Mapped Space 1: The Antaran Codex (8 page)

“The Yiwu will leave you alone
once you make the delivery – and you can learn Mandarin on the way.”

 
The Yiwu would leave me alone? Seriously? If
true, Vargis was more than an overdressed snake oil salesman with irritatingly
well-groomed facial hair. More likely the delivery would have the opposite
effect. He was sending me three hundred light years to make it easy for the
Chinese mafia to ensure I never came back.

“And if I don’t take the
contract?”

Vargis face hardened. “That would
be most unfortunate. For you, for your crew, for your ship. Trust me, Captain Kade,
I have only your best interests at heart.” Vargis emptied his glass, “Take the contract
and leave Mukul Sarat to me.”

I felt a now familiar sting in
the back of the neck and was out before I could reply. At least this time, I
was sitting down when I lost consciousness.

* * * *

I came to on a bench seat in the spaceport terminal.
It was some time before I had the strength to stagger onto the walkway back to
the
Silver Lining
and fumble my way
through the airlock. When I stepped into the darkened pressure-suit
compartment, a short barreled shrapnel gun almost took out my eye.

“Easy!” I yelled, lurching clumsily
away from the business end of Izin’s street sweeper. “It’s me!”

It had been several thousand
years since the shotgun had been invented, but looking into the business end of
its descendant was as intimidating as ever. Magnetic acceleration and exploding
micro munitions might have replaced gunpowder and shot, but the effect on human
flesh in a cramped passageway was just as gruesome.

“My apologies, Captain,” Izin
said, lowering the shrapgun and stepping back from the inner hatch, motioning
towards a twenty centimeter long polished metal object lying on the deck. It
was as thick as my fist in the middle, tapered at both ends, with a single neat
hole blasted through its center.

“What is it?”

“A minidrone. It attempted to
board the ship several hours ago.” He tapped the small six millimeter shredder
pistol at his hip, confirming where the tiny hole in its side had come from. With
his tamph eyes and inhuman steadiness, Izin was a frighteningly deadly shot
with any precision weapon.

My DNA sniffer gave the minidrone
the once over, but it was clean. “Why the artillery?” I asked, nodding at the
shrapgun.

“Hull sensors covering the pressure
bridge have been deactivated. I don’t know how or by who.” Izin was a walking Earth-tech
encyclopedia. If he didn’t know how it was done, it meant alien-tech had been
used against us. “I considered it to be an attack on the ship, so I selected
the optimal weapon for fighting in confined spaces.” He lifted the shrapgun
meaningfully. “Only the hull sensors aspecting the pressure bridge have been
disabled, so this was clearly the point of attack.”

“Only one came through?”

“Yes, Captain. I have a hull crawler
outside inspecting the damage now.”

My bionetic memory didn’t
recognize the minidrone, so if it was Earth-tech, it was custom made. “Take it apart.
Tell me anything you can about it – highest priority.”

Izin picked up the minidrone. “Is
there something I should know, Captain?”

“I’m working on a deal and we have
some unfriendly competition.”

“Is the order prohibiting lethal
force revoked?”

Tough question. If I let Izin off
the leash, I could end up with problems with the port authorities and if I
didn’t, the next attempt to get inside the ship might succeed. I decided to
play it safe, for now. “Not while we’re in port, unless they start shooting
first.”

“As you wish,” Izin said.

He led the way back to
engineering, setting the shrapgun and minidrone down, then took in his six
screens with a glance. “The hull crawler reports five hull sensors were
destroyed by a highly concentrated thermal effect with an active area of nine
microns.”

“That’s kind of small, isn’t it?”

“Nine millionths of a meter,”
Izin said. “Earth technology is incapable of producing a thermal weapon with
that level of precision.”

“Can you calculate where the
weapon was fired from?”

“Perhaps.”

“There’s a ship called the
Soberano
. Find out if they could hit us.”

Izin tapped into the spaceport’s
datanet and quickly scanned the ship registry. “The
Soberano
is a Mammoth class super transport less than three years
old, owned by Pan Core Shipping.”

“A mammoth?” I whistled softly. “She’d
make us look like an Kunarian buzzfly.”

Mammoths were over two hundred
thousand metric tons – fifty times the size of the
Silver Lining
– and they rarely left Core System space. No wonder Vargis’
office was so spacious.

“The
Soberano
arrived a few days ago.”

“What’s she carrying?” Ten years
of supplies for Hades City?

“Her manifest says she’s empty.”

“No cargo?”

“Confirmed by customs inspectors.”

Pan Core Shipping was one of the largest
shipping companies in Mapped Space. Why would they send such an expensive ship
out here empty when they had thousands of smaller, faster vessels in their
fleet? “What was her embarkation point?”

“Shinagawa Station.”

“That’s a long way to come for no
trade profit.”

The big Japanese orbital shipyard
complex was over nine hundred light years away in Inner Cygnus, well inside Core
System space. No wonder Vargis wanted no competition. I’d be nervous too, if
I’d spent months staring at well decorated bulkheads for nothing. Whatever
Sarat was up to, it had been in the planning for a long time, long enough to
hook Pan Core and get them to bankroll sending one of their biggest ships to
the edge of Mapped Space.

“The
Soberano
’s maintenance history indicates she spent seven weeks refitting
at Shinagawa before departure,” Izin said.

“Makes sense. Give her a refit
before a long haul.”

“She’d undergone a major
maintenance cycle two months before that. A second refit in such a short period
of time should have been unnecessary.”

Shinagawa Station was one of the few
major shipyards outside the Solar System, used by shipping companies and Earth
Navy alike. The station was famous not just for its robot dockyards, but its
vast stores of equipment, including naval ordnance. Suddenly, I realized why
the
Soberano
had docked a second time.
“They put naval weapons in her cargo holds!” It would explain why she was empty
– she had no room for cargo!

