Part 2 — The Lavender Lily
Location:Casa Verde Station, Level 17, Section B
Standard Date: 04 25 630
Juanita Davis looked at the screen in her small room. She was wearing her blond hair in ringlets to hide the interface that protruded from her left temple. She wanted to lift the hair away from the large multicolored jewel just in front of and above her left ear. It was the ultimate symbol of her control over her body and mind. Whatever the universe said, she would decide for herself what went onto and into her body. And what data bombarded her mind.
That control was a hard-won thing and, in a way, more boast than fact. Hence the hair arranged to hide the interface. Her official employment as a paralegal for the firm of Shuster and Cartwright required that she cover the interface even though she was kept in a cubby in the back of the office, out of sight of any potential client. Instead of lifting her hair, she stood and exited her room on Level 17 to take the lift to Level 4 where the offices were.
This part of Casa Verde Station was a cylinder 260 meters across, rotating 2.8 times per minute. Level 1 with its floor in from the outer surface had a diameter of 240 meters and a standard gravity. The gravity at Level 10 was two-thirds of a standard gravity, and Level 20 was one-third. Above that was industrial and special farms, and the labeling changed.
✽✽✽
Juanita used her interface to answer the special line. Another thing that her extra-large interface carried was a set of data files that were the vital part of encrypting communications. There was an identical set in the tablet that Benny the Mook used. The program that did the encrypting was of Juanita’s own design, and the datafiles had been tweaked and redesigned five times over the last decade. No one would know what Benny sent her or what she sent back. And any look at the records of the calls would show billable data transfers to three different clients of the firm. The minor thefts of their client’s billable hours were well hidden among the much larger amount that the partners fraudulently billed.
“What do you need, Boss?” Juanita sent. Her vocal cords were in no way involved in the communication. And to anyone who looked at her screen it would look like she was writing up a brief for a lawsuit against Captain Danny Gold and the ship Pandora, for back wages to Charleen Dreesen—said lawsuit demanding the ship itself in punitive damages.
“What is with that Charleen Dreesen?” Benny asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, where’s my mini-shuttle?”
“The rockets aren’t here yet,” Juanita sent as she typed. “They are stuck in the cargo section.”
“So, I can’t have my cargo transfer because I need my cargo transfer.” Benny snorted.
He wasn’t actually stupid, Juanita reminded herself. The fact that he was big and overweight with a crude sense of humor could be misleading. That, after all, was what got him the nickname Benny the Mook before he started his rise to power. Now, of course, no one called him Mook, at least not to his face. But he still maintained the appearance of someone who, while vicious enough, wasn’t smart enough to maintain his position. “Yes, Boss, that is precisely the problem.”
“Well, have her make the jump again and get them.”
“Yes, sir.” Juanita’s grimace never came near her lips, and her keystrokes didn’t vary at all. But what Benny wanted was what she was trying to avoid. Charleen Dreesen interested her. And, truth be told, jumping across in a hard suit was risky. More because of the chance of being caught than any physical risk. Casa Verde Station Admin didn’t want to lose the income stream, and they didn’t want anyone bringing anything on to the Habitat Section without a thorough inspection.
Location:Airlock 3, Maintenance Level D
Standard Date: 04 26 630
The process was the same as before, but it was a different camera that was still active. Charleen waited, watching the cargo section rotate. Then, as a particular rock out cropping came around, she leapt. She landed and quickly moved into an alcove until the camera passed out of view again, then opened the lock on the Cargo Section. No one was there to meet her this time, but she knew where to go. The rocket nozzles were there, loose in a box. They were small. The mini-shuttle was small. Much smaller than the hard suit she was wearing. That was how she and Juanita designed the thing.
She looked around the small room for other things to fill the box with. It wasn’t about weight, but distribution. She didn’t want stuff moving around. And even small titanium rocket nozzles were too heavy to leave loose in the box.
She found a sack of beans. Actual beans. She almost rejected them automatically. Bringing strange plants onto a station was not a good idea. But then she had a thought. There were all those extra chambers, spare rooms as Juanita called them, that the rats had sealed over the years, full of air. They could have their own farms. She decided it was worth the risk.
Carefully in the zero grav environment, she emptied the bag into the box, making sure that the beans didn’t bounce back out, and covered them with the bag and paper to fill in the rest. She closed the box and then moved it back and forth to test whether it was full enough to be stable. It was, barely.
The jump back was straightforward, but nerve racking. She returned the suit to the storage closet, then made her way back down station to the outer area, carrying the box on a dolly. In full grav, the box weighed upward of a hundred kilos, and she wasn’t a weightlifter.
Location:Casa Verde Station, Safe House
Standard Date: 04 27 630
Mr. Rodent knew his name by now. Not so much as a name, but as a call. A call that meant food or petting. But it wasn’t his name that had his attention at the moment. It was an enticing smell from the box in the corner. He made his way to the box and tried to get in, but Charleen grabbed him and said, “Not for you, Mr. Rodent,” and handed him to Joey.
✽✽✽
“What’s in the box?” Joey asked, taking his pet.
“Rocket nozzles, but that’s probably not what interested Mr. Rodent.”
“What did?”
“If you’ll give me a chance, I’ll tell you. I found a sack of beans, and I needed something else in the box, so I used them for padding.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“It can be, if you aren’t careful.”
“No. I mean bringing food and stuff into the station.”
“I know, and yes, it can be if you aren’t careful. But these are just beans, and I’m gonna have Juanita check them out before we use them.”
✽✽✽
Joey looked doubtful and Charleen grinned at the kid. “It’s okay. I sort of trust Juanita.” Joey looked even more doubtful at that, but it was true. Charleen wasn’t the greatest at reading people, but after she got to know them a bit, she wasn’t bad. And Juanita struck her as someone who wouldn’t screw you over if she had another good choice. Unlike Benny the Mook, who needed a good reason not to, or he’d put you out the lock just for the hell of it. And that was Benny’s hold on the station underbelly. Everyone was so afraid of the bastard that they worked hard to give him a reason not to hurt them.
