Jewel (17 page)

* * * * *

Four days later Jewel listened in while Strongheart reported
to Ana. “We’ve sprung another leak in Jörmungandr II, but I think we’ve got it
under control again.”

He might have been reporting on the food packet he’d opened
for breakfast for all the concern or tension Jewel could detect in his voice.
She didn’t understand how he could be so calm about all of this. She realized
Strongheart was a professional, but he’d lost his brother and two other men in
the past four days, and all of the signs indicated that their underwater
habitat wasn’t going to last much longer. Yet here he was, calmly discussing
patching another leak with less enthusiasm than he might contemplate the next
vid he planned to see. “Could he be taking something?” Jewel wondered out loud.

Affirmative
, Spy confirmed her suspicions even though
Jewel had not intended the question as a query for information.
Head Miner
Glorious Strongheart is taking higher than recommended doses of Calmattacks.

That wasn’t good. Calmattacks was a heavy-duty tranquilizer
prescribed for severe anxiety. It was supposed to be safe for people to go
about their regular business, but those studies were certainly not done at
depths a mile below sea level and in these sorts of circumstances. And the
other miners? Are they also taking it?

Affirmative.

This just kept getting worse and worse.
What about my
other research query? Have you found any documentation on why the Ymirians
chose this world and what they thought they would find here?

Not at this time
, Spy admitted.
My search is
progressing but has been hampered by bad atmospheric conditions that have
obstructed my long distance connections to both Snója base and the Brynhild in
orbit.

Ana finally got Strongheart to stop talking long enough for her
to ask a question. “Why would this be happening now? The air pockets have been
in that mining platform down there for close to twenty years. Why are they
suddenly losing their integrity now?”

“Well, we are stressing the ecosystem, so to speak,” Strongheart
reminded her. “Just moving around down here does that, but we’re also pumping
more air into the platform and of course it may be settling just a little as we
move the ore out from beneath it.”

“Settling?” Jewel interrupted. “You haven’t mentioned that
before.”

“Oh, well, I thought it was obvious,” Strongheart said.
“We’re literally removing tons of ore from the platform and the ocean floor
immediately around it. Of course that’s going to affect the distribution of
weight and the support for the wreck.”

“So let me make certain I understand what you’re saying. The
salvage work you’re engaged in is progressively making the mining platform
you’re working in less safe.” She looked at Ana. “Doesn’t that strike anyone
else as insane?”

Strongheart laughed. “That’s one way to look at it, but
don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.”

Jewel no longer believed him.

* * * * *

“Void!” Falco shouted three days later. “Help me, Arico! I’m
losing it!”

Jewel rushed out of the ship’s cabin to see Meg Falco
struggling valiantly to stop a five-hundred-pound cargo container from slipping
back over the edge of the
Tanngrisnir
and into the sea. Arico had his
hands on the other side of the container but didn’t appear to be having much
impact on the sliding container of ore.

“Pull, Arico! Pull!” Falco yelled at him. She’d gotten
serious now that so much money was on the line. She still complained about
everything but she’d discovered a work ethic that was actually impressive. It
just went to prove what the Cartelites had always known—greed was a powerful
motivator. Give someone a chance to truly profit and they’ll work their rear
ends off for you.

Jewel ran across the deck to throw her own muscles into the
fray, trying to keep the container full of raw armenium from falling back into
the sea. She gripped the unit by the straps on the side and heaved backward.
For a moment, she arrested the container’s progress, but then it started
sliding not back into the ocean, but across the rear gunnel toward Arico and
there was nothing she could do about it.

Well, almost nothing…

“Adrenalin!” she gasped.

Spy immediately took action, stimulating the production of
adrenaline in Jewel’s glands. She pulled harder on the straps and the container
stopped moving long enough for Arico to scramble out from behind it.

Falco shifted her grip and together she and Jewel pulled the
storage container all the way onto the deck.

“Whew!” Jewel breathed out a huge sigh of relief as she
wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. “That was a close one.”

“Good job, Aurora,” Falco told her. “You came in to help in
the nick of time.”

