Heretics (28 page)

Karl laughed.

“What?” Toni asked.

“You two really are Styx military, aren't you?”

“So?”

Karl shook his head. “A pirate would have some sense of economics. Even if my crew haven't taken their stake in the last load and found other work, they'll certainly have by the time we could get back. You've taken two months out of my schedule, so I've lost every contract that had been waiting for me on my normal run. Some of those I've been serving for seven years. You've pretty much destroyed my business, Lieutenant Valentine.”

There was a long silence in the cockpit before Toni II muttered something about insurance.

That's when Stefan lost it, “You stupid, thoughtless bitch! Do you have any idea what you've done?”

Karl looked at his son. “Stefan, please—”

“Thirty years my dad worked! Thirty years! You know what the average time is before a sole operator goes bankrupt?”

“Stefan?”

“Six months! Six months!” Spit flew from his mouth to hang in a weightless constellation in front of him. “This was his life. It was just as good as putting a bullet in his brain—”

“Stefan, stop it!” Karl snapped at his son. Toni II had lowered the gun, and Toni could see the same sick feeling in her face that Toni felt in her own gut. Karl looked between the two of them and said, “You aren't going to shoot us, are you?”

“No,” Toni said.

Karl sighed. “The point my son makes is that while we're insured for piracy, that only covers direct losses. Cargo, refueling, replacement cost of the ship if you steal it—business and personnel losses, no. As it is, after a year of arbitration I might get just enough paid out to cover my debts.”

“I'm sorry,” Toni said.

“At this point an apology is more amusing than anything else.”

“An apology—” Stefan began to yell again.

“Stefan!” Karl cut him off. “I did not raise an idiot child. Stop acting like one.”

Toni sighed and turned around toward the communication console. “I guess I'll request clearance to land and we can wait in the queue.”

Karl laughed. “You don't want to do that.”

“What?” Toni II asked before Toni could.

“Actually, I guess you can ask for clearance. You just can't land.”

Toni turned slowly back around to face the two of them. “Why can't we land?”

“We don't have a contragrav, damn it!” Stefan told her. “This ship
can't
land.”

Toni II raised her hand as if she were about to backhand the kid with the gun. Toni spoke before her twin's arm could move. “Don't play games, kid. We know the specs on a x252 cargo ship.”

“What about the specs on
this
cargo ship?” Karl asked. After a pause where both Tonis stared at him, he said, “I thought so. You had no idea—”

“Idea about what?” Toni II practically screamed at the man. Toni wanted to yell at her to calm down, but showing any form of discord between them in front of their captives would be worse than an emotional outburst.

“The Daedalus was customized to carry the same load as a 252 with the tach capability of an x252. That required stripping away extra mass that wasn't part of the tach-drive or life support—”

“Like the fucking contragrav,” Stefan interjected.

“As well as structural components that were only required for a descent into a gravity well,” Karl concluded. “Over the years we've tuned the
Daedalus
to tow mass in excess of 125% any other 252 series cargo ship.”

“You just can't land,” Toni whispered. She almost wanted to laugh at how badly her first foray into piracy was going. They'd managed to steal a ship that couldn't even make planetfall. What the hell were they going to do now? They had no resources—

“What's your cargo?” Toni II asked them.

Stefan snorted and muttered something that sounded like, “Great pirates we got here.”

Toni was inclined to agree with the sentiment.

Karl sighed. “About half our load has been off-loaded—anything valuable, sealed courier packages and the like, were taken off first. We were waiting for a surface-bound transport to take the remaining containers.”

“Containers of?” Toni II asked.

“Agricultural products, tropical fruit mostly.”

“Fruit?”

“Fruit,” Karl said. “On Styx, the margin for exotic foodstuffs is incredible. What little growing capacity they have is dedicated to staples, no reserve left for luxury items.”

Toni II looked at her and said, “Fruit,” as if she couldn't quite understand the meaning of the word. Toni felt the same stunned expression on her face. She turned around and looked at one of the comm displays and called up the cargo manifest and started reading.

“Pineapple, banana, mango, papaya, kiwi . . .” Four full containers of the stuff.
Tons
of fruit.

Toni tapped on the display and realized that she hadn't been thinking like a pirate, and it was time she started. They couldn't land, but there would certainly be orbital stations that could accommodate the
Daedalus
. And, this being the free-for-all Bakunin, there had to be someone in the market for what they carried. “Mr. Stavros?”

“Yes?”

“I'm afraid we're going to have to be pirates for a bit longer. We'll be taking your cargo to finance a berth to dock somewhere in orbit, and to find passage . . . somewhere. Once we take care of that, we'll release your ship back to you.”

“If you are going to be pirates a bit longer, my I suggest erasing the log and the cockpit surveillance video?”

“Dad? You're helping them?”

“Shh, Son. Just making the best of a bad situation.” Toni glanced over to a small display showing the data recorder for the cockpit. She stopped it, and after drilling through the advanced menu, she found the command to purge all the recorded data.

“What's the point of that?” Toni II asked. “There's still surveillance footage from the rest of the ship, and if we purge all that, they still have data from the air lock back at 3SEC—”

“It's just better if there isn't a record of what happens in this cockpit,” Karl said. “When I make an insurance claim against your theft of the
Daedalus
.”

Toni turned around. “You don't want this ship back?”

“A claim on the lost cargo will just cover my costs, not my losses. My son already explained the disruption of my business. If you really do wish to provide me some compensation, allow me to make a claim on the ship itself. I own it free and clear, and its loss would bring a hefty settlement . . .”

