Home: Interstellar: Merchant Princess (15 page)

“Are you OK?” he asked.

Meriel nodded and collapsed into a chair near the door. Nick reached out his hand—palm up—to her, and she offered hers in return, but he shook his head.

“The link, M,” he said. Meriel handed him the burner link, which he put into a shredder and then sprinkled the bits into the soil of a potted ficus. He rummaged through a drawer under the plant. “Did it hurt?”

The painful memories of the attack returned to her, refreshed by her recent visit, and she frowned. “Yeah.”

He took her hand with his left hand, and with his right pulled up her sleeve and sprayed a bandage on her wrist to cover the wound. Then he looked at her and she nodded. “So, what have you got for me, M?”

Meriel smiled, her eyes wide. “The alt-bridge recopied the data, Nick. I checked the jump coordinates. It might all be here.”

“Really? OK, come on then.”

He took her down the hall past a room of comfortable but common furniture and through a false door into a closet where various wigs and glasses hung. Beyond the closet, she entered a room filled with shiny computers and blinking lights. It was spotlessly clean but disorganized. There were cables and patch cords between everything. All of Nick’s money was in this room.

“My new cave,” he said.

Nick had a variety of replicators for different materials. He even had some old 3-D printers with the cases off and guts exposed—for prototyping, she guessed. Cryogenic equipment with chugging vacuum pumps occupied another corner, and Meriel wondered if he burned his own chips. A pile of prosthetic limbs and shelves of jars containing body parts drew her eye, and Meriel went over to look.

He raised his hand to stop her. “Don’t touch. I just might have a functioning liver there in a few more months.”

“I know someone you should meet,” she said, referring to John.

Nick did not respond to her and held out his hand again. “Give,” he said.

Meriel removed the sim-chip from her necklace.

“Do you know what’s on it?” he asked.

She shook her head. “It’s in the nav format, and my link is too slow to read it,” she said. “I checked the nav coordinates, so I think it’s all readable, but I can’t tell.” She handed him the chip. “Careful. We’re not likely to get another chance at this.”

Nick played with the chip he had seen many times. “You sure about this?” he asked. “They tampered with it, M. That means someone does not want us to know what’s on it.”

Meriel nodded slowly.

“And they want to scrap the
Princess
before you can get her back.”

He gave the chip back to her and went to a corner of his lab. After rummaging through a pile of electronics, he surfaced with an old, disposable, portable computer and a clear-plastic box embedded with a fine metal mesh. He put the portable into the cage, connected it to a power cord, and connected the cord to another box.

“Is that relic the one you used last time?” she asked.

“Yup. It’s the slowest, most addled computer that has embedded Riemann–Hilbert transforms rather than software emulations. It will allow us to read the alt-bridge format in real time.”

“What’s the cage for? And the box?”

“The cage is to stop any potential signals from escaping. The box is a power supply to isolate it from my house power.”

“Why so cautious?”

“It’s from the scene of a crime, M. It could be anything and turn all my darlings into zombies. I’ve got to totally isolate it.”

“We didn’t do this last time,” she said.

“We were fools last time.” He took the sim-chip from Meriel, put it into the chip reader on the computer, and closed the door of the cage. They watched the computer boot, and Nick gave a few voice commands.

“OK,” he said. “Here goes. List contents.” The computer responded to his voice command, and the screen flashed. “I recognize these.” The familiar subdirectories appeared, beginning with the jump coordinates for Enterprise. “OK, first,” Nick said and double clicked the jump coordinates. A scrolling string of numbers and symbols popped up.

“Those work,” Meriel said. “The alt-bridge asked me if I wanted to jump there, here…wherever. Next?”

Nick double clicked on the
Home
subdirectory with file names of news announcements about her mother’s obsession, the myth called Home. He clicked on the
Personal
subdirectory to find video files and then expanded the icons.

Meriel leaned closer. “Liz and I thought we lost these forever.”

“Sorry, M,” Nick said and patted her hand. He nodded and flicked his hand to scroll through the icons.

“Wait,” Meriel said. “That one. Click.” The vid played Mom and Liz in hard-suits, Mom with her helmet off and laughing. Elizabeth still had her helmet on, but you could see her big smile and starry eyes through the visor. “It’s Liz. Her first EVA. She must have been nine. She was so thrilled she couldn’t stop talking about it for days.”

Nick smiled. “It’s not Liz, M. It’s you. Zoom.”

He was right: brown hair, not blond, and the stars shown in her own big green eyes. It was Meriel, and the happiest she had ever been.

“Mom drilled me for weeks on the safety protocols, but I still couldn’t remember,” Meriel said. “The first thing she did before we entered the air lock was tether us together. We left the air lock for one of the deadliest environments in the universe, but I never felt safer. We just drifted and watched a nebula. Mom put our helmets together, and we talked about space without the communicators, like we owned it all, like we belonged there just as much as the stars.” Meriel looked back at Nick, who had the sweetest look on his face. “Make me a still of this, OK?” she said, unaware of the tears in her eyes.

She checked her link for the time. “We need to look at the data for something that will help.”

“Data,” Nick said. “Top. Double click. Is this anything?”

Meriel squinted, looking closely at the screen, and then she gasped. “Cargo manifest. Oh my God, it’s from our last flight! Let’s see: replicator data, data-feed updates, prototype jump engine, medical prototypes, bio stuff, and organics—all standard stuff. There. At the end. Zoom. I’ve not seen those before, just strings of numbers. Can you get the details of that?”

“Last. Double click,” Nick commanded to get the contents of the numbered items. The screen froze; a small window opened in the corner and began to scroll symbols. Behind the window, the screen flashed.

