Low Port Part 26

"They're rich enough to buy your cargo, though; how'd that happen?"

"Oh, the local fauna's good for scents and flavors; real complex stuff, easier to grow it than synthesize it. They've got whole plantations of weird plants they export."

"Sounds interesting," Jeffers said, with a glance at the furb.a.l.l.s. That explained what these things would be doing.

"Yeah, and it gets lonely out there in the backwater plantations, so they'll buy fancy pets. Now, do you have the papers ready? Got the fees figured out?"

"Just about..."

Tyler's com twittered.

"Yes?"

"Maintenance, Captain. Looks like you've got a blown balancer."

Tyler grimaced. "Which one?"

"Portside, number three."

"That son of a b.i.t.c.h. I'll be right down."

"I could just transmit..."

"No, I want to see it." She turned to Jeffers. "Show me where to thumb, and tell me what it's going to cost to get out of here as soon as Maintenance has my drive working."

Jeffers decided that he didn't want to drag this out. He held out the display and pointed. "Right there. And I think that, say, sixty kay will cover everything and get you cleared."

"Sixty kay? Try twenty."

"Well, I was allowing for extras, you know how it is. Say fifty."

"Thirty five. The Telemachans aren't that rich."

"I can't be sure to get it all done for less than forty."

"Forty's good enough. Give me your card."

Jeffers held out the card, and accepted the funds transfer. Then he took back the display and tapped more keys.

Tyler glared at him. "I thought you said that would cover it."

"It will," he said, not sure himself why he was delaying. "I still need to do the data entry, that's all. It'll just be a minute; I'll be out of here long before they have a new balancer aligned."

"Fine. You know the way out. Don't bother the furb.a.l.l.s, okay?"

"Sure."

She wasn't even nervous; he marveled at that. She hadn't asked whether the furb.a.l.l.s had done anything, wasn't worried about what he might see or do. She had weighed him in her mind and found him harmless.

Jeffers stood and watched as Tyler once again descended out of sight; the minute she was gone he reactivated the camera jammer and turned back to the furb.a.l.l.s.

"Listen," he said, only then realizing what he was going to do, and what he would say, "this is your s.h.i.+p, you understand? You bought it, and hired Captain Tyler to fly it for you, and then she chained you up and you don't know why. Got it?"

The furb.a.l.l.s exchanged glances.

"No," one of them said. "It isn't true."

"No, it's not true, but it should be, and you tell anyone who asks you on Telemachus that's what's happened, and they'll make sure that you can go home and that your families will be safe."

"I don't understand," the reddish one said.

"Just do it!" Jeffers said. "If anyone asks. If no one asks, forget I said anything."

"But..."

"I don't have time to argue," he said. He turned and headed for the ladder.

He glanced over his shoulder as he descended, and saw the furb.a.l.l.s looking at one another in confusion. He hoped they could manage their role-but it shouldn't be too demanding. All they had to do was act like wronged innocents-and that's what they were.

He started working up the new manifest while waiting for the airlock to cycle, but didn't finish it until back in his own office. It was a bit tricky; he had to make it look as if his subst.i.tute was the original, and the freight list a fake pasted over it. He also had to make sure that the Confederacy officials at the port on Telemachus wouldn't miss the revised version.

It was a safe bet that Captain Tyler would never check it, but he didn't dare just leave the modified version out in the open; the Confederacy would never believe that...

At last he was satisfied, and transmitted the files, along with a customs clearance for the Lord Lucan-a deliberately faulty customs clearance, so that the Confederacy would double check it.

If it worked-and he thought it would-when Tyler landed at the port on Telemachus and had her doc.u.ments checked, it would look as if she had been hired to fly sixty pa.s.sengers to the Contact Authority on Sirius II, and had instead kidnapped them to Telemachus III to be sold as slaves, with altered records calling them pets.

He hoped that the Confederacy officials on Telemachus III were less corrupt than his coworkers on Musas.h.i.+. They should be; the Confederacy had a reputation for clean, if ruthless, administration.

Tyler must have had some way to get past the customs officials there, though. Would the "pets" designation have been enough? Perhaps she knew who to bribe. But the risk letting a manifest this damaged through...

Well, Jeffers had done his best. He could only hope it was enough. The more he thought about it, the more he wanted those furb.a.l.l.s safely returned home. He wished there were a way to find out what would happen to them on Telemachus III, but he doubted the news would ever reach Musas.h.i.+.

An hour later he watched the launch, wondering whether he had done enough-and why he had done anything.

He hadn't known he had any real scruples left, but obviously he did.

