Jewel (11 page)

“Full of in-system propellant?” the captain asked. They
suddenly had her full attention.

“There wasn’t a distinction on the old colonizers,” Erik
explained. “But as to your real point, no, it’s not the same mixture that the
Euripides
uses. We could burn it if we had to, but it would be hard on our engines.”

“There better be another but coming,” the captain warned him.

“But,” Erik added, “there are a lot of the older style
in-system craft along the Fringe. This fuel is marketable. I just wonder why my
countrymen topped off the tanks like this. I mean, presuming that they are the
ones who did it, of course.”

Unsurprisingly the captain showed absolutely no interest in
the motivations of the former owners of the vessel. “Ms. Aurora, do you agree
that this fuel mixture is marketable?” she asked.

Jewel might not understand a lot about engine theory but she
was a Cartelite. She’d studied the markets on the Fringe in preparation for her
flight and she knew the relative value of their find. “Oh, yes, Captain. This
will be better than cash in a lot of places, and maybe even more useful to them
then armenium. And the best thing for us is that it doesn’t take up space that
we could use for anything else. You’ll have to check with Ana Yang, but our
reserves should be low enough that we can shift what remains around to free up
tanks from the
Genesis
reserve.”

“And you think there’s enough fuel to fill us to capacity?”
the captain asked.

Erik nodded to Jewel but spoke to the captain. “Yes, Ma’am.
Half of this ship is probably fuel tank. We could seal off the
Euripides
’
reserve tanks and fill them without making a significant dent in the
Genesis’
reserves. We’ll have plenty to sell.”

Captain Kiara sounded genuinely happy. “Very good, then.
I’ll get Ms. Yang working on this from our end right away. In the meantime, Mr.
Peron has discovered something interesting bouncing sensor beams off the hull
of the
Genesis
. He’s been comparing his findings with the schematics in
Carter’s collection and it appears that someone has done some remodeling on
board the
Genesis
. They’ve taken out most of the passenger
accommodations—both sleeping capsule berths and passenger cabins—fortified the
walls and made other structural alterations. I want to find out why and if
there’s something in that section of the ship we can salvage. It must have been
important to them. Why else would they waste time remodeling an antique
sub-light ship?”

“Will do,” Erik confirmed their orders. “We’ll contact you
as soon as we figure out what they’ve done.”

“See that you do, Mr. Exec,” the captain said. “I don’t have
a lot of patience for members of my crew who fool around.”

Jewel disconnected the call and reached for her clothes.
“You know I’m getting tired of people making allusions to my sex life over the
com-link.”

Erik laughed and joined her in getting dressed for the third
time in about two hours. Then they made their way to the passenger compartment,
using the schematics Jester had provided them.

The doors to the remodeled area were large enough to
accommodate a tractor-sized cargo-loader—two of which they’d found parked in
the loading bay whose entrance faced away from Brynhild Station. Clearly the
Ymirians had anticipated moving large amounts of bulky cargo into the
colonizer, which was actually a fairly cheap way of transporting the goods if
you didn’t mind a few years passing between placing the order and making the
delivery.

The area on the far side of the bay doors had been
significantly redesigned. Walls had been broken down to make room for the
tractors. Carpeting had been torn up and the floors reinforced to handle much
more substantial mass than the original design provided for. The new walls also
gave the impression of great strength—so much so that the image of a bank vault
flashed through Jewel’s mind.

“It reminds me of a prison,” Erik said. “This is damn
strange.”

Jewel knew why she had thought of banks—in her childhood
she’d had a significant amount of experience with them. But why, she wondered,
had Erik’s first thought been of prisons?

“Do you want to talk about what you’re running from?” Erik
asked her.

Jewel instinctively tried to pull back from him, but he maintained
his grip on her hand so she was forced to stand her ground and answer him. “No.
I definitely do not think this is the proper time to hold a discussion on our
respective pasts.”

To emphasize the fact that they had work to do, she shook
free of him and strode up to the first of the cells or vaults built into the
wall. It opened easily at her touch, revealing that the space within was
completely empty.

“I was wrong,” Erik admitted as he stepped up beside her.
“This isn’t a prison cell. What do you think they were planning to store in
here?”

“I don’t know,” Jewel admitted. “How many of these chambers
do you think there are?”

“That depends on how many decks they converted, but there
are easily thirty or forty of them on this level alone.”

There were, in fact, forty-two chambers laid out twenty-one
on a side, with another set of forty-two in the center of the ship and a third
set of forty-two on the port side of the vessel. It took a long time to look in
them all and longer yet to check the matching vaults on the next two levels
down.

“Have you found anything yet?” the captain asked them over
the com. Lazy she might be, but that vice did not make her particularly patient
with her subordinates.

