STAR HOUNDS -- OMNIBUS (7 page)

“Bloody fine endeavor, George!” said the Englishman as the boat was jockeyed back into space. Laura was sitting by the Frenchman. As all attention was on the ship’s maneuvers, she scanned the interior of the sucker-ship. Utilitarian. The only item of possible use in these close quarters was a power gun in the Frenchman’s holster.

“Thank you, Arthur,” said the crew-cut pilot. “Just a few minutes until docking procedure commences with the
Starbow
. We’ll be last back, I’m afraid.”

“Lieutenant Mizel,” said one of the others, “is your helmet stuck?”

“Oui!” said the Frenchman. “You would deprive us of your beauty after such a success?”

“Stuck,” Laura murmured. “Would you give me a hand?”

“But of course, mademoiselle,” the man replied courteously, reaching up to help undo the seals. Laura leaned over and unsnapped the man’s holster, quietly drawing the pistol.

“There!” said the Frenchman. “I do not see any difficulty. Allow me!” Deftly the short man removed the helmet. His smile flip-flopped as he saw the face underneath. “
Sacr
é
bleu
, Lieutenant Mizel. You have changed!”

Laura lifted the pistol’s business end to the man’s temple. “This isn’t on stun anymore, gentlemen,” she said, finger tight around the trigger. “And if you excuse the cliché, one false move and this man’s brains are going to go EVA.”

Heads swiveled. Eyebrows raised. “Well, I’ll be a goddamned mother-loving bastard,” said the pilot. He popped a wad of chewing gum in his maw and chomped furiously.

“No great loss, actually,” said the Englishman, a huge grin across his face. “I don’t know why Mish stuck him in here anyway. Sadistic humor that fellow has. Well then, my lady, I trust you were gentle with our lieutenant.”

“She’s tied up in a linen closet. She’ll have a headache when she wakes up, but otherwise she’s undamaged.” Laura glared at the pilot. “Now, I mean business, you rancid bunch of pirates. What are your docking procedures? How many other people will be there? Who is your captain? I want to be taken to him as soon as we dock. I have demands to make, and my bargaining tools are your wretched lives. ”

The words came out quickly and confidently, but, as was often the case in these situations, Laura was simply talking through her hat. The worst moment was just after she jumped face first into things, when she had a moment to consider the implications. She hadn’t the faintest idea who these people were, what their ship was like, how warlike they were …. Everything she had done was predicated upon one of her insane hunches, hunches that sometimes got her into bizarre situations, like falling in with those No-noses last year during the Mud Festival on Xerxes III.

This was definitely one of those odd situations, and all she could possibly do was bull her way through it, knowing that somehow this would all be to her advantage.

The pi-mercs all seemed amused at her request for a conference with their captain, except for the Frenchman, who looked solemn and thoughtful.

“Well now, ma’am,” said the pilot, chewing rapidly on his gum, mouth open. “That should be real fascinatin’ and all, but just what seems to be your problem? Somethin’ wrong with stayin’ on the
Ezekiel
? We didn’t puncture her, and it’s not as if there won’t be a rescue ship along. Mind you, I’m just wonderin’.”

“I have to be someplace in a hurry,” said Laura. “I thought I might ask your captain for a ride.” Yes, she thought. Promise him money. She could arrange for that.

“Ask Captain Tars Northern for a ride, eh?” The pilot grinned facetiously. “Pretty girl like you shouldn’t ask horny bastards like Northern for a ride.”

“I mean it,” she said angrily, pressing the gun harder against the Frenchman’s skull. “If I have to show it bloodily, I will be most happy to.”

“Mademoiselle, please,” said the Frenchman, but with no trace of fear.

“Too much like the old shrew back home, eh, Boney?” said the one he’d addressed as Arthur. “I believe, old boy, that you’ve met another Waterloo!” The fellow laughed uproariously.

“I really don’t see what’s so funny,” Laura said through clenched teeth.

