Salvage

by R J Theodore

  The spontaneous movement of her light in the round chamber, combined with the distortion at the thicker edges of the helmet’s glass dome, made her vision swim and her head feel buoyant. She closed her eyes to let it pass, but not before she got a glance at the base of the atrium.

  Her relieved exhalation sounded melodramatic in her ears. She opened her eyes to see a patch of fog clearing on the glass. She turned to nod at Sophie, who leaned out for a look, grinned and wiggled her gloved fingers on the railing, then pushed back to head for the vertical access shaft again. Talis followed, only slightly less enthusiastic than the eager engineer.

  The crystal was broken—shattered, more like—but there was enough remaining to call a chunk, a stump about the size of a table. Far easier to remove than if it had all been in one piece. Small cleaved pieces heaped like dried leaves around its base. Thumb, hand, and head-sized pieces for Sophie’s curiosity. The girl had been poking and prodding through the ship looking, not just for extra cargo, but for the technological secrets the aliens had guarded so closely. With the piece of hull, the gadgets they’d claimed, and now the real prize, Talis knew Sophie would be busy playing around for months.

  Which was good. They could commission their new ship the moment they got back to the world, but it wouldn’t be done for a long time. Without the distraction of alien hardware, Sophie would be pacing straight through the flimsy floor plating of Subrosa while she waited for it to be built.

  They took a glass-walled lift to the bottom of the atrium. Sophie read out the deck numbers, stenciled on the edge of each level. Talis couldn’t quite hear her over the fan in her helmet, which had kicked on in response to her increased pace, but this was Talis’s fourth visit to one of these ships, and even she was getting accustomed to the Yu’keem numeric characters.

  Talis would have to fill the time waiting for the new ship, herself. She had a running list in her head even before they knew there would be money enough to cover it. Upgrade Im Ufite Rantor as part of the order with Jones, whatever they could get at a conservative price. Renew old connections. Likely that’d take some effort. They’d gathered moss in their boot treads for two years now. Her previous business partners would have moved on, picking other crews for the contracts they might once have saved for her. Hard to blame them. Some of them might be out of business. Some might even be dead.

  The best remaining contact she had in that undercity port, Talbot, might have scratched her name out after the way she stormed off on him last time. He’d tried to warn her about the ring, and he hadn’t been wrong. Her fault. Didn’t mean she planned to apologize, but she did hope to repair their business relationship, so he’d give her more than the errand scraps at the bottom of his list. No time better than as-soon-as-possible to get going on that.

  Dug would have time to heal and be better for it. There weren’t many doctors on Subrosa she’d trust beyond extracting a splinter, but if they could sell off some of the less dangerous alien tech and barter hard on the ship’s construction, they could maybe hire an on-board physician instead of relying on Talis’s old field experience and Tisker’s handiness with a needle and thread.

  Tisker. She could count on him to keep her sane while they waited. His connections on Subrosa were older and more out of date than hers, but he was a child of that city and, as a native, could forge new relationships in ways she’d never be able to.

  She’d have to swallow her pride for a while, no doubt, but she had plenty of practice at that on the docks of Heddard Bay. She’d take local contracts at first, easy, cheap, mostly legal. Something to keep a little coin flowing in while they hemorrhaged their riches on the new ship. Something to build the trust back up. Build their instincts back up. Whatever it took, even if they could only break even.

  Eventually they’d have that wallop of a ship Sophie was designing. It would all be worth it.

  But she had her focus set too far above Horizon. First, they had some alien ships to destroy.

  And a revolution to supply.

  Sophie pulled a woven sling from one of her suit’s thigh pouches and unfolded it while Talis stepped out from the lift. They gathered up any pieces of the engine that were big enough to not slip through the holes in the netting. Sophie stuffed smaller pieces in her cargo pockets and insisted Talis do the same. She didn’t have to explain. With the crystals as fragile as they were, any piece that survived the trip back would be worth as much as a crate full of alien rifles. They were getting all sorts of unexpected prizes from this last ship.

