Borders and border crossings were the
food and drink of transportation. It was part of the human
fascination with protection of assets. Resources were life and
planets were resources. Planetary governments kept very close tabs on
what came onto a planet and what went off of a planet. Since a
frontier was a vast multidimensional surface, stretched through
space, impossible to survey and patrol, stopping illegal activity at
a border was both a lost cause and a long-standing tradition.
The Mule II had been stopped in space
from time to time for inspections by various authorities. Larry
always thought that space rendezvous were stupid and dangerous, but
planetary governments were often run by the most stupid and dangerous
of people. Since the Outer Rim frontier was patrolled by armed
scouts, an encounter was possible and it might involve a hazardous
ship-to-ship rendezvous.
Drover was starting to feel sick to
his stomach. Whiting had given him coordinates that were, Drover
recognized, dangerously close to the Outer Rim’s Carillon Base. She
wanted to travel past the likely locations of armed scouts, deep into
Outer Rim territory. The specific star she provided, however, was
recognized on the frontier as a Cephalopod star.
Larry tried to labor under the
assumption that she was going to negotiate some kind of switch in the
Cephalopod alliance that would weaken the Outer Rim’s position. He
also thought that hijacking a freighter was not the right way to
accomplish this. Larry tried to take some comfort in being a hostage,
but even that explanation had a problem because there were no
witnesses; no one saw the gun. He could plead hijacking, kidnapping
or terrorism all he wanted, but she was a military officer, and her
word would hold more weight than his.
Still, he nourished a tiny spark of
optimism, hoping that she was simply smuggling; not betraying
herself, him, Major General Johnson and the entire Core Planets
frontier. Realistically, he might wind up in a brig, awaiting trial
for treason. Or, he might wind up out of fuel somewhere. There was a
chance that she would be exchanged as a prisoner of war, leaving him
destitute and stranded; the Mule II grounded on planet it would never
leave.
Larry was tentatively sipping a hot
coffee in the tiny passenger wardroom that also served as an office.
It had a small desk that folded into a wall, a table and a spare
chair, plus some food storage cabinets. Larry hoped that the unease
in his guts would quiet down. He knew it was simply a visceral fear.
Having Whiting wandering around was making him jumpy and nervous; it
was eroding his pilot’s cool, his most valuable asset when
something went unexpectedly wrong.
Whiting had been looking at the
storage areas around the Mule II. The cargo bays were vast, but
easily searched. The passenger section had a few small sleeping
areas, grooming and toilet areas, and storage lockers. These lockers
were clearly for personal effects, and would be a too-obvious place
to hide something.
She knew that Drover was in the small
ward-room. She felt some guilt at pulling a gun on him, but every
other part of the plan had seemed so hollow. With nothing to offer,
she knew she couldn’t successfully negotiate in this situation. She
also knew that any attempt to explain her plan would give away
classified military secrets. She had felt a twinge of regret for
using Larry; he was a good pilot. However, she knew that if she
exposed him to General Johnson’s plans, then he would become an
accomplice instead of a hostage. His life would be over if he knew
what she was doing and he was caught.
Larry heard her climbing down the
ladder from an upper deck. He took a breath, trying to get a distant
perspective on the problem. He spun his drink in the cup idly,
wondering what she wanted with him now.
“Where can I stow these?” Whiting
called from the companionway.
Drover wondered what she had brought
on board. He heard a thump.
“Stow what?” Larry shouted.
“My uniform,” she said. Drover
almost dropped his drink.
He got up from the table and leaned
out into the companionway. She was hopping on one foot, struggling
out of her uniform pants. Once out of the pants, she stood around in
her T-shirt and underpants, rooting around in a rucksack. She pulled
out a handful of civilian-looking clothes. She threw on a skirt and a
light jacket. She stuffed her uniform into the sack and then wedged
the gun in on top.
“You’re out of uniform,” Drover
said. He looked down at his drink; he didn’t want to stare at the
too-stylish civilian outfit.
Whiting started opening one of the
lockers that lined the companionway, looking inside. “And?” she
said.
She’d had a chance to relax and
bottle up her rage and frustration. She was calm, and cool; ready to
take on the Outer Rim; ready to earn a reputation as an officer who
took charge and got things done. Once she was done with this, she
would have a successful military career. Her business and military
failures would be behind her.
“Don’t you get summary execution
for that sort of thing?” Drover asked.
She stopped looking in the locker,
and looked down at him. She had an actual grin. She had lost the
terribly intense frown of conflict. “Only if you get caught,” she
said.
