Ghost Ship

by Kathryn Hoff

“I want her with me, damnit!”

  “She’s your daughter, not your slave. That’s one last thing you can do for her—let her live her own life.”

  He paused. “What about the synthreactor?”

  “Busted. They hid it in the false wall in the survey room. I found it sticking out of the wall where the concussive blast breached the hull. You must have gone right past it when you boarded.”

  “I want it. It belongs to Troy.”

  “It’s nothing but scrap now. Not worth risking anyone’s life over. Whatever’s left of it will be destroyed when I take out the survey consoles.”

  He searched my face through the faceplate. “And you’ll look after my girl?”

  “I swear.”

  “Davo?” Bell called.

  I switched to the hailer. “He’s all right. He tore his suit and is a little low on air. I’m sealing the leak right now.”

  I pulled the Prestoseal from my utility belt and smeared it over Davo’s torn sleeve. “There. That should hold for a little while. Try not to move too much.”

  His response sounded like a growl.

  When I poked him, he panted, “That’s right, Bell. Get me back aboard—soon as this she-devil does what she promised.”

  I pulled Davo to the science section to join Babs, floating under Archer’s guard. With one stun pistol in his gloved hand and the other tucked in his utility belt, Archer looked like a formidable tough. I was pleased to see that he’d backed up to a console to prevent himself from going flying if he had to fire the stunner again.

  The helmet and wrist lamps did little to brighten the cavernous hold with its banks of consoles. The jagged tear in the hull opened out onto the even deeper darkness of the Gloom.

  “Are you really going to destroy the survey banks?” Archer asked. “With what?”

  Crewman Babs was stirring. I hoped he was very uncomfortable.

  “Watch these two for a minute. I need to get something.”

  Leaving Davo out of reach of anything he could push off from, I bounced back up the passage to the mess hall. Very carefully, I pried from the ceiling the two orange-sized explosive charges that I’d taken from the gun turret’s magazine before vacating it so hastily.

  I returned down the passage much more cautiously.

  Afloat in front of the prisoners, I held up the charges and keyed my mic to the hailing channel. “I’m attaching explosive charges from two concussive canisters to the survey consoles. Move your ships away from the port side of Grand Duchess. Archer, move the prisoners to cover.”

  I gave each floating form a shove to the door.

  With bits of Prestoseal, I glued one charge to the survey console and one to the remains of the false wall.

  In the passage, Archer waited at the door to a cabin—the one where the dead engineer sat in the chair of his eternally sleeping crewmate.

  “Babs and Davo inside?”

  “Yes. But I think you should let me do it.”

  I took the stunner from him. “No, thanks. I made a promise. Besides, I bounce better than you. Now close the door and keep a hand on the bulkhead. You’ll feel the vibration when it blows.”

  “What about him?” Archer nodded toward the body of Duchess’s captain, hovering in the passage.

  “He stays with me.” Somehow, it seemed right for him to be a witness to the destruction. It was his spying mission that got his ship lost and his crew killed. Maybe at the time it had seemed worthwhile.

  It was hard to tell through the helmet faceplate, but Archer’s eyes seemed to crinkle into a smile as he shut the cabin door.

  The feeling of menace oppressed me. Ancestors, tell these damned spirits that this is the only way to get them home.

  Floating in the passage with the frosty captain at my side, I shielded my body behind the bulkhead and leaned through the science section’s hatch.

  Setting the stunner to rapid fire, I took careful aim at the orange blobs glued to the survey console.

  I fired.

  CHAPTER 27

  Dead heroes

  The charges exploded with a soundless red flash. The shock rippled through the ship’s hull.

  I barely had time to take a breath before Archer barreled into me. “I felt the vibration. Are you hurt?”

  “Slow down. Tiny movements, remember?”

  He smeared Prestoseal over a few tiny holes in my suit. Bubbles of blood had leaked out of one of them. “You are hurt!” he said.

  “Just a scratch. Most of the debris blew outward.”

  Davo was there by then, peering into the science section.

  The survey consoles were nothing but twisted metal, the bulkhead behind it open to space in a hole big enough for two elephants to pass through side by side.

