Derelict For Trade

12

Dane frowned as he and Tooe passed through the dock into the main concourse. Had the captain read his mind? Why had he told them that business about Ali?

He sighed, hoping he was doing the right thing. It seemed right, he thought, looking at it from all angles. The Spin Axis was forbidden, and the captain had to officially uphold that ruling, even though everyone on the crew knew there was an awful lot of unofficial and sinister rule-breaking going on at Exchange.

But the habitat was not Terran territory, and the Queen's crew had no influence. Just the opposite, in fact, if someone was spreading bad rumors about them to the other spacers. Dane would have liked to explain his idea to the captain, and get his okay—but then that placed the burden of the decision on the captain. Dane couldn’t do that. So he was going to have to take this risk on his own.

He looked down, saw Tooe watching him, her crest half-raised at a hopeful angle. "Lead on," he said.

They zapped through the dock tubing to the access lock, but instead of bouncing their way down the concourse, she looked around carefully, then said, "We go this way, us." And she retreated toward an area jumbled with cables and cranes. Again a look, then she slipped behind a monster automated loader. Dane squeezed after her, cursing to himself when he klunked his head against an unseen pipe. That wouldn’t have happened in normal grav. But here, it's all too easy to launch yourself fast enough to knock your brains out, he thought sourly as he pushed after his charge. And maybe that's just what I need.

Tooe kept looking back, her yellow eyes bright with a chatoyant glow, as she picked her way past a jumble of outdated equipment. Then she clambered up onto a pipe and jumped into an open air shaft. Sighing to himself, Dane followed.

The microgravity of their level had made it easy to follow her up the shaft at first, but after they had climbed for a while Dane found himself losing all sense of orientation. He realized they were now in the Spin Axis proper—that area of the habitat where the gee force was too small to influence the human vestibular canals sufficiently to give any sense of up and down at all. He wondered briefly if the boundaries were different for Kanddoyd and Shver, or how their physiology worked.

They came out on a deck canted at a weird angle, and vertigo tugged at Dane. He shut his eyes for a moment, then hastily opened them again.

That was worse: without vision to orient him, free fall was just that—an endless fall that made his monkey hindbrain gibber in terror. He tried to force himself to abandon the concepts of down and up. Now he had six directions to choose from, instead of four. The deck wasn’t canted; he was.

Again Tooe launched into a dark hole. Dane pushed after, his heartbeat accelerating. Was this going to be the stupidest— and the last—impulsive decision he’d ever made?

At first Tooe led him through abandoned air shafts and service hatchways cramped with poorly lashed, corroded cargo pods and other ancient junk, all dimly lit by random console or emergency exit lights. Dane frowned at the sight of one particularly large tangle of pipes and reaction vessels—perhaps an autochem or something—that was fastened

down so loosely that Tooe’s impact on it when she changed direction sent it slowly toward the bulkhead. That kind of carelessness killed people, he thought, then grimaced as he remembered where he was. On a ship, yes, badly stowed cargo could be a death sentence for ship and crew, but anything that hit the habitat hard enough to make this junk move would open the habitat to space and kill everyone on it long before shifting junk up here had any effect.

As he followed the little hybrid, he thought over the last couple of days. All his instincts favored Tooe, but he realized now that that might just be because she was so small and flimsy she didn’t seem to constitute any kind of threat. But that was aboard the Queen, in their territory. Here in this weird hinterland, she could always get a lot of small creatures together, and they could do what they wanted with an unarmed spacer.

Suddenly his breath caught in his throat as the space around them opened up abruptly to a vast cavern, with huge spokes reaching off at thirty-degree angles, their shadowed depths dwindling in impossible perspective. He realized they had to be at the top of twelve of the Kanddoyd towers—down the center of each spoke was the slender tube of a maglev, bedizened with the strange liquescent light-lines favored by the insectile aliens. The maglevs came together in a twelve-pointed star; suddenly, to Dane’s already stressed perceptions, the sight suggested nothing so much as some immense denizen of undersea with twelve luminescent tentacles, and he half expected one of them to curl towards them with feral intent.

