"So what are we going to do about him, Vezzarn?" asked Pausert, getting to his feet. "Locking him into his cabin, without a guard, seems futile. We don't have the manpower to guard him. I presume he can pick the stateroom door locks easily enough?"
Vezzarn nodded. "Yes, Captain. They're not a big challenge, you know."
"I think, when we get though to Uldune," said the captain with a scowl, "that I must get this ship fitted with a brig. I could use it for you, and the Leewit, not to mention any other people we might pick up in the middle of nowhere, or take as paying passengers. I wish Hulik do Eldel was here."
"She'd be all for just shooting him now," said Vezzarn. "She was pretty harsh, was Hulik."
"Considering who she's ended up with, she'll have to be," said Pausert, rubbing his jaw wearily. "Look, I am not prepared to just shoot him out of hand. He seemed a genuine enough castaway, though I'd like to know what he was doing there. He's not explained that very well. And this does rather throw doubt onto his story of being a rich archeologist. Why would a rich archeologist be a proficient lock-tickler?"
"He's not. Not proficient, I mean," said Vezzarn. "But it is all very suspicious, Captain. I think we need to be more careful, at least. Maybe we need to ask him what his game is? Or drop him on another world?"
Pausert knew that was probably the right thing to do, that or Hulik's response. But he also knew he could not actually bring himself to do either. "Let's talk to the Leewit," he said. "Then we'll go and ask him a few pointed questions and decide just what steps to take next. If he turns nasty, the Leewit can always whistle at him. Serve him right."
The Leewit was about due to get up for her watch, so the captain made a mug of coffee and took it to her stateroom. She was not asleep, though. Actually, she and the little vatch were playing something that could be called tag—if the captain could figure quite how you touched an immaterial being, and how it touched you. The game seemed to involve a fair amount of acrobatics and giggling.
They also seemed to think that he and the cup of coffee would be a good addition to the game. It took him some time, and spilled coffee, to persuade them that this was not the case. But as he was persistent and quite used to dealing with the Leewit, he did succeed, and explained what Vezzarn had told him and what he planned to do about it.
"Don't like him much," said the Leewit. "He's a bit slimy. What do you think, Little-bit?"
The silvery-eyed peck of whirling nothingness seemed to briefly pause.
Doesn't taste nice
, it projected.
Pausert wondered quite what that meant. He also wondered if he, Vezzarn and Leewit had a "flavor" too. It could explain what drew vatches to certain people.
"I don't think he has any weapons. But we neglected to search him when he came onboard," admitted the captain. "We should have done that, but it is too late now. So I want you to stay back just at the door—maybe even around the corner. You can give him one of your whistles if he gives me any trouble."
"Coo. I
hope
he does," said the Leewit, militantly. She was destined to be a healer, one day. But she was still very fond of breaking things and causing chaos. Actually, that was one of the oddest things about having Goth away. The Leewit was being much more Goth-like—at least, when she remembered. The mask did slip every now and again.
The captain hoped Mebeckey did cooperate. The Leewit's whistles were quite devastating, even if you were not their target. The captain collected a blaster from Vezzarn, and quickly field-stripped it, reassembled it, and made very sure the charges were intact and full. The Leewit's eyes got quite wide at this.
They went along to knock at Mebeckey's door. He took a long time about answering it—to the point where the captain was considering shooting out the lock with his blaster—but Mebeckey did open it, eventually, looking a little guilty, the captain decided.
"You've got some explaining to do, sir," said Pausert grimly, still with the blaster in his hand. "I want some straight answers or I am going to have to choose between shooting you or putting you off my ship."
"But I haven't done anything!" protested Mebeckey. "My hands are clean. You can trust me. Really. I'm just an archeologist, worth much more to you alive than dead."
"But you were trying to pick the locks on the armaments locker," said Pausert roughly. "Now come out of there. You can come down to the bridge and do some explaining. Vezzarn, while I keep him under my gun, search him."
"I haven't got any weapons, truly," said Mebeckey, wide-eyed and frightened now. "And I can explain. Truly."
"You're going to," said Pausert. "All of it."
