Shooting the Rift - eARC (11 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

In which an error of judgment pays unexpected dividends.

Well, the Numarkut customs inspectors weren’t pirates exactly, but once their cutter had matched velocities (using plasma reaction drives, as gravitic repulsion this far from anything big enough to bounce off was pretty close to useless), I could see why Remington seemed unclear about the distinction. A thin, weasely fellow came aboard through one of the personnel locks, his uniform so encrusted with braid and impractical-looking sidearms it seemed a miracle he could walk about in it without getting tangled up in something every time he took a step.

“Inspector Plubek.” Remington extended a hand for a perfunctory shake, and withdrew it hastily, surreptitiously checking the number of fingers he had left. “Always a pleasure.”

“Likewise, I’m sure.” Plubek wiped his hand against the seat of his trousers, leaving a small, greasy stain—knowing the skipper’s tastes, I’d been generous with the mayo while making the sandwiches, and, though long gone, they’d left traces of their passing. He favored me with the sort of look normally reserved for squishy surprises on the sole of your shoe. “Who’s this?”

“My new deckhand. He’ll look after you.” So that’s why he’d brought me down here from the bridge with him. But I suppose it made sense. My duties were among the least pressing, and while I was fetching and carrying for our unwelcome visitor, everyone else could be getting on with something useful.

“No doubt,” Plubek said, in a voice which managed to convey exactly the opposite. He turned to me. “Come on then. First hold.”

Just keep him busy,
Remington sent, to my faint surprise.

Doing what?
I asked.

Remington shrugged.
Doesn’t matter
, he responded.
Just so long as he takes his time. Got some stuff to discuss with Sarah
. Then he turned and ambled away, already engrossed in conversation with Sowerby, who’d appeared from a nearby utility conduit while we were greeting the Inspector. Whatever they were talking about, it didn’t look like business—their heads were close, and her arm was around his waist before they’d even reached the end of the corridor. I resolved to make sure our tour of inspection skirted around the crew quarters, in case a piece of cloth had appeared on either door in the interim.

“Would you like to see the manifest?” I asked, snagging a copy from the central datanode.

“Might as well take a look at it, I suppose.” Plubek shrugged. “Some of it might even be true.”

“Of course it’s true,” I said, perhaps a little more vehemently than I’d intended. In all honesty, the idea simply hadn’t occurred to me that it wouldn’t be, despite my new avocation of intelligence gatherer, and I resolved to check it through again myself at the earliest opportunity. I shouldn’t be taking anything for granted any more.

Plubek snorted. “How long have you been aboard?”

“About a week,” I admitted. “Still finding my feet, if I’m honest.”

“If you’d found them by now, it’d make you the fastest on record.” Plubek stopped walking, and really looked at me for the first time. “You’re Commonwealth, right? Not Guild born?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” I asked, a trifle defensively. “I’m hardly the first dirtwalker to sign on with a Guild ship.” The slang term slipped out without conscious thought, and it was hard to say which of the two of us was the most surprised.

“Just a piece of advice,” Plubek said. “Lot of Commonwealthers on Numarkut. Leaguers too. And people picking sides who aren’t either, but see some advantage in it. Watch your step when you get there, that’s all.”

“I will. Thanks,” I said, with about as much sincerity as I thought the thinly veiled warning had been delivered in. (As things turned out, though, perhaps I did the fellow an injustice, and it had been sincerely meant.) I directed the manifest I’d retrieved to Plubek’s ‘sphere, but, to my surprise, he simply redirected it to a hand-held datapack he’d pulled out of his pocket. I regarded it curiously. “What’s that for?”

“What does it look like?” My incomprehension must still have shown on my face, because his own held a faintly condescending expression now. “Making a permanent record.”

Can’t you just mesh with the datanode back at the customs post?
I asked, and the fellow actually smiled.

“You really are a dirtwalker, aren’t you? Not everywhere’s the same as where you grew up.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” I said, leading the way out onto the catwalk over Number One hold.

Plubek sighed. “Not everyone uses neuroware. Some places don’t trust it. Which means they do things the old-fashioned way, with handhelds, and so do their merchant crews. And don’t get me started on the Sanctified Brethren—paper and clipboards. Faugh.”