“Oh, you will, ma’am,” said the pilot. “You sure will! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to work. And be careful there with old Boney. He’s a slippery one!”

Laura Shemzak frowned.

Something was definitely wrong here, besides the fact that she was taking this one unknown step at a time.

And the worst of it was, she seemed to be the only one who had no idea what that something was.

T
he pinnace communicated with the mother ship, clearing its redocking with the necessary codes.

“Yep, you must be one tough cookie to put Kat Mizel away like that,” the pilot—whom the others called variously “Patton” or “George”—commented as the computer went on automatic and the
Starbow’s
tractor guided the pinnace to home port. “You independent? Or are you a Feddy?”

“I’m independent now, but to be perfectly up front, I am a highly trained officer of the Federation, and the only reason I’m associating with scum of your low caliber is that you have something that I need. I’m a reasonable sort, so—” She broke off, staring at the vu-plates. The
Starbow
was unlike any interstellar vessel Laura had seen before.

The pilot noticed the direction of his passenger’s gaze. “Aha, I see the old
Starbow
has caught your eye. A beauty, isn’t she?”

The main body of the starship was sleek and silvery and beautiful. It glowed with a multitextured radiance. More remarkable, however, were the thick spokes radiating from the hub, ending in various jewel shapes, shimmering bezels set in a gigantic pendant hung around the neck of night.

Patton grinned. “Nope. Just don’t make ‘em like they used to.” His eyes gleamed strangely with some private joke. “And they probably never will again.”

“I’ve never seen the like in any catalog back home,” Laura admitted. “Is it of alien manufacture?” “You’ll have to ask the captain.”

“Yeah. I’m looking forward to that,” Laura said, redirecting her attention back where it belonged: on her captives, lest they try something.

All six of them were amazingly calm, even the one to whose temple she held the pistol. They all sat patiently, waiting as the hangar deck of the
Starbow
opened amidships, a hungry mouth awaiting a morsel of food.

Laura Shemzak was worried. God knew she’d been in stranger situations, and certainly more violent ones. But now, with this strange crew, and all this quiet, she was a little unnerved. Also, she realized, all those times before she was responsible only for herself and the Federation’s wishes.

Now she had elected to be responsible for the rescue of someone she truly cared about—Cal, her brother. The thought of him brought back her resolve. As crazy and strange as all this seemed, it was the only way she had any hope of seeing Cal again.

The pinnace fitted snugly into its slot, with barely a clang.

A voice erupted through the cabin. “Locks cycled. Ready for deboarding.”

“Yes,” said Arthur Wellesley. “But are they ready for what will be deboarding?”

“I think they should be,” Laura said. “Notify your captain that I would very much like to have him waiting outside, in person, for a short discussion.”

“Sure thing, lady,” said George Patton. “I’m sure that Tars is gonna want to meet you just as soon as possible.”

T
he docking bay was spacious. Their footsteps echoed as they walked along the floor, which was marked brightly with strange patterns and hieroglyphics. Laura hung back behind the pi-mercs, pistol trained steadily upon the base of the Frenchman’s head.

Captain Tars Northern waited for them, leaning against the railing of a upper gangway. Beside him stood a slight, querulous-looking man and a tall, stooped individual in a lab smock and a voluminous purple bow tie.

Captain Tars Northern held a bottle of brandy in one hand. He saluted the new arrivals and tippled a few swallows. “Welcome back, my comrades. Our new arrival, I salute you. Hail and well met, O wandering star lass!”

“Captain, really,” the man to his left said, eyes darting nervously about. “Don’t you think a little decorum—”

“Oh, get your prissy little nose outa my business, Jitt,” said the captain. “The doctor here is monitoring me and my condition, and my condition is just fine, thank you. Isn’t it, Dr. Mish?”

The man in the lab smock smiled wanly, examining a small machine held in one hand. “You are reaching your hour’s consumption limit, Captain.”

