Drifters' Alliance, Book 2 Read online

  The tiny green and purple marks I saw on her skin hidden below her coat tell me pretty much everything I need to know about her and how she managed to construct this majestic beast of a biogrid, but I don’t want to be the one to say that to her. It would be better for everyone involved if she’d just confess her personal mystery to me; otherwise, I risk not getting her on my side.

  That’s the nature of the Romanii; they never break tradition and share the details of their activities unless it’s absolutely necessary for life or death, and even then sometimes they choose the latter over exposure. But when they do let you into their world, you’re in for life. Their bonds are beyond strong.

  “Material falsehoods,” I say, quoting from a text I read and committed to memory during training at some point. I can’t remember whether it was Level 2 or 3. “When questioned by your captain as a member of his or her crew, you are required to answer truthfully, and failure to do so is punishable to the extent the captain determines.” I pause to let that sink in. Maybe she’s heard it before, but it’s difficult to tell from her stone-cold expression. “You and I both know you had others helping with this grid —a lot of others, and people not on this crew— and until you admit that, you are guilty of not being truthful with me, and of directly and purposefully countermanding my orders.”

  She’s shaking all over. I’ve seen this before, during my training with the OSG. They regularly had us watch interrogations of various people in custody who’d been detained for violating OSG directives, and the Romanii were regular guests of the OSG’s facilities. It took a lot to break them, and they were never the same after when they did. Because they place honor of family over every other value, a violation is a denial of their basic humanity in their eyes. Of ten successful interrogations I’d seen, eight resulted in the eventual suicides of the prisoners, all of them Romanii, and I don’t want that for Lucinda. Not in a million years.

  I turn my attention to Rollo. “Rollo, please leave the biogrid.”

  He looks relieved. “Where should Rollo go?”

  I sigh at his ridiculous habit of refusing to refer to himself in the first person. Obviously he has issues, and maybe one day I’ll get to the bottom of them, but not today. Right now, I just need him out of here so I can have a private conversation with this Romanii girl.

  “Rollo has a choice,” I say. “He can either go back to his holding chamber, or he can help Jeffers with his inventory. Under no circumstances should Rollo go anywhere else.”

  He nods. “Rollo will help with the inventory. Maybe that’ll earn him a fritter.”

  “Or not.” I wait for him to acknowledge the fact that fritters don’t come to those who slack.

  “Yes, Captain,” he says, giving me a sad salute before turning to go.

  When I’m sure he’s left the area and the portal to the grid has closed behind him, I turn back to Lucinda. “Okay, listen. I’m sorry I was so harsh with you before, but I had no idea.” I’m backed up against a wall. She’s not going to answer me of her own free will because her customs and training forbid it, but without her on the grid, the entire thing will die along with all my plans. We just need to get this shit out in the open and deal with it. I’m nothing if not decisive when there are no other options, and we have to move forward now. Forget protocol and cultural sensitivities; it’s time for the big reveal.

  “No idea about what?” She’s back to being suspicious. Her attitude makes complete sense to me now, though, so I don’t take offense.

  “No idea you’re Romanii.”

  Her jaw drops open and she goes into full glare mode. “Romanii? What?! Are you serious?!” Her outrage is as telling as her body art. It’s not that big an insult to be called one, unless you’re trying to hide who you really are or unless you have a big chip on your shoulder and think everyone in the universe is out to get your people.

  I shrug. “Yes, of course I’m serious. And had I known that about you before, I might have given you a break earlier. Hiding things from me is only going to make your life more difficult. I’m a fair person, Lucinda. I know your people and their customs. All you had to do was tell me who you are, and it would have been fine. We could have avoided this whole mess.” I say this knowing no Romanii in the history of their people would ever do such a thing. They’ve been persecuted for too long, not to mention the fact that they’re super wily. They’re too sly to get sappy and trusting with a xeno.

  She crosses her arms over her chest again. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Her tone is too haughty to be genuine.

  I lift a brow. “Are you sure that’s how you want to play it?”

  “I’m not playing anything. You’re crazy.” She tries to laugh, but it comes out really shrill. She stops the lame attempt at humor as soon as she hears herself.

  “Take your coat off.” I gesture at her white garb.

  She looks down. “What?”

  “Take it off. Show me you’re not Romanii.” That’s the one part about her people that’s never made sense to me. For a group trying so hard to operate under the radar, they sure do make it impossible to hide once they have any amount of skin showing. I guess pride in who you are sometimes overrules the survival instinct. I can relate. Hell, I probably should have stayed in my father’s household and just toed the line until I died; that would have been the smarter thing to do. But, of course, here I am…standing in a stinky hot biogrid ordering a girl to strip.

  “No, I’m not going to take my clothes off for you. You’re insane.”

  “I’m not asking you to take off your clothes. Just your coat.”

  “My clothes, my coat … it’s the same thing.”

  I’m starting to lose my patience. This is typical Romanii shit she’s pulling — they love to distract, annoy, and wear a person down with semantics and idiotic commentary. What she doesn’t realize is that I’ve been trained by some pretty ruthless people how to cut through that bullshit. But I don’t really want to use those methods on her. Not today, anyway. Instead of the OSG way, I’m going to use insults against her culture as my battle tactic, because sometimes, I fight dirty like that.

