Independent Flight (Aquarius Ascendant) (9 page)

Veronica
motioned her away from the crew. “Well that much is obvious, Chief. I’m a little surprised at the condition of the ship, given that a meteor apparently passed through its #4 hold. As badly off as she is, I’d have expected a catastrophic failure a long time before we even saw her.”

Kellie shook her head.
“It’s a pretty common state for ships like this. You get a few payments behind, and soon you’re eating beans from a tin to make ends meet until you can get your ship caught up on its maintenance–which of course it never does.”

“
That sounds a lot like the voice of experience.”

“
Once upon a time before I joined the service, I had my own independent shipping company.” Alyse demurred. “Things got pretty thin a time or two.”

“
Captain, this is Yeboah on
Two-oh-Seven
.” Veronica winced suddenly at the interruption. “I’m getting a squawk back from
Four on the Floor
. They were searching through the wreckage of the blowout. There was one intermodal container present, its hatch was blown off by venting air. There were two corpses, including one in a skinsuit, decapitated by the detached hatch. And a cloud of organic debris that was
probably
a corpse before it was mashed by a loose cargo container.”

Veronica winced,
“I’m sorry.”

“
I’m sorry too, Ma’am. Commander Saitova is heading this way to rendezvous, but she won’t be here until tomorrow; our instructions are to make ready for her arrival to cover us with additional personnel.”

“
Understood, Sub-lieutenant. In the meantime, we’ll continue to do our investigative work here. I’m going to pretty much assume that the whole remaining crew of this ship are joint owner-operators and probably best friends with the captain.”

What Veronica left unsaid was that
figuring out the captain’s identity was going to be a stone bitch and a half, since he or she was going to be legally responsible for this entire damned mess and had every reason to hide.

“
There is really no rest for the wicked, is there, Chief Alyse?”

“
No, Ma’am, there isn’t.” Kellie leaned against the doorframe with exaggerated casualness.

“
… Of all the times I want you to
disagree
with me, you have to choose this exact moment to agree.” Veronica leaned her head forward against the bulkhead.

“
Yes Ma’am.”

Chapter 8

Kellie picked up and sifted through cakes of compacted Alluvian silver. The stuff was fully processed and even already diluted down to street potency–nobody could even begin to claim that this was anything but a recreational drug. And the crew clearly knew all about it, given that the containers were scattered throughout the holds and covered with other cargo to try to make them less obvious.

“
Here too?” Veronica’s eyes formed an unspoken question.

Kellie
shook her head angrily. “This is enough drugs to coat a city pretty liberally. Whoever’s shipping this stuff, it looks like they’re planning to set themselves up as some sort of kingpin. No sign that the crew’s been dipping into their own snuff, though. Whatever their other faults, they’re not addicts.”

Veronica
’s mouth compressed to a fine line. “The rest of the crew, I’m guessing they’re hiding among the cargo in the holds. It’s a dumb smuggler or a desperate one who takes contraband cargo in brim-filled intermodal cargo containers, or an arrogant one. We don’t have enough people to do a full sweep of the ship, not and keep someone on
Two-Oh-Seven
to keep sensor watch. We’ve got twenty-one hours before
Four on the Floor
finishes her sweep and doubles back to rendezvous with us.”

“
Do you think they’re going to come out and try to take back the ship?”

“
Probably. According to Alyssa, their manifest has their destination at Inari D, so they might think they have a fair shot if they manage to get the drop on us–it’s only thirty light-years away.”

As the
two trooped off down the corridor, Ress’ face developed a sneer. These Alliance spacers were getting too close, dammit. He was lucky that the crew was so loyal; nobody would willingly give away that he was the captain, and the Alliance had banned giving captured smugglers the third degree.

The Alliance military didn
’t know how much contempt smugglers held it in. They probably had an idea, but they certainly didn’t
know
.

Ress wondered if
Duke Ifrit was trying to get a load of hot cargo away from his property and out of his hands. What mattered was the
cash
, and Duke Ifrit’s cash was as good as anyone else’s, now that Ress was away from Maraway. If, of course, the man survived to transfer the property to its destination and tell about it.

Ress looked around at his crewmen.
He’d been patiently winning back their respect ever since they took the damn cargo on board, only to have it swept away in an instant by the damn Navy. They resented their position, they resented the loss of their buddies, and they no doubt were quickly deciding that both of them were the fault of their abrasive captain’s preference for negotiating and his aversion to leaving money on the table.

The problem was that potential employers
also
hated leaving money on the table, so he often ended up leaving
jobs
on the table when his employers left it. And if it had been hard for his crew to ignore that fact when things were merely stretched thin, how much more when staring down the barrels of Navy guns?

The last two flights of the
Arrant Knave
hadn’t even really been
runs
, exactly–they’d had a little cargo in them, but mostly they were moves from one planet to another to try to find paying work.

Mattingly looked at him with
poorly disguised irritation. “This is another fine mess, Jonah. We all try not to judge your tendencies with us. You’ve always been straight, honest, and correct. But there’s just this… complete lack, where your tact is, and right now? We’re not in a good spot.”

“
I know, Matt, and I’m going to try to get us out of this, any way I can. I haven’t given up on the idea of getting the Navy to pull up stakes and go home, though I’ve got no idea how I’m gonna manage that at this late a date. That captain of theirs gives me the shivers.”

