Price of Ransom

  “Under what authority?” Deucalion asked.

  The coordinator skipped her attention across Lily and centered it on Deucalion. “You’re with the bureau. You know how it is. Once they decide to cite ‘security reasons,’ you’re free to get records if you have time to wade through the bureaucracy. I did find out that it was an order standing from Rehabilitation, if that helps. In fairness to min Giorgas—our rep—I don’t think he knew anymore than he told me, but the identifiers came back flagged as ‘violent offender,’ so he took him into custody and sent him off on a secure yacht.”

  “Sent him where?” Lily asked.

  “Concord,” said the coordinator and Deucalion at the same time. After a brief pause, Deucalion went on. “Rehabilitation is based at Concord. It’s the only place they would send him.”

  “I don’t suppose you could enlighten me.” The coordinator looked from Lily to Deucalion. “I interviewed the rogue briefly, because of the incident, and while I thought him disturbed I didn’t feel he was dangerous. I studied xeno in college,” she added, as if this were explanation enough, “although I never went on to get an advanced degree.”

  Deucalion shrugged, glancing at Lily as if to say that it was her choice what to divulge. And because the coordinator had been both efficient and helpful, Lily felt she deserved something.

  “He’s a half-breed.”

  “Ah,” replied the coordinator, trying not to look gratified. “That explains it. That must be an interesting story, Captain, how you got a half-breed on as a member of your crew.”

  Lily could not help but smile at the careful politeness with which the coordinator framed her curiosity. “It is. But unfortunately, if they’re three and an half days ahead of us, I don’t have time to relate it to you now.”

  “Ah, well.” The coordinator rose, undaunted by this evasion, and offered both Lily and Deucalion her hand to shake. “I had to try. Best luck to you.”

  “How long will it take us to get to Concord?” Lily asked Deucalion as they returned to the ship. Her usual escort—Jenny, Rainbow, and two je’jiri—followed them.

  “We’ll lose time to a yacht. Especially since you still don’t have a full-shifted bridge complement. On a straight route we can get there in about three weeks. Let’s see. If they left three and one half days ago, we can expect to get in a little under a week after they do. And once we get there we’ll have the charges against you to deal with. Concord’s system is such that even with my presence it could take weeks to find out where they’ve put him. And then we still have to get permission to see him.”

  “I’m glad you’re so optimistic.”

  “Realistic. Bureaucracy is one thing that never changes. Not to mention the final hearing on the disposition of the Forlorn Hope itself. I can’t predict what kind of ruling will be handed down, given its history.”

  “Deucalion.” The history of the Forlorn Hope made her think, not of her own hope to keep the ship for herself and her crew, but of the fate of the Hope’s original crew. “What if Intelligence incarcerates me? I have to be there, in person, when we find Hawk.”

  Deucalion considered. “You have to face those charges, Lily.”

  “Charges that essentially boil down to fraternizing with a couple of saboteurs, who I didn’t know were saboteurs at the time. I didn’t realize that was a crime. And if it is, it makes you a criminal as well. More so, since you knew.”

  “Let me rephrase,” he replied coolly. “If you intend to stay in League space you have no choice but to face the charges. I assure you, we assume innocence here, not guilt.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “When you’re sarcastic you sound like Adam. In any case, where would you go? Back to the Reft?”

  Back to the Reft. An unlikely prospect, she thought, given the circumstances under which they had left. And that was supposing any of them even wanted to return. “We could turn privateer,” she said, thoughtful. “Like La Belle. The Pale isn’t under League jurisdiction. Or anywhere else outside that.”

  He looked shocked. “You’d like to be a privateer?”

  “Not particularly. But if I’m given no choice—” She let the sentence hang, letting her silence speak.

  “Lily.” He looked as if he was about to stop right there in the middle of the corridor. Jenny, reading his body language, even faltered in her step. Then, glancing around at the foot traffic through which they made no appreciable ripple, he decided against drawing any more attention to themselves than the two je’jiri already brought them. His stride broke, but he picked it up quickly. “All right.” He frowned. “You have no idea how it galls me to bend regulations in this way—”

  Lily grinned. “Oh, I think I can guess.”

