Fortunes of the Imperium (11 page)

CHAPTER 9

M’Kenna Copper concentrated on the small tablet that was all the technology she or her family was allowed in their dim prison suite. Who knew they had family cells on Partwe?

She never thought in a million years she would have been arrested for any reason, let alone smuggling. They had always had good relationships with the merchants in the Autocracy. She and Rafe were law-abiding to a fault. They would never, never, never have risked their children’s lives, let alone their own, on contraband.

Yet, a prison suite was their current home, and had been since their arrest. Two rooms were all they had. Temperature and lighting were out of their control. To her it always felt a little too warm and dry. The glare of the lights from the corridor drew attention to the fact that the lighting in the cells was dimmer than she liked. She felt as though she was hiding in a cupboard away from a threat. That was true enough.

The bunks the Uctu constabulary provided were comfortable enough. Their padding was made so it couldn’t be pried away from the platform. It was raised at one end to make a pillow. The blanket fabric was too air-permeable to allow one to suffocate oneself, and too stiff to use as a noose. The walls were metal with a thick resinous coating on them that not only dampened the sounds from the corridor, but prevented the occupants from bashing their skulls in hopes of escape—or death. M’Kenna could see why suicide might be an alternative some might choose instead of official execution. She had looked up the methods the Uctu used. One glance was enough to make sure she code-locked the sites so the kids couldn’t open them.

The children slept in one room, she and Rafe in the other. Sanitary facilities were behind an unmovable privacy barrier that prevented others from seeing what was going on behind it, although anyone could hear. They wore bright green prison coveralls day and night. They were taken from their cell for showers once every couple of days, at the same time their coveralls were replaced with clean ones, although some leeway was possible for small children not yet toilet trained. Being able to leave the confines of the cage-fronted cell with Dorna a few times a day helped M’Kenna cope, but it wasn’t enough. There was no privacy at all.

Small as the living quarters in their ship were in comparison to a space station or the surface of a planet, at least they were able to stake out parts of that space for themselves, no-go areas that allowed them a morsel of alone-time. That was what kept M’Kenna in particular from committing mariticide or filicide. It was the little things, like the kids bumping into them or each other while playing, or her husband reaching out to touch her when she was thinking. Or M’Kenna stretching out her legs and kicking Rafe by accident. All of them were driving each other crazy. She needed time alone to work back through her memory of where the disaster might have happened. She had a gift for concentration, but it worked only in peace and quiet. There was little of either in the ward. She had to think. She had to!

The truth was, she was baffled. How in the explosive core of Alpha Centauri Five had that war skimmer gotten into their ship? It was impossible! The family had never been away from the ship long enough for anyone to unbolt all those hull plates, penetrate the insulation and protective bladders around that usually stinky tank, drain it, stick the flyer inside, refasten all of the layers around it and rebolt the hull, all without making a sound or setting off any of their alarms. It certainly couldn’t have been done with them aboard. Anywhere they had docked ought to have detected interference on that scale.

“It could’ve been when we went to the circus on Vijay 9,” Rafe said, breaking into her reverie. “We were gone all afternoon and half the evening.”

“You are not helping,” M’Kenna snapped. “In fact, you are unhelping.” Her fierce look told him to back off. He did. So did all the kids. They knew when they heard ‘Mommy’s thinking voice,’ there was no appeal. They retreated into their chamber and played together quietly. For a while.

“Let me out of here or I will tear you apart!” bellowed Nuro. He and the rest of the Wichu crew from
Sword Snacks IV
were just up the corridor. So were about half the ships that had left Way Station 46 with the
Entertainer
. They were all in the same boat, so to speak. A death ship.

At least they had been transferred planetside. The air was fresher on Partwe 3, although the chlorine-heavy atmosphere friendly to Uctus was getting to all the outworlders. M’Kenna had complained repeatedly until the warden had increased filtration in the cells. The trouble was, every time an Uctu warder or guard opened a door to the outside, they got another lungful of chlorine. It wasn’t enough to kill anyone, but it made the prison smell like a swimming pool. Lerin had developed a worrisome sounding cough from it.

M’Kenna’s inner noises were getting the better of her, too. Very few offenses in any nation called for the death penalty. Their court-appointed attorney, a Wichu named Allisjonil Derinket, assured them that most of the laws recited over the in-system relay were overturned on appeal. The trouble was that the crime of which she and the others stood accused was of carrying weapons of war over the borders without government license or permission. They had been caught red-handed. They had no way to prove their innocence. How long before the courts decided if they deserved an appeal? They were waiting to hear that and whether the children could be detached from the responsibility for the crime, leaving only their parents under indictment. M’Kenna would let herself be tortured to death slowly and agonizingly before a live audience if it would save her babies.

The thought of never seeing her children again made her sob out loud. She stifled the noise in the horrid green fabric of her sleeve, but Dorna, always sensitive to M’Kenna’s moods, came toddling out of the other room and threw herself into her mother’s arms. M’Kenna cuddled the toddler, kissing her wealth of dark curls over and over again. Something had to be done to get the Coppers out of there. Somebody knew what had happened. She needed evidence. She needed a witness. Somebody had seen something that wasn’t right. A file somewhere had the data that proved that skimmer had gone into her ship when she wasn’t looking.