Toni had a sudden realization, and Toni II articulated it. “And you'd like to combine it with the proceeds from selling it on the black market here on Bakunin?”

“A black market implies an illegal sale,” Karl said. “That's an inappropriate term since there are no laws here.”

“Dad, you'd really sell the
Daedalus?”

“Actually, I was hoping that our pirates here would broker such a deal for us. Better to keep the Stavroses out of it for the sake of the insurance investigators.”

Toni stared at the man who was, only a few subjective minutes ago, trying to kill her to defend his ship. “You're asking us to sell your ship?”

“I'd be willing to give a commission for a quick sale.”

“Do we have a deal?” Karl asked.

Toni looked up at her other self and saw the same befuddlement in her face. They both said, simultaneously, “You have a deal.”

 

Karl Stavros evidently had prior experience with the environment around Bakunin. As he said in an aside to Toni, “A necessary skill for any successful operator in my profession.” As he guided her though the complex web of orbital platforms and contract negotiations, she wondered exactly what that profession actually
was.
He didn't strike her as someone who made his money hauling fruit.

Even with the assistance of someone who knew the vicinity, they still couldn't find a destination for the
Daedalus.
Ten times the normal inbound traffic stalled everything they tried to do. Just the intense level of radio chatter made it hard to communicate. It took several long minutes just for an orbital platform to respond to their query, and almost always the response was, “Wait a moment while I clear these other ten calls I have ahead of you.”

Those moments were closer to hours. Hours talking to habitats named
Crowley, Luther, Hamilton, Light of Our Lord, General Fabrication Facility 23, Lingam, Hellfire Steel, Yoder, Nirvana, Dead Dog, Wisconsin . . .

It became increasingly clear that they were going to be drifting in the
Daedalus
for a while. After the initial urgency faded into a frustrating routine of opening a channel, sending a burst, and waiting for a response, Toni II spoke up, “Maybe we should look into what the hell's happening here?”

Toni looked over her shoulder at herself and it struck her that however frustrating it was for her, it must be an order of magnitude worse simply
watching
them hit virtual wall after wall.

Karl leaned back and rubbed his eyes, both of which had developed considerable shiners. “Your sister's right. We're not going to get docking privileges anywhere, any time soon.”

Toni stared at Karl, then looked back at Toni II.
She's probably thinking the same thing I am.

“Thoughts, Sis?” Toni asked her.

Her newly christened sister smiled. “Let's try and get into someone's data net.”

 

They couldn't hook into any paid data stream here without an account on the planet to draw from, but there were plenty of streams that were various flavors of free. Of the ones the
Daedalus
could pick up on, there were half a dozen news feeds.

Her “sister” bent over Toni's shoulder and touched the console screen selecting the feed from the Jefferson Commune Interplanetary Free Press.

The first headline made Toni suck in a breath. “Oh, boy,” she whispered.

The past couple of hours had distracted her from the reason they had hijacked the
Daedalus
in the first place. She had never doubted herself or her sister as to what was going to happen—but it hadn't hit her on a gut level until she saw it glowing in a news holo.

Stefan, who had been snoring in one of the crash chairs, woke up and walked up to the three of them muttering, “What's this?”

Toni didn't answer.

The headline read, WORMHOLE NETWORK UNDER ATTACK?

The holo began playing a high-resolution image, obviously enhanced, showing something she had only imagined before. A stretch of interstellar space showing two large distortions, both mirrored spheres reflecting stars other than the ones surrounding them. The two spheres were frozen in time, the distance between them impossible to judge.

“I asked,” Stefan interrupted, “what is this?”

Toni's sister responded before Toni could. “It's the reason I'm here holding a gun on you rather than beating virtual marines to a pulp. Now shut the hell up.”

The narrator continued.
“Xi Virginis traveling at a velocity three quarters of the speed of light. Compiled from several sources, we have a series of images from the impact.”

On the holo the view shifted, with the wormhole to the right now about a quarter of the way to the stationary one on the left. Toni now realized that the stars reflected in the right-hand sphere were noticeably blue-shifted, and the sphere itself was slightly distorted from the perfect round shape of its target.

The picture shifted again, and now the right- hand wormhole was halfway to its target. Both wormholes showed distortion in their reflected star fields, as if there were ripples in their nonexistent surface.

The next image had the distance between the wormholes quartered, and both showed extreme rippling distortion; in addition, both seemed to stretch toward each other.

The image cut away to a far distant perspective showing the explosion of impact. A new star glowing brighter and brighter, causing the stars around it to fade until it was a lone boiling white spark in a empty black sky.

“No reliable casualty estimates exist as of yet, but damage to tach-drives and communication devices have been extensive throughout the system. As much as two-thirds of tach-ships and three quarters of the interstellar communications infrastructure—”

Karl looked at both Tonis and asked, “What did you mean, ‘
This
is the reason.' ”

“The same thing was happening around Sigma Draconis. All three wormholes.”

“All three—” Karl began.

“Just listen,” both Tonis said simultaneously.

“—first transmissions were received indicating this was not an isolated event. We have confirmed that communications have come from Earth, Occisis, Cynos, Khamsin, Shiva, Windsor . . .”

Toni listened to the litany of systems.

Every wormhole in the old network had been destroyed. Every single one—tearing apart communications and transportation capabilities as it went. As the commentary went on, it was clear that most of the tach-comm messages, confirming the destruction, were messages sent before the actual impact, describing the wormholes coming insystem to the wormholes orbiting Alpha Centauri, Sirius, 61 Cygni, Epsilon Eridani . . . .