"Found a stowaway," Thorson said.
"And a thief," Mura added.
Johan Stotz put in sourly, "And a saboteur."
11
”Mr. Ya,” Captain Jellico said, "contact the Monitors."
Dane Thorson felt the little being twitch in his grasp, but it was so small his feet were in no danger of lifting off the deck even though he
hadn’t magged his boots.
"No thief, me!" it declared in a fluting voice. "I trade, I trade everythings!"
"What were you doing in our engine compartment?" Stotz asked, his eyes flinty. "That was trading?"
"No! I stop you move, me," came the prompt answer in heavily accented universal Trade speech. "No take cable, turn it. You not move to heavy zone, far away other side."
The captain sat down in a chair directly opposite the little blue-green person. Seated, he and the prisoner were eye to eye. Dane didn’t envy the stowaway’s view of an angry captain. Even at his most mild, Jellico looked tough, and he was obviously not in a good mood now.
"Who are you?" the captain asked. "And why are you on my ship?"
"I Tooe," was the prompt answer. "I Trader, me. No thief! Goo," the stowaway added in a sound midway between a cry and a whistle. Its frustration was palpable as it added some rapid words in Kanddoyd and then in Rigelian.
At the latter, Dane saw Rael Cofort’s eyes widen. The doctor turned to the captain and said, "I can speak some Rigelian. Would you like me to question her?"
"Her?" the captain said, with a curious smile. "I might have known you’d speak Rigelian."
Dr. Cofort’s lovely face glowed with color. "We traded quite a bit with certain Rigelian colonies when I was very small," she said. Then she turned to the stowaway and addressed her slowly in the hissing saurian tongue: "Tell us who you are and why you are here."
Dane understood that much, but none of the answer that spilled at terrific speed from Tooe in response.
No one spoke as the little stowaway talked, sometimes gesturing with her thin webbed hands. Dane watched with fascination as the fervor of her animated movements lifted her off the deck; she merely hooked out a foot
under the edge of the table and pulled herself back down with impossible grace—and left her leg cocked up as though the position were perfectly natural. She now stood at an angle to everyone else in the room.
He looked down at the little head with its smooth, faintly scaled skin, colored much more blue than the normal Rigelian green. He saw Tooe’s crest flicker, rise, flatten in anger, then fold as she talked. She was obviously a hybrid between a Rigelian and one of the other races seeded by the same saurians millennia ago. The Rigelians did not countenance hybrids; unlike Terrans, who mostly welcomed diversity in the human genome, they were exceedingly purist in outlook, and just as antagonistic toward those with similar biologies as they were toward those of far different backgrounds. He wondered how old she was.
Finally she came to a stop, and Dr. Cofort rubbed her chin thoughtfully. "It’s been a long time, and the dialect Tooe speaks is... unique, but I think I have most of her story."
"Let’s hear it," the captain said.
"She came on board just after we landed, and has been hiding in the cargo area ever since. She brought along a stash of items she thought we could use, and has been leaving them out, one at a time, since she ran out of her own food and had to start using ours. She insists she would have come forward as soon as we blasted out, but it was taking us a long time to do so. She wants to be a Trader, and thinks this was her only chance."
"Does her family concur?"
"She claims her only family is a group of other. castaways. They live up at the Spin Axis," Cofort said. "Her age works out to be about nineteen Standard years, which is technically adulthood by Terran law, at least. So she’s an independent entity."
Jellico tapped his fingers lightly on the table, then looked up at Dane. "Lock her in the brig for now. We have things to discuss."
Dane gently pulled his prisoner back and turned toward the door; she was so small her mass seemed utterly negligible. He hated this kind of duty, especially when it involved a being so small and flimsy. As he passed by Dr. Cofort he saw her wince in silent sympathy for the little Rigelian, which made Dane feel even worse.
Tooe made no protest as they descended to the brig, Dane keeping a firm grip on her spindly arm. Having seen her performance at the table, he had no doubt that he’d never catch her in free fall.
And yet Stotz did.
He looked at her thoughtfully when they reached the bare cabin that served as the Queen's brig and he had pushed her gently through the door. She drifted across the tiny room, folded down the bench from one wall, and sat upside down under the seat, curling her limbs up into a ball and putting her chin on her knees. Vertigo seized Dane as the utter naturalness of her motions upended his perceptions—now he was the one on the ceiling. He magged his boots, feeling himself click firmly to the deckplates, and he breathed deeply, forcing the vertigo away.
She said nothing; big deep yellow eyes looked up at Dane. He hastily closed the door, by now feeling like the biggest villain in the universe.
It wasn’t until he got back to the gallery and heard the others talking that he was able to rid himself of the sensation of walking on the ceiling.
"We’ve been in microgee too long," he muttered under his breath as he ducked through the hatch.
"... biggest discrepancy in what she was saying," Stotz’s voice carried over the others. "If she wanted to blast off with us, then why did I catch her sabotaging my drive?"
Dr. Cofort said, "She insisted it was a measure to keep us from moving up to the heavy zone. She must have been listening when the captain issued the order to prepare for the move, just before we left to visit the legate."
Jasper Weeks said softly, "Have to admit it was clever, to reverse the cable connecting the ignition system to the drive. It would have taken us hours to check all those cables, but it wasn’t really damage."
Stotz grunted. "Knows her way around an engine, then."
Mura said, "And these other things she left for me to find. Some of them are odd, but they’re not useless."
Jellico looked across at the doctor. "Did she say why she picked our ship?"
"Yes, she did," Cofort answered. "She said it was clean, and the animals were happy. She said she couldn’t believe that a ship of villains would be kind to their animals."
"Villains!" Ali exclaimed. "That’s a loud one, coming from a saboteur!"
"What I don’t like," the captain said, "is the fact that her being here is one more strange thing going on in a series that is far too long for my peace of mind."
Van Ryke pushed himself back down the bulkhead, where he had slowly drifted during the discussion. "But if what she says is true, she got here before things started going sour on us."
"Which was the day we tried to track down the old owners of the Starvenger," Rip said.
Jellico nodded. "Right. But none of you know this: the doctor and I were shot at when we were returning just now. Shot at with taste-agains, and chased halfway back to the docks—and no Monitors in sight."
The crew stared in amazed silence.
"So you can see why I don’t like any more coincidences showing up."
"So what do we do with her?" Dr. Cofort asked, frowning slightly.
"I have to admit, if she is a free agent, and if the authorities are corrupt, the idea of turning her over to them sticks in my craw," Jellico said. "But I don’t want her wandering around my ship unsupervised. Though she didn’t do any real damage up until now, our situation is too ticklish to risk any more problems. And though she claims to be honest, didn’t she admit to coming from one of the Spin Axis gangs? I thought that was where the detritus of the three civilizations hid out."