Supergiant (Gigaparsec Book 2) (18 page)

To make up for her false accusation of Deke, Roz introduced
him to Jeeves the next morning. The mimic would chat with Deke through the
doggie door but only after the copilot sang him nursery rhymes in Bat. Deke
said, “He can reach ultrasonic range. You’re holding a Bat child in your room.”

“No. The mimics prefer to
communicate in the inaudible range to avoid being detected.” Max convinced him
with a rare photo of Roz holding the sleeping alien.

Deke agreed to be a conversation
partner for the mimic to help Jeeves learn speech compatible with his unusual
vocal apparatus. Then he asked Roz, “Why are you so quiet all of a sudden?”

“Because Max has a picture of me,
and my hair isn’t even brushed.”

“Don’t worry. He has a better one
of you in—” Deke fell silent when he saw Max gesture. “Look at the time. We’re
due on deck for departure planning.”

Roz blocked Max’s exit. “Show me.”

With a sigh, he scrolled through
his photos. The latest was one of her standing next to her mother in matching
outfits. A spa employee had taken it for Alyssa. “I saw it on you stepfather’s
dresser and asked him for a copy. Do you want me to delete it?”

She gave him a peck on the cheek.
The fact that he had snuck these photos of her spoke volumes. “No. In fact, I
wouldn’t mind one of you in your tux … without the Goat disguise.”

“Reuben may have snapped a shot of
me shaking the governor’s hand on Eden.”

They chatted and held hands until
Kesh
buzzed
on Max’s earpiece. Max’s face fell as he listened. “I
understand. I’ll get Reuben and meet you there.”

Max kissed the hand he had been
holding. “Sorry. We have to secure everything or that pilot of ours will never
let us hear the end of it. Maybe you and Ivy can make that last check through
the engine areas you were talking about.”

“Sure,” Roz said, not entirely
aware of what she was agreeing to.

She suited up in her uniform and
met Ivy in the hall soon after. Ivy insisted they start at the bottom of the
ship and work up. Then her friend talked non-stop about interstellar commerce.
When Ivy wanted to avoid romantic issues, she often bored Roz with facts.
Perhaps she wanted to punish any sisters listening in. “Our next stop, Cardiam
used to be the biggest heavy-metal mine in the sector, but it’s playing out
now. These colonists are super rich, so they’ve shifted to building reactors
and gravity plates. The gas giant in the center of the system has beautiful
rings like Saturn but larger and more numerous. The rings are so big that we
can see them from the next star over, blocking sunlight in strobe patterns as
they pass between us and the target suns.”

Ivy wouldn’t meet her gaze.

“What is it? What won’t you tell
me?” Roz asked.

“Once we’ve made the jump,” Ivy
promised.

Panic gripped Roz. “Is someone
dying?”

“No. And making you worry isn’t
going to help you pilot. Max and Reuben are … exploring our alternatives.”

“Are you pregnant?”
If she is, I
hope to hell the father’s Human.

“This is strictly company business.
We’ll have a meeting as soon as you’re clear. I promise we won’t decide
anything without you.”

Roz cursed. “Treat me like an
adult.”

“Practice your breathing exercises
while I tell you the news. Realize that military intelligence is not an exact
science.”

Roz sat cross-legged and did the
breathing exercise until her annoyance level lowered. “Okay.”

“Your dragon outfit intrigued Kesh,
so he asked around. The fabric came from a Saurian merchant ship that passed
through here about four months ago along the same route we’re flying.”

“Oh, no. There’s no way we can beat
them if they’re heading to the prison.”

“The Saurian vessel might just need
gravity panels or something from the shipyard, so there’s no need to get worked
up,” Ivy said. “We’ll analyze data as it arrives.”

“Then what’s Max exploring?”

Ivy clenched her jaw. “Need to
know.” She was clearly afraid.

“They think Aviar double-crossed us
from the beginning. God, did that psycho call the Saurian ship for an early
pickup?”