  “Now you sound like Adam again. But in this case I will. Only if you promise that once we have taken the first steps to resolve the problem of Hawk, you will voluntarily present yourself to Intelligence for a hearing.”

  “If Hawk is at Concord, how am I to manage to find him without revealing my presence there and as such being arrested?”

  “You’re the captain. You ought to be used to delegating by now.”

  She puffed out her cheeks and then released the breath stored through her closed lips. “I think it was easier when I was the leader of a small strike force. None of this waiting around on the bridge. It’s much more wearing.”

  “Oh, yes.” Deucalion cast her a grateful look. “Thank you for reminding me. We also need to bring this matter of the Reft and its civil war to the attention of the council. They’ll have to decide what kind of embassy to send.”

  Lily could not help but smile, thinking of Alexander Jehane’s reaction to the arrival of a League embassy of any sort. “Whatever kind they send,” she said, “I’m sure they’ll find the experience interesting.” Thinking of Jehane made her think of Lia. Was she even alive? Glancing at Jenny, she wondered if the mercenary’s thoughts had made the same leap as her own, but she could read nothing but trained alertness on Jenny’s face as the woman kept an eye out for the possible, if unlikely, reappearance of Korrigan Windsor and his boys. “Very well,” Lily finished. “I accept. Let me see Hawk first, and then I’ll appear for a hearing.”

  “Trust me,” said Deucalion. “I don’t know what experience you’ve had—clearly not a good one—but League justice is fair, and as impartial as any human justice can be. You won’t be betrayed.”

  “I hope not,” muttered Lily, but she said it too softly for Deucalion to hear.

  Concord was not so much a large station as a number of large stations sewn together in complementary orbits. Yehoshua stared in awe at what was to him the most marvelous feat of engineering he had ever seen. He could not imagine how any human ingenuity could have woven such a complex web of interlinked stations and dry docks and arrays and more stations—all in a bewildering variety of sizes and shapes—and at the same time made it so utterly beautiful against the stark background of space and distant sun. And yet, he considered, it was always a mistake to underestimate human ingenuity.

  “Gregori,” he said for the fourth time. “Not only are you not supposed to be on this shuttle, but you absolutely will not be allowed off of it once we arrive.”

  “Look!” Gregori pointed away from the rather crude representation of Concord’s pattern that he was attempting to model on his com-screen to a disk suspended off to one side of the vast network of human life. “Is that a planet?”

  “I don’t know,” Yehoshua replied, feeling surly and trying to conceal it. “It must be. Gregori, will you promise me that you won’t try to sneak off this shuttle the same way you tried to sneak on?”

  “Sure,” replied Gregori cheerfully.

  Yehoshua thought over the entire statement. “Will you promise me that you won’t leave the shuttle at all once we reach Concord?”

  Now Gregori hesitated. He made the kind of face that only a very clever child thwarted of his utmost ambition can make. He shrugged his shoulders and pounded his toes in
to the back of the seat in front of him.

  “Cut that out,” snapped the occupant of the seat.

  Yehoshua sighed. “Gregori.”

  “I promise.” Gregori subsided sulkily into the comforts of his three-dimensional modeling of Concord’s intricate maze, pausing only once to dart a glance of searing disgust at Yehoshua. Yehoshua sighed again.

  “We have you clear, Hope One.” The voice of Concord traffic control pierced the small cabin’s hush easily. “You’ll find a berth available at Amity five plus seven. Use the eleven forty nexus for approach.”

  “Great,” muttered Pinto. “That makes perfect sense to me.”

  “Received and accepted,” Deucalion said into the com. He leaned over to bring up a display on Pinto’s console. Concord appeared, diagramed in colors and patterns for flight approach. “Here. The flight paths work as—”

  “I see,” said Pinto, taking in the angles and lines quickly. “That’s very efficient.” He sounded surprised.

