The Complete Aliens Omnibus, Volume 6 Read online

  “You’re as good as he is.” Quietly overruling his doubts, she moved closer, the scent of her hyacinth shampoo making his head swim. “This is it! When you’re a captain, you can do anything you want. Anything. You can be a tyrant or a god, or whatever you want. Any style you want. Make up your own style… be your own legend.

  “Listen, baby, listen. I listen when the captain talks. I overhear when the officers talk. I know what’s happening. All these years in space, hardscrabble people, hardscrabble lives…you don’t have to like the captain to listen to what he says about that, how he talks about mankind’s dreams, how we’re going out into space now for riches and development…we conquered all the frontiers, we put clothes on the natives, and now it’s happening… Look at Zone Emerald! Not a prison colony! Not a shake-and-bake! A palace for rich people, a shining new city, all the time expanding… and what do they want? Stuff! They want all the things that anybody wants that can be shipped— everything from shoes to poodles—”

  “From forks to fountains,” Jonsy assisted.

  “And when the wealthy start moving…

  “There’s more wealth to be earned,” he recited. “Investors coming in with capital. There are fortunes to be made—”

  “Fortunes,” she hissed, twisting her body as if in a dance, but without taking a step, and her eyes gleamed. “To be made. This is the time to go! The boom time that doesn’t last very long. This is the Gold Rush of space!”

  Jonsy let her spin intoxicants as he worked the bosun’s cockpit dashboard in preparation for the main autoload. He wasn’t doing anything illegal now, but his hands still felt dirty. His only job now was his regular one, to facilitate the clearances for the ship to take over its unloading and loading, in coordination with the Mequon’s automatic system.

  “It’s done now,” Rockie murmured, sensing that he needed encouragement. “The hard part is over. The little ugly whatevers are aboard in their peapods, sleeping away eternity while they make us rich.”

  “Don’t even talk about them. I don’t want to chance some ship system picking up our conversation and recording it.”

  “There’s nothing like that here—”

  “I don’t want to take chances!”

  “Okay, baby, okay… you’re the man.”

  Jonsy elbowed her away enough to free his arm when he noticed what was happening with the electronics. “Damn! The airlocks aren’t engaging. It’s supposed to be completely secure in the hold… I’m supposed to be able to open the space doors! Why aren’t they working?”

  “Did you do a bio-scan?” Rockie suggested. “Maybe there’s a mouse or something in there being picked up by the infrareds. The space doors won’t open unless there are no life-forms—”

  “The container!” Jonsy’s whole body went cold, his hands numb, as he peered through the big observation window down into the hold. “Crap! Somebody’s down there!”

  Rockie crushed her hands to her mouth. “Clyde! What could he want? Why is he there?”

  “Let me handle it!” His panicked whisper broke into a squawk. “Stay here!”

  She seized his arm. “Make it sound good! Tell him, just say, ‘Clyde, this is my job, go do your own job, I’ve got my own system going and I don’t have time to teach you’—”

  “Don’t tell me what to say! Stay here!”

  * * *

  The cavernous starboard cargo bay was chilly. The air was dry. Dry enough that Jonsy was forced to clear his throat as he approached the blue container with the yellow chevrons. He might otherwise have wanted to sneak up on Clyde, to put forth a kind of proprietorial stealth that would prove he was more proficient at slipping through the canyons between containers. He was the bosun, this was his territory. He was the expert at the safari of the ship’s hold.

  But his cover was blown. When he came around the corner to the broad side of the container, Clyde was unflapped at his sudden appearance.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” Jonsy asked. “I’m trying to close the hold off so I can open the space doors and start the autoload.”

  “I know, but I’m checking something,” Clyde said. He didn’t honor Jonsy with a glance, but poked relentlessly at the container’s black-and-silver locking panel.

  Jonsy tried to sound authoritative. “But, y’know, as long as you’re down here, you’re gumming up the works. We can’t get started.”

  “It can wait a minute or two. There’s a blip on this container’s clearance code.”

  “Oh—oh, yeah, it had a little flurry, but I combed it through. It’s just an older-style lock. Uh, hey, Clyde, don’t forget you’re supposed to lock down EV activity until after we’re, y’know, all loaded up.”

