Jewel (2 page)

When they finally reached the bridge it looked little
different than the corridors they’d just passed through. People shuddered in
little balls on the floor, awash in their own regurgitated filth. Projectile
vomit splattered control panels and view screens. Only one person could truly
be considered functioning—Com Tech Lara Everson. Though, functioning might have
been too strong a word to describe her. She had pulled herself half into her
seat where she appeared to have collapsed again after answering Erik’s call ten
minutes before. But Everson hadn’t let herself curl up on the floor again like
everyone else on the bridge. Instead she’d propped herself up in her chair and
let her head collapse against the communications panel while her face continued
to display the agony caused by the extreme vertigo.

“Everson!” the Exec grunted as soon as he caught sight of
her. “Head up. Contact the departments—especially Doctor Brüning—and find out
what our status is.”

He staggered over to Captain Kiara, dropped to his knees,
and checked the older woman’s pulse. There was a gash across the captain’s
forehead but the injury didn’t look too serious to Jewel. Erik must have agreed
with that assessment because he crawled across her body and pulled himself up
against the helm.

“And Everson,” he added.

The com tech still hadn’t moved.

“Make sure the steward goes and checks personally on our
passengers. This crash translation back to N-Space is going to have hit those
miners even worse than us. I don’t want them getting rowdy when they start to
pull their stomachs back together.”

Everson pushed her head up off her panel, looking as if she
wanted to start puking again. She didn’t verbally respond, but her fingers
picked up her audio plug and tried to insert it in her ear.

Erik sank into the chair before the helm and began fumbling
with the controls. The entire ship lurched in response.

“Void!” Erik cursed. “I can’t see straight. I don’t even
know where we are.”

That was something Jewel thought she might just be able to
help with. She tottered up to the navigation board and sank into the seat.
Mustafa Peron, the arrogant bastard who was supposed to be sitting here, lay
sprawled on the floor at her feet. There was a large bump on his head and his
bloody nose was probably broken. Jewel briefly considered checking the man’s
vitals but she didn’t like him and decided it was more important to discover if
the
Euripides
was about to collide with something.

She squinted in an effort to make her vision less blurry and
touched a couple of buttons on the control panel. Two screens lit up in front
of her. One was smeared with vomit, but fortunately most of the detritus from
Peron’s stomach had missed the control panel completely, as if he hadn’t been
facing it when the puking began.

“You know what you’re doing there?” Erik asked her.

He was aware, obviously, that in her role as purser Jewel
rarely saw the bridge. He would also know that there was nothing in her
official records that suggested she had the training to handle navigation on a
starship. But this was the mostly unaligned Fringe—not the sprawling
Confederacy, or the League, or the Cartel Worlds or any of eight dozen other
essentially civilized political entities that took basic precautions with
identification and licensure. In the farthest extremes of human habitation, it
was more common than not for a person’s official records to conceal more than
they revealed.

“Let’s find out, shall we?” she said, hoping her answer
sounded cool and heroic without giving anything serious away about her true
background.

During her years in school, Jewel had been exposed to every
job on a starship as part of her education—just enough time spent at each
station to familiarize her with their basic functions. In a family that bought
and sold starships, not to mention the people who made them work, and just
about everything else anyone could conceivably want to purchase, it was
considered important to have a personal understanding of the tasks you hired
other people to perform for you. Now that training might conceivably have an
even more practical use—if she could remember enough to take advantage of the
lessons.

The
Euripides
systems were older than the ones on the
ship she had trained on, but it wasn’t particularly difficult to operate—even
with her bioware deactivated.

She took a few moments to analyze the data beginning to
appear on her screens and then reported to Erik. “We’re in no immediate danger
of crashing into anything. That tiny speck up ahead of us is the system’s star.
It looks odd. I think it reads like a white dwarf except that it’s too
large—much bigger than I would expect it to be.”

“So it’s not a white dwarf,” Erik said.

Jewel shrugged. “Maybe yes, maybe no, I don’t fully
understand these readings.”

