Where the Ships Die Read online

  Cards hit the table, voices were raised in protest, and the teenager won again. The room felt warm and the chips wavered as he raked them in. Servos whirred as the droid dealt, and for reasons the teenager couldn't fathom, he felt lucky. And sure enough, after the others collected their cards, and were checking them over, he discovered he had three planets, a rocket, and an asteroid. The rocket morphed to a comet and the asteroid dissolved to a planet. Now he had clones... or four of a kind. The second highest hand there was.

  The others must have held fairly good cards, though, because the pot grew and grew until half of Dorn's newfound wealth sat at the center of the table, and sweat soaked through his clothes. That's when disaster struck. The XT produced a pair, and Harlan had triplets, but Van Kirk blew them away. The older man had a star system consisting of a rocket, asteroid, planet, star, and comet. It was the equivalent of a straight flush—and beat the youngster's four of a kind.

  Dorn felt fear gnaw his belly as Van Kirk pulled the chips toward his chest and built orderly stacks. The teenager considered dropping out of the game, but couldn't bring himself to do it. No, the older man had what amounted to his money, and he would win it back.

  Hours passed, and while there were no further disasters on the scale of the first one, Dorn suffered a long series of minor losses, was forced to buy more chips, and wound up broke except for the fifty hidden in his boot.

  But his luck had to change, or so it seemed to Dorn, so he stayed and waited for a break. It came at two in the morning. Dorn was looking at another so-so hand when the dealer droid slipped him a supernova, quickly followed by another, which was nothing less than remarkable, since the deck contained only two of them. Both cards were wild, meaning they could assume any value he gave them. Due to the fact that Dorn had three asteroids, he could claim the equivalent of a full house, the third highest hand possible.

  Dorn struggled to hide his elation, bet, and bet again. The others, confident that they could beat the boy, went along. The pot grew larger and larger. Finally, certain of victory, and eager to capitalize on his hand, the teenager pushed the last of his chips toward the center of the table, pulled the fifty out of his boot, and tossed the gold Voss Lines pin on top of the pile. The stacks crumbled—giving way to a red, white, and blue chip avalanche.

  There was a moment of silence while the others studied their hands. "I'm probably crazy," Harlan said slowly, "but I want to see what the boy's got. Or doesn't have. I'll see the last bet and call."

  More chips were pushed toward the center of the table as cards went face up. Their eyes went to Dorn. He smiled, laid his hand out for all to see, and reached for the pot. He had just started to pull it in when Van Kirk grabbed his arm.' 'Wait a minute, son. A straight beats three of a kind, so what the hell are you doing?"

  Dorn was still formulating a reply, still celebrating his win, while his eyes went to the cards. What he saw sent ice water through his veins. The asteroids remained as they were, but the supernovas were gone, replaced by a rocket and a planet. But that was impossible! That was ...

  Dorn came to his feet and looked around the table. Blood pounded in his ears, faces wavered, and his hands shook. "All right... which one of you did it? Empty your pockets. Someone used a remote on my cards."

  No one moved, and Miss Carmen materialized on the far side of the table. She wore a red evening gown and the arm serpent he'd seen earlier. Two men, both larger than Dorn, stood to either shoulder. She looked cold and disapproving. "Good evening. Do we have a problem of some sort?"

  "Yes we do!" Dorn said emphatically. "I had three asteroids, plus two supernovas. Then, just as I went to collect the pot, the novas disappeared."

  Miss Carmen raised a carefully drawn eyebrow. "Really? What are you suggesting? That you were cheated?"

  "That's exactly what I'm suggesting," Dorn said grimly. "Search these beings ... one of them used an illegal device to alter my cards."

  Harlan wore a smirk, Van Kirk shook his head sadly, and Pennuli glared from deeply set sockets. It was as if they'd seen the whole drama before and knew how it would go.

