Derelict For Trade

17

Rip snickered to himself as he followed Dane Thorson through a barren service adit, the odd beings in Tooe’s klinti methodically zooming ahead, checking in all directions, then waving them on to the next segment of the service transit, just like space pirates in some holovid.

Under the circumstances, the huge sign in three languages and three symbols was more funny than menacing:

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

More than that prompted the bubbling humor, fast and unstoppable as a springtide stream: Ali’s lengthy, colorful, and fluent reaction to his being forced to stay behind. The captain had been adamant. Until they knew for certain that the Monitors of Harmony were in league with the enemy, they would keep their promise, and Kosti and Kamil were not permitted to go anywhere but between the two ships.

Another cause for laughter was picturing what Kosti would say when he returned and found out what he’d missed.

But foremost was the surreal sense that Rip got when he watched the free-fall circus evolving around them. Now he saw Nunku’s beauty, an eldritch sort based on economy of line and motion: an eel-maiden moving in a sea of micro-gravity that was slowly drowning him, the earthbound one. Not only did he feel like he was in a holovid, now he was living a fairy tale.

Rip fought back a snort-spasm of hilarity. He knew that he should stop laughing, that he was probably closer to hysteria than he realized, but he just couldn’t. Luckily none of the others paid him the slightest attention; Dane was concentrating on the whispered reports in some other language that the klinti made from time to time, and Mura just ignored him. Stotz gave Rip a faint smile once, then he too ignored him, instead moving with a speed and control of effort that inspired instant admiration in Rip. He’d been amazed when Dane showed up with Johan, of all people, but now Rip could see why he was along—though how Dane had known to ask was still a mystery.

They traversed a good portion of the dock area before stopping behind

an adit at one of the maglevs that stayed in null grav. His antic mood was wearing off, eroded by the occasional disorientation of free fall and the strangeness of the Spinner. Now that Nunku was just a weird girl with spidery-thin arms and legs protruding from a ragged robe, some of his humor dissipated. But the obvious respect the others treated her with made it apparent she wasn’t just a mutant who hadn’t a decent change of clothes, or access to enough water to launder what she had. It was hard to look at her— and harder to imagine what her life must be like.

A closer glance at that pale, mottled skin sticking out of the tattered, old-fashioned djellaba made Rip wish suddenly for wide spaces, fresh air, and gravity.

The fresh air and wide spaces, at least, they got. After the scouts had watched for several long minutes, finally they signaled the all-clear, and the assault circus (as Rip privately termed this odd combination of beings) hastily emerged from the adit.

In quiet, law-abiding form they boarded the maglev.

Beings, mostly Kanddoyds, crowded on and off the maglev for the few stops they needed to make. Just before Rip and his party debarked, a group of Traders came on, several of them saluting the Queen's men before one of them scrutinized Dane and nudged one of his partners. A quick whisper, and the other Traders moved with more haste than necessary to the other side of the pod, studiously avoiding looking in their direction.

Though Dane didn’t react, this effectively killed the remainder of Rip’s sense of humor, his conviction that what he was doing wasn’t real, and filled him with an anger-laced sense of purpose.

After waiting a few seconds he, Stotz, Mura, and Dane followed Tooe’s group off, so it wasn’t immediately obvious they were all together, and they drifted down the concourse, looking off at the winking chains of lights along the Kanddoyd buildings.

By a circuitous route they approached a fine building with a fern garden carefully tended round it. One by one they followed one another behind a sheltering screen of ferns, and ducked into another service adit.

This one was narrow, with pipes and conduits lining all the walls. An

aggressive antiseptic smell didn’t quite cover the dank odor of waste on its way to the recycler.

Rip’s sense of purpose got an adrenaline boost when one of the scouts stopped, listening to a wrist com, and chattered to the others.

"Fast!" Tooe squeaked. "Fast! Fast! Monitors changing shift—"

They bounded from wall to wall, zooming up the narrow accessways.

Rip was immediately completely lost, for the accesses bent and twisted at odd angles. Someone knew where they were going, though.

Finally they came to a halt, and again the scouts used a tiny peek-through to ascertain when the hallway just beyond their hatch was empty. This was in null-gravity territory, which meant people came and went at all hours, which summed up Kanddoyd life. The Shver followed simulated sun cycles when they could, but the Kanddoyds had bred the diurnal rhythms out of their life cycles uncounted generations ago.

