Home: Interstellar: Merchant Princess (13 page)

This was part of Nick’s solution to the security problem: two embedded IDs. Meriel was no stranger to the security game and knew that two IDs would not be enough. If her security ID just appeared at the impound dock without logging her path there from red-zone, security would be alerted, and docks would be shut down until they caught her.
He’ll figure out something
.

only monthly inspection. every hour, they cycle through with motion detectors and security cameras looking for anything larger than vermin, which would be you. just use the corridors and the galley and the mess hall. ignore the schedule. begin at 17.96 on this link, and it will tell you the next place to be or not be.

Meriel finished the message and went into a bathroom stall to change and install the ID chip. She pressed the pistol against her wrist to install the chip and pulled the trigger. With a slight puff of gas, the chip tore into Meriel’s wrist.

“Ow!” she said without thinking. Nick was right; it hurt. It really hurt.

“OK in there?” someone outside asked.

“Sure,” she said while rubbing her wrist. And she would still need to press the wound each time she wanted to activate it. She had no bandage to cover the wound and buttoned her shirt cuff to cover it.

Just before entering red-zone, Meriel stopped at a hydration kiosk and surveyed the area. The security dock extended down a long corridor with security and police facilities to port and shuttle docks to starboard. The last shuttle dock went to the impound dock where the most infamous vessels in the galaxy were stored: warships used to sterilize entire colonies, pirate ships a hundred years old that had infected free space before the stations chartered the troopers to police the space lanes, and numerous smaller ships used for smuggling and petty crime. It was well guarded. If any of the ships were stolen, it might return to the service of plaguing humanity.

This was it. She had not broken the law yet, and her clothing and preparations were still legal. However, when she used the ID or stepped onto any of the shuttles, she would cross the line. If she were caught, her career would be over, the
Princess
would be lost, and she’d have trouble ever seeing the kids again—if they didn’t space her. But she had made up her mind. Her career meant nothing to her without a purpose, and the purpose she chose was to give the kids a future together.

She pressed the wound on her wrist repeatedly until the blue glow from the maintenance ID appeared under her skin. Then she walked to the red-zone entrance.

A message on the burner link interrupted her thoughts.

From nz: u sure about this?

Meriel texted back.

Yes

She did not need to announce herself or swipe her ID when she entered red-zone; if her ID did not respond to the RF query with the proper permissions, the security spiders that guarded the entrance would stop her. They wouldn’t kill her; they would just restrain and sedate her, but that would be enough to destroy her life.

Just past the heavily guarded entrance to the impound shuttle, Meriel waved her wrist near a small panel, and a door opened—the door to the maintenance shuttle. The entrance flashed yellow to acknowledge her permission. Meriel entered and left immediately for the impound dock.

The shuttle first stopped at dock N21, where two security officers in red helmets and IDs entered the shuttle. The larger officer turned to look at her squarely.
What would he expect
?
she thought.
Should I meet his gaze or cower
?
She thought meekness more appropriate to maintenance personnel and looked down.

“New here?” he asked, still watching her. Meriel nodded. “See the big one?” he said and pointed out the window. “That’s
Helmut’s Inferno
, the boat used to transport human slaves to the mines on G27H. Helmut used to stitch together his own cyborgs and sell the human parts to the organ trade. Ownership is still in litigation. Somebody actually wants to use the bloody thing.”

Meriel had heard of G27H, another mining colony hellhole, and shuddered. No one intentionally sold kids into sexual slavery or the organ trade. It wasn’t necessary. The excess population drifted there naturally, like water flowing downstream. The healthy bodies with dull minds or bad habits drifted to G27H, Etna, and other stagnant cesspools where the meat grinders were more likely to set up shop. Meriel thought of Penny and the kids and her pulse raced. Stars sparkled in her vision.
Breathe, girl. The kids are safe
.

“That one’s my favorite.” The guard pointed to an ovoid with a needle nose and huge jump fans. “They used that one to smuggle Rejuve after the stations banned it. That ship left psychotics in its wake for a decade until the troopers finally cornered it.”

They approached the dock, and the security officer turned away from her and edged to the door. “Don’t trip on the bodies,” he said with a laugh and elbowed his companion out the door.

She gazed out the window as they passed the M22 dock, where the
Princess
was stored. There she lay, a white ellipsoid, her jump fans stowed close to the hull like the wings of a dove. Meriel looked closely for any jets of gas from the hull, which could indicate a weakness in a seam that might blow when normal pressure was restored inside.

When the shuttle reached the M22 dock, Meriel exited and jumped across the zero-g connecting tube to the maintenance console. She used the console to locate the specific berth for the
Liu Yang
, the
Princess’s
alias, among the scores of other small ships docked there.

Getting there in zero-g would be easy: jump, dodge, and repeat, just like all the drills since she was a kid. The test of skill was how far you could travel without touching the walls, and like any spacer, she could usually jump farther than any passage on a merchant ship and end with a half somersault and tuck. The dock tubes here were wide and designed for zero-g, so all of the sharp corners had been removed to accommodate the clumsiness of those more accustomed to a steady gravity.

After a few long jumps and turns, Meriel reached the
Liu Yang
. She checked the ship’s status on the air-lock door.
N
2
/Argon 95/5. Inerted for preservation
, she thought.
Nice of them but deadly as carbon dioxide if I’m not careful.
Pressure at 0.5 bar, high enough not to get the bends
.
0-Power/S4
meant that some devices had reserve charge to help them power up, but otherwise the electronics were cold.