“I don’t know about that,” Jewel said. “I think I almost got
Arico crushed.”

Arico was crouched over with his hands on his knees, trying
to catch his breath. When he heard his name he looked up at them and grinned.
“It looked bad for a moment there,” he agreed, “but it all worked out for the
best.”

“Hey, Aurora,” Falco said. “It looks like you cut your hands
on those straps. You must have really jerked that container hard.”

Jewel looked down at her hands and found they were both
bleeding from long, thin cuts where the strap had bitten into them.

Next to the
Tanngrisnir
a humongous whale-analogue
surfaced and sprayed them all through its blowhole.

“You’d better get that looked at,” Falco said. “Arico can
help you. I’ve got to lower this winch line again.”

Jewel let Arico help her back toward the cabin. The wounds
were beginning to burn, but Spy helpfully cut down on the pain while she
shrugged out of her jacket in the heat of the main office and Arico bound her
hands with gauze. He wasn’t very good at it so it took a while. “How’s that?”
he finally asked, stepping back to let her examine his work.

“I don’t think Dr. Brüning has to worry about you honing in
on his job,” Jewel told him.

Arico just laughed and picked up his jacket. “He can keep—”

The outer layer of his jacket sloughed off and fell to the
floor.

Arico and Jewel stood staring at the mess on the floor
before Jewel turned to look at her own jacket—the new one—which was also
dissolving.

Arico dropped his jacket and backed away from it. “Why does
this keep happening?”

“I don’t know,” Jewel told him, “but we’re going to run out
of winter clothing if we don’t figure it out fast.”

* * * * *

Several days later, Jewel, Jester and Falco were maneuvering
another container filled with raw armenium onto the deck of the fast transport,
Hunin.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Jester shouted at her, “the exec sends his
love.”

Spy immediately reacted to the spacer’s statement.
Why
would the Executive Officer send such a message? You are engaged to be married
to—

Shut up, Spy
! Jewel snapped at her. To Jester she
shouted, “Stop making trouble, Jester! You know he didn’t say that. Kindly keep
your nose out of my love life.”

Your love life
? Spy queried. The bioware managed to
sound suspiciously like Jewel’s mother as she framed the question.
Have you
violated the terms of your engagement to Kole Delling? The repercussions—

Jewel had to cut this line of questioning off hard. She
absently rubbed at the bandaged cut beneath her glove on her left hand. It
burned and it wasn’t healing very well despite Spy’s help.
Haven’t you paid
any attention to the personal interactions of this crew since you came back on
line?
This is Jester I’m talking to. He’s the ship’s joker. Would you
stop acting paranoid and let me manage my personnel?

Spy was getting more and more difficult to handle.
Fortunately, Jewel wouldn’t need it much longer. It had already altered Dr.
Brüning’s records. Rather than preparing to purge them as Jewel had first
ordered, the bioware had subtly altered the ship’s data to disguise Jewel’s
identity and make his scans of her bioware look like poor fakes. Once they
reboarded the
Euripides
Jewel would shut the chips back down by touching
her sabotaged lamp and overloading the system with an electrical surge. It was
risky, but not so risky as leaving the program in operation. She couldn’t have
it screaming for help as soon as they reached a civilized star system.

Falco shoved the final cargo unit over to Jester, preventing
the spacer from continuing to tease Jewel. He struggled under the burden for a
moment before fitting it into its place on the deck of the Huninn. The miners
were sending the ore up now faster than the members of
Euripides
’ crew
were able to ferry it back to shore. It would have been nice if Captain Kiara
had left them with more hands to do the work, but the real problem was the
limited number of transports available to them. They were only able to ship
four containers a trip, which left a growing amount of ore on the dancing deck
of the
Tanngrisnir
—yet another problem to deal with before the next
major storm.

“Whew,” Jester breathed before wiping the sweat off his
forehead. “That’s the last of them this trip?”

“That’s right,” Jewel told him. “You’d better get these back
to Snója. We’ll see you in a few hours.”

