Smuggler's Dilemma (34 page)

"I'll clean her up," Marny said.

"Thank you, Marny. I'll replicate a suit liner for her and leave it outside the door."

"Aye, that'll work." Marny knelt down, scooped up Xie's limp body and carried her through the door to the berth deck.

I took the lift to the bridge deck and changed back into my normal vac-suit.

"Everything okay?" Nick asked. Tabby had come down from the cockpit and was hovering next to his chair.

"Xie's in really bad shape. They gave her a faulty suit and she didn't have enough O2 to get to the ship. Marny's helping her," I said.

"Is it safe to leave Marny with her?" Nick asked. He had a good reason for the question, as the Xie we both knew was very capable of deception.

"You should see her, Nick. She looks bad. Prison has been hard on her," I said.

"We still need to be careful. She's clever," he said.

"Agreed. How about we get out of here?" I didn't want to be near this awful place any longer than necessary.

"Can do," Tabby jetted nimbly up the stairs and strapped into her pilot's chair.

I joined her and we walked through an abbreviated check list.

Negotiate exit corridor with Kar'kel prison
, I said.

A moment later a navigation path appeared.

Engage
.

THE DEEP DARK

With nowhere to go, we simply glided along without power to the engines. Thirty minutes later, Marny accompanied a barely conscious Xie to the bridge and helped her onto the couch. I walked back, grabbed the aft station chair and brought it over to the table. For as badly as Xie had been treated, I wasn't about to sit next to her on the couch.

"Thank you," she said. Xie still looked pathetic even after Marny had cleaned her up and straightened out her hair with our hair cutting appliance. It was hard for me to imagine that Xie could be faking all this as part of some big master plan. Although if anyone could, it would be Xie.

"That's criminal to give you a broken suit. Those guards could have killed you," I said.

"Welcome to a Crano run prison."

"That's not right."

"Don't be naïve," she said with disdain. "No one cares. That's why M-Pro contracts out to Crano who then hires low cost thugs."

I shook my head. It was frustrating to think that people could be so cruel.

"Where are we headed?" I asked.

"I need access to an AI and comm equipment," she said.

"Sure… 'cause, what could go wrong with that?"

"You can't possibly believe I have this information memorized." Xie shook her head in disbelief.

"I've got it," Nick said. He knew I was getting frustrated.

I slid into the cockpit chair next to Tabby.

"You get kicked out?" Tabby asked.

"Sort of. I have trust issues with that one," I said.

"Isn't she the one who shot Nick?"

"That's the one."

Marny had come to sit between our two chairs. She had a good view of Nick and Xie, but apparently wanted to say something.

"Nobody distrusts that woman more than I do, Cap. Especially considering she both shot and vamped my boy there, but they brutalized her in prison. I did a full scan and she's had multiple bones broken and mended in the last few months," Marny whispered.

Another twenty minutes passed until Nick finally approached.

"I've got it, but you're not going to like it," he said.

"What now?" I asked. If Nick thought I wasn't going to like it, this was going to be an interesting conversation.

"She won't tell us unless we let her go when we're done. She'd rather die than go back."

"We can't do that. If we cross Alderson he'll revoke our Letter of Marque."

Nick grimaced. "What's the value of that Letter if he's willing to use it against us?"

"We could just take her back to prison."

"But then Alderson will cancel our deal."

"You think Xie knows this?" I asked. I wasn't ready to underestimate her.

"No. But, she's willing to gamble everything. According to her, she's got nothing to lose."

"You're in, aren't you?" I asked.

"I am. Think about it. It doesn't matter. If we turn around now, we get nothing and Alderson takes our Letter. If we actually deliver, nobody's going to care about Xie after that."

"Marny, Tabby, you want to weigh in on this?" I asked.

"Don't look at me," Tabby said.

Marny just shook her head. "I'd have a hard time taking her back to that prison."

"Fine. Let's do it," I said.

"She wants your word, Liam," Nick glanced back at Xie.

I nodded and stood up. Nick and Marny moved away from the stairs where we'd all been huddled.