"I will. I promise."
Vezzarn patted him down professionally, all the time keeping out of the captain's line of fire. "He's clean, Captain," he announced after a very thorough search—down to the soles of the man's borrowed boots.
Pausert holstered his weapon. "All right. Come down to the bridge and explain yourself. I want to get back to the controls. It's not the safest place in known space out here."
"I would much rather you were at the controls, Captain. I want to get out of the Chaladoor. More than anything. I wish I'd never come here."
"Explain exactly what did bring you here, to a burned out husk of a world in one of the most dangerous regions of space."
"Greed. I suppose," said the scarecrow of a man sadly. "I told you I was a very wealthy man. Well, that is true, or it was when I went to Garandool—the world you rescued me from. I don't know if it is anymore. I doubt if Bocaj or the others will have been able to loot all of my assets, but with that fiendish thing at his side, I do not know."
"I did understand the part about greed. The rest may make sense to you, Mebeckey. Begin at the beginning. Include an explanation of how come you pick locks. Rather ineptly, it would seem."
Mebeckey sighed. "It began a long time back, before I was wealthy. I was archeology graduate from a small community college in the Empire. It was not a particularly wise choice, when it came to making a living. The best job I could find was as an underpaid assistant to a very wealthy and rather unpleasant dilettante. He . . . well, he had a habit of locking things up. He locked everything. One day I caught someone breaking and entering. A little rat of a petty thief who used to pick locks. I threatened to hand him over to the police unless he taught me. I thought I might be able to, well, relieve my employer of some of the money he didn't pay me. I found that what he was locking up was not cash, but some of the little bits of loot he'd helped himself to from sites. Illegal items in themselves, but very much in demand with collectors. They were not particularly wonderful locks, and with my new assistant thief, I collected a generous share of his collection and shipped it to myself and fled to the Republic of Sirius. It was enough to set me up as a dealer called Becker, and also as a man of private wealth called Mebeckey who had an interest in xenoarchaeology. Thereafter, I would do exactly as my erstwhile employer had done. Loot and sell through my dealer persona. I never forgot how to pick locks, and over the years the skill has been quite useful."
"Still doesn't explain what you were doing in the Chaladoor," said the Leewit.
"A sequence of things. A piece of loot that came to Becker the antiquities dealer. Something that a pirate had looted off another ship, which in turn had come off a hulk they found drifting in space. Star pictures cut into the surface of two strange-shaped goblets which arrived several years apart. A book which turned out to be the log of the
Derehn Oph,
the ship of an expedition that had ventured into the Chaladoor not long after man left old Yarthe and expanded across the galaxy. The log mentioned the finding of the world the goblets had been taken from.
"It must have been part of a much larger set, perhaps commemorating a galactic empire of some alien lifeform. Some of the star patterns were quite distinctive, and the log spoke of other things found on Garandool—a vast half-melted fortress, cities buried in lava ash in the mountains, signs of huge war. And from the most obvious landing plain, a radio signal. An alien radio signal, still operational. Buried under a basalt flow. It's not something that had ever been found before. Alien machinery is worth more than relics. Artifacts that still worked . . . That would be worth more than just a fortune. And those goblets—they were a lead to the planets of this alien empire. The captain wrote in his log that he took these particular goblets as they showed the star system that Garandool was part of, and the next one over. There were about twenty more, he wrote.
"It was simply too tempting. I set about mounting an expedition out here, following the route in the old ship's log, with heavy drilling equipment and explosives to deal with the basalts. We had to work very secretively, and I fitted out my ship, the
Kapurnia,
with some heavy armament and some very powerful new drives. I thought back then that the stories of the Chaladoor were mostly superstition." He shuddered. "By the time we got to Garandool, I knew that wasn't true. But we got there, and there was the radio-beacon, sending out a repeat signal."
He took a deep breath. "There were also signs that someone had tried to dig there. That someone had unleashed nova guns at the rock from close range."
"How could you tell?" asked Pausert. "I mean, the range, the weapon . . ."
