Jewel (7 page)

“Seeing as we’re not being fired upon, Mr. Exec,” the captain
said, “I think we’ll work on the assumption that the crew of this station is
either absent, dead or incapacitated.”

She didn’t wait for a response. “Patch me through to the
Deck Officer,” she told Everson. She’d sent Warrant to the
Euripides
’
air locks twenty minutes before to prepare the ship for docking.

Everson hit a couple of buttons. “You’re clear, Captain.”

“Deck Officer, you may extend the boarding tunnel,” the
captain said, “but you are not to actually open our airlocks.”

“Yes, Ma’am!” Warrant acknowledged.

The captain turned to Erik. “We don’t like each other very
much, do we, Mr. Exec?”

Erik was clearly surprised by her question, which attracted
the sharp attention of everyone on the ship. “I wouldn’t say that, Captain.”
The lie was obvious to anyone looking at his face. “We’ve had a few bumps in
the road, but we respect each other enough to get the job done.”

Kiara considered his words for a few moments, then clearly
discarded them for the hot air they were. “Well, I’m going to do you a good turn
anyway. You’re in charge of the boarding party. I want you to make friendly
contact with the natives, if there are any. And I want you to support the
purser’s mission to secure us the supplies we need.”

Erik clearly liked his instructions so much he couldn’t keep
the grin off his face. “Thank you, Captain!”

Kiara had already turned to face Jewel. “Aurora, you’ll
accompany the exec. Find out what they have and get us what we need.”

“Yes, Ma’am!” Jewel agreed, wishing she’d been paired with
the deck officer and not Erik.

“Well what are you two waiting for?” the captain asked. “Mr.
Warrant will have the boarding tunnel extended in no time flat.”

Erik and Jewel started off toward the exit as if in
lockstep.

“And both of you keep in mind,” the captain called after
them, “that this is a work party. Don’t let me hear about you two fucking each
other in any dark passages.”

* * * * *

Jewel, Erik and four crewmembers assembled outside the
airlock that the deck officer had linked to the corresponding gate on Brynhild station.
Jewel looked over the crew, wishing she knew them better, but still glad that
she knew at least a little about each of them. As purser she had a lot of
contact with the general crew. Alfonse Arico had a reputation for being lazy,
which hopefully would keep him from getting himself into too much trouble.
Jester Carter was a cutup—too concerned with having a good time to pay
attention to his job. Malcontent Meg Falco would be too busy complaining about
the extra duty to do anything useful. Dawil Kwon—he was the one she’d have to
watch out for. There was something about him she didn’t like. He was hard in
all the wrong ways, but maybe it wouldn’t matter. Maybe Erik had known what he
was doing when he picked these people to accompany them.

“All right crew, listen up,” Erik told them. Like everyone
else, he was dressed in his normal shipboard uniform with the addition of a
vest covered with tools and first aid supplies. Unlike everyone else, he looked
very good in his uniform—good enough that Jewel wondered if he had it tailored
to better fit him than standard issue would.

“This isn’t the military,” Falco said. She was a tall woman
with tawny hair, but she didn’t groom herself well. Her clothes were too loose
and she gave off a disheveled aura that enhanced her reputation for having a
chip on her shoulder. “I’m a civilian. You can’t shout at me like that.”

“Hey, that’s a good one,” Jester told her as he jabbed her
in the ribs with his elbow. Too thin to be truly handsome, he compensated by
playing the class clown. “I wish I’d thought of it first.”

Falco pushed him back. “How many times do I have to tell
you, Jester? Don’t touch me! Exec? You saw it didn’t you? Jester’s harassing
me.”

Jewel rolled her eyes and kept her mouth shut.

Erik tried again, raising his voice to speak over his crew.
“We’re going into a foreign space station. We do not know the status of the
inhabitants. If they are present and in control of the station, we will treat
them politely. If they are incapacitated or in need of assistance, we will
render them aid. And if the station is deserted, we will investigate it to
learn what happened to the inhabitants—”

“No,” Captain Kiara interrupted as she stepped into the
corridor where they were assembled outside the airlock. “If the station is deserted,
we will search it to learn which of their resources we can utilize to get us
home again. Are there any questions?”

