Part 3 — Smuggler In Chief
Location: Casa Verde Station, Safe House
Standard Date: 07 18 630
Mike set the fancy cappuccino in front of Charleen Dreesen. “Please, you have to take her with you!”
“Why? She doesn’t know jack about life on a spaceship.” Charleen sipped the coffee and looked around the stone room, a converted hole in the large rotating asteroid that was Casa Verde Station. The walls were rock, cut and polished, but not painted, the table was extruded plastic, with extruded iron legs, just like the chair she was sitting in.
“Because Bruno talked to Benny about Debby, and Benny came by here just before you got back. He didn’t do anything more than grab her ass, but he was starting the hunt.” Mike’s daughter Debby was only twelve, but Benny the Mook liked to start his girls and boys off young. And while Mike wouldn’t object if she eventually chose that line of work, he didn’t want her doing it now. And he wanted it to be her choice.
Charleen knew all that from prior discussions. She also knew that Debby was in a hurry to grow up and something of a pain in the butt. If she stayed here, she would fall into Benny’s hands. And Benny wasn’t—from all reports—a kind and considerate lover. The reason Mike thought Charleen could take her is that as of this morning, station time, Charleen was the new First Mate on the Lavender Lily, an ice ship that made the run from Casa Verde Station, located 128 light minutes from the primary, to Vikas Station, located in the Oort cloud three light months out. It took two jumps to get there and a couple of days to a week to get to the jump chain, depending on how much went wrong with the hundred and fifty-year-old wing ship. “All right. I’ll talk to Juanita about getting her a suit of some sort. But she’s too damn small for a hard suit, and she’s still growing.”
“There must be work that she can do in the ship?”
“Some. But—” Charleen paused, trying to think of a polite way to put it, then gave up. “—she’s almost totally uneducated. She needs both education and training, and she’s almost thirteen and still doesn’t have internals.” Internals were the computer interface systems that were surgically implanted into anyone not at the absolute bottom of the social heap at about age seven. Even Charleen got hers at seven, and her people weren’t wealthy by a long shot.
Mike was in his thirties and still didn’t have the implants, which kept him from about eighty percent of the available jobs on Casa Verde Station. His lack of literacy kept him out of around the next eighteen or so percent, which didn’t leave a lot for him to do except prostitution or running an off the books safe house like this one.
Since Charleen’s arrival and the new job at the safe house, Mike was trying to save enough to get Debby and Joey the internal interfaces, but he was nowhere close to the cost yet.
“There is no way the Lavender Lily is going to front that sort of money, Mike. That means she will mostly be limited to mopping decks and we have bots for that. But if you can get her a suit, I’ll take her. She can at least learn her way around a ship. With a couple of trips under her belt, she might put together enough for an interface.”
Location: Lavender Lily, at Casa Verde Station
Standard Date: 07 24 630
Debby swallowed as Charleen Dreesen dragged her into the lock from the station to the boarding area of the Lavender Lily. She hated this. She knew her world—Casa Verde Station. At least the part of it that the station rats inhabited. She had gravity and the Coriolis effect was something she had lived with her whole life. She knew her role in the world, the same role that her dad occupied. She even knew that her first few times wouldn’t be a lot of fun. But she wanted to have money. Money for treats and clothes. And she was just getting big enough to have something to sell to get it.
And now she was stuck on this ship, where everyone would look down on her and she couldn’t do anything. Without any gravity. Her stomach wasn’t happy.
She looked at Charleen Dreesen with something very close to hate, and the bitch didn’t even seem to notice. Of course, with Charleen in that giant hard suit, you couldn’t tell much of anything about what she thought.
***
Charleen thought that Debby No-last-name was a teenager, or about to be. And that was all the condemnation Charleen needed. The lock cycled and Charleen floated into the corridor of the forward ring with Debby tethered to her. She used the magnetics in her boot soles to lock the suit to the deck.
The hatch closed. Charleen opened the suit and climbed out of it while Debby opened the flexible plastic helmet of her emergency suit. Debby was floating kitty-cornered to the direction down would be once the Lavender Lily got underway, so Charleen started to reposition her.
“What’s this?” Captain Wanda Long asked as the locks to the station disconnected with a clang. The captain was holding herself in place with a hand on the railing and was still wearing the old flex suit. The disposables over it were red with black piping this week. Her face had the slightly bruised look of someone who has been exposed to a low-pressure environment recently, and her voice was raspier than the last time they talked.
“This is Debby, our new ship’s girl, Skipper,” Charleen said.
“I don’t recall agreeing to a ship’s girl, Dreesen.”
“No, ma’am. It came up suddenly. Think of it as a favor to Juanita Davis.” That was a lie, but one that Juanita would probably back her on.
“What’s her training?”
“None at all, Captain. Not even an interface.”
“Then what possible good is she?”
“She can watch readouts and call people. She can work in hydro.”
“You do recall that we don’t have hydroponics on this bucket?”
That was true. Charleen hadn’t forgotten. Instead, she was trying to get hydro set up. Using one hand to hold herself in position she reached into an internal pocket on her hard suit and brought out a bag of seeds and growth agent.
The captain snorted. “You mess up my atmo balance and you’ll go out the lock, whatever Dori Vikas and the owners want.”
“I’ll be careful. Did you get the package I sent?”
“Yes. It’s in storage area three, next to your quarters. Where do you want to put the girl?”