When the corridor the scouts had chosen was empty, two of the klinti came forward. Rip saw that they had donned the plain gray coveralls of maintenance personnel. As they slipped out the hole, a third carefully handed them a canister. Puzzled, Rip pushed himself forward; then alarm thumped in his chest when he recognized the glowing hooked orange trigram indicating biohazardous contents.

Tooe closed the hatch almost all the way. From the darkness beyond, the rest of the group crowded around to watch. The two workers stood waiting quietly, one with his clawed fingers on the latch of the biohazard container.

Noises sounded; a group of chattering Kanddoyds appeared around a corner. Rip, peering down at an awkward angle, just barely glimpsed them before one of the workers pushed against the other, let out a yell, and next thing they knew the canister was open and zillions of tiny shapes swarmed out, spiraling into the corridor.

The Kanddoyds screeched like overtuned strings, clacking and whistling in supersonic ranges that brought up goose bumps on Rip’s neck.

One of the workers hooted something in High Kanddoyd, to which the beings responded with total panic.

Soon shrieks echoed back, one of them human: "EVACUATE! APYUI VAMPIRE FLIES!"

Apyui vampire flies? Rip backed away in horror lest any of the black shapes still darting about in the hallway slip through the service hatch still cracked open. Everyone knew about Apyui vampire flies, an insect harmless to the Fifftocs but deadly to every other race. Every space farer knew the terrible story of the Plague of Athero. Just a couple of the flies had gotten aboard a Trader that stopped in Fifftoc space and were inadvertently carried to a human system, where they rapidly bred by feeding through soft human skin. They didn’t just suck blood, they paralyzed their victims first with a potent chemical that spread through the nervous system, making the victim think he was dying by fire. Most victims died by suicide in their efforts to stop the pain; the few who lived were paralyzed for life.

"We’d better—" Rip started nervously.

Tooe’s webbed fingers grabbed his shoulder in a surprisingly strong grip. "Move not! Not Apyui flies. Ekko-tree mites. No harm."

Rip realized what had happened, and drew a shaky breath. "That’s brilliant," he muttered.

"Sneaky, but brilliant," Johan said wryly.

Dane grinned, then tabbed the hatch open and motioned them out. "Building has to be empty by now. Let’s get to it."

"Won’t they seal and gas the place?" Rip asked as they bounded down a hall passing doors above, below, to the sides, always squarely in the middle of walls.

"Gas won’t harm anyone but Jharzhakiu there," Dane said, pointing to a being with two sets of arms, one that ended in claws and the other in tentacles. The claw arms were busy pulling a breathing apparatus over a very weird face. "All we’ll smell is cinnamon," Dane added.

"Here," Tooe said. "Move back."

As she opened the hatch she tossed through it an automated doll with something strapped to its back. Dane sensed a flicker of response. Moving with feral grace, a boneless tentacle of gleaming metal lashed down from above the door and transfixed the doll as it scuttled frantically into the room, adhesive glands holding it firmly to the deck. As Rip watched, there was a bluish electric flash, and he saw a pulse zap back up the tentacle. A moment later a weird hum he hadn’t previously been aware of ceased.

Moving with practiced efficiency, several klinti moved in, teasing out the other traps and stings.

Dane said, "How would Flindyk have time to activate that stuff? The entire building must have been evacuated in half a minute."

"Remote activation," Rip said. "Easy enough to rig, if you’ve plenty of money and power."

At last the klinti indicated it was safe to move. Inside they found the mute evidence of hasty evacuation. Flimsies lay everywhere, chips had been dropped; here and three were floating bubbles from drink tubes that had gotten smashed somehow in the general exodus. There were four live consoles, each with projects suspended. Rip watched Nunku float from each to each, studying the keypads as though there were something to be read there.

He knew he was supposed to be backup muscle in case they were discovered, but he was a navigator by trade, which meant among other things learning computer tech, and he couldn’t take his attention away from her.

Signing to Dane, who was gently guiding wobbling fluid spheres out of their way, he said, "Yell if you need me. I want to watch."

Dane nodded and returned to his chore.

Stotz took up position by the main door, stationing himself just inside at an angle where he could see out but not be immediately seen. Mura made his way to another door and waited there, watching with blank face as the klinti moved about the room picking up chips and flimsies.

No one touched the consoles.