Location:Casa Verde Station, Safe House
Standard Date: 04 30 630
Charleen handed the sealed plastic sack to Juanita. It had fifteen of the small purple beans in it. “I need to know what these are and the effect they would have if we were to get grow lights and a hydro unit set up in one of the spare rooms.”
“I can tell you one thing it’s going to do right now,” Juanita said precisely, as the woman always spoke. “It will seriously distort the O2/CO2 calculations.”
“It’s for those new gardens we talked about. At least a start on them. And it’s not going to cause much shift on a station this big. Mr. Rodent and his family and friends aren’t knocking the O2 calcs out of whack.”
“The growth of the rat colony has been gradual,” Juanita said, and a graph went up on the screen. “I can even tell you when the initial infestation happened. It was in 603 or 604. Their population grew gradually, and they almost certainly displaced the ordinary rats we had before.” The screen showed a circle at the high point of the graph. “I think they were getting close to a population density that would have led to extermination efforts within another year or so. And the gardens were to be planned out carefully for atmo balance.”
“I haven’t planted them yet, and that’s why I’m giving you the seed to check out. What other plants and animals do we need to introduce? Or CO2 plants we need to balance it.” Not all plants were terran in origin, and some of the “plants” of other worlds used oxygen and gave off CO2 as part of their life cycle.
“Where did you plan on putting your farm?”
“Not one farm. Lots of little farms.” Charleen used the keyboard to access the room screen and call up the new and improved station map. She highlighted eight chambers that were assumed to be open to space but which Charleen suspected were sealed. “I want to check these places to see if the rats have made them into spare rooms. But to do it, I’m going to need these cameras to go down at the right time. Preferably with a loop to hide the fact that they are down.”
“It will take a few days to arrange that, and also to find out about the beans,” Juanita said. “I suggest you spend the time building the mini-shuttle for Benny.”
“That’s my plan, but I’m worried about how Benny will react once he no longer needs me to make the shuttle for him. I’m going to need a new job.”
“That is indeed a concern. For the moment, your suit against Captain Gold provides some protection, but I suspect that at some point Mr. Horace G. Lee, who purchased your interest, will discover that if you die tragically because of being stranded here by Captain Gold, it will only enhance his suit.”
“So, I need reasons to keep breathing. Any ideas?”
“Not at the moment, no. Understand, Benny is the Perro Jefe, and as such he has my loyalty, whatever my personal feelings.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Charleen said, thinking, That isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of Benny, but she makes it pretty clear that she won’t help me against him. “But please be on the lookout for something I can do to aid La Causa.”
“I will.”
✽✽✽
After she finished talking with Juanita, Charleen went into the other room where Bruno Falleri was drinking a beer and looking a bit too long at Debby, who served him the beer. Debby was a skinny twelve-year-old, just starting to develop, and Charleen thought Bruno, who had dark skin, brown hair, and epicanthal folds around bright blue eyes, was just enjoying the scenery. But it was potentially troubling that Debby was starting to be that scenery. Debby didn’t seem bothered by the attention. Charleen looked over at Mike. Debby’s dad was clearly not happy.
Charleen went over to Mike. “Hi, Mike.” Then, in a quieter voice, she added, “Let it go for now. But you might want to have a talk with Debby later.” Mike no longer had to work the spacer area. He and his kids were the caretakers of the safe house. But that didn’t make them safe, not with Benny the Mook in charge. If Charleen was reading this right, Benny figured that one person was plenty to run the safe house, and the other two could be put to other uses, even if only as examples.
“It’s not Bruno that bothers me,” Mike said quietly. “It’s the fact that Bruno is going to tell Benny about Debby. Benny likes to train up girls himself. Says ‘they need to learn to take it and like it’ before he puts them out in the corridors. And I don’t see any way to protect her.”
“We’ll think of something,” Charleen told him, though she didn’t have any idea what that might be.
✽✽✽
Charleen set the extruded plastic strut against the crossbar joint and screwed in the attaching bolt. She attached the leads and flexed the joint, noting the energy draw as the electro-plastic muscles were tugged and compressed. She made a note of the readouts, then attached the leads to the unit’s CPU.
For the next two days, Charleen was busy making a small robot mini-shuttle. It was one meter wide, one meter tall, and half a meter deep, and had cameras, ranging lasers, and a molecular circuit the size of a grain of rice. That circuit was welded into a circuit board the size of a hand and through the circuit board connected to the cameras, the rockets, the laser and the laser sensors. The whole thing could fold up into a fabric covered bundle only fifteen centimeters across and a meter tall, so it could be hidden easily.
Location:Casa Verde Station, Safe House
Standard Date: 05 02 630
“The package programs will need to be tweaked,” Charleen told Juanita, “and we need a full loop of the station rotation and a virtual model built to adjust the program for the very limited use. Mostly, we’ll be locking out options that this sucker will never use. It’s only going to travel about four meters each way. It’s got to time its launch to when the cameras are off and be pulled in the locks pretty quick, so the cameras you can’t turn off don’t see it.
“Oh, Juanita, can you get me an emergency suit?” Emergency suits were basically plastic suits that were sealed to hold air. Good ones had pleats at hip, knee, and ankle, shoulder, elbow, and wrist. Really good ones had real spacer gloves on them, but they were fragile as hell and hard to move in. The rich people often carried one in a little pouch at their waist, but they were rarely used, and most of the station rats didn’t have one.
“Why?”
“Because, with an emergency suit I can jump back and forth from that far in station, assuming I can set up a deal to turn off the cameras. And if I can get to the Cargo Section, I can pick up some off the books outsystem work.”
Location:The Grill, Level 17, Habitat Section
Standard Date: 05 04 630
“What’s Dreesen’s plan to stay in my good graces?” Benny asked Juanita. Encryption or no, he preferred to talk to Juanita in person. She could do amazing things with computers, but her face . . . not so much. He noticed her face go stiff, a sure sign that she was hiding something.
