Bott’s head swung left and right as he fingered the grenades on his belt. There was no way to predict where danger waited: overhead, underfoot, forward, behind. He studied what seemed to be holes I the corridor walls. Were they ornaments, part of the structural design, or the aiming mechanisms of traps?
Lights sat high, within translucent ridges which could resist attack in case of a slave riot. A slight hum could be heard coming from somewhere I the ceiling. Ort from the lights. Or from a waiting tank of gas which would snuff or suppress an enemy. He heard also three footsteps for each one of his, presumably echoes. His head continued to swivel, eyes open.
Bott had never bought all those late-watch tales about haunted ships. “Drover’s too new to be haunted anyhow,” he told himself, stopping again to make sure those echo footsteps stopped as well. “They designed it like this to scare the prisoners, to keep the crew quiet.”
The crew. Were there security devices in the walls, things a duly-trained crew member would know about, but unknown to an interloper? He slid his feet along the floor in case these were sound-activated. Such devices would more likely damage him than finish him off: a slow slave would be an object lesson to the others.
He turned a corner and passed a communications booth. A white light was flashing on a small monitor inside. He wondered if that was all right.
This new corridor seemed colder and darker. After a few steps, Bott realized this was because the walls were another color. On large ships, corridors were color-coordinated, so crew members could tell where they belonged. They had only to match the color of their uniforms to the wall.
In most of the ships Bott had raided, none of them anywhere near the level of the Drover, cargo bays had been orange. He couldn’t recall anything blue.
A door confronted him after only a few more sliding steps. The security slot next to it was blue. He reached for his deck of security cards and pulled out a dark blue one. With any luck, it was a cargo pass. He wondered what the LIGHT blue card was for.
The door slid back. He waved the card in the doorway first, to see if this triggered anything. When his hand was not shot away, he moved forward.
And looked down. He stood on a narrow bridge stretched over a vast cavern that could have swallowed his ship and the BBB-44 together. Bott shuddered. This was no cargo bay: not for what he called cargo, at least. This was an entrance to the slave quarters. The bridge was meant as a final obstacle for unrestrained sales to pass if they joined in revolt. Before they could escape their pen, they would need to move in single file across this bridge, under the guns of Imperial guards above.
Bott stared into the cold blue depths. He knew nothing about the slave pens aboard the Drover. He knew the ones on Coderah. In escaping those, he had nearly left his right arm and shoulder behind, and it would have been a cheap enough price to pay, at that.
He heard the tiniest sushing sigh. Whirling, Bott threw himself against the door as it started to slide shut. One foot and one shoulder held it in place and, throwing his weight against it, he was able to push through.
“That was stupid,” he told himself, panting on the other side, “You’ve got the bilstim card.”
He did not, however, have all day. When he could breathe again, he moved back up the corridor to the communications station.
A blue-rimmed viewscreen was now showing something, but Bott couldn’t tell what it was. He took the blue card he’d used on the door, turned it up the long way, and set it into the slot provided.
“I….”
A voice he had not heard before declared, “If this is a further complaint about the food, I must inform you that the drover still does not have a full complement of supplies. Mashed lumpucks will continue to be served without maynage until we can take up the remaining portion of our allotted supplies.”
“I wan’t going to complain,” Bott protested. “Um, the food’s okay, really.”
“What did you want then?” snapped the voice.
Bott reminded himself that he was the captain. “Link me to the main computer. Er, if you can.”
“One moment, please. I shall put you through.” There followed a burst of static in which Bott thought he could catch the wotds “Why can’t they take time to do it the right way?”
After that came a short whistle. A much more familiar voice demanded, “What are you doing down there?”
“I….”
“He’s going to complain about the food, I just know it,” growled the other voice. “Going over my head will do no good, you know. I still won’t have any maynage.”
“Oh, get off the line,” said the Drover.
After another grumble of static, the bridge computer asked Bott, “Why did you have to go through him? Touchy as a cook, he is.”
“Well, I didn’t know how else to reach you.”
“Oh, that’s right. You wouldn’t. You’re the pirate. Well, that gold card you were so flashy with a little while ago has a contact system built into it. Just hold it up the long way and press the sides. Do it that way from now on and cut out the middle grouch.”
Bott was glad to know about this, but felt it vital to assert his command position. “I’ll call you any way I like.”
“You are, of course, the captain, by all rights of theft and plunder,” the Drover told him. “But that’s no reason you need to put up with the moods of every subordinate computer.”
“Who was that?”
“Oh, he issues food and monitors conditions in the slave quarters. I don’t need to tell you you took a wrong turn, do I, Captain?”
Bott was willing to put off that discussion for a bit. “How many different computers do you have here?”
“I,” said the Drover, “Have one hundred and seventy-eight first level computers on my staff, each communicating with some three hundred lesser brains. Not counting yours, of course.”
“Why so many?”
“The ship can be run from a number of different stations,” the Drover explained, “And makes it impossible, in case of a slave revolt, for the ship to be taken over by unauthorized persons all at once.”
“Impossible? It’s a good thing I didn’t know about that before I did it.”
A growl of static was followed by “The master system works only if a full crew s available to conduct a proper resistance. Special codes are entered if part of the crew is captured or pressed into service by the slaves, and cards will be bypassed. It was planned that my staff was to be generational: entire families growing up here to regard the Drover as their home. Hiding places are provided where they could lead an armed resistance for years, if necessary, as the slaves learned their cause was hopeless. If you had simply called ahead, I could have told you I wasn’t quite ready yet for pirates.”
“I’ll remember that next time,” Bott promised. Thinking it over, he went on, “Are there any crew here now, hoed up to plan a resistance?”
“No,” the Drover told him. “More’s the pity. I’d make lovely, ingenious suggestions about what they could do with you.”
“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”
The voice went a bit chilly. “Has any computer ever lied to you?”
Bott thought this over. “No. Omitted data, let me mislead myself, yes. But lie outright? No.”
“All right, then. Go back the way you came, past two turnoffs, until you see the orange corridor you should have taken? If you are color-blind I can arrange to play tinkly music when you get there? No? Then go up the corridor past the first five cargo bay doors and enter the sixth. You can count to six, can’t you?”
“I’ve done it before. That’s the number of guards I took out at your front entrance.” He yanked his card from the slot.
He marched back up the corridor, thinking over possible loopholes in the computer’s declaration that no crew members were waiting in ambush. The orange corridor was warmer and less shadowed than the blue one, but he did not feel notably enheartened. The sixth cargo bay did not cheer him, either. Naturally, the Drover had had no time to take on much cargo, so the captured ship sat alone at one end of the immense room. The BBB-44 rested on a white oval on the orange floor.
And that was all. It sat silent, entrances closed, unguarded. Bott would have preferred a ring of armed guards, weapons pointed at him. He had dealt with that sort of thing before. But this ship was still: not dead, but waiting.
He moved forward, feeling alone and absurdly young, remembering the big abandoned hangar where he had found, cleaned, and repaired the very first ship he’d had on his own. The TDA-3 had been nowhere as big, but in this cargo cavern the captured ship looked smaller.
What kind of creatures might be waiting inside. Nothing too bizarre would be flying a BBB-44, surely. He unhooked a grenade from his belt, wishing he’d asked the Drover to do a scan, or even release that gas it had suggested.
“I can take on anything when I’m sober,” he muttered. “And I haven’t had a drink for three days.” This was true. He had taken on a lot of things that he wasn’t able to beat, of course. But here he was.
He bounced the grenade in his hand. “If only I could find out something without having to….”
A new voice declared, “Books are nice.”
Blogsy Babbles 