  “Satisfied?” I asked.

  “Go to hell.”

  I twisted around to peek at the bulkhead that had shielded me. It was spattered with shrapnel. I looked down at my Prestoseal-smeared shooting arm, feeling a little dizzy. Sticky moisture lined my glove.

  Maybe more than a scratch.

  “Archer, Babs must be coming around by now. See that Davo takes him to the cruiser. Kojo, keep Sparrow’s guns on the cruiser until she’s well away—it’s time for them to go home to Troy.”

  With Nemesis on one side and Sparrowhawk on the other, Grand Duchess sailed homeward on the Ribbon Road. She was a good deal more battered than when we’d found her.

  So was I. I’d fainted in Sparrowhawk’s airlock, throwing Archer into a panic. A tiny fragment of survey console had pierced my suit and gone all the way through my arm and out the other side, scoring a pinhead-wide path from elbow to shoulder through muscle, bone, and blood vessels.

  Charity clucked over me as she swathed my arm in antiseptic and bandages. “You got to be more careful. This crew seems to get more’n its share of bumps and bruises.”

  “I’m sorry about Davo,” I said. “At least now you know that everything he did was done out of duty to Troy. He was a patriot.”

  I almost choked on the last bit, but Charity didn’t notice. Patriotism didn’t excuse Davo from being a liar, a cheat, and a murderer, but I didn’t have the heart to tell Charity the full truth about Davo letting Grand Duchess die.

  “He was a hero, in his own way,” she said. “He sent me a message, too, ‘To be opened in case I kick off.’ Transmitted it just before he left Mudpuppy. I figured I’ll never see him again, so I opened it.”

  I nodded, resolving not to tell her that his story about dying was just another lie. “What did he say?”

  Her voice trembled but she held her head high. “Told me all about spying for Troy and being sorry he’d never been a real father to me. Said I was the best thing he ever done and all he wanted was for me to be happy. Asked me to forgive him for being such a no-good, backburning excuse for a father.”

  “And will you? Forgive him for all the lies?”

  “’Course I will,” she sniffed. “He’s my daddy.”

  I put my good arm around her and she wept into my shoulder.

  It made me tear up, too—for her, for me…and for all the daughters of lost fathers.

  I was sore and tired, but there was no time to rest. I had to make one last visit to Grand Duchess before we turned her over to Barony.

  Floating down her lifeless passages in a mended enviro suit, I returned the engineer to his station and replaced all the dead crew who’d been dislodged in the tumbling about—they’d have wanted to look their best for their homecoming. The aura of menace seemed to have lifted. Not that I got a feeling of gratitude exactly—I was still an interloper on Duchess—but the ghosts seemed more at peace with their fate.

  Most important, I resurrected the synthreactor core from under the frozen foodstuffs in the storeroom where I’d stashed it. It now reposed behind the false wall in our cargo hold, bulwarked by a few bales of thistledown.

  “What good does it do us?” Kojo carped. I was keeping him company in the wheelhouse as the Ribbon Road carrie
d Sparrow and Nemesis toward Barony with Grand Duchess between us.

  “Probably none. It’s damaged, maybe beyond repair. Archer looked at it, but it’s ancient Sage tech, he has no idea what makes it run.” Though he had suggested the synthreactor would make a nice coffee table.

  “Then we should dump it,” Kojo said. “If we’re caught with a synthreactor again, nobody will believe we came across it by chance. And the only contact we had who might touch something like that was Ordalo.”

  I stretched my injured arm. Moving made it ache, but it had a tendency to stiffen up if I kept it still too long.

  “We can eject it once we reach open space,” I said. “I just don’t want either Troy or Barony to have it—if they both think it’s been destroyed, maybe it will give them one less reason to start the next war.”

  Kojo tweaked our heading to keep the joined ships in the middle of the Road. Duchess’s damaged port flank loomed on our starboard side. The gaping tear in her hull seemed to stare an accusation at me.

  “Who did the synthreactor belong to, then?” he asked. “Barony or Troy?”