Drover nodded. He was aware that
there were often exchanges of prisoners where the actual crimes were
winked at. All sides would exchange spies in order to protect their
own intelligence networks.
This landed solidly on one of the
explanations Drover had been examining. He felt a wave of relief as
he realized that this also explained why she pulled a gun on him. He
could, in front of any veracity tester, say that he had been
kidnapped at gun point. She had given him a perfect, solid alibi that
he would believe down to the marrow in his bones. It was neither a
staged cover story nor a flimsy web of lies. No, this was the
complete story, impenetrable by any form of truth-seeking.
Larry was more than just relieved, he
was almost joyful to realize that she was just spying, nothing more.
The clenching tightness in his chest was gone; his stomach felt
better. He could relax, catch his breath, and stop fidgeting in the
cockpit.
Whiting saw his morose expression
fade away. She nodded, her grin growing.
“So, where can I hide this?” she
asked.
Larry looked at the label stenciled
on the wall. “Under that seat,” he said, pointing.
There was a small monitoring station
in the companionway, with a bench, display and some input devices. It
controlled the pumping equipment located nearby. Larry lifted up the
bench that formed the seat. The grinding drone of the adjacent
machinery could be heard much more clearly. Larry looked inside.
Since the machinery was accessible below the shelf, it wasn’t a
good choice for a storage locker.
“Not that one. That’s repair
access to—,” Larry glance up at the stenciled label. It had been
amended by a maintenance crew, and was barely legible. “It looks
like fuel. Or coolant.” It was hard to be sure without checking the
computer display.
Whiting squeezed past him to another
bench. This one didn’t have a display. It was the same standard
companionway wall module, but a display and controls had not been
inserted.
Larry watched as she lifted up the
bench. This one was clearly a simple locker, with no access to
machinery or ship’s systems. She bent over, pulled out two
lubrication kits and carefully set these on the deck. Then she pulled
out some used food plates and cups. These had obviously come from the
near-by ward room. She looked at Larry and dropped them on the deck
with a clatter.
“So,” he began, “am I still
going to get paid?” Now that the hijacking was behind them, he
wanted to minimize the cost of this side trip.
Whiting picked up her uniform and
tossed this into the locker with some vehemence. The gun made a loud,
ominous clunk in the locker. “You’ve been paid,” she said.
She reached into the locker and
started arranging her bag.
“I mean for this side trip, too,”
Larry ventured.
Whiting bent over, grabbed the two
lubrication kits. She jammed these down on top of her bundle. It took
some forcing to get it all to fit back into the small locker.
She looked up from her task at Larry
and said, “You know, each day I find new things about you that I
despise. You’re cocky and you’re greedy and you talk a lot. What
else? That ancient music you listen to!”
She gave a final shove to the content
and slammed the bench on them. The crash resounded through the ship.
Larry had reached his limit of polite
deference to his passengers.
“This isn’t really my favorite
working environment, you know. Military transport and gunpoint and
behind enemy lines and all that!” He was waving his hands as he
shouted. He’d splashed some of his drink onto the floor and wall of
the companionway.
“You work the frontier, right?”
Whiting asked, hands on hips, chin out.
“For money! You’ve changed this
into a war zone.” “Take a breath,” she said. “You just have
to learn to adapt.” Larry knew she could wear that kind of
tough-as-nails attitude because she was a Marine. She had military
forces to back her up. When he saw her in a civilian skirt and
jacket, she looked like a business woman, and fragile. He reminded
himself that she was still a Marine Lieutenant Colonel, and her
attitude was her most important asset.
She bent over and picked up the
plates and cups. She reached out with them. Larry juggled them in his
arms, along with his drink, wondering what she was doing.
“Civilization is coming,” she
said, coldly. “Clean these, stow them, and we’ll use them again.
They don’t go in lockers. Got it?”
He looked from his armload dishes to
Whiting. “Oh, no,” Drover said. “Don’t mind the gun! Just
clean these dishes before I slice you from shoulder to tenderloin and
put you in the smoker.”
Whiting turned and walked away.
Larry was starting to build up steam.
“Oh, everything’s fine.” Whiting had reached the ladder and was
going down to engineering. “We’re just going to fly toward enemy
lines out of uniform!”
She glanced up at him just as she
went below the deck level. Larry couldn’t tell if she was still
grinning. He looked at the dirty plates. It was hard to say how old
they were. He had to agree that they should be cleaned, but he
couldn’t agree with having a passenger tell him how to manage
domestic duties on his own ship. He looked back at the bench where
she’d found them. He lifted the bench with his toe. The lubrication
kits were perched on the bundle of clothes. Under those was the gun.
