Smuggler's Dilemma (35 page)

"Tabby will be down in a couple of minutes. Sleep alright, Xie?" I asked. I'd told myself that I was going to try to treat her like any other crew member.

"It was okay." She looked at me warily.

Marny gave her a concerned glance. "If you need something to help you sleep, I think we have some stuff."

"Maybe," Xie said.

"You mind running this up, Cap?" Marny asked as she handed me a plate loaded with eggs and toast for Nick. Wordlessly I took it and jumped on the lift, returning a minute later.

"Here you go," she said and slid a pan of cinnamon rolls onto the table. Like I said, I didn't like to miss her breakfasts.

Xie didn't take a roll, but looked at them suspiciously. I pulled one off, put it on a plate and slid it over to her. "Just take a bite. If you don't like it, you might keep that to yourself. Marny's also in charge of our physical conditioning and you don't really want to be pissing her off," I said trying to keep things light.

"What's the catch?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Last time you locked me in a cell," she said.

"You've got to eat, Xie. And let's be clear; last time you tried to kill me and my entire crew and
then
I locked you in a cell. I'm willing to put most of that behind us if you are."

"What about the restraints?"

"What do you think?"

She nodded as if she got it. She also pulled the plate over and ate the cinnamon roll like it was the most precious gift she'd ever received.

"Cap. You're scheduled to work out after breakfast, so you'd better take it easy on those rolls," Marny said just as Tabby arrived and I'd grabbed a second roll.

"Where do you work out?" Tabby asked with interest.

"You passed right under it when you came in the hold. Marny set up a ring for boxing and it has a cardio bike and running track," I said.

"I'll go. I've got two hours before my shift, and I've got some exercises I need to work on. I could even use your help," she said.

"Great, I'm in," I said.

We cleaned up the dishes and started to head back toward the hold.

"Xie, if you want to come along, you can. As long as one of us is accompanying you, you won't get stopped at the back door," I said.

A tiny smile showed on her face. I wasn't quite sure how to interpret it, but I wasn't willing to think dark thoughts this soon after having had Marny's cinnamon rolls.

The four of us trooped into the hold and I pointed at the three meter wide square attached to what we considered to be the ceiling.

"Local gravity up there is .6g. It extends for most of the ceiling. If you climb the wall, you'll find the flip-over point at three meters off the ceiling," I explained.

Before I could say anymore, Tabby arc-jetted upward and neatly rotated just before impacting the ring.

"We'll have to climb," I said. I'd made the climb dozens of times, so I just pulled myself up along the rib of the ship that sat exposed in the hold. "Do you still do yoga?" I asked looking at Xie.

"Not for a long while," she said.

As expected, my workout hit muscle groups I'd neglected while we'd been on Mars. I'd swear that Marny had some sort of spyware that plotted my activity and found the most trying activities.

Tabby had an entire routine of exercises she was to work through. We weren't able to get through many of them, as her muscle tone had been badly compromised by lying around in the hospital bed. At the end of two hours we were all a sweaty mess and ready to be done with it.

"Is it always like that?" Tabby asked after we were out of earshot of Marny.

"I'd be lying if I said that wasn't Marny's favorite activity," I said.

Over the long trip, Xie slowly started to come out of her shell. She was nowhere near the confident thug I'd met on Colony 40, but she was taking a more active role in ship life. I knew her to be an expert at hand to hand combat and as she regained her strength and agility we started working out together more and more. It was good to work out with Marny, but our fighting styles were considerably different. Most of my finesse moves were lost when used against Marny's much larger mass and superior strength. With Xie, however, I was able to practice more subtle offensive moves that relied less on brute strength. Before I knew it, we had fallen back into a comfortable pattern of training.

"You're much stronger and faster than you were," Xie admitted after one particularly exhausting session.

"You've regained your speed," I returned. We'd had to remove her restraints while working out because they punished her for moving too quickly.