But Tooe spared the spectacle not a glance. Instead she pulled herself gracefully along the interstice between two spokes and thus across the cavern, taking care to stay under the structural bracing—out of sight of inimical eyes, no doubt. Following her maneuver more clumsily, Dane put his hand on a pipe and yanked his fingers back with a hissed curse. The insulation was tattered and the pipe was bitterly cold. Only then did he note the ideograph denoting inert cryogenics. Probably nitrogen, he thought, then dismissed the thought, resolving to be more careful. He saw many more pipes like it, carrying different gases and liquids, some quite dangerous, and realized with mild appreciation the wisdom of the design: the emissions from any ruptures would tend to stay localized in zero gee, giving more time for repairs.

They traveled through air shafts for a while longer, finally emerging

into an intersection off which led five dark tunnels. The sixth was closed behind steel doors. Fog drifted out of one of the tunnels, veiling the faint lights that illuminated the open space and further confusing his sense of orientation. Dane’s danger sense prickled at the back of his neck. Where was the fog coming from?

Tooe paused, and when they saw a slight movement in the shadowy alcove just beyond a pool of light, she whistled quickly, a complicated series of notes, then rapped her knuckles on a loose piece of sheeting. It boomed softly; Dane noticed the center of it was shiny and dark, as if from years of steady use.

His ears caught the sound of movement, no more than a scrape, but Tooe swiftly followed up her whistle with another pattern, then visibly relaxed when from the shadows came a rapid clicking noise.

She gestured quietly to Dane, pushed off, and rocketed into the dark hole from which the fog was drifting. As they flew through the tunnel, Dane heard a faint hiss and saw the source of the fog: a leaking pipe. This must be a very old part of the Spin Axis, he thought; and indeed, as they went on, there were more and more leaks.

Occasionally Tooe would stop and whistle, or call, or tap some kind of signal, and on receiving a signal—usually from unseen watchers—she’d go on. At first Dane tried to memorize the trail, but had to give up before long. At the end, he was fairly certain they had doubled back.

He was about to ask what was going on; then an unsettling thought occurred to him: he’d been so busy wondering whether she could be trusted, he’d forgotten how Tooe must be feeling, taking a stranger to the place where her group hid out.

After what he’d heard over the last couple of days, Dane had a pretty good idea how life was in the Spin Axis. In the mostly abandoned space away from the area where the mysterious and sinister Shver Deathguard claimed, there were plenty of hidey-holes where various gangs lived, and none of them particularly liked or trusted the others. Sometimes there were fights—bad ones, since there were no Monitors to stop them. Mostly, though, the gangs seemed to exist in a kind of uneasy truce, lest the authorities suddenly decide to swoop down with heavy weapons and flame the place clean.

There were those groups that made their living from theft, or worse things. Tooe’s gang bartered.

"Nunku find we young," Tooe had said. "Teach us! We learn data, we learn machines, we trade. Get away from Spinner. I Tooe, go to space, me," she’d said proudly.

So Dane resigned himself to following a torturous path to Nunku’s hideout—when a piercing whistle echoed up from somewhere.

Tooe caught hold of a thin cable and stopped.

The sound came again, a high, weird note dropping down to another. Dane felt his neck bristle, and he flexed his hands. Now his danger sense was going into hyper—and from the looks of Tooe, it wasn’t just his imagination.

The little Rigelian darted to one of the adits, her crest flattened out in anger mode.

"That our call," she said quickly. "Danger—Shver hunt!"

"Shver hunt?" Dane repeated.

Tooe paid him no attention. She was very still, head angled to listen.

The sound came again, fainter, and this time Tooe sprang to a half-blocked shaft, and sped up inside.