  “I won’t forget. What’s in this container?”

  “Uh, it’s chickens.” Jonsy held up the bosun’s box showing the codes and lock-down authorizations. “Eight thousand chickens in individual cryopods. A whole poultry farm ready to be… farmed. Plucked. Egged. Whatever they do on a poultry farm.”

  “Cryopods? Isn’t this one of the old gravity-puff containers that holds cargo in zero-G and keeps it in the middle with puffs of air?”

  “Uh… it’s been converted to cryo.”

  “Why would anybody do that?” Clyde’s straight brows made a single serious line across his forehead. “I thought the black ones with the red stripes over there had the chickens.”

  “Uh, well, yeah… they all do.”

  “Are they from the same source as this one?”

  “Yeah, it’s a shipping company out of Cargo City. Those orange ones are theirs too, loaded with ducks and quail, pheasants, game birds… There are fifty-two containers filled with just pigs and hogs and wild boar—”

  “But if this one and those all have the chickens in stasis, why don’t they look the same as each other if they’re from the same shipping source?”

  “Uh… I’ll check. But that happens all the time. Even old and banged up, these jugs are valuable.”

  “Not that valuable.” While Jonsy made a show of playing on his bosun’s box, Clyde pecked persistently at the coded locking system, but the signals kept flashing orange—access denied. “How come every time I try to unlock it, it goes ‘tilt’ like it doesn’t want me to look inside?”

  “Maybe because you’re not authorized to look,” Jonsy contrived, letting his exasperation show. “I’m the bosun, not you. I’m supposed to be the one minding the locking systems.”

  Clyde glanced at him. “What’s your problem?”

  Jonsy sweated every peck, every touch of Clyde’s finger on the panel. Tap. Tap. Tap-tap. Tap. And the mechanical resistance from the locking computer. Epp. Epp. Beep. Bawk. Epp. “Uh, well, y’know you’re new here and we have our tricks that maybe you don’t know about yet. We already have multiple boarding clearances satisfied— see, they’re all right here—and if we add your personal clearance into the code, it’s just a big complicated mess for, y’know, no really good reason to add steps, an’ all. If we add you to every one of eighty-two hundred containers, we’ll never get any of them boarded and we’ll miss our rendezvous point. If you want to explain to the captain, I guess I can go through the protocols and dismantle the whole grid and reprogram the—”

  “Okay, okay, you made your point.” Clyde quit poking at the locking panel. “Can you get inside?”

  “Uh, I could, but I’ve got six hundred crates to confirm before this one, and if I don’t do it in order, that’ll take twice as long. I’ll have to go back to the cockpit and rifle through the cross-checks. But if you stay here and wait, the hold won’t move forward on its loading procedure. If you leave, it can at least do some ballast shifting till I get back.”

  “Yeah…” Clyde looked up in exasperation at the silent blue container and the giant yellow chevron that came down to end at his feet. “Okay, I didn’t mean to foul up your order. Just check the contents by sight before we break raft, will you? We’re not opening any cracks for smuggling.”

  “Yeah, I’ll chec
k it.”

  “Okay, but I want a report confirming.”

  As Clyde walked away, Jonsy watched him go, measuring the stride and wondering if he could replicate it. “Sure, you do,” he muttered.

  * * *

  Back on the crew observation deck, Keith the cook had buttered the cheerful mood with rum-laced chocolates that he called “tots,” and some kind of punch with lemon drops floating in it. Though the chocolates didn’t really have rum and the drops weren’t really lemon, he claimed to be an expert at extract and the crew was expected to comply with proper imagination. Not much in a spaceship’s pantry was real. Instead, cooks made do with concentrates, freeze-dries, extracts, illusions, and palate-fooling textures. In space, cuisine was the art of sensory deception.

  Captain Alley pretended the tots were yummy, gave Keith a nod of approval, and began singing to the tune of “Old Smoky.”

  “On the good ship Virginiaaaaa… in space we do dwell… we eat Keith’s spaghetti… and tell him it’s swellllll—”

  “Uh-oh,” Colleen uttered. “He’s singing.”