Rafe kept the maintenance records. They showed nothing out of the ordinary. He swore up and down that every detail was correct. M’Kenna trusted him. He was the best husband and partner she could have imagined, not to mention efficient, hard-working, shrewd and patient. When he talked her out of her job as a saleswoman for modular domiciles fifteen years before, it had sounded so outrageous to her to spend her life as an interstellar merchant, but his family had done it for centuries, millennia, even. She had been right to trust in him, to tie her life to his among the stars. At his fingertips, he had the experience to know when a ship part was starting to go. Every little wobble in the ship meant something to him, even if they all sounded alike to M’Kenna. If Rafe said there was nothing out of place on his scopes or database, he meant it. That brought her back to an exterior threat. Somebody had targeted her and some of the others.

M’Kenna kept going over the reports over and over again. When could that flitter have been placed in the waste tank? She still found it impossible. But it must have happened at some point, because there were other unexplained problems with the ship. Lerin had complained about the taste of the water. It turned out that their filtration system had gone almost completely on the fritz. If they had not been close to Nacer, they all might have died in transit of salmonella poisoning or another waterborne illness from lack of sanitation. They were all feeling pretty sick, though. It wasn’t only the strain of their situation, although that was bad enough. She could not stop smelling the chlorine in the atmosphere. It was almost as if they had not had their habilitation therapy, but all of them had had it years ago. Maybe the sanitation problem had undone all the injections and things, knocked out their enhanced immune systems.

She ran the files up and back on the tablet again and again. When could someone have gotten close enough to open their tank without them detecting it? She went through Rafe’s pristine logs again.

Before arriving at Way Station 46, the
Entertainer
had called in to see a few of their best customers and three suppliers, all in systems outside the Core Worlds on the way to the frontier. Normally M’Kenna would have said she could trust those people as far as she could throw them—but she could still trust them. She would also find it pretty outrageous that any of those vendors had an interest in military vehicles. Over the years she and Rafe had shed connections with people who cheated them one way or another, putting warnings on the Infogrid to protect fellow merchants, as they all did. Rising tides lifted all boats, and a hole in the tub made them all sink.

So where was the weak link? It seemed crazy to suspect any of their long-time customers or suppliers, but it was just as outrageous to suspect an ordinary space merchant family. Still, she was in jail and they weren’t. She needed to find out who was to blame.

She added names and dates of last contact to the file of enquiries that needed to be made, to hand over to their attorney. M’Kenna was desperate to ask those contacts herself, to ask what she hoped were the right questions, and ask to see security videos of the docking facilities on the stations that circled those worlds. But she couldn’t. She was stuck on Partwe 3. For maybe the rest of her life.

But what about the other merchants? That gave her something new to chew on. Those ships were not likely to have been anywhere together until they were all stuck on Way Station 46.
Had
they all stopped at one particular station during the last few months? She would have to see if she could compare the
Entertainer
’s logs with
Space Snacks
or the others. Or if the attorney could do so. It was such a pain in the afterthrusters not to be able to go and ask questions herself!

A movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention. Lerin stood a couple of paces away, bobbing up and down impatiently. She forced herself to smile at him.

“What is it, baby?” she asked.

“Mama, I want to play
Dozer Ships
,” he begged. “Please? I’m booooored!”

M’Kenna looked at the time in the corner of the tablet screen.

“Not now, honey. Hey! It’s time for lessons.”

He wrinkled his nose.

“Lessons! Why do we need lessons if we’re all going to die?”

M’Kenna grabbed him and crushed him to her, bruising his nine-year-old dignity. He fought loose, but not before she saw the fear in his eyes.

“Nobody is going to die, sweetheart,” she said firmly. “So you still need spatial geometry and calculus, so you can become a pilot like your daddy and your auntie Siff.” She opened the lesson plan folder and locked all the others, especially the game folder. Long time since she studied the basics of calculus and navigation. Math was ideal for learning how to think logically. “Here. You get started. There’s two screens of homework problems. When you’re done with them, I’ll quiz you. Then you can quiz me.”

He went along with her effort to keep the mood light.

“Bet I get more right than you!”

“We’ll see about that.” But she surrendered the tablet. Lerin grabbed it and raced into the children’s room.

Rafe sat on the bench that doubled as his bunk with his long legs outstretched and ankles crossed. His arms were folded tight against his chest.

“Are you awake?” she whispered.

He opened his eyes.

“Yes. Daydreaming of being anywhere but here,” he said. “Are you all right?”

She stopped herself just in time from snapping. He had the long-haul spacer’s gift of being able to accept long delays without reacting. Her shorter fuse marked her as a born groundling. But she was learning.

“I’m okay. I’m worried about the kids. I don’t care what happens to me, but I want them safe and out of here! I haven’t heard from your family yet if they can come and get them.”

“Dad or Aunt Libby will get back to us. They’ll probably hit the same snag when they try to cross the frontier. Better make some long-term arrangements here for the kids if . . .” Rafe didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. They talked the grim possibilities over and over after the children had gone to sleep.