“That must make your job quite difficult,” I said, deploying the appearance of polite interest I’d honed to perfection though innumerable social engagements.

“You have no idea,” Plubek said. “Especially with the number of trade partners Numarkut has.” He began poking at some crates which had preceded me aboard. “So we standardized on the handhelds. What’s in here?”

“Apple brandy,” I said, reaching into the shared space where our ‘spheres overlapped, and filleting out the appropriate item from the manifest.

“Like I’ve not heard that before,” Plubek said skeptically. “Avalon’s principal export, if you believe the paperwork. And it just happens to attract the lowest rate of tariff.” He gestured to the crate. “Let’s see it. And if it’s Silverwine in brandy bottles I won’t be amused.”

“Hang on,” I said, rummaging around the tool locker for a crowbar. The little handheld fascinated me, a concentrated mass of data, on the edge of the ‘sphere, but walled off from it. This was precisely the kind of thing Aunt Jenny would be interested in, I thought, logging the comings and goings of every ship Plubek had boarded, along with their cargoes, crew complements, and heaven knows what other juicy little nuggets of information. The problem was how to get at it: I might be able to use the direct interface he’d used himself, but unless he was a complete moron, which I rather doubted, he’d be certain to notice me trying to access it.

But there might be another way . . .

“That’s odd,” I said, handing him the tool, and standing back as he levered the lid off in a shower of splinters and wood shavings: Avalon’s distillers believed in traditional methods of packing their wares as well as producing them, although how much of this was genuine reverence for the generations of craftswomen who’d gone before them, and how much was just appreciation of the premium customers were prepared to pay for a sense of history to accompany their intoxication, I couldn’t have said without sounding cynical.

“What is?” Plubek asked, lifting a bottle from its nest of shredded wood. He held it up to the light, and shook it suspiciously, listening to the gurgle. Nothing rattled inside, so it contained only liquid; no contraband hoping to escape notice by holding its breath.

“There’s one crate too many,” I said, poking the manifest with my sneakware. Getting inside was so simple I didn’t even have to think about it, beyond a faint sense of unease as I recalled Remington’s threat of dire consequences if I started mucking about in the
Stacked Deck
’s datanode. But the prize was worth the risk. I hoped. . . . Reducing the number of crates recorded by one was the work of an instant, and I pulled back from the manifest with the sense of a job well done. If I’d read my man well, he’d only react in one way. “See?”

“So there is.” Plubek shrugged, with an eloquent lack of surprise. “Bloody shipping clerks. Couldn’t find their own asses with both hands and a map, some of them.” He twisted the cork out, and took a mouthful. Swallowed, and sighed with satisfaction.

“Silverwine?” I asked, and he shook his head.

“Not this time.” Which didn’t stop him taking another mouthful to be sure. I felt a small glow of triumph, which I was careful not to show. Instead, I tried to look indecisive.

“I should tell the skipper,” I said. “This is going to make a real mess of the paperwork. Though he’ll probably blame me.”

“Of course he will,” Plubek agreed, taking another swig. This was going even better than I’d hoped. “You’re the newbie. That’s your job.” Then, to my horror, he recorked the bottle, and replaced it in the crate. “That’s enough. Against regulations to be drinking on duty.” He smiled at me, in a manner almost entirely devoid of good humor. “You’re not trying to get me so drunk I miss whatever you’re really smuggling, are you?”

“No,” I said, with perhaps a little too much vehemence.

“Shame. It never works, but I don’t mind people trying.” He shrugged. “Transgene, see; I stop metabolizing the alcohol as soon as there’s just enough in my system to enjoy.”

“How very nice for you,” I said.

“Perk of the job.” A calculating look entered his eye. “But I wouldn’t want you getting in trouble with your skipper. Maybe this crate better just disappear.”

“Maybe it should,” I said. “Stop anyone spotting the discrepancy.”

Then my own words struck me like a bucket of ice water. He’d already downloaded a copy of the unmodified manifest to the handheld. If I couldn’t find a way in there to make the same adjustment, my meddling would be immediately obvious. Remington would turf me off the ship, and I’d probably find myself on the wrong side of a ton of Numarkut laws and customs regulations to boot.

