Pelquin's Comet (17 page)

He owed the little alien that much and, besides, he was an expert at keeping secrets. None of this prevented him from having reservations or from suspecting, on occasion, that Mudball wasn’t being entirely straight with him; that things were going on just beyond the reach of his knowledge and understanding. Drake had made it his personal mission to discover what.

While you were sleeping…
Mudball said.

I was unconscious,
he corrected.

Whatever. Anyway, to keep myself busy, I did some snooping and discovered an interesting little anomaly.

Anomaly? Of what sort?

The sort created when the ship’s records are tampered with to hide something that came aboard while we were off searching for engine parts.

Now that
is
interesting. I don’t suppose there were any clues as to what it might be?

No, none whatsoever. You can’t expect me to do all the work.

The interview with the PoD had taken a scant twenty minutes, which meant he still had a little time before the stimulant faded to leave his body wide open to the Doc’s sedatives again.
A quick visit to the hold would seem to be in order, then, don’t you think?

Oh goody, you really do take me to all the best places.

Just be grateful I take you anywhere.

He needed to know exactly what had been sneaked aboard. Did it indicate that Pelquin was involved in some sort of elaborate scam and merely using the rest of the crew to get to the cache, with the intention of double-crossing both them and First Solar along the way…?

Before he could act on this determination, however, his reveries were interrupted by Pelquin. “Drake, a quiet word. I’d like your opinion on something. You’ve spent more time with our new mechanic than anyone else has; what do you think of her?”

Gods, why was the man asking him?

Perhaps because he knows you have a vested interest in the welfare of the crew and the mission,
Mudball suggested.

“She seems competent enough…” he said.

“Do I sense a ‘but’?”

Now was his chance. If he really thought Leesa was a threat and wanted to get her removed from the ship, he just had to say as much. “Nothing specific,” he temporised, “but I’m pretty certain she comes with a considerable amount of baggage.”

“We
all
come with baggage, Mr Drake.”

“True, but hers strikes me as the sort that’s not easily ignored.”

“The fight, you mean? You think she was the cause?”

“Maybe, yes. It wasn’t a random attack; we were targeted.”

Pelquin shrugged. “We all have issues, Drake. So long as she leaves hers behind when we depart Babylon, I’m not concerned. Unless you’re suggesting hers are more than that?”

The pivotal moment. The last thing he wanted to do was let Leesa down again, but at the same time he had a job to do, one that Leesa’s secrets could endanger. “It’s hard to be sure,” he found himself saying, “but no, I haven’t seen anything to suggest this is any more than a local problem.”

“Well, in that case, I’ll take my chances. We need an active engineer, and it’s not as if I’m spoilt for choice right now. I appreciate your candour, but there’s not a man or woman aboard the
Comet
that doesn’t have their secrets, Mr Drake. Even you, I’ll warrant.”

Drake smiled. “Not me, Captain. I’m as straightforward as a man could be. First Solar wouldn’t employ me otherwise.”

“In that case, Mr Drake, I pity you. We should all have our secrets, each and every one of us. They help define who we are.”

“You may well be right, Captain, you may well be right.” With that, Drake nodded farewell and took his leave.

Very cryptic, and despite your misgivings you chose not to say anything about her,
Mudball said.
I never will understand the way you humans think.

Don’t worry, much of the time nor do we.

So, this Leesa,
she really is an auganic?

Yes.
And therein lay the problem. Drake was
almost
ready to accept that Leesa’s amnesia was genuine – she certainly hadn’t given herself away during their time together in La Gossa – but whereas he might still be in the dark about some aspects of Mudball’s capabilities, he knew full well what an auganic could do. So he couldn’t be certain she wasn’t faking it, and that lingering doubt was going to irritate the hell out of him until he could put it properly to rest.

Cool,
Mudball said.
Thought I’d never get the chance to meet one of those. This is all tremendously exciting.

No it wasn’t, not from where Drake was standing.

The hold was deserted, with deliveries made and the big cargo door shut for the night. There was a security camera, but Mudball ensured the image was recycled in a loop so that anyone who might happen to be watching would merely see continuous, undisturbed stillness.

Identifying the recently arrived crates proved easy enough. With all that had happened in the past few days the equipment taken on at New Sparta had yet to be unpacked; nobody had paid it much attention beyond checking for bullet holes and damage. Crates that didn’t show any sign of either had been pushed to the back of the hold. The later additions – those brought aboard that day at La Gossa – had simply been stacked in front of the New Spartan ones. There weren’t many, either; certainly not as many as Drake would have anticipated.

Using his perminal, he scanned each container’s coded label, which Mudball then compared to the official inventory.

In a matter of minutes they’d accounted for all of them.

They all match,
Mudball observed.
I don’t get it, why bother tampering with the loading records in that case?

Patience,
Pelquin advised,
patience.
There had to be something else, and, aware of his penchant for inspecting things, it wouldn’t surprise him in the slightest if Pelquin had made at least a superficial attempt to hide whatever it was.

Useful tool, a perminal; his was also primed with a number of apps specific to his job.

By common practice, packing crates for anything less than corporate scale commercial shipping were manufactured from genetically strengthened wood: a cheap, renewable, bio-degradable resource. Drake held the perminal steady, close to one of the crates they had already checked. A barchart of chemical components appeared. Next, he walked over and repeated the process with one of the crates taken on at New Sparta. The results were very satisfying.

Different,
Mudball observed.

Exactly. Different trees grown on different worlds; their chemical composition varies in a few key indicators.

Clever
, Mudball allowed.
Now you just hope that one of the shipping companies isn’t recycling crates that originated on the other world.

