My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire (29 page)

Aside from this chronic low-level tension among the crew, there was another impediment to my domestic tranquility. That was Jaenna. The more I knew of her, the more she puzzled me. She settled into her role with the Strike Force with all the assurance of one born and raised to command, her earlier reticence gone. She was skilled at it, too. The performances at Gar and during the fight for Franny were not flukes. Despite that, Jaenna consistently understated the military side of her education.

Why had she received military training? The empire didn’t teach its youngest daughters to lead troops, in fact, it taught
no
daughters to lead troops. Even harder to understand was why Tyaromon would be willing to throw all that training away. He must have known what his daughter was doing. It made no sense to me and I doubted I would resolve it until we finally reached Kaaran. I could live with the puzzles, though. My real problem wasn’t intellectual but hormonal.

The nature of our positions would have thrown us together often, but I suspected that she really sought out my company, duties aside. I certainly enjoyed hers, now that her concern over my taking her debt out in trade was a thing of the past. She had proved to be a very tough lady with an equally sharp mind. However, the bland gray of the shipsuits that Jaenna preferred accentuated her figure by giving the eye nothing else to focus on. Further, I believe that she, in all innocence, had no idea what her flashing green eyes, quick laugh and purposeful stride did to my hormonal balance. I liked Jaenna and that made it all the harder to keep my defenses up. I had sworn off women and I had meant every word and I had been a perfect Boy Scout but I wasn’t sure anymore if I could keep it up. When I found myself entranced by the motion of the blaster on her hip, I knew I was in trouble.

I was in trouble because I could do nothing. I couldn’t even say anything. I’m not sure what would have happened if I had; Jaenna was fond of me. However, there was more involved than just the two of us. When there is only one female on a ship with three-hundred-and-fifty armed and dangerous males, that female had better be above any suspicion. As it was, after our early victories, the Strike Force’s attitude toward Jaenna had swung from suspicion to damn near hero worship. That, even more than her speed with a blaster, had ensured that she wasn’t bothered, but if it were known that she was favoring one of us, the situation might change. Even if the crew would tolerate a liaison, no ship anywhere can have its captain and strike force commander sleeping together. Fortunately, the ship recycled cold water very efficiently.

Hard bargaining at the station (I was getting better at this) covered almost everything on my officers’ shopping list. I also came away with an interesting tip. It was the itinerary for a merchanter with a (reportedly) very valuable cargo. Time and space said that we could hit them at Mlyanna, if we were willing to pull a raid in the Inner Empire itself. It also meant no time to head for Yttengary and our refit, but if this was going to be the chance to fix up our ledger, I wanted to take it. The action went smoothly. The merchanter had an escort ship along, but neither of them was expecting a freebooter lurking by a wormhole in Fleet space. Franny managed to blow the escort without needing a missile (hurrah for the checkbook!) and we swooped after the merchanter. A lucky shot from one of our railguns turned the merchanter’s main engine to scrap almost as soon as we engaged. The Strike Force went in and the action was over in minutes. Having seen their escort blown away so easily seemed to take the starch out of the merchanter crew. The operation was off to an auspicious start with not a single casualty.

We couldn’t take the ship as a prize since the main engine was really wrecked, so we transferred the cargo hastily and left the wreck for the ships from Mlyanna, already scrambling as we worked, to salvage. Due to the rush at Mlyanna, we simply loaded the cargo and ran for the wormhole. It wasn’t until we were safely away from Mlyanna that we had a chance to examine what we had grabbed. Most of it was standard stuff, everything from household items to industrial machinery. All of it could be sold in the Outer Empire at a reasonable discount. Hidden among all the chaff, however, we found our prize. My informant hadn’t been able, or willing, to tell me what the merchanter carried that was so valuable. Once we opened that small container, we knew. It was full of cynta.

Cynta is a gemstone. It looks a lot like sapphire, but a variety of metallic impurities cause the interior to have a multicolored sparkle. The stone is found only on a few unusual low-gravity, highly volcanic worlds. Aside from its obvious value as a jewel, cynta was important in the construction of instruments that depend on low power magnetic fields, like the interactive helmets used in the Teacher and the physician’s operating tools. The empire has produced, over time, many synthetic versions of cynta, but has never quite reproduced the natural stone. Authentic stones, and it didn’t take long to prove these to be authentic, were wildly expensive. They were valuable enough to assign an escort to the merchanter even within the Inner Empire. We had a treasure in our hands.

