Three Card Monte (The Martian Alliance) (2 page)

Sleep wasn’t coming. I slipped out of bed and pulled on a flight robe. Calling it a robe was kind of a joke, since it was more like a baby sleeper, complete with feet. However, it was made out of absorbent, lightweight material that conformed to your shape, meaning Doven, Bullfrog, or Tresia could wear one if so desired. Flight robes made running to airlocks or to patch hull breaches a slightly more modest proposition.

I trotted up to the cockpit. Doven was in the captain’s seat, looking quite alert. He turned his head. “Can’t sleep?”

“Nope.” I settled into the first mate’s spot. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

Nice to see he and Roy had both practiced that clever response.

“Right. Will it shock you that I already extracted the argument details out of Roy?”

“No.”

“Why haven’t you told Ciarissa how you feel about her?”

His feathers ruffled. “This isn’t your concern, DeeDee.”

“The captain and first mate of this vessel are both upset with each other. That affects me and the rest of the crew. We’re heading to Polliworld and I don’t want you and Roy not paying attention to something important because you’re both too busy being angry with each other.”

“We’ll deal with it.”

“I’m sure you will. You know, Ciarissa’s a telepath. You can’t seriously think she doesn’t know that you like her.”

Doven had wings as well as arms and legs, and his head was more birdlike than human. He clicked his beak and glared at me, in the way that birds of all kinds and from any planet seem able to manage—the “I could do terrible things to you if you only knew” look. Cats and birds, they really had it down in terms of glaring ability.

“I know how powerful she is.”

I took this admission to its fullest conclusion. “Ah. So you think, because it’s clear you’re madly in love with Ciarissa and she’s never said, ‘let’s snuggle in my cabin’ to you, this means she’s not interested.”

Doven’s feathers ruffled to the point where I wasn’t sure if he was going to flap his wings out or not. His wingspan was impressive, and it was far wider than the cockpit area. If he flapped, he’d hit me. And I was pretty sure a part of him wanted to hit me.

But he pulled himself together. Literally. The wings tucked back neatly behind him, the feathers settled down, and the glare was now directed at deep space. “Correct.”

“You know, sometimes a girl expects the guy to make the first move.”

“And sometimes ‘the guy’ understands that his love is unrequited.” Doven turned his head toward me again. “But even if all ‘the guy’ receives is friendship, he still cares about his friend and doesn’t want her harmed simply because she refuses to tell her captain no.”

“What is Ciarissa saying yes to that you don’t think she should be?”

Doven shrugged his wings. “Everything Roy asks her to do.”

I sat with Doven for a while longer. We didn’t talk about Ciarissa or Roy. Instead I asked him to tell me a story about his world and how it began. He was a good storyteller, and I liked hearing about each planet’s olden days, before the Diamante Families had decided the galaxy was theirs and the rest of us only got to play in it if they wanted us to.

A good story can give you many reactions, but if the teller wants you to go to sleep when the story’s done, well, if they’re good, you get sleepy. Doven finished; I yawned widely and trooped back to bed.

I considered my options and kept the flight robe on. It was unlikely Roy was going to have time to be amorous before his turn at the controls. I got back into bed and snuggled next to him. I woke up briefly when he got up for his shift, but otherwise, I slept soundly.

Everyone ate breakfast and dinner together on the
Hummingbird
. It was Roy’s rule, and I liked it. We were a family. Sure, we were put together from the cast-offs and fugitives of the galaxy, but we were a family nonetheless.

Either my bugging them had gotten Roy and Doven to talk, or they’d both moved past the issue, because they seemed at ease with each other today.

Which was good, because we had to jump to the Pollisystem. Not all solar systems were named for one of their worlds, but Polliworld was the only inhabited planet its sun had, so had scored the name.

We strapped in. Sometimes Ciarissa and I went to the cockpit with Roy and Doven, and sometimes we didn’t. Today we didn’t. I wasn’t sure if she’d picked up everything that had gone on yesterday and last night, but with the others around, it wasn’t the time to ask her. She was dreamy-looking and serene as always, as her white-blonde hair floated around her head. If there was a problem, Ciarissa wasn’t allowing it to affect her mood.

“Crew, prepare for jump,” Roy said over the intercom.

It’s great to say “prepare,” but no matter how many times we did it, the jumps to hyperspace were always tough.

The first few moments of a jump made you feel compressed, and all you could see was inky blackness, whether you were looking out a window or not. If Roy or Doven calibrated even a bit incorrectly, this would be the last thing any of us would experience and we’d die in suffocating blackness.

Just when you thought you couldn’t take the feeling of suspended death any longer, your stomach turned inside out and back again. This fun feeling proved the jump was successful.

All windows, including that of the cockpit, were blacked out to prevent anyone from being able to see what we were flying past. It was great to say “no peeking” but, species nature being what it was, it was much harder to enforce.

Because of the ship’s rate of speed as it went into hyperspace, if anyone watched the star systems and gods alone knew what else go past, they’d either go blind or crazy. Someone in the past who’d possessed both technological know-how and a goodly helping of common sense had created a simple sensor that automatically blacked out all viewing portals once a spaceship jumped to hyperspace.

The rest of the flight was fairly nondescript. If I really concentrated I could feel a little extra compression—nothing like the initial jump, more like I was carrying an extra ten pounds on top of my skin.