  “It’s a space chantey,” Gunny said.

  “And we’ll transfer our carrrrr-go,” Alley sang on, louder, “while eating our tots… and hope that the mustard… doesn’t give us the trots!”

  “Ew!” LaMay snarled. “That’s not very ‘yar’!”

  “There’s not mustard in these, is there?” Colleen eyed the tray of chocolates Keith held before her. “Tell me there’s not mustard!”

  Keith ignored the question. “I’m either being insulted or immortalized.”

  Alley grinned merrily and sang on. “On top of spaghettiiiii…the crew gets their wish… we get strawberry sprinkles…on garlic and fish!”

  “Carry me back to Old Virginny,” LaMay said, “soon!”

  While they laughed, Clyde returned from checking that one old blue container, saving them from further serenades.

  “All clear?” Alley asked.

  “I’ll know in a few minutes,” Clyde reported.

  Gunny spoke with food in his mouth “What’s the plan for break-off after the transfer? Are we striking right out for our rendezvous?”

  Alley rocked back and grinned. “Translation—Captain, do we get a few hours of sleep before we have to get up and work again?”

  “Oh, fine, thanks. Like you and I haven’t been side by side on enough dirty, smelly, greasy jobs, that you have to treat me like this? That’s it. I quit.”

  “You quit last week, Gunny.”

  “This time I mean it.”

  “Oh, look! The holds are reconfiguring themselves!”

  Everyone paused to watch the transverse bulkheads begin to slide and climb, reshaping the hold to specifications only the computer fully understood. Reconfiguration would use the space most efficiently for bulk freight, even if some spaces were completely empty, and would retrim the ship’s cubic capacity to fit her most spaceworthy balance. A dozen swivel-derricks on telescoping masts adjusted themselves to work with the quadrant davits, now in new places, preparing to work with different bitts and bollards embedded into the ship’s structure to give them purchase. The dance of constant movement was beautiful in its industrial way.

  “Our mission for the next ten hours,” Alley interrupted, “while the ship stabilizes the new cargo, is maintenance surveying. We will check for crazing, pinhole corrosion, and those little structural devils that make first mates nuts.”

  “Thank you for your concern,” Clyde acknowledged. “Speaking of which, where are the zinc disks kept?”

  “Ask Jonsy. He’s the bosun.”

  “He’ll tell you they’re right next to the rivet guns.”

  “That’s what he always says for everything when he doesn’t know where they are. ‘Right next to the rivet guns.’ The end of the rainbow is next to the rivet guns.”

  “What’s ‘crazing’?” Keith asked.

  “Little random surface hairline breaks in the laminate. They’re caused by normal hull stresses. They have to be repaired quickly or they could penetrate all the way through. We fill them with loomed fiberglass and an epoxy resin compound.”

  “Filling them isn’t the hard part,” Colleen said. “Finding them is the hard part.”

  “Sounds gooey.”

  “It’s the way of things to come. Computers do the fancy work on ships, and gradually humans are only needed for the menial labor that requires fingers.”

  “There’s a pleasant prediction.”

  “So what you’re saying—”

  “Oh, now don’t hold me down!”

  “What you’re saying—tell me if this is what you’re saying—is that crewmen will eventually be needed more than captains.”

  “Nah, they’ll always need captains,” Alley trumpeted. “We provide style!”

  Their laughter was a welcome decoration, interrupted only by the ship’s com system. “Clyde, this is Jonsy.”

  Clyde jumped for the console. “Wow, that was fast… What’ve you got for me, Jonsy? Hey—shhh, the rest of you!”

  “The permits and records are all clear on that blue jug. It’s one of the cartage company’s older boxes. They’re phasing out gradually and changing to the new red-striped ones with better capacity and more dependable monitoring systems. That’s… y’know, that’s why it looks different. And why the lock didn’t work right.”

  “Did you check the contents yourself?”

  “Uh, yeah, it’s loaded with individual stacked cryopods of poultry. Rhode Island reds, black striders, prize Leghorns, speckled Cornish hybrids, giant Golden Orpingtons—”

  “You saw these chickens in cryosleep with your own eyes?”

  “Uh, sure did.”

