap to stay and flip the switch and have him satisfied that it was working properly.
But neither he nor the crew were a happy bunch of spacers. Being out here with a faulty air recycler was more terrifying than having to fight raiders or pirates or inimical aliens. “We can’t slow down and probe, Captain. We’ve got to get to a safe world with breathable air and then I can take the whole thing apart,” said the engineer. “And that’s Lumajo. I never thought I’d be glad to breathe its stinking air and even see those little furry apes again…but it will be air.”
Goth had decided to fish for information too. As well as hiding herself in no-shape, she could also bend light into other images—and project them onto the air. She could make them good enough to fool most people, but for this use…a little wavy faintness and transparency were more useful. She used Lina’s image…in gangways when a crew member was alone, and near the tail end of the alter-watch. She hoped it would spook them into talking.
It spooked them, all right. But not into telling her anything she didn’t know. “We didn’t do anything to her!” was the most she got out of that. But their nerves soon had them believing in phantoms, phantoms beyond her deliberate creation. “We should turn back,” moaned Skaz, her voice shaking in conversation with the crew in the mess. “It’s not safe. And there’s creepy stuff going on. I heard footsteps behind me last watch, but there was no one there.”
There was a murmur of uneasy assent, rapidly quashed by the captain and the mate. “We’re more than two thirds of the way to Lumajo,” said Forz.
“And there’s an Imperial Space Navy exercise between us and Morteen,” said the captain. “We’ll push on as fast as possible.”
That suited Goth. So she held off from harassing them with any more recycler issues, and settled for just making their lives miserable by sabotaging the robobutler in the mess so it would only produce Sargothian seaweed stew and sickly sweet drinks. She had a perfectly working
robobutler in the comfortable cabin—but it was a measure of how much they all feared whoever this absent “Boss” was, that they were too much afraid of him to suggest using it.
The Bolivar raced on toward its destination, its crew complaining this was the worst trip they’d ever had. That also suited Goth. They’d been all set to give her the worst trip of her life—and the last. She spent the rest of the trip removing power units from as many weapons as possible. There was a box marked FLOOR-CLEANING liquid in the store, and that seemed a good safe place to store them.
They were all plainly relieved to swing into orbit around a planet—Goth could see it on the vid on the comms link. Not as clearly as she’d like, but enough to see that it bore what looked like the scars of interstellar war. Parts were dense green, other areas stark and white with black streaks. Even from this great height, she could see octagonal structures down there. They must be huge. Like any world, Goth knew that it was a big, varied and complex place, but it plainly wore the marks of having been densely settled.
The Bolivar wasted no time on contacting planetary authorities or requesting landing permission. She just began to drop in on the planet they called Lumajo, targeting a site somewhere between a huge octagon and a far smaller one, which as they approached revealed itself as a cleared area of jungle.
Goth had very little idea what she was coming to. Other than mentions of stink, the hairy little apes, and the fact that the place was a source of a banned substance, she hadn’t gleaned much from the conversation of the crew. Mostly they talked about what they’d do back on Morteen, if they talked about planets at all. She had no idea how she’d even start to find Lina, how many people there were here, or quite what her plan was. But she’d eaten well and slept as much as possible. That would have to do for preparation.
The landing jarred her to the back teeth. Captain Pausert was good at putting a ship down as lightly as a feather, no matter what you thought of his takeoffs. The Bolivar’s captain wasn’t—but they were down in one piece. Now to get out and get searching…
The crew had been in a hurry to get off the ship. That was understandable, but did leave Goth with the main airlock closed, and the ramp up. She had all the codes to the airlocks and could open it and put the ramp down, easily enough, but that would be rather obvious to any watcher. By the noise, they were offloading cargo.
Invisible in no-shape, she went down to the cargo hold, where the sulfurous air of outside hit her, along with the smell of the hairy little…men. Well, they were sort of humanoid anyway. They looked less like humans than the Nartheby Sprites. They were offloading, and jabbering away in a singsong foreign tongue—which might actually have been a kind of singing. The words weren’t universal galactic, anyway. One phrase seemed to recur: “blong khagoh.”
They were watched by a couple of rough-looking spacers with blast-rifles and jangler-whips. Goth walked quietly down the ramp and onto Lumajo, where the gravel of the spaceship’s landing area shivered with heat, beneath a distant white sun. The sky was an odd dirty yellow color, and the air didn’t smell much better away from the chanting little locals. Exploring the rest of the place would involve getting over some high double fences that looked electrified. There were guard towers, too. It looked more like a military camp or a prison than anything else.
Goth figured it was likely that, if either were still alive, Pausert’s mother and even his father would most likely be inside the wire. She waited a while at the gate, and then walked back to the ship for a bit of shade. The sun might be a small point in the sky but it was hot and vicious. She could feel it burning her.
The hairy locals were loading the boxes and crates onto a large wooden trolley, with rough wheels made from cross sections of tree trunk. Sitting in the shade of the ship, Goth had time to study them. They were as hairy as a lelundel, and had little tails. They were shorter than the Leewit, but a little broader. How they saw anything was a mystery, because their faces too were hidden in their hair.
