Shades of Empire (ThreeCon)
Page 6
Four days after the Queen Bee left Space Station du Plessis, the ship entered folded space. A little less than a week later, Madeline decided to check with Niels about Alexander. “How’s the new guy working out?” she asked when her first mate called her to tell her the weekly stats were online.
“Fine,” Niels said, his face filling her video screen. “I just turned sys admin over to him.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea, so soon? He can’t know our systems that well.”
Niels grinned and pulled back from the monitor. She could see that he was in the op center. “Yeah, but he’s used to making do with less. That means he’s good at maximizing design. He’s already streamlined all the analysis modules so the results of the scanner reports can be analyzed faster.”
It was hard to argue with that kind of success. “I’m glad he fit into the staffing plan. How’s he doing otherwise?”
“Okay. He keeps to himself a lot, but then he’s new. And besides, our guys tend to stare at that tattoo a lot, and I think it puts him off.”
Madeline nodded. The gleaming swirls of the Imperial seal tended to have a hypnotic effect on her, too. It was difficult not to stare at it. “Is it a problem?”
“Nah, they’ll get used to it.” Niels leaned back in his chair and shot her a mischievous look. “He declined to be on the list, if that’s what you want to know.”
She had been curious, but she would never let Niels see that. She waved a hand negligently. “That wouldn’t be a concern for months, anyway.”
“Yeah, sure.”
Madeline ignored this half-hearted riposte. “How about his workouts? Does he keep up?”
Niels nodded. “You bet. He’s shown our guys a thing or two.”
“Even better,” she said, pleased. “It looks like we lucked out when we stumbled over that pod.”
“Not as much as Napier did. He’d be dead by now.”
Madeline shook her head as she reached for the cutoff switch. “Not dead, just crazy.”
She stopped worrying about her new crewman and went back to worrying about profitability.
• • •
About ten days later, Madeline was lying on her bunk, wondering if she could get away with taking an afternoon nap, when her door buzzer went off. Madeline sat up, considerably surprised. Almost no one ever came to her cabin unless they were invited, and she hadn’t issued any invitations that day.
“Come,” Madeline said, after a moment’s hesitation.
When the door opened, she was astonished that it was Thad who stepped into her cabin.
“Hello, Thad,” she said, trying not to let her surprise show. “What’s up?”
He stood there, shifting his weight from one foot to the other as if he couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Napier,” he said at last.
The name took her aback. After the good report Niels had given, it seemed unlikely Napier could have any problems bad enough to drive Thad to see her personally. “Napier?”
Thad nodded. “Napier has nightmares.”
Madeline got to her feet. “Well, he was subjected to a pretty bizarre form of torture on that life pod. That would give me nightmares for a while.”
Thad shook his head. “Not getting better. Worse.”
“His nightmares are getting worse?”
Thad nodded.
Madeline was used to dealing with him, and knew to ask specific questions. “Do you mean they happen more frequently or they seem more severe when he has them?”
Thad pondered this. “Both.”
“I see,” Madeline said. Thad didn’t look reassured. “Don’t worry about it, Thad. I’ll talk to Doc. Maybe he can give Napier something to help him sleep.”
Thad didn’t say anything; he simply stood there for a moment, and then he nodded.
Madeline stepped a little closer and put a hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay, Thad? Does it really bother you when Napier has nightmares?”
For a second she thought he was holding his breath, he was so still. He said nothing, but his eyes looked at her with an expression that she had never seen in them before.
“Yes,” he said.
“It bothers you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want me to ask Niels to switch him to room with someone else? You’d still have a roommate, but he wouldn’t have nightmares.”
“No.”
He wasn’t holding his breath now. His chest was rising and falling rapidly, as if he had been running. Madeline knew, because she was watching him intently. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him if he wanted to be on the list, but she bit back the words. “Is that all you needed from me?”
The pause seemed longer than usual. “Yes.”
She let go of his arm a little reluctantly. “You can go, then.”
“Thanks.”
He was gone, and she was still finding it hard to catch her breath. She paced around the cabin a few times, and then she called Niels.
“Yeah, skipper?”
“Who’s up on the list?”
He gave her an astonished stare. “It’s fourteen hundred hours!”
She glared at him. “Did I ask you the time?”
“No, ma’am,” he said promptly. “Pulaski’s up, but he’s on duty.”
“Who’s next?”
Niels looked down as he hit some keys on his terminal and checked the monitor. “Doc.”
“Is he on duty?”
“Nope. He just came off in fact. He was working split shift.”
“Good. Thanks, Niels.”
“You okay, Maddy?” he said with concern. “This isn’t like you?”
“Mind your own business, Niels,” she said, and she cut the connection abruptly.
Doc Sandoz was more than happy to answer her summons, but Madeline still found the encounter left her restless rather than sated. She passed on Thad’s concerns to Doc as semiofficial pillow talk, so the whole conversation should have been purged from her mind as something she no longer needed to worry about. Instead, she couldn’t forget the way Thad had stared into her eyes as if he had actually had some comprehension of what she felt.