“It’s a virus, taking over my computer. It’s trying to replicate. We need to end this.” Nick tried to turn off the computer, but it stayed on. “It’s not shutting off.” The cage started to glow. “It’s trying to induce a current in the cage. It needs to communicate. Yikes!”

Nick pulled the cord from the power supply, but the computer kept running. Next, he wheeled around the lab shutting things down but not before the portable flashed QR and UPC codes. He threw a towel over the cage to stop the video signals and then opened the door to the cage and flipped the portable to remove the battery. The instant Nick opened the cage, they heard audio bits and bleeps. “Sheesh, it’s trying to communicate by audio.”

One of his computers turned on and beeped. He pulled the power switch for his office, and all of his electronics shut down except the portable in the cage. He went back to pull the battery, but before he could, Meriel’s bracelet link started to respond.

“Turn it off, M!” Nick shouted.” Meriel tried and could not. Then she peeled the battery off her bracelet, and it went dead. Nick successfully pulled out the infected computer’s battery, and darkness filled the room.

The emergency lights came on, and Nick slumped back into his chair.

“So…what just happened?” Meriel asked.

“Damn, M. This virus is aggressive.” A frown crossed his face as he looked at the portable. “You bricked it, M. And I’m not sure what else it burrowed into.” After placing the sim-chip in his pocket, he threw the portable into a microwave with a Tesla coil, and the room lit up with blue flashes of lightning. After wisps of smoke came from the microwave, he picked up the smoking ruin with tongs and threw it into a mangler to grind it into dust. When the racket subsided, Nick turned off the mangler and sat.

“Feeling safer now?” Meriel asked with a grin.

“Not yet. When the refuse from the mangler is broken down into its constitutive elements by the recycler, then I’ll feel a little better.”

“Sorry for the trouble, Nick.”

“Part of the job, M,” he said. “Oh, and your link is probably infected, so you better leave it with me.” Meriel gave her bracelet to him, and he handed her another burner link. “Here. It doesn’t have much memory, but it does have your bioidentity. Use it until I can scrub yours, if that’s even possible.”

“This could be our break, Nick. The manifest might tell us what the
Princess
carried that was worth stealing—something other than drugs. Can you send a copy of what you find to Jeremy Bell? He’s my lawyer here on Enterprise.”

Nick nodded. “If it’s here, I’ll find it, M.”

“I hope so. We’re not likely to get another chance at this, Nick.”

“What do you mean?”

“You should have warned me about the security spider.”

Nick was silent.

“You didn’t know?”

Nick shook his head. “You should have told me about this earlier. I might have been…more reluctant to read the chip.”

“Why?”

“If I didn’t know about the spiders, then station security didn’t know. That meant that someone else wants information on the
Princess
. They must be private, and that’s expensive and illegal. You need to be more careful.”

“It didn’t see me.”

“You sure?”

“Yes,” she said but now wondered. “I’m out of options, Nick. I only have fifteen days to get evidence to the court.”

“We’ll make it.” Nick made a copy of her sim-chip and held up the original in front of her. “Here’s your chip back. It’s a loaded weapon, so be careful. Never try to read this, especially near a ship’s computer,” he said while wagging the chip at her. “If you do, it’ll take over in less than a second, and you don’t know what it will do. From now on, think of it as jewelry—pretty and just for show. I’ll figure it out from a copy.”

They hugged, and he watched her walk out the door.

Just outside his door, her link buzzed with a text from John, a message that could not reach her within Nick’s shielded domain.

We’re at the Gear Case for lunch. Doc is here looking for you.

Uh oh,
she thought and slowed her pace. She unconsciously held the sim-chip on her necklace.
Maybe our cargo was worth stealing and the manifest can tell me what it was. That would challenge the whole idea that the crew was involved in a drug deal.

Meriel turned her attention to the clover symbols she had found on the
Princess
. She looked at her palm for the symbol she’d copied, but her hand was clean—she had drawn the symbol on her glove and thrown the glove away. Still, she had a vid on the link. She took it out to check, but the vid was on the burner link that Nick had mulched. She reached for her bracelet link, but she had left it with Nick to disinfect and only had his cheap, anonymous link that she could have bought in a candy store. Sparkles appeared in front of her again, and she put her hand against the bulkhead wall for support.
Breathe
, she told herself, realizing that she had nothing to show that she had boarded the
Princess
or visited Nick.
It wasn’t a dream
, she told herself, but she remained unconvinced. She walked back to the service entrance she had just left and knocked on the door, but there was no answer.

“Hey, you!”

Meriel turned to see a security guard at the entrance to the alley. “What’s your business here?”

“Sorry, just looking for a bathroom,” she said being careful of Nick’s privacy.

“Back to blue-zone, spacer,” he said with contempt, and Meriel hurried away.

Across the dock, she noticed a man who looked vaguely familiar but lacked any distinguishing traits. Maybe that was why he stood out. Everyone was memorable for something, and we tune out the commonplace. She took a vid of him with Nick’s link and walked away.

***

Meriel approached blue-zone to meet the crew for lunch on the lookout for Ferrell. When she turned the corner near the Gear Case Café, she saw John, Cookie, Jeri, and Socket seated at a table, but Ferrell was not there. She signaled to John, and he walked over to her.

“Ferrell left. We told him you were shopping and…” He paused, noting her ashen complexion. “You OK?”

“Yeah,” Meriel said and rubbed her aching sides. “Just tired, I guess. Busy day.”
Understatement
, she thought and walked over to the table. John pulled up a chair for her and inserted it between himself and Jerri, evoking a frown and a shake of the head from Jerri but a smile from Socket. Meriel noticed but said nothing.

Meriel looked around. The café was noisy but well lit, which had advantages when dining with spacers.