Ghost Ship

by Kathryn Hoff

  As we began our journey, I settled into my bunk for a much-needed nap.

  My little ’tween-decks cabin had seemed as roomy as a palace when I first boarded Sparrow at the age of seven. Now that I was grown, it was narrow and cramped but it was home and comfort to me. My bunk pulled down over the locker that served as my table and business office during waking hours. The viewscreen displayed the Gloom’s dismal vista, like swirls of ink on a black page. Beside the viewscreen, the scanner blinked with the nearest beacon’s comforting guide. And near my bunk, where I could see it when I woke, was an image of Papa and Hiram in their prime, young and cocky, armed to the teeth and grinning after some long-ago battle.

  Sparrow’s rattle and sway through the ether currents soothed me like a lullaby. Dimming the lights, I recited the Gav prayer I’d learned from my mother. Beloved ancestors, help me find the wisdom to choose what is best, the strength to do what I must, and the courage to face what may come. Papa, if you’re listening, we’re paying back a kindness to your old friend Davo. We miss you.

  “Patch.”

  I opened my eyes, certain I’d heard my name.

  Papa stood beside my bunk, dressed in his usual work clothes but glowing with an inner light. He looked hale and hearty, not like those last, fever-wracked days.

  My soul filled with gladness to see him again. Kojo would call it a dream, but I still held the Gav belief that our ancestors cared for us from the afterlife. On our last voyage, a scientist had discovered that Gavs were telepathically receptive, something bred into us by the advanced race who rescued our Neanderthal forebears from Earth, so it wasn’t surprising that I was more sensitive than Kojo or Archer to messages from the afterlife. Papa’s visits had become less frequent of late, but I had no doubt his spirit still lived aboard Sparrowhawk.

  Papa’s voice murmured in my mind, “All debts come due.”

  “Papa?” I whispered.

  But he was gone, my cabin dark.

  All debts come due.

  Satisfied, I whispered, “Thank you, Papa.” Now I was sure: repaying Sparrowhawk’s debt to Davo was the right thing to do.

  CHAPTER 5

  A warning

  After breakfast the next morning, I wheeled the handcart, loaded with four fresh power modules, out of cold storage. The lower deck passage throbbed with the steady beat of the propulsion drivers. As I pushed the handcart into the engine room, the air reeked of lube and the piney scent of Prestoclean—Archer was as fastidious as a cat about his engines, if not about his person.

  “Power mods,” I called. “Where do you want them?”

  “Lower rank.” Archer matched me in height, but my Gavoran build dwarfed his skinny frame. It had taken Archer months to overcome his gentlemanly instincts and stop offering to help me wrangle the heavy power mods and jump cells.

  Four freezer bays for jump cells lined one side of the room, and the six bays for power modules were ranked on the other. Between them, two bolted-down swivel chairs faced consoles and monitors, viewscreen and scanner. Within easy reach were the controls for the propulsion balance, the maneuvering rockets, and the thruster trigger. Archer kept the thrusters locked—a cautious burst from thrusters could launch the ship off a planet; an incautious one could accelerate the ship hard enough to render the crew unconscious.

  As I threaded the mods through the tight quarters, Archer jigged between propulsion coils and power conduits, tweaking this and checking that. The consoles dinged and buzzed with the helm’s requests for rebalancing of the propulsion and adjustments to the maneuvering rockets in the turbulent ether this close to the Gloom.

  I paused to peer at Archer’s new hobby: at a workbench near his sleeping cubby, he’d clamped a rust-flecked, many-bladed cooling manifold from an obsolete ginning mill.

  “What are you planning to do with that?”

  He wiped a hand over his cheek to smear a stray bit of lube. “It’ll make a great storage shelf. I just have to reinforce the backing, weld on some feet, and clean it up a bit.”

  “Storage shelf.” It still looked like junk to me, but the central sectors had a market for creatively packaged antiques. “What about the rust?”

  “I’ll leave it. Lends authenticity. Have you found a buyer who might be interested?”