She very briefly considered reactivating the bioware
implanted in her temple and seeing if its vast memory storage held an
explanation for what she was observing, but she discarded the notion
immediately. First off, while the reboot wasn’t difficult, it wasn’t something
she could do on a whim. Second, since there was no immediate probability of a
collision, there was no genuine urgency—and thus no genuine need. Besides,
while the program might help her with its encyclopedic knowledge concerning
just about everything in the known galaxy, it would also rat her out to her
parents or their agents at the very first opportunity. That was the reason
she’d deactivated it in the first place and the reason she’d never be able to
use it again. So why was she wasting time thinking about it? Sure life was
harder without the bioware but she’d proven in the last nine months that she
could get along without it like normal people do.

Jewel painstakingly punched some more keys, drawing up data
on the rest of the star system, which she displayed on the second screen.
“Looks like there are three planets still orbiting out there—the inner ones
were presumably consumed during the red giant stage. I won’t swear there aren’t
more in the outskirts. If they aren’t radiating very strongly, these crappy old
sensors probably wouldn’t pick them up.”

She hit a few more keys and began to refine her readings. “I
don’t see any asteroid belts, but it looks like there are the remains of a
planetary nebula stretching pretty far out into the system now. Don’t know what
else that could be.”

“Any sign of human settlements?” Erik asked. He staggered
over behind her and balanced himself by putting his hands on her shoulders. The
contact made her shiver and remember the feel of his lips on hers and his
fingers caressing her breast through her
gi
. “We weren’t counting on an
extra slide space translation,” Erik reminded her, “and our fuel supply is
pretty low.”

Jewel thought about how to access that sort of information
then tentatively tried to call the data up on her terminal. Her results were
less than conclusive. “I’m not sure. Satellites are pretty small right? Would
we pick them up on the passive sensors?”

“Not if they aren’t transmitting. Which reminds me, does the
navigational computer have any idea where we are?”

She hit some more keys. “It’s an unexplored system slightly
off our plotted route to Arch.”

“Off our route?” he clarified, glancing back at the captain,
still crumpled and unconscious on the floor.

“That’s what I said,” Jewel confirmed.

Beside her, Peron groaned again, as if unconsciously trying
to remind everyone that he, in addition to the captain, was responsible for the
navigational error that had brought them here.

She shook her head in disgust. Unfortunately, basic
incompetence was an all too common problem out here on the Fringe. Hopefully
this error wouldn’t prove too costly.

Then she saw something she hadn’t noticed before. “Wait a
minute, what do we have here?” Her fingers stuttered across the keyboard trying
to figure out how to get the terminal to help her interpret what she was
seeing.

“What is it?” Erik asked. One of his hands slipped casually
off her shoulder halfway down to her breast as he leaned over to get a better
look at her tiny screen. His fingers weren’t actually doing anything, but Jewel
found them intensely distracting just the same. Her nipple began to swell as
her body remembered his caresses. Heat blossomed between her legs. She hoped
Erik couldn’t tell how his presence was affecting her. She didn’t want to lose
his respect.

At her station behind them, Everson finally reached the
ship’s doctor and began requesting he bring medical help to the bridge.

Jewel tried to push such concerns out of her mind and
concentrate on her instruments, but Erik’s fingers dangling so close to her
bosom continued to distract her. “I think it’s—no that’s too weird…”

Erik leaned closer, she could smell his breath—not his most
attractive feature considering they had all just vomited—but intensely intimate
nonetheless. His fingers slipped lower, almost innocently, as if he wasn’t
aware that he was touching her virgin flesh and setting her skin on fire.

“What is it?” he asked. Then he straightened up, pulling his
hand away, suddenly all business. “Oh, I see. That is unusual, isn’t it?”

“What is it?” Everson asked, breaking off her conversation
with the doctor. That sort of interruption wouldn’t be tolerated on a military
vessel, but the
Euripides
was only a rundown freighter.

