DERELICT RUN
(Part 6 of 8)
They gathered around, torches illuminating the contents.
“The... lowest… hells?” Dalibor said.
“Is—is this all—is this all like this?” Feraji gasped.
Mercutio turned off his torch and shoved it in his belt, and opened another box and another. Yellow gleamed back from their lights.
“Hooo-ly cats!” crowed Krimulo. “Oh, ho, ho, ho!”
“Oh, this ain’t good,” Mercutio said. “Fika fiko, look at this, boys. You think this is good news?”
“How’s it bad?”
Mercutio reached into a small chest and hefted out a bar of gold. It weighed no more than a large orange now, but the inertia made it weirdly hard to drag up and hard to stop when in motion. “Where’d all this come from?”
“The war,” Dalibor said automatically.
“Yah, no merdo, Armsman,” Mercutio snapped. “Look at us, idiot. We’re unofficially on a dead Provs ship at the north pole of an unvisited moon, packed with gold, and the Stationmaster and the commandant sent us. At two hundred below. Knowing we’d find it. How isn’t this bad?”
“The brig would be warmer,” Maltego said. “Wish I was there now.”
Mercutio put the bar down and closed the lids. “What now?”
“Take it back to Aphrodite Station,” Dalibor said slowly.
“Uh-huh. What happens to us then?”
They had drifted away from the stack of loot, spoke hushed, as though the Stationmaster could overhear them.
“We might end up in the brig again,” Mercutio said.
“Might! Yah?” his armsman said.
“And we might end up dead.”
“Might!” Batalo said angrily. He kicked the bulkhead and nearly sent himself tumbling.
The pilot buzzed in Mercutio’s ear, and he switched to the transport channel. “Yah?”
“Warrant?”
“What is it?”
“Got bad news.” She sounded strained.
“Oh?”
“She’s damaged. I’m gonna have trouble taking off.”
“Explain that part,” he said, his stomach tightening.
“As in can’t. When we came down rough, we broke attitude jets that I need to push her clear of the moon before I engage engines. So we won’t.”
“Won’t at all?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s great.”
“Not really.”
“... All right, sit tight,” he said. “I’ve got a situation here, too.”
She made a noise that might have been a laugh. “I guess we all got problems.”
“Yah, I guess we do. I’ll get back to you.”
“Aye that.”
He switched to the unit channel. They were arguing, of course.
“Shut it,” he said. “How much you think is here, Dalibor?”
Dalibor opened a box and moved a bar. “Ah, twelve to a box. Five boxes high, three boxes deep, three boxes long.” He did sums on his arm tablet. “Forty-five boxes, five hundred and forty bars, they’re stamped as twelve point five kilos each, sixty-seven hundred and fifty kilos.”
“Seven tonnes of gold,” Krimulo whispered. “Holy Lady.”
“I don’t even know what that’s worth,” Dalibor said.
“More than all of us put together. Six conscripts and two career idiots and one bint pilot,” Mercutio said.
“Land,” Maltego said. “Houses.”
“Women,” Vesperto said, pragmatic. “Booze.”
“And we won’t get squat. And we got another problem. We’re stuck here.”
Six helmeted faces stared.
“What?” said Feraji.
“Ship came down hard. She says we can’t get off again.”
“Stupid bint!” shouted Batalo. “Merdo! Fiku putino! Women on a spaceship are bad luck!”
“Ain’t her fault,” Mercutio said slowly. “But we gotta figure this out.”
“Call the station, talk to the commandant,” Dalibor said.
Mercutio thought about that for a minute. “All right. I’m going back over; drop the commandant a line. Dalibor, let’s pretend we’re doing this. Move this gold off the muster deck and out the emergency hatch.”
“Yah,” Dalibor said, gloomy. “Right that.”
“Get busy, I’ll be back.”
The warrant headed back across the crater, around the central ridge, and to where the Calabrono-9 lay crooked. He climbed into the passenger cabin.
“Oi, pilot,” Mercutio said.
She was in the cabin, doing sums and angles on the instruments. “Yah,” she said.
Her math was incomprehensible to him. “How’s it look?”
“Looks bad. I don’t see any way around it. If I fire the drive, we hit the side of the crater, assuming we don’t rip the under hull off. Guess what happens?”
“We die.”
“Smart, for militia.”
“We ain’t dumb apes.”
“Coulda fooled me. We can repressurize. I figure the tokamak can keep her warm for weeks, though,” she said. “So we could wait out twenty hours easy. I’ll call the Station, but I’m screwed. Lose my license, lose work.” She shrugged. “Lose everything, maybe. Indentured again. But I don’t wanna die. We’ll call. We’ll live.”
Mercutio sat in the other chair. “Maybe. Maybe.”
“Maybe?” She looked at him hard. He saw her eyes and a hint of her dark face behind the helmet plate. “What’s maybe about, Warrant?”
“There’s seven tonnes of gold on that ship over there.”
She took a moment. “You’re joking.”
“I wish I was.”
“…Why?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter?”
“What is that ship?”
“It’s a Provs vessel.”
“A five-hundred-year-old ship with seven tonnes of gold?”
“Yah.”
“Right over there?”
“About the size of it.”
She beat lightly on the instrument panel with her right gauntlet. “Merdo, fairy-stories, Warrant. Ships that can’t make station call but fly through the night forever. Asteroidal treasure. Aliens. Kid stuff.”
“I’ve seen it. It’s real.”
“Who sent you here?”
“Who wrote your requisition?”
“Port Control. I got the word there was a job. No one’s name, just Control.”
“That usual?”
“Yah, generally.”
“Sloppy. Well,” he said, “we were in the brig, and Commandant told us we’d sit there unless we did a job. Stationmaster was not happy about us smashing up stuff.”
“Stationmaster, eh. Then that’s who it is. Well, he’ll want his gold, won’t he? I’m calling in.”
She closed a switch on the comms controls. “Station, this is Calabrono-9, do you read? Over.” She waited. The silence lengthened. “Six-second delay each way,” she said.
“Yah.”
“Station—” She paused and clacked and reclacked the switch. “Station, this is Calabrono-9, do you read?”
Mercutio watched her manipulate the comms and try again. “Station, this is Calabrono-9, do you read?”
He crossed his arms.
“Station, this is Calabrono-9, do you read?”
The silence was eloquent.
“Warrant,” she said, “we got another problem.”
“Yah?”
“I can’t get a signal out of this crater.”
(See you next Thursday morning!)