“What next?” her daughter asked quietly.
“We find ourselves some real supper and we board our transportation.”
“Our transportation?” Yalena asked, frowning. “What transportation? I mean, where are we going?”
“The Star of Mali docked at Ziva Two this afternoon.”
Yalena’s brows, knit in puzzlement, shot abruptly upward. “Off-world?” she gasped. “But—” She closed her mouth, stunned. “You want us to go to Vishnu? To be with Daddy?”
Kafari nodded, not voicing her real plans aloud. After what she’d seen tonight, Kafari wasn’t going anywhere. There was too much at stake. Too many innocent lives had already been lost. But Yalena was going out, whether she liked it or not. Even if Kafari had to knock the girl senseless to do it.
“How do we get off-world?” Yalena asked. “We don’t have a shuttle pass. And I don’t think the P-Squads would let anybody board any kind of orbit-capable shuttle, now.” She gulped, seeing ramifications for the first time in her life. “They won’t want anyone to know what’s happening here, will they?”
“No, they won’t,” Kafari agreed. “But we’re not going by shuttle. Not exactly. For right now, however, we find food,” Kafari insisted. She tossed everything they’d carried with them into the nearest refuse bin, found a duffle in another pilfered locker, then led the way through empty, echoing corridors. They headed for the spaceport’s food hub, where they raided a restaurant kitchen. Wolfing down supper took only ten minutes. Then Kafari started dumping food into the duffle.
“Why are we taking so much?” Yalena asked.
“Because I don’t know how long it will take to get ourselves into orbit. Freighters operate on tight schedules and the Star of Mali is due to break orbit from Ziva Two about noontime tomorrow. If she leaves on schedule, we won’t have to wait longer than a few hours. But if there are delays over the mess in Madison — especially if the president’s been killed and I’m betting he has — we could be stuck for hours. Maybe days. And once we’re in our hiding place, I don’t want to come out, again. I won’t risk getting caught trying to sneak out and grab more food.”
Yalena, showing definite signs of wear and tear from their ghastly struggle, just nodded, accepting the explanation at face value. Kafari’s heart constricted. Her daughter hadn’t learned to be devious, yet. She zipped the duffle closed, then led the way through the spaceport along a different route, heading toward the cargo-handling side of the port. They found rows of big cargo-transfer bins, neatly labeled so the stevedores could tell at a glance which bins were consigned to which hold on the orbiting freighters or the occasional passenger craft. Kafari chose a big cargo box whose manifest tag said it contained processed fish meal, the biggest food export Jefferson produced. The idea of shipping any food had caused riots, particularly amongst the explosive urban poor, so POPPA propagandists had been very careful in assuring the public that the only food being shipped out was the treaty-mandated native fish, processed for Terran consumption.
“We’ll open the top, scoop out enough fish meal to bed down, and pour the stuff we remove into a refuse bin somewhere.”
Yalena nodded and scrambled up to try prying open the hinged top. “It won’t open, Mom. I don’t see any sign of a lock, but it won’t budge. It’s like the whole thing’s been welded shut.” She leaned down, peering over the sides. When she reached the back of the bin, she said, “Hey, that’s weird. Look at this, Mom. Why would somebody put a door into the side of a cargo bin full of fish meal? It would flood out the minute you tried to open it.”
Kafari crawled around to the back and frowned at the door that had been fitted into the narrow end of the bin. “You’re right. That is weird.”
“I’m going to check the other bins, Mom.” She moved at a brisk pace through the stacked cargo boxes. “This one’s got one, too. So does this one. And that one. The ones down here don’t, but this whole row does.” She was pointing at the bins nearest the warehouse doors.
Kafari’s frown deepened as the implications of that placement sank in. “These would be loaded first, at the back of the freighter’s cargo bay. Spot-check inspections wouldn’t be as likely to uncover these, stacked in the back.” That suggested all sorts of interesting things. She came to an abrupt decision and yanked the handle up. The metal door creaked open, but no fish meal poured out. The air that did flood out carried a butcher-shop smell with it. Kafari peered into the bin, using the hand light, and stared, struck literally speechless.
The whole, immense cargo box was full of meat. Not just any meat, either, and certainly not the noxious fish-meal they’d been shipping for years to the miners on Mali. She could see whole sides of beef. Thick, center-cut hams. Ropes of spiced sausage, a Klameth Canyon specialty that was confiscated by the government as fast as ranchers could produce and pack it. This food was supposed to be sent to the hard-working crews on the fishing trawlers and the high-latitude iron mines. If each of the modified cargo bins held this many dressed carcasses and processed meats, at least a quarter of the annual output of Jefferson’s ranches was sitting right here, awaiting shipment disguised as something else.
Who had authorized the clandestine shipments? Gifre Zeloc? Or one of the POPPA king-makers? Maybe even Vittori, himself? Whoever it was, they were lining their pockets with what had to be immense profits, doubtless selling to Malinese miners who could afford to pay for meats the average Jeffersonian Subbie hadn’t tasted in years. Kafari wanted to beam pictures of this to every datascreen on Jefferson. If enough people saw this, there would be food riots in the streets.
Until Sonny crushed them.
Choked by helpless rage, Kafari gripped the edge of the open door frame until her fingers turned white. Then she strode down the line, trying to judge what the loading order would be when these bins were hauled into the shuttle and boosted up to the cargo bay aboard the Star of Mali. “We go in this one,” she decided. “It’s less likely to get buried in the stack, which will give us time to get out and into the ship.”
“Won’t all the air escape?”
Kafari shook her head. “No, the shuttles will off-load into a two-tier cargo-handling system. When you’ve got perishables, you ferry them up in a pressurized shuttle and offload them through an airlock in Ziva Two. Stevedores there transfer the bins to the freighters’ cargo bays, which are snugged into the side of the station. This bin will be under pressure the whole time. Let’s close up the other one.”
Kafari opened the one she had chosen, then scrounged until she came up with a rain tarp from one of the storage rooms adjacent to the warehouse’s main floor. She pulled out a dozen full-sized hams, chilled for transport but not frozen, creating a space for the duffle and Yalena, then hauled the meat to a refuse bin and dumped it in, hiding the evidence of their tampering.
“You’ve got your wrist-comm on?” she asked Yalena.
“Yes.”
“Good. That meat’s not frozen, but we’ll wait a bit before crawling in. No sense in getting chilled right away. Here,” she sat down between the wall and the cargo bin, “snuggle up. We’ll get some sleep.”
Yalena curled up against her, leaning her head against Kafari’s shoulder. Within minutes the exhausted girl was sound asleep. Kafari’s throat closed. She hadn’t held her child like this since Yalena had turned five. She wanted more of it, much more, and knew it was impossible. To keep Yalena safe, she had to smuggle her off-world, get her to safety with her father. Her eyes burned with hot, salty tears. The need for Simon’s arms around her was a physical agony. All she had to do was climb into that bin full of meat…