Curse of the Iris (13 page)

This time the response came back almost instantly.

Yes
, he messaged back.

In truth, Tycho rarely bothered to scan the document when it arrived each morning. The briefing didn't contain truly sensitive information—that was reserved for the highest ranks of the Jovian military. Occasionally there was a roundup of pirate activity, but mostly it was boring political stuff that only adults cared about.

Tycho looked at the message for a moment. Suddenly the faintly glowing letters on the screen seemed filled with menace.

What am I looking for?
he typed.

On any other night, Tycho would have savored dinner, which included hydroponic vegetables and actual lab-grown beef, both welcome changes from the usual shipboard burgoos. As they served themselves in the familiar confines of the cuddy, the Hashoones were more cheerful than they'd been for weeks, with Huff even managing to guffaw about his brief time back in the Ceres jail. But Tycho's smile felt pained and fake—his curiosity about the mysterious message had curdled into anxiety.

The others ate heartily enough to make up for his lack of enthusiasm. When the ruins of a flummery had been cleared away and the cook had gone back down the aft ladderwell to belowdecks, Diocletia poured herself a mug of flip and cleared her throat.

“Now then,” she said, “let's hear what you've found out about our scanner and the Collective.”

“Blasted unlucky affair from bow to stern,” growled Huff. “Best to leave the whole mess wherever it lies. That's what Father believed, leastways.”

“And maybe that's what I'll decide too, Dad,” Diocletia said. “But first I'd like a better idea of what we're dealing with. Yana, go ahead.”

Yana had brought the scanner up from the quarterdeck and now placed it on the table.

“This device was built to detect sound waves in water,” she said. “It contains an acoustical receiver and a decryption module that will only pick up a very specific signal. And look here: whoever built this used high-quality gaskets and heat-sealed the seams. It's waterproof, and built to withstand high pressure.”

“You say waterproof, but do you really mean liquid-proof?” Carlo asked.

“As in, made to detect a signal in a lake of methane? That was my first thought too. But no, it was made for water. In one of Titan's lakes, an acoustic signal would fade so quickly that you'd have to get really close to the signal.”

“How close?” Carlo asked.

“Reach-out-and-poke-it-with-the-other-end close,” Yana said.

Mavry laughed. “And how close would you have to be in water?”

“Ten or fifteen kilometers, maybe.”

“Why does it have a decryption module?” Tycho asked. “If everyone can still
hear
the signal, what's the point of encrypting it?”

“Probably to make sure you're hearing the right signal,” Yana said. “Which implies that you'd be hearing other noise while you were searching.”

“Interesting,” Diocletia said. “Unfortunately, an underwater signal doesn't limit the possibilities much.”

“That's true,” Yana said. “Subsurface oceans are pretty common in the solar system—the early settlers picked moons that had them. There's Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto in the Jupiter system, plus Titan and Enceladus in the Saturn system, Titania and Oberon at Uranus, and Neptune's moon Triton.”

“Don't forget the Martian aquifers,” Huff interjected. “Hopin' I go to my reward never seein' that horrible rust ball again.”

“And then there's Earth,” Mavry said.

His children looked at him quizzically.

“What? I've heard Earth has rather extensive oceans.”

“Why would a band of Jupiter pirates hide a stolen treasure on Earth?” Carlo asked.

“The mind of a pirate is a curious place,” Mavry said, perhaps a bit defensively.

“All right, Yana. Good work,” Diocletia said. “Now let's hear what Carlo and Tycho have found out about the Collective.”

Carlo and Tycho dug out their mediapads.

“So the
Iris
raid happened in 2809, and the Collective was created a year later,” Carlo said. “We started by comparing its articles of incorporation to documents drawn up by other pirates over the years. They're similar—lots of pirates stashed stolen goods until the heat from the authorities died down, and they made agreements to make sure nobody cheated and grabbed the loot for themselves.”

Huff chuckled.