Jester waved good-naturedly and spun
Huninn
about.
Fortunately, he didn’t make another joke about Erik.

Falco looked around, her mouth twisting like she was about
to start complaining.

Jewel moved to preempt that as well. “You really did a good
job out there, Meg. I’m very impressed at how you’re handling all of this
responsibility. I want you to know that I’m going to talk with Erik and Ana
about this, and we’re going to recommend that Captain Kiara promote you.”

Falco’s mouth opened and closed reflexively before she said,
“Really? You really mean it?”

“Of course, I do,” Jewel assured her. “And if I have my way
about it—”

Luxora
, Spy whispered in her brain.
We have a
problem.

Just a moment
, Jewel told it.

“And if I have my way about it,” she continued to Falco,
“we’ll get that promotion in during this voyage so you get the benefit of it on
this armenium salvage.”

A grin split Falco’s face from ear to ear. “You mean it?”
The smile faltered. “The captain’s not going to want to do anything that hurts
her profit.”

Luxora
, Spy whispered.

Jewel ignored it. “This won’t affect the captain’s profits
one way or the other, so you don’t have to worry about that. Trust me. It’s not
going to be hard to get Ana onboard, and together I’m sure we can convince
Erik.”

The smile returned. “Thanks, Aurora, you’re all right.”

Jewel grinned at her. “You deserve it, Meg. Now if you’ll
excuse me, I have some work to get back to in the cabin.”

She turned away from Falco as Spy spoke in her head again.
Jewel,
we have a problem.

You mean we have another problem
, Jewel corrected
her. Then the form of her bioware’s address filtered into her active
consciousness.
What’s wrong, Spy? You never call me Jewel.

I have found the information you requested locked in the
secured files of the Chief Engineer on Brynhild Station
, Spy reported.
It
is highly dangerous. I would not report it to you if you had not given me
explicit instructions to do so.

This really didn’t sound good, but Jewel didn’t have the
sort of personality that allowed her to hide from bad news.
How bad?

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Falco looking at
her, a peculiar expression on her face. Jewel realized she had stopped walking
and that Falco had noticed. She was an observant woman who, despite her
attitude problems, had never been lazy. She’d picked up on a lot of the moments
when Jewel was talking to Spy and she, together with Ana Yang of all people,
had expressed concern that she kept spacing out. Ana thought Jewel was sick,
but Falco—Jewel didn’t know what Falco was thinking.

Jewel hurried along to the cabin both to get out of the
weather and to escape Falco’s gaze while Spy continued its report.
If this
news were leaked to the general populace, it has the potential to break the
armenite monopoly on armenium production.

“Wow!” Jewel gasped.

The comfortable helmsman’s chair pivoted around, revealing
Ana Yang, who’d evidently been reading off the slate in her hands.

Embarrassed, and still wanting to cover Spy’s existence,
Jewel filled in a few unrelated words that were still believable considering
the wintry weather. “It is really cold out there.”

“It sure is,” Ana agreed in more or less friendly tones. “I
was just looking at the weather forecasts, now that we can access Brynhild
Station’s satellite network. It looks like we’ve got a blizzard coming three or
four days out at best.”

“And I thought that’s what we called the wind and snow we’ve
been having,” Jewel joked.

“No,” Ana informed her. The expression on her face was
frighteningly serious. “We’ve been experiencing relatively minor storms. This
will be like a hurricane by comparison.”

“Oh, that’s just great,” Jewel complained.

She slipped out of her gloves and coat, careful of her
injured hands, and sat down on the far side of the little cabin. At least her
palms weren’t bleeding, but the wounds in her flesh hadn’t healed cleanly and
antibiotics didn’t seem to be counteracting the infection. But that wasn’t
important now. She needed to learn what Spy had to say. She picked up her slate
so she could pretend to study it and sank back in her chair.
Go ahead, Spy.

It gets worse
, the bioware informed her. It was an
interesting statement because Jewel was in no way convinced that breaking the
Armenite monopoly on FTL fuel would be a bad thing for the galaxy—at least if
they could do it without starting a war.