“Oh hell, I’m celebrating,” the captain said. Although his words were spoken overcarefully, they were not slurred, and his eyes were bright and aware, his feet steady. He looked down at the visitor fondly. “It’s not every day that we get a Feddy agent come to call.”

Laura could not believe her eyes. “You’re drunk!” she said. “I have the life of one of your crewmembers at the end of a cocked gun, and you’re boozing?”

Captain Northern grinned. “Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum, my dear!” He leaned on his doctor’s shoulder. “We must keep up appearances for our Feddy Friends, mustn’t we. Yes indeed. You”—he pointed a finger at her, chuckling—“have done me a most enormous favor, dear lady!”

Laura glanced around suspiciously, expecting some sort of trick. But she could sense nothing wrong, even with her interior sensors clicked up full. “I have demands to make, Captain!” she shouted. “Do not joke with me! I want to bargain the life of this man for a large favor.”

Dr. Mish shook his head sadly. Captain Northern whooped. “Oh dear, you mean you would really blow off the head of Napoleon Bonaparte?”

Laura blinked. She’d heard that name before—long, long before.

“You need not worry, mademoiselle,” said Napoleon Bonaparte. “They’ll just reassemble me. I’m just a robot, you see.”

Dr. Mish signaled.

Napoleon Bonaparte ducked with amazing speed. Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, was the one to take the full force of the blast. It took Wellington’s right arm off, but his left arm knocked the gun from Laura’s hand before she could pull the trigger again. Bonaparte was on his feet, but Laura agilely dodged his attempt to grab her. She leaped for the gun lying on the floor, but somehow Bonaparte’s arm snagged onto her ankle. Automatically twisting as she fell, she managed to wrench free and land on her hands and feet.

Robots! Of course! It all fell together, even Kat Mizel’s complaints about “tin generals.” The main body of the pi-merc boarding party must have been robots—much safer!

But she had to get that gun, she knew—there was no way she could threaten anything or anybody and get her way with her bare hands.

“Would you things get on with it?” she heard Captain Northern yell. “Grab her before she does anything silly!”

Of course. If she could just get to the captain ….

She dodged one of the robots and struck out for her destination. But the Bonaparte robot grabbed her from behind in an amazing jump. It put Laura in an astonishingly strong half nelson before she could get anywhere near Northern.

“Jolly good show, Boney,” said the duke, wires trailing from his shoulder socket. “Did the admiral who beat you at Trafalgar teach you that?”

“
S
tick her in the brig. We’ll interrogate her later,” Captain Northern said, smiling at the word “interrogate.” “We’ve got to supervise the unloading of the other ships.”

By now three of the robots were restraining Laura; she had flailed about powerfully, so Patton and another robot had aided Napoleon.

“Captain,” said the tall, white-haired man beside him, examining his clipboard. “My sensors show that the young lady is veritably riddled with artificial materials of an intensely sophisticated variety. I strongly suggest, if you’re going to incarcerate the young lady before any discussions with her, that a heavy guard be placed or even that she be medicinally rendered unconscious.”

“A cyborg. Perhaps with a few tricks up her sleeves, you say. Curiouser and curiouser.” He capped his bottle and slipped it into the doctor’s voluminous side pocket. “Enough of that. Tell me, Doctor, are there any signs of anything dangerous inside her?”

“No, I’ve checked that. Further, more detailed information can be derived at a later date.”

“All I want,” Laura said, “is passage to Shortchild. Take me there, and I’ll spare your lives! Ouch!” she said as Patton increased pressure on one of her arms.

“Feisty little thing. Jitt, take care of her. She can keep her consciousness as long as she’s good. Post guards. I’ll speak to her when the ships are unloaded.”

“But time is of the essence,” Laura cried, desperation causing her to lose control. “I have to get to that base to get my blip-ship!”

Captain Northern had turned to depart, but he halted in his tracks. “Doctor, did I hear her say blip-ship? Do you mean the XT line, young lady?”