“She wants me to get her a suit so that she can slip over to the cargo section and get outsystem work.”
That was true, but it wasn’t all of it. Benny didn’t say anything though. Better to let Juanita think she was getting stuff past him. He considered what she was saying. There were opportunities there. Benny controlled the station rats in the habitat section, but was under strict orders to leave the station’s legal residents alone. He also had no muscle in the cargo section. That was run by the Stevedore’s Guild. Donald Gonzales ran the stevedores for the organization, and Benny was having to pay Don a premium to get his goods without Don informing Lee.
His situation was even worse off station. All he had was one contact on an insystem freighter. The Lavender Lily was an ice hauler that made regular trips to the Casa Oort cloud, where it picked up H2O ice as well as liquid nitrogen and whatever else was ordered. Benny had an arrangement with the first mate, so he could get Dreesen onto the Lily and could probably arrange for her to be lost in some sort of accident if she became a problem. All without it splashing on him. In the meantime, she might be useful to make some new outsystem contacts.
Location: Casa Verde Station, Safe House
Standard Date: 05 10 630
Juanita sat in the newly-installed data chair. “I have your suit. And I have a berth for you.”
“A berth?”
“Benny has a connection with the first mate on the Lavender Lily. It’s only insystem, from Casa Verde to a station in the Oort cloud and back.” The particulars showed up on the room screen. Apparently, Juanita was using the data chair to full advantage.
“How much of my pay am I going to have to pay Benny?”
“You won’t be getting paid. You won’t be on the books at all. At least for the first trip. You are doing Benny a favor in exchange for the suit. As a special bonus, though, you will be allowed to trade on your own with the rock miners out in the cloud. And Mr. Meyer will let you take two hundred kilos of goods with you for sale.”
“Assuming he lets me keep any of it,” Charleen muttered. She thought about the rats, and then she thought about the secret of the rats. If it got back to Station Security that the rats were sealing the asteroid, making parts habitable, the station authorities were going to do a survey and claim all the spare rooms for themselves. The rats would be a valuable cargo, but Charleen couldn’t think of a way to keep it secret. Besides, so far—with the exception of Mr. Rodent—all the rats were aggressively feral. Then Charleen had another thought. “Juanita, can you come up with a way of knocking out the rats for a while? Say a couple of days?”
“Probably. In spite of the changes, they are rodents. Feed them the right amount of barbiturates and they will sleep for several hours. Put knockout gas in a container containing the rats, and they will sleep as long as you like. Why?”
“Not sure yet, but I may have a plan.”
“Well, you will need to finish your planning quickly. The Lily is unloading now and will be leaving in two days.
“One other thing. Benny expects you to make contact with someone on Vikas Station. He wants additional outsystem contacts. I will provide a memcore.”
“I’m not getting paid and he expects me to make contacts for him?”
“If you provide a good contact, he will give you a bonus. Oh, and leave your credit data with me.” Juanita handed Charleen an emerald green memcore. “I need you to go to the SMOG branch and get your balance transferred to this, then bring it back to me. We’ll transfer it back when you return. That way, you can take your papers with you.”
Charleen wanted very badly to say “the fuck I will” to that. But she didn’t, because she knew what would happen if she did. She would go out the airlock and Juanita or another of Benny’s crew would take her memcore to the branch and the account would be transferred anyway. She knew how this worked. She grew up on a station not all that different from Casa Verde and in a part of the station that was possibly even rougher than this was. Instead she said, “I want a bonus for that. And tell Benny that if I have a good contact when I get back, I’m going to want a big bonus.” Benny would understand that.
Location: Casa Verde Station, Lavender Lily
Standard Date: 05 12 630
Dressed in an emergency suit, Charleen floated into the personnel lock of the Lily and looked around. The lock wasn’t corroded, but only because of the regular vacuum drying that it received. The graphite lubricant on the lock hinges was long overdue for replacement and the silicone seals were worn and leaked. It was only the regular influx of air that kept the lock filled after the outer hatch was closed.
The inner hatch opened to show a rotund man in a worn flex suit. He had no hair on his head and there were red spots where the flexsuit helmet pressed his head.
“All right. What have you got in the bag?” he asked. He was also wearing—but not pointing—a flechette pistol much like Charleen’s. Charleen’s was in a hidden compartment in her duffle, since Juanita informed her that the Lily didn’t allow the crew to go armed.
Her duffle held the two hundred kilos of gear she was—in theory—allowed to sell on her own.
She opened the duffle and displayed several small pieces of equipment, some foods, and seeds. She watched as Mr. Meyer went through her goods, claiming some for ship’s needs and pocketing more. After he was done, her duffle was lighter by twenty kilos.
Then she repacked it, and he led her to her berth. It was A Wing Aft. The ship didn’t have a ship’s brain like the Pandora. It didn’t even have an expert system. Instead, each wing was managed by the crew member assigned to it, and that meant that they couldn’t flap at nearly the speed of a real jump ship. It also meant that they were effectively limited to only very simple-to-manage jumps.
✽✽✽
Two hours later, while Charleen was still arranging her berth, the Lily started acceleration. It was less than half a standard grav, so it didn’t inconvenience Charleen much. She assumed that her watch mate was manning the A Wing Aft. So she finished putting things away, then pulled the sensor that she got from Juanita in exchange for a future favor. A big future favor, since there was no guarantee that she would be able to deliver her end of the deal.
She scanned the room for listening devices and cameras. She found them, but they didn’t work. So she took off her shirt and the harness containing the two comatose rats. She put the rats into the snap-together cage she’d brought, and hid the cage in her locker. Then she got dressed and went to the A Wing Aft to meet her shift mate.
A ship like this should have three people on each wing, taking it in shifts. What she found was the wing running on automatics.
Charleen didn’t want to touch anything. She knew perfectly well that if her wing were to impact another of the ship’s wings through an error in cycle timing, both wings would be destroyed. And, very probably, they would all die. So she examined without touching, then called the bridge.