“
She’s got an intense glare, doesn’t she,” piped up Erwin Bates, a dark-skinned engineer, “I feel like I can’t get away with anything around her.”

Jerry Laures was whimpering on the floor, cradling his hand and his rapidly-swelling index finger.
It was definitely broken, and Megan Keys, his wife, was getting the first aid kit from out the wall safe.

“
Laures,” said Ress, “Why’d you have to go and shoot at powered armor?”

The man was too focused on his wounded paw to answer. Laures had always been something of a shoot first and think later type of operator, and his wife seemed to work on the same wavelength.
On the other hand, Megan wasn’t exactly jumping up to try to wrap a crowbar around those Navy assholes’ craniums–not that it would do any particular amount of good against those helmets of theirs. The frangible round had splashed right off of it, though he suspected that something heavier might have actually punched through.

It was just their damn luck to have been passing through a star system at the same time that a Navy carrier was dropping fighters– they
’d watched the spatial distortion move through the system and tried their hardest to avoid it, but keeping ahead of the deployment wave would have required suspicious amounts of speed on their path out of the system. Keeping a low profile had seemed like the smarter option until they were hit.

Mattingly grumbled,
“Is that damn blonde trying to be a pain in the ass, or does it just come naturally to Navy women?”

Ress looked at him and rolled his eyes.
“Matt,” he said, “You
know
the answer to that question. Of
course
Navy women are a pain in the ass; hell, you dated one for ten years.” That had been another, long-ago portion of both Ress’ and Mattingly’s lives–a time when they both had been willing to be law-abiding citizens and to a certain extent even productive in a traditional way. They’d even both been
part
of a navy at one point–granted, the Triangle Republic Navy was often little better than the pirates and smugglers they claimed to police, but they were still a navy, and they still had the galaxy’s sixth largest force of battleships (obsolescent though the average example of the type was). But that time had gone away a long time ago, and both of their lives had followed a different path since then.

Trying to keep their ships and bodies together
had started to drag to an inevitably dark conclusion in the last few years, as business had dried up following a new set of shipping regs that had legitimized much of the illicit trade that smaller operators quietly depended on. Despite the odd contraband contract, Ress had been
mostly
legit for most of his spacing career. It wasn’t anything anyone else hadn’t done–look away when a suspiciously light load of “medicine” was being passed to him, don’t open that crate of machine parts bound for a planet in revolution, that sort of thing.
Knowingly
taking on contraband was something they’d only resorted to in the last year.
We had no choice, dammit!

T
he
Arrant Knave
had hit a freak micro-meteor. An actual,
macroscopic
rock, in deep space. Ress had never even been within a hundred kilometers of a space-borne micro-meteor before. But the lateral radar in the belly hadn’t had the resolution to pick out the damn rock before it had hit his ship and knocked a hole in its #4 cargo hold.

“
Other than that time we got stuck in a Terril laser trap, we’ve never hit anything bigger than a fleck of paint,” Ress moaned. He hadn’t personally been at the helm when the actual strike occurred, and by the time he realized what was going on, they were already at maximum thrust. At that point, turning around and sheepishly loping back would have been the worst of both worlds.

Even then they might have made it to
FTL if the Allied fighter hadn’t jolted their compromised structure with a kiloton-range nuclear warhead less than a tenth of a second’s flight ahead of him. Ress’ reflexes had wrenched the helm to starboard, but
Knave
had had too much momentum to completely avoid the blast, and the fringes of a nuclear explosion had lashed his ship broadside and completely destabilized the already fluctuating warp drive. A loosened gear bag had come depressingly close to killing Mattingly during the jolt. There were red lines through half of the newly-replaced warp lenses and the other half needed to be refocused before they could be reengaged at FTL speed, so
Arrant Knave
was right now a very expensive, high-tech asteroid. And now he had an Allied boarding party walking all over his ship, taking condemning evidence of him and his ship. He had to get away from these self-righteous Navy assholes–by guile if he could, but if he had to fight them, he would. He
had to.

The
Interstellar Navy had always treated drug runners as if they were the source of the chemicals in their holds, which was clearly nonsense –Ress’ job was to ship them from someone who did to a buyer, and he planned to receive his pay for delivering a hold full of valuable cargo. And they were impossible to bribe–unlike the Triangle Republic Navy they were in the general case annoyingly incorruptible. He didn’t know a chemistry set from a cooktop. It didn’t matter whether that cargo was molecular circuitry or neuroactive chemicals; the job was the job, and he was proud of getting his jobs done, no matter what anybody said about it.

Ress was even
proud
of the fact that he’d never muffed a delivery. After all, he had said, there were two kinds of businesspeople in this world–the ones who would get a job done even if it meant crawling over their momma’s corpse, and the ones you couldn’t count on.

If he couldn
’t run away from them, then, Jonah Ress promised to
kill
them. It was easier to beat a murder rap where the only witnesses were dead than to beat a smuggling rap against
living
witnesses.

*

Sitting in the cockpit of
Two-oh-Seven
, Alyssa Yeboah was keeping her eye on everything going on inside the freighter. Unknown to Jonah Ress, she had hacked her way into the ship’s central network and planted an expert system there to feed all the information coming through its networked camera and transducer system into her console. Monitoring data streams for relevant intelligence was easy work for Navy computer systems, and Ress and Mattingly’s covert conversation had definitely fitted into the ‘relevant’ category.