  The proprietress frowned delicately. "That's a serious allegation, Citizen Voss, and one that I take seriously, especially in light of the fact that it reflects on my customers and the cantina itself. First, allow me to say that no one, absolutely no one, gives orders to me, especially the drunken sons of bankrupt space trash. That's correct, Citizen Voss, I checked on your has-been family, and you are broke.

  "In addition, it might interest you to know that the Cantina Roja is equipped with some rather sophisticated detection systems, so sophisticated that devices like the one you describe are discovered instantly, and confiscated moments later. You lost fair and square. Rudy and Sal will see you to the door. Don't come back."

  Dorn tried to move, tried to respond, but discovered that the alcohol had slowed his reflexes. The bouncers moved with practiced ease, lifted the youngster off the floor, and elbow-carried him toward the kitchen. Hot, steamy air parted in front of his face as people in white turned to stare. A door opened, and he saw lights on the far side of the river. He barely had time to shout "No!" before being lifted into the air and thrown over the railing.

  Time seemed to slow. Dorn remembered his previous visit, the river, and the exposed mud flats. Was the tide out or in? Would he land in mud or in the water? And what about pilings?

  The fall ended. Shockingly cold water enveloped him and filled his boots. The boots, plus the water that soaked the teenager's clothes, weighted him down. Precious moments passed while the current pulled Dorn along. Curiously enough it was his old nemesis, Coach Mahowski, who intervened to save him. The voice, clipped and gruff, sounded in his head.

  "This is a swimming pool, Mr. Voss, the purpose of which is not to provide you with entertainment, or provide the skills necessary to impress members of the opposite sex, but to help you survive in the element from which your ancestors crawled millions of years ago. The first rule to remember is that similar to most forms of excrement, underclassmen float, and that being the case, are equipped to survive in the water. What they lack, during the earlier years anyway, is brains—those amazing organs of thought, which, if employed properly, enable young men them to think their way out of most emergencies, or better yet, prevent them from happening in the first place."

  Well, it was way too late to prevent the situation that Dorn found himself in, but it wasn't too late to think, and that meant losing some weight.

  It was pitch black beneath the surface of the river, the current spun Dorn in circles, and his lungs were about to burst. It took a true act of will to bend over, pull his boots off, rip the buttons from his water logged jacket, and work his way out of it. The results were nearly instantaneous.

  The clothing fell away and Dorn rose, propelled by Mahowski's flutter kick and the strength of his arms. They broke the surface first followed by his head and shoulders. Dorn spit foul-tasting water out of his mouth, inhaled great draughts of air, and kicked to keep his head up. He fought to get his bearings while an eddy spun him around. A long line of lights wobbled downstream, but before he could speculate on what they were, the river, working in concert with the outgoing tide, pulled the teenager over a series of rock ledges and into the blackness below.

  The water stung as it made its way into countless cuts and scratches. His shoulder hurt where a rock had banged into it. Dorn ignored the pain, headed for the eastern shore, but didn't make much headway. He went ten feet downstream for each foot of lateral progress. The lights grew brighter and were overhead when the youngster hit the fishing net.

  Later he would learn that silvers, a species of ocean-dwelling eel, liked to ride the incoming tide upriver to feed on the tiny organisms that flourished where fresh water mixed with salt—until the flow reversed itself, and the silvers were carried downstream. It was a cycle the locals took full advantage of by stretching nets across the river and harvesting as many of the eels as they could. But that knowledge would come
later. This was now ... and Dorn was in trouble.

  Eels thumped into the boy's back, then pinned him against the net. Most of the silvers were one or two feet long and packed a wallop. He wondered what they ate and hoped it wasn't flesh. Dorn grabbed double handfuls of the net, looked upward, and saw a rickety bridge. The scrap lumber groaned under the force of the water and vibrated like a tuning fork. The teenager pushed his toes through the open mesh and tried to climb. He heard voices and shouted at the top of his lungs. "Help! I'm down here! Pull me up!"