“This is a problem,” Ruoni said when we saw the extent of our treasure.

“And why is it a problem?” I asked in return. “This makes us rich for sure. Selling it will finally make the crew happy.” It might even be enough, I thought, to make Jaenna feel ready to head home to Kaaran. That would take care of my problems, although how happy it would leave me was open to question.

“It is a problem,” Ruoni said, “because we have to sell it somehow and I do not see how we are going to do that. There is too much of it. Industries that use authentic cynta are in the Inner Empire. Places in the Outer Empire that use it are small and widely scattered. No one of them could absorb this amount, not even a few of them together. You know what will happen if we transit back and forth across the Outer Empire selling cynta.”

I started to see the problem. “We’ll draw a crowd. Of freebooters.”

Ruoni nodded.

“So, we’ll unload it at one of the stations like we do with most goods. Pick a big one. Tetragrammaton, maybe?”

“It won’t work. Even Tetragrammaton would have trouble dealing this much cynta quickly and they’ll be nervous for sure sitting on it for very long. We’re going to have to deal with someone in the gray zone, maybe even in the Inner Empire.”

Finding that kind of contact was going to be hard. Normally, when a freebooter approached a trading station, business was never discussed on the comm channel. The freebooter identified himself as a private vessel (true statement) desiring liberty for his crew (also true statement). Only when the captain reached the station office was the cargo discussed. This satisfied the Imperial need for a polite fiction. Anything could be done behind closed doors, so long as it looked good on the surface. In this situation, though, the ritual made life difficult. The Outer Empire stations knew they were dealing with freebooters. The formula was as hollow on their side as it was on ours. Closer in, that might not be the case. I wouldn’t know, until I was on the station, whether they were willing and able to deal.

In this, Ruoni wasn’t much help. “I know very few of the gray zone stations,” he said, “and none of the ones with close ties to the Inner Empire.”

The Imperials in our crew, for all that they had patrolled these regions, also had little to contribute. They knew a number of stations, including some very large ones, but couldn’t tell me whether the stations would deal with a freebooter. Worse, since these were all stations the Fleet visited regularly, the odds of finding a Fleet unit in port were too high. I wanted to trade, not fight.

In the end, Jaenna turned out to have the best lead. I had been blowing off steam to her one evening about having a fortune in the hold and no place to sell it, when she interrupted me.

“Danny, wait a moment. Something you said, I don’t know what, reminded me of a place.” I waited, as requested, while she put her thoughts in order. “I remember Valaria saying that we had made a deal for some equipment with a gray zone station. I remember him saying that he was sure they’d gotten it from a freebooter through a station in the Outer Empire. It sticks in my mind because Kaaran has stations out there we would normally use to channel goods. This was through an independent, so it was unusual.”

“Can you remember the system?”

“Give me a moment.” She closed her eyes. Then, “Graudoc!” she exclaimed. “That’s where it was.”

“Well, that’s a great start. Do you remember anything else about it?”

“No, only the name. But if we dealt with them on Kaaran, it has to be in the computer and the entry should be reasonably current.”

We checked and it was. Graudoc turned out to be a world in the gray zone controlled by one of the smaller kvenningari. There wasn’t much that stood out about the world. It held 2.5 billion Srihani on a surface area a bit smaller than Earth’s. A diversified range of industries made Graudoc largely self-sufficient in the necessities of life, fairly typical for a contemporary Imperial world. If the world was plain vanilla, however, the station was not. Graudoc maintained a large trading station and, according to the computer, most of the traffic was with kvenningari worlds. Visits from the Fleet were rare.

“None of which directly states that they will deal with freebooters,” I mused, “but from what you remember they’ve done it once before, even if indirectly. I do believe it’s worth a try.”

Graudoc was a good thirty degrees Galactic east and another five degrees off the ecliptic from where we were. Reaching it took three lengthy transits, during which I had time to lose my confidence in making the deal five times. I knew the cynta was worth a fortune, I just wasn’t sure how big a fortune.

