Privateer Tales 3: Parley

by Jamie McFarlane

  A message was waiting for me.

  Hold action for eighteen hours and then return to Mars if no further communication is received. Belcose Out.

  My stomach sank as I read the words. Belcose would simply have us abandon her. I wasn’t a MINT agent, but I couldn’t imagine just giving up on Qiu. I sent a reply.

  Will hold position until 2400 and reassess.

  I rejoined the crew on the bridge. Nick was fast forwarding through the recordings. By the look on his face, he hadn’t found anything yet.

  “Any word from Belcose?” Marny asked.

  “Yes. We’re to wait for eighteen hours and if we don’t hear anything we’re to leave.”

  “That’s pretty cold,” she said.

  “Not really,” Tali interjected. “That would put her out of communication for twenty-four hours. If she doesn’t have an exfiltration team then she’ll have to find her own way out. Not much you can do.”

  Nick hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to the conversation up to this point.

  “You know how hard it would be to remove all of this data? We’re talking tens of thousands of micro nodes that had to be wiped. She couldn’t possibly have had enough access to do all that.”

  “Anything in the logs?” I asked. I had no idea what I was talking about, but when Nick went on a hunt for something, he always ended up talking about log files.

  “No. It’s crazy. They’re clean too. I couldn’t do what she did even if I wanted to. Even with all my access. Wish I knew how she did that,” Nick's frustration came out in his words.

  “How bad do you want to know?” Tali asked.

  “What do you mean? Do you know what’s going on?” he asked her.

  Tali pulled out the small object she’d placed on the table when we’d talked to Qiu in my quarters. She thumbed it on and placed it on the console next to where Nick was sitting. My ears popped again and I could feel a weird pressure against my ear drums.

  “No, but I know someone who could figure it out … for a price.”

  “How much?” I asked

  “Normally she gets three hundred an hour. I’d guess she could find it in three or less.”

  Nick looked at Tali skeptically but didn’t say anything.

  “Let’s send her a message and see if she’s willing to poke around. It’s a big deal that someone can wipe systems on our ship,” Nick said.

  “I’ll send it right away. Marny, I bet with a little detective work and the nanite tracker we can figure out how she got off the ship. Want to help?”

  “Aye. That I do.”

  Nick continued to sift through images from different sources and I heard him growling with dissatisfaction. I decided my efforts would be best used on a navigation plan back to Mars. When we finally left for Mars, I didn’t want any delays for lack of planning. At 0700 Marny and Tali re-entered the bridge.

  “Hold on to your seat Cap, you’re not going to believe what we found,” Marny said. She definitely had my attention. I noticed that Tali was holding several objects.

  “What do you have?”

  “She exited the ship using the secondary airlock.”

  “Under the bridge? That’s crazy, how’d she get down there?”

  “There’s a hatch in her bunk room that looks newly installed. She dropped down below decks and gained entry to the airlock.”

  “Shouldn’t that be locked out by security?”

  “It is, and as you might expect, there’s no record of her using it. The nanite trail is very clear, though. We sent the timestamps to the ship, so we should have been able to watch her walk through the ship virtually. Except, when we tried that, all those records were missing, too. You can’t actually see those locations at the times when she’s there.”

  “Hang on, I’ll superimpose them onto a different time sequence. We won’t see her, but we can at least see where she went,” Nick said. He started typing into a reading pad.

  “She stashed a few things in a compartment - also newly installed. They aren’t important, just items that could identify her as Navy; an ident bracelet and her wedding ring, along with a few other personal items.”

  “She’s married?” It was hard for me to think of Qiu Loo as being friendly enough to hook up with someone. It struck a chord with me, finally humanizing the enigmatic woman.

  “So someone has taken control of your ship, installed secret compartments, and broken your security and the big revelation for you is that she’s married?” Tali asked wryly.

  I looked back and smiled sheepishly, “No, sorry, it was just the most surprising thing. I guess I’d already started to suspect the other stuff.”