Charleen turned to Debby “Where do you want to stay, kid? Forward with me, the captain, and the forward wing crew, or aft with the aft wing crew?”
Debby looked at her, face full of resentment, and said, “I’ll stay aft if I have any choice.”
“It’s fine by me.” Charleen rotated back to the Captain. “Skipper?”
“Makes no difference to me. But her food’s coming out of your meals.”
“Right, Skipper. There’s extra grub in the package, along with seals and some equipment for the ship. What’s the schedule?”
The captain tapped her captain’s cap and said, “Roger, get us underway.”
There was a nudge, then another. Both at almost a right angle to “down” as the ice ship used thrusters to move away from the station and rotate. Charleen reached out a hand and grabbed Debby. More short burns of the positioning system. It was almost two minutes later that the ship’s body was rotated enough to let the forward wings make half strokes without impinging on the station. Slowly, the ship started to move and they felt gravity start to take hold. It came up to—Charleen checked her internals automatically—3.2 meters per second squared. A touch under a third of a standard grav. Once they were well away from the station that would go up to a standard grav, since they were running close to empty.
Location: Lavender Lily, Two Days out from Casa Verde Station
Standard Date: 07 26 630
Debby sat in the worn seat of the Aft C wing controller watching a computer screen show graphs and numbers. The first graph showed the speed of flaps, and the second showed the level of force that the Aft C wing was producing. It was boring. Boring, boring, booooring. It would be boring even if she knew how it worked. Finally, Sam Tucker got back from lunch, and she was released. She left the wing control section, and started back to her quarters. But her quarters were just as boring.
So instead of going back to her quarters, she went exploring. She walked left around the ring checking hatches. Debby grew up on Casa Verde Station, and not the good part, so she knew about air leaks and the dangers of space. She wore her emergency suit and checked gauges as she explored. She found that the Lavender Lily was not nearly as well appointed in terms of hidden places as the station was, but it did have some unused equipment closets and several hydro sections that were shut down and opened to vacuum.
Debby couldn’t open the hatch. They locked if the pressure difference was great enough. So, for now, Debby went on to the next hatch. It was a lock to the interior of the ship; the storage hold that was open to vacuum and would hold the ice that the Lavender Lily shipped in from the Oort cloud on the trip back. There was a much smaller area that held the supplies that the ship took out, but the truth was that the Lily mostly deadheaded to the Oort cloud. It took tons of ice to pay for grams of equipment.
Debby pulled the soft helm over her head and sealed it. She stepped into the lock and waited for it to cycle, then made her way along the catwalk to the back of the hydro sections. There were holes in the back of the chamber, but they were mostly small, and there was a discoloration on the catwalk where the whatever it was sprayed out of hydro onto the metal of the walkway.
The lights on her helmet bobbed as she moved, and the whole place had an eerie feel to it.
***
Her internals alerted Captain Wanda Long that someone had opened lock three internal aft, and she called up the lock camera. The image was fuzzy and there was a blotch of something in the lower left quadrant of the field but it was clear enough to see that Debby was in the lock and that her helmet was on and sealed. Wanda tagged the soft suit to alert her if it lost pressure, but other than that left the kid to her exploring.
Standard Date: 07 28 630
Debby lay in her bunk, in brand new disposable pajamas, listening and trying to read along as the slate read to her about the printers.
“The printers are necessary units on any spaceship. Like the ship’s carpenter from the Old Earth age of sail, they are central to any number of minor and occasionally major repairs. The Lavender Lily carries four types of printer. The steel printers, the aluminum printers, the plastic printers, and the molecular printer.”
Debby tapped the image of the plastic printer.
“The plastic printer, aside from the ship’s parts, is used to produce the disposables the crew wear, and plates, utensils, tools, sometimes hobby products. Anything produced by the plastic printer is logged and clothing, hobby products and anything else printed for personal use are to be vatted for recycling when the crew member is finished with them, else the crew member’s pay will be docked.”
Debby tapped the question box and asked, “How are disposable clothes made?”
What she got was a movie of a disposable party dress being made. Individual microfibers were extruded and woven together to form threads which were then woven through a micro mesh to give them shape and form. The plastic extruder was connected to a set of 500 small robotic arms that did the weaving.
“While primarily controlled through programming, the plastic extruder does need some monitoring,” the program said.
“I’d volunteer for that,” Debby muttered.
“Noted,” the slate said.
“Wait a minute—” Debby started, then thought about it. This wasn’t Charleen being a bitch. It was just the ship system responding to Debby. “Computer, is there bonus pay or benefits to volunteering?”
“Crew members are salaried employees paid by the week, so bonus pay and benefits fall under the captain’s discretion. However, it is standard practice to offer bonuses for voluntary extra work.”
So maybe. Debby considered. It wasn’t like she had a bunch to do. She couldn’t really stand a watch. She didn’t have the implants.
***
Captain Wanda Long’s implants pinged her. The ship’s girl just volunteered to watch the plastics extruder. It wouldn’t hurt anything if the kid got bored. Which she surely would. Watching a printer operate was right up there with watching paint dry for excitement.
***
Debby did find monitoring the plastic printer boring. She also found it irritating, because 115 of the robot arms of the printer were nonfunctional. No one fixed them. They just noted the nonfunctional arms and had the software work around the lack. Debby started researching. She found five parts that needed replacing in one arm, three in the next, and so on. She was so busy playing with the printer that she didn’t even notice they were approaching Vikas Station.