  But they got too greedy. As they lifted the largest chunk together, the deck lights turned red, and a wailing siren blared from hidden speakers. A light over the lift chamber turned crimson, and the doors slid shut.

  The control panels darkened except for a red sequence of characters in Yu’keem, which flashed at them. Sophie lowered her side of the net back to the ground and attempted to enter commands on her tablet. Each tap or swipe was met with a dull, frustrating tone and an emphatic blink of that alien message.

  Talis reached for the electrocancellation barrel on Sophie’s back, but Sophie read her intent and turned to keep it away from her. “That’ll just get us stuck in here. I don’t think we are near enough to whatever controls that alarm to do anything about the noise. Give me a minute to figure this out.”

  “What’s it saying?” Talis felt helpless without the ability to punch or shoot something making such a racket.

  Sophie’s shoulders rose and fell with a sigh. “Something about the ship being compromised and to stay here until ship security handles it.”

  Talis gripped the sally bar at her belt and pulled it free. Not that she expected Yu’Nyun security officers to show up, but being stuck in a metal wreck with flashing lights and blaring alarms on one side and freezing eternity on the other side put a lump in her throat that was hard to breathe around. She forced the flat, sharp end of her tool against the seam in the lift’s hatch. “Let’s not wait for help to arrive. Help me pry this open, then. We’ll climb its shaft back out.”

  Sophie swapped the tablet for her sally bar. They’d gotten into a rhythm opening the reluctant hatches on Yu’Nyun ships, but this one would not budge.

  They stopped to take a breath. The air in the ship was warmer now. The aliens kept their ships too cold for Talis’s comfort, but after a day spent in freezing thin atmo, she felt like it might steam them in their descent suits. How she longed to pop the helmet for a few minutes, but she didn’t trust the aliens not to vent poisons into the air to stop intruders.

  “So I guess that’s the secondary locking system everyone’s been fussing over.” Sophie returned her attention to the tablet.

  A few taps and some sort of confirmation sequence, and it began to flash with the same red message as the other control panels. “All right, I’m fully connected with the ship now.”

  The matching message blinked slightly out of sync, and Talis looked away and closed her eyes to let her nerves settle.

  Sophie didn’t speak, and Talis could barely hear the tap of her gloved fingers on the surface of the device. Talis opened her eyes again, desperate to know some progress was being made. Sophie’s eyebrows were furrowed in concentration. She nibbled her upper lip against her lower teeth while she navigated through various screens. Frequently, the tablet made a small disapproving tone that repeated three times before shunting her back to the red message. Sophie made small disapproving noises of her own, each time, in response.

  Talis squinted at the bulkhead around them, trying to ignore the strobing of red and white flashes from the lighting panels. Maybe they could pry loose the overhead panels if the door wouldn’t open. Might be able to access the lift shaft if they could remove enough of the bulkhead.

  “Any way you could speed it up, Soph?”

  “Would be easier if—” Sophie stopped herself short, then barked a laugh. “Gods, Sophie, when were you going to . . .”
>
  As impatient as Talis was, Sophie had always been harder on herself. It was a lot to put on the engineer, to get them out with a cryptic device that didn’t speak their language.

  Except, then it did.

  “Menu Options,” it stated in clipped, monotone Common Trade.

  Talis almost forgot how unsettling the hollow sound of the mechanical translation was, but as the device in Sophie’s hands began to speak, reciting a list of menu options that must have correlated to the Yu’keem characters on the screen, Talis wondered how she could ever forget that dysrhythmic nightmare voice.

  “Configure language.” Pause. “Configure display.” Pause. “Configure interface.”

  Triumphant, Sophie looked up from the communication pad at Talis. Her eyes sparkled, her grin enormous, as the voice droned on through a list of options for the device’s settings.

