"Did you see what kind of ship it was?" Jones asked. "Human? Minotaur?"
"Obnaoian?" Ranantan asked hopefully. The ships from his race were few and far between and rarely survived the harsh weather long.
"It was a human ship," Paige told the little alien, and then added for the others' sake, "A Novaya Rus frigate. Probably lost its bridge when it clipped the vimana."
"We're going to go help them?" Becky asked.
"We've got enough trouble of our own." Paige told the girl what she would understand. It was more complex than that. Military new arrivals were always heavily armed and viewed everyone and everything with suspicion. When their command structure survived, they often practiced "eminent domain" that was really piracy. When their command structure died in the crash, they imploded into violence. "We can't be the only humans that saw them come down. Someone not hip deep in trouble will contact them."
"Ship!" Mitch shouted from the crow's nest—the farthest point from Charlene that Paige could put him. "Ship off the port bow!"
Paige scrambled up to the bridge where Orin was already scanning the horizon. With the debris in the water, it took her several minutes to pick out the low-riding craft.
"Good eyes, Mitch!" She called back studying the form.
Orin made a sound of discovery, indicating he'd caught sight of it too. "That's a civ raft, isn't it?"
"I think so." Civ rafts were wide, haphazard looking things. She could identify the nesting dome, the salvage heaps, and the holding nets.
Like all sentient life forms, the civ could have only reached the Sargasso after their race developed wormhole technology. Their rafts—if you scrapped off all the junk and muck—bore witness that they were once skilled builders. The bare bones were of a synthetic thermoplastic polymer that floated and resisted saturation by water. And the construction across the various rafts was too uniform to suggest that they been lucky and raided someone else's technology. But whatever level of civilization they had when they came to the Sargasso, they lost. The civ had reverted back to complete savages.
"Is it tagged?" Orin scanned the raft. "I don't see anything."
Paige looked for symbols that humans painted onto civ rafts. "There's no ear tags on it. It's not a tribe we know."
"I think we should stay away from them. We're all but dead in the water. I don't want to end up lunch for them."
The civ saw everything as food, regardless of sentience, and they ate their prey alive. It was a nasty end, and Paige didn't want to think about the possibility that survivors of the crashed frigate might have been picked up by the civ. Statistically, it was highly unlikely. The frigate would have traveled another hundred miles or more before hitting water. The slim chance still put a shiver down her back.
On the other hand, the civ salvaged everything in their path. The definition of ownership for civ seemed to be that only when you couldn't pry something up did it actually belong to anyone. The trick in dealing with the civ, thus, was making sure you didn't get stuck to something they owned. Considering that they kept spider mites as pets, that was easier said than done.
"They might have a converter in their salvage heaps," Paige said.
"You're not thinking of trading with them? This tribe has never even seen a human before."
"All the tribes we've traded with have spoken the same language. I can do this. Let's wait for the debris field to thin down and then I'll take the launch across."
Orin was shaking his head slowly. Paige knew that he saw the same dangers that she did and didn't like the odds.
"We need a converter," she said. "Or we'll stay dead in the water."
Orin glanced at their dead radio and a frown quirked the corner of his mouth as he calculated the odds of help coming to them. "I'll do it then."
"Orin . . ." She caught herself before she finished her thought. Either the Bailey's odd genetic mix or something in the Sargasso itself had given her family remarkable gifts. Each of them had their own strengths and weaknesses. Orin was her equal in reading people, and thus a capable translator. He didn't have, though, that odd mental quirk that Paige thought of as the white space, where jumps in logic took place, and answers came from seemingly nowhere. He wouldn't have her edge when faced with complications.
Unfortunately, he read what she had left unsaid and his frown deepened.
She poked him in the gut. "Suck it up. We've got too much on the line. I'm the best choice and you know it."
"I'd feel better if I couldn't kick your butt in a fair fight."
"I'll just have to fight dirty."
He scowled at her for attempting to make him laugh. She poked him in the stomach again.
"Hey, I've got the easy job," she said. "You have to deal with the crew while I'm gone."
* * *
First week out, she'd made a rule that only she and Orin were allowed on the bridge to keep all of her crew from cramming into the room. Thus all of them were outside the door when she opened it.
"We're going to trade with the civ." She forestalled them from all asking questions at once. "Charlene, we need something to trade the civ. Something that will take them time to unload from the launch. Something awkward to handle."
Charlene gave a resentful look for being ordered away first, but she went, taking Mitch with her. That boy had to grow a backbone.
Paige continued to hand out duties. "Hillary, take Becky and get everything off the launch except the motor. Even the bumpers. Avery and Manny, I want to be able to move the Rosetta if the current shifts and brings the raft toward us. Ran, I'll need a headset that will let me talk to Jones." She repeated the last in Obnaoian, just to make sure he understood.