The ship’s intelligent system, though, took note of Debby’s repairs and reported them to the captain, who was rather pleased, but much more surprised. She authorized Debby to use the plastic printer as she chose.
Location: Vikas Station
Standard Date: 07 29 630
Ignoring Dori Vikas, Captain Wanda Long sipped the Cerveza Black, a Guinness variant that was a product of Vikas Station hydroponics and a brew master with a special touch. There was never enough of the beer to export, but Wanda enjoyed it while she was here. “Ah . . .” She set down the beer and looked up to see Dori and Charleen looking at her. “Sorry. I miss this.”
“Well, if you make the run to Casa Azul, I’ll give you a case.”
“We don’t have the rutters for Azul. You know that.”
“I do,” Charleen said.
“What?” Wanda almost spilled her beer. “Where did you get them?”
“I’m a spacer, Captain.” Charleen shrugged in that irritating way of hers. “I have rutters for millions of jumps. That’s most of what’s in my ruby memcore.” Then she grimaced. “In this case, the Pandora sent me a copy of her rutters for the Casa System as a parting gift when I left the ship.”
“Okay. You have them, but the rutters for a brainship are different. They are . . .” Wanda ran out of words because the difference was hard to describe. It wasn’t that they were more or less precise, more that they were less restrictive. A ship like the Pandora could use adjustments of their wing fields to make jump in a lot of places and on a lot of vectors that a ship like the Lily couldn’t. Even a ship with artificial brain wing controllers would be able to adjust to the minor variations in dust and zero-point energy in a way that a crew couldn’t.
“I know, Captain. But I think we can calculate jumps for Azul based on the rutters I have.”
“You think? You’re an able spacer, not an astrogator.”
Again with that shrug that Wanda found irritating. Mostly, Wanda knew, because it usually meant that Charleen was right and she was wrong. “I’ve been handling wing interfaces since I was sixteen on dozens of ships and I was linked into the Pan at most jumps while I was aboard. Between those I got a feel for the jumps, and I have been watching what we do in the Lily. There’s no feel to it, but I can get the reads on all the wings from the bridge interface. I’m pretty sure I can pilot through jump eleven on route sixteen.” She used her interface to call up the jump. “After that, it’s pretty straightforward.” She called up a string of three more jumps that would get them to Casa Azul, a mining station located only seven light minutes from the primary, which was the mining center for the promethium batteries that provided most of the power for Vikas Station. The markup that Casa Verde was charging on the batteries was one of the reasons that both the Lily and Vikas Station were in financial trouble.
“Maybe. But even if you can get us there, that’s no guarantee that we will get a better deal. And the authorities on Casa Verde aren’t going to be happy.”
“Maybe not,” Charleen said. “But if they become too much of a pain, we can just drop Casa Verde from our route.”
“Are you nuts?”
“I’m not saying we would do it. But what if we did? Where would they get the ice they need to handle the atmo loss from leakage without us?”
“There are other ships.”
“Yes, there are. Verde gets at least two ships a week, but almost all of them are outsystem ships, many of which will be gone for years after their visit, and none of which are going to be willing to ship something as low profit as ice.”
“What will it take to get you to try it?” Dori Vikas asked.
“You’re serious about this, aren’t you?” When Dori nodded Wanda put her beer down and looked at the jump route displayed on the virtual screen. Using her hands and her internals she rotated the map, looking at it from various angles. It might work. But if it doesn’t, I’m going to face time penalties. “If it doesn’t work you pay the penalties.” Even if it does, there are going to be people on Casa Verde Station that will be seriously pissed at me. “If it does—” She considered. “—if it does, you are going to provide ID and papers for our ship’s girl.”
Charleen blinked and Dori looked confused, so Wanda explained. “A station rat that I got stuck with by Benny the Mook’s consigliere. If I have to carry her, I want her legal.” And that was all it was, Wanda insisted to herself. It didn’t have anything to do with the fact that the kid was fixing stuff on the ship or the ridiculous notion that Wanda was starting to like the kid.
Location: Lavender Lily, En Route to Casa Azul
Standard Date: 08 12 630
Wanda focused on her interface, reading the potentials of the wings. They were getting close to Dreesen’s jump and Wanda didn’t see the way through it.
She watched as they got close and Dreesen started playing with field density. The delay time was too great. By the time Dreesen gave the order and the crewman on the wing made the adjustment, they were five flaps behind. Wanda could see it happening and realized that if they had better response time, it would work. But it didn’t. Over the next hour, while they traversed the jump, constantly adjusting their wing’s fields and flap rates, they almost made jump at least ten times. But they exited the jump point still on this side of the jump.
“Sorry, Captain,” Dreesen said. “But we have the readings from this pass. I think I can do it if we try again.”
A part of Wanda wanted to tell Charleen Dreesen to shove it, blame the whole problem on her, and go back through three jumps and make their way to Casa Verde. But the captain in her, the woman who had worked her way up from an able spacer over thirty years of work and failure, realized that with the data they collected on the last pass they probably could make it through.
“We’ll make the loop all right, but you won’t be conning us on our second pass through. You, Roger, and I are going to spend the next three days while we loop back to this jump point coming up with a program that will respond to zero-point-energy variations by specific limited wing fluxuations.” She almost left it at that, but a strange urge for honesty prompted her to continue. “It’s not your fault. No human can respond fast enough. It takes automatics.”