She’d just dropped it in there. He wondered how much she trusted
him. How far would she really go? Maybe she hadn’t armed the gun,
and she didn’t trust him at all. Perhaps she was daring him to pick
it up. He wondered what he would do with the gun. Force her back to
Henry base, where he’d be arrested? He could see few choices. He
realized that she had trapped him into watching her plan unfold. He
was really just a passenger on her trip.
He recalled one of the ancient canal
song recordings.
“The cook we had on board the deck
stood six feet in her socks,
Her hand was like an elephant’s ear
and her breath could open the locks.
A maid of sixty summers was she, most
of her body was on the floor,
And when at night she’d go to sleep,
Oh, sufferin’ how she’d snore.”
It was time, he thought, to try
and get back to the Old Core Planets and away from the frontier. The
trips would be shorter and safer, but we would also have to cope with
more passenger problems. He took the plates to the galley.
❖
Whiting climbed down to engineering.
She found it very difficult to tell if Mo Lusc was draped over a
console, or Mo had left its gown draped over the console. She also
noticed a distinct odor. She had only caught a whiff of it when she
first met Mo. Now, she was sure that she could identify a definite
Cephalopod smell. Perhaps it was Mo specifically, or perhaps it was
the Cephalopod version of the generic sweat and urine smell that
always accompanied a troop of marines.
It was gloomy down in engineering.
She tried not to flinch or jump when the pile of rags started
stirring. Slowly, a lump rose in the middle of the console. The rags
shifted around with a rustling until Mo Lusc’s eyes were visible,
peering out from the shadowing depths of the rags.
There was a chime as Mo’s speech
synthesizer activated.
“Were we watching? Were we
monitoring closely? Did we monitor so closely we did not apprehend
your approach?” It was hard to fathom precisely what Mo meant. The
speech synthesizer was set to a very grating, high-pitched screech.
The mechanical drone lacked any emotional content. Mo had gone
through a number of color shifts; Whiting hadn’t known enough Cephs
to work out any of the meanings.
Mo’s greeting was a version of a
story Whiting had heard more than once. Caught napping at the
engineering station, it claimed it was monitoring so closely it
didn’t hear her come in. Whiting thought that it was not too
different from any other marine.
“Are you having a good day, Light
Colonel Whiting? Are your glands doing well today?” Whiting looked
down for a moment. Yes, the jacket did make her chest look big. But
that was no reason for talking about it. If Mo Lusc was human, it
would be a complete jerk. If she had the military police to back her
up, she would have it thrown in the brig if it continued talking
about her chest like that.
“My glands are fine,” she
replied, coldly. “I changed clothes, maybe that’s your problem.”
It didn’t matter how she said it, she realized, any emotional
content would be lost by the speech translator. She could be as rude
as she wanted.
“You changed your display? Why? How
will we keep track of all these mammals if they keep changing?”
Mo’s synthesizer squeaked.
She wondered who Mo referred to when
it said “we”. She wondered if there were other Cephalopods on
board the ship. In several days of travel, she’d only seen Mo once.
For all she knew, one of the cargo bays could be creeping with Cephs.
The thought made her uneasy; she reached for the reassuring weight of
her gun, and remembered that she’d set that aside. She was on a
mission where she couldn’t rely on overwhelming Marine force.
Mo continued, “Were Drover and I
speaking of your glands earlier? Did you speak of our glands?”
It took her a moment to understand
this to mean that Drover had been talking about her chest with Mo.
The thought of two species talking about their sexual preferences was
both amusing and horrifying.
“Oh, you were?” Whiting said.
“Did Drover tell us that you had
remarkable glands?” She looked down at her chest again, and then up
at Mo, embarrassed. “That creep!” she said.
She was starting to find these two
were intolerable. She was extremely fit, and was lucky to have genes
that gave her a good figure. She found herself sliding away from
amused and toward horrified that a Mammal and a Cephalopod would talk
about her in any kind of sexual context.
“Do we often see mammalian glands?”
Mo’s synthesizer began after a brief humming. “Did you adapt from
a scavenger species?” Mo’s synthesizer hummed idly for a moment
and then shut off.
She found this to be a dizzying turn
of conversation. She knew that before humans had moved into space,
they had descended from migratory great apes, but she didn’t recall
anything about the prey-predator status. She’d heard somewhere that
pre-humans were omnivorous scavengers, that was why we had to eat a
varied diet; it was part of our chemistry. Space travelers or
tree-dwellers, we were limited by our chemistry.