She was going off to the rescue, with no weapons, no aid but Dane. Cursing himself for not having gotten a sleeprod, at least, he pushed after for a few seconds, his mind rapidly making and discarding plans.

A sharp turn in another old shaft and the Spin Axis opened up around them again, into a complicated space filled with angular cargo pods lashed to a confusion of pipes and tiedowns. Here too was the fog, and the air was cold. The whistle was suddenly very near. Tooe flicked out her skinny arm, and she and Dane watched as a squat being scooted by, ricocheting in terror-inspired grace off the cargo pods. As the victim disappeared from sight, there was a rumble of deep voices, and eight or ten Shver appeared, wearing some kind of jet-packs. In the dim lighting Dane could see that these Shver were young, and wealthy, and they all

carried vicious-looking force blades. Anger burned inside him: eight heavyweights against a small being scarcely larger than Tooe!

"You stay." Tooe’s voice was reedy with fear. "My nest-mate Momo, I help—"

"Wait," Dane murmured. "Can you get us ahead of them somehow?"

She whipped around and stared after Momo and the chasers, as if figuring a vector on the probable path. Then she nodded, her crest flicking into hope mode.

"Then get me there ahead, and we’ll have a little fun, if I’ve figured this right," Dane said, scanning the pipes running through the chamber.

Dane never did figure out how she did it; perhaps the adrenaline of the chase effaced the memory, but in a very few minutes, after a dizzying flight through interstices he would have sworn were too small for him, they were back in the foggy tunnel. He could hear the whistle of terror from Momo coming closer, and, fainter, the brutal laughter of the pursuing Shver. Dane pulled himself along as fast as he dared, scanning the tunnel walls until he spotted what he’d hoped for: the leaking pipe from which the fog was billowing. Fortunately, it was inert cryo again, for there was suddenly no time left as Momo rocketed past and, with no further warning, the Shver were upon them.

The bulky beings stopped, nonplussed. He saw them squint, trying to see through the fog veiling him and Tooe. Then the one in the lead smiled, evidently seeing easy prey. It jetted forward slowly, waving the others back, its force knife humming shrilly as it pointed the weapon square at Dane’s head.

Dane didn’t move, and noted approvingly that Tooe didn’t either. He flexed the toes of his right foot very slightly, checking that his foot was still firmly hooked under a cable.

"Vanish you, or be prey," the foremost Shver growled, his posture arrogant.

Dane didn’t answer. Instead, as the Shver lunged at him, he twisted down and aside by pulling up his right leg, and, as he rocketed down, chopped savagely at the leaking pipe with his left hand and yanked

sideways on it with his right, pushing hard against the tunnel wall with all the strength in his legs.

With a shrill screech of tortured metal the pipe ruptured and the liquid nitrogen jetted out straight at his attacker, the roar of its release suddenly augmented by a basso scream of agony from the Shver.

"Now!" shouted Dane, and they flew off down the tunnel. As they swung around a corner he looked back and bile suddenly spurted into his throat. Out of the boiling fog that veiled the confused panic of the Shver a small object looped toward them: a severed hand, frost covered, the force knife still humming in its rigid grasp. As he watched, frozen with a mixture of horror and triumph, the hand hit the bulkhead a few feet away and shattered into dust.

Dane felt a tug at his arm. "Trounced rascal knaves, you," she crowed; then her crest flattened as she saw his expression. She shook her head. "Won’t bleed, him. Saw freeze wound once—lots of time, medic fix."

Dane pushed off and followed her, shocked less by the sight than the violence his actions had revealed in him. Then he thought of the Ariadne. What if the Queen had been attacked? The thought made him feel a little better, but he was still subdued when they caught up with Momo.

The little being was a kind of humanoid Dane had never seen before. He was small, squat, and his skin was red— almost crimson; Dane wondered what influence in his environment could have created that. At first Momo was sobbing, and Tooe made consoling noises. When Momo was able to gulp back his tears, he and Tooe held a rapid conversation in Kanddoyd, snapping and tapping their fingers in complicated rhythms to accentuate their speech.

