Three

The Shade Tree

When Gus Feller made up his mind to act, he acted quickly; by eleven local the next morning, he and Hector Gomp arrived by leased shuttle at the Shade Tree, where Gomp was not at all surprised to find his Captain still in residence.

Captain Barrett, on the other hand, was surprised at the Colonel’s request.  “You want to book passage?  Where to?”

Colonel Feller smiled at the Shade Tree’s Captain. “Where are you going next?”

Barrett laughed. “Well, Colonel, I haven’t really decided yet. We need to finish up a few repairs, most of my crew’s down in Mountain View on shore leave. I don’t figure on putting to space again for another five days.”

“Suits me fine,” Feller said. “That gives me some time to make arrangements to be gone a spell.”

“You really don’t care where we’re going?  We get into some shady places; it gets dangerous some of the…” Her voice trailed off as Colonel Feller grinned widely.

“I think I can handle it, Captain.”

“All right then,” Barrett smiled and shook the Colonels’ hand. “Welcome aboard. We clear Tarbos orbit on Tuesday morning; if you can be here Monday by twenty local, my Exec will set you up with a berth.”

“I’ll be here,” Feller agreed. He extended his heavy, callused hand and shook Barrett’s slim one. “Captain, thank you. I best be getting on back down to the surface. Gomp, you want a ride back to the city?”

“Sure thing, sir,” Gomp grinned. “Still got four more days of shore leave.”

“And no room booked, I suppose?” Feller asked.

“SOP, sir,” Gomp agreed.

“Gomp,” Barrett began,

“I know, Cap’n, I know – don’t get tossed in jail. Geez, Cap’n – I’d a never took a swing at him if I’d have known he was a cop.”

***

The Brookes

Saskia Miroslava woke up slowly, her head pounding from a drug hangover. She opened her eyes, squinting against the glare of a single overhead light.

“Sassy,” she heard a familiar voice. She turned her head; Mickie Watanabe was sitting against the smooth grey wall two feet away, still in her bathing suit. Sassy looked down; she was still in her suit as well.

“Where are we?”

“Listen,” Mickie replied, pointing down at the deck. From the deck below where Sassy lay came the distinctive, low-pitched rumble of a Gellar star drive. “We’re on a ship.”

“What? What ship?”

“I don’t know, Sassy. I think we’re in trouble.”

Sassy sat up, rubbing her head, and noticed for the first time that there were four others in the room.  All four were young women, under twenty-five or so; all four huddled miserably on the deck. There was no furniture.

The room was more like a cell, maybe ten meters by four, curved slightly – following the contour of a ship’s hull, Sassy was sure. There were no ports, no terminals, no wall hangings, just four plain unmarked gray bulkheads and only one door. Sassy stood up, laid a finger on the panel to feel the slight buzzing of a security field that would give her a considerable jolt if she tried to force the door.

“We’re in trouble,” Sassy agreed.

Mickie drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them as she sat against the bulkhead, sobbing quietly. Sassy sat on the deck next to her and wrapped her arms around the smaller girl. “Don’t worry, Mickie. The Captain will come after us. We’ll be fine.” She stroked Mickie’s hair, wishing she felt as confident as she sounded.

“We don’t know where they’re taking us,” Mickie cried. “We could be going over the frontier, we could be going anywhere. How can the Captain find us? How can anyone find us?”

“We listed the ship on the hotel check-in,” Sassy assured her. “When we don’t turn up to pay the tab, they’ll call the ship – and remember, Mickie, the Exec invented the protocols that the Navy uses to track ships in subspace. Nobody’s better at it than she is. They’ll find us,” she repeated. “They’ll find us.”

“Are you in the Navy?” one of the other girls asked. Sassy looked up; the girl was about her age, black-haired, petite, wearing a dress suited for an evening on the town, but torn and soiled by rough handling.

“No,” Sassy answered. “We’re from the Shade Tree. It’s a privateer ship.”

“You really think they’ll come after you?”

“I know they will,” Sassy said.

The girl moved over to sit next to the two from the Shade Tree. “I’m Mira Toler,” she said.

“I’m Sassy Miroslava. This is Mickie Watanabe. We work in Engineering on the Shade Tree.”

Toler leaned closer, her voice lowered. “They thought I was asleep when they tossed me in here,” she confided, “but I heard them talking. They’re talking about selling us.”

“Slavers?” Sassy gasped.

“Yeah,” Toler agreed. “There have been rumors; every once in a while someone just disappears, usually girls about our age but some men, too. Anyway – they mentioned where they were heading.”

“Where?”

“Someplace called Titan’s Belt,” Toler whispered, “Out past Avalon, on the south side of the Confederacy.”

“I was afraid we’d be headed to the Grugell frontier, but that’s away off in the opposite direction.”

“Yeah,” Toler agreed, “I know. I’m studying astrogation at the University at Mountain View.”

“Think you could figure out where we are once we get to wherever this Titan’s Belt is?”

“Not without a bearing on the night sky, spectrograph readings on a dozen stars or so and a navigation console,” Toler said. “It’s not that easy.”

Sassy raised her voice. “Do any of you have any technical skills?”

Two of the other shook their heads sadly; the third looked up, revealing a tear-streaked face. “I do, sort of,” she said. “My Dad was a Chief Petty Officer in the Navy, he developed signals systems for starships with Space Systems Command; he taught me a lot.”

“What’s your name?”

“Gillian Marquez.”

“Where did they get you, honey?”

“Right out of my own flat in Rangely,” she said, indicating her tan pajama pants and top. Sassy noticed her feet were bare and dirty. “They won’t even give us clean clothes.”

“All right,” Sassy said, “We’re on a ship, headed somewhere called Titan’s Belt. We know it’s near Avalon. We know these people are slavers. Now, Mickie and I are engineers; Mickie can hack computers and I know Gellar drives as well as anyone. Gillian, you know signals systems, and Mira knows a little astrogation. Let’s put our heads together; we have to find some way to let someone know where we are.”

***

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