“Bridge,” said a voice she didn’t recognize. It was older, female, and the product of many decades of drinking and smoking. Charleen guessed it had to be Captain Wanda Long, the skipper of this tub.
“Able Spacer Charleen Dreesen in wing control for A Wing Aft. I’ve been examining the controls and readouts. I’m reading Aft A as cycling thirty-two microseconds fast relative to Forward A and I’d like to adjust it.”
“Wait one.” There was a short pause. “Yes. Good catch, Dreesen. But I don’t want you messing with the controls until you have been read in on their quirks. Wait one. I’ll get Tommy to come help you out. That’s Spacer Tommy White. You really an able spacer, Dreesen, with the papers?”
“Except for the Casa version,” Charleen said.
The woman laughed. “Well, the local version is all Tommy has. It’s all most of us have. You just sit right there, Dreesen, and I’ll get Tommy down to you.”
✽✽✽
“So, who the fuck are you?” The guy was younger than Charleen, maybe twenty, maybe less. He had the bruising a person could get from a leaky hard suit, and was bleary-eyed from lack of sleep. “You coulda just told me, not ratted me out to the skipper. I woulda fixed it next shift.”
Charleen wasn’t at all sure how to respond to that. On a properly run ship, this sort of error was corrected immediately and any delay could get your papers pulled. But it was true that from the readouts it was unlikely that the wing would have drifted into the danger zone in the next few hours, if they kept to their present course. But, if they changed course, the wing pattern would shift, then the error might have been fatal. Charleen shook herself and just said, “I didn’t know where to find you to tell you about it.”
“Crew Cabin Aft A 1. What’d ya think? Skipper says you’re an able spacer. And you couldn’t figure that out?”
Charleen didn’t say anything. He had a point.
He waved at the console. “So how would you do it? Shift the timing?”
She told him.
He nodded, then leaned over and pressed the intercom button. “Skipper, be ready. I’m gonna see how the newbie does it.” He turned to Charleen.
She entered a series of commands and checked them, then hit execute. And on the next cycle, the aft A waited thirty-two microseconds before start up, and they were in sync with the forward A.
“You shoulda checked the Aft B and D to make sure they were in sync.”
“I did,” Charleen said, “before you got here. D is still a little off, but we’re better aligned with it than we were before.”
He looked at the readouts, then nodded. “Yep. Julio is off shift. He’ll get it when he comes on.” He looked at the time readout, then added, “I’m going back to bed. Don’t touch anything. I’ll be back to show you the ropes in four hours.”
Location: Lavender Lily
Standard Date: 05 20 630
Charleen sat in Aft A as they approached jump. She was trusted now, at least by the aft watch. That was Tommy, Julio on aft D, Susan on aft C and Mickie on aft B. The Lily had eight of the electromagnetic wings that jump capable ships used both to accelerate through normal space and to make jump. Four forward and four aft. With proper command and control, this would be a real jump ship, but not the way things were. There ought to be a total of 24 spacers on the wings, but this ship only carried 12. Seven on the forward wings, and five on the aft. The Lily had an engineer to manage the fusion bottle that fed plasma to the central core to provide power for ship systems, but no engineer’s mate. Nor was there a cook. The crew lived on packaged rations and sold their waste to the farms in the Oort cloud.
She waited and watched the readout as the flap patterns changed, and the skipper hunted for the right combination to make jump happen. This was not like any ship she had ever been on. Certainly not like the Pandora, with its ship’s brain and Danny Gold tied into it, feeling space and slipping through jumps as though it was nothing. This was like riding an old-fashioned elevator with an incompetent elevator boy trying to find the floor.
Finally, the skipper found the spot and they shifted. Only the readouts told her of the change, and then the way the acceleration evened out.
“Two hours to jump two,” the skipper announced. “Everyone, check your wings, and then take a break.”
Charleen checked the status of Aft A, looking at the wing projector through the cameras, checking the plasma feed even though they hadn’t used any plasma at all this trip, just the space dust and zero point energy. Then Charleen got up and made her now customary circuit around the aft ring. The Lily, like most ships, was a barrel-shaped body with wing projectors sticking out up to a hundred meters from the skin to project wings that stretched a hundred kilometers into space. In the case of the Lily, there were three habitable zones, a ring around the front rim of the barrel, a ring around the back rim, and an area next to the fusion power plant that ran down the center of the barrel. Charleen’s customary walk was around the aft ring corridor. The Lily was a hundred meters across, so Charleen’s walk was 314 meters of three-meter-wide corridor with living quarters and maintenance shops dotting the inner wall and occasional thick plexiglass portals dotting the outside wall. Since the ship was accelerating at about half a standard grav, Charleen’s walk was more of a skip, each step taking her a couple of meters.
At Aft B, Mickie was a room over from the Aft B control station working with the aluminum printer, making a set of rainbow-patterned decorative hair combs. Mickie had sandy brown hair, done up with three of the decorative combs in it. She was wearing a new disposable, a wasp-waisted, pseudo corseted outfit with puffed sleeves and ruffles in sky blue and yellow. She waved as Charleen skipped by.
***
Back at her station two hours later, the bumpy elevator ride was repeated and they made their second jump, the one that took them to within half a light second of the five hundred kilometer across cometary body that was their target.
Location: Casa Outsystem, Vikas Station
Standard Date: 05 22 630
Charleen stepped through the shuttle’s hatch to the station proper and saw a worn plastic banner proclaiming Vikas Station Restaurant. The restaurant wasn’t walled off from the corridor and the miners were seated at tables, eating. There were windows, heavy plexiglass, but real windows, and through them Charleen could see the rock rotating slowly in space. She was again under rotational gravity, though out here it was only about two-thirds of a grav. It was also tighter, a much smaller radius, so the Coriolis effect was greater. It took Charleen a few minutes to get her station legs back after the time on ship.