As he watched the glowing dot vanish into the heavens he wondered whether it might be time to find another line of work, perhaps even time to get off Musas.h.i.+ once and for all; Musas.h.i.+ Port was clearly not a good place for a man with scruples.

He had tried for years to do without them, but he had discovered today that there were some he was not willing to lose, and the discovery was strangely comforting.

If he settled somewhere new, he would try to do better than he had here, to be a better person. He wondered how honest he could be if he worked at it.

To his own surprise, he thought he would enjoy finding out.

SPINACRE'S WAR.

Lee Martindale

Several times daily, Milos Spinacre engaged in a near-religious ritual: wis.h.i.+ng, with devout fervor, that he'd taken his chances with that general tribunal. However badly it might have gone for him-and his counsel had been adamant that it would have gone badly indeed-nothing could have been worse than the bargain into which he'd been pleaded. Commander of Ysbet Tertiary until further notice, with further notice, he was told with something akin to glee on the part of the ranking officer of the tribunal, having to do with a mythical subcrust place of punishment and the presence of something called "snowflakes."

That a man of Spinacre's self claimed intelligence and stature should be consigned to an unremarkable planet within reasonable galactic proximity to practically nowhere was bad enough. That he'd been a.s.signed command of the least of three s.p.a.ceports, faded memoirs of a war fought and finished more than two decades before was, in Spinacre's opinion, deliberate circ.u.mnavigation of the Conventions regarding cruel and unusual punishments. And further proof, in his mind, that the command ranks of s.p.a.ceMil were populated by ignorant pretenders nowhere near his equals.

Nearly as often, he ran the mental catalog of the ills that plagued his "command." Equipment so old that it broke if you looked at it hard and so obsolete that requisitions for replacement parts were, more often than not, replied to with disbelief that any such piece of equipment had ever existed. A distinct lack of respect from his counterparts at the other stations-one a convicted murderer, the other so profoundly mad that he was frequently visited by the writers of scholarly psychiatric tomes and recreational fright fiction. And then there was his personnel: a fairly even mix of those with summary files that made his own look positively pristine and new, at-the-very-bottom-of-their-cla.s.ses-yet-incorrigibly-by-the-book graduates who amazed Spinacre each morning by having survived the night.

Worse than these, by many orders of magnitude, was the native quarter that sat like an open sore immediately outside the station perimeter. It may have once had a name in the indigenous language of the area that translated to something hopeful and beautiful, bestowed by founders drawn by the construction of Tertiary and dreams of profitable commerce. But everything in the files, every reference he heard or read, called the collection of narrow alleys, shabby habitations, bars, bordellos, and black markets BackGate. And Milos Spinacre hated it.

More than half of the problems that crossed his desk had something to do with the place. It was the destination of choice for deserters, not to mention the source of most of the injuries and all of the cases of food poisoning, alcohol poisoning and s.e.xually transmitted diseases treated by Tertiary's medical facility. Central considered the losses in manpower, man-hours and material his fault. And, thanks to the flat and cavalier refusal of the riff-raff who inhabited the place to pay taxes and bribes, Milos wasn't even able to turn the customary profit.

Then one day there came curtly worded and nearly identical communications from the commanders of both Ysbet Primary and Ysbet Secondary. An inbound s.h.i.+p was being diverted to his facility, carrying "troops grievously wounded in action against Elasian Aggression. You are under orders to see them safely and quietly settled in off-station facilities for the purpose of recuperation, rehabilitation and resettlement into civilian life."

Spinacre hadn't even known there was a war going on, had no idea who the Elasians were or what const.i.tuted their aggression. But he had finally found a use for BackGate: he'd dump his cripples there.

Whether by design or happenstance, BackGate's thoroughfares were little more than alleys, barely wide enough for two people on foot to pa.s.s each other and far too narrow to accommodate even the smallest of mechanized transports in the station. So it was that BackGate's newest residents arrived in equinid-drawn carts and were dumped into the middle of what laughingly pa.s.sed for its town square like so many sacks of spoiled grain. They numbered slightly fewer than forty and were a varied lot. Men and women of a number of human and near human races, ranging in age from barely old enough to enlist to old enough to have been retired long before sustaining the injuries that brought them here. Their one commonality seemed to be that those injuries were of a nature to render them, in the parent opinion of their military superiors, no longer useful.

The last cart was hardly out of sight when a middle-aged man braced himself on the shoulders of two of his companions and pushed himself upright. Balancing on his remaining leg, he looked around much as one might reconnoiter hostile territory, alert to any movement or sound that would give him information, prepared for any attack that might come. "Report," he called back without looking.

"Squad One okay."

"Squad Two okay."

"Squad Three okay."

"Squad Four okay. Sarge, what's going on?"