“Hmm,” said the doctor. “That would explain the biomech additions to her nervous and skeletal systems.” Captain Northern clapped his hands, immensely pleased. “Young lady, I will talk to you, then, within the hour!”

T
he “brig” turned out to be a spartan cabin, with reinforced bulkheads and door. After searching her for concealed weapons, the robots tossed her in and locked the door. She kicked the small bunk furiously then lay down with a wail that died into a whimper.

So what was she going to do now, she wondered. Everything was in the captain’s hands, and he appeared to be raving mad … or at least a drunk. Why did his crew follow him, take his orders? What kind of power did he have over them?

“What did you say your name was?” a voice asked through a speaker. Laura recognized the soft whiny quality; it was the man the others had called Dansen Jitt.

“Is this part of the vaunted interrogation?” Laura asked contemptuously. Jitt had hung back far behind them as they navigated the corridors and lifts that eventually led to this cold, sterile room, carefully training a stun gun on her. She had pegged him as a coward immediately, what with his nervous eyes, his tremulous mouth. Nonetheless, there was a shy, unique beauty to his face, a grace to his gestures and movements that she found attractive, now that she recalled them.

She took a curious comfort in the sound of his voice. After all, Jitt didn’t seem to particularly relish his duties as guard; he certainly didn’t seem to want her hurt.

Besides, she thought, I shouldn’t be nasty to him. I should pump him for information. Maybe I can get an idea of what the captain has in mind for me—and maybe I can find out how to make some kind of deal with him. He seems awfully interested in the fact that I’m a blip-ship pilot.

“Oh no, no, the captain makes jokes sometimes, strange jokes, and that was one of them. Sometimes, though, he is serious when he seems to be joking, and that puts things quite out of whack.”

“I am Laura Shemzak,” she said in a softer voice. Volume and demands would get her nowhere now. “Your captain … is he mentally deranged?”

Jitt laughed. “Oh, you might think so, and he would love to admit it, if that would throw you off. Let’s just say that the mind of Captain Tars Northern has its demons, and it has its angels … and it most certainly has a clown or two. I shouldn’t be talking to you, but I just can’t imagine why you’d want to get on board this crazy ship. Sometimes I think I’d like to get off!”

“Didn’t you hear what I said out there? I just need a ride. I can pay well, and it’s really very important.”

“Well, you should talk to the captain about that, not me.”

“He seemed strangely unmoved by the loss of one of his crewmembers. She was human, or I couldn’t have knocked her out the way I did,” said Laura, hoping to keep the little man talking. He certainly seemed the talkative type, and she could use all the information she could get.

“Oh yes, Lieutenant Kat Mizel. I don’t suppose that, you being a Feddy, you’d comprehend. But you see, Mizel and Northern had a bit of a bond. Captain Northern got drunk on Rook’s World two months ago and woke up married to Lieutenant Mizel. They have a year’s contract, but Kat had been hounding him about making it longer, about having children, and God knows what else. I think Captain Northern is actually quite relieved that today’s events are going to allow the remaining ten months of the contract expire without close proximity to the lieutenant.”

“Marriage, yes, of course,” Laura said, smiling despite herself. “My brother and I … we watched ancient films about marriage. Cal found the most bizarre books. It is a very funny state, marriage.”

“I wish I could have convinced Kat Mizel of that. We’ve had more conflict in this boat the past two months than the Federation Fleet experienced when the Jaxdrons invaded! The captain, for all he swears, is just not suited for even temporary matrimonial bliss.”

“Then the rumors are true. The rite still exists on some of the more barbaric colony worlds, I thought the tales in the tabloids were manufactured. Are you married, Dansen Jitt?”

“I will admit to a few wives on various worlds, yes. But you mentioned a brother. I didn’t know you Feddies had brothers and sisters. I thought they just stirred up some zygotes in a womb vat, added salt to flavor, and disgorged children into the maw of society.”

Laura could not help but smile mischievously. “The government goofed. We found out, you see. We love each other. We have sworn loyalty to one another.”