Ivy shrugged. “We may never know.
Lord Aviar’s family has legitimate business interests up and down the trade
line. It would be easy to hide a bribe inside a favorable trade transaction.
Whoever sped the departure of a traitor would curry favor with the church and
crown.”

“Could we use your diplomatic
contacts to get the professor pardoned?”

“Not if the professor has already
been shipped to Niisham.”

Roz asked, “You mean it could have
happened already?”

“Max is looking for clues. If we
can prove Aviar reneged, we’re entitled to a huge legal settlement thanks to
the bond Kesh insisted on.”

Roz addressed the ship’s AI.
“Minder, where are Max and Reuben right now?”

“The desert biome.”

With several diplomatic
packages, all rigged with explosives
. They were trying to read the mail for
future systems to get a peek at what was coming. “Forget money if it means our
men get hurt.” Roz was already propelling herself through the zero-g tunnel at
maximum speed.

Ivy shouted, “Max doesn’t want you
in the blast radius.”

As soon as Roz reached the cargo
level, she took a shortcut through the inner ring. Jogging past the dining area
to the desert room, she found Max and Reuben couched behind a bunker. “Stop.”

Max tried to intercept her. “You’re
too valuable to risk here.”

Furious, she said, “You obviously
don’t understand the concept of a triad. If you die, Echo dies, and I’ll want
to.”

He shook his head at the comment as
if it had been a slap. “What do you recommend? I should let my friends die for
me?”

She extended her probability senses
and pointed. “Open the final package. Aviar is all about power. If he’s doing
this to force us into a course of action, there’ll be a letter in that package
gloating and dictating terms. If this scheme is to get us arrested, that should
be obvious, too.”

Max nodded slowly. “Sound
reasoning. How do you propose checking this theory without blowing anyone up?”

“We fake a radio signal from
Niishamboor’s nav beacon. When the package
clicks
open, someone else can
open it.”

“Like who?” asked Max.

“Like me,” Herb said from behind
Roz.

Horrified, Roz said, “I didn’t
mean—”

“I’m dying anyway,” her stepfather
said. “Put me to good use. Maybe then people will stop hating me for talking to
the Bankers.”

Max said, “Even if we get the
signal right, there’s no guarantee you can open the case without triggering
something.”

Turning to Roz, the friendly old
man asked, “Do you want me to survive?”

All eyes on her, Roz whispered,
“Yes.”

“Then I will. You’re your mother’s
daughter.”

The others exchanged looks. Max
sighed. “Fine, but we should eject the other packages just to be safe. They
might go off if they get the signals out of sequence or something.”

Herb asked, “What if Aviar didn’t
plan to renege?”

“Then we can retrieve the crates
later,” Reuben replied. “At this point we can’t afford to believe anything he
told us.”

The partners took a vote and
agreed. Roz invented a phantom problem in the engines and applied to traffic
control for a shakedown cruise around the entertainment planet’s barren moon to
test the fictional repairs. The moon would block signals and mask the
elimination of any unwanted matter. She plotted a course that would loop them
back to the space station, in case the explosion was bad enough to injure
people or the ship.

After several tense hours, Reuben
cracked the beacon code and transmitted the signal destined to greet them at
the entrance to the Niishamboor system. The diplomatic crate
clicked
open. Inside they discovered that though the shapes were familiar, these radio
components had been stamped out of gold.

Herb unsnapped the grid framework
and hefted a precious-metal cube. “It breaks down into smaller parts that are
easier to transport or hide.”

“Bribes for the local government?”
asked Max.

Herb picked a letter out of the
pouch reserved for the operating manuals. “This is addressed to Shiraz.”

“Go ahead,” she said, gripping
Max’s hand tightly.

