Dragoons honor, p.10
Dragoon's Honor, page 10
He was superstitious, she knew, because every ship he’d ever named had been shot down, shot up, or crashed somewhere.
Never challenge the gods. That was his take on naming the assault shuttle.
So he flew by his name, instead of a ship.
“Stand by, Del,” a woman replied with a tease in her voice. “Johan is closing off your bay after we make sure all the dumbshits are gone. Thirty seconds we’ll trigger the vac alarms and start the elevators.”
“Roger that,” Del said. “Feeling the need for cookies. Y’all got the munchies over there?”
“I certainly do,” whoever she was replied. “Might not share, though.”
“Kid, that’s between you and God,” Del told her, then cut the line.
Then Del turned to her and his face was as serious as death.
“What kind of trouble are you bringing onto my deck?” he asked simply.
So she told him.
PART 2
Delridge Smith liked to think he’d seen it all. Done it all.
Somedays, he figured he might even be right.
But the Dragoon going after some Neu Berne yahoo in a campaign that sounded an awful lot like an impending honor killing was a new one.
Not the sort of thing he’d been involved in since…oh, yeah.
We’ll skip politely over the parts where folks might take exception. Statutes of limitations tended to be pretty long on that world.
Prissy, little shits with no sense of humor.
They had come to appreciate his definition of honor, though.
The hard way.
“You expecting accidents?” he asked Afia as the elevator finally got them to the top and settled.
Bay was about a hunnert meters down. Closed off behind the sorts of doors that would stop a missile strike on most of the places he’d ever tried. And that was the top level, where shit was at risk. You’d almost need to sequence nuclear detonations if you wanted to hurt Sovereign Nakhimov.
Not that he hadn’t calculated exactly how he’d do it, if pushed.
Always be prepared.
Too many years flying with Sykora manning the forward turret. Woman was always ready for trouble.
“I’m not expecting anything, Del,” Afia huffed in his general direction. “This run is nothing more than a way for me to talk to Ship-Suvi and see what she knows, before the Dragoon proceeds on whatever it is she needs to do. All you’re doing is providing the taxi service.”
He let her have that one.
Kid. Not even thirty. He probably had grandkids her age. God knows he’d done a lot worse things than Javier in those days.
Probably just as well nobody could track him down for alimony payments, even if he probably was the father. Or grandfather.
Piracy had still been a safer bet than matrimony, after all.
Overhead, the clamshell parted finally, revealing the darkness.
Always a surprise. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he kept expecting sunlight when the sky opened up like that. Like the early days flying, out of some of the places where he’d be taking off to strafe and bomb some dumb bastages who hadn’t had any more understanding of what was going on than him.
Del powered things up and smiled.
“Flight Control, this is Del,” he called. “Heading out. Back in about three hours, so set your alarms for cookies.”
“You better believe it,” Antonia replied.
He laughed and switched channels.
“Excalibur, this is flight operations,” he said, a little more serious but not much. “Inbound with cargo. Please let Burdine know that I’d appreciate some fresh cookies to bribe people with, back here on the station, on return.”
“Message transmitted, Del,” Suvi replied.
Ship-Suvi. Not the little version Afia was carrying around in her pocket.
Weird vocabulary, when you needed to number versions of the person you were talking to, but that was life.
Del lifted clear of the platform and went back for more boxes.
PART 3
Suvi had the patience to do this. Javier had first insisted, then made it possible. Helped that he’d assumed she was going to possibly live forever, and needed to be prepared for that.
And for outliving all her current friends.
Wasn’t like former crew members, who retired from the service after twenty or thirty years, then still had many years left and she might run into them later. Suvi had friends now.
Still, she was okay with them off having adventures on that ugly rock, while she sat in the starglow from the eight closest suns and basked.
Plus, put all her Survey years to work. Nobody probably needed this depth of detail for their navigational records, but she’d hit some world soon and file a copy with them. Or several.
Humans liked data. They turned it into information in ways that were occasionally silly, but utterly necessary for some task.
So every rogue planet large enough to reflect any manner of light. All the stars and planets nearby, scanned with every passive anything she could point at them, and the patience to hold those sensors for days without flinching.
And her shard was coming home with Afia.
EXCITEMENT IMPENDING!!!
She wondered what trouble she’d already gotten into, that Afia was bringing her back here to ask questions.
No other reason, since the original plan had called for the woman to remain on the station for several days while working out cargo movements back and forth.
And she’d have left the shard with Djamila or someone otherwise.
So, go-time!
She shifted into her pink polar bear furs and added a flying cap from the primitive days when aeroplanes were canvas and wires.
Risking death every time you turned the engine over and took to the skies.
Then she found herself fidgeting. Del would take nearly twenty minutes to actually fly over, and Suvi didn’t think she should ping the shard to spill the beans. She only knew the two of them were with Del because she scanned him regularly and saw those echoes.
What to do?