  “I think it was originally in Troy’s hands. When Grand Duchess was in Troy territory, she must have come across an illegal terraforming site and stolen it.”

  “And kept it hidden in Duchess because they weren’t planning on turning it in, they were going to use it themselves.” Kojo’s half smile told of an appreciation for their tactics.

  I had no such admiration. “Troy sent Davo into the Gloom to track down Duchess and recover the synthreactor. He found Duchess in orbit around Shipkiller and left her to die, figuring to circle back in a few weeks when he wouldn’t meet any resistance.” The bastard. “He couldn’t tell his Hellbender crew because that would blow his cover as a Troy spy.”

  “But before he could go back,” Kojo said, “Hellbender was captured by Barony. He stood up to torture pretty well, you have to admit.”

  Honestly, it was like Kojo actually admired the louse. “If that’s what you want to call it. He chose to save Troy’s terraforming operation over saving his crew.”

  “But once he was free, why did he chance going after Duchess? He knew Lili was following him—he should have laid low. And why come to us?”

  “That’s where it gets complicated. When Duchess stole the synthreactor a year ago, Troy must have cast around for a replacement. It makes sense that they would go to the biggest black-market tech dealer in the sector.”

  Kojo’s face lit up. “Ordalo. So our synthreactor was destined for Troy.”

  “That’s what I figure. Davo might even have suggested that Sparrowhawk and his old chums Kwame and Hiram would be good candidates to haul it.”

  Kojo’s hand on the control tightened. “If I’d known that, I would have killed the bastard.” It still rankled on him that he’d been cheated into a debt so vast he’d have no choice but to carry Ordalo’s contraband.

  Good. Maybe he’d be more wary next time someone offered him a sure thing.

  “When Barony set Davo free,” I said, “the first thing he would do is check in with his Troy handlers. They probably told him to stay away from Duchess, that the replacement synthreactor was on its way.”

  “So what changed?” Kojo asked. “Wait, I know—Ordalo was arrested.”

  “With lots of publicity about breaking up the smuggling operation. That meant Troy would never get Ordalo’s synthreactor, so they had to take the risk of sending Davo to bring back the one from Duchess.”

  I took a sip of ale. My arm ached where the shrapnel had ripped through it.

  “Whether or not they set us up originally, Troy’s intelligence service knew that Ordalo was shipping their replacement synthreactor on Sparrowhawk. So when Ordalo was arrested, Davo dropped in for a visit—an excuse to snoop around Sparrow in case we hadn’t delivered the goods yet.”

  “And he knew about all Dad’s little hiding places from the time they sailed together.” Kojo shook his head. “Dad should have been more careful who he took up with.”

  “The logical thing was for Davo to use Sparrow for both sides of his mission, so he set about convincing us to go after Duchess, giving him more time to search our holds.”

  “And we fell for his story like a frontier rube falls for a central-sector con man.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Kojo shook his head. “All those lies. He must have gone dizzy trying to keep it all straight. What kind of a mind thinks like that?”

  “A spy.”

  Kojo laughed. “Speaking of cons, you better get dressed. We’re coming up on Barony territory.”

  As we approached the first Barony outpost, I straightened my Corridor Patrol officer’s jacket and adjusted the brown knit cap to hide my fraying braids. Adopting the expression typical of Patrol officers—scowl tinged with disdain—I activated Sparrowhawk’s watch station viewer to respond to questions.

  “That’s correct, Group Captain. A derelict ship, expedition vessel Grand Duchess. I have accompanied the salvage team to see that your property arrives safely, and to ensure that the terms offered for the vessel’s return are complied with.”

  In no time at all, we were flanked by a dozen Barony patrol cruisers, all vying for the honor of towing Grand Duchess to space dock.

  Apparently, Barony really did love their dead heroes.

  There were questions, lots of them. What disaster had burned out half of Grand Duchess’s engineering section? We explained that we’d found it that way, no doubt the crew’s last-ditch effort to escape the gas giant. The destruction of Duchess’s gun turret? The gaping hole in her side where the survey consoles had been? We blamed the Troy militia. What did we know about the missing survey records or the captain’s logs? Why, nothing at all.