Opening the letter, Herb read to
himself and summarized. “Since we’ll have to go to Niisham to speak with our scientist
anyway, he’s given us a list of ten other prisoners he wants us to rescue from
the supergiant. This gold is just a down payment. With Magi stasis, we could
transport all of them. He lists a ransom amount for each one that we’re able to
smuggle out.”

Max strode over, scooped up the
letter, and scanned it into the ship’s computer system. He sent Herb away with
their thanks.

****

Max called a partners meeting to order on the bridge. “Are
the people on the list criminal masterminds or rebel leaders?”

Reuben said, “I don’t think Aviar
cares as long as it causes chaos.” He brought up bios of each candidate and
projected them onto walls. None of them seemed particularly violent or heinous.

Ivy tapped a photo that stood out
from the rest. “Prince Feeveerkahn was third in line for the throne. He went
off his nut a few years ago and disappeared from society.”

“What did he do?” asked Roz.

“Feeveerkahn wanted to talk peace
with the Phibs before we crushed them,” Ivy replied after consulting her
sisters.

Deke seemed embarrassed by the
accusation. “What was done to the prince is wrong, but what has been offered to
the Void may not be reclaimed.”

“Yes, it can. I can get us out of
that dead-end system with the improved subbasement drive,” Roz said. “It’ll
work. We only need Crakik for the slightest adjustment in drift. I say we go
all in, rescue people from hell, and prove the drive works.”

“How far off course would we be if
we couldn’t find the professor, or he has no idea what the fix should be?”
Reuben asked.

“More exact numbers for the precise
exit vector will take hours, but if we had Shiraz’s equations on the original
test, we would have only been drifting for ten to eleven years,” Echo replied.
“In this event, the partners could rest in stasis. I vote in favor.”

Max stared into Roz’s eyes. “Tell
me you can make this happen.”

“
We
can. Worst case, if the
stasis doesn’t work, we can grow our own food and grow old … together.”

He brooded for a moment. “I believe
she can pull it off. I say we go all in.”

And that’s why I’d follow you
anywhere
. She searched his face for some ripple of her own emotion. He
remained a sphinx.

Reuben and Kesh fixated on the
incredible stack of gold and all the zeroes on the list bounties. Both voted
for the rescue mission.

Ivy sounded grim. “Doesn’t matter
what I say at this point, but this is not going to be a cake walk. Our problems
have nothing to do with whether
Generala
can hack subspace. We have to
steal the jump-vector coordinates to the target, outrun or outgun a military
outpost, and locate a needle in a radioactive haystack. Then we’ll have to make
sure our raft doesn’t sink when everyone in the prison wants to climb aboard.
People are going to die. If we make it out of Niisham in one piece, we have to
worry about the Bankers. We’ll need a plausible cover story to explain to
people how we jumped out of that system. There are a dozen ways we could end up
one with the Void ourselves.”

“So a yes with all those provisos?”
Roz asked.

“If you drop this suicidal fantasy,
my employer is offering you a permanent position as a professor at the Anodyne
University, including a house, bodyguards, longevity treatments, and a long
list of men willing to wine and dine you.”

“I’d never considered being a
professor. That might suit me in a couple years,” Roz admitted. “Unfortunately,
this mission is more important than me.”

“Then I abstain,” said Ivy.

“Deke?” asked Max. “We’ll free you
from your contract on the other side. You can claim we forced you to
participate.”

“I took an oath to the crown. That oath
included defending the prince. If his majesty is really in that prison colony,
I’ll do what he orders.”

“Can’t be more fair than that,”
said Max.

Ever the accountant, Kesh said, “We
should wait as long as possible to cash in the gold. The moment we do, Aviar
will know we’ve stopped being his dupes.”

Max nodded. “Let’s return to the
dock and plan our trip to the prison colony.”

Reuben found a song from his
collection and played it on the bridge speakers. The English refrain mentioned
being on the Highway to Hell.

The men on the ship convened a strategy session on the
prison issue. What would they find there, and how could they guard against it?
“You’re not going to exclude me this time,” Roz insisted.