The miners were happy to see them. About a hundred men and women who spent their lives cutting cometary ice into blocks small enough to be shifted easily to a ship. They used specially designed shuttles, and they bought everything they used except oxygen and nitrogen, then lived on a station that orbited the comet because the comet wasn’t stable enough to spin. It was just ice and a few rocks that were on friendly terms, but not mated one to the other.
Charleen went to dinner in the restaurant and watched the miners and her crew mates mingle in the permanent flea market that was across the way. They were close enough in so that the deck of the station had a noticeable curve and Charleen had to take a couple breaths to keep her meal where it belonged, as her inner ears and eyes argued about what forces were acting on them.
While she was doing that, she was approached by a small woman with gray hair and dark eyes a narrow nose and wide mouth, in a worn flex suit. The woman pulled up a chair, seated herself like she owned the place, and said, “Hello. I’m Dori Vikas. I own this station.”
“Nice place,” Charleen said noncommittally.
“It’ll do for what it is,” Dori said, then continued. “I try to get to know the crews on ships that visit my station. I don’t want trouble.” There was a threat in her voice, more than just the words.
“No trouble,” Charleen agreed.
“Good, then. Now, I notice that you aren’t over at the flea market. Most spacers have something to sell.”
“I have quite a bit that you might find of use,” Charleen said. “But most of it doesn’t belong in a flea market.”
“What do you have to sell?”
“Is there someplace we can talk?”
Location: Vikas Station, Dori’s Office
One floor in from the restaurant was Dori’s office, a small bare room with a computer console and not much else.
Charleen pulled a memcore from her pocket and passed it over. This was a risky move in a way, but there wasn’t any other choice except to ship Lovie and Dovie, the mating pair of rats, back to Casa Verde.
Dori plugged the memcore in and Charleen said, “Call up the rat video.”
For five minutes Charleen waited as the rat video played. Made by her and Joey with the cooperation of Mr. Rodent, it extolled the station-sealing virtues of the Joey-named “Super Rats.”
“I don’t know . . .” Dori tried to sound disinterested. “Seems like they might be more trouble than they’re worth. After all—” She pointed out the window to the chunk of ice floating in space no more than two hundred klicks from the station.
“Yes, true enough,” Charleen agreed. “But it costs energy to crack the water into hydrogen and oxygen and that energy is at a premium out here. I know we brought several nuclear batteries, and that you wanted more than we brought.” Nuclear batteries were slow decaying fissionables surrounded by sheets of radiation cells, encased in heavy leaded bottles that provided a slow, steady power source. They were big, heavy, and expensive, but a standard product for stations that were too far from a sun to get much solar energy and not big enough to sport a fusion reactor.
The discussion continued, and Charleen went through the rest of her inventory. All of which was more valuable out here than back in station. The problem was that aside from water, Dori didn’t have all that much to sell. There were some other elements in the rock, and there was some slow life that operated even out here, a class of molds that grew over the course of centuries, not days or years, but produced compounds that the more active insystem life cycles were hard pressed to produce. The green tar used in making shield gold for spaceship engines was one example, but as it happened, not one that existed on the rock.
Charleen’s problem was that she didn’t know enough to know whether any of it was of any value. She eventually took a flyer on about two tons of the various molds from the rock, which she stowed just inboard from her cabin on the Lily. She got a ribbing from the crew about how useless it was on the trip back to Casa Verde. She also got a miner’s suit sized to her. It wasn’t exactly like a hard suit, since it came with a different suite of tools, but it was close enough to be convertible.
Finally, she did set up a link using Juanita’s memcore so that Dori Vikas could send encrypted messages to Casa Verde and read the responses. That was about as good a contact as Benny could hope for, the owner of the station. She asked Dori not to mention the rats and warned her about Benny, adding “You’re safe enough out here, but be careful of him if you go insystem. And don’t send anyone to deal with him you can’t afford to lose.”
“You want to stay out here?”
“What would I do on a mining station?” Charleen grinned. They shook hands and Charleen left.
She spent much of her time on the trip back tweaking her new suit into a proper spacer’s hard suit.
Location: Lavender Lily, off Casa Verde Station
Standard Date: 06 04 630
Charleen floated out the lock in her hard suit and used her jets to scoot over to the cargo hauler from the station. She fitted herself into the control section and linked into the control system, then flew back to the Lily and picked up a thirty-ton chunk of water ice, turned and guided the block to the cargo section, where it would be placed in a storage area. Then the storage area would be sealed and the ice melted, filtered and pumped into smaller containers to be transferred to the habitat section, where it would, as needed, be converted into oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen was used to power spaceships, and the oxygen used for station atmosphere.
Location: Casa Verde Station, Cargo Section
Standard Date: 06 05 630
“Fancy,” said the stevedore as Charleen opened her hard suit. “What did you give them out there to get a suit like that?”
“Why, I just gave them a bright and friendly smile,” Charleen lied, with no expectation of being believed.
The stevedore snorted.
Opening the chest plate like a door, Charleen snaked her right arm out of the sleeve and started undoing latches. A few moments later, she was out of the hard suit, wearing disposables from the Lily. She smiled at the stevedore and asked, “Where can I store Hilda here? Somewhere out of the way.”
“That smile won’t work on me, hon. You ain’t my type.”
“Worth a try. What will it cost me?”
He named a figure and Charleen winced. Then the bargaining began. Five minutes later, she had an agreement. If she didn’t get back here in three days to pay him, he would keep the suit. Charleen didn’t have any cash and, of course, her credit was in the emerald memcore that Juanita had.
Location: Casa Verde Station, Safe House
Juanita passed over the memcore without comment and Charleen looked at her. “My bonus?”
“It’s in there. At least, the bonus for leaving the accounts with me is in there. The bonus for a contact on Vikas Station depends on the contact.”
“The contact is Dori Vikas herself. What’s that worth?” Charleen held up her ruby memcore. “You should already have messages from her waiting to be decrypted. They will be corrupted attachments to her accounting reports.”
Juanita held out her hand and Charleen shook her head. “What’s the bonus?”