What she felt? Madeline let out a profound sigh as she admitted to herself that her problem was a physical attraction to someone who was completely ineligible as a bed partner—someone whom she couldn’t even ask, because taking him to bed would be an act of exploitation that repelled her conscious mind, even while her subconscious obviously had no objections.
Madeline groaned and got up from her bed. At least a workout in the gym would work off her frustrations in a way that did some good.
• • •
When the Queen Bee arrived at Tegallos, Alexander waited curiously to see what would happen. He had brushed up on intergalactic geography and history on his off-duty time, finding information in the Bee’s databanks that hadn’t been available in his school on Gaulle or the training center on Lubar.
He had discovered that while the Rim Worlds were mostly new colonies, a few were much older, some of the earliest colonies founded by Terra after it joined the Third Confederation of Planets. Only two of the nine were currently members of ThreeCon. Most of them took advantage of their isolated status at the edge of inhabited space to ignore ThreeCon’s rules, and make the most of whatever interstellar commerce had to offer. Decos, in particular, was famed as a smuggler’s paradise, because it offered a market that asked no questions.
Tegallos was another extreme. Settled originally by Terrans because the gravity was a close match for their home world, the colony had a unique economy. The climate was pleasant, for the most part, but the soil was too barren to attract either agricultural or mining interests, so Tegallos had gradually begun to trade in other resources. It was said that you could buy anything on Decos, and anyone on Tegallos.
“So,” Alexander asked Juan Mahler, as the other man flipped through the manifest system, “what are we doing here?”
Juan spared a second
to look at him and then went back to his list. “Trading. We’re a merchant ship, remember?”
“Trading what?”
“Cargo. That’s all you need to know.”
There didn’t seem to be any more information available there, so Alexander went back to his own duties. He knew from what the other crew members had said that the systems in place on the Bee were a decade or more behind what was found in newer vessels. Still, Gaulle’s interaction with the rest of the galaxy had been so circumscribed—both by imperial paranoia and by ThreeCon interdiction—that their technology was well behind that found in the outside universe, and the Queen Bee’s various systems seemed a marvel to him.
Alexander knew Niels Trudeau had given him a favorable report, and he was hopeful that his work would earn him not only a secure place aboard the Queen Bee but also a chance to leave it on occasion.
They had established an orbit of Tegallos that morning, and Alexander was still waiting to see if the crew would be allowed shore leave. When no one said anything by mid afternoon, Alexander went to Niels and asked him straight out.
“We’ll let some of them go tomorrow,” the first mate said, “and the rest the day after, when the first lot is back on board.”
“What about me?”
Niels grinned. “Oh, you’ll get a ride downside, but Maddy’s given you a keeper. You’re not to go anywhere without Luong Khan.”
Alexander wasn’t entirely surprised, either by the order or by Madeline Palestrino’s choice of a babysitter. Luong Khan was almost as big as he was, and was several years older. Of all the crew, Khan had the most experience at both martial arts and actual combat. Alexander had placed him as coming from the Aquitaine the first time he had met him, and hadn’t been surprised to learn he was a fellow deserter.
The next day, Alexander found his name on the leave schedule, right below Khan’s. They rode down in the same shuttle, and Alexander realized Khan wasn’t wasting any effort in being subtle. He had been told to stick to Alexander like glue, and glue was what Alexander would get from him.
The shuttle set them down at Mandalay, the main port. Once they had left the spaceport and wandered into the city, Alexander was glad of the company. The first du Plessis Emperor had decreed that Gaulle was to be inhabited solely by humans and had deported all other sentient beings. Consequently, the inhabitants of Gaulle never saw an alien unless they followed the example of Madeline Palestrino’s crew and deserted both the army and their world. Alexander soon discovered that the rest of the galaxy was considerably more open to mixing species.
The brazenness with which the main industry of Tegallos was advertised took Alexander aback. He saw things in the shop windows that made him open his eyes wide. The price sheets made him gasp. Apparently, the prostitutes of Tegallos were willing, for a fee, to perform a variety of sexual acts on beings of any species or gender.
“Good god!” he said as they walked down the street. “What is that?”
Khan followed his gaze and grinned. “That’s a Miloran. Actually, she’s rather small for her species. Most of the women are bigger than that, and the males are even larger.”
“Christ on a crusade!” Alexander said with feeling.
“Yeah,” Khan agreed. “You don’t want to get a Miloran mad at you. Fortunately, they tend to be even-tempered.”
“It—she looks like she’s made of concrete.”
“I suppose she does. They come in other colors, but mostly they’re shades of gray-brown. You don’t see that many of them here, because they consider the gravity too inadequate, but there’s always a few of them around. I know a good place if you want to see what it’s like to screw one.”
“No, thank you,” said Alexander firmly.
“Yeah, I guess it would be too much for you.”
Alexander didn’t bother to answer this taunt, because he was staring at an even more remarkable being who had just come out of a nearby shop. “What is that?”