Max sighed. “I understand, but the
key here is stepping carefully. No one raises an eyebrow if the right person
asks a tangential question about something they have a right to know. The
Saurians have a small trade settlement near the spaceport. Our captain
determined that the Blue Claw Clan has the exclusive on prison deliveries. As a
former affiliate and current debtor to the clan, Kesh obtained this information
casually. As a bounty hunter, I found new, high-resolution mug shots of Crakik
and his cellmate in local law-enforcement databases while looking for
high-priced warrants in the area.” Max showed her the police data on his arm
display.

The Bat files came with
voice-prints attached for better identification, not that Roz could pick the
professor out of a crowd without his glasses. The thug with him, however,
resembled an alley cat that had been in numerous fights. The notch in his ear
was quite distinctive. “Which means a ship with their information came out this
way. This confirms that the professor passed though before us on the way to
Niishamboor.”

“Indirectly,” Max said. “I need you
to examine the public database in the pilots’ lounge. Examine the records in
general as if you’re planning which trade route to hire out to. While you’re
reading the results, you can determine how many Blue Claw ships have gone
through here recently. No targeted queries.”

Roz nodded. “Got it. I can filter
out the ones who returned through the trade loop a year later.”

“We only want to analyze the
frequency and passenger capacity of each. That way, we can try to infer the
population of the prison colony. Take Ivy with you to stand guard. I trust her
spycraft to keep you out of trouble.” When she took a deep breath to complain,
he held up a hand. “None of us goes anywhere alone.”

How hard can this be?

****

The pilots’ lounge was packed because the entertainment hub
provided free programs to flight crews while they waited. Roz had to sit in a
queue while Ivy chatted up a lonely Human sales executive at the bar across the
hall.
I have never seen her pay for a drink or sit alone.
Maybe that was
part of being a spy. People tended to ignore couples.

Once Roz gained access to the
public data links, she discovered Saurian prison transports came through the
entertainment hub about once an Anodyne year, but the capacity of the ships
seemed too large. Perhaps most of the volume was meant for returning ore. To
improve her estimates, she went back a few decades. The ships had steadily
increased in both frequency and size. To track the trend, she went back before
the Gigaparsec War. Early ships had arrived every eight years and held perhaps
forty prisoners, about the size of the crew. The biggest spike had occurred in
the last twenty years where the ships expanded to five or six times that size.

She had originally envisioned a
high-security facility like Alcatraz Island, which had housed on the order of
250 inmates. Based solely on the upper-limit estimate, such a prison would be
critically overcrowded. Roz needed other information sources to provide a lower
bound on the population.

A young pilot in a blue scarf
tapped on her cube wall. “Busy,” she told him.

This planet was an entertainment
data hive, so someone must have done a news story on Niisham in the last
century. Roz switched databases. The only thing the news search told her was
that treason arrests happened more often, but trials were done in a secret
court, with no verdicts published.

Roz tried again with documentaries
on prison overcrowding and found a public grant proposal submitted to a
charitable foundation. The grant had been filed by Lasandar, some famous
talk-show host and sentient-rights activist. He wanted to study the deplorable
conditions at the Niisham prison, but Lasandar had disappeared mid-project.
Clicking on his name for more details generated an odd error message.

When she went to the concierge desk
to get a translation for one of the messages, the blue-scarfed male stole her
spot. She objected, but he waved her off with, “Busy.”

Indignant, she stormed to the desk
to complain.

Ivy waved her over to the bar. Roz
pointed to herself. Ivy nodded, smiled, and gestured more broadly. The man with
her seemed excited.

Ivy introduced herself and linked
arms in order to turn Roz’s face away from the hall. “I was just telling Todd
here that the secret to approaching women is confidence.”

Behind her, police rushed into the
pilots’ lounge.

“In what way?” Roz said, puzzled on
all fronts.