That left only Jones to ask questions. "I'm coming as your backup, right?"
"Yes. This is how it's going to work. Trading with the civ is like cooperative stealing. I'll go on board their raft, find what I want, and then start the trade. At that point, they'll take everything they want—which will be everything they can carry away—and I can take anything I can carry away."
Jones nodded her understanding. "What do I need to watch out for?"
"The biggest danger is their numbers. There's anywhere from fifty to two hundred of them onboard. If things go hostile, they'll tear us to shreds."
"They can try. What weapons do they have?"
"Nothing more sophisticated than knives."
Jones frowned down at Paige with her mouth shifted slightly to the side, as if rolling something about in her mouth, trying it out before letting it out. Finally, the woman asked, "I take it we can't do a preemptive strike?"
"No!" Paige cried. "They're intelligent. Primitive. But intelligent."
"Yeah, I thought that would be your answer. You know, I admire your morals, but they're damn inconvenient sometimes."
"They're not supposed to be convenient." Paige grumbled. She found it a little unnerving to discover that the most heavily armed person on board had such a homicidal attitude. "You have to fight to keep your bearings or the current will take you where it wants; the easy course is also the one that leaves you helpless."
Jones made a short disgusted noise. "Sometimes you don't have a choice."
"You always have a choice," Paige said firmly. She considered switching to someone else to back her up. No. If things went badly, Jones had the right mindset and reactions. In the future, with more civilized races, though, Jones would be a bad choice as backup.
Luckily Charlene and Mitch returned, saving Paige from clashing farther with Jones over morality. The teenage lovers carried a large rough wooden barrel which they eased down onto the deck cautiously.
"I think these will work well." Charlene pried the lid off the barrel. Inside were dark green glass blanks.
Paige picked one of the blanks up. They were slightly bigger than a softball, slick and difficult to hold. To a civ, with their smaller hands, the blanks would be nearly impossible to carry more than one, thus perfect for her needs. "Thanks Charlene," Paige put the blank back in
to the barrel. "We have like ten barrels of these?"
"Yeah," Charlene said.
"Can you pour two barrels worth into the bottom of the launch? And be careful, they'll shatter easily."
Charlene nodded her understanding. She and Mitch heaved up the barrel and carried it toward the launch.
Jones waited until the lovers were out of earshot before asking, "What were those?"
"Glass blanks." Paige had noticed that Jones didn't like to appear ignorant among her peers. There might also be an upper limit to Jones's willingness to admit weakness to her Captain. With that thought, Paige expanded her answer. "Everyone has sand enough to make glass but not the means to heat the sand until it forms glass in useable quantities. Minotaurs have foundries. They make these blanks in bulk. Humans reshape the glass to what they need."
"Oh, that's why you don't have glass windows in your houses."
"Why would you use glass in a window?"
"To keep out the weather." Jones's tone was as if she was explaining to a child.
Paige shook her head. "Glass would break in a storm. That's why we have shutters."
Jones breathed out a mix of disbelief and annoyance. "There are ways to make glass tough enough that it can withstand a bullet."
Paige rolled a blank around on her palm considering it. The civ weren't the only ones regressing. She hired on Jones because the woman knew how to maintain and fire the Rosetta's big guns and brought with her a laser rifle. Both her knowledge and her firearm were scarce in the Sargasso. When humans set out to colonize the stars, only the colonies that received a steady supply of people and materials succeeded. While new ships were always arriving at the Sargasso, like the Russian frigate they saw earlier, they rarely expected to find themselves stranded, nor landed safely.
What would happen to them if the humans outside the Sargasso lost their war to the nefrim and ceased to arrive? The question threatened to drag her into the white zone for an answer. She shook it off; even without checking that sharply analytical part of her brain, she sensed it would be a bad thing. They needed their constant supply of people like Jones to remind them of things like bullet-strong glass.
"So why are we pouring the blanks into the bottom of the boat?" Jones asked.
"It will take the civ longer to move them and give me more time to get a converter off their raft," Paige said.
"And if you run out of time?"
"Be ready for a fight."
* * *
Because of the need to keep equipment to a bare minimum, they were quickly ready. Jones pulled out the pieces of her combat armor that survived the sinking of her spaceship. Ran had pieced together a headset for Paige that operated on same frequency as Jones's com-line. Paige made sure that she had her folded bowie knife tucked deep into her hip pocket. They double-checked that the launch's engine was running smoothly, and then they pushed off.
The civ raft was a kilometer long, and as they slowly approached it, it grew until it seemed like an island, complete with rolling hills. The hills, however, were the domed hives and mounds of collected flotsam. Paige had Jones troll past all four sides as she scanned the edge. True to their recent bad luck, she spotted nothing that looked like it might have a converter inside.