"Feels like we've been here before," Xie said when I approached her.

"Be funnier if you hadn't shot Nick."

"Not my best day. I was in with some bad people and that seemed like a good way through it. It was my decision and it was a mistake."

"Well, this might turn out to
not
be my best day, but we're in."

"I need your word that you'll let me go after we're done."

"You have it," I said.

"Hand me the reading pad." Xie nodded at the pad on the table. I slid it across to her and she punched up a destination.

I took it and looked her in the eyes. "While you're on the ship, you're not to attempt to use any communication devices, approach any weapons or enter the hold. You should know that the restraints you're wearing will initially warn you, but if you persist, they will incapacitate you. Don't attempt to remove them. That said, you have free reign of the berth deck. You are also allowed to visit the bridge as long as you confine that to sitting on the couch. Bottom line is we don't trust you, but we're not interested in making you miserable, either. Marny will show you your bunk room and after that you can set your own schedule."

"Why wouldn't you just lock me up?"

"I guess I'm a romantic. I don't believe everyone is just bad or just good. I'm hoping if I show you respect, that someday you'll decide to show that respect to someone else."

"You want to reform me?" Her face was hard to read, but I swear I saw a flicker of something that gave me hope.

"Nah. It's really just how I'd want to be treated," I said.

Marny interrupted. "Come on. I'll show you where the mess is." I hadn't realized she was standing behind me.

It was difficult to watch Xie walk back to the lift. Even without the heavy prison suit, she shuffled.

"You really are hopeless," Tabby said as I sat back in my cockpit chair.

"I know. Let's see where we're going."

I swiped the top of the reading pad and flicked the data that Xie provided to the navigational system. The forward holo immediately projected a location in the Hildas region of the main asteroid belt. It was a good location, on the edge of North American controlled space and so far out that likely nothing but probes were sent there. If this really was the location of the dreadnaught, it was also on the opposite side of the solar system from where the Navy believed it to be.

"That's on the edge of The Deep Dark," Tabby said. The Deep Dark was a term spacers used to describe the vast emptiness of space once you got past all of the asteroids and planets. Although, in this case, we'd still be in the orbital path of Jupiter, but I understood her point.

Calculate navigation plan with a twenty degree dogleg above the ecliptic at a million kilometers
, I said.

"Why the dogleg?" Tabby asked.

"We've run into our fair share of problems out here and I don't need anyone anticipating where we're going. We'll sail above the ecliptic, then straighten it out," I said.

All hands, prepare for hard burn
.

"Nick, are you ready?" I asked.

"Yup."

Engage
.

"Now what?" Tabby asked.

"Cards?"

"Seriously?"

"For the next four hours we need to keep a close watch, just in case. Soon, we'll be far enough away from Mars that we can relax. There shouldn't be much out there, especially once were above the ecliptic plane. After that, we'll just need to keep someone either in the cockpit or on the bridge. That's not normally a problem because we tend to hang out up here anyway."

"You don't have jobs to do?" Tabby asked.

"We do, but it's not a lot. My girl here is in pretty good shape." I leaned forward and patting the console in front of me. "There are a few maintenance chores, but Nick and I will split them up. The big deal is getting exercise every day. It's easy to ignore."

She gave me a wry grin. "Patricia would kill me if I neglected my PT."

"Four hour watch work for you?" I asked.

"I think so."

"Good. You'll be going four-four-two. I'll schedule out the whole trip that way, but if that doesn't work, we can talk about it."

"Four-four-two?"

"Right. Sorry. You'll be on for four hours for your first watch, four hours for your next watch, then two hours for the following watch. Nick, Marny and I will also have the same four-four-two schedule," I said.

"Why is it uneven?"

"Mostly for variety. Monotony is the thing we struggle against the most out here."

"Hard to imagine this getting boring," Tabby said.

"Yeah, I get it. That feeling won't wear off for a couple of trips. I still love it, but some watches can get long. You're just lucky Ada isn't on board. She'd have you working on your pilot's license."