  But she held up a hand as Talis opened her mouth to speak. Instead, Sophie picked an option from each offered list, navigating by speech instead of touch. Several times she reached the same annoyed error message—something about incomplete logic, now read out loud in an irritated tone—and had to begin again. Just because it now spoke their language didn’t mean its system made any more sense.

  After a dozen attempts, all ending in frustration, Talis began, again, to search the bulkhead for seams to pry open. The blaring siren was getting to her. The flashing lights were getting to her, and now the obstinate voice that denied them was getting to her. Surely Tisker saw evidence of their trouble from the observation deck above? Or even Dug, who was supposed to be resting now that there were no prisoners to watch, might happen to look out his porthole? It had been over an hour since they last loaded up the platform and checked in. How long before someone came down to check on them—assuming they could find them, or get through the ship’s latched doors to conduct a search?

  Talis’s breathing was more shallow and rapid with every passing moment. She shut her eyes, trying to ignore the infuriating disembodied voice and Sophie’s increasingly exasperated selections. She had to breathe, so she could think. So she could find them a way out of there. Or at least, so she could work the fatigued muscles of her arms to break their way out if she had to.

  She took a deep breath for the count of five, ignoring the sensation of her throat closing off to deny the air. Held it for the count of five. Exhaled for another count. Repeat. It took several attempts to find her rhythm. She focused on the purr of her helmet’s air cycling fan. Tried to block out the ship’s stubborn noises. Her throat started to relax. The sound of the alarms faded in urgency and became part of her count.

  And then they were gone.

  “Engage.”

  Sophie’s voice hung in the silence. Talis opened her eyes again. The lights had returned to normal and the lift door stood open.

  “You did it?”

  Sophie only waved the pad in the air, one-handed. There was a shimmer of perspiration on her forehead, and her face was flush. But the grin was back.

  “I can get us back up, I think, before we drain the last of the power.” Sophie slipped the pad back into her pouch and grabbed up her side of the net bag. “Captain?”

  Talis’s fingers felt slightly less than reliable, shaking as they were, so she looped her hands through the netting a couple extra times, then nodded.

  It was the imp’s unbridled curiosity and genius that had saved them again. That solved the puzzles and traps of alien technology hundreds of years more advanced than anything on Peridot—and a language she had learned for fun—and reduced them to simple questions and simple answers, in translation. That she had spent these past two years studying the enemy and the way their minds worked had made the ship bend to her will and had made Sophie very dangerous to the Yu’Nyun. Maybe the most dangerous adversary on the planet.

  A lift ride up, then two concentric corridors toward the hull, through access hatches that parted at Sophie’s command, and finally, the bulkhead opened onto starry skies. The empty tow platform waited there, level with the deck. Talis put one foot out onto the platform and gripped the frame with her free hand to steady it while she and Sophie hefted the weight of the crystal pieces over the gap between the lift and the edge of the alien deck.

  Her hands now free, Talis engaged the platform’s steadying clamps to the rim of the hull and fed the ramp across the gap. Through the toothed plating, she saw straight down into the flotsam below. The low railings on either side promised a quick drop if they lost their balance, but vertigo was far preferable to the panicked cramping of a few minutes prior.

  Sophie was unbothered by either and shifted the bag so the mound of crystals wouldn’t tip and spill out.

  Last call. Talis glanced back at the smoke-blackened cabin. Only the innermost bulkhead was undamaged. Shame, that. She grabbed a paraffin torch from its clip near the platform gate and crossed to the inner bulkhead opposite the breach. She cut around the flat glossy command panel there. Sophie appeared at her elbow at moment later and worked at it from the other side. Not a question from her.

  Now that Sophie’s communicator pad was having more than a one-sided conversation with the ships and the rest of the alien tech, it cast a new light on the salvage they’d gathered. There were more communicator pads out in the world. But Sophie had a head start on knowing what to do with them. And she’d have a jump on any Vein patent chaser. With the alien pad’s voice assistance and the girl’s obsessive drive, she’d be fluent in Yu’keem—both written and spoken—before they got back to Subrosa.