Whatever Vargis was after, he
intended to protect it.

“If Earth Navy found out,” Izin
said, “Pan Core would be in serious trouble.”

“Can we see the
Soberano
from here?”

“No, she’s in the southern
cavern, docked across berths S-36 to S-45.”

She was so big, she took up ten
births!

Izin called up her registry holo,
displaying it on one of his six screens. She looked like two stretched spheres
joined by a long oblong. The stern sphere held her twin energy plants and sixteen
maneuvering engines in four rows of four, while the bow sphere held command,
control and crew sections. Ten large rectangular doors were spaced along each
side of the hull, marking the location of her twenty cavernous cargo holds. She
was certainly large enough to have been transformed into a veritable battleship,
although with her cargo doors sealed, there’d be no visible evidence of it. Whatever
Sarat was selling, no pirate would ever get their hands on it, once Vargis got
it aboard the
Soberano
.

Neither would I.

“How many crew?” I asked.

“Minimum complement of twelve,
life support for thirty.”

I’d assume he had thirty aboard;
crew plus more like Jawbones and Scarface. The
Soberano
would be slower than the
Lining
bubbled and would wallow like a whale in flat space, but if I
was right about the refit, she’d hit like the devil.

I started to leave, but Izin
touched a control and the image of another ship appeared. “This is the only
Caravel D class ship docked. Berthed at W-4.”

I took one look at the old girl
and recognized her immediately. If the
Silver
Lining
was a tow boat, the
Heureux
was a barge. Her hull configuration was simple: three box-like cargo holds
ahead of a lopsided superstructure mounting a single large maneuvering engine
astern. Spaced along the top of the cargo holds were clamps for a dozen VRS
containers, although I’d rarely seen Marie use them. Like most work boats, it
was a simple, utilitarian design. The paint job was subtly different and her registry
number had changed, but the modified vector housings on her well worn engine were
unmistakable. No wonder Marie was nervous to see me. She knew I’d recognize the
Heureux
anywhere, no matter what
disguise she was wearing.

“That’s her.” The
Heureux
had been in Marie’s family for
three generations. She was almost eighty years old, but thanks to tender care
and regular maintenance, she was still a reliable, if elderly, workhorse.

“According to the port register,
that ship is the
Vandray’s Promise
.
The Captain is Esmin Vandray.”

“Esmin? . . . Good work, Izin.”

I’d known Marie to pull a few
reckless stunts, but I’d never seen her risk her license before. Using a fake
ship registry and borrowed skipper’s tags seemed crazy, even for her. I sure
hoped whatever she was up to, was worth it.

I would have liked to figure out
what that was, but knew I had to find Sarat soon, before Vargis sidelined me,
permanently.

* * * *

I tried
sleeping off the effects of being drugged twice, but after what seemed to be
only minutes, I became aware of a pungent aroma. At first I thought I was
dreaming, but the scent of incense grew stronger, eventually jarring me awake. My
stateroom’s wall screen was set to simulate a window with the shades drawn,
creating an illusion that it was more than a metal box. The feeble light
penetrating the ‘shades’ illuminated a thin pall of gray smoke floating in the
air. I heard a man inhale, then saw the end of a fume-stick glow revealing a
swarthy face amidst the darkness.

Ignoring the throbbing in my
head, I sat up and stared into the shadows to the right of the window sim where
a dark form sat. Blue smoke wafted from his slender fume-stick, slowly filling
my stateroom with an intoxicating haze that would take the
atmo
scrubbers days to clear.

Somehow he’d gotten inside the
ship, bypassed Izin’s elaborate security system and then made himself
comfortable in my stateroom without triggering my threading’s proximity sensors.
Such a feat should have been impossible. I tried DNA locking him, but as far as
my threading was concerned, he didn’t exist. Not even a thermal trace. My
olfactory analyzer told me the smoke came from an expensive Pashtun
narco
-leaf that heightened well being without distorting
perceptual thinking. Inexplicably, it was unable to identify the physical
source of the smoke, even though I was staring straight at the fume-stick.

“Being a light sleeper is a good
thing for people in your line of work, Captain Kade.”

My visitor spoke in a cultured
Republic accent, which my listener identified as coming from Kerala or Tamil
Nadu in southern India – a good fit to Lena’s briefing profile.

“Mukul Sarat, I presume?” My
listener had been able to analyze his accent, which told me the entire room
wasn’t suppressed, just a highly localized area around him. The EIS had been
trying to produce a personal dampening field for years with no success, yet my
guest was clearly protected by just such a device, leaving me in no doubt he
was geared up with alien-tech.

Sarat nodded, showing no surprise
that I’d guessed his identity. He was tall and bald, with a gaunt face and dark
sunken eyes. “I understand you wish to bid at my auction?”

“That’s right.”

“Perhaps you were unaware that
this is an invitation only gathering, and frankly, a man such as yourself lacks
the financial resources to participate.”

“And yet you broke into my ship,
beat my security, and are stinking up my room with that weed you’re smoking.”

“I’m a curious man.”

“Curious enough to destroy my
hull sensors so you could sneak aboard.”

“Consider it a demonstration,”
Sarat said, “of my . . . connections.”

“You better hope my engineer
doesn’t find you aboard,” I said, “or the only thing you’ll be connected to is
the wrong end of a shredder.”

“Ah yes, I heard you had a pet tamph.
I never cared for them myself – too hard to control.”

“Only if you can’t earn their
respect.”

“I prefer fee for service. Which
brings me to the reason for my visit. I’ve done some checking on you, Kade. You’re
notorious for making rash decisions and acquiring enemies.”