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If I still had hair, I'd be pulling it out right about now. Luckily, it, along with a large portion of my sanity, had been sacrificed to the dark reaches of the vasty a long time ago.
"Recheck your board, Black Rock Seven," I said. "We are priority, docking directly to main station." The tiny dot of light that marked our dock space on the 3-D display in front of me was nowhere near the main shipping ring of Mandragala Station.
"No, ser." The Black Rock Seven Security Officer's expression was bored as he stared out of the comm screen at me. "The docket shows your payload is status: quarantined. You will proceed to Remote Dock D, berth three, as instructed."
"But that's impossible!" We were carrying six skids of apolytosium 17 ingots, an inert alloy used in spaceship hulls! "Check again."
"Look, Captain..." his tone took on the forced patience of someone who dealt with brain-atrophied spacers every day.
"Zant," I said. "Captain Vivi Zant." The name was on the screen right in front of him.
"Captain Vivi Zant. The docket says your payload is red-tagged. If you have a problem with that, take it up with the dockmaster."
I had a major problem with that. There was a ship, crewed by a bunch of card-carrying union bastards, waiting for our cargo. By the time we hit the clamp rings, we'd be an hour late. Now, this guy was telling me there would be an additional holdup while we straightened out this quarantine mess. Small free-haulers like the Thief's Hand didn't keep a union ship waiting in dock. It wasn't healthy—economically or physically.
"Why?" I asked.
"What, ser?" His patient tone was wearing thin.
"Why the quarantine?"
"We do not have that information, ser. Please stand by for Mandragala Station docking instruction."
I threw myself back in my pilot couch and scowled at the hologram mock-up of the station as I waited for a green light to signal Mandragala had cleared the Thief's Hand for final approach into port. To Remote Dock D, berth three.
Most Black Rock Station staff enjoy their job sitting on the edge of Earth Alliance star systems, swatting at the little spacer mice squeaking to get past their vicious paws.
Does it sound like I hate them? No. As a former Earth Alliance Space Marine, I used to be one of them. Six years ago, spacer time. My ship's time. Because that's all that matters to me on the scale of things. And I was still running errands for the military out on the Rim when they tugged my chain. Still paying for the things they put inside my head and body when I served. Those things let me do their jobs. They are things I really want to keep so I can continue to transport cargo between EA stations and the Outer Rim.
I caught a stealthy movement from the corner of my eye.
Crap! I'd left the vid-link with Black Rock open! I lunged forward to cut the connection as Saurubi landed on the console beside me in a flurry of red, dusky blue and bronze.
She thrust her face at the screen with an angry hiss.
For once, The Mother Universe blessed me with a sliver of luck—the Black Rock officer had turned his attention down to the board in front of him.
I caught my business partner/co-captain by the back of her short vest and jerked down hard. She slid off the console with a screech of claws on metal. Thirty-two kilograms of sinew, bone, and fur hit the deck with a solid thump.
At the same moment, a light on the console bloomed green and a stream of digits scrolled down the in-system nav screen.
Black Rock Seven looked up at me with an expression that asked, "Why are you still here?"
I flashed him a brittle smile. "Remote Dock D it is, ser." I cut the vid link, returning Black Rock and the Hand back to their isolated bubbles in space.
Saurubi sprang back to her feet, twitching her ears to shake out any rumples I'd caused to her fur, and leaned on the console to display an intimidating set of canines at the now-dark screen.
"What does he say?"
"He says we've got trouble." I keyed a go code to confirm the coordinates, then sat back to rub my fingers over my bare scalp. "What the hell, Saura! Have you lost your fuzzy blue mind? You heard the scuttlebutt at the last drop point!" Rumor was the EA was running security in the Inner Systems so tight that Black Rock personnel were spoiling for any excuse to add some excitement to their day. "Messing with them is dangerous."
"Not as dangerous as me."
I gave her a sidelong look. "That's when you're close enough to hook your nasty little claws into them. Not out here."
That pleased her. It didn't distract her. "What does he say?" she asked again.
"Our cargo is quarantined."
Pointed furry ears bent back, flat to her head, the edges turned outward. "How can quarantine metal?" She made a rude snorting sound. "Tell is wrong."
"Saura—"
"What? You are warrior, Vivi. You must be fierce in the presence of stupidity!"
Fierce, yeah. But I knew the difference between exhibiting 'fierce' and exhibiting 'bad attitude', my past being riddled with incident reports of the latter.
I was trying to do better these days.
Besides, if I pushed this guy too hard, he could send out one of his nasty short-range drones to put a hole in our ship, then bump us into the local star. Security maintained in Black Rock's eyes.
Saura clasped her hands behind her back and began to pace the generous four steps our ship bridge allowed.
I sat in silence, giving her time to regain control over a temper that matched the flaming red pouf of fur she wore in a soft deathhawk cut.
Tabisee are similar in body structure to Humans. They walk upright with forward-bending knees and their facial features are comparable to ours, except for their large, slit-pupil eyes. Their bodies are sinewy, lithe, and covered in fur. They have sharp white teeth and lethal claws, which they considerately keep sheathed most of the time.
And any comparison you might be making to a small earth animal should stop right there. Tabisee are not soft or cuddly—well, their fur is soft—but they are definitely not cuddly. They do not have whiskers. They do not purr. Their tempers are short, and they are brutally honest and pragmatic in nature.
They also hate earth cats, probably because of the parallels Humans ignorantly try to draw from their appearance.
Saura stands one-and-a-half meters tall. The tips of her upright ears barely brush my shoulder, but on a bad day, she can take out a squad of Space Marines in three minutes flat. I've seen her do it, and it wasn't always on a bet for beer money and laughs. Did I mention Tabisee have short tempers? I have a healthy respect for the co-owner of the Thief's Hand.