Location: Casa Verde Station, SMOG Office
Standard Date: 06 05 630
Horace G. Lee finished reading the legal opinion and smiled. He was worried when Benny the Mook sent Dreesen off on the freighter. But according to this, his case would be even better if she were to have a fatal accident while working on the Lily. There was one problem. If she was doing something illegal when she died, that would screw up the case. The truth was, Horace wasn’t expecting the case to go anywhere, but even a small chance at the payout that a full-fledged brain ship represented was worth the risk. Hell, even the Lily would be worth it, if he could find a claim to file. And if Charleen died while working, he just might be able to. He wrote a memo and sent it off to Shuster and Cartwright, asking what the Lily’s liability would be if Dreesen died while legally employed by the ship.
Then he went back to his other projects. Charleen Dreesen had a very short life expectancy anyway, but it was always better to get as many omelets as possible from broken eggs.
Location Casa Verde Station, Offices of Shuster and Cartwright
Standard Date: 06 05 630
Juanita found the email from Lee in her inbox, forwarded by Elaine Cartwright. Elaine’s attached note told Juanita to provide the precedents and make sure that Charleen’s agreement with Lee would extend to further action, and then destroy the email. It was pretty obvious that Lee planned to have Charleen die on the Lily.
She guessed that the order would go from Lee to Benny to Benny’s contact on the Lily. Benny would manage it well, but his contact was just an asshole who liked little boys. That was Benny’s hook into the guy. But whatever Meyer did to little boys who couldn’t fight back, he didn’t have the stones to take out Dreesen straight up. And Juanita doubted he would be able to sabotage her successfully.
Juanita was developing a healthy respect for Charleen Dreesen. And that was worrying, because if Meyer tried and failed, Charleen would know who ordered it, and guess that Juanita knew. Charleen would be pissed and Juanita didn’t want that anger directed at her.
The fact that Juanita liked Charleen wouldn’t have been enough to make her give warning. First and foremost, Juanita looked after Juanita. But liking Charleen did play a role in her decision tree.
Even as she was considering this, she was looking up precedents. What Lee wanted could be done, but to make it work right, a larger payment to Charleen would need to be made and backdated. Charleen wouldn’t have to actually know about that. It would just have to be in an account in her name. Also, to make Charleen legal, she would have to retain a law firm to apply for an insystem waiver. Something that would let her work insystem, but only in Casa Verde space. So that was what she wrote up.
Location: Casa Verde Station, Safe House
Standard Date: 06 06 630
“What’s up with the beans?” Charleen asked as Juanita slipped into the main room of the safe house.
“They are a variety of soybean, but have been tweaked for higher protein content. They taste horrible. But soaked and ground, they make a marvelous food for a variety of beefsteak mushrooms that are both nutritious and quite tasty. A farmer in section four was trying to smuggle them in. He is not happy that they went missing, but they are growing well in one of our farms.
“We need to have a chat.”
***
In Charleen’s room, Juanita pulled out her bug snoop and scanned the room. “They are going to kill you.”
“Why? I thought I was being valuable to Benny.”
“This doesn’t come from Benny.” Juanita told her the tale, even the fact that the law firm of Shuster and Cartwright attempted to get her the Casa Verde license that would let her sign onto a big dark jump ship, but only managed to get her a limited waiver. “That’s to keep you from packing your bags and leaving the system on the next jump ship through.”
Charleen nodded. It all held together. And she knew something else. She was going to have to somehow make the failure to kill her look like luck, not prior knowledge. Juanita was much too valuable to sacrifice.
Location: Casa Verde Station, Main Lock
Standard Date: 06 15 630
Charleen was legitimate this time, so she stood in line with the others waiting for the big lock to come across from the Cargo Section, then filed in and grabbed a handhold. Less than a minute later, she was stepping into the Cargo Section.
After a short detour to pick up supplies that were shipped across by way of the robot mini-shuttle, she went and collected her hard suit. One nice thing about hard suits, they had a lot of places to hide stuff if you knew how. Charleen knew how. Her flechette pistol was now in a pocket in the arm of her hard suit. And the rats were unconscious in a pocket in Hilda’s chest.
She knew Meyer was going to try and kill her this trip. She didn’t know if the rest of the crew knew about it.
Her supplies this time were mostly things that Dori Vikas ordered from Benny, and Benny would be paid in Casa System credits legally transferred to, and through, the law firm of Shuster and Cartwright. Charleen was getting a bonus for transporting the goods. Of course, after she was dead, the bonus would be paid to Meyer. That had an additional advantage this time. Meyer didn’t mess with the stuff she brought for trade. That, in turn, let her bring more, and more varied stuff than Benny knew about.
Location: Lavender Lily, En Route to First Jump
Standard Date: 06 19 630
Charleen stood on the gantry, that part of the deck that was open to space. A wing ship operated under constant acceleration, so “down” was mostly aft, and that allowed for the use of walkways surrounding the ship so that the wing projectors, communications equipment, plasma nozzles, and other equipment on the ship could be managed while under power. The gantry had a railing, though on the Lily there were several places where the railing was missing or loose. In fact, there was a loose section about a meter away from where Charleen was standing on the gantry, adjusting a feed tube to the plasma nozzle. It was, according to First Mate Meyer, an emergency job that needed to be completed before the first jump. She twisted the tube coupling with a monkey wrench and watched the readout through her interface. She wasn’t watching the readout for what she was supposed to be, though. She was watching for an override command.
It came.
A command was sent to vent plasma to the wings. And the exception for her wing was misplaced. She, or her implant—it was all too fast for human thought— sent a counter command and rang an alarm.
Meanwhile, Charleen dropped to her belly on the gantry.
She waited.
Nothing happened.
She called the bridge. “Bridge, this is Dreesen. I just got an alarm that the lockout for aft A was removed. What’s going on? You people trying to kill me?”
It was Meyer who answered. “What are you talking about? The lockout is in place. I’m looking right at the readout now.” A short pause, then, “Okay. I’m coming out there.”