“I explained that I’m a lesbian,
but I could teach him how to pick up attractive, young women. I demonstrated
with you.”

Officers bodily lifted a protesting
blue scarf and carried him away.

“I think I need to go back to my
room,” Roz said.

Todd asked if she’d like some
company. Squashing his excitement, Roz turned to Ivy and said, “That’s a great
idea. Could you go with me? I’m new here and might get lost.”

Roz didn’t let go of Ivy’s arm the
whole way back, going with the theory that no one paid attention to couples.

“That was hilarious,” Ivy said.
“I’ll bet he still hasn’t closed his slack jaw.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

When they were in the ship’s cargo
bay, Ivy asked, “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” Roz said, sounding
unconvincing even to her own ears.

Ivy grilled her first and then Max
did. In the end, she had to repeat her research story to the collected
partners.

“Assume that the local police have
a sample of Roz’s voice from surveillance. We can’t let her speak in public
until this blows over or we have a credible excuse,” Max said to the group in
the crew common area. “I conclude that even the number of people shipped to
prison is considered a state secret.”

Roz said, “So we find out who
worked with Lasandar. Be circumspect. We might find allies at Civil Rights for
All, the charity who funded his work.”

“Now that the authorities have been
tipped off, how do you recommend we do that?” Max asked.

Sometimes, Roz wanted to smack him.
“You wear your patented dolphin medal. I get my humanitarian award from Aviar,
and we waltz into the charity’s main office.”

Max wiped his face. “When faced
with a superior opponent, you need study him carefully. This is going to take
political maneuvering and acumen that neither of us has.”

Roz considered for a moment.
“You’re saying we need a swindler. We can just ask my mom.”

The others exchanged glances. Max
said, “That’s actually a brilliant idea.”

Once informed of the
intelligence-gathering challenge, Alyssa had a plan within moments. “We’ll
start close to the truth. I’ll shop around for film makers for my daughter’s
engagement celebration. With the couple’s prestige and my money, I’ll need the
best. We’ll make the rounds, inviting several prominent charities to the event,
and I’ll mention liking Lasandar’s style. His crew will come to us.”

“Engagement party?” Max asked.

Alyssa put a hand on his arm.
“It’ll be easy. Just hold her hand and sneak adoring gazes at her like you
usually do. Everyone will believe it.”

Roz blushed at her mother’s forward
nature, but Max didn’t deny it.

****

Deke and Alyssa went to the surface with Roz to grill every
video-industry professional related to Lasandar. Deke wore a prosthetic, but
his limp was noticeable in the gravity.

One editor had a copy of Lasandar’s
final project, which he parted with when the con woman fed him a story about
being part of an undercover task force investigating sentient-rights abuses.
The Magi reputation for random acts of kindness helped her case.

The editor warned, “Forget my name
and link address. You didn’t get this cube from me. The government only
arrested Las because he did the voice-overs. He refused to identify the rest of
us.”

Roz accepted the holo cube. The
clip showed the initial plans for the colony, followed by examples of extreme
crowding and something completely unexpected—dirty-faced children hiding in the
background. She froze the playback. “Where did you get this footage?”

“Bought it bootleg from one of the
Saurian ships,” explained the film editor. “The little girl is probably one of
the military-guard brats, though the prisoners aren’t neutered either. The
mortality rate is just so much higher for the workers. The guardian class makes
certain the prisoners don’t kill each other, confiscates weapons, and doles out
food based on hours of labor.”

Alyssa said, “Our captain is a
Saurian. We’ll have him invent the provenance for the film and use still shots
where possible.”

“How many people are trapped in the
prison system?” Roz asked.

The editor glanced nervously out
his office windows, as if checking for government agents. “Maybe five thousand,
guards and prisoners combined.”

Roz coughed in surprise, twenty
times the designed load for the colony. “There are that many traitors to the
crown each year?”

