The Science Officer (8 page)

Javier pointed. “A guy. The survivor, I’m guessing. And we’re in his front yard, so maybe we should be nice to him?”

Javier slid out of reach and stepped forward. Good old–fashioned Biblical Patriarch stepped into view, complete with a beard to his waist and the sort of stick Moses carried in every video Javier’d ever seen of Exodus. In a dark alley, he might be scary. Here? Faced by a small army? Harmless.

“I’m Javier,” he addressed the newcomer. “We saw your signal. Took a while. You are most definitely in the middle of absolutely nowhere.”

The man considered him silently. Which made sense. Javier had months where the only person he talked to besides the chickens was Suvi. The old man might have forgotten how to talk. Or, maybe he spoke something really obscure and didn’t grok.

What the hell. Javier reached into his pack and pulled out a bar of dried fruit and oats. He opened the bar and held it out as a peace offering. “Food?”

A hand descended from the heavens and drug him back a step before the man moved. Javier hadn’t forgotten how strong Sykora was. But, man…

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Aritza?”

Javier turned. Nobody was sneaking up on these people, so he could ignore the guy. “Diplomacy, lady,” he said with an exasperated sigh. “Being nice. It’s the part of negotiations that doesn’t involve shooting people.”

She was back to staring daggers. “I’m in charge here.” That tone might have put an edge on a dull knife.

Fine
. “Fine,” Javier said. What the hell. He plopped down, crossed his legs, and took a bite of the bar. Let the gun bunny sort it out.

She snarled down at him. “Now what are you doing?” Javier noted that at no point did the barrel ever waver from dead–center on the new guy. Pissed, she might be. Deadly, without a doubt.

“You’re in charge, Sykora,” he snarled back, only a little less hostile. “Do it your way.”

Ξ

Yes, that was the way of things, Lemuel thought. The Harlot was not suited to lead. She knew only violence or seduction. Not the ways of Men. Here, She was surrounded by sycophants, but for one who was not under her spell. Lemuel found that his purpose was clear.

He relaxed his natural scowl and tried to remember how to smile. The Harlot was a lost cause, so he directed it at the man sitting. “He–he–hello,” he stuttered.

He found speech to be a complicated task, once the habit was lost. He spent most of his weeks in silent prayer and the sort of hard work necessary to survive in the Lord’s paradise.

The Harlot kept her weapon pointed at him. And her bile.

“What’s your name?” she challenged him.

That brought Lemuel up short. He hadn’t used his name in…a very long time. He blinked a few times. How many seasons had he been here? Many, doing the Lord’s work in the wilderness.

“Answer me,” the Harlot continued, her anger palpable.

The Lord counselled patience in the face of the denizens of the pit. “Le–Lemuel,” he said brokenly, finding the word deep in his memory.

The friendly male, unbowed by the Harlot, spoke to him from the dirt. “Hungry?”

Lemuel cocked his head. Words were difficult to process.

“Here,” the man continued. He held out his hand, holding the bar of food that he had taken a bite from.

The Harlot’s fury grew. “Come no closer,” she rasped harshly.

The male looked up at her, rolled his eyes disapprovingly, and tossed the bar to Lemuel with a single, “Fine. Catch.”

Lemuel managed to keep it from falling.

A sniff. A blue and red thing. Fruit of some sort, dried and packed together, with nuts he could not recognize. Minus a healthy bite out of one end.

Since it came from the male, Lemuel broke off a small chunk and touched it with his tongue. The poisons in this place were subtle, but dangerous. Mohr had died after eating the local fruit in an attempt to go native on this world.

Thus did the Righteous fall from the Lord’s Grace.

Lemuel took a very small bite. Better to risk illness than to refuse his one potential ally among the strangers and burn a valuable bridge. He considered his words as he slowly chewed.

“Thank you,” he finally found. Language was coming back to him now.

Lemuel considered the lovely taste, fruits that would not grow in this Eden, nuts from alien trees. His body remembered the taste of honey, so different from the form the local insects made.

Perhaps the Lord was telling him that he could finally go home, after so long in the wilderness.