Charleen stayed on the deck as she caught her breath. She was scared, but she had a few minutes. It would take Meyer a bit of time to get down here from forward. And, since it was him coming down—and because her lockout worked—the rest of the crew probably weren’t involved.
The problem now was all he had to do once he got here was shoot her and dump her off the gantry. The wings would pick her up and rip her to shreds as she added to the ship’s acceleration.
The ship’s cameras weren’t working out here, probably by Meyer’s design, but maybe just from lack of maintenance. Charleen had her own cameras, though. Carefully, she got up and went over to the lock that Meyer would likely use. She attached a mini-cam to the gantry railing. Then she went back to the wing and got back to work, using the hardsuit face mask to monitor the camera.
She had the plasma feed ring off by the time the lock opened, and she saw Meyer come out in a soft suit. Not a working suit, but a personal suit. More comfortable than a hard suit, but not a true flex suit. What mattered, though, was in his gauntleted hand. A flechette pistol.
Charleen moved. She ducked around the wing projector base, and crawled over to the equipment locker. Using her mag boots, she climbed over the gantry railing and out on the actual hull of the ship, then moved over to get behind Meyer. Her cam showed him moving cautiously toward the half-disassembled plasma feed and looking away from her. She used her suit jets to help her jump up and onto the gantry behind him, dangerous while the ship was under power. She landed on the gantry, took four giant steps, grabbed Meyer by the collar and ass of his suit, lifted him using her hard suit’s muscles . . . and threw.
He sailed out into space and started to spin, firing his flechette gun madly. To try and maneuver, or to try and kill her?
She didn’t know, or care, which.
She hit the deck of the gantry and then felt the bump as Meyer was caught by the flapping magnetic wings and accelerated to a considerable fraction of the speed of light. The soft suit, and his even softer body, was shredded by a magnetic field designed to rip atoms apart.
Charleen threw up in her suit, filling the helmet with vomit. The automatics pulled some of the gunk out of her helmet, enough so she didn’t suffocate. She had never killed anyone, not in her entire life. She was a tough woman, at home in a bar room brawl. But killing someone was different. Not harder, but worse. It was something she never wanted to do again, but she was starting to think she wasn’t going to have any choice in the matter.
Using her implant, she activated the suit comm to contact the bridge. “Skipper, Meyer went over the rail. He hit the wing. I saw it.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. He had a gun. He came at me and slipped. I think he was trying to kill me.”
“Why would he try to kill you?”
“I don’t know, Skipper. All I know is he had a gun in his hand, and when he went over the side, he started shooting.” Charleen looked around as well as she could through the patina of vomit on the face plate. There were a couple of divots that were probably flechette impacts scarring the hull that she could see. “I see a couple of dings, Skipper, but none are close to where I was. Maybe he was trying to use the flechette gun as a rocket. But why was he carrying it?” As she spoke, Charleen went over to the gantry railing and picked up the mini-cam. She wiped its memory, and after thinking about it, tossed it out into space. Better not to take chances.
“Look, Skipper, I’m coming in. When I saw the wing catch him, I lost my lunch in my helmet.”
***
Inside, Charleen pulled off the helmet, then the rest of the suit. Tommy was there, looking frightened. Then he wrinkled his nose at her appearance and the smell. She left her suit open, and headed for the fresher.
***
By the time she came out of the fresher, the whole crew was there. No one on the bridge, and everything on automatics. There was no way they would make jump in that state.
“What happened?” Captain Wanda Long asked. She was in an old flex suit, over which she wore disposables. Her captain’s cap was decorated with the scrambled eggs that some captains favored, but other than that it was a standard interface cap.
“I don’t know, Captain. I looked up and he was over the side with a flechette gun spinning him around like a top. And then he got far enough out to get caught by aft A as it flapped to rear extension, and . . . Well, it was too fast to really see, but it ripped him to shreds. It had to.”
“The sensor record shows that the lock opened over a minute before he hit the wing. What was happening all that time?” The skipper’s voice was accusatory, but Charleen wasn’t scared. The skipper had a tongue like sandpaper, but wasn’t going to hold a drumhead court, not on a tramp freighter that didn’t have any place to go but around the system and back to Casa Verde Station.
Charleen shook her head. “I don’t know, Skipper. I was neck deep in the damn plasma feed. It’s still half disassembled.”
“Tommy, you go out and check that.”
Tommy did, and the skipper ordered Charleen to her quarters until she decided what to do.
“Can I clean my suit, skipper? When I saw him, I lost everything in my stomach.”
“Not what you would expect from someone who took it into her head to kill the first mate, Skipper,” Roger Stone, the engineer, said.
“Besides,” offered Julio, “what’s her motive? It’s not like he was going to rape her in that hard suit.”
“No, you’re right about that,” the skipper said, and added with a grimace, “And she’s not his type, anyway. But something went on out there and, for the moment, I’m gonna put her under quarters arrest until we get somewhere where there is some sort of cop to investigate things. Julio, you clean her suit. Tommy, you go fix the plasma feed.”
With that, the court martial was over and everyone went back to work. Except Charleen, who went to her quarters and took a long, hot bath, while the ship accelerated in a long loop that would take them back to the jump.
Location: Casa Outsystem, Vikas Station
Standard Date: 06 22 630
“Why were the cameras out, Captain Long?” Dori Vikas tapped her desk. “And why are the gantry railings loose or broken?”
“Come on, Dori.” Wanda Long rolled her eyes. “You know that we’re behind on maintenance. With what we get on these ice runs, it’s surprising the wings still work. Gantry cameras are about four hundredth on the list of to dos. And the gantry railing is probably two hundredth.”
Charleen hid a smile. They were in Dori’s office and the investigation of the death of Conrad Meyer, First Officer on the Lavender Lily, was underway.
Dori asked some more questions, but the only suggestion of impropriety was the fact that Meyer was carrying a gun, and even then there was no evidence that he was actually pointing it at anyone, or that he fired it before he went over the side.