Meg Falco immediately raised her hand.

“Not from you, Falco,” the captain cut her off. “From you,
Mr. Exec.” She advanced until she stood directly in front of him and poked her
finger into his chest. “I’m letting you lead the boarding party because you’re
a former member of the Ymirian navy, and as such, it seems to me that you’re
the best man I’ve got to investigate a Ymirian space station. But make no
mistake about it. This is not a humanitarian mission. If you happen to find out
what happened to the crew here, that’s fine. But all I really care about is
getting the
Euripides
home again. Understood?”

Erik’s eyes burned with cold fury as he confirmed the
captain’s instructions. Jewel wondered if the anger was because he disagreed
with the captain’s priorities or because she had disrespected him by dressing
him down in front of his crew. Probably it was a combination of both things.
The situation on the
Euripides
was beyond going from bad to worse.

Jewel wondered if Captain Kiara had intended it that way.

“Very good then. Deck Officer, wait until I’m out of the
corridor and then open the lock.”

Warrant nodded and gave the captain about ten seconds to get
behind a different air-tight door, then he manually unsealed the inner airlock
on the
Euripides
and ushered everyone inside. Once they were in
position, he resealed the door and spoke to Erik through the intercom system.
“It’s all yours, Gunnarson. Good luck to you.”

“Thanks, Manny,” Erik told him before beginning to unseal
the outer airlock. It was a heavy door and he had to strain to turn the wheel.
It occurred to Jewel that if Warrant had screwed up and failed to secure the
docking tunnel correctly, then the six of them were about to suffer a very
painful death.

Fortunately, that didn’t happen.

Erik swung open the outer lock and stepped through. “Hey,
Exec,” Jester called out. “Do you have a pistol stuffed in the back of your
pants or did you just shit yourself?”

Erik didn’t answer him, just checked to make certain his gun
was secure in the waist of his pants and kept moving into the docking tunnel.
The tunnel was a zero gravity environment but the exec managed the floating
passage like a seasoned professional.

Jester didn’t do so well. He was laughing too hard to keep
his balance and dark-skinned Dawil Kwon shoved him hard in the back to send him
sprawling face first down the tunnel toward Erik’s ass.

Meg Falco flashed one of her few genuine smiles. “Thanks,
Dawil.”

“No problem,” he told her just before shoving her after
Jester. “I can see you two are made for each other.”

Falco squealed and floated after Jester.

Jewel hung her head for a moment, embarrassed by the
unprofessional nature of the crew, then started down the docking tunnel, easily
handling the zero gravity. They played sports in zero g where she came from and
transiting to the station presented no problem. “Hello?” Erik called as he
entered the satellite ahead of them. It appeared to be a standard greeting area
just inside the airlock. “Permission to come aboard?”

Brynhild was dark as a tomb on the station side of the
airlock and refrigerator cold.

Jewel stepped into the airlock behind him. Her weight
returned to her as she left the docking tunnel. Jewel took out her flashlight.
“There’s power or else we wouldn’t have gravity. I wonder why there’s no
light.”

“There’s probably an energy saving mode, which shuts them
down in the corridor if a certain amount of time passes without anyone walking
by,” Kwon volunteered.

Jewel couldn’t help glancing at him in surprise.

He smiled at her, as if he’d enjoyed confounding her
expectations. He had wide, flat features on skin darker than her own—evidently
his parents hadn’t been obsessed with sculpting him into something he wasn’t.

“Then all we have to do—” Jewel started.

“Is walk into the hall,” Erik finished for her as he acted
on the suggestion.

Lights blinked on in the corridor cascading out from them as
far as the eye could see.

Erik twisted back around to offer Kwon a serious look of
appraisal. “Good job, Dawil. You spend a lot of time on space stations?”

“I grew up on one,” Kwon told him. “It was a couple of
centuries old with all kinds of sections tacked on—some of which people never
went to anymore. It didn’t make sense to heat and light them if people weren’t
around.”

“Unfortunately, I think that’s going to apply to Brynhild
too,” Erik told him. “It doesn’t look like anyone’s still around.”