  “It has to be,” said Deucalion. “Do you know how much traffic moves in and out of here, as a daily average?”

  “No. Let me see. There’s the opening, and then you go round through—oh—and this grid intersects there and—that’s very good.”

  “I’ll tell you some other time,” Deucalion murmured, returning his attention to com. “Forlorn Hope, this is Hope One. We will berth in thirty-five Standard minutes.”

  “Acknowledged. We have no further on-board relays for you, except that Gregori is to promise not to leave the shuttle until you return to the ship.”

  “Gregori?” Deucalion turned in his seat. “How did Gregori get on board?”

  “You don’t want to know,” said Yehoshua.

  Deucalion turned back to the console. “You can be sure that Gregori will not leave the shuttle. Hope One, out.” He unstrapped himself from the seat and used the handholds on the other seats to get back to Yehoshua’s row. “Now see here, young man,” he began sternly. Gregori regarded him with astonishment. “You may think stowing away is a fun game, but I assure you that it is nothing of the kind. We are on a very delicate mission here and your presence makes it far more difficult for us to succeed. Were you to get lost on Concord—which I assure you that you would—we can just as well forget finding Hawk at all. So you will not leave this shuttle until we return to the Forlorn Hope. Do you understand?”

  Gregori’s astonishment had turned by degrees into chagrin. “Yes,” he replied in a very small voice. He hung his head. His chin trembled.

  “Good,” said Deucalion without the least sign of remorse for upsetting the boy. He returned to the com-chair next to Pinto.

  Yehoshua followed him forward. “Don’t you think you were a little harsh on him?”

  “No. Sometimes scaring a child that age is the only way to make them understand consequences before those same consequences overwhelm them and everyone else.”

  “I wasn’t aware that you had so much experience with child rearing,” Yehoshua replied, unable to keep an edge of sarcasm from his voice.

  “I don’t. But my brother and I unwittingly contributed to several near-disasters by just that kind of behavior. Almost got our mother killed, once. We were only nine years old. I have never seen my father as furious as he was on that day. And with good reason.”

  Yehoshua could find no reply for this explanation, so he returned to his seat. When they berthed at Concord, Gregori turned to him and said, in a low voice, “I’m sorry. I never thought that it might mean we couldn’t get min Hawk back.”

  Yehoshua patted him on the shoulder with awkward sympathy, but it was with relief that he left Gregori to Pinto’s ministrations and followed Deucalion and Paisley off the shuttle. Yehoshua was not quite sure why the captain had sent Paisley along on this expedition, except that the young Ridani woman had been remarkably subdued lately and perhaps Lily thought a glimpse of Concord might cheer her up.

  And indeed, as Deucalion led them through the bewildering maze of halls and corridors and concourses that made up Concord—that made up this one small section of Concord, he had to remind himself—Paisley’s face brightened and she stared about herself with infectious awe at the huge murals that ornamented each concourse.

  “It be not just ya big,” she informed Deucalion ingenuously, “but ya pretty as well. All ya pictures, and so bright, and so—so many.”

  “Concord’s murals are famous,” Deucalion conceded. “It was the Temu Assembly that suggested commissioning artists to depict human history and culture on Concord’s walls. A fitting tribute, and a reminder.”

  “Ah,” said Paisley wisely. “I reckon you all must be ya rich, as live here.”

  “Rich?” Deucalion chuckled. “It’s a rich life, certainly.”

  “No. I mean ya credit rich. Like ya Senators on Central. They could have all or everything they wanted.”

  “Couldn’t everyone?” He shook his head. “No, I suppose you lived under a primitive economy there.”

  “We have free trade,” protested Yehoshua, disliking Deucalion’s tone of voice. “Central’s abuse of trade regulations was one of the factors that caused the revolution. But perhaps you’ve moved beyond free trade here.”

  “Certainly not. Where would people find their incentives? But we no longer have the vast inequities in the distribution of wealth that used to characterize that system.”