“And you said that there were some fresh dings on the skin of the ship, right? So that’s corroboration that he did indeed have a gun with him,” Dori pointed out.
“Someone had one!” Captain Long said, giving Charleen an accusing look. Then she added, “And Julio found a flechette gun in a pocket in her suit.”
“Not one I could get to without opening the suit,” Charleen said. “And you guys were right there when I came back in the lock. So it couldn’t have been that gun that put the divots in the hull. You know that, Captain.”
From her dissatisfied expression, it was clear that Captain Long did know that. And wasn’t pleased by the knowledge.
There was some more arguing, but Dori bangled a paperweight on her desk and delivered her findings. Insufficient evidence to hold Charleen. And a tentative finding of death by misadventure in the matter of First Mate Conrad Meyer.
***
Two hours later, Charleen was back in Dori’s office. “So what really happened?” Dori asked as she waved Charleen to a chair. “The recorders are off. And I know something’s up, because I got a message from Benny that I was to make sure that Meyer wasn’t prosecuted for your accidental death. I wasn’t happy with that message, but I’d probably have gone along simply to keep the pipeline of goods and equipment open. I’m just as happy not to have to.”
Until Dori said that, Charleen was planning on keeping her mouth shut. But if Dori was being this up front about Benny’s contact . . . well, it might be worthwhile to open up. “From my sources, Benny wasn’t behind it. He just made the arrangements. I was supposed to die on the trip out, and the Lavender Lily was to take the blame. That would give a man named Horace Gordon Randolph Lee the right to sue them on my behalf and receive the damages due me. He bought the rights to sue on my behalf when Danny Gold dumped me on Casa Verde.”
“So, this Danny Gold screwed you, and you sold your right to sue to Lee?”
“Sort of. I don’t think Danny meant to, but it looked like he was going to get dumped on but good. And I didn’t want to get splashed. None of that matters. The thing is, if I died on the Lily, then he would have a good shot at seizing the ship and a better case against Gold. So, I’m more valuable to him dead than alive.”
“You sure you don’t want to stay out here?”
“Like I said, what would I do out here?”
“Honestly, I’m glad you feel that way.” Dori got up, walked over to a sideboard, and picked up a red crystal decanter. She held it up and Charleen nodded. Then she poured them both shots of New Kentucky whisky, part of Charleen’s off the books cargo this trip. “Because I’m not sure I would have let you stay. You see, I own a ten-point share in the Lily. That’s the only reason it stops out here. The Casa authorities are trying to shut me down so they can take over. That’s why the taxes on any goods shipped out from insystem are so high.”
“You think Lee is involved?”
“I have no idea. He’s not someone I know about.”
Charleen sipped her whisky. “So, what do you want from me?”
“I want you to keep the pipeline open. I want factory bots. I want expert systems. I want a fucking fusion tube if I can get one.” Modern fusion plants used a fusion bottle to fuse the hydrogen but collected the energy using a magnetic tunnel that pulled energy from the helium plasma that was ejected from the fusion bottle. It was a long tube, and by the time the helium left it, almost half its energy was converted into electrical power. They were big, expensive, and more suited to spaceships than stations because the helium was still moving pretty fast when it left the tube.
“I don’t think I can get you a fusion tube,” Charleen said. “But make me a list and I’ll see what I can do. Assuming I still have a job on the Lily after this.”
“I’ll talk to the other owners,” Dori said. “And while we’re about it, I want you to put me in touch with your source.”
“My source?”
“The one who warned you about the attack.”
Charleen shook her head. “Not now. If you want, I’ll tell him you want to set up relations, but I won’t do a thing unless he agrees.”
“Good enough. You know that book code program you brought me from Benny?”
Charleen nodded.
“Get him a copy of that and tell him to use Jane Eyre as the book. The forty-third E-edition, published by Banyon Press.”
“I can do that,” Charleen agreed, making a note of the book and edition in her internals.
Location: Casa Verde Station, Safe House
Standard Date: 07 02 630
“What took you so long?” Juanita Davis asked as a weary Charleen Dreesen sank into the chair.
“A busted coil on Forward B, and not enough crew to fix it in a reasonable amount of time.” Charleen shook her head. “That ship is in serious need of more crew and more maintenance.”
“You know, you aren’t the only spacer who got stuck here because of the issue with papers.”
“You know others?”
“Some. They have not all been as lucky as you. Several are in lock-up.” Juanita got that look in her eye, the one that said her brain was busy in the station net, and she would return to her body when she was good and ready.
Charleen waited, leaned her head back against the back of the chair and closed her eyes. She was asleep almost immediately, then—
“Charleen, wake up,” Juanita said. Not quite shouting, but sharply.
“What? Sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Several are acting as spacers, essentially indentured to get their local ticket. Three are in lock up because they didn’t want to take that sort of deal. Two have become flash addicts and over fifteen have simply fallen off the grid. They are either living as station rats or dead.”
“See if you can find some of those. Though my guess is that at least a few of them got smuggled aboard ships heading outsystem and have promised themselves that they will never return to the Casa System.”
Location: The Grill, Level 17, Habitat Section
Standard Date: 07 02 630
“What the hell happened, Mook?”
Benny gritted his teeth but didn’t respond. Mr. Lee was not someone he could challenge. If he hit Lee, he would be dealt with, and they both knew it. But even Mr. Lee didn’t call Benny “Mook” unless he was pissed. “I don’t know, sir. We got a radio message from my contact on Vikas Station. All she knew was that Conrad Meyer had some sort of accident and went over the side. I have to assume that Charleen Dreesen is a lot tougher than she looks. Or she just got lucky. Either way, she’ll probably be on the lookout now. She can still be taken out, but it’s going to be hard to make it look like an accident.”
Benny waited while Mr. Lee mulled.
“Okay. For now, leave her alone. The suit against Gold is still in the works, so for now it’s probably better if she stays alive and legal.”