  “If you want to convince me you’re not Romanii, you should probably stop acting so Romanii.”

  Her arms jerk down to her sides. “I’m not even going to justify that with a response.”

  I lift my chin toward her arms, stiff as boards with her hands in fists. “You already did respond, actually. Why are you so defensive? Is it because you think I’ll discriminate against you?” She has every right to fear that. Romanii aren’t exactly the most respected of people populating our universe. Something about them relieving people of their possessions without paying for them might be the reason for it.

  The Romanii have this cultural attitude that no amount of imprisonment or redirection has been able to eliminate from their group-think; namely, that any asset not being used or guarded carefully is obviously a resource in need of redistribution by their people. The fact that Lucinda created this entire biogrid under Langlade’s nose is the perfect example of this theory in action: he wasn’t using the outer and upper chambers or these pipes and other parts? Fine. Lucinda found a use for them that was more than adequate. Some people call the Romanii scavengers; I call them resourceful. The trick is to get them on your side.

  “No, I’m not being defensive at all,” she says, her chin once again up in the air. “I’m just not going to admit to being a thief.”

  I hold out my hands. “Hey, no one here called the Romanii thieves.”

  “You’ve done nothing but call me a thief since you stepped foot on this ship.” Her eyes go a little watery at that. Ironically, they are pretty sensitive about the stealing thing.

  “So you’re admitting to being Romanii, then?”

  “No!” she shouts. “I’m doing no such thing!”

  “Fine. Let’s go, then.” I start walking toward the exit.

  “Where?”

  “To the brig. If you can’t be hones
t, I can’t trust you with this ship’s most valuable asset.”

  She stands there with her jaw going out of joint, first left and then right, as she battles her inner demons. I wait for her to come to the inevitable conclusion that if she’s not here to take care of her green babies, all her hard work will go to waste when they die.

  “Fine.” She grabs at the buttons on her jacket. “You want to see me without my coat on, go ahead. Get your cheap thrills.”

  As the jacket slides from her shoulders, the edges of her all-over body tattoos are revealed, snaking out from under her collar and sleeves. Bits of concealing makeup near the bottom of her neck have smudged, telling me she’s gone to considerable effort to hide her roots from the people on this ship. I wonder if it’s just me she’s been keeping in the dark or if it includes the gingers and Jeffers too. I find it hard to believe they could all be that clueless. There had to be thirty people in here working on this grid. Wily motherfuckers, every last one of them.

  “Thank you, Lucinda. You can put your coat back on.”

  She jerks the material into place, yanking it up over her shoulders and refusing to meet my gaze.

  As clearly as she is rejecting me, it isn’t working to dissuade me from engaging with her. In fact, I’m anxious to help her understand my thought process. Normally, I’d just let someone in her position stew over it, but not when that person is a Romanii. Letting a Romanii get riled up about something and then giving them time to really simmer in that anger is never a good idea. They have long memories, and they pass them on to their kin. And those kin tend to pop up in the damnedest places.

  “I respect your culture, Lucinda. I would never call any of your people thieves.”

  She says nothing in response.

  “I also agree with the basic premise that extra resources should be put to use.”

  Her motions slow down. Now she’s brushing invisible lint or maybe imagined wrinkles from her sleeve.

  “But I also believe that before anyone relieves me of my assets, they should discuss it with me first. I’m not an unreasonable person. If I can’t use something for the good of the crew, I’ll give it up. I don’t get attached to things.”

  “People are not things,” she finally says.

  “I never said they were.”

  “You’re so quick to threaten to put someone in custody, to tell them what they should be doing and not doing.”

  I shrug. “That’s the job of the captain, Lucinda. I’m sorry that the leadership before I got on this ship was lacking, but it won’t be anymore. Not with me at the helm.”

  “And how long will that be, do you think?” She sounds tough, but she’ll never be as tough as I am.

  “Until I take my last breath, whether it’s a hundred years or ten minutes from now.”

  I walk over to the portal and leave her standing there.

  “What am I supposed to do now? Do you expect me to go to the brig?”

  I shake my head as I walk over the threshold. “Nope. I know you built this grid with the help of your people. How you got them on this ship, got them working on building this monster, and then got them off again without Langlade knowing … well, you’ll tell me eventually. Until then, I’ll wait. It’s enough right now that I know and that you know I know.”

  I can feel her frustration burning through the back of my head, but she says nothing, so I just keep on going. I have other matters to take in hand, and the issue of this biogrid isn’t going anywhere. One day she’ll tell me about her world, if I’m patient and respectful and tough as nails. And I’m pretty damn sure I can be all those things.

  The voice of one of the gingers comes out into the corridor via an overhead comm box as I make my way up to the flight deck, interrupting my thoughts about Lucinda and her super secret, go-go gadget biogrid building crew.

  “Attention, attention, all crewmembers, this is engineering. We have a vacuum cycle underway, so don’t be surprised if your hair starts standing on end in about two minutes. As you wait for that tingly feeling, please don’t hesitate to bring all potential target practice items to the cargo area as directed by her ladyness, Captain Cass. That is all. Engineering out.”