  “Do you mean anyone could live here?” Paisley asked, disbelieving. “Even ya Ridanis?” As she spoke, they passed a pair of people, one of whom was, like the administrator Scallop from Diomede Center, a half-tattooed Ridani.

  “Ridanis?” Deucalion looked puzzled, clearly not understanding the thrust of her question. “Of course anyone can live here, given the population constraints on a closed system.”

  “Sure,” Paisley breathed. “And glory.” Her eyes shone with the wonder of it.

  “Here we are.” Deucalion directed them past a mural of men and women harvesting a field of grain and then off into a corridor on the left that led into a warren of offices. He halted by a wall panel next to a door and keyed in. A moment later the door shunted aside silently to reveal a small room with an elaborately contoured desk and an exceedingly tall, black woman sitting behind it.

  Seeing her visitors, she smiled broadly. “Deucalion! Come in. Come in.” She stood up and came forward to give him a hug, then shook hands with Yehoshua and Paisley. Under her loose, half-length tunic, her belly swelled out in the universal proportions of a pregnant woman. “Please, sit down. I’m Kaeshima.” As she turned back to the desk, Deucalion showed them how to lever out and open chairs from the wall. They unfolded into constructions of delicacy and beauty and remarkable comfort.

  “You’re well?” Deucalion asked once they were seated.

  “Quite well. Now.” Kaeshima sat down and tilted a slender screen so that Deucalion could view it as well. “I’ve done some investigation and on any general channel there is no record of a secure yacht from Zeya Depot or any record of this person arriving at Concorde—not on the regular manifests or even on the reports of traffic into Rehabilitation. I’m digging down farther now. We’ll see if he turns up in classified.”

  “You think he won’t?” asked Deucalion.

  Kaeshima smiled, her very full lips mocking. “He ought to if he hadn’t shown up here before. But it could be that they’re going to cover his arrival up entirely.”

  “How can that possibly be done?”

  “Deucalion, I do love you for your naïveté. They leave no trail at all. They just never enter him.”

  “But that’s—”

  “Not very sociable, I know.”

  “Sociable!” Deucalion stood up, as if that action were the only outlet for his emotions.

  Yehoshua braced himself for the lecture he saw coming, and was surprised, glancing at Kaeshima, to see that she was still smiling. Her eyes met his and she exchanged a complicitous glance with him.

  “That kind of secrecy goes against every princip
le on which we’ve built our society. It subverts democracy itself. How can they possibly justify—”

  “Deucalion.” The gentleness with which Kaeshima interrupted him brought his tirade to an abrupt halt. “Most people can find a way to justify even the most unreasonable actions. I’m just warning you that it might not be as easy as we’d hoped to track down this Hawk. Especially if he’s who I suspect he is—one of the old saboteur network. But if anyone can find him …” She trailed off.

  “You can. I know.” Deucalion sat down, not quite meekly. “That’s why I came to you, Kae.”

  “Flatterer. And here I thought it was for sentimental reasons.” When Deucalion did not reply to this sally, she returned to the keyboard built into her desk. “In case no reference to min Hawk shows up, which I suspect will be the case, I’m also running a cocurrent cross-check of Rehabilitation, Psych, and Xenology for unusual activity or unexpected transfer of personnel.”

  “Can anyone access all of this information?” Yehoshua asked.

  Kaeshima glanced up, curious. “It’s public.” She looked over at Deucalion.

  “They really aren’t from League space,” he replied.

  “Ah.” It was comment enough.

  “Even classified material?” Yehoshua persisted.

  Kaeshima continued to type as she spoke. “Define classified. It’s not as if it’s a private organization with qualifying standards and memberships fees. This is government. There are, of course, privacy restrictions to protect the individual. I can’t nose into your health records, for instance, or find out how you voted. But when a government starts keeping secrets from the people—you and I—who are in fact the ultimate authority”—she shrugged—“Certainly there is classified information. But if one can prove necessity to know and fair intent of use, that kind of information remains accessible.”

  “Is that what you’ve done here?”

  “No.” She grinned. “I’m circumventing the system. I snuck in the back door. After all, I helped design the current software.”