Andre Norton - Derelict For Trade

"Let’s each grab a sleeprod, and meet at the outer lock in—two minutes."

Tooe gave a chirp of anticipation, and rocketed up the ladder.

Rip followed more slowly.

Dane dove at the down-ladder and hand-over-handed himself down to the engine level. As he expected, he found Johan Stotz at his console, deep in a multidimensional flowchart of the power flow in the Queen , from engines out. To Dane it looked like a multicolored sea urchin with a blue-white star at its heart, radiating out crooked, angular spines of light that shaded through the rainbow to red as they tapered out to nothingness. For Stotz, he realized, it was like reading a simple map.

Johan Stotz was a tall, thin, taciturn fellow only a few years older than Dane, though sometimes Dane felt that Johan was closer to Van Ryke’s age. He was by nature quiet, and he seemed completely absorbed in engineering; more than once, when Jellico had set down on some pleasant world and gave the crew leave for R and R, it turned out later Stotz’s idea of relaxation and enjoyment was to travel halfway across a continent to attend a seminar on "The Macronucleic Interface to Ship’s Power: Friend or Foe?"

He never talked about his past—none of them did, really. But Dane remembered very well that first day when they found Tooe. He knew it must have taken some formidably trained knowledge of microgee movement to lay hold of that quick little Rigelian.

"You know null-grav sports?" Dane asked.

Stotz blinked once, his brows rising in mild surprise. "I was pretty good at school," he conceded.

"How good?" Dane asked.

Stotz grinned faintly. "Paid my way through by playing Nuller Rugby."

Dane whistled. That meant he wasn’t just good, he was lethal. "That’s just what I need," he said, and he briefly outlined what Tooe had proposed. "We’re going now, taking a sleeprod. Are you in?"

He half expected Stotz to bow out. He just never got involved in rowdy stuff, at least while Dane had been on board.

But now his slight grin stretched, and with a quick gesture he saved his work and shut down his console.

"Lead on," he said.

They stopped to get a pair of sleeprods, then started up to the outer lock.

There he found not just the captain waiting, but a good part of the crew. Another surprise awaited Dane: Rip, Tooe, and Frank Mura stood on the dock. Mura’s face was utterly impassive, and he carried no sleeprod, but Dane noted a short, thin object just outlined in Frank’s tunic pocket. Dane guessed it had to be the weird little ultrasonic instrument Frank called a feedle pipe.

The crew watched them go in silence; to all intents and purposes anyone else on the dock would see a group setting out for one of the concourses for some entertainment.

But anyone spying, Dane thought seconds later, would be puzzled by their disappearance. They dropped rapidly through a one-person access hatch that Tooe had shown him earlier, and started along a hidden route.

At a juncture, Dane encountered his third surprise. In the midst of Tooe’s klinti members, as though protected by them, Dane recognized the long, fragile form belonging to Nunku.

Rip snickered tohimself as he followed Dane Thorson through a barren service adit, the odd beings in Tooe’s klinti methodically zooming ahead, checking in all directions, then waving them on to the next segment of the service transit, just like space pirates in some holovid.

Under the circumstances, the huge sign in three languages and three symbols was more funny than menacing:

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

More than that prompted the bubbling humor, fast and unstoppable as a springtide stream: Ali’s lengthy, colorful, and fluent reaction to his being forced to stay behind. The captain had been adamant. Until they knew for certain that the Monitors of Harmony were in league with the enemy, they would keep their promise, and Kosti and Kamil were not permitted to go anywhere but between the two ships.

Another cause for laughter was picturing what Kosti would say when he returned and found out what he’d missed.

But foremost was the surreal sense that Rip got when he watched the free-fall circus evolving around them. Now he saw Nunku’s beauty, an eldritch sort based on economy of line and motion: an eel-maiden moving in a sea of micro-gravity that was slowly drowning him, the earthbound one. Not only did he feel like he was in a holovid, now he was living a fairy tale.

Rip fought back a snort-spasm of hilarity. He knew that he should stop laughing, that he was probably closer to hysteria than he realized, but he just couldn’t. Luckily none of the others paid him the slightest attention; Dane was concentrating on the whispered reports in some other language that the klinti made from time to time, and Mura just ignored him. Stotz gave Rip a faint smile once, then he too ignored him, instead moving with a speed and control of effort that inspired instant admiration in Rip. He’d been amazed when Dane showed up with Johan, of all people, but now Rip could see why he was along—though how Dane had known to ask was still a mystery.

They traversed a good portion of the dock area before stopping behind

an adit at one of the maglevs that stayed in null grav. His antic mood was wearing off, eroded by the occasional disorientation of free fall and the strangeness of the Spinner. Now that Nunku was just a weird girl with spidery-thin arms and legs protruding from a ragged robe, some of his humor dissipated. But the obvious respect the others treated her with made it apparent she wasn’t just a mutant who hadn’t a decent change of clothes, or access to enough water to launder what she had. It was hard to look at her— and harder to imagine what her life must be like.

A closer glance at that pale, mottled skin sticking out of the tattered, old-fashioned djellaba made Rip wish suddenly for wide spaces, fresh air, and gravity.

The fresh air and wide spaces, at least, they got. After the scouts had watched for several long minutes, finally they signaled the all-clear, and the assault circus (as Rip privately termed this odd combination of beings) hastily emerged from the adit.

In quiet, law-abiding form they boarded the maglev.

Beings, mostly Kanddoyds, crowded on and off the maglev for the few stops they needed to make. Just before Rip and his party debarked, a group of Traders came on, several of them saluting the Queen's men before one of them scrutinized Dane and nudged one of his partners. A quick whisper, and the other Traders moved with more haste than necessary to the other side of the pod, studiously avoiding looking in their direction.

Though Dane didn’t react, this effectively killed the remainder of Rip’s sense of humor, his conviction that what he was doing wasn’t real, and filled him with an anger-laced sense of purpose.

After waiting a few seconds he, Stotz, Mura, and Dane followed Tooe’s group off, so it wasn’t immediately obvious they were all together, and they drifted down the concourse, looking off at the winking chains of lights along the Kanddoyd buildings.

By a circuitous route they approached a fine building with a fern garden carefully tended round it. One by one they followed one another behind a sheltering screen of ferns, and ducked into another service adit.

This one was narrow, with pipes and conduits lining all the walls. An

aggressive antiseptic smell didn’t quite cover the dank odor of waste on its way to the recycler.

Rip’s sense of purpose got an adrenaline boost when one of the scouts stopped, listening to a wrist com, and chattered to the others.

"Fast!" Tooe squeaked. "Fast! Fast! Monitors changing shift—"

They bounded from wall to wall, zooming up the narrow accessways.