***
Debby couldn’t help with the programing. She didn’t have the interface and knew jack all about spacing anyway. So while they made their loop, she spent the time printing parts and installing them as she was instructed by the ship’s AI. Sometimes she was helped by the ship’s automatics, and sometimes she worked on her own with just the slate and its vids to show her where the different parts went.
Location: Casa Azul Station
Standard Date: 08 19 630
Debby followed Captain Wanda Long out of the shuttle craft and into the station. The shuttle was parked in a docking bay near the rim. Like Casa Verde, Casa Azul was an asteroid, but it was five kilometers long and three wide. It rotated slower and because it was much closer to the sun, it got most of its power from an umbrella of solar cells. It was mostly iron, but there were good-sized pockets of promethium. It felt strange. She was with the skipper to get an actual ship suit. Not an emergency suit, a real soft suit. One that she could wear until she outgrew it, and one that wouldn’t tear under casual use.
***
Debby pulled on the pants of the soft suit then, following the video connected the suit waste disposal pads front and back. The emergency suit didn’t have any means of handling waste. Then she wriggled into the top, attached it with the seal at her waist, and checked the readout on the arm of the suit. She pulled on the gloves and used the wrist seal to lock them in place. Finally, she put on the helmet. The shop woman came over and checked her seals, then used controls to scrunch the legs and arms up a bit so that the suit would fit Debby.
Debby loved it. It was hers, with a hard helmet and a HUD in the visor. She still didn’t have an interface. The skipper was pleased with the price they got for their ice on Casa Azul, but not that pleased. Debby was surprised that she got the suit.
But she spun around, and jumped up and down, making sure she could move in the suit. She could, but it was certainly work. The suit, with the oxy recycling system, weighed over fifteen kilos.
Location: Lavender Lily, Final Approach to Vikas Station
Standard Date: 08 27 630
Debby watched the plastic sheet come out. It wasn’t clothing. It was a seal, a patch for Hydro Aft 4. It was four meters long, flexible, but only in the length dimension, and it had a seal attachment to connect it to another sheet the same shape. The skipper gave her permission to make it, though Debby might not have told the skipper all the details of how it would work.
Location: Lavender Lily, Bridge
“We have your batteries for you, Dori,” Wanda said. “You owe me a case of beer and a full load of ice.”
“A full load? Come on. A load of batteries is only— Wait. You have a double load of batteries?”
“Yep.” Wanda smirked. “You better make that two cases of beer.” Wanda looked over at Roger, who was grinning to beat the band. Aside from the batteries, they were stocked with forty tons of titanium tension rods, the sort used to keep asteroid stations like Casa Verde from flying apart due to their centrifugal force.
She looked over at Dreesen and felt her smile dim. She knew it wasn’t really Dreesen’s fault, but she just couldn’t warm to the woman.
“So, will you be going back to Casa Azul?” Dori asked.
“Not this trip. We have been getting irate messages from Casa Verde since we diverted to Azul. At this point, I figure we need to make a stop there to mend our relations.”
***
It took three days to load the Lily with ice. Then they headed back insystem to Casa Verde.
Location: Lavender Lily, off Casa Verde Station, Cargo Section
Standard Date: 09 05 630
Debby watched as Charleen used her hard suit and cargo rig to shift huge blocks of ice from the hold of the Lily to the ice storage and processing area in the Casa Verde cargo section. It was a big job and the bad news was they brought so much ice that they dropped the price. The good news was that it was still a lot of credits. It wasn’t enough to get the Lily’s debts up to date, but it sure got them closer. And they hadn’t told the station about the tension rods yet.
Debby called up the price of tension rods on the station manifest and compared it to the variety they had. Even as she watched, the Lily started selling them and it took a little while for the station traders to realize that there was a new supply.
Location: Casa Verde Station
Standard Date: 09 07 630
Debby followed Charleen down the corridor toward the hock shop that hid the entrance to the safe house. She was dressed in new disposables, spacer style, and she had an amber memcore with an actual credit balance in her pouch. It wasn’t much of a credit balance, but that was going to change. Because Debby had a plan.
The door to the hock shop was open and she followed Charleen in. She recognized Jamie Cortez, a black-haired woman of about forty, wearing new disposables in a paisley pattern of brown and gold to go with her mocha skin. “What happened to you, kid? You look like a spacer.”
“I am a spacer. I have a memcore and in it are my papers as an apprentice spacer.”
“I’m impressed.” Jamie pushed a button under the counter and a door that until a moment before looked like a section of wall popped open about four centimeters. Charleen nodded at Jamie and went through the door. Debby followed. Then they went down a twisting staircase to the main room of the safe house.
Dad was there and Joey, but so were Benny the Mook and Juanita Davis. Benny looked satisfied and Dad looked scared.
***
Charleen, in a moment, realized exactly what was happening and that she should have expected it. Benny was embarrassed. Getting Debby loose looked like they got away with something. It was unlikely that Benny really cared one way or the other about Debby, but he couldn’t let people think that he could be gotten around. Bruno reached for Debby and Mike tried for Bruno. Benny drew his flechette pistol. And, without thinking about it, Charleen drew hers and shot. Then shot twice more. She didn’t think at all. She just reacted to the surge of terror and Benny’s move.
It wasn’t until she had the pistol smoking in her hand and Benny was collapsed on his chair with blood pouring from two holes that she realized Benny hadn’t been drawing on her. He hadn’t even been planning on shooting anyone, except maybe to wound Mike.