“No, Ma’am,” Erik told her, “but this is the last
refurbished deck. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“I don’t believe in luck, Mr. Exec,” the captain told him.
Her dry voice was beginning to really irritate Jewel.

She opened the latest set of vault doors—the one hundred
ninety-third that she had personally opened.

She stopped, momentarily startled to find the room filled
with cargo containers. Each container was about a meter high and two meters
long. The boxes were stacked three high and she assumed, based on the
measurements of the vaults, about four deep, putting twelve of them in each
storage unit.

“You might have to alter your beliefs, Captain,” she called
out, “because we’ve just found something.”

“Give me a moment, Captain,” Erik said. He stepped up beside
Jewel. “Can we slide one of those containers out of there? It’s stacked to the
ceiling. I don’t think we can open it unless we get it out into the corridor.”

Jewel shook her head. “I wouldn’t even want to try. These
units must be heavy or the colonists wouldn’t have had to use that cargo loader
to move them.”

“What did you find?” the captain prompted them.

“You’ll have to hold another few minutes,” Erik told her.
“I’ve got to get a loading truck down here.”

He ran off to do exactly that, returning after ten minutes,
driving one of the tractors from the cargo bay. It was old-fashioned—no hover
pads beneath it—instead driving on durable treads. There were two prongs in
front of it that could be raised and lowered by controls in the cab of the
vehicle. It took Erik about forty-five seconds to line it up, then he speared a
cargo container, backed it out into the main bay and lowered it to the ground.

He snagged a tool to open the container from beneath the
seat and jumped off the cab. It wasn’t locked—just sealed—and it only took
about ninety seconds to get the lid off. Jewel helped him shift the cover so it
slid to the ground.

“What’s in it?” Captain Kiara asked again. If she’d been
impatient before she was almost furious with her sense of urgency now.

“I have no idea,” Erik said.

But Jewel did. Mouth agape in wonder, she pulled out a
handful of the stuff on her glove. It was green in color and had the
consistency of thick grainy jelly. “Stars above us,” she whispered. “This is
raw armenium!”

Captain Kiara impatiently drummed her fingers on the
tabletop, but Jewel knew she was no longer in a hurry to leave the Valkyrie
System. The captain had heard the siren call of gold—or in this case
armenium—wafting across the void of space, and like the legendary Odysseus she
intended for nothing to stop her from reaching her prize. Of course, Odysseus
had had the foresight to pour molten wax into the ears of his crew so that they
couldn’t hear the siren’s song and could help him resist the maddening
impulses. In Kiara’s case, her crew was actually urging her on.

“Raw armenium!” Peron repeated for about the thirty-seventh
time. “Jewel, I know you and I didn’t hit it off quite right, but I want you to
know I’m prepared to forgive you for everything and marry you when we get back
to Arch.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Jewel told him before
rolling her eyes at Erik. At least Peron’s intentions were slowly becoming more
honorable, however ridiculous they still sounded. When he’d first broached the
subject he’d only wanted to treat her to a hedonistic weekend at the Moons of
Elaison.

Everyone else seemed to be in just as good a mood—smiles and
laughter all around. Even Ana Yang appeared to have overcome her anger and
found at least a courteous nod for Jewel from her seat across the conference
table. And Emanuel Warrant seemed downright overjoyed with her.

“Tell me how much it is,” Peron begged again. “I want to
hear the numbers.”

“All right,” Captain Kiara interrupted him. “Let’s call this
meeting to order.” She looked around the table at her gathered officers. Erik,
Warrant, Peron and Yang. Plus the ship’s doctor, Gunther Brüning, and for some
reason, Jewel’s roommate, Ship’s Steward, Vega Costa. And Jewel, of course, who
had somehow earned everyone’s gratitude because she knew what raw armenium
looked like.

The officers quickly settled down so that the captain could
speak.

“Thank you,” she said with uncharacteristic courtesy. “Let’s
start as Mr. Peron requested, by going over the numbers. They’re good, people,
really good, but not quite the incredible bonanza that you’re all expecting.”

That little announcement sobered everyone up pretty quickly.

“Ms. Aurora,” the captain said, “the floor is yours.”

“Thank you, Captain,” she said. “I think what you’re all
interested in is the raw numbers—how much is this find on the
Genesis
worth,
and I have to tell you that we don’t know for sure. What I can do is describe
the factors that will come into this decision and suggest a probable range and
some complications.

“First off, this is not the armenium we use in our ships.
That’s a refined product, gold in color and highly toxic. While we assume that
the raw stuff isn’t good for us we don’t actually know how bad it might be
either.” She remembered impulsively scooping up some in her hand and was
grateful she’d been wearing gloves.

“How much is it worth?” Peron prodded her.

Jewel shook her head. “We don’t know.”

Disagreement broke out immediately around the table.