Suvi settled for pulling out a mechanical symphony and listening to Piet’s latest work, adding in some jazz filters and an amplified electric upright bass being plucked, just to give it that extra oomph. He wouldn’t mind, as long as she did it in the privacy of her own mind.
Eventually, Del landed. She’d handled it with her docking shard, because nothing particularly weird. Del was the best pilot she’d ever known and made it look routine.
Suvi closed the bay doors and started inflating the bay for operations.
Meanwhile she pinged her shard and got a serious brain dump.
Oh, that’s cool.
She made a list of all the plants that should do well if Javier got seeds, as well as how they might just go ahead and permanently lose some more cargo space to add more plantings for fruit that could turn into wine. She couldn’t drink it, but could absolutely monitor things until it was perfect, every time, then kill the yeast and decant it.
Homemade wine? Lots of it?
Nifty.
Then she took a deep breath and swapped her flight cap for a pith helmet. Put on baggy pants and a loose, white linen shirt for hot weather. Not that she had weather where she was going, but the old vids always put lost civilizations in hot climates, either deserts or jungles, and dressed appropriately.
She considered a machete. And a whip. Settled for a walking stick.
Again, she controlled everything, and didn’t feel the need to introduce a combat game crawl into her research.
Today.
Tomorrow, that kinda sounded like fun. Especially if she added some good randomizers that could keep encounters in a range that matched the skills of the intrepid explorer she might instantiate for herself.
Living forever also meant not going crazy from boredom.
She assumed most of her cousins were simply too dull to ever have that problem.
And off she went.
The old vaults. She brought the lights down and added a few frightened rats as she visualized things in the form of a stone catacomb. Maybe UnderParis, back on Earth.
Down dark corridors with water dripping somewhere. Critters racing madly away from the torch she held in one hand. Then she decided to make it electric instead, and cast a beam ahead of her.
Oh, better. More realistic.
Suvi kept her giggles to herself and found the tomb she wanted.
Hammerfield, himself.
That jackass who’d fled instead of fighting.
Eventually, she’d found the flaw in his code. Some random blip of solar wind had hit the wrong combination of memory sectors and broken things.
EXACTLY why she’d had Afia and Ilan carve a checksum into a wall in front of her pyramid, so she could go back every once in a while and make sure she was still her.
If Javier or anybody ever went deep into her programming again, she’d have to have the wall ground down and resurfaced, but it kept her from worrying about losing herself.
Hammerfield had once been a pretty nice chap. Dull, as they were. Superior, because fleet flagships tended to look down on everyone. Especially Cutter/Probes.
Whatever.
She opened up his vault and stepped in. In her visualization, it was pretty big, but most of the side rooms were dedicated to accidental astronomical research.
You leave a ship parked someplace as interesting as that, recording everything, and you had a lot of nifty data to work with. And that place had been an utter mess astronomically, for all it had been one of the most amazing systems she had ever surveyed.
Again, maybe she’d share it one of these days. The important things weren’t there anymore, and Neu Berne might like it as a place of pilgrimage, though, so on second thought, the folks that would make that journey were exactly the wrong people.
The ones who missed the old days.
Nevermind.
She went into the old stuff.
When she’d returned the last crew, Suvi had had a long chat with a few station systems, updating herself with the sorts of depth of detail that organics really didn’t grok, unless they were nerds like Javier.
Jabril Qadir had been after her time. Or Hammerfield’s anyway. And hers, technically, because she’d been off-duty in long-term standby storage in those days.
Before Javier.
But she had a modern history of Neu Berne. They’d hoped that providing such a thing might induce her to want to stay. To return to duty.
You people never met the crew of Storm Gauntlet, okay? Better here.
Okay, old news. Looking, looking, looking, ah!
Jabril Qadir. Oh, you were a shit, weren’t you? Theft by embezzling. Falsification of records (no higher sin, asshole). Flight from justice. Outstanding warrants, but all of them twenty years old at this point.
Still, Suvi found his image. File had several, because he’d been in the news a bunch at the start, plus the occasional “Whatever happened to…?” article in the newspapers she’d picked up.
Suvi conjured an easel and a chair, swapped her pith helmet for a beret, and proceeded to go to work aging up a picture of what he’d look like today, working with the Dragoon’s detailed descriptions.
Plus twenty years, so fifty-two. Add this much weight, but bulky mass instead of gym work. Add some wrinkles. Let the hair grow out and color it down into the right hue, assuming it was real and not a wig because he was bald, save that the thirty-two-year-old version had a good head of hair.
No male pattern baldness expected.
She rendered him as a bust and included twenty pictures from different angles for Djamila to compare later.
At one point, she looked up when she smelled cookies starting to bake, realizing that she’d been down here for hours of real time.
Girl could get lost in herself when she had a mystery to solve.
Suvi packaged it all up and transmitted it to the shard, compressed down to the point that it would fit. Djamila might need to clear a reader to get the images, but that wasn’t going to be a problem.