“I ever tell you 'bout the fortune Madame Chang and her Crimson Raiders stashed in a surplus science balloon? Set it adrift in Jupiter's upper atmosphere with a tracker on it. Which worked great till an electrical storm fried the tracker. Somehows they found the thing in all that soup, 'cept it was caught in the outer bands of a cyclone, an' so—”

Diocletia reached over and put her hand on her father's arm. Huff glanced at her, then scratched at his beard with his forearm cannon.

“Arrr, ain't got time to tell that yarn proper. You kids'll have to wait. Go ahead, Carlo.”

“The bylaws of the Collective allowed members to transfer or sell their shares, but none of them ever did—they passed them down to their heirs instead,” Carlo said. “Which means we can get our hands on them.”

“Why not skip all this paperwork and just take the treasure?” Yana asked. “Isn't the old saying that possession is a hundred percent of the law?”

“Now that's proper pirate thinkin',” Huff rumbled.

“Thanks, Grandpa,” Yana said.

“If there's a treasure left to take,” Diocletia said.

“You think it's gone?” Tycho asked.

“I do,” Diocletia said, then held up her hand as Yana began to protest. “But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Go ahead, Carlo.”

“If the treasure's still out there, and we find it, there are reasons we can't just grab it,” Carlo said. “For one thing, the articles of incorporation are still legally binding: any legal heirs to the Collective could sue us for their shares and expect to win. On the other hand, as far as we know, there have been no real leads on the
Iris
cache for decades. That means the people who own those shares may have forgotten about them, or see them as worthless paper. We might be able to get them cheap.”

“Except that a message went out to the Collective members when the case was opened,” Diocletia reminded him.

“A message sent over channels set up eighty-five years ago,” Tycho said. “Carlo and I were curious, so we messaged Aunt Carina to ask whether she received it at Darklands. She didn't get anything on any channel she could think of.”

“The pirates who formed the Collective must all be dead by now,” Yana said. “So who has their rights under the agreement?”

“That's what we looked into,” Carlo said. “We only had one afternoon, so we couldn't dive too deeply into the records, but we found them all. They're a mix of children and grandchildren. Some are still starship captains, some aren't. Johannes we know about, of course. After that—”

“Let's see if we can make this simpler,” Diocletia said, arms folded. “Start with the members whose scanners were missing from the case—Moxley, Saxton, and Unger.”

“Very well, Mother,” Carlo said, tapping at his mediapad. “Orville Moxley was born on Io and became the captain of the
Emin Pasha
, which he passed down to his nephew Thaddeus. But then it gets weird. The ship registration lapses in the 2840s.”

“Under that name, sure,” Mavry said with a smile. “She was reregistered, probably on Cybele, where they're more casual about legal matters. By then her captain had renamed himself and wanted to rename his ship, too. So he called her the
Hydra
.”

Tycho gasped. “Thaddeus Moxley is Thoadbone Mox?”

“One an' the same,” Huff said. “Bad idea to call him Thaddeus, though. There's a long list of folks he's shot for that.”

“So Thoadbone has a way to find the
Iris
cache?” Tycho asked.

Yana grinned, her eyes bright. “This is good news.”

“How is that possibly good news?” Tycho asked. His sister's delight in dangerous situations never failed to surprise him—the last thing he wanted was to cross paths again with Mox.

Yana rolled her eyes.

“Because even if he got the message, we don't have to worry about giving him his share,” she said. “What's he going to do, take us to court? He's wanted everywhere in the solar system.”

“Never mind that for now,” Diocletia said. “Moxley's scanner is gone. How do we know Orville or Thoadbone didn't use it to find the treasure decades ago?”

“Arrr, if ol' Thoadbone had come into that kind of money, the shindy woulda been gigantic,” Huff said. “Every Jupiter pirate worth his carbine woulda known about it.”

“And Orville?” Mavry asked.

“Cut from the same cloth as his nephew,” Huff said. “Plus Father would have blown a hatch seal. He didn't like talkin' about the
Iris
cache, but he wouldn't have stood for bein' robbed by a Moxley.”

“Maybe,” Diocletia said, clearly unconvinced. “Tell me about the other missing scanners.”

