A Covenant of Justice (11 page)

The balcony of the command bridge loomed high above the main operations deck. The Dragon Lord stepped boldly out into the center of the bridge and waited. He had come to the bridge. He had come this far and would come no further. Commander ‘Ga Lunik must come now to him. He stopped. He stood. He struck a pose. Squat and stolid, he waited.

And waited.

And waited. . . .

Commander ‘Ga Lunik stood at the opposite end of the bridge, drinking from a steaming mug. He listened to the reports of his aides. He turned and studied the displays on the deck below. He turned back to his aides. He issued several orders. He turned and noticed the Dragon Lord waiting for him. He turned back to his aides and chatted with them a while longer. He snapped his fingers and an insect attendant scurried up. He handed the insect the mug and waved it away. He glanced at the displays below again, studied them for a long moment. He conferred with a junior officer. At last, he completed all the many little tasks associated with running a starship and ambled over to the Dragon Lord.

Commander ‘Ga Lunik smiled at the Dragon Lord. His expression revealed nothing of his inner face, it reflected only sincerity and concern. “Thank you for coming, my Lord.”

“You have information?”

“As a matter of fact, we do. I thought you should know. Our Marauders have intercepted the Lady's locater. Only the locater. Not the Lady. The rebels have . . . removed it from her body.”

“They have
touched
her? They've laid hands upon her flesh?”

Commander ‘Ga Lunik kept his expression neutral. “I would presume so, yes. I cannot imagine any other way to remove the locater without a physical extraction.”

The Dragon Lord snorted in fury. “They have soiled the Lady's purity! Will their heinous offenses never cease?” He stamped around in circles, lashing his huge tail back and forth. For several moments, he gave one of his very best performances of offense and rage. When he finally came to a stop, he noticed that few of the Phaestor crewmembers had reacted, or even bothered to look up from their instruments.

The Dragon Lord realized with chagrin that the Vampires had not accepted his performance as genuine. Indeed, apparently they had even expected him to demonstrate his rage. He hadn't fooled them at all. Hmm. He considered killing a few, but the moment for that urge had already passed. He allowed his anger to subside and turned back to the waiting Captain of the starship. “What else?” he demanded.

“With the loss of this last locater, we can no longer track the course of the boat. Our probability display shows an ever expanding sphere of possibility. Within two hours, we will have to assume that they have landed on Burihatin-14.”

“Yes,” acknowledged the Dragon Lord. “We will have to assume that, won't we.” He roared once in annoyance, just to see if ‘Ga Lunik would flinch. It worked; he did. The Dragon Lord felt a little better. But not much.

This latest bit of news represented a serious setback to his strategies. He had meant to discomfit Zillabar, not endanger her. He had never considered her in real danger while they still maintained the ability to track her. Now, the damned rebels had actually escaped! And Zillabar's safety had become more than problematic. Suppose they injured her further. Suppose they killed her—?

The Dragon Lord groaned inwardly. The recapture of the rebels and the rescue of Zillabar would require a major effort. Dishonorable suicide began to look inevitable again. The Dragon Lord did not like that thought at all. He knew of too many tastes that he had not yet sampled, too many things he had not yet had the chance to eat.

He snorted and turned to Commander ‘Ga Lunik. “Recall all your Marauders, except those that can get to Fourteen faster. Set an immediate course for Burihatin-14. We need to arrive there as soon as possible.”

Commander ‘Ga Lunik stared at the Dragon Lord blandly. “My Lord, perhaps you have forgotten. The Phaestor do not take orders from the Dragons. I give the orders aboard this vessel. And I have already given all the orders on this matter which I consider necessary and appropriate.” He bowed gracefully. “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to advise you. You may return to your quarters now. Your continued presence on the bridge may present a distraction to my crew.” Commander ‘Ga Lunik turned crisply and strode away without waiting to see the Dragon Lord's reaction.

Aboard the starship
Lady MacBeth
,
otherspace
appeared as a glorious blur of light and color. The entire ship glowed with energy, within and without. As beautiful as the omnipresent FTL aura appeared, it annoyed the hell out of Star-Captain Neena Linn-Campbell. She strode angrily up the keel-corridor of
The Lady MacBeth
, swearing every step of the way to the Operations Deck.