“The Feddy Friends must not approve of that,” Dansen Jitt commented.

“There’s nothing they can do. They need us.”

“Right. Blip-ship pilot. Marvelous. I’ve never met one. You seem reasonably normal. Is that what your brother does as well?”

“No.”

Dansen Jitt, unfrightened, proved conversationally convivial. Twenty minutes later, though Laura had learned little about the
Starbow
beyond the fact that it was an independent vessel plying its mercenary and piratical trade on the rim of Federation space, she did find out much about Dansen Jitt—he seemed to adore talking about himself, and he did so wittily and fluently. As though the speech was practiced, thought Laura, and Jitt was eager for an audience.

The state of being human had always been a confusing experience since the dawn of consciousness, Laura knew. But life in the thirty-first century Old Dating System, 734.34 in the N.D.S., was particularly vexing because of shadowy areas developing between the “human” and “nonhuman.” Indeed, on certain worlds one could opt out of the dilemma totally by literally transforming to the alien. Xenoforming the process was called, and it was a development created more than five hundred years before when colonists seeking a planet to make their own learned that it was much less hassle and infinitely less expensive to genetically engineer themselves to an environment instead of terraforming a non-Earth-standard planet.

Dansen Jitt was born on a planet in the Antares sector, a world called Changeit in Neogalactic. His colony was one of the first to adopt xenoforming, adapting to fit to the ecology of a world rich with a different chemical structure from Earth standard. However, after thousands of humans had adjusted, something cataclysmic happened to their sensibilities. It was voted, through their democratic government, to change back to Earth Human Standard and travel the course of terraforming. The transition, though costly and difficult, was a success, and Changeit became one of the most successful new worlds, rich in everything. But its inhabitants were somehow different for their double change; tradition said the Changed had seen something in their New Reality that so terrorized them that their choice was either to return to their previous state or destroy themselves. As a result, their descendants owned unusual near-psychic talents … and tended toward a constant state of low-level fear and paranoia.

Dansen Jitt had been the son of a merchant. Early in his life he had discovered his knack for accuracy in statistical odds—without the benefit of actual hard statistics. The facts, he told Laura, would pop into his head at the most erratic moments. He found that he could use this “talent” to his best advantage in the casinos of the Anarchy Worlds, and for a long time went on boom-and-bust cycles of wealth. Occasional deep gambling debts forced him into a life of periodic crime, which he hated because of his overwhelming cowardice. He soon became persona non grata on many worlds.

However, just last year, he had met a remarkable fellow in a particularly seedy dive on Marshton IV.

“I was down on my funds, but statistically I was hot and the stuff was pouring into me as the dice rolled on the spinning cards. Shaksa we were playing, and one of the heavy losers was a military-looking guy who drank like he had an empty leg.

“After the game he asked me to buy him a drink.’Jitt’ he says, ‘how’d you like to make some real money and get the opportunity to enjoy it without Authority breathing down your backside?’

“He explained he was a captain of the most wonderful starship in the universe. ‘Now, mind you, we do need funds, so occasionally we knock off the odd Federation vessel, or hire our services to the wealthy. Nothing too dangerous, and I distinguish something in you that could make it even less dangerous.’

“Well, he couldn’t have come at a better time. I had almost nowhere to go. I was even a criminal on Changeit. So I agreed.

“Of course, Northern was lying through his teeth about what the
Starbow
truly does …. But if you stick around for any length of time, I suppose you’ll discover that fact readily enough.”

Laura supposed she would have to stick around for a time; she didn’t want to try to escape, because the
Starbow
was her hope for getting to Shortchild quickly.

Laura attempted to probe for more information, but at that point Dansen Jitt was interrupted and notified that the captain was ready for an audience with the captive, and would he and the robot guards kindly lead her to the galley, where a modest dinner was under way?

This suited Laura very well, for not only did she wish to bargain with the captain of this weird boat; she was also quite hungry.