“Oh, that?” Khan said, with studied nonchalance. “He’s a Shuratanian. They’re much smaller than us Terrans, but you don’t want to get one of them mad, either, because they live three hundred years and they have real good memories.”
Alexander stared at the small being, several centimeters short of a meter and a half in height, who was faintly greenish-gray in color and vaguely reptilian in appearance. He was humanoid, but his head was very round, completely hairless, and was distinguished by two long pointy, almost prehensile ears that grew right at the top.
“Sheesh,” Alexander said. “Are there more species of aliens here?”
“Non-Terrans,” Khan corrected. He sounded very disdainful for a fellow Gaullian. “You can get your face smashed in for calling someone an alien. They don’t appreciate it any more than we do. And we don’t say human because it doesn’t translate well; we say Terran. Anyway, the gravity’s too much for Tryffs, so you probably won’t see any of them here. Mostly, you see Milorans and Shuratanians wherever you find us Terrans, because we’re all so similar.”
“Similar!”
Khan grinned. “When you see some of the others, you’ll know what I mean.”
They didn’t see any of the more exotic aliens, although over the next hour they saw many more examples of both the Shuratanian and Miloran species. Alexander was amazed that Khan had learned to tell the sexes apart for both types of beings, and, with Milorans could even tell the youngsters from the elderly.
Khan grew bored with Alexander’s naiveté, and finally pointed out one storefront that seemed to contain a traditional Terran brothel. It looked almost respectable beside its more brazen neighbors.
“You want to take a look?” Khan asked. “You’re not on the list.”
Alexander glanced at the other man and realized he wasn’t offering out of altruistic reasons. “I’m not feeling amorous just at the moment, but you go ahead. I’ll wait.”
Khan shook his head regretfully. “Nope. We stay together.”
Alexander was curious. “Why so eager? I thought you were on the list?”
Khan shrugged negligently. “The skipper’s a damn fine lay, but she’s only one woman and there are a lot of other guys on the list with me. Lucy doesn’t have near her appetite, Carmela’s hooked up with the exec, and none of the other women will give me the time of day.”
Alexander gave him another glance and decided to press for information while he had the chance. “Isn’t it difficult to go back and forth from going to bed with a woman and then taking orders from her?”
Khan considered the question and shook his head. “Not now. It took me a while to get used to the way things are on a ship, but I’m okay with it now. And it’s not like I’m having a thing with her, or anything special like that.”
“Do you ever say no?”
Khan grinned. “Nope. If you’re on duty when your name comes up, you don’t lose your place, but if you say no, you go to the end of the line.”
The formality of the rules intrigued Alexander. “Anyone ever try to cut in line?”
Khan’s grin grew wider. “No way. That’s why the exec keeps the list. Anyone who tries to bribe him is off it for good.”
“It still seems like a strange setup to me.”
“I suppose it is,” Khan said, “but then the skipper is an unusual woman.”
“And the work doesn’t bother you? You’re not worried about the possibility of getting caught?”
Khan shot him a wary look as if he suspected Alexander of having ulterior motives for asking the question. “I was in the Imperial Army, you know?” he said, abruptly changing the subject. “I was a conscript. After twelve years, I saw my chance and I got out. Believe me, I can live with the risk if it means I get a chance to strike back at that bastard.”
“Which bastard?”
“Emperor Lothar Fucking Edward Antonio du Plessis. Anything we can do to make his ass itch is worth it to me.”
Alexander didn’t comment, but he could identify with the sentiment.
“What a waste,” Khan said bitterly as they rode back up in the Bee’s shuttle. “Especially since you could probably get a discount when the whore saw that.” He indicated the Imperial seal on Alexander’s cheek.
Alexander shook his head. “I’m not interested in trading on this. I’d get rid of it if I could.”
Khan’s eyebrows climbed up his forehead. “Is it true there’s a detonator and an implosion device in the chip, so if you try to have it removed it’ll take your face off?”
Alexander kept his expression impassive. “That’s what they told me when they put it in. I have no way of knowing if it was the truth, but they didn’t take it out when they marooned me, so I suppose it is. Anyway, I don’t intend to test it.”
Khan seemed suitably impressed. “And is it true they never give the guy an anesthetic when they implant it?”
“Now that one I can answer,” Alexander said, his voice grim with the memory. “It’s true. Tradition, they called it. The Corps is too tough to need an anesthetic for minor pain.”
“Minor? I thought they drilled into the cheekbone?”
“They do—with a laser.”
“Holy shit!”
“Yeah.”
• • •
Alexander wasn’t surprised to see that Luong Khan’s name appeared again on the leave list the next day. After all, the man had been working when he followed Alexander around, and he deserved a real day off as much as any of them.
He was surprised to see Thaddeus Jenner’s name. Apparently, Madeline Palestrino wasn’t worried enough about her seemingly simple-minded astrogator to restrict his movements in any way. Alexander asked Thaddeus about it as the man got dressed in civilian clothes after breakfast.
“You going downside, Thad?”
“Yes.”
“Going to have a good time in Mandalay?”