Two aides followed her—Ota, her bioform First Officer, and Robin, her android copilot. “I won't have it!” she exclaimed. “I won't have this ship run like a third-class freebooter freighter.”

“But Captain—our registration
lists
us as a third-class freebooter freighter,” said Robin, keeping her voice and expression neutral.

“So what? That doesn't mean we have to act like it. I want us to represent ourselves as a first class ship, inside and out, top to bottom, bow to stern, forward and aft, with no one and nothing left out, goddammit! This damned FTL shimmer curdles the milk. It wilts the lettuce. It fatigues the polyceramics. And it gives me migraines! I want the fluction-bars recalibrated. I don't care how many goddamn times Shariba-Jen has to do it. If we have to flush every last assembly valve in the entire system, then that's what we'll do. And I want it done before we break orbit from Burihatin-14. God knows what an undamped FTL-effect will do to a cargo of 5-week pfingle eggs.”

“Allow me to say this again, Captain. I have my doubts about the rating of those eggs—”

At that moment, Gito, the ship's engineer, turned out of a cross passage ahead of them. Seeing the Captain and the look on her face, he thought to step back quickly; but he acted too late. Captain Campbell stopped him with a roar. “Gito! Can you hear it? Can you see it? The hyperspace injectors have begun making that pocketa-pocketa noise again!”

“Yes, Captain. I can see it. I can hear it. And I promise you, Shariba-Jen and I will find the problem and fix it.” Without missing a beat, he added, “May I ask you when you will find the time to continue our contract renegotiation?”

“When you and Jen complete the repairs to this ship, then we'll talk. Why should I discuss shares in the corporation with an engineer who can't keep an
otherspace
field in tune?” Catching sight of the robot crew member behind Gito, she added, “Oh, and Jen—I see you! Don't you try to hide! I want you to see to the food processors again! The orange juice still has a nasty blue tinge. I thought you said you fixed that.”

“Yes, Captain. I'll see to it immediately. But if I might echo Gito's concern, perhaps we might have more attention to some of these things if we felt a sense of financial partnership as well as spiritual—”

“No, goddammit! No! I will have no discussions of partnership of any kind unless and until every damn doohickey and thingamabob on this bucket works correctly! You will not get your way through blackmail, greenmail, whitemail or any other kind of mail! Prove your worth and then we'll talk! You think I don't know what the lot of you have done! Put this ship right or I'll shove the lot of you out the goddamn airlock and drag this thing home myself!” She stormed ahead, leaving the rest of the crew gaping after her, unable to reply. Ota, a Lix-class bioform, followed without comment.

Gito and Shariba-Jen exchanged looks. “Come on, Jen,” said Gito. “Let's go ‘prove our worth.' Let's see if she likes it when the toilet tickles her every time she squats to pee.”

“I wouldn't advise that,” recommended Robin. “Perhaps we should rethink our strategy.”

“Nah,” said Gito. “The crazier she gets, the more advantage we have.” He grinned and hurried off, followed by the expressionless robot.

Robin shrugged and hurried after Ota and Captain Campbell.

The Captain climbed up through the Operations Bay, onto the Ops Deck, and from there up to the Command Bridge, swearing a blue streak that spanned seven different languages, including the Old Tongue, Diplomatic Phaestor, Dragonic, Neo-High German, Interlingua, Interstellar Binary, and Object Pascal. Ota followed, without comment and without apparent understanding. Nevertheless, several of the Captain's more colorful euphemisms left the bioform distinctly uncomfortable.

Star-Captain Campbell flung herself into her Command Seat unhappily. “Idiots, thieves and imbeciles. They attack us from without. They attack us from within. Thank the stars I've never allowed myself to trust another person long enough to let him, her, or it, get close enough to do any real damage. We'll hire a while new crew if we have to—and that includes you too, Ota. Don't you give me that look. Okay, yes, so I rescued you from a death worse than fate on Thoska-Roole. Don't let it go to your head. I can just as easily jettison you and all the rest. I have a business to tend to. I didn't turn in my Guild Insignia so the rest of you could get rich by feeding off the bones of my flayed corpse. I expect a little loyalty, a little unity, a little cooperation, goddammit. And what do I get? Malfeasance, nonfeasance, incompetence, and unreasonable requests! This has all got to stop! What do I have to do to get things back to normal around here anyway?”

