The Science Officer (2 page)

Javier took a breath before he responded. “This is a probe–cutter, retired out of active duty twenty years ago, and converted to a long–range survey scout.”

The man’s voice was back. “Who are you?”

Javier shrugged in his suit. “Just a guy on a survey contract for Concord Fleet. A private contractor trying to make a buck.”

“And all the botany?”

Javier perked up a bit. These people didn’t sound like pirates. At least not the ones in the shows or movies. Way too articulate for what he was expecting “Hobby,” he said. “Something to do when I spend two to three years at a time in the middle of nowhere.”

Javier could hear the banging on the hatch in front of him. The airlock was about to be opened. With the ship powerless, they had already overridden the airlock bearings and cut the interlocks. And done it faster than most shipyard crews could manage. Damn. They were good.

The woman’s voice was back now. She sounded angry. Like a cat denied a mouse. “I’ve got you on my scanner,” she said. “Where are your weapons?”

Javier shrugged. Things were about to get tricky. “I have a pistol in my cabin,” he said. “Didn’t figure it would do me much good here.”

“You got that right, mister,” she snarled. “You stand perfectly still when the lock opens. If you’re lying about anything, you’re a dead man.”

Javier braced his foot under a rail put there by the ship’s architect for exactly this situation. For good measure, he held his hands straight out sideways, open and as unthreatening as he could. “Got it.”

The airlock door crawled open about eight centimeters, about as far as someone without gravity could torque it manually in one twist. Someone fantastically strong. Someone really angry.

A barrel poked through, like a hunting snake. No head appeared in the gap, so Javier assumed a camera on the gunsight.

He remained still. He even smiled. “Hi there.”

“Don’t move.”

“Not planning to.”

The hatch crawled farther open.

Somebody on the other side stuck a sensor pod across the threshold. It pinged loudly in the silence.

Nothing.

Javier wasn’t use to meeting other people as patient as he was. He had expected them to come barging in shooting by now. Maybe this was a good sign.

The sensor pod chirped.

Javier slowly let out a breath he hadn’t been aware he was holding. There was air, so they weren’t going to blow the locks and vent his ship into space. Maybe another good sign.

A head appeared in the gap, over the barrel.

“Just you, huh?” It was her.

Javier nodded. “And four chickens.”

The edge of anger in her voice was subsiding to exasperation. “What is it,” she said, “about the damned chickens?”

Javier held his voice as steady as possible, even when it really wanted to go up an octave. “Some people eat chickens,” he said, “and they are quite tasty. But they also make eggs if you treat them right. That means a meal every day for years, instead of one meal and done. I’d rather you not shoot my chickens. Kinda impossible to replace out here.”

She swam forward across the threshold, like a Nereid moving in water. The barrel seemed centered on Javier’s chest with magnets.

He could see her eyes through the filtered faceshield, barely. He felt like a rabbit confronting a bobcat. He smiled. “Hi.”

And then she shot him.

Ξ

Part Two

Darkness.

Sensation.

Pain.

Wakefulness.

Javier opened his eyes slowly. Even the dim light hurt.

He settled for a squint.

“Gah. What is that putrid stench?” Javier’s eyes came fully open, in spite of the brightness. His stomach would have climbed out of his mouth if there was anything in it. Small victories.

He tried to move. And found his hands were bound behind his back.

“Blood and martyrs,” he continued, “don’t you people know how to program a bio–scrubber?”

A hand cracked the side of his skull. Open palm, sharp but not damaging. “Mind your tongue.”

Javier turned to look up at his tormentor. And kept looking up.

He was pretty sure it was a she, because she seemed to have breasts. Small ones, to be sure, hiding on top of muscles. Lots of muscles. And the bones in the face appeared female. Not particularly delicate. Definitely not feminine.

Brown hair worn short to fit inside a lifesuit, buzzed very short on the sides and spiked into a petite Mohawk. The only thing petite about her.

The only vaguely–female touch was the collection of rings, studs, and stones in both ears. Nothing through the nose, though.

And the voice was a studied alto. Sharp, crisp, forceful. Reminded him of a PT instructor from the Academy. The one who liked to sing on forty kilometer hikes in full gear. He disliked her already.