Once the trolley was piled high with boxes and crates, coils of wire, steel beams of various shapes and sizes, the spacemen chased the little humanoids—on average half their size—to leashes on the drawbar. With the little humanoids chanting rhythmically again, they hauled the load toward the gate. Goth walked along in the shade, wishing she had the hat and sunglasses from Parisienne. They were still with her luggage on the ship.
They dragged the trolley through the gate and to the compound beyond, which boasted a palace-like building and primitive-looking factories and warehouses beyond that, and, behind yet another layer of wire, scruffy-looking huts. The trolley-loads of goods were being taken to one of the warehouses, where they were offloaded and packed away. There were several shiny new ground trucks in the building that certainly could have done the job, Goth noted, before they locked the place up again.
The little humanoids were marched to the huts behind the next wire barrier. There was no obvious sense in following them so Goth took her sunburn along behind the guards, heading for the big house. She’d met some rough types over the years, traveling around in the Venture and with the circus. These men, listening to their talk, made Lesithanian fishermen look polite and nice. They smelled about as bad too, even in the sulfurous air. They were plainly in a hurry to get indoors, and about that, at least Goth could agree. The palace-like building was air-conditioned, which was welcome.
It took Goth a while to get her bearings inside, raid the kitchen, and find a quiet spot to eat. It was going to take her time to explore, and she’d have no choice but to use up some energy staying in no-shape. So far she’d found that some of the place was given over to dormitory-like rooms as well as a communal hall, where the crew of the Bolivar were doing some catching up on meals that didn’t look very appetizing. Goth was tempted to help their ill-luck along, but instead concentrated on eavesdropping for clues. It wasn’t particularly productive. Most of what they were talking about she’d heard before back on the ship. And all the others could talk about was “the Gaks.”
It seemed the Gaks were the little humanoids. They’d apparently burned out several fields a few days back. They were arguing about the best response. Goth went on her way, exploring. Warily, she tried touching walls and objects to “read” them. It was a dangerous thing to do because if she got drawn in, she could well fall into a trance—which would stop her being light-shifted into no-shape.
Mostly, though, it turned out to be quite safe. There were few strong emotions and deep thoughts to leave traces. Every old place had them, but this building was quite new, and not, as it were, full of the past. She went on searching, and eventually came to the prisoners at the back. They were locked into a separate section, which Goth got access to by following someone carrying buckets of food…food that reeked of paratha. It didn’t look appetizing, but Goth realized it didn’t have to.
This section of the building consisted of a series of small metal rooms, with barred doors and a caged walkway, which she found led to the factory plant. Here the walls told a different story. Here she really had to be careful. But the despair and anger were not just in the walls. They were in the people still trapped in the little hot rooms. The air-conditioning was not for prisoners.
Neither Pausert’s mother nor his father were among the handful of prisoners. That was worrying. Goth followed the person delivering plates of paratha-laced slops, which they slid into a grid on the bottom of each door.
No one said much. They just eagerly took their plates. This was one prison where the prisoners thought the food was great, at least. The food deliverer left them to it, and walked out. Goth wasn’t quite quick enough to follow her, but she could always get out some other way. There were several empty cells, so Goth took herself into the farthest one, to have a rest from no-shape and read the walls.
It was a grim experience, and a grim story. The last prisoner had been a guard who had stolen something from the boss. That told her about the people she was dealing with, but not the reason she’d come h
ere.
The next cell, however, was the jackpot. Goth learned a great deal about Lieutenant-Commander Kaen, Pausert’s father. He’d been quite badly injured and in a lot of pain when they had brought him here. But he had recovered and there was something of an imprint of his memory of the place, machinery he had worked on, and the little humanoids.
The oddest thing was there was no memory of fences. This was a man she’d never met, who had left the traces of his determination, anger and pain for her to read—but he reminded her a lot of Pausert, which made her quite snuffly. There were no other empty cells. A couple of the other prisoners were talking in a despondent fashion about the problems they had with one of the machines.
Goth figured she’d regained enough energy and slipped back into no-shape; then, went down the caged walkway to the factory. The harsh sun was down, but there was some light from a pair of moonlets on the horizon. Goth could see it was a simple bottling plant with what, on examination, proved to be a big drying room for huge leaves, and a crushing plant for the same. The whole place reeked of paratha. The building was not particularly secure, and it was easy enough to get out of. In this it was unlike the main building, which did not look easy to get into. That was solidly built and had a guard house on the doors, and pillboxes on the corners.
Goth decided to go back to the Bolivar and collect her bag. There was a cargo-hold door that should be accessible. After the terrible heat of the day, it was already cool and Goth could bet it would be freezing by dawn. The first of the moons was below the horizon, and the second was touching it. It’d be pitch dark soon. There was wire in the way, but she could deal with that. Teleporting a piece out of it worked. She’d walk across in no-shape, get a good meal from the robobutler, a shower and maybe sleep there. And she could bring the sunshades and hat with her, as well as some clothes for cool nights.
