“Uh-huh. Anyway, you got rid of that vatch for good, I think.”
“I did? How?”
“When you ordered the lamp to move. Vatch would figure you were telling him what to do. They don’t like that at all. I figure he got mad and left.”
“After switching the lamp off to show me, eh? Think he might be back?”
“They don’t usually. Anyway, I’ll spot him if he does.”
“Yes…” The captain scratched his chin. “So what made you decide to bring us out east of the Empire?”
Goth, it turned out, had had a number of reasons. Some of them sounded startling at first.
“One thing, here’s Uldune!” Her fingertip traced over the star map between them, stopped. “Be just about a week away, on half-power.”
The captain gave her a surprised look. Uldune was one of the worlds around here which were featured in Nikkeldepain’s history books; and it was not featured at all favorably. Under the leadership of its Daal, Sedmon the Grim, and various successors of the same name, it had been the headquarters of a ferocious pirate confederacy which had trampled over half the Empire on a number of occasions, and raided far and wide beyond it. And that particular section of history, as he recalled it, wasn’t very far in the past.
“What’s good about being that close to Uldune?” he inquired. “From what I’ve heard of them, that’s as bloodthirsty a bunch of cutthroats as ever infested space!”
“Guess they were pretty bad,” Goth acknowledged. “But that’s a time back. They’re sort of reformed now.”
“Sort of reformed?”
She shrugged. “Well, they’re still a bunch of crooks, Captain. But we can do business with them.”
“Business!”
She seemed to know what she was talking about, though. The witches were familiar with this section of galactic space — Karres, in fact, had been shifted from a point east of the Empire to its recent station in the Iverdahl System not much more than eighty years ago. And while Goth was Karres-born, she’d done a good deal of traveling around here with her parents and sisters. Not very surprising, of course. With the Sheewash Drive available to give their ship a boost when they felt like it, a witch family should be able to go pretty well where it chose.
She’d never been on Uldune but it was a frequent stopover point for Karres people. Uldune’s reform, initiated by its previous Daal, Sedmon the Fifth, and continued under his successor, had been a matter of simple expediency — the Empire’s expanding space power was making wholesale piracy too unprofitable and risky a form of enterprise. Sedmon the Sixth was an able politician who maintained mutually satisfactory relations with the Empire and other space neighbors, while deriving much of his revenue by catering to the requirements of people who operated outside the laws of any government. Uldune today was banker, fence, haven, trading center, outfitter, supplier, broker, and middleman to all comers who could afford its services. It never asked embarrassing questions. Outright pirates — successful ones, at any rate — were still perfectly welcome. So was anybody who merely wanted to transact some form of business unhampered by standard legal technicalities.
“I’m beginning to get it!” the captain acknowledged. “But what makes you think we won’t get robbed blind there?”
“They’re not crooks that way — at least not often. The Daal goes for the skinning alive thing,” Goth explained. “You get robbed, you squawk. Then somebody gets skinned. It’s pretty safe!”
It did sound like the Daal had hit on a dependable method to give his planet a reputation for solid integrity in business deals. “So we sell the cargo there,” the captain mused. “They take their cut — probably a big one—”
“Uh-huh. Runs around forty per.”
“Of the assessed value?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Steep! But if they’ve got to see the stuff gets smuggled to buyers in the Empire or somewhere else, they’re taking the risks. And, allowing for what the new drive engines will cost us, we’ll be on Uldune then with what should still be a very good chunk of money… Hmm!” He settled back in his chair. “What were those other ideas?”
The first half of the week-long run to Uldune passed uneventfully. They turned around the plans Goth had been nourishing, amended them here and there. But basically the captain couldn’t detect many flaws in them. He didn’t tell her so, but it struck him that if Goth hadn’t happened to be born a witch she might have made out pretty well on Nikkeldepain. She seemed to have a natural bent for the more devious business angles. As one of their first transactions on the reformed pirate planet, they would pick up fictitious identities. The Daal maintained a special department which handled nothing else and documented its work so impeccably that it would stand up under the most thorough investigation. It was a costly matter, but the proceeds of the cargo sale would cover the additional expense. If the search for the Venture and her crew spread east of the Empire, established aliases might be very necessary.
In that respect the Sheewash Drive had turned into a liability. Used judiciously, however, it should be an important asset to the independent trader the Venture was to become. This was an untamed area of space; there were sections where even the Empire’s heavily armed patrols did not attempt to go in less than squadron strength. And other sections which nobody tried to patrol at all…
“The Sea of Light, f’rinstance,” Goth said, nodding at the twisted purple cosmic cloud glow the captain had observed on his first look out of the screens. It had drifted meanwhile over to the Venture’s port side. “That’s a hairy place! You get too close to that, you’ve had it! Every time.”
She didn’t know exactly what happened when one got too close to the cloud. Neither did anyone else. It had been a long while since anybody had tried to find out.
The Drive wouldn’t exactly allow them to go wherever they chose, even if Goth had been able to make regular and unlimited use of it. But as an invisible and unsuspected part of the ship’s emergency equipment it would let them take on assignments not many others would care to consider.
There should be money in that, the captain thought. Plenty of money. Once they were launched, they shouldn’t have much to worry about on that score. But it meant having the Venture rebuilt very completely before they took her out again.
The prospects for the next few years looked good all around. Goth evidently wasn’t at all disturbed by the fact that it might be at least that long before she saw her people again. The witches seemed to look at such things a little differently. Well, he thought, the two of them should see and learn a lot while making their fortune as traders; and he’d take care of Goth as best he could. Though from Goth’s point of view, it had occurred to him, it might seem more that she was taking care of Captain Pausert.
He couldn’t quite imagine himself developing witch powers. He’d tried to pump Goth about that a little and was told in effect not to worry — he’d know when it began to happen and meanwhile there was no way to hurry it up. Just what would happen couldn’t be predicted. The type of talents that developed and the sequence in which they appeared varied widely among Karres children and the relatively few adults in whom something brought klatha into sudden activity. Goth was a teleporting specialist and had, perhaps because of that, caught on to the Sheewash Drive very quickly and mastered it like a grown-up. So far she’d done little else. The Leewit, besides being the possessor of a variety of devastating whistles, which she used with considerable restraint under most circumstances, was a klatha linguist. Give her a few words of a language she’d never heard before, and something in her swept out, encompassed it all; and she’d soon be chattering away in it happily as if she’d spoken nothing else in all her young life.