  “Got it,” Nick pushed his hand across the reading tablet with a flourish and projected a gray mono-chrome woman’s figure in the doorway of my cabin.

  We watched her walk back from the cabin to BR-2. She entered and moved around the cabin. The AI did a reasonable job of inferring what direction she was pointing, but without understanding what she was doing with her hands, the movement didn’t always make sense.

  “Hey, that’s not supposed to be there,” I said, when a compartment popped open on the exterior wall of the room while she stood next to it.

  “It looks like that was installed while the ship was at the shipyard,” Marny said.

  “You think they did something to the AI core that gave Qiu the ability to mess with the ship’s recordings?” Nick asked.

  “It’s a reasonable guess, but it’d just be speculation.”

  We watched Qiu’s image lie down for a period of time. Nick sped the time sequence up and finally she got up, opened a small hatch beneath the bunk and made her way through the emergency airlock. The time sequence lined up with when we docked at Jeratorn.

  “Well, mystery solved. It seems like that was a lot of work to go through instead of just exiting through the normal airlock,” I said.

  “Can you think of a reason why she’d want to hide the fact that she’d been on this ship?”

  “I see no advantage in us sharing that information,” I said.

  “I don’t think Belcose was very straightforward with us about what is really going on here. What if one of us was taken hostage? Perhaps Qiu had to take precautions in case one of us was made to talk,” Marny said.

  “Agreed. Now I hate to sound like a mercenary, but we have a load to put on in twenty minutes, so this will have to sit for now.”

  “Aye, Cap. Not much more we can do anyway. I’ll get changed.”

  Hail Adela Chen. The AI didn’t respond.

  “Hold on a sec,” Tali said. She grabbed the small device and turned it off. The weird pressure dissipated and my ears popped again.

  Hail Adela Chen. This time we were successful.

  “Hiyas, Liam. What’s up?” I always enjoyed hearing Ada’s cheerful voice.

  “Any word from the co-op on our ore?”

  “Yes. They’re loading the string right now and it’ll be ready shortly.”

  “I’d like you to grab it and head to our first heave-to position. We’re picking up a shipment at 0800, but are having some issues with our first package. We need to look into things.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  “We’re not really sure, but I need you to follow the plan. If for some reason you don’t hear from us, make your way back to Mars. I want you to build your own nav-plan. I’m concerned our original might not be secure.”

  “Oh, that sounds ominous.”

  “I think I’m just being paranoid, but just in case, you know what to do.”

  “Sure do, Liam. Be careful, okay?”

  “Roger that. You too, Ada.” End comm.

  Tali once again deployed the small device. I started to find the ear popping to be annoying.

  “Liam, before you leave, I’ve got a message back from the person I was telling you about. She’s willing to do a diagnostic, but wants to know about your comm gear. Are you willing to let her know about the Navy transceiver in your cabin?”<
br />
  “Why would she care about that?”

  “Full disclosure. I might have intimated at its existence - no details. She and I have a long history, so I hinted.”

  “Why would she care?”

  “That device isn’t what you think it is. The Navy’s long had quantum comm devices that can instantly communicate over extreme distances. For whatever reason, your contact – Belcose, I presume, from the conversations on the bridge - didn’t want you to know of its capabilities. Point is, there’s a good chance that Bit could hook up to it if I told her about it.”

  “Frak, yah. I’m okay with that. Nick?”

  “How much do you trust this Bit?” he asked.

  “I’ve trusted Bit Coffman with my life more times than I can count. She’s odd, but you’ll not find a greater technical genius.”

  “That’s a lot. I’m in,” Nick said.

  “I’ll send the comm right now,” Tali said.

  OBJECT LESSONS SUCK

  Marny insisted that I switch to an armored vac-suit for loading the shipment. In her mind, we were past the point of pretending that everything was okay. If Stevedore Horten found it odd, he sure didn’t say anything. I didn’t ask for his ident today, since I recognized him, and he was his normal unhappy self. The load I’d selected didn’t completely fill our holds, but pretty closely maxed out our available bond. The barges and ore had eaten up the rest of the bond we had on loan from the Navy.

