Jelaza Kazone
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
“Captain.”
The voice was quietly urgent, utterly familiar.
“Joyita?”
Theo opened her eyes, blinking in confusion. This was not her cabin aboard Bechimo. This was—was…
…her personal suite in her brother’s house on Surebleak. Right. She remembered now.
She remembered all of it, now.
“What’s amiss?” murmured Kara, who was sharing Theo’s pillow.
“Hold,” Theo said to her; and, “Joyita, what news?”
“Captain,” Joyita’s voice carried an unaccustomed edge of irritation. “Surebleak Portmaster requests your presence in her office immediately, regarding the drones we set in Surebleak orbit.” There was a short pause. “She did not sound happy.”
Kara raised herself on an elbow and looked at Theo. Theo looked at Kara. Kara sighed.
Well, they’d known it was possible that someone would figure it out—and would care. They hadn’t, to be fair, thought that anybody at Surebleak, which wasn’t precisely the tightest-run port in the universe, would have cared.
“What time is it?” Theo asked. They’d landed opposite Surebleak time, and yesterday had been—well. And then there’d been the crew meet, which went late for celebrating Bechimo’s newly legal status as a Complex Logic, and they had landed off-time, so the party went on ’til pretty near local morning, and she’d still been dancing when she left for her rooms, and she’d asked Kara if she’d like to share pleasure, and she had—all of which meant that by the time they’d gotten to sleep the sky was showing dawn, and—
“It is midmorning,” Bechimo said inside her head. “I did not think it necessary to wake you, but Joyita would have it.”
Theo sighed. Not late then, and she was short on sleep. Not dangerously short on sleep, but…
“Joyita’s right,” Theo said aloud. “The portmaster shouldn’t be kept waiting.”
“Especially,” Kara added wryly, “when she is already unhappy with us.”
“There’s that,” Theo agreed and tossed back the covers, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed.
“Joyita, please tell Surebleak Portmaster that I have received her message and will come to her with all possible speed.”
“Yes, Captain,” said Joyita, followed by a subtle click, as if he had closed a connection.
“Jeeves?” Theo asked, grabbing the robe she’d flung onto the bottom of the bed only a couple hours before.
A different voice—also male, very mellow, speaking Standard Terran, which nobody did, really, but it suited him.
“Yes, Captain Waitley?”
“Jeeves, please ask Tommy Lee if he’s available to drive me to the port, more or less immediately. I’ll need time to shower and dress.”
“Certainly, Captain. He will be waiting for you at the front door in half an hour.”
And, Theo thought, it was nice to know, definitively, how long immediately was, with regard to Surebleak’s portmaster.
There was a rustle behind her; Theo turned to find Kara had pushed back her blankets and was on her feet.
“Shall I come with you, as crew representative?” she asked. “The entire ship had agreed on—”
Theo shook her head.
“The portmaster will take it as given that the captain speaks for the ship,” she said. “You might as well go back to bed.” She produced a lopsided grin. “One of us ought to get some sleep.”
“Hah,” said Kara, tipping her head. “Perhaps I will update the executive officer.”
Theo looked at her with interest.
“Do you have a particular reason to want Clarence mad at you?”
“Not particularly, no,” Kara said. “I will wait for you here, if it pleases?”
“It pleases,” Theo told her. “I should be back soon. How long can it take to pay a fine, after all?”
• • • ✴ • • •
“Good morning, Tommy,” Theo said, sliding into the back seat of the town car.
“Morning, Captain,” he answered easily. He looked perfectly cheerful and wide awake, lucky man.
“I’ll have you to the port in no time at all. You just take a quick zip-nap back here and leave the piloting to me.”
Which wasn’t, Theo admitted, a bad idea at all.
“Thanks,” she said.
“No worries,” he answered, shutting the door and going around to the driver’s seat.
Theo dropped her head back against the cushion and closed her eyes. Breathing deeply, she accessed a pilot’s board drill—meant to impart the benefits of a good solid two hours of sleep in one intense fifteen-minute exercise—and was deep into the trance before the car had passed through the front gate.
* * *
Theo woke on a deep breath and did a quick scan. She felt rested and relaxed, alert and ready to talk with the portmaster. There’d be a fine, naturally enough. It was the least that the port could do—well, it was really the only thing the port could do. Littering the lanes was a definite violation, even though the little surprises they’d dropped strategically at probable entry points for Chandra Marudas had been too small to damage a ship, and rigged to disintegrate within twenty-four hours of release. They’d been meant to embarrass Captain yos’Thadi, and that they had done—loudly.
No less than what he’d deserved, Theo had thought, her ship and crew in agreement. Not only had the good Scout captain been maliciously pursuing her ship and a crewman, he’d taken leave to insult Bechimo’s abilities.
Yeah, he’d deserved to be publicly embarrassed.
Worse than that, he’d come to Surebleak confident that the field judgment requested of Scout Commander Val Con yos’Phelium, coincidentally Theo’s brother Val Con, would put Bechimo into his hands for deprogramming and destruction.
Well, Captain yos’Thadi had gone away unsatisfied, while Val Con’s field judgment had the potential to change…nearly everything, and the drones they’d dropped had disintegrated hours ago, having done no more harm than they were intended to do.
Or maybe not.
Theo opened her eyes, frowning.
Had they somehow unwittingly damaged a ship? The drones were so small, so fragile that, had a ship encountered one, it would have seemed like nothing more worrisome than a patch of dust. Joyita had said that the portmaster sounded peeved, and come to think of it, if it was only a matter of paying a fine, the port should’ve billed the ship. There wasn’t any need for the portmaster to get involved.
“Theo.”
Bechimo spoke to her in bond-space, sounding perfectly calm.
“Your blood pressure is rising,” he continued. “I can assure you that the drones each disintegrated according to the presets. There were no collisions; no ships were harmed. Of course, I monitored them.”
Of course he had. Bechimo wouldn’t leave such a thing to chance. Theo took a breath.
“Sorry,” she said in bond-space. “Just borrowing trouble.”
“Indeed,” Bechimo said. “Not that there isn’t some cause for concern. You are correct that, if it were only a fine, you would not be called to speak with the portmaster in person. Portmasters, even on such a port as Surebleak, are busy with higher matters. The collection of fines is best left to flunkies—or to automatics.”
“So, she wants to read me a lecture,” Theo said. “Or—wait! Maybe she got Val Con’s judgment, and she wants to talk to the captain of a Complex Logic—the Complex Logic, the one who triggered the need for a field judgment.”
Bechimo was silent for a long moment.
Theo stirred.
“Do you think she’s working with Captain yos’Thadi?” she asked, her hand already moving toward the intercom, to tell Tommy to turn the car around.
“No,” Bechimo said, and she paused. “I do not think so. Joyita has been doing research.”
Of course Joyita had been doing research, Theo thought. There was nothing Joyita liked better than to pry into other people’s secrets. He routinely violated privacy codes and security gates, and unfortunately, the information he mined was almost always useful.
“What did he find out?” she asked.
“That Portmaster Liu has been an exemplary master of an unruly and unprofitable port. Joyita expresses some curiosity about why she was assigned here. He is undertaking further research on that line.”
Theo considered that.
“As long as he doesn’t open anything he shouldn’t,” she said.
“I am certain he will be discreet,” Bechimo answered, which wasn’t exactly what she had in mind.
She bit her lip.
“Unless it’s the field judgment, there’s no reason for her to see me. And Joyita said she sounded irritated. If she’s—”
“Time to wake up, Captain,” Tommy’s voice came over the intercom. “Arrival at the portmaster’s office in three minutes.”