Nunku gestured toward a door cleverly hidden in a fabulous mosaic, and two of the klinti sprang to it. This time they tossed a diaphanous veil

of teased-out Rackney silk, triggering an apparently solid image from its fluorescent fibers with a juiced-up toy holobeamer. The response was more subtle: Dane saw a flicker of motion and the image sheered sideways and disappeared as something snatched the silk from the air. Different klinti moved in; this time clearing it took longer.

Inside was the garden room, just as Rael had described to the crew. Rip gave an appreciative glance at the wealth that had gone into the office’s design. Could a Trade official earn enough to afford this stuff—even a fellow saving for a hundred years?

He shook his head and turned to watch Nunku.

Meanwhile, she had been moving cautiously behind her boobytrap scouts toward a touch console inset into a desk. There were very few keytabs but those were extremely costly porcelain, gold-painted.

Nunku cast a quick glance at Rip, gave him a surprisingly shy smile.

She altered her posture so he could see better as she removed a chip from her tattered clothing and dropped it into a slot. The screen lit up, but only swirled in a fractal chaos that parodied the beauty spinning overhead.

"Mine chip hath released a nofratu," she said in a soft, sibilant voice. "Very dangerous, quite forbidden. There are no inherent constraints on its reproduction."

That voice, the odd accent, like his grandmother’s almost, and her childish moon face above the long stick body made him feel curiously adrift, as if reality had turned inside out and left him stranded in a dreamscape. "There is very little it cannot dissolve," she said as the movement of the patterns onscreen accelerated.

He realized she was happy to explain, that this odd, pitiful person was a born teacher.

Abruptly, the screen cleared to a maze of symbols and glyphs.

"What is that?" he asked, his finger drawn to a particularly complex ideograph.

She grabbed his wrist in a surprisingly strong grasp; he noticed for the first time how large her knuckles and wrist were in proportion to her

fingers and arms. "It is something the varlet Flindyk would most straitly desire thee to touch," she said without heat.

She released him as he pulled his hand back. With an attenuated finger, she touched the screen gently. The pattern folded in on itself, swallowing ranks of data. Rip had the sense of something focusing and wondered how Nunku saw it.

"A twisted web indeed he spinneth," she said. "But I shall pluck out the treasure at its heart." She touched the screen again, this time with a complex pattern of several fingers. Again the evolution, the sense of something evolving from blur to image. Nunku was once more the eel-maiden, this time swimming in a sea of data, with its own predators and beauties.

The unreality of the scene was intensified when Rip heard someone sneeze a few times in the outer chamber, and moments later he smelled a sharp odor rather like cinnamon and burned straw. The maintenance people were flushing the supposed vampire flies—they’d be in soon.

Nunku had to realize it too, but her face was merely absorbed as with delicate touch she tried various patterns of pressure and rhythm, watching the screen ripple through simpler and simpler patterns of symbols.

Finally the screen flickered and Rip saw data ranked in the Kanddoyd language. Moving swiftly now, Nunku pressed a keytab and at once the status light for a download shone a steady green.

"It returneth, its appetites sated, and with it our data."

It took only a few seconds, then Nunku pulled the chip out and the screen flickered to the fractal display they’d first seen.

"It should have erased my tracks," she said, "at least on the surface. A direct probe would reveal what we have done, but I do make no doubt I left nary a trace to raise the suspicions of yon miscreants."

"Then we’d better go," Rip said.

Until now she’d moved slowly; now she placed one of those impossibly thin feet on a surface and shot through the door to the outer room.

Very swiftly they all exited, the scouts reversing their process of entry so the pitfalls would be intact. Rip knew that the interruption would show up on some computer somewhere, but it couldn’t be helped. They could only hope that if the room seemed to be untouched no one would check—at least until they were safely out of reach.

They shot into the service adit just moments before a vanguard of maintenance people moved slowly down the hall, ostensibly looking for pests. One of Tooe’s klinti left the hatch open a fraction, just enough for them to see that the maintenance people were followed by two fully armed Monitors.

Someone closed the hatch, and in the dim indirect light of the service tunnel they moved swiftly back through the building’s crazy angles and curves until they emerged once again behind the protective screen of huge ferns.

Again they progressed in twos and threes onto the concourse, the last of the klinti being the two who had meanwhile shed and stashed their maintenance clothing.

This time, however, they did not go to the maglev. Instead, Rip and his companions from the Queen followed the others in an evasive pattern that led to the Spin Axis.