"You're a strange person, Liam Hoffen. I don't know why you're treating me so well," she commented.

"Maybe that's just the world I want to live in," I replied.

"Maybe…"

PLAN B

In the main asteroid belt, the farther away from the Sun you got, the more spread out the asteroids were. The Hildas region of the belt was about as far out as you could go without actually crossing the orbital path of Jupiter (which I was disappointed we weren't even remotely close to). This feature made mining in these sparsely populated regions a very expensive proposition.

We were approaching a cluster of asteroids that could be contained in a box no more than a hundred kilometers on a side - about a tenth the size of Colony 40's original claim. In my mind, I thought there was a better than fifty percent chance that Xie was lying to us and had no idea where the dreadnaught would be located. I'd never sufficiently discovered how high up in the Red Houzi command chain she'd been, so I had no good way to judge the value of her information.

For the last four days we'd crept forward in stealth mode, our passive sensors not picking up any local activity. I'd decided to play it safe and not arrive too close, the Houzi would no doubt have sensors to warn them of enemy approach. That is, if they were actually there.

On the fifth day, we'd come close enough to tell that there was, indeed, no ship, no base, nothing.

"There's nothing here," Nick declared.

We were seated at the table on the bridge. For the last few hours, it had become increasingly clear that something large had been here, given the amount of garbage. Whatever it had been, it no longer remained.

"How about it, Xie. Was this just a wild goose chase? Or did Red Houzi just move on?" I tried to keep the anger out of my voice. This woman had betrayed me the last time we'd sailed together. My mind, naturally, ran through the different reasons she might be doing it again.

"No. They're supposed to be here. Don't get too close, though. We always left traps behind. The alarms will let Red Houzi know that someone has found one of their abandoned bases," she said.

"So what? We're done? Twenty-four days of sailing and nothing?" I asked.

"They had to move somewhere," she said.

"You're out of the loop. This mission is a bust," Nick said.

She took a breath. "Wait. There's another spot."

"Why should we believe you," Nick asked.

She placed her hand on his arm and Marny visibly stiffened. I could see this going very badly in a short period of time.

"You're right, Nick. I used you and Liam. I know trust needs to be built and I haven't done that. If it means anything to you, I'm sorry for how I behaved - for using you, shooting you, and for trying to take your ship. I'm not expecting forgiveness - you have no reason to forgive me. I just needed to say that."

"This feels manipulative," Marny said.

"No, I get it," Xie said, retracting her hand from Nick's arm. "Let me put this out there though. The other location isn't that far, another eight days, plus a stealth approach. I'd bet you have enough fuel to try one more location. What's the harm?"

Nick slid a pad over to her, "Give me the location."

"Thank you," Xie said.

"I didn't say we were going."

Xie nodded demurely. I was just paranoid enough to feel like she was playing Nick perfectly. I caught Marny's eye and saw that she was thinking the same thing.

"We'd only just have enough fuel. If we got into any combat, it'd be a long ride home," he said. He was referencing a well-known idiom and romantic theme in space travel. The 'long ride home' being a reference to using your last small amount of fuel to send you back home, even though you'd run out of O2 and food well before you got there.

"You can't trust her, Nick," Marny said.

"The Navy will be interested in this site, either way," I said.

"True," Marny agreed.

"It's another week. If she'd wanted to pull us into a trap, she didn't need to bring us here first," Nick said.

"You're right, of course," Xie said. "I've not been trustworthy. It's also possible there won't be anything there, but we were developing the location. It wasn't supposed to be up and going for another year."

"We'll look," Nick said.

"Thank you," she replied.

Four days later at the midpoint, I decided that I'd give Sterra a heads up. I'd been assured that the quantum crystals were untraceable and the Navy had been expecting some word from us.

"Belcose, come in, are you there?" I said into the handheld receiver that actually had a cord connecting it to the main comm device. I repeated this call once a minute for ten, which was our protocol.