The approach to Graudoc went in the manner of all other station approaches. True, there was a destroyer that detached itself from planetary orbit as we came in, something that would rarely happen in the Outer Empire, but I could hardly blame them. With the station orbiting the inhabited planet, instead of an outer gas giant as it would be in the Outer Empire, they had a right to be nervous. Franny’s signature would look like an Imperial cruiser, but once she identified herself as a private vessel, the station would know she was a heavily armed, and unusual, freebooter. When we docked, I held the liberty down to ten percent of the crew at any one time. Given my preference, none of the crew would have gone on station, but a move like that would have raised suspicions about our intentions even more. The fewer of them on station the better, just in case Graudoc decided to be righteous about freebooters.

Angel and I went off to the station manager’s office. That was another interesting custom. The captain, in person, carried out the negotiations. It probably gave the station manager some assurance that nothing was being hatched while the negotiations went on. Angel was along because the same custom allowed me a single symbolic bodyguard.

The office was a plush suite near the station’s main hub. I had been on a ship long enough that the size of those rooms made me feel as though I was on the Great Plains. The suite took up a vertical three stories, with an immense vaulted ceiling. Eight-feet-high view ports looked out on the station’s satellite hubs and Graudoc beyond. It was a long walk from the doorway to the manager’s desk. That desk was a work of art in itself. It encompassed an arc of sixty degrees, a chord from end to end must have been twenty feet, and the solid stone top showed polished swirls of pink and red. The only item on it was a computer keyboard, set off to one side. I didn’t see a monitor and realized that it must have a virtual screen. The output would hang in the air and could be seen only from the desk chair. Such machines were not cheap.

The Srihani who sat behind the desk was a glaring contrast to the desk, to the expanse of sparkling tiles we had crossed on our way from the door, and to the bejeweled flunkies who sat in multicolored tunics on either side of the desk. Dremmon a Hrustun, the station manager, was as fat a Srihani as I had seen, far too fat for even the memory fabric clothes to help. His tunic must have antedated his present girth; it stretched tightly over his belly and wrinkled elsewhere. Fresh grease adorned the tunic over one breast and had not been entirely wiped from his lips. The hair that remained on his balding pate was unkempt.

“Good voyage, Captain Danny a Troy?” Dremmon inquired formally.

“A good voyage, Station Manager Dremmon,” I replied in kind.

The formality out of the way, Dremmon got down to business.

“Tell me what brings a private, heavily armed ship to Graudoc.” His belly prevented him from leaning forward, but his eyes narrowed and his voice hardened. Dremmon wasn’t looking for a polite answer.

“Trade.”

Dremmon’s answering laugh had no humor in it. “Freebooters. What makes you think I deal with scum?”

“Well, for one,” I said lightly, “it’s a fair bet that your hands are as dirty as your tunic.”

Underneath the blubber, Dremmon stiffened. So did the dandies on either side of him. I could sense Angel bracing himself at my side.

“Have a care, freebooter,” Dremmon said softly, “I directly represent Evronan kvenningar. On this station, I am supreme and my word will not be questioned. You two are very alone here.”

I tried to look relaxed, even though I was as edgy as everyone else in the room. A leader should always look relaxed, especially if he isn’t. My high school coach had told me so.

“Don’t get your balls in a knot, Dremmon. First of all, he,” I gestured at Angel, “isn’t my real bodyguard. The ship is and you know it. Second, unless you’re dumber than you look, you knew we were freebooters looking to trade from the moment we opened comm and you saw the specs on the ship. Now, the first deal I’ll make is this. You don’t insult me and I won’t insult you.”

The change in Dremmon was immediate, as he decided that intimidation wouldn’t bring him a negotiating advantage. He waved a pudgy hand in front of his face and said, “Fine. What do you have to deal?”

We went to work, one item at a time, through the cargo manifest of the ship we’d taken. At each item, Dremmon would name a price, either in credit or barter. Occasionally, he consulted his terminal before speaking. No matter what he said, I responded with screams of rage or disbelief before demanding a much higher price. Then it was Dremmon’s turn to choke in indignation, accusing me of demanding good money for worthless merchandise that he would probably have to jettison to space. Then he would make me another offer and it would be my turn again.