Home: Interstellar: Merchant Princess (3 page)

“I’m coping fine. You see me ripping anybody’s head off?”

“Well, I hoped something like that would never cross your mind. The meds help with the blackouts, too. We can’t have you blacking out on a cargo loader, now can we?”

Meriel looked around, hoping no one else had heard him. She walked back to Ferrell. “I don’t have blackouts, Doc,” she said softly. “That was only when I was a kid. I just get nervous sometimes.”
Damn,
I just gave him more ammunition
.

“I understand completely,” he said. “I’ll make an appointment for—”

Meriel brightened, seeing the possibility of escape, and started to back away again more quickly. “Sure, Doc. Before we complete the circuit.”

“No, next shift,” he shouted after her.

“Right. Next week. OK, I’ll be there,” she yelled back over her shoulder and ducked around the bulkhead.

John took a roundabout way to the bridge through the
mess
hall to pick up a mug of coffee from the replicator. He knew Jerri could find their way with the computer alone, but it would require lots of short jumps and fuel. Margins were tight, so the longer he delayed, the more they would appreciate his talents.

“Smith on deck,” John said as he paused at the door to the bridge. “Permission to enter, sir.”

“Jeez, there you are,” said Steven, the OOD, signaling for John to enter. “You stop for a manicure?”

“Seven twenty-three. Mark the time,” John said, walking to the navigation station next to Jerri.

“Sure. Just find out where the hell we are,” Steven said pacing the bridge. Jerri noticed the hot coffee in John’s hand and shook her head.

The nav-a station projected a star map with an overlay of what looked like an ice-cream cone with the point at the start of their last jump. The scoop of ice cream at the end of the cone represented where they might be now—their
sphere of uncertainty
.

“Sphere’s too big to plot a jump,” Jerri said and switched the projection to the smaller nav-b station, where John sat. “We’d end up in a star.”

“Did you try to triangulate the Doppler?” John asked.

“Nope,” Jerri said with an impatient frown, “just waiting for you.”

“What’s coming in, Socket?” he asked communications chief Suzanne Soquette, or just Socket—a nickname she rather enjoyed. She was beautiful, even for a spacer, and John always had to limit his gaze to avoid staring.

“Some chatter for the buyers and lots of encrypted garbage,” Socket said with an extra flash of her eyes which increased his discomfort. “All
EM
, clear as a bell. Who’d think anybody’s listening out here?”

“Pipe some of the chatter over to me,” John said. While he waited for the feed, John turned to Steven. “Say, I met the new cargo chief in the passageway just now,” he said. “What’s her story?”

“Came over from Jeff’s boat, the
Jolly Roger
, saying she didn’t like the routes and had trouble sleeping,” Steven said. “Jeff said she’s the best cargo mate in the sector. Lifetime spacer who knows the boards. Said she could man any seat on the bridge if she wanted it, so Molly bought out her contract.” Molly was XO and rated exec-4 with laser-sharp instincts, so she would know. Steven’s link flashed, and he went back to his console.

Jerri leaned over to John. “Is this academic or are you interested?” she asked with a timid smile and raised eyebrows.

“Nothing’s academic.”

Socket leaned over. “She’s too pretty for you.”

Jerri dropped her smile. “If you ask me, I think she’s got a past. Something that won’t forget her, won’t let her go.”

“So, what’s got the hooks in?”

“Well, rumors say it was from a long time ago and bad,” she said, “something that needs drugs. Pirates, I heard, but that’s just a horror story. I really don’t know.”

“Done,” Socket said, hit a button, and leaned back in her chair. She turned to look at John. “Say, sailor, why don’t you just ask her?” she added with a wink.

“I’ll do that,” John said. His nav-b monitor lit up with comm chatter, and he pulled up a parser to extract the time stamps and origins from the packets. “Too many
gravity well
s to make this exact,” he said, “but let’s give it a go.” On Jerri’s star map, he added three rays from the center point that represented the vectors of the incoming signals. He rotated the projections until the sources aligned with the three well-known stations. A new sphere appeared around the locus of the rays—a sphere that was still much too large.

“Not good enough,” Jerri said with a smug grin. She folded her arms across her chest again.

John recalled the second
law of navigation
—everything is moving all the time; nothing stands still, ever. He adjusted the locations of the sources based on the time stamp on the EM and time dilation. This changed the position of the station from where it was currently to where it was when the EM originated, and the sphere contracted. He added some reliable EM from Earth and then added two more sources for fine-tuning. With each line, the sphere shrank until it was a point with a fuzzy halo. John zoomed into the star map—their current most probable location.

“OK, Jerri, check for a match,” John said and leaned back in his chair with a smile. “Say, did we get the score on the outbound?”

“Fourteen to nine, final,” Steven said. “Socket wins the pool.”

Socket smiled but kept her head down.

