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CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
"We've never had a 'health and welfare' inspection before," the voice said suspiciously.
"Yeah, tell me something I don't know." Jin controlled his voice carefully, sliding just the right hint of exasperation into it. "We've got a task force with an IBI inspection team coming out, and we need to make a big show. Personally, I think they're operating on the theory that everyone needs a good shaking up after the coup attempt, but what do I know? According to The Book, we're supposed to do these things on every ship, not that anybody ever did it! But now we're under the gun, so we're trying to get a paper trail going."
There was a long pause, and Jin wished that he could see the other's face, but the freighter had supplied only a voice cha
Emerald Dawn was a known ship. She'd passed through the system at least twice before, once since Jin had been inserted. She generally traded minor technological trinkets like fire-starters for local gems and artwork. In addition, she got a small fee for dropping electronic transfers in the system, which was the real reason for her visits. As a matter of fact, he'd talked with the ship on her previous run, and he hoped the familiarity of his voice would lull them to some extent.
"Okay," a new voice said finally. "This is Captain De
"Whatever." Jin let a bit of the peevish bureaucrat into his tone. "I'm just doing my job."
The shuttle was on autopilot, so he slid out of the pilot's chair with a nod at Poertena, and pulled his way aft. This was made somewhat difficult by the fact that the small craft was crammed with Marines in battle armor. Most of them had clamped onto the walls and floors, but a few were drifting, more or less at random.
He stopped opposite Captain Pahner, whose feet were stuck to the ceiling as he stood "head-down," perusing the schematics for the target.
"They're not real happy," the IBI agent said.
"I don't care if they're happy," Pahner said. "Just as long as they open their doors."
"One shot, and we're all vapor," Jin noted.
"And as far as they know, they're suddenly the most wanted ship in the Empire," Pahner pointed out. "It would be very bad form for a tramp freighter to shoot up an official Imperial inspection craft. They'll let us dock. After that, you just hit the deck."
* * *
"Why does this make my butt pucker?" Fiorello Giova
"Because your butt always puckers when we get boarded." Amanda Beach, his first officer, shook her head in mock gravity. "Relax. It's got all the codes for an Imperial customs ship. Really, it's because your conscience isn't pure. You need to spend some time on the planets, reacquiring your oneness with Gaia."
Giova
"Your sense of humor is the reason you're out here, you know. Just keep it up." He leaned forward, as if the viewscreen could tell him more if he only stared hard enough, and rubbed his cheek. "And you're wrong. There's something very much not right here."
"You want me to go down to the airlock?" Beach asked as the CO fell silent, watching the shuttle make its final approach. He continued to say nothing for several more seconds, but, finally, he nodded.
"Yes. And take Longo and Ucelli."
"My," she said, pursing her lips as she got to her feet, "you are nervous. Isn't that sort of overkill?"
"Better over than under," Giova
* * *
Jin waited until all the telltales turned green, then opened the airlock door and swung forward through it cautiously. The three people waiting for him represented a fair percentage of the total crew for a tramp like this, and their presence in such numbers indicated just how uncomfortable they must be.
He'd have been just as nervous in their shoes. The profit which could be made from "jacking" ships like this were enough to make them high-priority targets. Even a tramp as old and beat up as Emerald Dawn was worth nearly a billion credits. So anytime one was parked anywhere but at a fully secured port—which did not, by any stretch, describe Marduk—its crew was always on the lookout for pirates. And it wasn't impossible to imagine the entire port being captured, or even that one Temu Jin would be in on it. Stranger things had transpired in the borderlands.
Besides, now that he thought about it, that was actually a pretty fair description, in a slightly skewed way, of what was actually going to happen.
The threesome had obviously been chosen with some care. According to her collar tabs, the woman was senior, a merchant lieutenant, so probably she was Emerald Dawn's second-in-command. She looked a bit long in the tooth for that, and fairly beat up. Regen healed almost perfectly, but scars were inevitable—at least when a limb hadn't had to be completely regrown—and this one, for all her striking looks, had plenty. She'd been in more than one fight, and a couple of them must have been with knives.
The second most notable was the largest of the group, a hulking figure which outmassed even the redoubtable Gro
For that matter, so would the little guy. He was the calmest seeming of the lot as he leaned nonchalantly against a bulkhead, but the low-slung double pistols sort of said it all.
And all three of them wore light body armor.
Jin stepped forward carefully, keeping his hands in view at all times, and extended the pad.
"Pax, okay?" He tabbed the controls and gestured around. "All I want is a thumbprint saying that the 'inspection' was complete, and that you have no complaints. I'll put in all sorts of stuff checked, basically half the stuff on your manifest. And we're all happy. I'm happy, you're happy, the IBI asshole is happy, and everybody can go back to business as usual."
Beach took the pad and glanced at the document on its display. As the bullet-sweating geek had suggested, it showed a detailed inspection of an imaginary ship conforming to their class, with a list of cargo opened and checked. It was quite an artistic forgery, a masterpiece of the genre.
"Why, thank you," she said, giving him a thin smile as she a
"Yeah? Well, Mr. Gun-Happy over there looks like he's remembering the last baby he ate, and I ain't even go
"I don't eat babies," the gunman whispered. "They stick in your teeth."
"Ha. Ha," the IBI agent said.
"Done," Beach said, and handed him the pad.
"Thanks," Jin replied with a relieved sigh. His hand was unaccountably clumsy as he accepted the pad, and it slipped out of his fingers. He swore, grabbed for it, then followed it to the deck, and as he did, he noted with the cool, professional detachment available only to the truly frightened that the threesome had reacted to the little ruse as if such things happened to them every day.
The fabric of his suit hardened under the kinetic impact of the first round just as the shuttle doors exploded open behind him.
* * *
"Shit," Giova