  There was a good deal of excited yelling followed by the appearance of a primitive fish-oil lantern and a pair of unshaven faces. One of them boasted a nose that had been flattened and reflattened in a long series of barroom brawls. "Well, look what we got here Packie, an extra big eel. I told you the sacrifice would work."

  Packie, a man with high cheekbones and a gaunt face, remained unconvinced. "Sez you. Killin' a dog don't make no difference. It was dumb luck, that's all. The priests drink your money and laugh while you work. Come on, let's haul him out."

  Strong, sinewy arms reached down to grab Dorn's wrists, pulled, and lifted him free of the eel-packed waters. The bridge was two planks wide, and it sagged under the combined weight of three people. The teenager looked down into water that churned with silvery life. He was about to thank the men when they grabbed his wrists. The cord went on with amazing speed. Dorn turned, tried to run, but was clubbed to his knees. He felt dizzy and allowed his forehead to rest against the water-slicked wood.

  The first man shook his head disapprovingly and slapped the billy club against his left palm. It had dispatched a lot of eels and could easily break a skull. The lantern hung from a pole and cast long, hard shadows. "And where the hell do you think you're going, eel-boy? We caught you fair and square. Put the ropes on, Packie, the silvers are waitin', and we got work to do."

  It took the better part of two hours for the fishermen to harvest their catch, remove the net, and load everything, Dorn included, onto a makeshift cart. The wheels were made of wood rimmed with steel. For a penny apiece, plus another when the work was done, an army of street urchins grabbed the vehicle's hand-hewn tongue and pulled the conveyance through the early morning streets.

  The fishermen, tired from their night's labors, lounged above Dorn's head and shared the contents of a stoneware jug. He, along with hundreds of dead eels, were thrown from one side of the wagon to the other as the exuberant children pulled their burden through narrow, twisting passageways. Where were they going? And more important, why? Those questions were at the forefront of the young man's mind. At one time or another he had offered the fishermen money he didn't have, and threatened them with Headmaster Tull's wrath, all to no avail. All he could do was wait and hope for the best.

  Slums, the likes of which Dorn hadn't seen since his outings with Mr. Halworthy, passed to either side. The smell of sewage was so powerful it overwhelmed the odor produced by the eels and caused the teenager to gag. The thought of what he must have swallowed, and the bacteria that had access to his body, made Dora thankful for the countless inoculations the school had given him.

  The cart bounced into a turn, threw Dorn and the silvers sideways, and came to a grinding halt. By craning his neck and looking upward, the teenager saw a weatherbeaten sign. It read "The Keno Labor Exchange" and squeaked as the wind pushed against it.

  What had been discomfort mixed with indignation quickly turned to fear. Though protected from most of the planet's less pleasant realities, and never allowed to venture out on their own, Dorn and his fellow students had heard of the so-called labor exchanges, places where sentients of every possible description signed their lives away in return for food and the bare necessities. It amounted to legally sanctioned slavery and had flourished for years.

  Dorn struggled against his bonds, and was still struggling when his captors lifted him free of the cart, pushed their way through a crowd of goggle-eyed children, and carried him through a gate. The youth was suspended facedown. He saw mud squish out from under the men's homemade sandals, heard the babble of contentious voices, and the crack of what might have been a whip.

  The next sound was the rasp of metal on metal, followed by a male voice. "Throw him in the holding cell and report to the office. Citizen Inwa will pay the finder's fee."

  The fishermen took the voice literally, threw Dorn into a cell, and slammed the door behind him. Still tied, and unable to break his fall, the youngster hit hard and skidded across the muck-covered floor. He came to rest next to a man so emaciated he looked like a living skeleton. Sores covered his face, blood flecked his lips, and his eyes seemed dim. They blinked, blinked again, and closed. The words were so weak, so insubstantial, they seemed like ghosts. "Hello, son. Welcome to hell."

  6

  What the parents sow, their children shall reap.