Meriel installed fresh O
2
cylinders on one of the
warm-suits
stowed outside the air-lock door and put it on. She then put extra O
2
cylinders in her bag, estimating they would give her about forty minutes, which was twice what she expected to need. Using the control module on her suit’s forearm, she set monitors for the oxygen levels and respiration rates. She closed her visor, turned on her headlight, and pushed the entry-request button on the air-lock door. The air-lock door would not respond to her, and she guessed that her ID had failed. She winced when she pressed the wound on her wrist until a yellow glow flashed under her skin.
This must be the rest of Nick’s access solution
, she thought while she waited.
He must have found an exploit in the security database
. Now she had to wait until he modified the database to log her route.

After a few seconds, her wrist flashed with a red glow, and she heard the whoosh of exchanging gasses. Then the air-lock door dilated. It was cold and dark when the door closed behind her. Her suit’s heads-up display registered N
2
/Ar and lowered pressure as it adjusted to the ship’s atmosphere. The hard contrast from the headlamp beam made the shadows appear sinister, and she changed the lamp from beam to flood.

On the day of the attack, Meriel and Elizabeth had entered this air-lock passage, and she remembered it clearly, her memory showing her what her headlight could not. The
Princess
was the foundation of her life then, as transparent as a mood, the only world she knew, and it was embedded deep below her conscious life of studies, family, and entertainments. She did not notice it until it was ripped from her, along with the rest of her childhood. Now it came to life again as familiar as her breath. The
Princess
was no pragmatic merchant ship. This was her home.

Though her hands were gloved, she could feel the textures of the polished-walnut railings and padded handholds from memory. The fabric walls were covered with Earth animals, nebulas, and fantasy landscapes—children’s artworks in progress. Holographic displays that once cycled through some of the finest art and architecture of human antiquity lined the walls of the promenades.

The craft studio was next door and Meriel could not resist entering. There she found a sketch of a big-eyed puppy by little Elizabeth still pinned to the wall next to Tommy’s drawing of a dragon chewing on a navy battleship. She pushed slowly down the passageway, remembering the deOx drills and zero-g games and then drifted past the mess hall, where Uncle Ed made snacks while they watched vids. Her mouth watered at the memory of the last birthday cake her mother had baked for Elizabeth’s birthday party, a cake frosted like a planet with deep-blue water and green land. Meriel coasted toward the bridge and remembered sitting next to Mom at the nav console and visualizing the stars. She rubbed the bulkhead. The
Princess
was not dead, just dreaming.

Meriel drifted into the bridge and stopped breathing again. Just past the decompression doors, she noted the rainbow discoloration around a hasty weld job that patched the hull breach. Meriel touched her chest where the sim-chip hung. “It’s all here,” her mom had said.

Esther had stood bridge watch XO at the time of the attack. Meriel traced her mother’s path from there to each of the kids’ bunks and then to the cabin she and Elizabeth had shared. It was just the way they had left it on the day of the attack: zero-g and painted with tigers and porpoises, not the sterile gray she had lived with for a decade. The beam of her headlamp panned to the foot of her berth, where a net held the toys that Nick had made and Elizabeth’s doll, the birthday present she’d received that day. Meriel reached out for them automatically. Then she stopped. She could not take anything out with her.

Retracing their path to the maintenance-1 hold where they had hidden first, Meriel examined the hatch that her mother had welded shut from the inside. The hold itself was empty and appeared to have been sterilized. She took another passageway to cargo-2 and found it empty as well. The hatch to the small service tunnel where they exited was still open, and Meriel knew why: to remove her mother’s body.

Stars floated in front of her eyes again when she tried to step into the hold. Her stomach began to cramp, and her hands shook. The heads-up display blinked red with a blood CO
2
crash, and the breath-rate alarm sounded: symptoms of hyperventilation.
I don’t remember being this afraid
, she thought, but her body remembered.

Tears can’t fall in zero-g, and Meriel saw the world through the eyes of the children in the freezing hold ten years ago: cloudy, surreal, disorienting—like looking through a nebula. But she was too afraid to cry then, too afraid of what would happen to them if she let go even a little, afraid of what would happen to her and her world. She had to hold that world together, or it would wash away with the tears, and she would lose it forever. She still could not let go and rubbed the tears from the corners of her eyes on the padding of the visor hinge and floated to slow her breathing.

When her blood monitor returned to nearly normal, Meriel entered the hold and immediately pushed back to where they first entered in maintenance-1. She found nothing and returned to the open hatch to look around. Meriel remembered all of the kids in their pajamas and Sam suspending his link in the air to distract them.

She looked down. The deck was covered in a translucent, dull brown: dried blood, her mother’s blood.
They never cleaned this.
“Have faith,” she heard in her mother’s voice.

The suit monitor alarmed again.
Breathe,
she told herself. Tears came again, and she could not continue. A new suit alarm alerted her that only three minutes of oxygen remained on that tank. That meant she was breathing much too fast. She was sweating, and ice had formed on the inside of her visor. She had to be more careful.

Meriel found nothing in the hold. She frowned, turned the headlamp to beam, and then looked down into the access way—still nothing. She cycled through the headlamp’s wavelengths used to expose service marks and carbon fiber fatigue and scanned the hold and accessway again—still nothing. Turning to leave, Meriel caught a glint off something under the dried blood. Cycling through the headlight wavelengths again, she found that a bright-blue light exposed it more clearly. It was a symbol sketched with an orange cargo marker that looked like a four-leaf clover with an open circle in the middle. Her mother must have drawn this while the kids slept, and her blood covered it. Meriel had no idea what it signified. She took a vid and copied the symbol on her glove with her own maintenance marker.