  Back on the ship, Tali waved us over to the door of my quarters. Marny and I followed her in and I relaxed the helmet of my suit. Nick was already there and I felt the now familiar push of the privacy device that Tali kept deploying.

  Projected against the hull, next to my desk, was a live stream image of an unusual looking woman. She had a red-blond buzz cut and a proportionally larger than usual head. She appeared to be slightly heavier than most, with bright blue eyes and it didn’t look like she sat still very well. Apparently, the conference call had been underway for a few minutes. The woman saw me enter and pointed at me from the wall.

  “That must be the Mac-Daddy himself. You guys want to tell him or should I?”

  The woman was speaking at a high rate of speed and it took me a moment to parse all of her words. I looked over to Tali, who was chuckling to herself.

  “It’s your show, sister. Give it to him,” Tali said. Clearly, Bit Coffman put her in a good mood.

  “Well, good news first. I don’t think the Navy did anything too nasty. All flight control systems, O2 handling, septic, navigation, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera are functioning like they should.”

  “Bad news?”

  “They’re in deep. This thing is crawling with covert tech. Your buddy’s been spying on you, hardcore. He sees you when you’re sleeping … type of thing.”

  “Knows when we’re awake?” I couldn’t resist.

  “HAH! Bingo. Tali, where you been hiding these boys? I like ‘em, even if they are wet behind the ears.”

  “Any way to get rid of it?” Nick asked.

  “Not practically. Sure, if you were back here on Mars, I could get my grad students to crawl all over it and take the good stuff.”

  “What would that cost?”

  “Probably twenty liters of Fizzy Cola and a couple of bushels of jalapeño flavored popcorn.”

  “Bushels?”

  “Spacers … A bushel is a whole lot. Point is, with some bribery, a couple of weeks and you let me keep what we remove, we’d do it for free.”

  “So we don’t have to worry about losing control of the ship?”

  “Nah. If you really want that video back, I could get it, too - it’s still around. They’ve just done a good job of hiding it - not a great job.”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary,” Nick said.

  “Can’t tell you how much we appreciate the help, Bit,” I said. I felt relieved to have an idea of the scope of the navy’s invasion of our privacy.

  “One more thing,” Tali said.

  “What’s that, Talisman?”

  “No nicknames, Bit.”

  “Sorry.” The large woman had an impish grin on her face as opposed to Tali's disapproving schoolmarm scowl. I suspected this was a repeating theme in their relationship.

  “We’re short on time, Bit. I’ll catch up with you when I’m back on Mars.” Tali flicked off the transceiver and also turned off her scrambling device. Apparently, the quantum communication device wasn’t affected by her scrambler.

  Establish comm Adela Chen.

  “Hiyas, Liam.”

  “Any word on your barges?”

  “Yes. They’re all done. I was about to hail you and let you know we were headed over there. Jordy wants to know if we want to do any personnel transfers.”

  “I don’t think so. We’re planning to meet you at the rendezvous later on today and we can transfer then if we need to.”

  “Okay, we’re just pulling away now. Stay safe,” Ada said.

  “Roger that, Ada. You too. Ping me when you’re clear of Jeratorn, okay?” It was a load off my mind to get Ada underway. I was torn between sending her on without an escort and having her stay in this area. Either way had risks.

  “Will do.” She terminated the comm.

  “I think Tali and I should make a sweep of the station and see if we can get an idea of where Qiu might have gone,” I said.

  “Are you thinking rescue mission?” Tali asked.

  “Not at all, more like getting the lay of the land. She may just be ignoring us.”

  “How do you suppose we’d figure that out? And, for the record, I think it should be me and Tali,” Marny said.

  “I know. I’m not expecting any action, but if something goes bad, I need a fully functioning ship. Same reason I want Jordy to be with Ada. I’m trying to keep someone with real skills with each of the squishier members of the crew.” Marny pursed her lips. I felt like I had her agreement at least for the moment.