The Harlot would not be an easy foe.

The words of his father came back to him, across the gulf of vast time.

“Welcome,” he said slowly, carefully, enunciating each word with care. “Welcome to Eden.”

Ξ

Djamila was not taken in by the rustic’s pose. He had already survived many years on the surface of a hostile planet, surrounded by alien flora and fauna. That made him dangerous. That Eden nonsense bullshit wasn’t going to cut it.

And Aritza was going to play good cop. Big surprise there. The man had no sense. None.

Predictable. But she could bad cop with the best of them. Watch this.

“Aritza,” she called down to the punk sitting in the dirt, “Is he armed?”

“No.” The answer was surprisingly quick. And assured.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Because,” he replied in a voice right at the edge of insubordinate, “the only power sources that aren’t over here are in that.” A finger pointed at the wreck. “My sensors showed him as a bear until he came into the open.”

“And the staff he’s carrying?”

“What?” Aritza shot back. “You can’t take an old man with a stick?”

Djamila considered kicking him. Aritza was really getting on her nerves.

She scowled her best, most professional, scowl at the native. Yes, she could handle him unarmed. Plus, she was supposed to be nice.

Interstellar law and custom said you always rescued ship–wrecked survivors and got them back to civilization. Even pirates honored that one. Mostly.

So, catalog the wreck. Rescue the local. Figure out if she could make it look like a tragic accident had killed Aritza.

She slung the battle–rifle on her shoulder.

All in a day’s work.

Ξ

Javier watched Sykora’s face on the sly.

He thought about teaching her how to play poker one of these days, but decided he was safer not telling her she was an open book. The Gunners on B deck were more fun, anyway.

The old man stared intently at him, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Better poker player there. Didn’t like Sykora at all. That made him good people.

Might as well cut straight to the messy bits.

Javier levered himself upright and brushed the dirt and leaves and crap off his butt with one hand. He clicked the recall button on the portable and caught the remote as it settled into his hand. Suvi would keep it active. She was very smart. Much better to trust her than the ogre–lady.

Now, the old man.

“So the reason we came here was to salvage the wreck, Lemuel,” he said. Simple. Honest. Easy. “We didn’t expect to find anyone alive after all this time.”

Javier read the signs as he spoke. Two guys at a bus stop, talking about last night’s game. He waited for Lemuel’s nod, got it, went on.

“Interstellar law says we rescue you at this point and get you someplace where you can get home from.” Javier turned as he spoke and looked right up at Sykora’s scowl. “Where and how will be up to Captain Sokolov, but you’ll be able to save some of your stuff.”

Again, the pause as Lemuel processed his words and nodded.

“We’re going to inventory everything for value, and most definitely remove the power reactor. What was on your manifest?”

He watched Lemuel scrunch up his face in thought. The eyes drifted off focus and blinked rapidly. A hand came up and scratched the semi–bald pate. Javier heard him whisper
Home
once, under his breath. A very small smile appeared briefly.

The eyes finally focused on his. “Uhm. Machine parts, I think,” Lemuel said quietly. “And trade goods for some colony.”

Sykora overrode his next question. “Which colony?” she barked.

Lemuel looked down, apparently embarrassed. “I do not know,” he said. “I was a cook and stevedore. Anya was the navigator.”

Javier turned to Sykora and gave her his best stink–eye scowl. Then a smile as he turned back to the old man. “So let’s go take a tour of the wreck, Lemuel,” he said soothingly. “You can point out all the interesting and dangerous parts as we go.”

This was going to be like herding cats. Normally, Javier would have said herding goldfish, but carp won’t turn suddenly and slash you with their claws. Sykora had that look in her eyes.

Part Four

Lemuel considered his options as they ascended into the ship. They were many, but he bestrode a dangerous path.

Javier had introduced himself and made it clear that he could become a friend.

The Harlot had a name as well, but Lemuel had not bothered to remember it. Weren’t they all the same, after all?

The others, male and female alike, were obviously under the sway of the Harlot. From the looks and mannerisms, Lemuel could see that they considered Javier an outsider to their group, though they treated him with respect.

