The dogs were ecstatic to see both of them coming home at once. Scout took them down to the cave to run off all the energy they could, and by the time she took them back to the room, Daisy had what few belongings that mattered to them packed in a small, sealed plastic crate.
There was another crate beside it, a bit larger with small holes drilled through it in several places. Daisy dropped to her knees, and Gert ran to her, tail wagging so hard the motion started at her forelegs. Daisy snuggled her and petted her and cooed over her, then snatched her up and stuffed her inside the crate. Scout scooped up Shadow and pushed Gert to one side to make room for him. Before either of them knew quite what was going on, Daisy had shut the lid and sealed it shut.
“How do we do this?” Scout asked, looking from the delicate glider in her hand to the two crates they had to carry.
“I’ll show you,” Daisy said. “You’ll get the hang of it once we’re out in free fall. I’ll take the dogs. If you have to ditch your crate, we’ll get by, but I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
Scout nodded, far less sure herself.
Daisy hefted the crate with both dogs inside and carried it out the doorway, down the hall to the tunnel on the far side of the cave. Scout, carrying the smaller, far lighter crate, envied how easy Daisy made it look. Sure, her augmented body had super strength, but how did she manage to slip through the narrowest parts of the end of the cave as if the plastic crate in her arms was as fluid as her own body?
Daisy came back and helped Scout angle her own crate through the narrowest bit. If she too was wondering how Scout was going to manage flying with a box she couldn’t walk with, she didn’t show it.
Once they were out on the sandy patch outside of the tunnel mouth, Daisy stopped to pull a rope harness out of one of her cargo pockets. Scout had one just like it in one of her belt pouches, and she quickly slipped it over her shoulders and fastened it in front. Scout waited for Daisy to attach hers to the crate, but instead, she turned to Scout.
“You first,” Daisy said.
“Me first? I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“You first so I can help you,” Daisy said, adjusting the fit of Scout’s harness before running a rope through the ring set over her breastbone. “I’m giving you a lot of extra length. You have a sense of how far down the artificial gravity goes here?”
“Sort of,” Scout said.
“You’ll jump out and get your wind under you; then I’ll toss down the crate. It’s going to drag you down, don’t worry about that. Just keep yourself level. Once you’re out of the gravity field, everything is going to feel much more natural.”
Scout doubted that. She would still have a lot of extra mass dangling at the end of a long rope. Nonaerodynamic mass at that.
Scout waited for Daisy to give her a nod, then took as much of a run as she could, launching off the last bit of rock and extending her glider wings to catch the air.
It felt like her best takeoff ever, right up until Daisy tossed down the crate.
Scout could tell that Daisy had thrust it as straight down as she could with all of her augmented strength, sending it on the fastest path out of the gravity field rather than swinging it on the end of its rope, a motion that would likely send Scout tumbling out of proper glider configuration. Even so, the sudden increase in weight made her all too aware that her body weight was being held aloft by what basically amounted to plastic paper.
But she remembered what Daisy said and fought the urge to panic at how fast the underbelly of island bedrock was zooming past her, focusing instead on keeping her arms spread wide, letting her wings fill with air. She caught an updraft just as she plunged out of the gravity field, not enough to buoy her back up again but enough to let her circle in place for a moment, to get used to the odd pendulum of mass confusing her momentum.
Then Daisy was beside her. The dogs in their crate were fastened flush against her belly. Not that they found that comforting: even with the wind filling her ears, Scout could hear their anxious whining.
“Got it?” Daisy asked, drawing close to Scout’s side.
“I think so,” Scout said. “Is it far to this port?”
Daisy laughed. “We’re in the middle of a spherical cloud, and all of the ports are on the edge.”
Scout laughed in return. Galactic Central had many spaceports, the largest positioned “above” the two main islands at the “top” of the cloud. Given that “up” and “down” were largely defined by everyone on the islands choosing to orient their islands with their unique gravity fields the same way, the distinction was purely academic. And given that no edge of the bubble that contained the atmosphere was any closer to the central islands than any other edge, the main port being on the edge directly overhead was doubly academic.
But there were many other ports all around the edges of the bubble, most grouped together by common interests. Trading ships mostly moved in and out of one cluster of ports, passenger vessels another.
Scout didn’t know which port they had come in through, only that Daisy had been able to dock a stolen ship there, get Scout and the dogs off, and exchange that ship for a stack of coins before the authorities were any the wiser. Scout expected where they were going would prove to be, if not the same place, a very similar one.
And indeed, Daisy led her to a small, isolated port, as far from the part of the cloud the Tajaki trade dynasty inhabited as it was possible to get, and not part of any cluster. The island they landed on was barely more than a bare patch of rock, just large enough to hold the half of the building that stood within the contained atmosphere. There was just room enough for them to touch down and fold their gliders before entering the doorway to the dark interior.