"Just a guess, but I'd say we've been 'resettled.' I want..." He chopped off as three people stepped out of a doorway and began walking toward the group. "Heads up. We've got company." He heard rustling behind him as those who could stand did so, moving to positions protective of those who could not.

Two men and one woman surveyed the group as they approached. It was the woman who spoke first. "Which one of you is Billem Simmons?"

"That would be me, ma'am."

The woman beamed a broad smile. "Flossa Menderos, Mr. Simmons. Welcome to Ysbet.''

"This has certainly been a day for surprises," Simmons said after taking a long pull from his mug of hot soup.

Flossa, sitting across from him at the table, chuckled low and comfortably. "You're surprised they abandoned you like that."

Now it was Simmons turn to chuckle. "Hardly. Anyone with family or planetary ties had been s.h.i.+pped home already. We're what was left. No, what surprised me-and I mean no disrespect-is that we weren't all killed right off the bat, right in the middle of the square."

Flossa smiled knowingly. "Station personnel had a few things to say about BackGate, did they?"

"They talked among themselves. Apparently they were under the impression that missing limbs or blindness meant we were all deaf, too."

That drew a snort from Flossa before she continued, "Well, we do cultivate a certain amount of rumor and innuendo. It affords us a limited level of protection against... interference."

Simmons thought back a few hours to what had taken place immediately after Flossa had introduced herself as "mayor of this little corner of Paradise." One of the two men with her had signaled, and a dozen or so people had converged on the square from the surrounding buildings. A moment of tension, but it was soon apparent that the locals were there to offer help as it was needed. Mostly it wasn't; the "squads" in Simmons' company had organized themselves based on mutual a.s.sistance. Those with two working legs carried or braced those without, those who could see guided those who couldn't, and so on.

Within a few minutes, they were being settled into a single-story warehouse, or to be more precise, slightly more than half of a single story warehouse. The front part, accessed from a narrow alley, functioned as just that, which s.h.i.+elded the activities, and people, in the back. It was also warmer, drier and more comfortable than what most of the military folk had seen most of the time. Within the hour, local medics were checking over the new arrivals while other residents carried in pots of soup and platters of meat and bread and started getting everyone fed.

"Well, for whatever it's worth," Billem said as he raised his soup mug toward Flossa in a kind of salute, "my people and I are grateful. I don't know how just yet, but we'll pay you and yours back."

Over the course of the next few weeks, the castoffs concentrated on healing, growing stronger, and catching up on things like regular meals and adequate sleep under the care of their new "neighbors." They also started settling into new lives, thanks to what Billem thought of as BackGate's Rehabilitation and Reintegration Program. He'd spent a lifetime in an occupation where disabling injuries were one-way tickets "out." Flossa's people had taken a different, often creative, approach. One by one, the former soldiers found jobs and trades, new homes and new lives. One by one, they melted into BackGate and became part of it.

"You've pulled off a miracle," Billem told her one afternoon, lifting his gla.s.s to her in a toast as they sat at the table that had become their "command post" and would soon be returned to wherever it had come from, along with the cots and kitchen equipment. They'd just seen the last of his people settled in.

"We've pulled off a miracle," she corrected, returning the toast and looking around at the deserted barracks. "Well, almost. It's your turn now."

"Don't worry about me."

Flossa was quiet for a moment before she said gently, "Billem, all your people are taken care of. You can stand down now."

"And do what?" Billem pushed himself off the chair, reaching for the crutches one of his people had made for him in her new trade of woodworking. "I enlisted two days out of secondary. No pre-enlistment jobs, no fall-back trade ... h.e.l.l, no hobbies! I've never been anything but a soldier and I never wanted to be anything else. That's it."

Flossa watched him pace back and forth. "Is it?"

Billem glared at her. "Yes."

"Just like it was with about half your people. You were in on those interviews; you heard every single one of them say exactly the same thing you're saying now."

"Yes, but..."

"Yes, but nothing. You've spent the better part of your life in charge of groups of people. Making sure they got fed, making sure they got clothed. Making sure they got the equipment they needed when they needed it and coming up with fall-back plans when they didn't. You've planned strategy and given orders and watched backs. You've probably managed to keep newborn lieutenants alive without disavowing them of the notion that they were in charge. And you've likely handled discipline problems and worse-"

"Yeah, but..."

"And you've probably been in more than a few bars and a fair share of wh.o.r.ehouses in your time."

"Yeah, so?"

"So I've got a job for you. Helping to run mine."

Spinacre waited a full six months before starting an "official" investigation into the fate of the cripples he'd sent into BackGate. A month before that, he'd sent out feelers-by way of spies-to make certain that the result of any investigation would serve his purposes.