There were a few species in the galaxy that were so delicate that they could never travel via hyperspace because of this pressure. Taking the sick or injured into hyperspace was also iffy—most of the time it wasn’t an issue, but because illness and injury made a being more sensitive, hyperspace could sometimes cause additional health problems.

Most of us shrugged it off and ignored it because the downsides of hyperspace were far outweighed by the advantages of being able to travel all over the galaxy without the trip taking entire lifetimes.

As with our sleep times, Roy insisted on either himself or Doven remaining at the controls. Today they both stayed in the cockpit. I decided not to wander up to see what was going on—hopefully things were fine and they were making up with each other. If they were fighting, we’d hear it sooner or later.

Instead, I headed for the engine room to see what Willy was up to. Willy was the only true Earther on board—Roy and Kyle were Martian, and so right up there on the popularity rolls with shape shifters and Quillian Shamans. Willy was also the eldest member of the crew—presuming Dr. Wufren was telling the truth, which was never a safe bet.

Willy had done a lot and seen a lot. He’d traveled from one side of the galaxy to the other more times than the rest of us put together. He was our ship’s engineer and chief mechanic, though Bullfrog could also cover if needed, and Kyle was learning how to do these jobs as well.

I was unsurprised, therefore, to find Kyle with Willy in the
Hummingbird’s
belly.

“Hey, DeeDee, what’re you doing here?” Kyle asked from under what might have been a carbine, might have been a drive shaft, or might have been something else entirely. I didn’t shift into inanimate objects, so I’d never given the ship’s mechanics much attention. That’s what Willy, Bullfrog and, apparently, Kyle were for.

“I can’t visit the engine room?”

He was lying on a rolling board that allowed him to slide under engine parts without having to crawl. Willy said the idea came from Old Earth, in the ancient days before space flight. Willy liked using something that had been used by mechanics for millennia.

Kyle rolled closer to me, though he remained on his back. He was a mini-Roy—smaller all the way around, but no one could ever mistake them for anything other than siblings, even with grease over half of Kyle’s face. “You almost never come down here,” he pointed out. “So, why’re you here now? Not that it’s not great to see you. My big bro being a pain?”

“No, he’s busy and I’m just sort of bored.”

“You mean you don’t want to find out if Roy and Doven are still fighting.”

“You’re so much smarter than Roy thinks you are. I’m impressed.”

Willy peered over the whatever-it-was they were working on. “Yeah? Then why’s the kid covered with grease?”

“Because he idolizes you.”

Willy laughed. “You’re so good with the flattery, little girl.”

“Only when it’s deserved.” Roy had a great crew, and Willy absolutely belonged with the rest of us. To date, he’d never come across anything mechanical he couldn’t figure out, fix, and improve.

Willy walked around to me, wiping his hands on a rag. He was one of those lean men who got a little more sunken and a lot more wiry with age. His hair was still mostly black, though there was, as he put it, a little bit of snow on the mountaintop. “Sure, sure. Kyle, go fetch the magnosensor repair kit. The one I have stored under my bunk.”

Kyle scrambled to his feet. “You sure? I thought we had it all fixed.”

“You know there’s no such thing as thinking out in space, kiddo. You have to be dead sure, or you just wind up dead.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know, I know. And I’m going,” he added as Willy flicked his rag at Kyle, who trotted off with a laugh.

I waited until I knew Kyle was out of earshot. “So, what’s going on?”

Willy grinned. “Can never fool you, can I? I don’t know if this is such a good idea.”

“Having Kyle get the magnosensor repair kit?”

“Don’t play cute with me. You know what I mean.”

“Maybe. Going to Polliworld or seeing what’s going on with Monte the Leech?”

“Both.”

“You love gambling. Actually, I might be understating it—you adore gambling.”

“Not more than life itself, little girl.”

“We’ve dealt with Monte for years; I doubt he’s going to give us too much trouble.”

Willy snorted. “Little girl, if he’s made this deal, Monte’s already
in
trouble. And Roy’s heading us right into the thick of whatever that trouble is. The last place we want to be is caught between the Diamante Families and the Polliworld Underground.”

“Okay, I’ll give you that would be the proverbial rock and a hard place situation.” I considered this. “Do you think Roy knows something?”

“No, I don’t. The news caught him as unawares as the rest of us. No, I think Roy’s heading us to Polliworld to distract everyone from the fight he’s having with Doven—especially himself and Doven.”

“Could be. Should I talk to Ciarissa?”

“Nah. No point. Either she’s interested or she’s not. Besides, that’s not the problem. The problem is that Doven and Roy are having a fundamental disagreement.”

“Doven told me he thought Roy was working Ciarissa too hard and that he didn’t like anything Roy was asking her to do. I know I was gone for three months, but nothing I’ve seen since I’ve been back would make me think Ciarissa’s at the point of collapse.”

“Right. I don’t think that’s the real reason they’re fighting.”

“Why would Doven lie to me?”

“Oh, I’m sure he was telling you the truth. He’s been sweet on Ciarissa for as long as she’s been with us. But I think there’s more to it.”

“Any guess as to what? Because I don’t have any idea.”

“No idea either.” Willy cocked his head at me. “But you’re the one most likely to get the truth out of Roy. And I suggest you do so, before we all end up caught in the middle of whatever’s really going on.”