Derelict For Trade

1

Except for the bleep from the computer consoles and the occasional rapid tick of keys, the control deck of the Solar Queen was silent.

Dane Thorson watched the tall, panther-lean man in the command pod, and felt his guts tighten.

Captain Jellico’s gaze stayed on the constantly changing displays and readouts on his console. His face was emotionless, as always, but the subtle signs of tension were there to be read in the whiteness of the blaster scar on his cheek, and the taut muscles of his back.

At the astrogation console Steen Wilcox leaned forward, his fingers working steadily as he coaxed displays and readouts from his navputer—numbers that flickered so fast across the displays they were incomprehensible to Dane.

But Dane didn’t have to be able to interpret them. As assistant cargo master, he had no job right now. He had squeezed into the back of the cramped control deck only because he couldn’t just sit in his cabin, like his senior, Jan Van Ryke, or in the mess with the steward, Frank Mura, and the medic Craig Tau. Dane was not able to play a game of cards like those two, apparently ignoring the tension gripping the ship—nor did he have Van Ryke’s unflappable attitude toward life. Dane knew they were in danger, perhaps the worst they’d faced yet, and he had to face danger straight on.

"Damn, damn, damn," Wilcox muttered under his breath. The display lights underlit his face with a weird yellow glow. "I don’t like coming out of hyper this close to a planet, Chief."

"We have to." Jellico’s voice was clipped, precise. "My calcs so far are proving true right to the tenth decimal—we don’t have enough fuel left for snapout in flat space. We’ve got to use a gravity well."

Dane Thorson glanced again at the fuel-level panel. He’d been watching it for the last hour—he knew they all had. The captain had computed it very close, but he was right; unless they exploited the dimensional weakness caused by a planetary mass, they wouldn’t have enough fuel to emerge from hyperspace—or rather, snapout wouldn’t leave them enough fuel to rendezvous with Exchange, the Trade city in orbit above Mykos. As it was, it would be close.

"One minute to snapout," the captain said, and the engines snarled as they wound up towards the surge of power that would catapult them back into normal space. Dane pressed himself into his seat, reaching to connect his restraining belt—

And a tremendous bang shook the ship.

Dane’s head rocked, and he clutched at his pod arms. Trouble lights flickered on the captain’s console, and from the com to the engine deck came fluent curses from the usually taciturn Johan Stotz.

The pseudo-gravity of hyperspace suddenly vanished as the familiar fleeting nausea of snapout seized Dane, and he almost flew out of his seat before he managed to get his magnetic boots back on the deck and cinch up his seat belt.

"Snapout!" Wilcox exclaimed, and then, in a sharp voice, "We hit a knot!"

"Coordinates," Jellico commanded. "Find out where we are—and what lies on our course."

Wilcox’s fingers were already flying over his console.

Dane looked at Captain Jellico, whose face was unchanged as he scanned his instruments. This was the most dreaded of all events, save plague, for the gravitational distortion that had thrown them out meant the existence of a close or large mass, and where there was one, there were likely many. Had they somehow flown into an uncharted asteroid cluster? Dane wondered. No, Steen Wilcox was too good for that.

As he watched the ordered haste of his fellow crew members at the controls, Dane became aware of a presence near him, and a faint, pleasant smell of lavender. He glanced up. The new medic, Rael Cofort, stood in the bridge hatch just behind his seat, a watchful look in her changeable violet eyes. So she too had to be on hand to see what happened.

It was something they had in common—a thought that made Dane vaguely uncomfortable. He turned his head to dismiss the thought, and watched the farseeing sensors of the Solar Queen slowly paint a picture of their course, while Wilcox’s navputer oriented them.

"We’re in the Mykos system, about twenty-five light-minutes from the sun," the astrogator said presently. He worked his console a bit longer.

"No masses detected on course—we’re about fifteen degrees above the ecliptic." Then he paused, looked from his console readout to his keys and back again. A chill seized Dane; it was rare to see the astrogator hesitate like that.

After another longer pause, without any change in his tone, Wilcox pronounced a death sentence on their careers as Free Traders.

"Insufficient fuel to reach any port," he said.

No one spoke. The truth was there on the screen for everyone on the bridge to see: they were billions of miles from where they had intended to emerge, without enough fuel to brake their tremendous velocity in time to bring them safely to the nearest port.

Dane cleared his throat, about to suggest they radio for help, but he pressed his lips together. That was for the captain to say. The Old Man knows as well as I do that the salvage fees would bankrupt us, he thought.

But Jellico was not looking at the screen. He had turned slightly in his pod, and was regarding Wilcox, his hard eyes narrowed in question.

"And?" he said.