That gave him an opening. Did he have the courage to seize it? Was this place to become Megiddo, after all? The Lord had worked in his mysterious ways to place Lemuel here so long ago.

Had he finally proven the strength of his faith? Or had he failed and was to be irrevocably damned by the Harlot?

Lemuel prayed silently to himself as he led the troupe of strangers, invaders unto his quiet paradise, down into the realm of his earliest, greatest challenge.

Ξ

Suvi was having an adventure.

The flitter–ship was far more maneuverable than
Mielikki
had been. She could hover, and spin, and bob, and float, and saunter. She missed having a turret she could use, but on a hull this small, it probably wouldn’t do more than irritate a squirrel. Not that that was a bad thing.

She had already used a series of ultrasound pings to map the hallway and the first cargo hold they had entered. The humans hadn’t heard, but they missed everything anyway.

Now she was studying a small lizard–looking creature on a wall. Maybe the philosophical offspring of a gecko and a chameleon. It blended well, but moved quickly and gracefully. And couldn’t have been more than six centimeters long.

She watched it munch happily on the local equivalent of a spider that hadn’t heard him coming either. There was probably a moral to that story.

Suvi launched another aggressive series of pings, but nothing moved.

She flitted over to a crate and scanned the weathered coding on the side. The language of shipping containers was probably the first universal stellar language. You could write and speak in any number of tongues and get by, but you had to talk to a very limited intelligence computer to move big things around.

That meant simple codes, with descriptive tags built in, so that someone could point a laser scanner at a stack of containers, scan the whole wall, and inventory everything in seconds. Here, she was stuck thinking at almost human speeds, so it took much longer, and the flitter–ship had a very limited scanning laser, so she had to get close.

But it was fun.

This one contained quality glasswork, cups and vases and such, designed to be sold boutique–style on a frontier colony with some money. The sort of place that had been too poor to take anything initially that wasn’t directly related to immediate survival. And had then survived the first few years in the wilderness, and prospered enough that people were ready to have nice things. Suvi added it to the list.

There weren’t any great prizes here. No precious metal alloys, or objects d’art, or high–end machine parts that Javier could use to build her a new ship. And this freighter was never flying again without more time in a space–dock than was worth considering. From what she had overheard, the others were mostly interested in ripping out the reactors and engines anyway.

Then she remembered the Black Flag. Being stuck thinking at only human speeds really sucked. These people were the pirates who had jumped them. Javier was a prisoner, of sorts, and that’s why they thought she was dead.

Duh.

Gods, she hated slow processing hardware.

Well, that changed everything. If Javier was working with them, he had some sort of deal going, and she was his ace in the hole. She could do that.

Now she really missed all the extra brain horsepower. It would be nice to be able to read these people at the unconscious level, with all sorts of extra scanners and thermometers so she had a solid hold on their biometrics. Hmmm. She’d have to settle for turning up the audio channels and putting in a cutout in case it got loud suddenly.

Time to watch, and wait, and prepare. Javier was going to need her.

Ξ

Javier smiled but grumbled. Having an honest deal with a bunch of pirates was one thing, but it would have been nice if this wreck had had some sort of big score. If he had to work with Sykora for four years, one of them would end up messily dead. No doubt about that.

He was under no illusion that he’d have any chance to escape or communicate with anybody, any time they got close to civilization. Even with a lot of planning. Ogre Lady would just lock him in a broom closet for a day if she had to.

And the old man was going to be no help at all. He seemed lost in a fugue of some sort. Probably spent too long alone here and gone totally nuts. He certainly didn’t realize he mumbled, not that anything coherent came out.

And Sykora…Yeah. Don’t let her too close behind you. Simple as that. At least he had Suvi watching his back. Not that she could do much, but she was going to make his work a whole lot easier while he was here. And she could keep his back safer.

Javier watched as another box came up on the screen, inventoried, mapped, and tagged. If nothing else, at least they had something to show for all the effort.

He was going to be too busy just staying alive. Being Science Officer could wait.