Jewel raised her hand to try and hold back the comments. “We
don’t know,” she repeated, “because we don’t know how pure our ore is. In the
Confederation, refined armenium is selling at just over two thousand solars per
ounce—about twelve times the current price of gold. We don’t know how pure our
ore is and we don’t know how much pure ore it takes to produce one ounce of
refined armenium.” That wasn’t true, of course. Jewel was intimately familiar
with those ratios, but she had no intention of admitting to possessing such
specialized knowledge to a group of spacers on the Fringe.

Again everyone began talking over her.

“But.” Jewel tried to be heard anyway. “But!”

Erik stood and banged on the table. “Come on people, this is
no way to handle a meeting. Jewel has the floor!”

Everyone quieted down again.

“Thank you,” Jewel said. “If we make a very conservative
assumption of say, fifty pounds of ore per ounce of refined fuel…”

“Fifty pounds!” Peron exclaimed.

“That’s just for the sake of argument,” Jewel said. “We
don’t know what the actual number is. It might be ten pounds, it might be one
pound, it might be a hundred pounds.” On average, Jewel knew that the actual
figure was ten pounds, but again she couldn’t admit to knowing that, could she?
The only people who possessed such knowledge were Cartelites and Armenites. If
her crewmates began to suspect she was a Cartelite they could earn themselves a
small fortune in reward money by turning her over to her parents or their
agents. Jewel wasn’t one hundred percent certain what would happen to her then
since she was no longer a virgin and could be rejected by the Armenites, but
the penalty was going to be stiff for breaking a trillion dollar armenium
contract. It wasn’t just her parents she would have to worry about. The
government would almost certainly get involved. Everyone would want a pound of
flesh in revenge of the fortunes she’d just terminated and the damage she’d
done to the Cartelite economy. A lifetime of hard labor was among the more
pleasant penalties she could imagine.

“But—”

“Mr. Peron,” Captain Kiara cut in, “let her talk.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Jewel said again. “So if we assume
that fifty pounds of ore converts to one ounce of refined fuel, then we’re
talking about roughly ten ounces per container. There are twelve containers per
compartment and twenty-two filled compartments on the
Genesis
. That
means that ore—once refined—would eventually have a market value of 32,400,000
solars.”

“We’re rich,” Peron shouted again, and from the looks on
just about everyone else’s faces, it seemed pretty clear that they agreed with
him.

“No, we’re not,” Jewel said flatly. “There are dozens of
problems we’d have to overcome to sell this ore, but frankly, even if we
overcome them we can’t hope to generate anything like thirty-two million solars
in revenue. That’s the price of refined fuel sold to the consumers—people like
us. We are talking about selling unrefined ore to a refiner. Assuming we can do
that, we’ll be lucky to be able to get ten or twenty percent of the final
distribution price.”

Peron surged to his feet again. “Ten percent? That
relationship’s off, baby.”

“Why wouldn’t we be able to sell it to a refiner, Jewel?”
Ana Yang asked.

The single biggest reason was because Jewel refused to have
anything to do with it, but she couldn’t tell everyone that. “Because the
refiners are all members of the Armenite Hegemony or the Cartel Worlds. The
Cartelites have, in some cases, two hundred standard year relationships with
the Armenites and every reason to support their continued monopolization of the
armenium trade. It would be highly dangerous for us to let them know we’ve
found a cache of the raw material.”

“Highly dangerous for us, perhaps,” Doctor Brüning repeated.
It was the first time he’d spoken since Jewel had entered the room, and other
than the captain, he was the only one who didn’t look like he was already
celebrating their good fortune. “But not, I think, so dangerous for you.”

A cold feeling of dread crept into Jewel. “What do you
mean?” she asked.

Dr. Brüning stood, commanding the attention of everyone in
the room. He was an unhealthily overweight man with oily skin and a body odor that
his deodorant never quite completely masked. “I mean,” he grandly announced,
“that the Cartel Worlds are well known for their ruthless business practices
with outsiders, but they’re also known for taking care of their own.”

That was one of those truisms that sounded good to people on
the outside but which in practice didn’t mean what everyone assumed. Cartel
families were far more ruthless amongst themselves then they ever were with
their customers and neighbors. It all came down to what you thought they meant
by taking care of their own.

“And that matters why?” Jewel asked him.

She expected Brüning to try something funny but was still
surprised at the speed with which his fingers reached out and ripped the patch
of artificial skin from her left temple. There was a collective gasp from
around the table as Jewel’s three implanted biochips were uncovered publicly
for the first time since she’d nearly killed herself getting them shut off. She
knew only too well what everyone saw. Three apparent diamonds of impressive
size and perfect purity peeking out from within the light brown flesh of her
temple—except that anyone looking at them knew they weren’t diamonds. The
jewels were extremely sophisticated computers wired directly into her neural
pathways to bolster her own mental processing and give her, literally at a
thought, access to the sys-net wherever she went. And the technology was
extravagantly expensive—tens of millions of solars expensive—making them as
important to the Cartels as a symbol of Cartelite wealth as they were useful
for their extraordinary speed and processing power.

