Crystal Soldier (32 page)

IT WAS QUIET IN the piloting tower, both pilots at their stations, and the tree, Jela thought, at its. There was a tickle in the back of his mind, as if some intelligence beside his own was surveying the sparse starfield. If the sight awoke consternation in that other auditor, he didn't know it—though he wouldn't have been surprised. He'd been on the Rim more than once, and still the lack of . . . 
clutter
 . . . awed, amazed and intimidated him.

Pilot Cantra, now. If she felt awe or amazement, she kept both far away from her face. It wasn't to be expected, Jela thought wryly, that the pilot would be intimated by anything.

From the jump-seat came the sound of small and shaky in-breath. Dulsey, at least, was impressed.

"Are we in the Deeps, then, Pilot?" she asked softly.

Cantra lifted a shoulder, her attention more than two-thirds on her board, which might at least indicate due caution.

"Say, the Shallows," she murmured. "When we come out of the next transition, then you'll have the Deeps." She finished fiddling with her board and released the shock straps.

"Rimmers, they call this the Little Empty," she said. "We'll take ourselves a pause here. Pilots'll do a complete systems check. Dulsey, if you're willing, a good meal to go into the next phase on would be welcome."

Truth told, it was that next transition that was giving Jela a bit of worry. The pilot might be enjoying her joke, pretending they weren't sitting in the Deeps, but he only had two beacons on con and some small star clusters on the screens, bright and hard against the velvet . . .

"I am more than willing to provide a meal, Pilot," Dulsey was saying. "Now?"

"Give us time to do the checks," Cantra answered, coming up out of her chair in a stretch. "Call it two ship-hours. Ace?"

"Ace," Dulsey said.

"Good. I'm also going to need eyeballs on the clamps and a diagnostic on the can system. You take that on, while Jela an' me get busy here."

"Yes, Pilot." Dulsey unstrapped and slid to her feet with a will, moving out of the tower with the determined stride of a woman with work to accomplish.

Cantra sighed and shook her head and gave Jela a look out of amused green eyes.

"Hope the Uncle's ready for this," she said.

"Dulsey's a hard worker," Jela answered. "If the Uncle's surviving 'way out here, he has to have a corps of hard, smart workers with him. She'll fit right in."

"Uncle's a bit further out, yet," Cantra said, leaning over her board and initiating a system-wide check. "Found this area too crowded, is what I heard." She straightened and gave him another look, this one straight and stern.

"Get your check running, Pilot. After, I'll thank you to recall that you were going to be showing me what those guns you dote on can do."

"Understand," Jela said, his big hands resting lightly on the edge of the co-pilot's board, "that you'll have to unlock the system all the way. I'll need complete access. I'll also thank you for sharing your codes so I won't have to use the system override."

She'd expected him to need gut-level access, but it was still hard to get her fingers moving in the sequence that would open the guns to him and send the codes to his work screen.

"Thank you." That was said soft, like maybe he had an idea how much of a struggle habit had put up against need-to-know.

"We'll begin," he said, of a sudden not soft at all, "with a complete system check, an inspection of records . . . "

She frowned, reached to the board—and pulled her hand back.
Need to know
, she reminded herself.
You need to know your guns, and this is the man to teach you
.

Which didn't mean he had the right to snoop her info.

"Right, Commodore," she said with asperity. "I'm guessing you'll need serial numbers, purchase dates, shell counts, and . . . "

He sighed, and she figured he was going to come all high-brass now.

Instead, though, he nodded.

"We'll want all of that, if you can give it to me. Then we can look and see what needs to be done to optimize things, and what rounds we might need to load up on."

Cantra sighed. If he'd yelled, she'd've yelled back. But him being reasonable . . .

She sighed again.

"This ain't a cruise ship, Pilot; it's a Dark trader. You think I keep copies of my receipts all nice and tidy for the port cops to look over at their leisure?"

There was a brief bit of tight silence—then he sighed, and shook his head, and said, quiet, "I take your point. Let's have some target practice, then."