“The royal family uses the prison
to get rid of rivals and keep secrets. I remember one poor sap whose only crime
was winning too many horticulture competitions against the dowager.”

“Doesn’t public outcry keep the
royals in line?” asked Roz.

“That’s why they won’t let us
report on the subject. As the war depleted radioactives from Cardiam, we needed
to expand operations at Niisham to compensate. Suddenly, a bunch of mining engineers
and construction specialists were indicted in a bomb plot.”

Roz said, “Could you back that up
with names?”

“A few. Look, I can’t afford to be
linked to any of this. I have a family of my own.”

Roz collected what background
information she could off the public sites. The specialists mentioned seemed to
be middle-aged and rich, but she couldn’t find anything about their previous
jobs or residences.

In the cab on the way back to the
hotel, Deke raised the partition and spoke in English so the driver wouldn’t
overhear. “There’s something you need to know about Bat social interaction.”

“How are the language lessons going
with Jeeves?”

The copilot shrugged. “He may need
a speech therapist.”

Roz put a hand to her chest. “Is he
cognitively delayed, or has his mouth been deformed by malnutrition and living
in a closet?”

“I—I’m not that kind of specialist.
He speaks better than a Human, for what that’s worth.”

“Is there any way we could hire a
therapist for the next leg?” Roz asked her mother. “I’d want the best. I’ll pay
out of my share.”

Deke said, “What I need to tell you
is that some of translation is implied culturally, and AIs will never fill in
the gaps. Remember how vague the editor was? Whenever something doesn’t seem to
have a cause, the cause is neutronium.” The power behind the throne.

“So these engineers wanted to
retire from the neutronium plant but knew too much?” Alyssa guessed. “Reminds
me of the tomb builders being buried with the pharaohs.”

Deke shrugged. “Perhaps they merely
failed to make their quota or spilled secrets. Either way, investigating these
men would be seen as an attempt to find the source of the neutronium. That
could never be allowed.”

“We also can’t attack the
overcrowding or the unfairness without criticizing the royals.” Alyssa took the
cube from Roz and pointed at the face of the child. “This is what we
concentrate on—the children who don’t belong in prison. People could get behind
a cause like saving them, and removing them would solve a problem for the
establishment. You’re a convincing advocate for disadvantaged little ones. Your
passion will come through on camera.”

“So we go in as humanitarian aid
for the children—blankets, water filtration, and food?” Roz suggested. Her eyes
were glued to the window as they sped through a traffic circle with several
rings and two distinct levels.

Alyssa said, “Plus birth control
for the inmates and emergency evacuation in stasis for any children with severe
medical needs. You’d have an excuse for hiring that speech therapist or
nutrition expert.”

Roz did some quick math in her
head. “We could haul three or four times as many kids in the same space as the
engineers.”

“How do we get permits and funding
for all that?” asked Deke. “Let alone for this party. The guest list is over
five hundred already.”

“Ah,” Alyssa said with a smile.
“The public and politicians will give us the finances when they see the ads for
our cause. What I’m curious about is how you plan to get your ship out of that
one-way system again.”

Roz pulled up charts for the lie that
she and Echo had prepared. She didn’t want to deceive her mother, but Roz
couldn’t tell anyone else about the subbasement drive, especially not off the
ship. “We found a loophole, a gravity thread that passes through the very edge
of the Niisham system every 271 years.”

“Bull,” Alyssa replied. “The Bats
would know about that.”

“The Magi didn’t put it on the star
charts they shared. Some astronomical phenomena they kept to themselves,
especially when the Bats started using the one-way jump to dispose of trash,”
Roz explained. The thread in question passed a quarter parsec away from the
alleged target, but politicians weren’t rocket scientists. Her stomach roiled
from the high speeds and traffic weaving.

Her mother asked, “Why are the Magi
so zealous about exploring all the systems, even the unreachable ones?”
Everyone else had enough trouble managing the 80 percent of Union space that
the Turtles and Magi had explored for them.