There is that,
he conceded,
but if so we’ll try something else. For now, though…

It didn’t take long. Nate, and presumably Pelquin, must have been in a hurry; Drake found what he was looking for immediately behind the foremost crates: wood that had originated on Babylon rather than New Sparta.

No shipping labels of any sort,
Mudball pointed out.

It wasn’t a large crate – by no means the largest there – but, lacking a gravsled or a powerlifter to help move some of the other containers aside, opening it took a while longer than Drake would have liked. By the time he succeeded and could see what was in there, pain and wooziness were creeping in again. Drake ignored them, determined to discover what Pelquin was up to before succumbing to the doc’s drugs.

His perseverance was eventually rewarded, though sight of the crate’s contents made him wonder whether the drugs weren’t kicking in after all. Using the torch facility on his perminal at widest setting, he stared at the compact curved unit and twin stacks of metal plates, eight in total.

“Well I’ll be…”

You know what this is?
Mudball said.

Yes.
It came as a relief, in a way. Yes, the captain might be keeping tight-lipped about things, but this didn’t smack of a double cross, merely of caution.

Drake centred the beam on the lettering, depicted in flowing script on the side of this innocuous looking engine: PTARMIGAN. The counterfeiters had even mimicked the proper logo.
It’s called a Ptarmigan, after a mountain dwelling bird of Old Earth which changed its plumage to white in winter as camouflage against the snow.

Presumably it’s an acronym; the letters stand for something, right?

Not that I know of.

Oh come on, they must do… Phase Tension And Resonance… Ehm… Okay, maybe not.

The cute little name they’ve given it doesn’t really matter,
Drake said.

Right. It’s what the thing does that’s important.

Exactly.
He’d seen pictures of something like this, though he never expected to actually encounter one.
It’s a dissonance field generator. Or, if you prefer, a cloaking device.

Drake fought the onset of fatigue as he made his way back from the hold, his feet dragging at every step. The last person he wanted to bump into was Nate Almont, so inevitably he did, in a very literal sense. The broader man turned his shoulder, clearly intent on catching Drake in passing. Drake saw the move coming and was able to twist out of the way, avoiding all but the lightest of brushes, but conversation was a little harder to evade.

“Now I wonder where you’ve been,” Almont said. “Snooping around as usual?”

“Merely taking my daily constitutional,” Drake assured him. “There’s so little room to exercise on a ship, don’t you find?”

Almont grunted, and Drake took that as his cue to walk on, ending the encounter before it could develop into anything more significant and before he fell asleep on his feet.

“I’m keeping an eye on you, banker, you remember that,” Almont called after him.

It was all Drake could do to keep his legs moving, so he ignored Almont’s parting shot and continued to his alcove – that little corner of
Pelquin’s Comet
that was his, however temporarily. Once there, he stretched out on the bed, lying on his back and trying to organise his thoughts before sleep claimed him. Mudball hopped down to squat on the pillow beside his head.

Events were mounting up, an accumulation that invariably created patterns. All Drake had to do was recognise and interpret those patterns. He started reviewing what he knew. A superficially senseless raid had come close to killing the
Comet
’s engineer. During the ship’s next jump a fault had developed which nobody still conscious was capable of diagnosing. The ship had landed on Babylon to seek medical and technical assistance. Pelquin, possibly in collusion with Nate Almont, had ulterior motives for coming to Babylon. As a result of landing there, Leesa came on board: somebody who knew Drake in another life, though she didn’t appear to know him now. While on Babylon, the ship had taken delivery of specialist equipment which the captain had hoped to slip aboard unnoticed…

Was all of that mere chance? Of course not; but that didn’t mean that
all
these disparate factors were directly related. It was easy to jump to false conclusions, to sweep up associated but quite separate occurrences and assume they were part of one unified pattern, warping the shape of the real pattern in the process.

The challenge was determining which facts were linked to which others and to recognise those that merely
appeared
to be. Nor could he afford to be wrong. But then this was one of his primary skills, and he did so enjoy a challenge.

Nate Almont sat at the heart of things. He was the catalyst that had set events in motion. It was Almont who had left the ship on acrimonious terms; Almont who returned after a year of doing goodness knew what professing knowledge of an Elder cache, and Almont who brought with him an artefact; the same Almont who disappeared for protracted periods whenever the ship was in dock.

Drake closed his eyes and set about pairing facts in his mind, testing them to see how they fitted and where they led. He knew sleep was imminent no matter how hard he tried to stave it off, and could only hope that come morning his subconscious would have unpicked the various threads and identified the true nature of the pattern. Only then would he know the best way to proceed.

He was dead to the world by the time the
Comet
took off and left Babylon’s atmosphere behind.

E
LEVEN

As a child, Leesa had always loved the name her community had adopted, believing it to be the most romantic name in the universe: Liaise. She imagined the settlement had chosen this in honour of some ancient city of Old Earth and, to her childhood self, the word conjured up images of exotic wonder; of darkly handsome chisel-jawed princes guiding elegant swan-necked boats beneath dramatic skies, slipping silently along mist-wreathed waterways propelled by nothing more than a pole of burnished wood, while the whole world held its breath awaiting the outcome of their noble quests. The glint of steel in the depths of their eyes told you at once that these were not men to be messed with: strong, silent, and determined to be reunited with their one true loves. The women in question would of course be spirited and beautiful maidens, oppressed by the dictates of misguided parents and denied their heart’s desire; all for their own good, or so they were told. Pennants fluttered from flagpoles while water lapped against quaysides with ominous portent and cobbled, torch-lit courtyards stood ready for the long shadows and purposeful footsteps of determined suitors. Glittering masks were optional, but clothes were invariably long, flowing, and fashioned from finest silk, while love would overcome every obstacle.