Erik pointed at the data on Jewel’s screen even though
Everson wasn’t close enough to read it. “Looks like this star is a white dwarf
after all, but it seems to have something mighty large orbiting around it.”

“It’s a gas giant, only two million miles out,” Jewel
announced. “I’d say it’s roughly eleven times the diameter of the star. And,
correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t those moons circling the planet?”

“How did a gas giant get so close to the star?” Everson
asked.

Erik shrugged. “It’s not all that common, but sometimes the
gravity pulls them in.”

“Hold a minute,” Everson said, putting one hand up to
silence the exec while the other touched the audio plug in her ear. “We’re
being challenged—a standard navigation buoy from the…”

Her voice trailed off and she looked up at the exec again.
“It’s a Ymirian signal, Sir.”

Erik nearly leapt across the bridge to stand beside her,
leaning close as if he could hear the message from her audio plug. “Ymirian?
Not Armenite?”

“It’s Ymirian, all right,” Everson confirmed, excitement
making her speak more rapidly. “I feel like I’m listening to a piece of
history. You just don’t find these anywhere anymore.”

Jewel frowned, confused by the exchange, and decided she
wanted to know what they were talking about more than she wanted to appear
cool, experienced and knowledgeable. “I don’t understand,” she admitted.
“What’s Ymir?”

Erik glanced over at her for a moment. “It’s my home world,”
he finally said. “The Armenites occupied it twenty years ago.”

Jewel felt a flood of guilt. Her fiancé, Kole Delling, was
an Armenite. And her family had an extensive business relationship with his
people—not that Erik could know that. Their fortune, and the fortunes of much
of the Cartel Worlds, depended on the crazy militant bastards. She didn’t know
what she should say to Erik, so she settled for, “I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” the exec replied before returning his attention to
Everson. “Is it a live transmission or a recorded message?”

“Recorded, Sir,” Everson responded without any hesitation.
“It’s already repeating itself—standard query for an inbound starship. How
should I reply?”

Erik didn’t answer her directly. “Where’s it coming from?”
he asked.

“Now that it’s talking to us,” Jewel announced, “I’ve found
it on my screens. It looks like it’s roughly twenty-four million miles
away—standard outer system buoy, I’d say.”

She turned to look at Erik, admiring his strength and the
force of his personality. He was exactly what she’d expected to find out here
on the Fringe—a romantic figure running roughshod over a barely competent,
disorderly crew. He was probably a former naval officer, and now she knew he
hadn’t ended up out here due to incompetence or unacceptable vices like so many
of the others. No, he’d lost his navy and his home world to the Armenites—just
one of the dozen or so worlds those monsters had gobbled up over the past
century. Now he looked as if he’d seen a ghost—even paler than he’d been when
he’d finished puking up his guts after the crash translation. Maybe the
possibility of finding a still-independent colony of his home world was the
equivalent of running into a friend he thought long dead.

Jewel wanted to get up and go to him, but knew that his
professional demeanor couldn’t accept the act of kindness. So she caught his
eye and waited for him to nod acknowledgement of her words.

“Thank you, Jewel, any idea where that buoy is reporting
back to?”

She shrugged. That wasn’t something their instruments were
going to tell them—at least not with her operating them. “The most likely place
is one of those planets in the outer system,” she said. “But…” Something about
the inner planet bothered her, but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was.

“But what?” Erik asked her.

“Give me a moment,” Jewel said. She turned back to her
control panel and pulled up a view of the solar system again. The
Euripides
wasn’t a colony ship. It wasn’t an explorer. It wasn’t really anything more
than a dilapidated cargo hauler with one of its bays turned into a makeshift
passenger compartment for miners who hadn’t wanted to renew their tours at
Thimble. But she could still answer some very basic astronomical questions
about the system.

Her fingers flew over the keyboard.

Beside her, Mustafa Peron sat up and rubbed at the dried
blood and vomit on his jaw. “I feel terrible,” he informed them. His broken
nose made his voice sound strange.