It didn’t matter though.
She pointed her gun at the rock ceiling of the safe house main room, noting in passing that at a distance of less than ten feet she had missed the big man once.
“Everyone, calm down. It’s over!” Charleen shouted. She hadn’t meant to shout, but she was scared out of her mind. She took a breath and waited a few seconds more, half-expecting one of Benny’s hands to shoot her in retribution. She couldn’t prevent it. She didn’t have eyes in the back of her head and there were hands all around the room.
No one shot.
Slowly, careful not to point it at anyone, Charleen put her pistol back on its magnets.
She glanced at Juanita. “What happens now?”
Juanita shook her head. “I have no idea. Benny put no plans in place for his demise.”
***
Bruno was still holding the kid’s arm. Not because he wanted to, but because until a few seconds ago, it was his job. He looked around the room. Including him, there were four of Benny’s hands, if you didn’t count Juanita, and no one did. Juanita was a consigliere, not a hand. Of the hands in the room, Bruno was the fastest, but his gun hand was full of the kid’s arm. That would slow him. He almost tried it anyway, but he hesitated.
And that hesitation led to thought. The other hands were looking at him as Juanita spoke, and Bruno knew that he didn’t want to be Benny. Partly that was because Charleen Dreesen’s gun hand was still next to her gun. Partly it was because even if he took her, Ann Chi would try for him. Might take him even as he took Dreesen. But mostly it was because the Perro Jefe was a target and Bruno didn’t want to be a target.
He looked at the spacer. “I guess you’re the Perra Jefa now,” he said, letting go of Debby’s arm. He looked at Ann Chi, rested his hand on the pistol and said, “I’ll back Charleen Dreesen, the new Perra Jefa.”
Ann looked at him and for a second he thought she was going to try it. But she didn’t. After a long, long moment, she slowly nodded and moved her hand away from her gun.
***
Debby couldn’t move. She was too frightened.
The boogeyman of her childhood and the hurdle she would have to leap to reach adulthood was gone in the blink of an eye.
And Charleen Dreesen did it.
The snooty woman who probably had the hots for Dad and treated Debby like she was a little kid was scarier than Benny the Mook. She was just standing there with her flechette gun pointing at the ceiling, ready to kill anyone who looked at her cross-eyed. Then she slowly brought the pistol back to her leg and let it attach to the magnets and said something to someone.
Debby couldn’t hear for the blood pounding in her ears. She had been smarting off to this crazy fucking killer ever since she met her.
Charleen said something, sounding calm. Then Juanita said something, and Debby almost understood.
Bruno let go of Debby’s arm and said he’d back Charleen. What? Charleen Dreesen is the new Perra Jefa, top dog?!
“You will need to have a talk with the director for La Causa,” Juanita explained the way she did. “And the argument you used with Benny will not work with the director. He is protected in ways Benny wasn’t. His death would produce an investigation and prosecution. The other station bosses would not like that.”
“So what do you suggest?” Charleen paused, then said, “No. We will talk about it later and in more privacy.” She turned to Bruno. “Bruno, I want you to run things for now, just as if Benny was still in charge.” She looked around the room. “That goes for everyone. No mention of what happened here or even that Benny is gone until I have a chance to talk to the director. Mike, help Bruno stow the body somewhere until we figure out what to do with it. Debby, look after your brother for now. You will be going back on board the Lily tomorrow. Say nothing to anyone about what you saw here today.”
Debby nodded, then collected Joey, and they went to the bedroom she and Joey shared before she started working on the Lily.
Location: Casa Verde Station, Offices of SMOG
Standard Date: 09 08 630
Horace G. Lee looked up as Benny’s little geek came in with Dreesen. Juanita was her usual stick-up-the-butt self, but he could tell right away that Dreesen was scared. Something was up, and for whatever reason, Dreesen wasn’t trying to make a run for it on that tramp she crewed on. He stood and waved them to the cubicle that was his official office. Once they were inside, he ordered the windows to opacity and closed the door. He then turned on the sound blanket and watched as Juanita pulled out her personal scanner and scanned for bugs, all the while getting more and more jittery.
Finally, with everyone seated again, he asked, “What’s this all about?”
Charleen Dreesen spoke, sounding nervous, “Benny the Mook is rat food in a compartment that the station authorities don’t know holds air.”
Horace looked at Juanita, and she nodded confirmation. “How did it happen?”
“He drew on me,” Dreesen said. Then, in a rush, “In hindsight, I think it was intended as no more than a threat, but hindsight doesn’t get us much of anything. He drew. He’s dead. I don’t want to kill anyone else if I don’t have to, but I don’t want to die.”
Suddenly Horace was scared. He knew he was protected, knew that if Dreesen killed him she would be dead not long afterward. But she just admitted that killing Benny was a mistake. Horace didn’t want to encourage any more such mistakes, say, killing him. Besides, Dreesen was proving exceedingly difficult to kill. He honestly didn’t have anything against the spacer. It was just business. “I take it you’re here to make things right without ending up dead?”
He waited while Dreesen nodded, then continued. “Do you have a plan for that?”
She nodded again.
This was like pulling teeth. “Well, trot it out!”
They did, partly Dreesen, but mostly Juanita. Benny’s demise would be kept relatively quiet. It would leak, of course, but the part of the station under Benny’s control would stay the same. And Charleen, advised by Juanita, would run it. Benny would remain officially alive as one of the phony IDs they used for transactions.