“You’re a Cartelite?” Yang asked—a disturbing mixture of
horror and awe inscribed upon her face.

“I’m in love again,” Peron quipped. “Marry me right now,
Jewel.”

“Of course I’m not a member of the Cartels!” Jewel lied.

“There’s no point in denying it,” Brüning said. “We can all
see the proof that you are implanted in your face.”

Jewel stood up to face him. “You ought to be praying that
I’m not a Cartelite right now. How did you find out about these stones anyway?”

“I’m the ship’s doctor,” Brüning laughed. “I noticed the
patch of artificial skin right away and surreptitiously scanned you when you
sat for your routine medical evaluation when you joined the ship.”

“But that’s unethical,” Jewel protested.

Brüning laughed at her.

“Jewel, why would you hide this?” Warrant asked. “I mean, a
Cartelite, a member of one of the great families? What the hell are you doing
out here with us?”

Peron suddenly sat up straight. “Hey, I’ll bet you’re the
reason we crash translated into this system. You used that bioware to crash our
systems. You already knew about the armenium and used us to discover it for
you.”

Jewel sank back into her seat and dropped her face in her
hands. She’d prepared a story for this eventuality, but now that she actually
had to use it she worried that no one would believe it. But she had to face
this. She stiffened her spine and took the accusations head on. “Nice fantasy,
Peron, Unfortunately, none of it is true.”

“Your face tells us otherwise,” Brüning said.

Jewel sat up and ran her fingertips over her implants. “You
don’t actually think these are real, do you? If the Cartel Worlds knew about
this system and wanted to exploit them, they’d drop a fleet of expert miners on
Valkyrie—not finagle a broken-down cargo transport to just chance upon it like
this.”

Emanuel Warrant and Ana Yang both nodded thoughtfully, as if
they thought what Jewel had just said made sense.

Unfortunately, Erik couldn’t let the matter drop. “This is
what you’re running from, isn’t it?”

Jewel suppressed a rush of rage at his indiscretion. “No,
Erik, I am not a runaway Cartelite playing crew on a tramp freighter as some
sort of bizarre, spoiled socialite game.” She hung her head in apparent defeat
and started to spin her story. “I was born on Alexandria. It’s a dominion of
Luxor in the heart of the Cartel Worlds. My parents were small-time
entrepreneurs with a mix of con artist stuck in.”

There had actually been a case like the one she was
describing, so her story should carry an authentic ring. Still, it was
difficult for her to read whether or not the other people around the table
believed what she was saying or not. The only vibe she could readily pick up on
was hostility—definitely less desirable then the giddy pleasure they’d been
showing when she’d entered the room.

“They were trying to swing the big deal,” Jewel explained,
“and needed to pass themselves off as being higher up the social and economic
ladder than they could ever hope to be. So they had me implanted with these
inert stones.”

“Inert?” Ana asked.

Jewel nodded. Since her bioware was shut down, this was
almost a true statement. “They’re fakes. I was still a child when they did it,
but that didn’t protect me when the scheme fell apart. There are all sorts of
laws and regulations protecting the Cartel families and aping them in this
fashion was a huge violation. I had an uncle who realized what was happening
and got me on a starship headed for the Confederacy before my parents’ house of
cards completely collapsed. The Confederacy laws technically protected me, but
the Cartel has a very long reach and I found I couldn’t make a living in the
civilized planets. They kept stirring up trouble for me.”

It was a sad reflection on the reputation of the Cartelites—the
ruling families of the Cartel Worlds—that no one sitting around the table found
it difficult to believe that the Cartels could be so vengeful. They were
greedy, nasty creatures utterly devoid of human compassion, or even genuine
charity. It was one of the lesser reasons that she’d run away from home…

“So you can’t help us sell the armenium,” Captain Kiara
said. She didn’t look disturbed—probably because she had already guessed
Jewel’s plan for what to do with the raw fuel.

“I didn’t say that,” Jewel said. “The Cartels are the only
legal distributors of armenium, but a lot of other businesses and governments
would love the opportunity to study the raw fuel. Hundreds of billions of
solars are spent on industrial espionage every year, and a significant
proportion of that has to be directed at the armenium trade. So if we can find
an interested party, we might actually make much more than the ten or twenty
percent we could potentially eke out of the Cartels anyway.”

Around the table, people began to relax again. “And you
could do that for us?” Warrant asked. “Sell it to someone outside of the
Cartels?”