"I'd do that," she said.

I just shook my head. Of course she would. "Shoot a message to Ada. She'd love to work you through it."

"I will."

"We also have a change of watch formality that I need to run you through. Currently, you have the helm. So when I'm taking the watch I ask 'Anything to report?' to which you respond with any changes to system statuses. After that, I'd say 'I relieve you' and you respond 'I stand relieved.' Overall, it's pretty simple, but the ship is keyed into those phrases, so we always know who's got the helm," I explained.

"Simple enough."

"Anything to report?" I asked.

After I relieved Tabby, she popped out of the chair and hovered down the stairs. "I'll be back," she said.

I hardly noticed the change from .6g to 1g when the engines reached their full burn, but Tabby struggled on the stairs. She was independent enough that she wasn't about to mention it.

I had a lot of work to finalize before we got too far out of the system. Mom, Ada and the
Adela Chen
would be back on Mars by the end of week and I only had them scheduled for one more trip. It would take at least three similar-length runs for them to stay busy for the entire time we were gone. I was starting to get a feeling for the types of jobs that were available and filtering out the stuff I didn't like became a lot easier. By the end of my shift, not only were we clear of Mars, but I had two more loads scheduled, as long as they weren't spoken for by the time we dropped out of hard burn in about eight hours.

"Anything to report?" Marny asked from behind my chair. We exchanged the rest of the formality that had become second nature to us.

"How's Xie doing?" I asked. I couldn't believe how quickly I'd moved to thinking of her as a victim.

"She's sound asleep and has been since I took her down to the aft bunk room," Marny said.

"How can you be sure?" I asked.

"I'm monitoring her. Just because she's been abused doesn't mean I'm going to trust her."

"I could use some shuteye too."

"I'll have breakfast in six hours."

"What time is it?" It felt a lot more like afternoon than the middle of the night watch.

"We're back on universal time. By the way, you're scheduled for exercise after breakfast."

I sighed but didn't say anything. I knew better than to fight it. I found Tabby asleep on the bed. It seemed ironic that she was able to use up most of the bed, but I didn't think I'd be pointing that out any time soon. I snuck in beside her and lay my head on the pillow after setting an alarm for five hours. I wasn't about to miss breakfast if Marny was cooking.

I woke Tabby after my alarm had been going off for way too long. Intellectually, I knew that the sound of the alarm was transmitted directly to my ear through my earwig, but it seemed like the noise should also have disturbed Tabby.

"We've got forty minutes before breakfast and you've got watch in a little over two hours," I said.

She blinked at me, trying to come awake. "Okay. Take a shower and let me get ready in private."

"I'd like to learn how to help you."

"Not yet, I'm not ready for that. The assistant-bot can do it just fine for now," she said.

"I'll be in the mess." I turned to go.

"Don't be mad, Liam. This is hard for me," she said.

"I know. We'll go slowly," I said. I popped a mouth freshener and leaned over to give her a kiss. She grabbed me, causing me to fall back into the bed. We wrestled around. My mind had a lot of conflicting emotions. To say that it wasn't weird that she was missing limbs wouldn't have been a fair statement. It was totally weird. On the other hand, this was the girl I'd fallen in love with and couldn't imagine living without. It took some effort, but I pushed out the thoughts of weird and simply embraced the moment.

When we finally came up for air it was 0600 on the dot. Marny's breakfast would be ready and I'd feel bad if we didn't show up. "We gotta go. Marny's got breakfast."

"Go. It'll take me ten minutes, but I'll be right there."

As I stood up, she somehow grabbed a handful of my rear end.

"Hey," I said and scooted away.

"Best not to turn your back on me," she said.

"I guess not."

I skipped the shower and saw that Nick was at the helm. "Hey, you want me to bring you some breakfast up?" I said loudly, across the bridge.

"Sure. Something light though. I'm headed to bed in a couple of hours."

"Roger that."

Xie was seated at the mess table. She'd chosen the corner with her back against the wall.

"I wondered if you sleepy heads would be getting up," Marny said.