  I smile as the first layer of hair on my head starts to lift and bits of dust and other random particles begin floating toward the nearest intake vents at the floor near my feet. We’ll have a nearly clean ship in just a few hours, and then we’ll spend the rest of our wait on the Alliance getting the rest of her spiffed up. She’ll be like new the next time Beltz steps foot on her.

  I reach the flight deck just as an alarm begins to sound, telling me we have company within shooting distance.

  Chapter Nine

  I RUSH TO THE CAPTAIN’S chair while my blood pumps double time through my veins. Adelle has been monitoring the systems while I’ve been making the rounds of the ship welcoming my crew to their new world, and I instructed her to only contact me if there was a direct threat. As I look out the clearpanel at the ship approaching, I realize I should have been less specific about what she was supposed to be guarding against. Next time, I’ll tell her to alert me when anyone or anything gets within a hundred klicks of our position.

  I flick the all-comm button on at my array as I drop into my seat. “Attention all crewmembers, we have a craft of unknown identity approaching. Please report to your stations if you aren’t already there. Engineering, our shields are going hot, so put a pause on that cycle.” The vacuum cycle is going to have to wait. I need the power for whatever this is.

  After flipping off the all-comm and putting some extra shield percentage in place, I focus my attention on the approaching ship. It appears to be a PC of some sort, but bigger than the one that buzzed us at the last station. Normally, a craft off in the distance, especially one of this size, isn’t anything to get riled up about without more obvious signs of aggression, but I’m not taking any chances right now with the recent change in the OSG’s policies on water control. Who the hell knows what’s going to happen next in our world? This thing could be the front runner of a giant scavenger corps.

  The door to the flightdeck slides open, and Baebong walks through it to join me. “What’ve we got?” He practically flings himself into his chair and spins it toward the clearpanel, pressing several buttons that bring up the coordination chart. If it’s calibrated correctly, it will tell him how far this craft is from our position and where it will be for the next several minutes in relation to us, assuming the craft maintains a constant speed.

  I point at the clearpanel, calling attention to the craft’s back-angled wing formation and small, arrow-like body style. “Looks like a PC. Not the same one that buzzed us at the station, though.” Not that it could be that guy. We didn’t broadcast our intended destination before night crawling, so there’s no way that pilot would have been able to follow us. If he’d been pulled into the vortex along with us, we would have gotten an alert from Adelle. Or we should have, anyway.

  “Adelle?” I wait impatiently for the compubot to answer.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “When we night crawled the other day, did we bring anyone with us?”

  “No, Captain.”

  “Are you programmed to alert me automatically when that happens?”

  “Yes, Captain, I am.”

  “Is there any reason why you would ignore that programming?”

  “I am sorry, Captain, but I do not understand the question.”

  Baebong looks over at me, confused. I guess he and the computer are on the same page — the one that says computers can’t ignore their programming. But both of them are forgetting that one time when they did, when everything in our ancient world went up in smoke.

  After I heard the stories about our world ending, about the viruses, the bombs, and the reaction of the computers after the dust settled, I never totally trusted a non-sentient being again. Raised in a household where computers did almost everything a human could do only made me more suspicious of their entire race. Th
at’s how revolutions start … right under your nose and even inside your own home sometimes. After all, it was a computer who helped me escape my personal prison, and I know for damn sure my father never programmed it to do that. I took its chip with me when I left so that he couldn’t destroy it. The sentimental part of me entertains the idea of resurrecting my savior inside another host one day. The smarter version of myself fears what that means about both the compubot and me. Until then, the chip remains inactive and on my person, in a tiny compartment sewn into my jacket that no one but me knows about.

  Jeffers enters the flightdeck chamber from the other door, to my left. I watch as he takes a seat in the other available chair. “What is that?” he asks. “Do we know who’s piloting?”

  I shake my head, staring at the ship as it gets closer and closer. Something about it looks off. I realize that not everyone flies nose forward, but it’s usually when there’s something wrong with the azimuth indicators that they fly kind of off-kilter like this one is. He’s not sending out a distress signal of any kind, though, otherwise we’d be hearing it right now.

  I’m guess I’m used to ships looking more … purposeful. This one is just floating, letting some small thrust given a long time ago send it where it’s going. It’s possible a piece of space junk bumped into it and knocked it off level, but anyone on board would have probably straightened her out if that were the case. It’s almost as if it’s just limping along instead of actually trying to reach a destination. Or at least, that’s the impression it’s trying to give. There are no alarm bells ringing on my ship, but they’re clanging like crazy in my head.

  “Try to reach it,” I say to Baebong, hoping my internal alarms are just overblown paranoia. I suppose it’s possible this PC could be experiencing an emergency even without a distress signal, and if the ship is in trouble, I’m not against helping its captain out. He can’t have more than one other person on board with the size of the thing being what it is — maybe two, max. Turning into a jellyfish out in the Dark with no gravitational field to keep my feet on the ground and my bones strong is my worst nightmare, so I’d never leave someone else to that fate if I could help it. Besides, it’s just common courtesy not to let your fellow human turn to jelly, right?