“I’d love to chat about
evolution, but I want to use your sensors,” Whiting replied,
cautiously.
She realized she didn’t know the
first things about management interaction with Cephalopods. She’d
need to get over her aversion to the smell and spend more time with
Cephalopods if she was going to learn to motivate them.
Mo slid, or perhaps oozed, off the
console. The motion started with some of the rags sliding off to one
side. Then more of the rags moved over to join them. The head moved
over to the side to join the bulk of the body. The eyes remained at
the same height, and gazed up, unblinking, at Whiting. Then the
remaining tentacles drifted off of the console to join the rest of
the body. It looked like Mo was being poured off the console onto the
deck.
The operational controls were a
series of shallow disks and indentations; different patches glowed
and pulsed in a variety of colors. A colored section flickered
suddenly. One of Mo’s tentacles reached out and caressed a shallow
depression. The flickering changed to a slow beat that alternated
between three different colors. The area was vast, covering almost
two full meters; farther than a person could comfortably reach. There
was a faint trace of slime over the entire control panel. Whiting
looked around for a set of human controls.
Mo’s speech synthesizer started to
hum. “Can we exchange secretions now? Can you change your colors to
perform a mating display?”
Whiting stepped back, staring at the
Cephalopod. Her hand patted her thigh where her gun should have been
hanging.
“Would you like to see some
arousing displays that we have recorded? Have we recently acquired
some from another trade vessel?” Mo asked. A tentacle wavered
slightly, starting to move toward one of the lockers.
Whiting shook her head in disbelief.
She needed to get the job done and get out of here before she lost
her temper and started threatening the squid. Beyond the smell and
Mo’s bad behavior, it was also too dark to work in this area.
“Okay, how about you drive?” she
asked, pointing at the engineering console. She hoped that operating
the sensors would keep the squid busy and quiet.
“Should we drive? Are we first
officer-rated for a ship of this size? Perhaps you use an idiom for
something else?” Mo asked.
This, at least, was a reasonably
clear question. “Yes. You operate the sensors. I want an extreme
range search for Outer Rim ship ion trails.” She wanted to add
something like “you idiot”, but she bit it back. She had a
mission to accomplish.
Mo Lusc oozed back onto the console.
First, some tentacles moved over. Then, the head moved over the
console. Finally, the remaining tentacles joined the rest on the
console. Whiting couldn’t be sure, but it appeared that the length
of the tentacles could change, also. Mo had been just under two
meters while standing. But gathered on the console, Mo seemed much
smaller. With the head in the middle, two batches of limbs reached
only about a meter to each edge of the console.
A conventional video monitor above
the engineering console flickered into life, showing the expected
empty space surrounding the ship. Whiting peered at it as details
were added during the sensor scans.
“Are we far beyond the base named
Henry? Are we deep in the Mammal frontier? If we go further, we will
be within range of the Outer Rim Carillon base?” Mo asked.
Whiting watched the display closely.
Each sensor scan showed that they were alone in this region of space.
“How long before we make contact?”
she asked. She glanced down at Mo, and watched the fabric rustling as
it operated the sensor controls. She wondered how well it understood
the Outer Rim’s encroaching on Core planets stars.
“Could we make contact in only
hours if we go more directly?” Mo replied. Whiting wanted to think
this through, but Mo continued, “Will they have guards? With
weapons? Should we withdraw before they find us?”
“Out here? Are they that close?”
she asked.
“Can we be too close?” Mo asked.
Whiting wondered at this. Too close
for what? She was sure that Drover was no genius; all that he or Mo
knew was a course to a specific location. She wondered if Mo meant
that their course was too close to Outer Rim sensors, or the
destination she’d given them was too close to Carillon base?
Perhaps Mo Lusc knew more about the current state of Outer Rim
navigation aids and sensor systems than her intelligence sources.
What was too close?
An energy flux indicator started to
flash. Something had altered the low background noise generated in
the interstellar vacuum.
“What’s that?” Whiting asked,
pointing at the display.
Mo’s head shifted around to watch
her point. Tentacles rustled. The display shifted slightly to
emphasize the change in energy density.
“Is that another sensor?” Mo
asked.
“We’ve been spotted?” she
asked. This was a contingency in her plan. She had looked at it as an
unpleasant, awkward and difficult to manage contingency. She knew
that getting away might require some real luck.
“Can it be worse?” Mo asked.
Worse? She wondered. What did Mo mean
by worse? She didn’t know what a Cephalopod would define as the
worst possible contingency on the frontier between warring Mammals.
For her and her pilot, though, the worst situation was capture.