"My fingers hurt," one sailor complained.
"Yeah," Joat agreed, "my cuticles are beginning to peel back." She sighed. "I'm really sorry to put you through this, guys. But what could I do? I don't care what he says about that instrument, too many people have warned me against it."
"I don't think it really causes problems, ma'am. But I can see where you wouldn't want to take a chance," the other sailor said.
They'd gone through several hundred boxes and were beginning to close in on the hidden cache of crown rubies.
Fardles! she thought, Doesn't that nardy Commander have anything better to do? We've been at this for hours! Surely someone, somewhere is committing a vicious crime that these guys should be trying to stop!
She reached out and grabbed a box that she knew contained one of the doctored Crown rubies. She could feel the difference in weight. The two sailors reached for two more ruby filled boxes. Her heart began to pound as she readied the lie she'd been preparing.
"What the hell is this?" one of the men asked.
"It's slag," Joat told him taking it out of his hand. "It's what's left over when they've cut the crystals from the matrix they're grown from." Please, she thought, be ignorant about laser crystals. Be dumb, please!
"Here's another one," said his companion.
Joat opened her box and dumped out the disguised ruby.
"Fardles! I'll bet the rest of the shipment is like this! I should have known better! There's no such thing as a bargain, just deals you regret. I bet I end up paying top dollar for every good crystal I've got." She slammed the ruby back into the box in disgust and tossed the box contemptuously over her shoulder.
"Pereira, Benavides, heads up! We're moving out."
The two sailors put down their boxes with sighs of relief and rose. Stretching to get the kinks out, they smiled at Joat.
"Sorry about the mess," one said.
"Don't worry about it," Joat told them, grinning. "Perils of passage," she assured them.
She rose too and escorted them to the lock that connected her ship to theirs.
The Commander was there and he and Joat gave each other a fish-eyed stare.
"Sorry for the inconvenience," he said stiffly.
"Not at all," she said, smiling. The hatch clanged shut. "You meddling, officious twit!" she added with a snarl, kicking the hatch-cover.
Joseph and Alvec had stayed carefully on the bridge, on the general principle that absent faces generated no awkward questions. Joseph handed her one of the glasses of Arrack he held and Joat took it solemnly. The three of them clicked glasses and drank.
Joat smacked her lips. "I never thought I'd live to say this, but I needed that."
"We better clean up this mess," Alvec said, "and get underway before we attract any more attention."
"Attention," Joseph mused. "True, I am from a backward planet, but still… in my trade-" he made a gesture of apology "-which for the moment is yours, Joat… drawing attention to oneself is not a good thing."
"Yeah," Alvec said. "And the way we've been going, we've got a great big holo sign reading Hurrah, We're Here! welded to the bow of the ship."
Joseph sighed. "I am haunted by the feeling that we have just refused to grasp a lifeline that fate has thrown us. Whatever happens now, my friends, I pray that the God is watching over us, for I fear we are utterly outside of human help. And too many depend on us for failure to be tolerable."
Joat nodded. If Joseph was right, Amos and his party were in the hands of the Kolnari. She shuddered. A fate that makes death seem like a fun alternative.
Chapter Ten
"Don't tell me!" Seg said, his long multijointed fingers dancing over the control console. "You set the customs corvette onto them!"
"Yes," Bros sighed.
Remember, he's a romantic, but not necessarily a complete idiot. Not intellectually; emotionally yes, but he could still figure things out. He probably even had a gifted amateur's grasp of the profession-just enough to make inspired guesses about thirty percent of the time, including some occasions when a professional wouldn't see the unlikely. The rest of the time he'd be dead wrong and unwilling to admit it.
"Why? Ahhhh… to convince their next contact that they're on the wrong side of the law! That they have no choice but to descend deeper and deeper into the depths of crime. And meanwhile, you'll be closing in! Fiendish!"
Bros frowned. That is my plan, stripped of the adjectives. And put like that, it sounded pretty lame, particularly now that he knew about Nomik Ciety's link to Joat. Or did it just sound bad because the Sondee was saying it, with mezzo-soprano warbles of excitement on the vowels?
Too late to do anything about it now. "Let's go," he said. The next move would be up to Ciety. Just enough of his shipping capacity had disappeared for one reason or another to make him pretty desperate; in his line of work, clients didn't really deal well with delays. On the other hand, there hadn't been enough to make him suspect Intelligence was onto him. Bros hoped.
Silken lay back with a delighted little purr and Nomik laid his head on her bosom. She reached down and stroked his dark blond hair, damp from his exertions.
"You missed me," she said in a pleased little growl.
"You bet I did." He snatched her hand and kissed it. "You're one of a kind, Silky. And there's no substitute for the best."
She laughed and wiggled playfully. He looked up at her and smiled, scooting himself higher in the bed to kiss her. She turned again, sliding out of the bed and padding across the polished black basalt and stark-white Schwartztarr fur rugs to the autobar. She returned with a bottle of champagne and two tall flute cones of carved glass, smoking with chill. He admired the grace of her arm as it curved to pour the priceless Terran wine.
"We are good together, aren't we?" she said, slipping back into the satin tangle.
"Especially at times like these," he murmured, winding his arms around her.
The bed rotated and tilted to face the wall that was a single sheet of crystal, giving a view of stark airless white mountains and the banded blue and aquamarine of the gas-giant beyond.
Eventually they leaned companionably against the head of the bed and each other, quietly sipping chilled champagne, filling each other in on their doings.
"I think I may have found a new agent for the organization," Silken confided.
"Oh?"
"I met the most amazing young woman on Schwartztarr. She's about my age and owns her own ship. Well, she and her bank. Her reputation is crystal clean, she's considered a fair dealer and she gets her cargo to destination on time and in good condition. She's discreet, she's smart," she glanced over at Nomik, "she's got guts. Would you believe it, she went eye to eye with me over something and didn't blink."
"And you did?"
She laughed. "Yes, I did. I couldn't help it, the woman was right."
"You gave in to her, just because she was right?" Nomik had turned to look at Silken, amazement written all over his face. "I don't believe it. What is this woman… a witch?"
"Mmmm, no." She chuckled, "Maybe a kindred spirit. And she did have the whip hand." Silken shrugged and he kissed her shoulder. "The thing is," she tapped his nose lightly with one slender finger, "she's got a massive debt to New Destinies. They've fined her a hundred and twenty thousand credits."
He frowned. "What did she do, poison the water, blow a hole in the station, ram a passenger liner?"