“You could start by lowering your voice,” suggested Ota. “The paneling on the walls has begun to blister.”

Neena Linn-Campbell gave her First Officer a skeptical look. “I thought bioforms didn't make jokes.”

“Only in self-defense,” Ota replied.

“All right,” Campbell said. She damped her anger and slowed her words. “Talk to me.”

“Have you considered the possibility of bankruptcy?”

“No. I did that once. I didn't enjoy it. I don't want to do it again.” Then she stopped and looked at Ota with sudden graveness. “We do have other alternatives, don't we?”

Ota held up a hand and rotated it in a gesture of uncertainty; palm up, palm down, palm up again.

Neena Linn-Campbell raised an eyebrow. “That bad, huh?”

“We have assumed more debts than we should.”

“Mm.”

“We've missed too many opportunities, Captain. We missed several chances to pick up charters on Thoska-Roole—”

“You may remember, we had
other
concerns at the time.”

“I don't question that, Captain, but—”

“What would you have had me do—risk having the ship seized?”

“No, ma'am. I just wanted to point out had we picked up those cargoes, they would have covered the cost of this jump. The failure of the Zillabar charter to pay their fees in full, plus our failure to pick up paying cargo for the jump back to Burihatin has left us in a serious debit situation. In addition, the failure of Sawyer and Finn Markham, and Lee-1169, to rendezvous as promised has left us with passengers aboard who cannot pay for their passage as expected—not to mention the fact that we remain heavily invested in pfingle eggs which currently sit aging in a Burihatin warehouse.”

Ota shook its head unhappily. “I don't see a way for us to escape this financial trap. Freebooters working without Guild Insignia don't have command the same kind of rates as Guild licensed vessels. It worries me.”

“We've experienced worse,” Captain Campbell said.

“Not in my memory,” Ota retorted.

“Mm. You might have a point there.” Abruptly, she shook her head. “Look, if we can deliver the pfingle eggs before they hatch, the payment for that cargo should resolve our problem.”

“I wish I shared your certainty, ma'am. I don't trust our supplier to have actually sold us three-month pfingle eggs. I'd sure hate to have them hatch while in transit.”

“We'll stash them in the aft cargo bay and monitor them continually. If we detect any undue activity, we'll jettison the whole cargo.”

Ota remarked blandly, “I have heard that once the first pfingle hatches, the rest will hatch within 30 seconds. That would mean blasting open the aft cargo doors in a deliberate act of explosive decompression. Shariba-Jen has informed me that while such an act would entail considerable risk, and in fact might cause significant structural damage to the stern of the vessel, we should have a fairly good chance of surviving an emergency jettisoning of the cargo. But only, of course, if we can detect the hatching of the first egg in time.”

“Mm, yes.” Captain Campbell considered that. “I wonder if we might install the whole thing in an external bubble. Would that give us an additional margin for error?”

“I'll have to ask Shariba-Jen, as well as EDNA.”

Star-Captain Campbell sagged in her chair. “I had no idea that it would cost so much to shake free of Regency interference.”

“It would have cost us more to maintain our Guild membership.”

Star-Captain Campbell looked to Ota, surprised. “I had no idea that you thought that way. I thought you disagreed with my decision.”

“On the contrary, Captain. You just never asked me for my opinion.”

“Well. Thank you.”

“Besides, as a freebooter, it offers the rest of the crew the opportunity to renegotiate our profit position with you.”

Captain Campbell stared at Ota for a long moment. “Et tu, Ota?”

Ota nodded meekly. “You have always encouraged me to express more independence.”

Captain Campbell closed her mouth. She held her hands up in front of her in a broad gesture of deference and respect. “Then I have only myself to blame.” She turned away abruptly. “EDNA? You have something to say?”

The ship's mind answered softly. “We will arrive at Burihatin in eleven minutes. We should begin preparations to drop out of
otherspace
.”