Javier’s eyes finally focused. Not that bad looking, though. If you liked them 2.1 meters tall and built like rugby players. And scowling.

Javier was having enough trouble not retching to be faux–polite. “Then stop trying to poison me and get me some clean air to breath, lady.”

The hand came up again. Javier braced internally for the blow.

“Sykora, enough.” The voice cut her off. She looked to her right, scowled, subsided.

Javier processed the words. Slowly. Eventually. Heavy stun was like waking up still drunk the next morning, fifty kilometers from home, in someone else’s clothes. Wearing clown shoes. Been there, done that.

He turned back to the voice and realized he was sitting in a small office, staring at a man behind a desk. An average–looking man. Shaved head where Javier kept his black hair comfortably long. Salt and pepper van–dyke, neatly trimmed where Javier was generally clean–shaven. Average build, average height. So close to Javier’s 1.8 meters that they might see eye to eye. That would probably be important.

The man studied him, just as closely. “What do you know about programming bio–scrubbers?” He held a mug of something warm and probably caffeinated. Javier noticed a big, heavy gold ring on his hand holding the mug. The kind you got from the Academy on Bryce when you graduated. And became an officer in the Concord Fleet. Huh.

Javier bit back the first rude thought that sprang to mind. Rugby girl would just hit him again. Or worse. “Have you been on my ship yet?”

The man’s dark eyes got a guarded look. “I have not,” he said. The voice was a rich baritone. Javier could hear the command tones underneath it. This was a man who was used to being in charge, and could pull it off.

Javier leaned forward a bit, until
her
hand landed on his shoulder and
planted
him into the chair. Damn. She might outweigh him, too. “Go smell the air over there and get back to me,” he said. “Mind you, stay away from the bee hives and try not to torment the chickens any more than you have to, but go smell how nice my ship is, compared to this poisonous swamp of a death trap you’re sailing in, Mister.” Javier added the whip–crack to his voice they had both learned on Bryce.

He was rewarded by the man’s glance down at where his hands would be, it they weren’t tied behind him. Looking For The Ring. It was a rite of passage in the wider universe. Academy graduates. Strangers in strange lands.

The man leaned back and smiled, just a touch. Obviously, the same thoughts had crossed his mind. “I didn’t see your ring, Mister.” Yup, the universal greeting. Long–lost brothers in arms.

Javier shrugged, on firmer ground, if no safer. “My second wife kept it when she divorced me,” he said. “Class of ’63.”

The man nodded, an entire silent, exquisite conversation. “I see. Class of ’49.” He turned to the woman hovering nearby, her weight just a suggestion now on Javier’s shoulder. “Your observations, Sykora?”

Javier noticed her nails. Perfectly manicured, if kept extremely short. Again, working all the time in a lifesuit. He checked her wrist and saw the tell–tale calluses from an armored suit, the reinforced kind you wore when wrangling heavy equipment in zero–g, or heading into combat. She didn’t look like an asteroid miner. Too tall.

She locked eyes with him for a second, as if reading his mind. Not that it was much deeper than a mud puddle, according to both his ex–wives. He winked at her. Her scowl deepened.

“He is correct, Captain,” she said. “The ship is extremely clean and well kept. Well–founded, according to the engineering team, although the maintenance logs were destroyed when he smashed the personality computer.”

The man, the Captain, scowled at Javier when he looked back. “Along with all the calibration records for the sensors and jump–drives?”

Javier just goggled at the man. “Hey,” he said, “You people are pirates. SOP, buddy. Deal with it.”

Sykora back–handed him, more of a love–tap than a blow. She growled under her breath.

The Captain tapped his finger, hard, on the desktop, to bring her up short. She glared at Javier anyway. If looks could kill.

Javier decided to ignore her. “So, Captain,” he said, “what can I help you with?” He resisted leaning back and kicking his feet out. That might just get him killed.

The Captain glowered at him. Javier could see why he was the Captain when he turned all that charisma on. Power. Presence. The eyes got serious, piercing. They eyebrows flexed like muscles and moved together just a little, like they were pointing at him. Javier felt the man’s whole presence centered on him. The voice sounded like a tool, or a weapon. Perfectly crafted, razor sharp, elegant.