Horace listened to it, then shook his head. “I need more. Like you said, Benny’s death is going to leak and your continued survival will be seen as a concession on my part. If I don’t get some compensation for it, it will make me look weak. You understand that, don’t you, Ms. Dreesen?”
“Give me some time. A couple of months. And let me see if I can . . .” She trailed off as he shook his head.
“Something up front, or at least a concrete promise.”
“An increase in your take by five percent in the next six months,” Juanita said.
Horace looked at her, feeling relief. “Fifteen and three months.” Negotiating and shooting didn’t go together.
They came out at eight percent and five months.
“What about the Lily? You upset some people when you jumped them to Casa Azul.”
“They can make that jump on their own, sir, but I have someone I can put on their crew to move items for us.”
“The ship’s girl?” Horace shook his head. “She’s a station rat and doesn’t have the rank.”
“She will need better papers and an interface, but the fact that she is only a ship’s girl will help.”
That took some explaining, but finally Horace agreed to at least give them a shot. He would front the money for Debby’s implants in the form of a perfectly legitimate loan from SMOG Savings and Loan.
“What about the Lavender Lily? You can’t be a Perra Jefa and crew on a tramp at the same time.”
“Juanita will be in charge here for the next trip while I break in a new mate for the Lily. Then I’ll take over the crew and Debby will be our eyes and ears on the Lily.”
Location: Casa Verde Station, Med Center
Standard Date: 09 15 630
Debby lay back on the thin mattress. She wasn’t sure about this. It meant that she was missing the next trip of the Lily and that she was in debt for a solid year’s pay. More than that, though, this was the first time she had ever been in Station Medical. And who knew what these legals would think of a station rat like her. The machines beeped and blinked and a circular bar moved over her from head to feet, then moved back up. They stuck needles into her arms, fingers, feet, and head, then ran more tests. Finally, they put a mask over her face, and the nurse never said a word to her.
She went to sleep and had strange dreams. Screens opened up in her mind and the wing readouts appeared on the screen then. But this was different. She could make them change just by willing it, and the gravity felt wrong for a ship. More like a station. Then a voice in her head explained that she was having her interface calibrated and was in station grav with its Coriolis effect.
She wasn’t hooked into her body at all. She was floating in the data. And she would have been terrified, except that she was being fed opiates and adrenaline scrubbers.
The reason that most interfaces were installed around seven was a compromise. The brain was at something of a size plateau, but still had a lot of plasticity. That didn’t mean that the interface wouldn’t work if it was installed later, but it was harder to get used to. The way Debby knew that was because the interface was feeding the information into her brain. Debby decided that she would work at it and wished that she’d gotten the interface earlier, at which point the interface let her know that: Physically it is actually better to wait until the brain reaches its max size, but not much better.
It was weird. It wasn’t like she was hearing it or seeing it on a screen. Not exactly. But it wasn’t like she was thinking it, either. It was like the information was being shoved into her, and was decidedly uncomfortable. She wondered why and again the information was shoved into her head: The interface data is intentionally tagged as separate from your normal thoughts to prevent the interface from sneaking in any sort of internal conditioning.
Debby, with the cynicism of a twelve-year-old raised in the slums of Casa Verde Station, realized at once that whoever made the interfaces could sneak in conditioning anyway, just by failing to tag the data downloads. The interface insisted that it was hard wired to prevent that. Debby didn’t buy it, but it didn’t matter. She needed the interface to be an able spacer, which was now her goal in life.
***
For the next month, while the Lavender Lily made a trip to Vikas, then to Casa Azul, then back to Vikas, and finally back to Casa Verde, Debby learned to use her internals and Juanita ran the crew on the station. Insurance payments were collected, the safe house operated.
Location: Casa Verde Station, Corridor
Standard Date: 10 20 630
Charleen walked down the corridor with her pistol showing openly on her leg, held by the magnets. It was a statement. She was the Perra Jefa of Industrial 3 habitat section, of Casa Verde Station. Station Security knew that the Mook was dead and she wouldn’t be harassed.
She reached the door to the pawn shop and the owner nodded and pushed the button that opened the door to the safe house.
***
Debby looked up as the chime to the door sounded, then remembered to use her interface and checked the camera. She saw Dreesen step through the door. She grimaced. She was happy that the Lily was back and wanted to be back on board, but she wasn’t comfortable leaving Dad and Joey in the care of the new Perra Jefa.
Debby stood as Dreesen entered the main room. So did Dad and Joey. Even Mr. Rodent was watching Dreesen as she came in.
“Hi, Mike,” Dreesen said. Then, “How’s Mr. Rodent, Joey?”
For a few minutes they talked, then Dreesen pinged Debby’s internals. “We need to talk.”
Debby didn’t know what was up, but she was suddenly frightened.
***
Charleen looked over at Mike. “Debby needs to be briefed before she goes to the Lily for her next trip. And some of it is La Causa business, so you and Joey stay here while we take a walk. Okay?
“Grab your duffle, and come with me, kid,” she said to Debby.
***
A few minutes later at the food court, they met Juanita Davis, and she set up an audio shield around a private booth.
“I saw your mods behind Hydro Four,” Charleen told Debby. “Nice work. You’re going to be running Hydro Four on the next trip out, so you will be in a position to access it easily enough.”
