“Rugs?” Heris stared at him. “Like—the carpet that used to be here?”
“We didn’t have real carpet; we had rugs woven of plant fiber and animal hair. Some handwoven, and some factory-produced. But yes, they ate holes in rugs. And upholstery. Old-fashioned books, too, especially the bindings. My uncle said it was the glue. And they’d make a mess of data cubes left lying around, even though they couldn’t eat them. They’d leave their . . . mess . . . on them, which glopped up the cube readers. Why?”
“Because . . . that may be why the decorators have them. I hadn’t really thought about it but . . . the stuff the decorators take out of a ship—all the wall coverings and carpet and upholstery—has to go somewhere. They’d pay to have it processed in the Station recycler, and then they’d have to pay to replace that with new material. Imported or fabricated, either one. Let me run the figures . . .”
This was something she could work out, once she thought of it. And the specifications were in the contract she’d brought along. She called them up. “Look—here’s an estimate of square meters, times minimum thickness of carpet, of wall covering, of upholstery. Which comes to—” She looked at the volume result. “—And they’re required to give chemical composition—organics—so in case anything’s volatile, what kind of outgassing the ship’s environmentals will have to handle. Interesting.”
“What?”
“If they’re honest, given the density and composition, the volume of material they’d have to have processed onstation or transport would cost them—” She called in the financial subroutines. “Too much. Plus replacement. I’ll figure that both ways, local processing and importation. No, three ways—from planetary sources and importation from more distant sources.” The result exceeded the bid on Cecelia’s job.
“Can’t be,” Petris said. “You’ve made a mistake somewhere.”
“I might have,” Heris said. “But if I didn’t, and if these disgusting insects were put here for a reason—and if they eat rugs and pillows and upholstery—”
“They eat them,” Petris said, with distaste. “They certainly don’t manufacture their replacements. It might be cheaper to have them gobble up the client’s old stuff, but unless they can be cooked into delicious banquet meals, I don’t see how that helps.” Then his face changed expression. “Unless, of course, they’re cooked into something else—the new furnishings.”
“That’s sick,” Heris said. “Besides, how could you get them all back out?”
“It would explain why they risk breaking the vermin laws, if it did work.”
“And it gives us something to sell,” Heris said. “Both the information and the . . . er . . . samples.”
“It certainly establishes us as outlaws,” Petris said. “Selling vermin—carrying them loose on a spaceship?”
“Not loose if we can capture them,” Heris said. “I don’t want any more surprises.”
Capturing the clots of pale cockroaches in Heris’s cabin turned out to be easy, but everyone soon knew that those had not been the only ones aboard. Although their pale color made them hard to spot in some locations, they were obvious in the galley when someone flipped the lights on and they scuttered for dark corners. They swarmed to every food spill, and for a while food spills were more common. Even Heris, who had convinced herself they were harmless, dropped a mug of soup when one ran up her arm. Eventually the crew learned to tolerate the sight of them—or at least not drop things—but no one liked it.
“What’s this thing?” asked Nasiru Haidar one day, carrying the tiny object gingerly between thumb and forefinger. “And I already know it’s not a dropping—I’ve learned to recognize those.”
Petris peered at it. “Egg case, and it’s already hatched. Or they have. So they’re fertile.”
“How fast do they reproduce?” Nasiru asked.
Petris shrugged. “I have no idea. Where I grew up, the entire life cycle of some insects was only 20 planetary days—and our days were close to Old Earth days, they said.”
“And these insects were mature when introduced—possibly more than ten days before we undocked. So they could have laid eggs immediately they came aboard—”
“It’s possible that we undocked with only egg cases,” Petris said, “and all the cockroaches on the ship are those who came with us as eggs.”
“So I couldn’t have seen them,” muttered Oblo. Everyone had pointed out that he’d been aboard the ship, stashing supplies. He’d insisted there were no cockroaches then.
“Possible.” Heris grimaced. “What doesn’t seem possible is getting them all. I wish we knew how long ago that had hatched. Are the ones we see now first or second generation? Or worse?”
Haidar and Skoterin, with their specialty in environmental systems, seemed the logical ones to devise living quarters for the captured cockroaches, and ways of eliminating those still loose. Heris hoped Cecelia would never need to know that she had had cockroaches running loose all over her ship.
Brun waved at her friends as her balloon tugged on the mooring lines. Dozens of other balloons obscured her view of the hills. She signalled her handler, who released the line; she kept a steady burn as the balloon rose. A few were already high above her, bright colors hardly visible; a dozen released within a second of her release, and still more waited for a last passenger. The Festival of the Air . . . she remembered how she’d gasped the first time she saw all the balloons and kites and gliders and parasails. She’d had to learn to pretend disdain, even while learning to pilot a balloon; she’d claimed her father made her do it. But she’d always loved it.
Surface winds pushed her back over the taller hills, away from her goal. She didn’t hurry to rise above them. Half a dozen balloons she knew well were drifting as she was, toward the course marker on the highest hill ten kilometers away.
“Racing, are you?” called a Kentworth, from a yellow balloon striped with purple. “I thought you declared noncompetitive this year.”
“Declarations are secret; the wind doesn’t lie!” she yelled back. Every year some people pretended not to be racing until the race itself; it was one of the things she’d counted on. She let the balloon sag as it approached the next ridge of hills; with the wind behind her, she’d gain altitude here anyway, and she didn’t want to be pushed into the contrary winds aloft. Not yet.
She was still a couple of kilometers short of the first marker when she turned on the burner. She had let herself sag below most of the competitors, but that was her style. Now the burner’s roar drowned out the sound of others, and the hooting and cheering of watchers below. Slowly at first her balloon steadied, then lifted . . . then surged upward, as if yanked by a string.
“Damn!” she yelled. The nearest balloon might or might not hear her over the burner, but anyone watching or recording her on cube could see her mouth moving. “Burner’s stuck on; I’m going to lose my wind—” She hauled herself up onto the basket rim, and banged noisily at the burner with a wrench as the balloon surged upward. Her stomach protested; she ignored it. It was no worse than a fast elevator ride. Around her, then below, the others receded to multicolored blobs. When she felt the wind shift, she whacked the burner control in the right place, which she’d been studiously missing, and turned it off. In the silence, she heard laughter from below, and one bellow asking if she needed help. “No,” she yelled back down. “Fine now.” The balloon kept rising; it had plenty of heat in it, and the air at this level was cooler.
She leaned out, watching all the other craft in the air. She knew what the winds aloft had been when she launched, but winds changed . . . she was drifting back now, away from the course marker, back past the launch site where balloons just launching looked like overstuffed sofa pillows. Half a dozen balloons were higher and ahead, well on their second race leg, having passed the first course marker before gaining altitude to ride the other wind direction.