"Pull up there, where the edge is low," Paige tucked away the binoculars. "I'm going onboard. Soon as I get across, pull away again."
She moved to the bow, and the moment the two boats kissed sides, she leapt across. The surface of the raft oozed slightly where she landed. The stench of rotting matter, manure and mold was nearly overpowering. She panted through her mouth rather than breathe through her nose and waved to Jones that she was on safe. Jones pulled the launch away, moving to a safe distance from the rafe and then idled there, waiting.
Immediately, Paige was noticed. A civ scuttled up to her, its five eyes gleaming like onyx marbles, opening its long thin snout to hiss at her, exposing all its sharp teeth. She held her hands up to her mouth, cupping them so her fingers took the place of teeth, and gave the shuttering hissed greeting back. "I eat you! I eat you!"
"Mine! Mine! All mine!" It cried gesturing at piles of salvage. "I eat you!"
"That mine! That mine! All mine!" She gestured toward the launch. "I eat you!"
Ownership established and proper threats exchanged, she left the civ pacing the edge of the raft, eyeing her goods. While they couldn't prove that the civ were telepathic, it would certainly explain why an exchange with one would work with all of them. After the first encounter, they ignored her except an occasional, "I eat you!" hissed in her direction.
Civ raft ships made her skin crawl. Everything was covered by a thin layer of excrement and viscera supporting an ecosystem of fungus and plants that the civ's pet spider mites lived off of. Spider mites' eggs, little pale globes of tissue, spotted everything. She tried not to shudder too hard when the omnipresent spider mites skittered across her skin—but she did make sure that they didn't pause. The civ used the spider mites' silk to stick down their belongings.
She passed the holding nets, careful not to touch the sticky strands. They held animals from Icarus, drugged senseless by the mite venom. In smaller nets the silk was woven into fine cloth, capturing both fish and the water needed to keep it alive. No humans, though, nor anything else she recognized as sentient.
Evidence of human contact was everywhere. A life preserver. A deck chair. A set of signal flags. Some of it was nearly lost under the spider mites that worked to attach it to the raft.
"Have you found anything yet?" Jones's voice came over the headset.
"They've been in human water for a while," Paige told her. "But everything so far has all been stuff that floats. They could have picked it up in open water after a storm. For a converter, they would have to salvage a wreck."
"Is there anything non-buoyant?"
"Not yet." Paige clambered over a mound and found a group of civ eating something four legged and furred. While the aliens feasted on its hindquarters, the creature still panted, its eyes flicking toward her movement. Paige whimpered and scrambled backwards, slipped, and fell with a cry. The spider mites skittered toward her. She leapt to her feet.
"Bailey?"
"I'm fine! I'm fine. I'm okay. I'm fine." It was taking all her control to keep from bolting from the raft. Frightened as she was, she couldn't leave without a converter. If Fenrir's Rock had been wiped out, the next storm could be the Rosetta's last without a converter.
"I don't see anything outside on the salvage heaps. They might have something inside one of the hives."
"You're not going inside are you?"
She crouched at the entrance, staring down the low tunnel, panting out her fear.
"If they take you down in there, we're not going to be able to get you out," Jones warned her.
"When are you going to learn? The correct response is 'it's going to be fine?'"
Jones gave a dry humorless laugh. "Go in, kid, and you're on your own."
This is what it came down to. Being so fucking scared and knowing you had to go on. She was shaking as she got down on her hands and knees. One last deep breath for courage, and she crawled into the hive.
* * *
The dark tunnel connected to a dimly lit chamber. Light seeped in through what looked like paper-thin oiled skins. She didn't want to think too long on what kind of skins the civ might have used. There were four tunnels leading out of the chamber, each so low she'd have to go on her hands and knees. She couldn't imagine the civ dragging engine parts through the low corridors, but she couldn't be sure until she explored them all.
* * *
One would have never guessed that the civ actually used technology from the outside of the ship, but buried deep inside the hive, she found evidence they did retain some knowledge of technology. Machinery that she recognized, and some she didn't, sat among the organic matter, as out of place as a wrench in a packrat's nest. Did they actually use it, or like the rodent, just liked it for the 'shiny' factor? She igno
red the equipment that she didn't know; it would take too long to figure out how to get them open and how they worked.
In one chamber she found a Red combat suit, its distress signal recently activated. The beacon light flared the room to red brilliance before dropping the area to utter darkness. A suit wouldn't have a converter but it would have infiltration scanners. If they still worked, she could . . .
The beacon flared red again. With a sudden deep-throated growl, something large moved in the shadows. The light gleamed red like blood on bared teeth.