Another shard had been talking to Afia in the background. Adding in all those details and feeding them to herself, down in those treasure vaults while she’d worked.
Suvi went ahead and fully invested herself now.
“I just loaded your device with everything I think Djamila will need,” she informed Afia. “Newspapers, images, aged-up predictions. The whole nine meters. Ought to help her decide what to do next. We going hunting?”
“Other you is,” Afia said. “If you did all that, then there’s a pretty good chance that this really is our guy. You included warrant information, in case she ends up shooting the guy dead and gets arrested? Not sure what those station folks would do at that point, but better safe than sorry, ya know?”
“I did,” Suvi replied. “Sovereign Nakhimov probably won’t honor an extradition request, and Javier technically can’t make one, but we both know how charming he can be. The woman he’s been dealing with looks like she might seducible.”
“Presumably,” Afia agreed. “But this is the Dragoon’s game now. He’s going to sit back and make her handle it. Dunno how, but this is Djamila we’re talking about.”
Suvi laughed. The Dragoon was a dangerous human. And she’d known some folks in her time.
It was a pity that Suvi couldn’t hardly do anything from here, isolated by the paranoia of the folks on the station over there.
At least she could send her shard along, with all the tools necessary to help out. She’d be able to hear all the stories from herself later.
Djamila had deadly friends herself.
PART 4
Javier turned to study Hajna and grinned. Djamila didn’t dance. Hajna could have turned pro, had she wanted to.
“I’m on duty,” Hajna replied. “Permanent duty, I’ll remind you. Your idea. You’ll have to bother someone else if you wanted to fool around.”
All that as deadpan as she might get when she was sitting on four sixes and a full pot.
Dangerous babe. The perfect kind.
His grin grew wider.
“Just making sure,” Javier nodded. “Folks will notice when I change killers, so you needed to be down in the zone. Especially if Anargul wants to get frisky. She gave off those vibes.”
“Oh, honey,” Hajna laughed. “I half expected her to start humping your leg.”
Javier shrugged. So had he.
“Next up, some gambling,” he announced, looking up and noting that Zakhar was ignoring him, while Bethany appeared to be, but in a way that let her hear everything. Sascha was sleeping in to spell Hajna later. The Gunbunnies were more or less rotating on and off duty in pairs against need. Djamila had disappeared. Afia was running back to the ship.
He was in another of Adrian’s amazing wardrobe outfits, this one with a cloak added. Navy blue but a cotton blend as light as silk for indoors.
Stylin’ more than anything, since weather wasn’t an issue.
He settled the cloak and headed out the hatch.
Hotel resort. Upper end, because he had the money to be in the area reserved for VIP VIPs, when you needed a whole suite just for your staff.
When your room service people had room service people.
It always amazed him that Behnam had turned out so nice and agreeable, having been raised in such a place. However, she’d also gone to war with the rest of her relatives as a teenager and held everything against all comers in the decades since, so he supposed that she’d learned not to take anything for granted.
He had a pocket full of ten drachma notes for tips.
All part of a legend he needed to build, so that everybody was looking at him.
Hallways utterly interchangeable with other places he’d been. Maybe done by the same designer, or at least from the same parts catalog. Carpet that swallowed sound. Lights in that evening mood where you were relaxed and ready to go out and party.
Main casino floor when he got there was good to simply walk through, but Javier didn’t linger. Circled it once like a cat, but that was to smell all of his food options for later, and note which ones had lines and which seemed dead.
Always trust the locals at a truckstop. If there aren’t any, the food isn’t any good and you should keep going.
And most of this space was dedicated to small-ante games and machines where you sat and pushed buttons randomly for hours. Or at least until your money ran out. Or your butt fell asleep.
Ugh.
Hajna stayed close, but not too close. Lull in the middle of his night, when he’d normally have gone to bed, but stalking had felt like a better idea.
So he walked. Memorized everything against firefights later. You never knew with the Dragoon and her people.
Vaulted ceiling overhead for no other reason than that cathedral feel. Done well. Someone had hired the right architects, that much was certain.
Eventually, he meandered on. Past the two water parks, with and without clothing depending on your social mores.
Once upon a time, he’d expected impending nudity to break the Dragoon. She’d risen to the challenge instead. Kept rising.
Felt like he’d walked around four kilometers when Javier finally found what he was looking for. Spiraling down in, because he’d known where it was, but wanted to take his time getting there.
Gave folks time to be prepared for him.
Somehow, he wasn’t surprised when Amina Anargul showed up as he was arriving.
She’d dressed looser a notch in the last few hours. Let her hair down, as it were, wearing a red dress a little less tight and more flowing, in the way it showed off the inner curves of her breasts and highlighted her thigh muscles.
He came to rest directly in front of her with a smile.
“Madam,” Javier addressed himself to her, right on the edge of invading her personal space.
Without invitation. As yet.
“Prince Javier,” she replied. “Looking for a game of chance?”