Rip was fascinated by the increasing strangeness of their surroundings as they approached the Spinner. Their route became ever more crooked, compressed by the micrograv shifting of forgotten cargo and junk over the centuries. Several times he saw where automated buildbots had evidently just chewed through everything in their path, bracing abandoned machinery to the walls merely as support for the new pipelines or data paths that transfixed them. No wonder there were so many leaks. It was almost like the Kanddoyds expected their cylome to be no more permanent than the planet that had rejected them.

From out of the fog and shadows came a hooting call, another in the series that had followed them, as unseen but ever-present klinti monitored their progress and their intentions. Of course they were tense, he thought, perceiving now the fragile network of relationships that kept the various factions and territories from deadly strife.

We've fractured the peace here—everywhere on the cylome, he

thought. If this doesn't work, if we can't prove this conspiracy, we won't survive. Everyone on the habitat will have been turned against us. Watching Nunku, Rip realized that the klinti knew this, and knew they would not survive either. They had made their choice: an irrevocable one.

The klinti nest was so bizarre that it gave Rip the sense of being the source of all the weirdness of the Spinner, rather than its effect. Not only was there no sense of up and down in the vast chamber, it seemed to have been designed using these elements of the klinti habitations with ferocious intent. Spidery latticework tubes—the free-fall equivalent of catwalks—webbed the space at all angles, swollen here and there with homes like galls on an oak branch. Between the thinner strands of the web were cables, ropes, and even some vines, which the inhabitants used to change direction on their graceful flights between catwalks. But when he saw two klinti meet and pass, each upside down to the other like an old Terran print he’d seen once, Rip saw how much more space that gave them. For a moment he flashed on how the Queen must look to Tooe, its wasteful, almost pretentious insistence on nonexistent acceleration, with almost half her space sacrificed to a cramped up-down orientation.

Nunku seemed to have no objections as Rip followed her to the strangest console he had ever seen. At a glance he knew that it was completely self-designed and built, and as he scanned it more slowly, his fingers unconsciously flexed as if they wanted nothing more than to get at those keys.

Nunku settled in place and inserted her chip, and moments later the screen reflected the same data that Rip remembered seeing on Flindyk’s screen.

"What I have," Nunku said, "are the payroll records. All of them."

Rip whistled to himself. That would be uncountable gigs of data. "Search on the ship names?" he asked.

Nunku nodded. "I do not think we shall find any ship names here," she said. "But of course we must examine for them first."

"You mean rule it out first," Rip said with a grin. "It won’t be that easy."

A rare, sweet smile transformed Nunku’s face for a moment into

something. almost human. Rip felt a wrench of pity for this young woman who was, after all, human, and who had been forced into this nightmarish form and existence through no fault of her own.

Her fingers tapped softly over her screen, tabbed two keys, and she said, "Nothing."

"How about people?" That was Dane. Stotz—of course— was busy examining the vibration compensators rigged on the junction with one of the catwalks. "The ones we suspect: Koytatik, Flindyk himself, and anyone from Clan Golm, but especially the Jheel."

Nunku’s fingers danced rapidly across the screen.

After a time, she said, "Here is Koytatik. They are paid by the piece, so this will be difficult." She pointed at the screen. "Here is Trade Authority—these are all ship Companies. Here’s one for a starfaring Shver clan."

"Is that suspicious?" Dane asked.

Nunku said, "We are right to think anything suspicious, though the piece of work seemeth straightforward enow: registry of an upgrade in engines, and the addition of another energy weapon for far-range work." She paused and checked something swiftly on a side console, then nodded. "As I comprehended. Clan Shren is known for frontier exploration and mapping."

"We can mark it for later perusal," Rip said, "but I think that’s a dead end."

Nunku nodded. "We should, I believe, assume that most of this is perfectly legitimate business."

"So how do we find what isn’t?" Rip said, watching as Nunku scanned swiftly through endless items of business.

"Vector," Nunku murmured.

Rip knew that, but how to find what to triangulate on? He turned away, feeling more frustrated by the moment. If the data was in a language he knew, and on a computer he could operate, he’d figure out an attack

pattern for shedding the unnecessary data. Not to be able to read what was on the screen before him made him feel like he was trying to grasp and hold water.

"I shall try a search on common providers that Koytatik and Flindyk and the Jheel have." She tapped, they waited in silence, and she laid her hands on her console. "Nothing."