  The Alhanthian Book of Truth

  The Planet Mechnos

  The offices where Natalie had played as a child, and where her parents had hatched their multitudinous schemes, were silent now, emptied of people, machines, and furniture. The next tenant would arrive soon, causing the halls, offices, and conference rooms to hum with a different purpose.

  The guard was a former Voss Lines employee who had found temporary employment with a security firm. She greeted Natalie with a hug and allowed her to roam the building. Just for old times' sake, so she could look around, and remember how things had been.

  And remember Natalie did, bursting into unexpected tears when she entered the office her parents had shared, empty now except for cables that poked up out of the floor, and the remains of a once bushy plant.

  Like any officer, Natalie was theoretically ready to handle anything from burnt toast to a runaway reactor. Nothing, however, had prepared Natalie for the death of her parents. She sat where the toy box had been and leaned on the wall. Tears trickled down her cheeks, and she used a sleeve to wipe them away. The only thing worse than watching her parents die was the feelings that had plagued her since. Sorrow, not for them, but for herself. Because they had abandoned her. How stupid. Especially in light of the fact that they had never been there to begin with.

  It seemed as if they'd always been on the com, locked away in meetings, or traveling somewhere. Building toward what? A burst of bright light, followed by a sparsely attended memorial service and an empty office. She thought about Dorn, wondered how he was doing, and wished she could be with him.

  How typical of her parents! To die at the same exact moment, so there was no room to squeeze between them, to know even one a tiny bit better. They'd been a unit for as long as she could remember, a single force that made its own rules and placed Voss Lines before everything else.

  That's the way things were ... and there was no use whining about it. No, she had responsibilities, not just to herself and what remained of her parent's empire, but to Dorn and his future. The kind of responsibilities she had left home to avoid.

  However, like all officers, good ones anyway, Natalie understood the concept of duty. And duty dictated that she secure the one asset that remained, get as much for it as possible, and invest the money in a sensible manner. Then, and only then, could she return to the life she wanted for herself.

  The problem was that you can't sell something you don't have, and Natalie needed the coordinates for the Mescalero Gap. An extremely valuable piece of information that her parents never divulged to anyone, even to the point of programming the adjunct memories themselves. For it was the AMs that, when connected to a ship's navcomp, provided the computer with the wormhole's coordinates, and erased the data one microsecond after use. More than a dozen would-be thieves had died testing their wits against the booby-trapped boxes.

  Yes, there were other ways to locate gaps, but given that the wormholes were invisible to ordinary optics, such efforts depended on indirect evidence such as the influence they exerted on the matter that surrounded them, the radiation they produced, and the X rays they emitted. All of this might
or might not lead the would-be traveler to the correct hole. And mistakes were fatal.

  So, while a few foolhardy or desperate captains had no doubt used the gap for free and gotten away with it, most sentients preferred to fork over the fee and know that they would survive.

  Natalie scrambled to her feet. There was little or no doubt that her parents had been carrying the coordinates on their bodies, but the data cube, or whatever device they used as a storage medium, had been destroyed along with them. But there were backup copies, she was sure of that, and her task was to find one. Because to sell the wormhole, and free herself from its grip, she needed a legal description of where it was. Not to mention the fact that she couldn't program the AMs— thereby cutting what remained of the shipping line off from its only source of income. Requests continued to come in, and she had no way to fill them. That's why Natalie had broken into the family mansion the night before, searched the now vacant house from roof to cellar, and searched it again. All to no avail.

  Like most children, Natalie and her brother loved games, especially hide-and-seek, which the Voss Lines office staff had tolerated because of who they were. In the process of playing, and otherwise sticking their noses where they didn't belong, the children had discovered a variety of nooks and crannies. That included the drawer where their father kept some rather risque holo cubes, a drug stash that belonged to the firm's comptroller, and the crawl space where the maintenance woman took naps.

  But of all the possible hiding places, the one Natalie considered most likely to contain what she was looking for was located behind the commode in her mother's private rest room.