Carlo nodded at Tycho—they had carefully negotiated for equal presentation time, determined that neither would have an advantage when it came to credit in the Log.

“Josef Unger was born on Europa and emigrated to Callisto in the final years of the Resettling,” Tycho said. “He last raised ship at Callisto in 2816—the same year he retrieved his scanner from the Bank of Ceres. Given the condition of the
Foundling
, I think we know what happened to him. His son, Pieter, was a freight hauler for a number of small-time shipping lines, working his way up from lumper to supercargo.”

“Dull work, that,” Huff said. “Particularly for a pirate's son.”

Mavry nodded. “I think we can assume Pieter wasn't hiding the
Iris
cache under his bunk.”

“Agreed,” Diocletia said. “But then what happened to Josef's scanner?”

“I don't know,” Tycho said. “It could have been destroyed in the crash. Or, um . . .”

“When I blasted what was left of the
Foundling
?” Diocletia asked with a smile.

Tycho shrugged.

“Well, not every mystery can be solved,” she said, sipping from her mug. “Go on, Tycho.”

“Anyway, Pieter Unger died thirty years ago, when a runaway ore loader breached the
Reliable
's hull above Ariel. That left his eldest son, Loris, as the Unger heir. He's a miner in Port Town, with no current residence listed.”

“Does that mean he's dead?” Yana asked.

“Not necessarily,” Huff said. “Plenty of rock scratchers travel light, with naught but their gear. They get a bunk in mining camp an' victuals as part of their contract. Miserable existence, even by dirtsider standards.”

“So we'll have to find him,” Yana said. “Who's next?”

“Muggs Saxton,” Carlo said. “He was a small-time pirate from Ganymede when he joined the raid on the
Iris
. He managed to stay ahead of the Securitat for seven years until they dug him out of a bolt-hole on Ganymede and sent him to 1172 Aeneas.”

“Spent some time there meself,” Huff interjected. “Father never understood why he got locked up as long as he did. Back then, long as you didn't kill nobody, piratin' meant a fine and a year in the brig—an' with good behavior, you were out in three or four months. The men what hit the
Iris
got four years, with no early release.”

“Not Muggs,” Carlo said. “He got released for good behavior after two. All the other
Iris
pirates served their full sentences. Then, ten years after he got out, Muggs quit pirating and started making investments and buying property on Ganymede.
A lot
of property and investments.”

“Enough to make you wonder where he got the money?” Mavry asked.

Carlo nodded somberly. “Particularly since his scanner was gone.”

“Arrr, you ain't got to worry on that score,” Huff said. “I know where Muggs got his livres. He jumped a prospector in the Kuiper Belt and stole his claim. Muggs always preferred shootin' at folks what couldn't shoot back.”

Carlo looked confused. “That's not in any of the records.”

Huff grinned, his metal teeth gleaming alongside his normal ones.

“An' where would you look, lad? The Department of Dirty Deeds? Don't get too fond of records, Carlo—the truly important business never appears in 'em.”

“Point taken,” Carlo said. “Anyway, Muggs's eldest grandson would be his heir—Honorius Saxton-Koenig, Lord Sicyon. He owns a huge homestead on Ganymede and a stake in Gibraltar Artisans.”

At the mention of that name, Diocletia scowled and Mavry's face went cold.

Tycho had expected some kind of reaction. Sims Gibraltar had been the first mate aboard the
Ghostlight
, the Gibraltar family's pirate ship. He'd also been Aunt Carina's fiancé. At 624 Hektor, an Earth destroyer had cracked the
Ghostlight
's reactor, flooding her with deadly radiation. The Gibraltars cared for Sims and the other survivors as best they could but announced a few weeks later that all had died. A devastated Carina had sworn never to return to space, and the captaincy of the
Shadow Comet
had gone to her sister, Diocletia.

“We now have Johannes's scanner,” Diocletia said. “So the last Collective member to discuss is Blink Yakata.”

Carlo looked apologetic. “Yes. He had one child—a daughter.”