SHE KEPT WAITING for it, but he never did turn the brass on. He did insist that the best target practice they could get was from using a couple sets of what he called "underpowered rounds" as targets.

"I'm curious, Pilot," he said while she was in the midst of rough calculating in her head to back up the ship's computer, "how long you've had these Jaythrees and Jayfours on hand?"

The "Jaythrees and Jayfours" in question were currently loaded in Gun One, which he was using for his own, while she was firing general purpose tracking rounds with only a minimum of on-board guidance from Gun Two. It looked like he was practicing, too, because it was obvious he was calculating like mad, and doing something special and antsy with the settings . . .

"You're making it hard for me to concentrate . . . ," she muttered. He fidgeted briefly, and she sighed, giving up for the moment. "Which I guess is about right for combat conditions . . . "

He nodded, then fired the rounds; Cantra watched for his finger mark to indicate that she should start tracking, her mind maybe a quarter on his question.

"Garen bought 'em when she bought the guns," she said finally; "I never used them 'cause they was listed as close-in combat support in the docs, and I never had need." She moved her shoulders, and glanced at the side of his face.

"I'm a smuggler," she said, her voice sharper than she'd entirely intended "not a pirate. The guns're defense."

The finger move came; she started the ranging, saw in her head that the shells were in a highly elliptical—no, make that a parabolic—orbit so tight it might even graze the distant star, would likely, in fact, fall right into it . . .

From the co-pilot's section, she heard a small sound, almost as if Jela was humming, which was nothing new, though why he was inspired to hum or sing now . . . but she could hear him busy on the keyboard, tapping queries or commands in a real hurry.

There
! The computer and her calcs had reached an accord! She fired, let the computer take the next shot, fired the next on manual, let the computer have the next, and sat back to watch the tracks on the computer screen.

Even with Jela's rounds being "under-powered" it would take quite awhile for the interception, if she'd been accurate enough to—

Jela wasn't humming so much as growling. She turned her head to look at him.

"Can you tell me," he asked in a low, gravelly voice, "can you tell me
exactly
who sold you those shells and the manuals?" His face was so absolutely neutral that she felt dread rising through her, despite her training. Jela mad—really mad and out for balance—wasn't a sight she particularly wanted to see, she realized. Not that it would be smart to let him know he'd managed to unnerve her.

"Hah!" She shrugged carelessly and waved her hands in a casual
not my job
.

"Will the ship's log give us any idea?"

Her hands moved themselves; indication—
perhaps
. And expanded—
Maybe, low probability
.

"Garen was pretty careful about some stuff she didn't want me to know about . . . "

He looked away from her, fingers moving on the query pad, and spoke as if from a distance.

"At first opportunity—and you will remind me if I fail in this, please, Pilot! At first opportunity we will replace your documentation for these guns. We will also inspect—two sets of eyeballs so we're sure—the munitions themselves."

He paused, sending her a look out of hard black eyes.

"Try to remember where these shells came from, Pilot. Any clue would be good."

The man was serious, and—not mad, no. Something else, stronger and sterner than mere anger.

"Pilot, there's cause?" she managed, bringing the Rim accent up. "They out of spec?"

He rubbed his face with those broad hands, like he was trying to wipe away sweat, or a sight he wished he hadn't seen.

After a sigh he looked at her straight on again, not quite so hard.

"Jaythrees are rounds one might use to deny a landing ground to an enemy. A landing ground one wishes not to occupy for oneself. In addition to a fairly lethal explosive charge, they release a fine mist of plutonium powder. Jayfours . . . " He rubbed his face again.

"Jayfours are binary cleansers. The gas they release is . . . inimical . . . to most air breathing creatures and plants. In the presence of oxygen it will deteriorate to mere poison in about twelve days, and to an irritant in another twelve."

"Depending on the winds, one could cleanse half a continent."

Cantra blinked, swallowed and had cause to be briefly grateful for her early schooling.

"The docs?" she said, matching him quiet for quiet.

"Apparently someone wished to make you and your Garen into household names. Or else your seller, too, was tricked." She looked to the screen, where her shots, and the computer's, raced after the deadly payloads, and then back to him

"You aimed them for the star then . . . "

His hands fluttered into hand-talk.