Jerri pulled John’s data to her station and matched the major stars by their spectra and red shifts. “There we are,” she said. Their actual position lay just outside the original sphere. “Mass was wrong.”

“Are we hauling military?” John asked.

Steven frowned and nodded. “They’re gonna get someone killed.”

“Who’d know?” Jerri said.

“Time seven thirty-one. Eight minutes. Remember that if someone asks,” John said with a smile and cued up a text to Meriel.

To Hope: 8 min.

“Stick around to check my course corrections,” Jerri said.

“Sure,” John said. He grabbed the visualization goggles, leaned back, and put his feet up.

Steven walked up to John, threw his coffee in a recycler, and knocked his feet off the console. “This is Meriel’s first post as cargo chief, John,” he said softly, “so don’t eff it up, OK? And don’t startle her. She’s qualified marine-three.”

“I’m parking the
Cruiser
,” Meriel said to Lev Tyler, her cargo-3, who waved back at her from the cargo-bay console. She backed the power loader to the bulkhead, secured it, and put the servos on standby. With a half-liter thermos of coffee wedged into the power loader’s cage, she watched Lev complete the data-integrity checks on the ship’s memory cargo.

Twenty-one days
and I don’t have a clue,
she thought and played with the sim-chip on her necklace. “It’s all here,” her mother had said ten years ago. But it wasn’t all there. The files were unreadable after the police returned the chip to her. She rubbed the medal, a symbol of the Church of Jesus Christ Spaceman, between her fingers.
Is this what she meant? Have faith? No
. Esther believed, but Meriel was sure she meant the sim-chip. They would have to try again.

Meriel thumbed a text to her only nonspacer friend, a hacker named Nickolai Zanek on Enterprise.

To nz:

Panic. I need your help. I’ve got twenty-one days to prove the
Princess
was not a drug boat, or we lose her. Forever. We need to bang on the sim-chip again. There has to be something there. See you on Enterprise.

Love, M

It would be a week before she could see him. What could she do until then?

She scanned the schedules for the other kids. Tommy Spurell’s ship, the
Jennifer Edwards
, would dock at Enterprise about the same time as the
Tiger
would. He was twenty now and stable as a rock. She texted him.

Let’s touch base on Enterprise. M.

What else
?
she thought.
There’s gotta be something we’ve missed all this time.

The police filed the case as “unexplained,” but that left everyone with only the wrong explanation—that their cargo was contraband, and contraband meant drugs. Meriel knew it could not be true, but the slander would stick if she just walked away.

OK, then. Space is huge. How could pirates have found the
Princess
in deep space?
Aunt Teddy might know, but she’s not here. How about a navy guy
?

Meriel pulled up the display on the cargo loader and keyed in a search of the crew and, specifically, marine qualifications.
Let’s see,
she thought,
marine-2, another two, a six.
Meriel whistled aloud.
Wow, a marine-6 as chief of security. Sergeant Major of the Marines, Charles Cook. That’s fleet class. How’d this little ship get somebody that good
? She left to visit the security office and find Sergeant Cook. Instead, she found a note that said, “At the gym.”

***

The
Tiger’s
gym was unusual because it had open mats and did not smell like stale sweat. Meriel found a big man with short blond hair demolishing a training droid.
Faster than his bulk
, she thought and went to the mats and stretched.

She began her kata on the mats almost as a meditation, a ritual she’d started as physical therapy for her wounds. Her movements were smooth, except for the strike at the end of each position. The big man stopped to watch her during her second iteration, and on the ninth position, he intervened.

“May I?” he asked. Meriel stopped and nodded, skeptical that he might have useful coaching. “Your rear knee should be bent, not stiff, and your heel off the mat when you begin your strike.” He leaned over and touched the outside edge of his hand to the inside of her knee to flex it.

Meriel smiled. “And you are?”

“They call me Cookie. You’re marine qualified?”

“Yes, sir. Name’s Meriel Hope.”

Cookie raised his eyebrows at her show of respect. “Oh yeah, new cargo chief. Marine-three, huh? Weapons?”

“Blasters, pulse rifles, nothing heavy.”

“Combat?” he asked.

“No, sir.”

“S’OK. Shooting for marine-four?”

Meriel shook her head. “Not yet. I want to get better where I am.”

“OK, good. Then you do your kata, and I’ll oppose you.”

“I’ve never done that before,” she said.

“Yeah, that’s what happens when you train by holo,” he said and put an instrumentation cuff on his forearm. “Now, repeat position nine beginning from eight.”

Meriel lined up in position eight and rotated both feet for a downward strike with the blade of her hand. Cookie stepped back and blocked with his forearm raised and left hand poised for a punch, but he did not strike. Meriel struck his padded forearm.

“Hold that position,” he said and moved to her side. “See, if your heel is down before you begin your strike, the power comes from your muscles. That’s weak. We want the power from your center.” He slapped his tummy with his palm. “Drop the heel with your center and then strike simultaneously. Like this.” He demonstrated the strike and drop. “Now you.”