"Take Flindyk out," Rip suggested.

This time they had too much information. The Jheel was connected with Koytatik’s office in certain capacities, so it wasn’t surprising that a myriad of businesses showed up.

They tried other combinations, until Rip, who’d stopped watching the screen and was resting in midair, pretending that he had his own computer before him, imagined a vector that he would follow.

"Go back," he said, opening his eyes. "To the Jheel and Koytatik."

Nunku moved back, and looked up inquiringly.

"Now, how about finding out who’s behind each of the businesses?

Strip out Trade departments, of course."

Nunku nodded slightly, her fingers working. Her face was absorbed, not at all surprised, and Rip suddenly wondered if she hadn’t already thought of it, but out of an innate courtesy listened to his ideas. She's a leader, he thought, watching her. She makes all these weird beings feel needed and valued. A good trait, he realized, for a captain.

"Ah," she said, with that sudden smile, and he knew he’d been right—she’d initiated a search right from the start because no computer was that fast. "I have done inquiries on each of the ownership combinations furnished by the Exchange listings, and of them, there is one that is registered as based here, but the owners." She paused, and in a lightning move sent yet another probe into the system. "Zounds!" she exclaimed. "As I surmised. Sphere Eleven Startraders, a limited partnership. These owners were once individuals, but all are deceased."

Dane clapped his hands, ignoring the laugh from Tooe and some of her friends as the movement sent him into an inadvertent somersault. "Run the dates of payments from Sphere Eleven Startraders for a month before and after each of the ETAs on the insured ships."

Once again Nunku’s fingers sped over her screen, and then she sat back and smiled. "There it is," she said. "The Jheel is on the listing after Ariadne, but no others. Koytatik, however, is listed after, five disappeared ships, each a month after the ETA."

"It’s good," Rip said, rubbing his fingertips to get rid of the tingle of the computer tech who is on the scent, "but it’s still not proof. The last connection—"

This time Nunku laughed, a lovely, merry sound. "The trail of credit from Sphere Eleven to whoever is providing the money."

Stotz came forward and spoke for the first time. "That probably won’t show up," he said. "If it’s Flindyk, he’s so entrenched in the system he knows how to ride it and how to blind it. I’ll stake any sum he gets some goon to pay cash, anonymous source, into the Sphere Eleven accounts at intervals that have nothing to do with the payouts—"

"And in amounts that won’t match withdrawal sums or dates from his own funds," Rip said. "Yup. I’d do that too, if I were setting up a hijacking empire. Make sure your flunkies are paid promptly, because they don’t care where it comes from, but make certain the source is sufficiently fuzzy for the random legit auditor, who does care."

"Then we’re stopped after all?" Dane asked, looking annoyed.

"I shall see if I can break through the guardians of Flindyk’s own accounts," Nunku said quietly.

"Look, Viking," Rip said. "Let’s take what we have and give it to the captain and the others. We can’t expect to get it all at once, but what we have here ought to be enough for quick brains like Ya’s and Van’s and Wilcox’s, not to mention the Old Man’s."

"Right," Dane said, but without much enthusiasm. He turned to Nunku. "Thanks for your help, We’ll report back."

"Momo and Ghesl’h’h shall see thee safely out of the Spinner," was all she said.

All four men were silent on the long journey out.

Just before they returned to the Queen, Dane said, "Why don’t you take this data to the captain? I’m going down to Shver territory to see if our ferret extracted anything more. We obviously need every scrap of data we can get."

"Bad idea," Stotz said. "Didn’t someone say Flindyk has to be onto that ferret by now?"

"It’s going to burn at me until I know," Dane said. "Look. I’ll do it just like before, nice and easy. If there’s anything suspicious, I won’t go in."

"At least sound it first," Stotz said.

Dane and Rip shook their heads at the same time, and Dane grinned before saying, "If the ferret’s discovered, the sounder will be too."

Rip said, "Then I’m going with you."

"Maybe we should all go," Frank said.

Dane shook his head. "In that grav, if you try to block a Shver’s hit your arm will shatter. And Johan, your nuller skills won’t be much use in one-point-six gravs."

Stotz grinned. "All right. Besides, I think this"—he waved the chip Nunku had given them—"better get into the captain’s hands right away."

They stopped at a maglev concourse, and before separating, Mura said, "If you’re not back right away, we’re all coming after you."