  Clyde paused, rolled his tongue inside his left cheek as if feeling for a bit of unchewed food, and for a moment seemed to balk at accepting the explanation. “Okay, good. Thanks for checking.”

  “Get us—we got Orpingtons.”

  “Sounds like the trots.”

  As Clyde dropped back into his lounge chair, Alley asked. “Something bothering you?”

  Clyde offered a shrugging nod. “Why do half Jonsy’s sentences start with ‘uh’? Makes him sound uncertain.”

  “Same reason half my sentences start with ‘aw, heck.’”

  “Does the policy say anything about different sizes and styles of containers from the same source?”

  “Hell, read page eleven million two thousand whatever, it’s right there.”

  Clyde shook his head. “Somebody ought to comb through that system and simplify it.”

  “We do,” Dave said. “We simplify the code by ignoring most of it.”

  “The Bureau of Shipping keeps adding regulations, as if that helps,” Alley explained. “Makes it harder to check when something seems fishy.”

  “Is something fishy?” Keith asked.

  Clyde shrugged. “Yeah, but it cleared with multiple failsafes, double-checks, coordinated security locks, and confirmation by sight.”

  Dave nodded, eyes bright with anticipation. “Can’t do better than that.”

  “So we’re ‘go’?” Alley asked.

  “Captain, I do believe we are ‘go.’”

  “Great!” The captain clicked on the main communications system with an announcement to all posts. “All scanners on. All systems, all stations, we are go for autoload!” He clicked off and dropped back into his chair, then put his foot up on the padded bar in front of him. “I love this part. I love watching the ship follow its last order, transferring cargo entirely by automated means… I love watching the cargo shift itself around like big bears coming out of hibernation. I love the winches and the gantries and the magnetics and tilt-locks, and that big chunking sound when a ten-thousand-ton jug clicks into place. Chhhhunnk! That deep vibration! It’s like making love! Yeah!”

  “You’re just a moving man by nature,” Colleen commented.

  “You bet I am! What’s any gathering of human beings without their supply train? Tugs and tra
ins and freighters… I love ’em all.”

  “I hope you love livestock, ’cuz that’s 90 percent of what we’re loading today.”

  Alley accepted a refill on his pseudo–fruit punch and watched a pretend lemon drop make the circuit around the rim of his glass. “As long as they don’t wizz in my cargo holds, what trouble can they possibly be?”

  3

  “Trust me. They’ll never notice.”

  This was great. This would be monumental. What a coup. Keith the Dark Chef and Gunny, his unwitting sidekick in evil, crept through the ship on a stealth mission into the underworld—the tomblike starboard hold. Their timing was perfect, just after the autoload, when the computers had secured everything and the crew was concentrating on the port side autoload. Keith calculated a window of several minutes during which nobody would miss them and nobody would look in here.

  “This is stupendous,” Keith editorialized. “Legendary. We’re going to be big names in space lore.”

  Gunny’s mind was on something else. “There are a dozen containers with birds in them. How do you know which ones have chickens?”

  “Sixty thousand chickens in various containers. I’ve got it all figured out.”

  “Did you ever cook a real chicken? What if we steal a bunch of chickens and then you end up burning ’em?”

  “If you’re sure you can break into the lock, then I’m sure I can cook chickens.”

  “I can break into any lock.”

  “I can cook any chicken. At the last port, I secured a hundred ninety pounds of real potatoes. Not flakes, not powder. Real potatoes. Yukon golds. Such pretty little nuggets—I been peelin’ ’em all day… there it is! It’s right over there.

  The blue old one with the dents. It’s the only one without the modern approach alarms. We can walk right up and do our business.”

  Gunny followed Keith down a T-section in the walkway, trying not to look down through the walkway slats which allowed for ventilation, but didn’t do much for acrophobia. “Sounds like you want to use it for a toilet. You sure we won’t get in trouble for this? Stealing cargo?”

  “Stealing twenty chickens out of sixty thousand,” Keith told him. “It’s twenty chickens, not twenty elephants. Chickens. Ten times that’ll die of natural causes. If I can find any dead ones, I’ll take them too, if that makes you feel better. I’ve got it all figured out.”