Jewel knew how much this discovery had to disappoint Erik,
but she was impressed by how he covered his pain as he handed out assignments.
“Okay, let’s find out for sure what’s going on here. Jewel, you take Falco and
Jester and head spinward. I’ll take Kwon and Arico and head counter spin.”

Very few space stations gained their gravity through spin
anymore, but the terminology had lingered.

Jewel took a moment to size up her crew, strangely
disappointed that Erik was splitting the two of them up. She knew it made
sense—they were both officers. And she didn’t want to be alone with him and
inspire any more rumors, but she was disappointed just the same.

Like Erik, she decided to press on as if nothing troubled
her. “All right you two, let’s get going. We’ve got supplies to locate.”

“I’m not going with you,” Falco protested. “You’re not a
real ship’s officer—you’re the purser.”

Jewel decided to ignore her. “Come on, Jester, let’s get to
work.”

Falco wasn’t ready to give up. “She’s not a real ship’s
officer,” she shouted after Erik.

“That’s right,” the exec called back as he led his two
people up the corridor. “All she knows about, Falco, is how to pay your
salary—or not pay it, if the fancy strikes her.”

“She can’t do that!”

“I’d say the joke will be on you,” Jester told her, “if you
keep pushing and find out she can.”

“I can’t believe how cold it is!” Falco said. In two hours
she hadn’t stopped complaining. “It’s freezing in here!”

If Jewel were in a fair mood, she’d have admitted the woman
was right, but she wasn’t feeling fair right now. Brynhild Station was more
than cold, it was near freezing—the temperature gauges apparently kept at 4
degrees Celsius in the power down mode they’d found the station in. That sort
of frigid atmosphere did not heat up again very quickly—and it didn’t help that
their explorations continued to move them into new parts of the station.

But a purser who couldn’t scrounge up three coats on a
deserted space station really wasn’t worth the title. Jewel had found them
blankets to drape over themselves inside of eight minutes and upgraded those to
actual winter weather gear within eight minutes after that. She’d been a little
bit surprised to find so many cold weather garments on a temperature-controlled
space station. An ominous sign, but the gear was useful to them just the same.

“Jewel?” The sound of Erik’s voice, even over her com unit,
made Jewel’s heart beat faster. “We’ve found the Control Deck. It’s deserted
like everywhere else.”

Jewel willed her hormones to cool off—not that the mere
wishing for it actually accomplished anything. She still didn’t like the way
Erik had started things with her without first clueing her into his history on
the ship, and she really didn’t like the way her body kept responding to him.
She wet her lips and asked a probably futile question. “What about the computer
terminals?”

Erik’s deep voice continued to resonate inside her.
“Password protected, of course, just like the others.”

“Damn,” Jewel whispered. She knew she had the capability to
break into those systems if she was willing to activate her bioware again, but
she couldn’t do that without compromising her security. Her parents had
installed her first bioware chip when she was an infant, and planned all her
expansions and upgrades as she grew older. She knew they’d used it to spy on
her—monitor was the term they would have preferred—throughout her childhood.
And they could continue to legally do so until she reached her thirtieth
birthday and legal emancipation into adulthood. Not that she really expected
them to stop spying then. Laws really didn’t apply to people like her parents.

“That’s too bad, Er—Mr. Gunnarson. Any sign of what happened
to the people?”

“Just call him Erik, for Stars’ sake,” Falco muttered. “It’s
not like everyone doesn’t know he’s balling you. Hurry up and get it over with
so someone like me can get her turn.”

Jewel spun about to stare at Falco in astonishment, unable
to believe the sort of things that came out of this crew’s mouths. Was no one
on the Fringe even remotely professional?

“No sign,” Erik responded over the com-link, “but as I said
before, I can’t get access to the computer. How about you?”

“We’re taking a quick inventory of the kitchen storage
compartments. The news is pretty good. They have a lot of food stored here—all
vacuum sealed—at a glance it looks like enough to last for years.”

“Decades,” Jester interrupted with his own little
contribution. “These are packets of colonizer food and those ships had to be
prepared for the possibility that they wouldn’t find a habitable planet in the
first couple of star systems they visited, so they had to lay in a serious
quantity of extra supplies.”