  “I think so—an art dealer in Saipan. The trick is to price it high and provide a story.” I grinned at him. “You’re a ‘rustic artisan who extracts functionality from society’s detritus and hidden beauty from the mundane.’ I’ve told him, strictly in confidence, that you’re a retired pirate, a reclusive genius who shuns the spotlight because you may still be wanted.”

  He giggled. “Good idea. Maybe I’ll add a few laser scars for drama.”

  “Um, the dealer asked if the pieces are signed. I told him you put a private mark on each one so you could identify them, nothing so obvious as a signature.”

  “Then I’d better invent something, hadn’t I? A hidden glyph that only a few people would know to look for. Nice touch.” He raised a brow at me. “We make a good team, don’t we?”

  Damn. Why did the most innocent conversations with Archer always get twisted into something else?

  I didn’t answer, not wanting to get into another argument. Instead, I busied myself dragging the spent power mods from their bays and shoving in the fresh ones.

  After stacking the last spent mod onto the flatbed of the handcart, I straightened, brushing my hands against my trousers even though Archer kept the engine room spotless.

  When I turned around, Archer thrust a flat box at me, a goofy grin on his face. “This is for you.”

  I eyed the box with suspicion. “What is it?”

  His smile slipped. “Patch, it’s just candy. A present for you. Can’t a man buy his wife a present?”

  Oh, hell. So much for avoiding an argument.

  “Archer, you have to stop buying me presents.”

  He turned away to wriggle a valve. “It’s nothing much, just some toffee from the dockside shop. I like to buy you things.”

  I leaned into his line of sight so we were eye to eye. “This marriage, it doesn’t mean anything. It was just to keep that Cartel agent from getting too pushy. Vell’s free with his flippers but he’d never interfere with a married woman.” It had seemed like such a good idea at the time.

  He turned soft, brown puppy eyes on me. “I know that, but we like each other, too. Why can’t we build on that?”

  Because, as any engineer should know, when you build on sand, the whole house falls.

  Not that there hadn’t been moments. When we’d finally limped into Kriti after that last disastrous voyage, Archer and I had clung to each other in exhaustion and relief and found a spark of desire. During our time in port, the days of rest and nights of passion had left us refreshed and happy—until it became clear that Archer wanted more than a frolic in the bunk.

  “We’ve been through this,” I said. “You want a family, like you grew up with. I just don’t think that kind of life is for me.” Stability, commitment, sexual fidelity—all those things were alien to the Gav side of my nature. Most of all, Archer wanted children—and I was barren. “I just think we’re better off as shipmates than as, well, mates.”

  “Not all families are the same. Why can’t we build our own kind of family?”

  “All hands, scramble. We’ve got company.” Hiram’s call from the com rescued me from coming up with an answer.

  I glanced at the scanner. Coming up fast was a sleek, menacing Corridor Patrol cruiser.

  A hail blasted through the ship. “Selkid cutter Sparrowhawk, heave to and prepare to be boarded.”

  “Damn,” I said. “What do they want?”

  “Here.” Archer pushed the box into my hands. “Share the candy with the others if you want, but please, think about what I said.”

  I ran up the aft steps to my cabin to get my datacon with the cargo manifests. Before joining Kojo at the passenger hatch, I paused for a quick look in the mirror, straighten
ing my beret to cover my Gavoran forehead and letting my orange curls frizz out in the back. Might as well look as Terran as possible.

  As soon as the hatch opened, Patrol officers—all Gavoran—muscled their way in. While the inspection officers fanned out into the ship, a scowling sergeant scanned our identity implants.

  “Kojo Babatunji, Terran. Pachita Babatunji, Terran.” She peered at my features. “You don’t look Terran.”

  “A few mixed genes,” I said. That only made her scowl worse.

  We’d been inspected enough times that we all knew the drill. Kojo led an officer through the passenger deck, helpfully pointing out the luxuries of cabins, salon, and galley as if the Patrol were a prospective charter client. Archer shadowed the officers checking the engines and stores, complaining about the low quality of power mods in this sector. Hiram’s mocking voice wafted down the companionway from the command deck: “Want to check out my bunk? Sorry, lass, you’re not my type. What about the head? Better look in there, real close.”