The place looked like it had seen better days. The waiting area was ample, but there was nowhere to sit. Scout could see marks on the floor showing where benches had once been bolted down. Now there was nothing but skittering dust bunnies that danced across the floor to pile up closer to the walls.
The storage rooms, on the other hand, were packed to maximum capacity. And someone was lingering in each of those doorways, not waiting, just watching as Daisy and Scout continued down the long hall.
The vaulted roof had an occasional skylight, the only sources of light in the space. One pair of skylights, Scout was still looking up into the pinkish gray cloud that encased Galactic Central. The next she was looking up into the black of space.
“This way,” Daisy said, as the main hallway split off into a web of smaller corridors. They climbed a ramp and went down another long corridor that ended in an open airlock.
“Captain Dieu-le-Veut!” Daisy called, catching Scout by the arm to keep her from stepping through the airlock.
“Who wants to know?” a woman called back. It didn’t sound like her mood had improved since Scout had seen her last, on the ground outside the public house.
“Ruby Peach,” Daisy called back, then made a little face at Scout as if flinching at her own alias.
“Ruby Peach owes me money,” the captain snarled.
“Not yet she doesn’t,” Daisy said. “Permission to come aboard?”
“Cheeky!” the captain snapped. Then Scout heard a metallic clang and imagined a hand grasping a ship’s bulkhead to pull a body up out of a chair, then a deeper series of clangs as her steps drew ever nearer.
It looked like they had woken her up. Her flame-red hair had pulled loose from its braid, dancing in a cloud around her head as she ducked inside her ship’s airlock to glare out at them.
“Who’s this?” she demanded.
“Passenger,” Daisy said. “You’re about to get the second installment as soon as we get these crates on board. But you’re not to leave and spend it on wine. We’ll be leaving in a hurry once we have the other passengers with us.”
“This job is starting to sound like more trouble than it’s worth,” the captain grumbled.
“It’s exactly what we agreed to,” Daisy said reasonably.
“Maybe I give back the advance and we call it even,” the captain said. “It’s not like I’ll have an opportunity for cargo or work out the way you’re going.”
“Fine,” Daisy said brightly, ignoring Scout’s jaw dropping open. It was far too late to start changing the plan now. But she remained silent. Surely Daisy knew what she was doing. “If you just fetch the money, I’ll count to see that it’s all there, and we’ll be on our way.”
“Well,” the captain said. “We did have an arrangement, as you said. You can stack your crates through there, in storage, and pay me the second bit as promised.”
“You can’t leave the ship while we’re gone,” Daisy said firmly.
“I do believe I only agreed not to leave the port,” the captain said testily.
Scout cast her mind back to her short walk through the port. She hadn’t seen any sort of dining or drinking establishment, but surely there must have been something tucked away in a corner . . . ?
“You have to stay in the ship,” Daisy said, pulling Scout in after her so she could shut the airlock door. “We have something that requires looking after.”
“That wasn’t part of the agreement,” the captain all but snarled.
Daisy didn’t respond, just bent to open the larger of the two crates, the one containing Shadow and Gert. They came bounding out to run to Scout, then skidded to a halt when they saw the stranger towering over them.
All the anger drained out of her face. For a minute, Scout thought she saw sadness there. But then a smile appeared as she dropped down to one knee and held out her hands. Not a particularly friendly smile, not one that seemed to get much use, but the dogs only recognized that someone wanted to be friends. They approached cautiously, both eschewing the metallic hand in favor of the fleshy one. The captain spoke comforting words to them in a language Scout didn’t recognize.
“We won’t be long,” Daisy said. “All of our stuff is in the other crate, and our friends will be traveling light.”
The captain didn’t seem to hear, lost as she was in scratching first one dog’s ears, then the other’s.
“We’ll be in a significant hurry when we return,” Daisy persisted.
“I’ll be ready,” the captain said. It sounded like she wanted it to come out more snappish than it did but she couldn’t manage that and smile at the dogs at the same time. “Don’t worry about us. We’ll be fine.”
Daisy and Scout slipped out of the airlock, closing the door behind them before the dogs could quite figure out what was going on.
“You’re sure we can trust her?” Scout asked. She hated leaving her dogs with strangers.
“Captain Jocquette Dieu-le-Veut has no friends or family and seldom works with a crew,” Daisy told her as she wrapped her arm around Scout’s and led her back out of the port. “What she did have was a dog. Decades old, that dog was, and her only companion. She’s been out of sorts since he died. When I first saw her in the public house, she was mourning his death. That’s how we got to talking. I would trust her with any dog’s life implicitly.”
“What about our lives?” Scout asked.
“We can trust her greed,” Daisy said. “As long as we have money she wants that she doesn’t get until the end, she’ll do the job.”
Scout didn’t say anything. It truly was far too late to start changing the plan.
But if Captain Jocquette Dieu-le-Veut were truly motivated by money above all things, why hadn’t she noticed that Daisy hadn’t paid the second installment before they had left?