  In my Patrol officer persona, I did admit to moving the bodies after the battle. “It seemed only respectful to place them at their stations, brave souls.” Of course, that didn’t explain the shrapnel in the captain’s torso, but they didn’t bring it up and neither did I.

  Both Kojo and Lili begged off any ceremonial presentations for bringing Grand Duchess home, saying they preferred to stay out of the limelight, and me emphasizing that as a Corridor Patrol officer I preferred to avoid publicity. The Barony generals accepted that with raised eyebrows but allowed Nemesis and Sparrowhawk to anchor near the outermost space dock for two days while Barony readied the reward.

  Two days at anchor was a luxury we all needed. Archer used the time to baby his engines back into a state of efficiency and cleanliness, and Hiram relaxed with a ration of brandy. Kojo coaxed Lili’s engineer Fargo into a game or two of chinko, until Fargo got mad at losing and left in a huff. Charity took two showers a day and enjoyed the entertainments. She seemed to have made peace with the fact that she was never going to see Davo again.

  I went to my cabin to catch up on sleep. When I recited my prayer to the ancestors before closing my eyes, I added a little complaint to Papa—he might have warned me about Davo being such a liar.

  In my dreams, Papa appeared, dressed in his workday jacket. I expected him to be pleased with all we’d done. Instead, he just repeated his warnings about debts coming due.

  Useless advice. Our attempt to pay back Sparrow’s debt to Davo had backfired into near disaster. And while we owed a ton of rhollium to a host of people, for once, we were due a payoff from Barony. I went back to sleep, grumpy that Papa hadn’t been paying attention.

  CHAPTER 28

  Bounty

  On the second day at anchor, Archer and I were sharing lunch in the salon when Kojo poked his head in, his face grim. “Come to the wardroom, sis. We got a transmission—from Lumina Escrow.”

  I climbed the companionway with low spirits. We weren’t yet at the twenty-eight-day mark. Had the buyer gone for the goods and found the Settlement Authority’s locator tag? If they had, then Ordalo’s organization wouldn’t rest until they found us. Ancestors, grant me courage.

  Hiram was already in the wardroom, his face s
olemn.

  “Not you, lad,” he said. “This is private.”

  I turned, surprised to see that Archer had followed us.

  I laid a hand on Hiram’s arm. “He may as well stay. Archer’s been with us every step of the way, he has a right to know the worst.”

  Kojo shrugged. “Might as well. If the news is bad, he’ll know soon enough.”

  Hiram and I took the two chairs at the wardroom’s small table. Kojo lounged on the bunk and Archer leaned on the door, his hand twitching. I keyed the transmission to play.

  The serene face of escrow agent Ghiel appeared on the screen. “This confirms that as of today, the buyer has inspected and approved the goods at the coordinates provided by the sellers. Therefore, in accordance with the terms of the escrow, the releases held by Lumina have been filed with the registrar. Thank you for your trust and your business, Lumina Escrow is always ready to serve.”

  Kojo closed his eyes and leaned his head back. “Thank Zub! It’s done. The debt to Ordalo, the mortgage, the indentures, gone.”

  “That’s good, right?” Archer asked.

  Hiram slapped Kojo on the back. “Now that’s something to celebrate. I gotta admit, lad, you had me worried for a while.”

  I hugged myself, unable to believe it. “Finally, things are going our way.” All Ordalo’s threats were finished. At last, the synthreactor was on its way to wherever Troy was hiding its terraforming operation. “Once the Settlement Authority tracks the synthreactor to its destination, we’ll be free.”

  Kojo grinned. “Free and with Barony’s bounty in our pockets.”

  With tears in my eyes, I kissed Hiram’s bald spot and let Archer hug me.

  Free. Free to go back to sailing and trading the way we always had. Free to head for home sectors, visit with old chums, and drum up some business. Free to find a way to coax Hiram into an easier way of life. Free to dissolve my sham marriage to Archer and go back to being uncomplicated friends.

  Free to turn our stern to Kriti and the Ribbon Road and never again sail under the shadow of the Gloom.