Dane followed along behind, doing his best to follow the flow of words. The Kanddoyd they spoke seemed highly idiomatic, or else had been adapted over time for the benefit of physiologies different from Kanddoyd.

Suddenly they both turned to Dane, and Momo said in Kanddoyd-accented Terran, "Gracious and forever gratitude to Terran visitor, my honor to give to you." He lifted both hands to his head and covered his eyes with his thumbs, flickering his fingers in a gesture which Dane recognized as an analogue for the respectful clacking of Kanddoyd mandibles.

"Glad to help," he said, feeling awkward.

"We conduct honored rescuer to Nunku," Momo said.

Dane bit his lip. Wasn’t that where Tooe had intended to take him all along? For a moment his suspicions rose again, to disappear when he realized that the two were taking him on a straight route, rather than the circuitous one Tooe had embarked on at first.

Warm air and the deep droning of vast engines, more a vibration than a sound, indicated they were somewhere in the vicinity of the great motors for the ventilators that kept the air moving in the Spin Axis. The air smelled slightly metallic, but was fresh enough, and unlike the still air in the abandoned storage areas, this ruffled gently across his skin, making it clear that someone had seen to circulation.

They passed a jumble of ancient hull metal and other discarded parts of spaceships. Twice Tooe made calling sounds, but there were no answers this time. Warnings, Dane thought. Before, she was signaling for permission to enter other gangs’ territories, and now she was letting her own gang know she was coming.

I wonder if the signal says anything about me, he thought as they floated down into a vast circular room, well lit from an astonishing variety of lighting equipment scavenged from several centuries’ choices of styles.

At once eight or ten beings appeared, ricocheting down with bizarre grace from the network of catwalks and cables stretching everywhere, all of them raggedly dressed in ill-fitting spacer castoffs. They represented biologies from an astonishingly wide range of systems, all humanoid, but that was the only common bond.

The one that drew the eye was a very weird creature indeed. Her head seemed much too large for her body, but Dane realized after a second look that her head was normal in size. The thin, strangely elongated body inside the tattered old robe was not. It was as if a child’s body had been stretched out to ten or twelve feet. Such a person would have to live in free fall, Dane realized as Tooe eagerly drew him forward. She could never stand on her own in normal gravity.

"Dane Thorsen, here Nunku," Tooe said.

A pair of wide china-blue eyes regarded Dane gravely from under a tangle of lank light-brown hair. "We thank thee for thy help," she said softly.

Tooe and Momo then launched into a stream of talk, mixing together words from six or more languages. Mostly they spoke Kanddoyd, but here and there were Terran words. At the end, there was even one Shver: "Golm."

Dane looked up sharply, and the others reacted with startled glances.

Dane felt his neck and ears burning. "Sorry," he said.

Nunku shook her head slightly. "Clan Golm," she murmured. "Thou knowest of them?"

Dane shrugged, feeling stupid. "It’s just that there was one of them—called himself the Jheel—who... made things difficult for my shipmates," he finished lamely.

Tooe whistled, then said, "Golm Jheels, all three, bad, Zoral very very bad. Zoral hunt Momo," she finished.

Nunku said, "It is an old clan, and powerful. The young ones do not act worthy of trust. They want more power."

Dane said carefully, "The Jheel I mean works in the Terran Trade communications office. Do you know something about this Jheel?"

Another fast conversation in mixed Rigelian, Kanddoyd, and other languages, this time with other figures coming forward to participate.

At last Nunku nodded, and it was Momo who said, "Thou art my rescuer. I trade data. What needest thou?"

Dane sighed. How to explain? Ought he to explain?

He looked from Tooe to Momo to Nunku, saw them waiting expectantly. He had come because Tooe wanted him to; she kept talking about Nunku and the others like. like he would the crew of the Queen. Like they were family.

"Well, here’s what’s going on," he began.