Charleen watched as Debby’s face went really still, and was at least a little impressed. The kid had some tough to go with her bluster.
***
Debby wasn’t feeling tough, not even a little bit. She was terrified that her chance to be a spacer had just died. But she couldn’t think of anything to say. So she just sat there as the Perra Jefa and the consigliere looked at her and grinned at each other.
“It saved me some work,” Dreesen said finally. “You were going to have to ship some stuff to pay off your loan, anyway, but this makes it easier.” For the next half hour, they talked. There were thon plants in some of the secret spare rooms, farms and a spare room that had been turned into a processing plant that turned the thon juice into flash. And Debby was going to be carrying ten kilos of uncut flash in her closet. Whether she wanted to or not. “And make damn sure Freddy Jackson doesn’t find out about it. He’s a flashhead and he’ll snort your whole stock, and kill you in the process. Not to mention, kill his own damn self snorting uncut flash.”
“Why. . . ?” Debby started to ask.
“No choice. It’s not like qualified astrogators are lining up for berths on the Lily.” There were more details. A lot more. Aside from the drugs, Debby was going to be taking a set of code books to Dori Vikas on Vikas Station.
“And this is going to pay off my loan?” Debby wanted to be sure.
“Well, it’s going to make a good start, kid. Don’t get ahead of yourself. You only have insystem papers anyway, so you can’t sign on to a deep space ship. Take your time. You’ll get there.”
It sounded like Dreesen actually meant it.
Lavender Lily, en route to Vikas Station
Standard Date: 10 26 630
Debby stood a watch now. Four hours of sitting in the aft C wing control station, feeling the wing as it flapped. It didn’t feel like flapping, even with the interface. The flaps were too fast to feel. It was more like noise or vibration. And it constantly changed as each flap picked up a different amount of space crap and moved it. But she had the readouts from forward C and D to let her know a little in advance what was coming. Four hours on, four off, then four on, and eight off. The eight was her rack time. The other four was her off time. But that was the time she tended Hydro Four and did general maintenance. This trip was all work, all the time. There was no time at all to get bored. Well, her watch was boring. So, by the second day, she sat in the station and treated the wing flaps as background while she studied ship’s systems, using the flat plate computer interface.
***
“Aft C, you’re drifting,” came Freddy Jackson’s voice over the net. “Add 2573 joules to the output until we’re through the jump.”
Debby made the adjustment.
“Not all at once, you idiot!” Freddy tried to blast her internals.
“Not her fault, Mr. Jackson,” the skipper broke in. “Debby’s a ship’s girl. You’re supposed to be my astrogator. You want a gradual build, you tell her that, preferably in advance.”
“What’s a ship’s girl doing standing a watch?” Freddy demanded and abruptly she was out of the link. It worried Debby, and Freddy scared her. He was always watching everyone. Debby was familiar with flashheads. She knew about the paranoid delusions that gradually developed with regular use of the drug. But he was the first mate, and a better astrogator than the skipper was. Would he get her thrown off the ship?
You could never be sure what a flash head would do.
Two hours later, after Freddy Flashhead had made her correct the wing settings three times, they made jump. For the next jump she was off shift. Then they were at Vikas Station.
It was in the restaurant in Vikas Station that she learned what Freddy Flashhead had done to her.
Vikas Station, Restaurant
Standard Date: 10 31 630
The skipper was seated at a corner table that looked out the big plexiglass windows at the ice ball when Debby got there. She waved Debby over and said, “Sit, sit,” when Debby hesitated.
Debby sat and the skipper called up the menu. “Have the mushroom steak, Debby. It’s not a Morland bison steak, but it’s pretty good.”
Debby ordered it. It was seared brown and crispy on the surface and it was pink on the inside. It was served with green beans and warm bread with syntho-butter.
Debby ate and it was so good that she almost stopped worrying about the jump. Almost, but not quite.
“Fred Jackson doesn’t want you on the wing controllers,” the skipper blurted about halfway through the meal. Then she sighed. “And he’s probably right, at least for now. Handling a wing controller through your interface takes a special touch and you don’t have it.”
“I can learn, Captain,” Debby insisted. “I just got my interface, you know that.”
“I do and that may be the problem,” the skipper said, but the way her fork waved back and forth over the plate suggested that she didn’t really think that was it. “You can monitor and run sims, and in a few trips, we’ll look at it again. But, for now, you’re relieved of watch duties.” The skipper glanced at the clock. “Look, I have to go. Finish your dinner and when you’re back on the ship, concentrate on hydro and fixing stuff on the ship, just like you’ve been doing.” The skipper got up and left.
Debby tried to finish her meal, but her appetite was mostly gone. The trouble with flashheads wasn’t that they were paranoid. The trouble with flashheads was that they were paranoid and observant. They noticed shit. Noticed things that a normal person would miss. They also noticed things that weren’t there. But they noticed things. If Freddy Flashhead was watching her, he might go back in the computer records, find the extruded sheets that she used to make the “smugglers hold” off Hydro Four. And he might turn her in. Maybe to the station authorities at Casa Azul or Casa Verde.
Debby didn’t know what to do. Then while she was trying to decide, her implant pinged with a coded message. It was just a meaningless string of numbers if you didn’t have the code books in Debby’s implant. With those code books, it became text that her implant read to her. “Go to lock five and punch in the code 3264.”