  Talis considered the panel as it came away from the bulkhead. Might be time to pull out that new ship design and make a few modifications. Talis exhaled a quick, private laugh.

  That new ship was going to cost them two fortunes. But damn the expense. They’d earned every luxury and advantage money could buy.

  Chapter 28

  But the way Dug’s face shone with a sheen of perspiration when they returned to the ship, they needed all the health care money could buy, first. He was helping Tisker move the alien junk out of the way of the next load. As they approached with the final haul, Talis saw his knees buckle. He tried to hide it, but she saw.

  “Why did you let him up?”

  Tisker flinched. Talis regretted it as soon as she said it. It wasn’t his fault. No one could stop Dug when it occurred to him to do something. She wished she’d been able to trust Vennika enough to keep her around instead of sending the doctor back to Fall Island with Captain Sekkai. She put a hand on Tisker’s shoulder. “Sorry. Never mind.”

  Then she turned on Dug. “But you. Maybe once you could have convinced me you’re invincible, but you’re apparently still running on half a body’s worth of blood.”

  What she really wanted to do was hug him, shake some sense into him, and tuck him back into bed herself. But he’d never tolerate such an insult.

  He nodded, without argument. She watched him limp off. That he made no protest meant he felt even worse than he looked.

  She sighed and turned back to her younger crew people. “Heddard Bay, huh?”

  Nodding, Sophie fiddled with one of the crystal pieces she’d transferred from her descent suit to her regular pockets. There was something on her mind.

  “Out with it, Soph.”

  “That assassin’s knife. I’ve been looking at it, and I found a hidden trigger in the handle.”

  “Like a gun?”

  Sophie shook her head. “It extends the filaments hidden along the edge. Now, there’s a chance that its only purpose is to flare them out and make a nastier wound . . .”

  “But?”

  “But what if something used to sit in those notches? Something that’s floating around, wreaking havoc in Dug’s gut now?”

  “All right, then. Back to Heddard Bay.” Nearest staffed and trained medical facility was in Lippen, that was for sure. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and
Kirna will tell us the alien ampules are full of fancy space medicine after all.”

  Sophie’s face lit up. “Oh, that reminds me! Maybe I can get a translation on that other tablet that came with them.”

  “Do it. Tisker, you’re with me. We’re dropping down to set the charges. We’ll leave no leftovers for the carrion to pick.”

  “Just another minute, Captain!” Sophie fiddled with a stripped wire, carefully connecting the bare ends of its twisted pairs to barely visible contacts on the back of the tablet. “I should be able to access it now.”

  She’d tried, unsuccessfully, to get her does-everything tablet to connect to the flow-of-text tablet that came packed in with the ampules. After Talis and Tisker had returned from rigging explosive charges around the most sensitive parts of the Yu’Nyun ship, Sophie had grabbed what remained of their adhesive putty and started building some kind of direct connection cable. Every now and then, her tablet offered an entirely unhelpful comment, or disdainful judgement on Sophie’s lack of experience with its technology, and Sophie would curse its aunts five ways and back before diving back in to try again.

  “Ah ha!” The tablet began a slow monotone read of the dissertation on the screen while Sophie sat back in triumph and wiped her brow with the back of her hand.

  Talis couldn’t focus on the message around all the overlong and complex terms the system read out. She understood “subjects” and “test groups” and “remarkable” and heard several mentions of the name of a nearby island, Ytima, but beyond that, its point was as unintelligible to her as archaic Matriaherat epic poetry.

  While it ran, she made faces at Sophie to express her lack of comprehension. When the disconcerting voice finally silenced, she asked, “Could you make heads or hindquarters out of any of that?”

  Sophie pulled the putty connections free. “I think it was saying they tested this stuff on someone at Ytima, and the results were unexpected but potentially positive?”