  “I’m thinking we keep it simple. We’ll just take a tour of the main corridors on the main level and see where it leads us. How are we set for encrypted communication if we find something?”

  “We checked out a few Navy comm encryption upgrades from the armory for the suits, so we should be fine. I’d also prefer you were both in armor,” Marny said.

  “I think we’d stand out too much. This is just a friendly walk around the station - two crew members taking a stroll while on leave.”

  “Young lovers?” Tali asked. This caused everyone to laugh.

  “Seriously?”

  “I wasn’t really, but now that it’s out there, it is a really good way to get around. People are generally put off by public displays of affection.”

  “Let’s see if that’s necessary,” I said.

  “Aww, don’t be such a prude, I won’t bite … hard.” Marny and Nick snickered again. It didn’t help that she was both beautiful and deadly.

  “Flechette or blaster?” I asked.

  “I put some new flechettes in the armory. Let me grab one for you.” Marny got up and walked out of the room.

  “Come up with three locations that we could be headed to. If we get stopped for some reason it’s best to have an answer.”

  Display map of station. Highlight businesses that are currently open.

  The projection on the forward wall of my quarters showed a dozen businesses.

  “There’s a breakfast diner near the top and a replicator on the lower level. Nick, can you queue up something on that one?”

  “Sure, make sure you bring me something from the diner.”

  Marny came back in and handed me a substantial looking flechette pistol.

  “Ruger F0C. It’s got a full suit interface, guided shot if you’re fast enough, and a hell of a punch. I’ll key it to you so the bad guys can’t pick it up and shoot you with it.”

  It was heavier than any of the flechette pistols I’d held in the past.

  “What kind of loads do I have in here?”

  “B
asic loads. They’ll have a substantial punch - nothing fancy though.”

  Tali pinched the air in front of her eyes and flicked a virtual object at me. The interface for the nanite tracker popped up a request on my HUD. I accepted.

  “Let’s take a little walkabout,” Tali said.

  “Are you going to carry a weapon?” I asked. She didn’t have a holster on and was dressed in the same tight black vac-suit she’d been wearing the entire trip.

  “Oh, don’t worry, I’m packing.”

  The nanites had an interface that could be set to narrow our search. I adjusted the range so I wouldn’t have to see all of the trackers inside the ship. We would start at the timestamp where Qiu had left the ship.

  Tali and I cycled through the airlock and walked down the ramp of the ship. Scanning the bay, I didn’t see any of the telltales of Qiu’s trackers. It wasn’t a big surprise. She’d actually left the ship before we pulled into the bay and her suit wouldn’t have vented any trackers, even if she had come this way.

  We passed through the airlock at the back of the bay and found ourselves in a long concourse that joined the docking bays with the main station. The faded and chipped label L-1 was stenciled at eye-level, providing a reminder that we were in a pressurized environment adjacent to vacuum. It was both common practice, and in most places, the law that vac-suits were worn in these areas. Technically, you could live in the station without a suit, but depressurization was very possible. Most people kept them on just to be safe. I wouldn’t expect to find any trackers here either.

  Our bay was only a hundred and fifty meters from the A tower of the Jeratorn station. We’d learned that the three main sections were referred to as towers and were creatively named A, B and C. Jeratorn station was home to twenty-five hundred people. Each of the towers were mainly residential with businesses haphazardly sprinkled around.

  Our first destination was The Oval Plate toward the top of tower B. It was a breakfast diner that was open from 0500 to 1300 each day. The short hours and specific cuisine seemed odd on a station like this.

  Our route was planned to take us past the station administrator’s office. It was a little out of the way, but if anyone asked, we could simply say that we took a wrong turn. According to Belcose, the current station administrator was one Harry Flark, the administrator of Colony 40 when it had been attacked a couple of months previous. The Navy was very interested in why he might have moved between stations and I believed that Qiu’s mission was ultimately to arrest the man. His office was an obvious, possible destination for her.