Metal Boxes - Rusty Hinges (12 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY

Stone looked around the farmstead. He didn’t know what to expect. This one didn’t look any different than Sissie’s family’s farmstead had. There were small buildings — too short for humans and too tiny for drascos — barns, sheds, well-manicured fields, and orchards as far as the eye could see. What made this different was that every piglet working wore colored sashes, indicating their rank in the piglet space corps.

Ninety percent of the piglets on Rusty Hinges refused to do more than visit their family’s farmstead. Most of the piglets had heard only the rumors about Home, their species birthplace. They were born into the breeding pens for Hyrocanian consumption. Rusty Hinges was their home and had been their whole lives. A few elders who did remember, gratefully embraced their families and kissed the plowed fields of their home farmsteads. Some few, like Sissie refused to leave the ship. She even refused to allow Shorty to vacate her slavehood.

Shorty, by necessity, was with Emily and Stone at the piglet’s space corps headquarters. Being an interpreter to a translator was numbingly boring. He managed to parrot everything to Butcher and Numos that Emily repeated to him. It didn’t take much for Stone to tell she was bored.

“I mean, really, Mama, like, why did I try so hard at that soccer game. You know? Like, if I knew this was going to be such a snooze fest, I’d have blown that last goal, right? Like, you know what I mean?”

Stone nodded. He didn’t want to say so, but he was just as bored. The negotiations were going so slowly it was almost like Butcher and the space corps commander didn’t really want to get to the point. He was here under orders to assist in translating, not to help in the negotiation.

The piglet commander said, “This may not be the best time to entertain guests. The ander nut harvest won’t be with us for another three months. Maybe you should come back then.”

Butcher said, “Sir, let’s take a break for a few moments and I’ll consider going away and coming back.”

Shorty rolled his eyes to the sky. He whispered to Emily.

She giggled.
“Shorty is so funny.”

Stone said, “What did he say?”

Emily said,
“Like, I’m not supposed to tell. It’s a secret, you know.”

Stone said, “Emily Jay Drasco Stone. You tell me right now.”

“Okay, okay, okay. You don’t have to get your tail in a knot. He said we should tell the piglet commander that his trouser fly is undone.”

Stone shook his head, “He isn’t wearing any trousers.” The older piglet got up from the table and wandered into a nearby garden to help pull a few weeds. His bare fanny wiggled in the hot noonday sun.

Emily rolled her eyes,
“Well, yeah! That’s what makes it funny.”

Whizzer and Emmons were already in the garden, enjoying the sun rather than working. At least Whizzer seemed to be doing little to nothing. Emmons was studying the piglets looking for behavioral patterns. She stood, wiped the dirt from her bottom, and strolled back to the human conference. Whizzer leaned back against a fence post and appeared to sleep.

Stone said, “We should do something to get the ball rolling. We seem to be stuck at an impasse. All we want is to get access to the jump point that gets us home.”

Butcher shook his head, having overheard. “Ensign Stone, we have two options here. One is we go home with our tails between our legs, failing our mission.”

“But, it isn’t a failure, sir. We’ve clearly determined that the Hyrocanians found Allie’s World by accident and with the piglets new repulsar technology, they can’t duplicate it.”

Numos said, “That was only part of our assignment, Ensign Stone.” He leaned against a fence rail, propping one foot on it, looking for all the world like anything but a marine.

Butcher nodded as he walked over to a table and gulped down a cold glass of some fruit juice concoction the piglets set up as refreshments. He nibbled on a small cookie-like confection. “I think these folks could use a good infusion of coffee and chocolate.”

The captain looked at Stone. “Sure, we could go home, but is that the best course of action?”

Shorty answered through Emily,
“It wouldn’t be my choice, Captain. Look, Boss, we’ve got an opportunity here to get a little payback.”

Numos said, “I’m not thinking revenge, but we may be able to strike a blow against the Hyrocanians and stop this war.”

Butcher said, “That is my thought exactly. We have a Q-Ship that might get us deep into enemy territory. Maybe close enough to find their home world. Maybe close enough to disable their fleet in this region of space. Maybe close enough to find some way to stop them from attacking human space all together. We don’t know, but if we go home we’ll never know.”

Stone nodded, “Yes, sir. I got it. Forward, not back.”

Numos grunted, “Ooo-rah!”

Butcher said, “This old coot may be beating around the bush, but if you listen between the words you can hear a lot. The piglets were a space-going race, but they never went far. Shorty was more explorer than pirate. He’d visited a neighboring solar system though a navigation point. Apparently, he jumped into the system just after the Hyrocanians arrived.”

Shorty said, “
In all of the confusion, there were a few pieces of odd technology laying around. I took them and scooted home. I’d already been labeled a pirate for taking Sissie, so I thought that a little extra tech might be a good thing with unfriendly cannibals in the area. Unfortunately, I was followed home and scooped up.”

Butcher said, “That little excursion into this system started fifty years of Hyrocanian raids. The four-armed freaks were so busy with the neighboring system, they didn’t bother coming here in full force until it was too late. By then, the piglets had developed their repulsar mines.”

Emmons joined the conversation. “The piglets have almost a religious belief that hurting another intelligent creature will do them more harm than they commit.”

Numos said, “As a marine, I can understand that belief. I don’t agree with it since some creatures just need to be put down, however, I do understand it.” He hadn’t moved from his resting position at the fence.

Emmons said, “That is why the piglets developed a repulsar mine. It throws an enemy into hyperspace, but it won’t kill them.”