“Just what I was thinking.” He sent a brief signal, and within a couple of minutes a drone emblazoned with the crest of the Numarkut Excise was hoisting the crate and buzzing out of the hold with it. “Now, what else have you got down here?”

As our tour of the holds progressed, I began to understand how the system worked; and, how, gallingly, I’d got myself into potentially serious trouble for no good reason. Anything, it seemed, which caught his fancy, Plubek would decide had been improperly packed, or contravened some local regulation, and impound. And anything impounded would immediately be scooped up by the drone, to be conveyed to the hold of his customs cutter. Which, fortunately, was small enough to have docked comfortably inside only one of ours, or, I suspected, our cargo would simply have been gutted. (A suspicion I was later to discover was entirely unfounded: an elaborate informal, but nonetheless rigidly adhered to, protocol existed between the Guild and the Numarkut Excise, governing precisely how much they could confiscate, and which items that, though technically prohibited, they would regrettably fail to notice.)

At the time, though, I was barely aware of what was going on around me, being completely preoccupied with the problem of cracking Plubek’s handheld. Going in through his ‘sphere was clearly not going to be an option. However, if it was supposed to interface with old-fashioned technologies, as he’d intimated, there was bound to be a port for that. Not ideal, but if it was my only way in, I’d just have to find a way. In the meantime, I spun things out as long as I could, with a stream of the kind of content-free conversation I’d been perfecting since my first cotillion.

Once again, my gift for improvised data manipulation came to my rescue. Every time the drone removed an item from the hold it sent an update to Plubek’s handheld, and once I’d noticed that, I recorded the next exchange. Sure enough, there was an identifiable key at the start of the datablurt, and as soon as I’d got into that, I could set to work. Stripping out the datanomes I needed, and carefully walling off the area of my ‘sphere I was working in from the connection Plubek was maintaining, I swapped them into my sneakware and poked cautiously at the handheld’s access port.

To my relief, and, I must confess, some degree of surprise, it worked first time. There wasn’t any leisure for self-congratulation, though; Plubek could mesh directly with the device again at any moment, and I had to be in and out again before he did.

My first surprise was how little information there was in there. Personal ‘spheres tended to be linked to a nearby node most of the time, conferring almost limitless access and storage; but the relatively primitive handheld was constrained by its architecture, unable to spill over into the wider datasphere. Unless that was a deliberate security feature, of course: as that thought occurred to me, I resolved to be even more circumspect.

Fortunately, the
Stacked Deck
’s manifest was the first thing I came across, and repeating my modification to the inventory the work of a nano. After that, I couldn’t hang about for long enough to see what else the handheld contained, so I simply grabbed copies of everything and fled. My own ‘sphere was too small to contain it all, but I’d been allocated a bit of personal space on the ship’s node (with further threats from Remington of dire consequences if I ever misused it), so I simply diverted my digital spoils there, and hoped for the best. I’d walled off the area with some basic privacy protocols (nothing like as sophisticated as I could have done, but I didn’t want to advertise just how skilled I was at this sort of thing—which would probably have made my shipmates a little nervous), and I was under no illusions that they’d hold for long if anyone was serious about taking a peek—which was why I hadn’t stored anything sensitive there up until now. I briefly considered upgrading the security on the fly, but decided against it, on the grounds that doing so would only draw attention to the fact that there was something worth looking at there now; better just to let sleeping dogs lie.

As the data took a subjectively eternal two or three seconds to copy across I found myself holding my breath in an agony of suspense, convinced that Plubek would notice the transfer; but he remained focused on the cargo, no doubt looking for something else worth filching. As the last few shreds of data slipped out of my ‘sphere he straightened up, a bottle of Silverwine in each hand.

“Improperly stamped,” he said, shaking his head sorrowfully, although the vintner’s impression in the wax seal below the cork seemed clear enough to me. “I’ll have to impound it.”

“Better safe than sorry,” I agreed, colluding in the game. “Where to next?”

“I think we’re done,” the Inspector said, which came as no surprise. He’d already been through all the other holds by this point, and I had no doubt that his own was so full there wasn’t room for any more “contraband” anyway. “Where’s Captain Remington?”