She stopped pacing and looked at me, the bronzy wires intricately tattooed into her skin glinting as if they had a life of their own. "What does quarantine business mean?"
"For us? We can't deliver our cargo until they remove the restrictions."
"Cannot get paid." She summed up the problem precisely.
"Yeah..." I watched her ears shift through a series of positions, open and forward, upright and turned outward, then tilted back and flattened: thought, deeper consideration, then irritation.
"Not good." It was an idiosyncrasy of Saurubi's that she dropped what she considered superfluous words, particularly pronouns. It was something about Tabi Astrogators lack of concern for people and their specifics. Inversely, she said Humans talk too much.
"Worse than not good." I said glumly. "If we can't get our money we can't make our lien payment for the Hand. If we can't make our payment..." What that meant sent another wave of panic through me.
Panic was not a useful reaction. I dug down deep, the way I'd learned to dig when we leaped from a dropship into a shitstorm of weapon fire during a Marine raid on a pirate's nest.
That, however, had only been risking death. This could strike to the very heart of our existence with an ugly finality, sending Saura back to the Tabi Empire and me to the life of a scrub, begging on the docks.
"You will fix, Vivi," Saura said brightly. In her logic, the problem was created by Humans, therefore, I should resolve it.
Dutifully I found the bedrock level of confidence—the idiotic Human optimism—that told me I could do anything I had to.
"It's a stupid mistake," I told her. "I can fix it."
***
THERE WAS NO TIME TO start at the bottom and work my way up, so I bypassed the dockmaster and went directly to the person in charge. We were still two days out from Mandragala when Stationmaster Hu returned my call.
"Captain Zant," he greeted. "I understand your concern, but there are unconfirmed reports of a slagmander nest in one of the ore bins on Galray. We must proceed under the assumption that your cargo is contaminated." His expression did not invite discussion.
I knew about the little red lizards indigenous to Galray's rocky surface. They were merely an annoyance and the harsh climate kept their numbers under control. Their excretions, however, carried a deadly parasitic infection that spread like wildfire in close-packed Human settlements. Over a century ago, when operations first opened on the planet, a contaminated cargo had killed over a thousand settlers at its destination world, as well as wiping out a ship crew and nearly half of Galray Company's production staff.
That's the way things worked in space; you adapted fast or you died. Sometimes you didn't get the chance to adapt.
"Ser, we took on our cargo from a low-orbit foundry, where slagmander contamination is not possible." Galray's mining companies, which produced metals critical to the hardening of ship hulls, now lifted the ore off world by vacuum well and smelted it by concentrating the local star's energy with giant mirrors in a process called sol melt to prevent another infestation and the shutdown of their world's exports. The ingots, strapped to skids, transferred directly from the foundry into a ship's hold. The whole operation took place in a vacuum as another preventative measure against slagmander contamination. Nothing in space touched planetside and no living thing could survive the process. Cargo flowed out of the vast facilities every day without incident.
He shrugged. "Station management has chosen to err on the side of caution. Until the quarantine expires, you can't shift your cargo out of your hold."
"How long is that?"
"The quarantine period is forty-two days."
My heart tried to twist out of my chest. The note on our ship was due thirteen hours after we hit the dock cradle.
"Fourteen standard days have already passed while we were in transit," I pointed out. It was a useless argument; even if we shaved off that time, we couldn't survive the remaining twenty-eight days of quarantine any more than we could survive forty-two days. We had hours to fix this or we would lose our ship.
"We can't take the risk. The full isolation period is in effect. However," he took a deep breath.
"What?" I jumped on the word.
"The medical consensus is that you'd be dead by now if the contamination had breached your ship's life areas. We are willing to attach a decontamination unit to your debarkation tube and allow you access to the station to conduct your business. The ship's hold, however, will remain sealed for the length of the quarantine."
It was the best I was going to get from him.
"Thank you, ser." I thumbed off the connection and sat, staring off into the air.
This was bad.
A stinging pain on the back of my hand snapped me out of my dark thoughts.
"Ow."
Saura lifted her claw. Her ears tipped in question.
"No one is taking the Thief's Hand, Saura." I said fiercely as I wiped the back of my hand against my thigh. The blue fabric of my shipskins would absorb the blood droplet and cycle it with my dead skin cells and sweat. "We won't let them."
We couldn't let them.
"Can go to frontier, Vivi," she suggested. "Not put in to port."
Just take the ship and cargo and leave... It took a moment for that to run through my brain. As desperately tempting as it sounded, it was impossible. "No, Saura, we can't." I'd been forced into spacer life on the run once. It was not something I wanted to move back into. "Big H would never stop searching for us if we skipped out on our loan. He has too many connections." His flunkies would climb all over each other to do him a favor, hoping to catch a crumb of his gratitude. "We'll work this out. I refuse to make you a criminal."
She sniffed. "Already criminal."
"Not that way. Not hounded to the edges of charted space."
Her ears tilted forward, twisting. "Then what do?"
"We go in. Scriver can advance us enough money on the cargo to make our lien payment to Big H. Once he's off our backs, I can work on getting this situation cleared up. If we're stuck in port for the whole quarantine period, I'll pick up odd jobs to keep us going." I didn't want to think beyond that to the legal repercussions of our failure to deliver our cargo to the destination ship on time. I sighed. "We may be looking at some tough times."
"Tough times," she echoed acknowledgment. With the high fees on Mandragala Station and our strained budget, we were facing cold, hunger, and thirst.
We'd been through tough times before.