"It's an important aspect of xenoarcheology. The damage left on alien structures—quite a lot during the time of the Nartheby Sprite empire, some on the other alien relics we've found—help us to date them. Naturally, faking the damage is part of the trade. So radiation signatures to modern human weapons are well documented. And the scatter gives the range."
"Oh, so had they taken your treasures and gone?" asked the Leewit.
"Hardly. We did a space-survey just to make sure that they weren't still around. The world had a number of suspicious refined metal sites, above the rock melt. But careful examination showed them to be wrecks. Disintegrating wrecks. Old. Alien ships. That alone was valuable material. But deep radar showed structures still under the basalt, so we started excavations, going deeper than anyone had previously with space-guns and shovels. It took us a few months—in the meanwhile we had some members of the expedition checking out the wrecks. They were all of a similar design—Melchin or Illtraming—if the Nartheby Sprite records were to be believed. The Melchin were a legendary culture, even to Nartheby Sprites. The Illtraming had rebelled against them, so their ship design is similar. Anyway . . . they'd plainly been attacking this world with all the force they could muster. They'd literally melted the surface and sterilized the world. My crew collected quite a lot of material from the wrecks, even though they'd plainly been picked over before—they found enough to pay for the expedition twice over, and I was tempted to cut and run right then. But what had they been trying so hard to destroy? Greed kept me, and my people, working away with drills and geological lasers.
"We'd cut a storage bay—and with the sort of people I worked with, you understand I'd put a grade-four safe door on it, and I kept most of the food and artifacts in there. Pieces of alien ship. Bits of half-decayed equipment we had no idea of the original purpose of . . . a fortune of sorts. In the meantime we kept right on excavating. Then we hit the tunnel—the walls had been made of osmite—heat resistant, vastly expensive material. The stuff was harder than battle-armor. We couldn't cut through it. It took us a month to find the entrance. But we did. And it was still intact, under the melted rock."
Pausert had to admit that he was enthralled. It had even dispelled his tiredness for a while. "And what did you find there?"
"The reason why someone tried so hard to destroy their enemy. And, thanks to us, they'd failed. Oh, and of course wealth untold. For an alien value of wealth."
One of the nicest things about Pausert as a younger man, Goth decided, was that he looked to her for leadership. Not that she wanted him to all the time, but she could see how their roles would change as they grew older. Now, he was very trusting of her. If she'd said to almost any other person, "I need to sell this miffel-fur coat," they would have wanted to know why, and formed opinions about her because of that. Pausert had just smiled and said that there really was only one place to sell that kind of thing, and that he'd show her the way straight after school. Now she just had to survive school.
The new uniform prickled and scratched, especially on her makemake-stung parts. The boys and the girls stared. And talked. Taking Pausert's mother's advice, she did not punch them for doing so. She just smiled politely. She did, during the recess on the large quadrangle, 'port a frog from the biology dissections in among a gossiping bunch of them who had been studiously ignoring her. It was foolish of them to assume that she couldn't hear them or it didn't matter if she did. She was able to sit, demurely, hands together on her lap, through the screaming and subsequent fight with the boys they thought responsible.
She went to math class and carefully made two mistakes, just enough to be good but not as good as some of the boys. There'd be time to move soon. Once again Pausert's mother's survival course on "how to be a social chameleon at school" made that rite of passage possible. Only Pausert seemed in the slightest suspicious—possibly because she'd done one of those problems with him yesterday. Or possibly because he knew his mother. The teacher put her to sit beside him, plainly intended as a punishment, a social solecism. It was the sort of punishment she was happy to endure. He didn't seem too put out by it either.
They left the class with a sea of homework . . . and smiles on their faces. Goth was aware of the reaction from the other children. The looks. It was a steep learning curve, this. She'd followed the captain, and observed Hulik do Eldel and Sunnat with the captain. She'd of course seen other Karres teens, and the interactions between them. But in a society of klatha-users, with adult teaching patterns resident in their heads, interactions were more restrained and yet more advanced and mature. This was different. She was indeed learning a great deal on her "very important year." She hadn't anticipated learning it from ordinary school children, but from deadly dangers and the defense of Karres and all it held dear.