Dori Vikas’ Office, Vikas Station
The “lock” proved to be an elevator. It took her up one level and opened into a room with a desk and not much else except an old woman at the desk. “You’re Juanita’s courier?”
The old lady sounded surprised, and that got Debby’s back up. “Who were you expecting? The flashhead?” Debby regretted saying it even before it was out of her mouth, but she couldn’t help herself. Adults who treated her like a kid and assumed she couldn’t do anything pissed her off.
The old lady, though, didn’t throw her out or scream at her. She just looked at her while Debby got nervouser and nervouser. Then she smiled. “You don’t like being treated like a kid. I get that. But letting people see it, that’s a mistake. Especially since right now, in the job you have . . .” The old lady stopped talking and just sat there while Debby started to wonder if she was senile or something. Then she laughed. “Never mind, kid. You keep right on bristling every time someone treats you like a kid. It will prove to them they’re right, and that’s just what you need them to think.”
Okay. The old lady was nuts.
The old lady laughed again, and waved Debby to a chair. “Sit down, Debby Douglas. You have some code books for me, I think. And some flash? I’m Dori Vikas, by the way.”
Debby cautiously sat down, and as she thought back over what Dori Vikas said, she almost got it. Dori gave her the codes and she hooked up her internals to the office comp and transferred the files. “I’m not sure how to move the flash, though. It’s on the ship and, like I said, we have a flashhead on the crew. He’s the first mate, so he can see anytime I open a lock or use a shuttle. And I can’t put five keys of flash in my suit.”
“Good point, kid,” Dori said, and Debby felt herself tense up and forced herself to relax. To this old lady, Dad was probably a kid.
“Better, Debby,” Dori said. “There’s no reason you should care what I think of you, as long as we can work together. And you want to seem like a kid to the flashhead. Now, tell me about him.”
Debby did, over the course of almost an hour.
“The thing is, Debby, a lot of deep space pilots use flash to help them sense the wing fluctuation. They don’t all get hooked. I don’t know if your Freddy Flashhead is a true addict or not. For that matter, he probably doesn’t know, either. It could be that he was handling it fine until he got stuck on Casa Verde, then went over the edge because he didn’t have work.”
“Maybe,” Debby conceded doubtfully. She’d heard the same thing before, but in her experience, a flashhead was a flashhead.
They went back to how to move the flash and the shieldgold that Dori was trading for it.
“I have override codes for the Lily’s central comp. You’ll need to be careful using them, and don’t go near the astro section of the comp. You overwrite the rutters and you’re going to die in the dark. And I’m going to lose a lot of money,” Dori said.
They went over it again, and over the next couple of days, Debby moved the flash and the shieldgold, and modified the record of the printer to hide what she’d made to make the smuggler’s hold.
Lavender Lily, en route to Casa Azul Station
Standard Date: 11 02 630
Debby checked the mushrooms in Hydro Four. They were the steak mushrooms from Vikas Station. They were growing fine and pulling some of the excess O2 from the garden. She went to the console and fed in an override code that would have the computer make a loop of her last fifteen minutes and repeat it, so that it looked like she was still puttering in the garden. Then she went into the smuggler’s hold and accessed the private computer she got from Dori. She needed to check on the contacts on Casa Azul.
Fourteen minutes later, her internals reminded her she needed to be back at her station, and she left with the report on her contact at Azul.
Casa Azul Station
Standard Date: 11 05 630
Debby, wearing her hard suit, opened the lock on the side of the Lavender Lily and pulled the five-kilo package out of the lock behind her, then jumped across the open space to the cargo area. Pulling herself and the package with her hands, she moved over to a lock on the station. It opened, and a man of about thirty was waiting for her.
She put the bag in the lock and, without saying anything, jumped back to the ship.
***
Two hours later, Debby sat at Nadine’s Bistro and Winery on the “drag,” Level Fifteen, Section Twenty-three. The waiter came over and offered her a menu. It was a slate computer with images and info on the dishes. She took it and started looking at it. She ordered using her internals. The waiter came by and took her menu, and as he left, a female stationer came over and sat at her table. “You’re Debby Douglas? You’re a kid!”
Debby bristled, then remembered Dori and almost laughed. She tried to bristle anyway, but didn’t do a very good job of it. “Who are you? And why are you at my table?” she asked aloud, even as her internals sent the code string to the woman’s internals.
“Don’t get your panties in a twist, kid,” the woman said, and her internals sent back confirmation. This was Juanita’s contact on Casa Azul. And this flashy blond with a smart cloth top that had an image of hands moving over her oversized tits was about as different from the cyber geek Juanita as Debby could imagine. “I’m just surprised, after all. I don’t guess you’re after a party?”
“Not my type,” Debby said with a look.
“I have a cousin. Distinguished sort. Just the type a young spacer would want for her first party.”
Meanwhile, the woman’s hand slipped over and grasped Debby’s and she felt a memcore pressed into her palm. So she let the woman try to sell her a party for a few more minutes, then leave. Debby slipped the memcore into her spacer’s disposables without looking at it.
She finished her meal and went back to her ship.
In the smugglers hold, she plugged in the ruby memcore and got the transfer information. She couldn’t access it, no more than to be sure it was there, but she had the payment.
Debby was feeling pretty good about herself. She had a job now. She might not be a spacer in the sense of being able to handle a wing in flight, but she was learning. And, in the meantime, she was the Lavender Lily’s smuggler in chief.
It worked for her.