Best course
, she read.

And again—
best course
.

TARGET PRACTICE WAS over, and so was the meal, eaten companionably together. The pilots were strapped in at their stations, while the third member of the crew sat in the jump-seat.

"All right, Dulsey," Cantra said, her eyes on her board, "I'll need those eighteen numbers now."

Dulsey stiffened, relaxed, shrugged diffidently.

"Pilot, I do not have eighteen. The numbers I was given come in three sets of twelve."

Jela, damn his hide, laughed. Cantra sighed.

"Let's have 'em, then," she said resignedly, and waited while Dulsey activated the jump-seat's tablet and tapped her info rapidly in.

They came up on the pilot's work screen—and the co-pilot's too—three neat rows of twelve, and anything more like plain and fancy gibberish Cantra hoped never to see.

"I'd guess," Jela said quietly, "that you'll be able to construct something reasonably familiar to you from those numbers. Maybe even something—" he wiggled his fingers in the pilot-talk for
comfortable
.

Comfortable. Right. Fuming, Cantra fed the numbers to the nav brain, not that she expected it to be able to do much with them—and she wasn't disappointed, damnitall.

"Easy for you to say," she snapped at Jela. "But out here, numbers ain't quite so casual as they are in the heart. Down there you got lots of reinforcement, including some places you just can't go, 'cause it'd take too much power, and lots of experience and references to let you know what's possible and what's not. Out here, almost any number'll get you
some
where. Twelve to five says most of where you can go is even safe. Sort of."

While she was talking, her fingers were busy shuffling and reshuffling Dulsey's pack of thirty-six.

"Well, if we pile 'em up backwards and split 'em in two, we get one coord that'll take us into somewhere just a bit inside the wavefront of a gas pulse pumping out an X-ray beacon. So I guess we'll discard that one. If we stack 'em straight and divide in two, we get more gibberish. But . . . "

On a guess, she re-shuffled the digits the old way, the one that'd been real popular with the Dark traders along back years ago and—yes.

"If we do it this way," she said aloud, being careful not explain exactly
which
way, "we get two sets of honest coords, and one looks a lot like something I think I recognize." She spun her chair to face Dulsey.

"So, did you get any more of that key? Any way I can confirm? I might expect an engineer to know we was missing something here."

Dulsey sat up straighter—a good trick, considering how upright she kept herself as a matter of course.

"Pilot, understand that the information was not all given to th—to me. One of my pod had the first set of numbers, which I became party to. The second set was mine to keep. The third . . . I broke a seal to get. It was assumed by our source that if we came, we would come all together."

"Hah!" Jela said. Cantra threw him a glance and a nod.

"Maybe," he said to Dulsey, "there were other numbers scattered among the rest of your Pod?"

But Dulsey shook her head.

"No, those were all we were given." She looked carefully at Jela, and continued almost inaudibly. "The others would not have been able to conceal the numbers and so were not given them."

Cantra grinned. "But you, not having all the numbers yourself, thought you ought to, and was ready to go with or without?"

Dulsey closed her eyes briefly, sighed, and faced her. "I cannot apologize for surviving," she said, and despite the brave words, her voice carried shame. "Nothing I did risked my Pod mates, and there was nothing else I could have—"

"Stop!" Jela held up a hand. Cantra looked at him with interest, Dulsey with concern.

"Dulsey," he said, "I believe you. I believe you did the right thing. We've all become soldiers in this life—you as much as me or Pilot Cantra, here. You acted to preserve resources, which you have done; and you behaved with honor. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Your right to be alive is not in question. What Pilot Cantra must judge—as pilot and captain of this ship—is the safety of the routes you've given her. This is for the good of the ship, and the good of the crew."

Not bad
, thought Cantra, admiringly. In the jump-seat, Dulsey shook her head again.

"I understand," she managed, voice shaking a little. "Truly, Pilot Jela, if I had more information, I would gladly—but these are the numbers. I have nothing else."