Stone shook his head violently. “That’s bull pucky. Throwing someone into hyperspace may just be a death sentence. I should know. Someone tried to kill me that way once. These piglets did it to me again when they threw the Rusty Hinges back into hyperspace.”

Butcher said, “That is true. If we hadn’t quickly jumped out when we did, there is no way to know where we would have jumped out. The odds are high against us jumping into the heart of a black hole, but it could have happened, since a black hole’s massive gravity well does have a huge impact on normal space.”

Stone said, “Just because someone doesn’t pull the trigger themselves, doesn’t mean they don’t kill.”

Emmons walked over and put a hand on his arm. “I understand, Ensign Stone. It’s a fine distinction, but it’s one they’ve made. Rather than kill creatures that have captured and eaten thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of their people, they threw them so far away they might never get back, leaving them to die at the hands of space.”

Butcher said, “They built a few spaceships with massive repulsar beams just in case someone or something does exactly what we did, find their way into the system without using a navigation point. Their ship’s repulsars would have sent us into hyperspace without the benefit of any jump point at either end. Who knows where or if we could have ever gotten out again.”

Emily looked at Shorty and back at Stone. “
He, like, really wants to know what we want.”

Butcher said, “I want them to identify which jump point the Hyrocanians were using to conduct their raids. That should lead us one step closer to their fleet.”

Shorty said, “
I know that. I can show you.”

Butcher said, “That is step one. Step two is to get them to grant us access to that nav point. We can’t move more than a nanometer without Char-tim-Lous’s repulsar warship on our tail.”

Emily snorted in laughter, “
Mama, he said tail. Humans, like for sure, don’t have no tails
.” Stone didn’t bother to translate her joke.

Butcher said, “I don’t expect them to put together a fleet to go with us.”

Emmons said, “I can guarantee they wouldn’t do that. At this point, they don’t trust us, nor anyone coming into their system.”

Butcher agreed. Looking around the table, he picked up another confection. Looking at it, he shook his head and put it back. “I’m too old to start getting fat now. Major, if I eat another cookie, you have my permission to slap me silly.”

“Aye, aye, Thom. It’d be my pleasure.”

“Don’t take too much pleasure in it, Dash,” Butcher said. “What I do want get is concession three. If we go through after the Hyrocanians and survive, can we come back through here to head home? So far, I haven’t been able to get the space corps commander steered toward that communication.”

Shorty grabbed Butcher by the wrist. With surprising strength, he jerked the man down, bending him at the waist. He grabbed the captain’s ear, leaned close, whispered loud enough for Emily to translate, and said,
“You’re being too subtle. You humans never get to the point.”
He let go, spun around, and faced the space corps commander.
“Listen up, you old bag of ass-wind. These humans are here to fight your enemy for you. You will let them go fight. You will give them the codes to disable the repulsar mines for when, or if, they ever come back, and you’ll allow them to pass through so they can go home.”

The commander stood in his field and shouted back,
“Pirate, if we give them the codes to the mines, they may be followed here by the Eaters, as the Eaters followed you all those years ago.”

Stone said, “Hey, Shorty? Ask him if they can give us a code that only works for one ship at a time? That way anyone following us without a code will get repulsed.”

Butcher nodded. “I haven’t any intention of coming back if anyone is tracking us. I won’t lead Hyrocanians back into human space.” Followed by the rest of his staff, Shorty, and Emily, the captain walked across the field where the piglets were working. They all stood along the fence rail in various poses waiting for a response. The commander was thinking, but not saying anything.

Stone asked Emily, “Anything?”

“No, Mama. They’re talking with each other to see if such a thing is possible.”

Stone gestured out into the middle of the small field. A group of piglets were using axes and levers trying to work a thick tree trunk out of the ground.

Numos said, “I could blast that out of there in a second if I had any weapons with me.”

Stone said, “Emily, would you help them?

“
Aw, Mama. Why should I help them? Like, we aren’t doing enough for them?”

Stone said, “For me?” When she didn’t answer, he added, “For a bar of ooze, all to yourself?” The ooze was drasco candy infused with carbon dioxide. The drascos fought over pieces like it was gold.

Emily vaulted over the fence, tap danced across the field, not even rustling a leaf on any plant. Squatting, glaring at the tree stump, she raised her tail over her head. Slamming her bone spike deep into the stump, she grunted and jerked. The tree stump ripped out of the ground with a screech. Shaking it loose from her tail, she threw it over the fence, where it slammed to the ground away from the crops.

The commandant asked,
“What will you give me if I give you the codes to come back?”

Butcher said, “What do you want?”

“You have no lands to trade.”

Stone said, “I do. I will give you — how much land do you want for the codes.”

“Where is this land?”

Stone said, “Allie’s World is a short space jump from here.”

Shorty said,
“You would give him land on Allie’s World? Praise harmony, I’ve seen that land, you old ass-wind. It’s better than this ancient rock-strewn weed-covered patch you call a garden. It won’t be easy to farm, but everyone knows you’re a tough old man and can tame a wild world.”

Stone laughed when he heard the translation. Throwing insults and compliments in the same sentence might be a strange negotiation tactic, but it seemed to be working. Especially the religious reference to harmony that Stone doubted Shorty believed anymore.

“Come on, you old gas-bag. How much land do you want? It’s just a small code.”

“I want a field half the size of this.”
He threw his arms about him, pointing at the area inside the fence. It couldn’t have been more than five acres.

Stone shook his head. “I cannot give you that much now. However, if you give us the codes first, I will trade you ten times that much land when I come back. Before you answer, I also want a repulsar mine so humans can learn to fight their enemies without killing them and I want to keep the codes and come back to your world for trade between our peoples.”