Meriel repeated the move. He frowned and tapped her forehead with his index finger. “Get out of your head. Your body knows the pattern. See from your center, not your eyes,” he said and patted his tummy again.

Meriel repeated the move until Cookie nodded. She felt as if her whole body had struck his forearm. He raised the instrumentation cuff to show her the readout. “See. Twice the impact force.”

Meriel raised her eyebrows.

“OK, next position,” he said, and Meriel pivoted.

“Stop,” he said. “Good. Pivot is fine, but just before the end, your rear foot is planted, and your body turns from the hips in a motion to strike, like a coiled spring.”

Again, Meriel repeated the moves while Cookie opposed her, and they finished her kata.

“OK, now from the start and speed it up. Don’t think,” he said.

Now her kata looked like a fight, each strike opposed by a block, each block followed by another strike. Cookie was huge but moved like a lion. At the end, they were both sweaty, and welts rose on Meriel’s forearms and shins.

“Don’t take the impact of my blows,” Cookie said as he toweled the sweat from his forehead. “Sure, it’s a kata, but I outweigh you two to one in muscle. Divert my blows, and don’t try to absorb the impact. Blend until you can strike. Improvise.”

Meriel nodded.

They bowed to each other and went into the showers.

“Say, you’re marine-three,” he said over the shower partition. “You passed zero-g defense, right? Gymnastics and center of gravity?”

“Yes.”

“That makes you an optional for my security team,” he said. “You OK with that? It’ll bump your pay a grade.”

“Sure.”

“OK, let’s call that your interview.”

“Who’s on the team?”

“There’s Suzanne Soquette in comm, Nobu Draeger in the galley, and Lev Tyler, who works for you in cargo. Lev is my number two. Staff Sergeant Tyler, actually. Good man. Your marine-three cert will make you a squad leader like Socket. The captain’s marine-two rated, but I don’t count him. I’ll let you know when we meet.”

“Sure,” Meriel said. “Say, do they teach you how to attack ships in space?”

“Uh, yeah. Hull breach, hand-to-hand weightless,
EMP
weapons. It’s history mostly, not practice. Why?”

“How about defense in open space?”

“No,” he said. “They always tell us that surprise is unlikely, even impossible without betrayal.”

“How so?” she asked and finished her shower to listen.

“Well, if you are smaller than a moon, it’s too hard to find you in open space unless your attacker knows right where you’re going to be,” he said and left his shower. “If your attacker is waiting for you, you can see him before he sees you.”

“How does that work?” Meriel asked.

“Well, if you want a better explanation, you need to ask a pilot about coordinating in space and how hard it is. It’s just easier to find relatively fixed targets like stations. Nothing like sublight in atmosphere. Jerri will know, and Smith would too.”

Meriel nodded slowly, going over the implications. “What about smugglers? If it’s so hard to locate each other, why even try a drug drop in space?”

“Expense and time aren’t issues when it’s illegal or when secrecy is paramount,” he said.

Drugs again. This doesn’t help
. She finished dressing and saw John’s text calling her bet. Then she met Cookie in the passageway.

“Just let me know when you want to do this again,” he said. “You can usually find me in the gym or the galley. I can qualify you to marine-four, if that’s your goal.”

Meriel nodded again. “Eventually, sir. Thank you.” She smiled, grateful for her good luck, and turned to leave.

“Hey, I don’t mean to pry, but is this about the
Princess
?”

Meriel looked at him silently. She did not talk about the
Princess
, because the first thing people usually said was “sorry” or “poor girl” or “oh my God!” The last thing she wanted was pity.

“Don’t misunderstand, Chief,” he said. “I got nothing against you. I’m head of security. I read the files. If you qualified marine-three and logistics-five, you’re good on my team.”

“Appreciate it. Just not ready to talk about it yet.”

Cookie nodded. “No problem. I’m off to the galley. Where you headed?”

“The mess to study. I have a nav-three test coming up.

“Isn’t it noisy there?”

“Sure, but studying gets lonely, especially since that’s all I do when I’m off duty.”

They walked together to the mess hall, and Meriel sat down at a table. Cookie brought her coffee.

“I’ll bet Smith can help you with nav,” Cookie said with a glint in his eye.

“Uh-huh,” Meriel said with a look that said, “Mind your own business.”

“Hey, just saying,” Cookie said and went back to the galley.

Meriel used her link to cast a holo of her test prep but could not concentrate. She was preoccupied by the threat of losing the
Princess
to the station lawyers and her helplessness to stop it.
Calm down. Jeremy will have an idea
.

The five-minute claxon interrupted Meriel, and she returned to her cabin to prepare for the jump. There she drank the nutrients, took the tranq without boost, and had another nightmare.