Wilcox’s shoulders hunched. "We’re headed straight at the Mykos cylomes at about five percent cee. Unless a salvage tug reaches us in sixteen hours or less, the habitat defenses will blow us out of space."

For a moment nobody said anything, and Dane reflected bitterly on the irony of their position. Few human Free Traders liked docking at the artificial habitats called cylomes—the cylindrical habitats favored by many alien races outside the human sphere of influence. Unfortunately for the Queen their low fuel situation had made the choice for them.

There’d been a lot of grousing in the mess-cabin strategy session when they’d discussed this option, even though the hospitality of the Kanddoyd race towards humans was well known. But now, even that option had been snatched from them, and they might not even have to worry about bankruptcy; ravening plasmabolts of the Kanddoyd defenses would see to that. Habitats were so vulnerable to space debris that their defenders tended to shoot first and ask questions afterwards.

The silence was broken by the leisurely click of magboots on the deckplates. Dane looked up, saw the comfortable bulk of cargo master Van Ryke looming over him, the white-blond bushy brows raised in mild question.

The captain said, "Ya. Send out SOS and Salvage Call. Standard terms."

As the Martian-born comtech turned to obey, Dane felt the reaction of his crewmates. His own heart seemed to have been knocked awry by whatever they had hit. He remembered how, just minutes before, he’d envisioned the various ways his crewmates each responded to danger.

He’d come to know them well in his time aboard the Queen, and he knew how much they trusted one another, and the captain. And now they seemed to have reached the end of their shiptime together.

Salvage would break the Queen permanently—there was no way out of that.

He looked down at his hands, which seemed suddenly unfamiliar. They were the hands of a man—a big, rawboned man, callused and strong. He’d been scarcely out of his teens when he’d come to the Queen, straight from Pool and training. He’d finished his growing up with this crew. The Queen was his home. He flexed his hands, thinking: I guess I should consider myself lucky to be alive, even for a short time.

A broad hand clapped his shoulder and squeezed. He looked up into Van Ryke’s good-humored eyes and his reassuring smile. A faint hope awoke. If Van Ryke didn’t seem worried, maybe there was an angle no one else had seen as yet.

Tang Ya sat back and sighed. "It’ll be at least an hour before we hear anything," he said.

The captain nodded curtly. "Then we have an hour to plan." He keyed the com so everyone on board could participate. "We hit something, probably space debris, since there was nothing in the charts. We knew when we voted on this option that this was the closest margin we’d ever run—we had to balance our fuel and hyperspace jump against the needs of landing. I don’t have to calculate the odds against running into something in snapout. We all know they’re in the billions against one, but it seems this time our luck ran out."

Dane flexed his hands again.

"Not to complain, my dear friends..." From the engine deck came the familiar humorous drawl of the engineer apprentice Ali Kamil. "We all voted yes when we left Canuche, but it seems our luck ran out that day."

For a long moment there was silence, and Dane sensed everyone considering the wearing weeks they’d just endured.

Their hearts had been high when they left Canuche. The Queen was in good shape, and they had the generous sum given them by the grateful Macgregory for their heroic work there. They’d chosen not to stay on Canuche, though the cargo work promised by the equally grateful merchants would have meant a steady income. Steady—and boring.

They had decided unanimously to turn down the contract, for they were not cargo haulers, but Free Traders.

This was the risk every Free Trader took. Life was a gamble, and sometimes one lost. At least Captain Jellico permitted his crew to vote on the big decisions, and again everyone had voted unanimously to put all their earnings into the Survey auction on Denlieth, which had sounded so promising for Traders looking for new opportunities. Unfortunately the big Companies had heard the same scuttlebutt. All the Queen had been able to afford to bid on had been a Class D planet, and they’d scarcely gotten that as Combine and Inter-Solar had not only snapped up the better choices, but the I-S agent— probably in revenge for past encounters—had deliberately driven up the prices on the rest.

The Queen had just managed to get the one claim, and it had proved to be a dead one. Worse, the refueling station promised on the tape with the planet’s coordinates had closed down probably weeks before their arrival, for lack of business, and the Queen had been forced to make what fuel they had last for this jump. They’d had no choice but to head for the nearest system, which was farther out on the frontiers of the Terran Federation than they had ever been. The Company ships seldom came out this far; even Free Traders were rare.

Most of the crew had groused about Mykos—all except Jan Van Ryke.

Dane looked up at the cargo master, who was watching the screens, his lips pursed. Van Ryke had admitted that he thought the Kanddoyds, and Exchange, might turn out to be a successful venture.

"Don’t like habitats," Johan Stotz had growled.

"Me either," Ali had drawled, lounging behind his chief, his handsome face derisive. "If human beings were meant to live in gas tubes in space,

we would have been born in vacuum."