  As I led the sergeant to the cargo hold, an officer raised his head. “There is technology here.”

  “Of course there is.” I waved my datacon. “Used equipment, all as stated on the manifest. Nothing on the restricted list.”

  “Unseal this crate.” Did they teach them that sneer in Patrol training?

  One by one, I opened Archer’s three crates of jumbled junk—twisted and rusting machine parts past all hope of repair, obsolete devices for applications that no longer existed, broken knickknacks.

  “What is all this?” the sergeant demanded.

  “Scrap, for spare parts.” No need to mention the seeds of artistic inspiration.

  The Patrol officer made a rude comment in Gav about Terran garbage, which I pretended not to understand.

  An officer paused in front of one of the bales, as wide as a door and as tall as a man, “We’ll open this one for inspection.”

  “No, wait!” I stepped between the officer and the bale, arms outstretched like a mother protecting her young. “You can’t open that—it’s compressed thistledown. One tear and we’ll be drowning in the stuff. Scan it if you need to.”

  While an officer went for a scanner, the sergeant glowered around the sparsely filled hold. “You carry little cargo, yet the mass reading for your ship is abnormally high. What are you hiding?”

  “Grav pellets, twelves casks. We’ve been careful to spread them out.” I took her to three of the twelve locations—the back of the hold, under a bunk in one of the passenger cabins, in an empty jump cell bay in the cold storage hold. Each barrel-sized cask was double and triple lashed to be sure it didn’t shift.

  Meanwhile, her officers searched the ship, thumping bulkheads, scanning food stores, peeking into lockers.

  For once, we weren’t hiding a thing.

  Eventually, they gave it up and filed back into their cruiser.

  Last out was the sergeant. She frowned at me and Kojo, waiting helpfully to see her off the ship. “This is not a safe area to linger in,” she said. “Technology smugglers have become bolder—don’t be in our way when we find them.”

  When she was gone, the hatch sealed, and the cruiser de-linked, Kojo turned to me, looking sick. “Burzing Patrol. If they’re stopping ships like this, no one will be able to reach the goods. You’d think the Settlement Authority would make them back off a little.”

  I barely heard him. Putting my datacon into my pocket, my fingers had touched metal. Puzzled, I pulled out a hundred-sovereign coin, though I never kept money in that pocket.

  Etched on the rhollium surface was a message: Do not leave the sector.

  CHAPTER 6

  Faith and Charity

  The coin showed a bit of wear on the edges and the Selkid emperor’s seal had been smoothed and burnished by hundreds of flippers and fingers. The etched Terran letters, though, were crisp and sharp: Do not leave the sector.

  Kojo turned the coin over and over, squinting as if the message would somehow become clearer. “What do you mean, you’re not sure where you got it?”

  “I was wearing this jacket yesterday at the casino. I know the coin wasn’t in my pocket when I was arrested—the garda would have found it when they searched me. But someone could have slipped it in afterward and I might not have noticed.”

  “The bar where we had an ale,” Kojo said. “The crowd at the docks…it could have been anybody.”

  “Maybe the raid made Ordalo suspicious. Maybe he sent a warning to stay where he can find us if somehow the buyer rejects the goods.”

  Kojo shook his head. “That’s too subtle for Ordalo. He would have just sent some goons to take a hostage or cripple our propulsion. I’ll bet one of the Patrol officers snuck it into your pocket just now.”

  That seemed unlikely, but if it was true, I didn’t like the implications. “If it came from the Patrol, then it wasn’t just by chance they were lying in wait on our course to the jump gate.”

  Kojo brightened. “That must be it. The casino raid wasn’t in the Settlement Authority’s plan. They must have needed a way to get in touch with us that wouldn’t tip off Ordalo if anyone’s watching. It would be just like them to tell the Corridor Patrol to see if we were heading for the gate and to warn us to stay put. After all, they gave the coin to you, not me—that’s what the Gav would do, isn’t it? Assume that the female is the one to talk to?”

  I twisted a lock of hair. “While a messenger from Ordalo would have given the coin to the ship’s captain. But why would the Authority use a coin to send a message? That’s a Selkid custom, not something a Gav would think of.”