"Belcose here, what's your status,
Hotspur
?" he asked. It was interesting that he specifically knew it was me, given I hadn't identified myself.

"Negative contact. But we're headed to a second site," I said.

"Coordinates?" he asked.

"Not yet. We'll check it out and once we're clear of the area, I'll share. We did, however, find an abandoned base. Our prisoner assures us it was recently active," I said.

"Status in system has changed. There's been another attack," he said.

"Did our target show up?"

"Negative."

"How long ago?"

"Eighteen days. When will you know about your second site?"

"No more than a week. We're not that hopeful, though."

"Understood. Anything else?"

"No. Hoffen out," I turned the set off and placed it back in its box.

It was easy to slip back into our normal routines, but with a growing sense of apprehension. We'd seen the enemy's lair and it was reasonable to expect they were in the area. Xie had grown withdrawn, nervous even, and that added to my own sense of foreboding.

Finally, we arrived near enough to a new group of asteroids still in the Hildas region of the main belt. The navigation plan called for us to creep in the final four days using our stealth capabilities. Each day we got closer, we further limited the use of anything that might generate a signal.

"Liam, you need to see this," Tabby said. She was on watch and I was back in the hold working out with Marny. Out of a need to release our frustration, we'd been sparring more and more as the days wore on.

Show on HUD
, I told my AI.

Our passive sensors were finally able to resolve the thirty kilometer ring of asteroids. More importantly, I was able to just make out what I believed was the dreadnaught. If we turned on our active sensors, we'd know for sure, but the consequences could be dire.

"Tabby, slow our approach and bring us to a Zero Delta-V," I said.

"Aye, slowing approach with maximum stealth, to Zero Delta-V," she responded. Repeating commands apparently was something they taught at the Academy because it was something she frequently did.

"Xie was right. We're needed on the bridge," I said to Marny.

On the way past Xie's bunk room I knocked. She spent most of her time in her room, only joining us for our one common meal of the day. She opened the door and looked up at me, her face was drawn with worry.

"You were right. We found it," I said.

Unexpectedly she jumped and hugged me. She'd startled me and I almost treated her hug like a grapple. At the last moment, I accepted it. She felt my response and pulled back suddenly.

"I'm sorry. That wasn't appropriate. You've taken a big risk on me," she said.

"Nick is the one who approved this leg of the trip."

"We both know that's not a hundred percent of it. If you hadn't advocated for me, this would have gone the other way."

"Let's talk on the bridge."

Tabby projected the asteroid field onto the small holo sitting on top of the bridge table. The passive sensors were constantly refining the image. There was no doubt we were looking at the dreadnaught. It was nestled next to three rectangular structures, which were in turn attached by long catwalks.

"Have we seen any other ships?" I asked.

"We're too far out. The only reason we're able to see the dreadnaught is because there is so much external work being done on it. The AI is filling in details for us, making guesses. We'd have to get closer to detect anything smaller than a destroyer," Nick said.

"So, that's good news," I said.

Everyone looked at me, mystified.

It made sense to me. "There aren't any destroyers."

"We don't really know that for sure," Nick said.

"What are we waiting for? Why aren't we just calling the Navy so they can come out and get these guys?" Tabby said.

"Good question. Nick?" I said.

Nick raised his eyebrows and tilted his head to the side. It was his, 'that's probably what we should do,' look.

"Marny?" I asked.

"Aye. It's a sound idea," she said.

I looked to Xie. She looked like she was busting to say something, but to her credit, she was keeping it to herself.

"Xie. You have something?" I asked.

"It's stupid," she said.

"What?"

"Where's the fleet?" she asked.

"Their fleet got destroyed by the Navy on Colony 40," I said.

"Yes. That was their first fleet. They have two fleets though, where's that fleet. It should be here, protecting that dreadnaught," she said.

"About three weeks ago the Braryth colony was sacked by a pirate fleet," I said. I hadn't shared that information with Xie.

"Don't you see it? They're vulnerable," she said.