"That’s the way most humans feel," Van Ryke had said, beaming at them in triumph. "Which is exactly why we have a greater chance at success. Just think how little Terran competition we’ll find!"

Now Dane looked around, saw Rip Shannon, the astrogator apprentice, tapping his fingers on his knees. "We might be able to work a deal," he said. "We all have good skills—"

"Right," came Craig Tau’s voice over the com. "We might be forced to hire ourselves out to different outfits for a time, but if we pledge to save half our earnings and come back to rescue the Queen—"

"If she’s not rendered down into scrap in the meantime." Karl Kosti’s rumbling voice came from the engine deck.

"Which is why we cut a deal," Kamil said. "We have several silver tongues on board—"

All through their discussion, Dane noted abstractedly that Wilcox had not ceased his scanning of surrounding space; having satisfied himself of a clear course ahead, the astrogator had turned his attention in other directions.

" Captain!" Wilcox’s exclamation brought everyone’s attention forward again. "We’ve got a tail! Matching velocity—"

"Tang!" Jellico snapped. "Raise them."

Dane saw Rael frown and Van Ryke grip a handhold in the hatchway. He suspected they had the same thought as he did: was this some new form of space piracy?

"Working, Captain—" Tang Ya muttered. The comtech crouched over his console, the muscles in his broad back ridged with his intense concentration. "No answer—"

"Try Shver and Kanddoyd frequencies," Jellico cut in.

Of course Terran frequencies might not work this far out—Dane didn’t know much about their present location, except that the Mykos system

was on the boundaries of two alien spheres of influence, Kanddoyd and Shver.

"Sent, Captain," Tang said. "No response." He paused. "And no engine emissions detectable, either."

"Rip, try to get visuals," Jellico ordered.

The astrogator apprentice worked at his console as Jellico went about setting up their defense system. Not that they had much in the way of weaponry—the Solar Queen was a Trade vessel, not a fighter.

For a protracted moment there was silence on the bridge again. Dane watched until the edges of his vision twinkled darkly, then realized he had been holding his breath too long.

Rip said suddenly, "There it is!"

He keyed his console and the screen overhead flickered. They all stared up at the sleek ship following them. A frisson of fear shuddered through Dane as he noted the unfamiliar lines of the ship—it was not of Terran manufacture, nor, he knew from his recent studies, Kanddoyd or Shver.

No lights shone from it. The ship looked dead.

"Plague ship?" Jasper Weeks’s voice came over the ship’s com. The jet tech’s apprentice was obviously watching on Kosti’s screen.

Wilcox looked over at the captain. "May be, and maybe abandoned." He tabbed a key and the ship jumped even closer to view, showing dark scoring down one side. "Looks like she’s been fired on."

"She’s Terran registry," Rip exclaimed as their angle on the gleaming hull changed. In silence they read the registry numbers, and next to it, in Terran script and another script Dane had never seen before, was the word Starvenger.

"If she’s Terran registry, chances are the crew were human, or humanoid," Tau said.

Kosti’s voice came over the com: "Question is, if we use fuel to match speeds and cable it in, we’re going to be running on fumes. Unless it’s got

fuel on board."

No one spoke as the captain studied the ship on screen. Jellico’s thumb stroked absently at the blaster scar on his cheek, a sure sign he was thinking furiously. This was the Free Trader life: a risk versus a gamble. With no fuel at all, the salvage fees would be even higher, due to the tug’s greater fuel expenditure to match velocity.

Dane looked up at that dead ship with its blasted hull, and felt the old cramping all over again. Even though the ship was alien, its fuel, if any, would probably be usable by the Queen—the basics of fuel technology were universal, for no race, save perhaps the long-dead Forerunners, had ever cracked the secret of antigravity.

"Even if there’s fuel on board," Johan Stotz said, "do we want to risk being contaminated by whatever killed its crew?"

"If it doesn’t kill us," Kosti said, "and we do find fuel, we’ve got to have time to adapt the Queen's catalyzers and engine feeds before the Kanddoyds vaporize us—"

"With, of course, infinite regret," came Ali’s irrepressible voice.

The captain slammed his hand down flat on his console. "Let’s find out," he said suddenly. "We’re no worse off if it doesn’t. Wilcox, bring us into cable distance. Kosti, make ready the johblocks."

It took less than thirty minutes to bring the Queen up within cable distance of the strange ship and lay hold of it with the johblocks, whose atomically smooth gripping surfaces literally melded with any substance, no matter how obdurate—and there were few things more obdurate than a ship’s hull. As Dane expected, the other ship gave the johblocks no trouble, and it was soon drawn within half a kilometer of the Trader vessel.

When Wilcox finally announced zero relative velocity, Jellico said, "I want an investigation team, full biohaz suits. Maybe our luck has changed."