“You could fix your highly–automated and customized ship so we could use it. Otherwise, we’ll have to part it out and decide if you should be sold into slavery or just killed out of hand. What’s your preference?”

Let’s see. Lose, lose, or lose. A whole handful of bad choices. Kinda like the how both marriages ended up. “How about I fix your bio–scrubbers and then you drop me someplace civilized so I can hitch–hike home? A way to say
thank you?
” Nobody every appreciated his ability to find silver linings.

The Captain was not amused. “Throw him in the brig for a while. Maybe he’ll reconsider.”

Javier watched, amazed, as Sykora picked him up out the chair, bodily, with one hand and sat him on his feet. “Gladly,” she sneered.

Outside in the hallway, the air was even worse. Javier felt like he could walk on it. “How do you people breathe this
squamph?
” He coughed a few times, but that just sucked the crud deeper into his lungs instead of clearing them out.

Sykora didn’t help matters. She grabbed him by the wrists behind his back and levered them up until he was on his knees. Through the pain in his shoulders, he did notice that the position compressed things enough that he stopped coughing. Probably not her original plan. Silver linings.

She lifted him again bodily by the scruff of the neck, and shoved him ahead of her. “Move, punk.”

He glanced back. “If my ship’s dead, can you put me a cabin over there so I can at least breathe?”

That was good for a cuff to the side of the head. Not enough to rattle anything loose, just enough to shut most people up. Most people.

“Seriously,” Javier said, looking over a shoulder, “can I at least fix yours if I have to breath this gunk? I promise that clean air will make you a nicer person.”

His first wife used to give him that same look. Uncanny.

She grabbed him by the collar to halt him, pushed a button to open a hatch, and casually shoved him through, bouncing him off the far bulkhead.

After a few of the stars faded from sight, he looked over a shoulder. “Handcuffs off, please?”

She glared down at the top of his head. “Face the wall,” she growled.

Javier stood perfectly still when she unlocked him, and clenched a little as he expected a rabbit punch or another shot to the head, but she stepped back and activated the security field without a word.

Javier leaned close enough to the force field that it started to spark at him. “Remember, Sykora,” he called, “clean air and smiling faces.” He looked around, found a bed to sit on, and stretched out to contemplate his day.

Kinda sucky, but it could have been much, much worse.

Ξ

The voice jarred him out of his daydreams. Probably just was well. They weren’t fit for polite company anyway.

“On your feet.”

Javier smiled. His princess Sykora had come back to rescue him. Or shoot him. Never a dull moment in space.

He stood up and stayed well back from the security field as she disarmed it and stepped to the doorway. She had to duck to clear the lintel. Javier maybe came up to her chin.

“Hands together in front,” she said as she held out a set of manacles. Which was better than a pistol. He put his hands out politely and watched her cuff them expertly.

She pulled the connecting chain until he was almost touching her chest, staring up into her face, which was probably a smarter response than sticking his nose between her boobs. Probably. “Come with me,” she said, so quietly as to be almost a whisper.

Like I had a choice?
Javier thought to himself. Even four years of Academy training in close–combat drill would make him look like a fool if he tried something. This woman was a killer. She pulled him into the hallway.

Sykora stood him up in front of a tall, skinny, Asian guy. Almost the same skin tone as his, but a different hue. He looked almost as confused as Javier. “Yu, this is…” She paused and stared hard at Javier. “What is your name, anyway?”

Javier stuck both manacled hands out at the man to shake. “Javier Aritza,” he said with a smile. Silver linings. Yu shook absently.

“Aritza,” she said, tense, “you are going to show Machinist’s Mate Yu here how to fix the life–support system and tune the bio–scrubbers.”

Javier looked up at her and blinked. “Or?”

She smiled cruelly. “Or I bounce you off the wall for a bit.”

He smiled back, warm and sarcastic. “Didn’t think I was your type, madam.”

Light.

Pain.

Stars.

The wall was cold on his back. And his butt. And he was on the floor. And his face hurt where she had punched him. And his head had a goose egg growing where his skull had bounced off the bulkhead. And bells.