  “But the writing’s Terran, not Selkid or Gav. Maybe the Kriti folk have adopted that bit of Selkid culture along with their currency—everybody here uses sovereigns.”

  All this was giving me a headache.

  I tucked the coin into an inside pocket for safekeeping. “All we know is that someone doesn’t want us to leave the sector. Maybe that’s exactly why we should.”

  Kojo patted my shoulder. “If it’s the Settlement Authority, they could stop us at the gate. If it’s Ordalo—well, salvaging that Barony toll enforcer will keep us out of sight for a while. We need Davo’s fifty thousand sovs. Maybe after that, we’ll have a better idea of how far we need to run.”

  In the wheelhouse, Hiram looked up at me from the pilot’s seat. There was little to see—in this sector, the ether, remnants of some primordial cosmic explosion, was so dense it blocked the light of distant stars and galaxies like thunderclouds on a moonless night. The Gloom’s tendrils swirled heavily around us, pushing Sparrowhawk this way and that as if she were a rowboat caught in rapids. With each tiny course adjustment, Sparrow’s grav generator bounced and hiccupped.

  I slipped into the watch station. “Why don’t you go get some rest, Hiram? We were in port so long, I’ve missed taking the helm.”

  Hiram stretched. “Ah, missy. I don’t mind if you do. But I’ll just close my eyes a bit right here. Somehow, my bunk’s not as comfortable as the wheelhouse. I can’t seem to rest easy there.”

  I tweaked the headings, correcting for the ether’s waves and eddies, pinging the engine room when the maneuvering rockets needed to be deployed. Soon Hiram was slumped in the pilot seat, softly snoring, a blissful smile on his lips as Sparrowhawk rocked him like a baby in a cradle.

  It had been happening more and more lately: Hiram refusing to go to his bunk in the wardroom, dozing off at the helm while on duty. That was fine, if we were in the quiet of faster-than-light travel in the star corridors, but in the turbulent ether of sublight sailing, a pilot needed to be wide awake.

  The truth was, we’d stretched Hiram to the limit on our most recent voyage—one that had gone on far longer and been far harder than any of us had anticipated. It wasn’t fair to him, or to Sparrowhawk.

  Hiram had been a quiet pillar of strength for us after Papa’s passing. He and Papa had spent most of their lives together, fighting side by side in their mercenary days and saili
ng the ether in Sparrowhawk together after Papa won her in some particularly fierce battle. It was largely Hiram’s daring and his extensive knowledge of the ether currents that had earned Sparrowhawk a reputation for being willing and able to evade inconvenient Patrol checkpoints. United in love and war, Papa and Hiram’s relationship had far outlasted all of Papa’s portside romances, including Papa’s short marriage to Kojo’s mother and his fleeting love for mine.

  Hiram would have been well justified to leave us after Papa was gone, to settle down in some quiet colony and pilot a nice safe shuttle between worlds. Instead, he’d stayed with us, a well-loved uncle, never intruding but always ready with advice when asked. Putting up with my bickering with Kojo, our foolish mistakes, and our relentless money woes.

  Once we got out of our current problems, I promised myself, we’d take it easy. A nice, safe trip to our home sector. Short hops with time for Hiram to rest in between. Kojo and I would take the helm more often, even if we had to pry the controls out of Hiram’s hands.

  We have to look after him, I thought. Zub knows, he’s looked after us for long enough.

  For the rest of the day, we chugged away from Kriti toward the coordinates where we were supposed to meet Davo’s skimmer. The rendezvous point Davo had chosen had the advantage of being just like everywhere else, except slightly calmer. The eddy’s only distinguishing feature was a denser-than-usual field of radiation that blizzed our sensors.

  There, we sat and waited.

  And waited.

  The scanner bristled with radiation static, warnings about the Gloom, and directives to stay on beacon. No sign of a ship.

  Kojo sat at the wheelhouse’s watch station, drumming his fingers on the console. I stood behind Hiram’s seat at the helm, peering through the canopy at the Gloom’s inky black. From this vantage, Kriti was no more than a tiny, silvery crescent, almost lost in the sun’s blue-white glare.