Ballistic (The Palladium Wars), стр. 43
She’d done charcoal portraits of the whole crew. They were part of a group of intricate drawings that decorated the bulkheads down in the engineering workshop. Light and shadow, shape and texture, all brought into existence just by the pressure and tilt of a piece of sharpened charcoal. Aden had always considered engineering and art two different branches of the skill tree far away from each other, but Tess seemed to excel at both in equal measure. He was neither artsy nor technically inclined, and watching her quiet and confident mastery at both work and play sometimes made him feel inadequate and uninteresting. Mostly, however, she made him want to get to know her better.
“Twelve more hours of this, then the handover, then eighteen to get back to the busy neighborhood,” Tristan said. “That’s four or five meals out of the box. Chances are good you’ll draw a number eleven at some point.”
Aden let go of Tristan’s bottle of Liquid Sunshine and gave it a nudge toward Tess. It tumbled through the air above the table, slowly flipping end over end.
“If you do, this might help,” he said. She caught the bottle and squirted out a dab, which coalesced into a little red sphere in the zero-g environment. Tess snatched it up with her mouth.
“That’s really good,” she proclaimed, and Tristan smiled with satisfaction.
“Five box meal surprises in a row,” she said. “I know they’re paying double fee for hauling that cargo. But some hardships can’t be compensated fairly.”
“What do you think we’re hauling?” Tristan asked.
Tess shrugged. “Maya says it’s not explosives or ammunition. If they’re paying double to hire a stealth ship, it’s contraband, no question. The drop-off is somewhere in space, so we’re just a leg in the delivery, and not the final one.”
“Something that’s going to end up on Rhodia. What’s their main prohibitionist fetish?”
“Synthetic stims,” Aden replied. “But everyone has those banned. Black-market cybernetics. Military weapons. Anything with combat AI in it.”
“You worried we’re smuggling some sort of assassin robot?” Tess said.
“I just know I’m worried,” he admitted. “It won’t matter what kind of contraband it is if we get caught, right? So I’m not sure I want to know about it.”
He recalled the exchange he had witnessed on the airlock deck ten hours earlier.
“It was just something one of them said to the other. When they were leaving the ship. Just a quick exchange, three or four words. I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. But it rubbed me the wrong way, you know? Gave me a bad feeling.”
“You didn’t hear them? Or you didn’t understand what they were saying?” Tess asked.
“I was three or four meters too far to hear them well enough. They were facing away from me and talking to each other.”
“If it’s bothering you that much, you can just check the sensor records from the airlock,” she said. “If they were still in the airlock, the audio feed probably picked them up just fine.”
He felt a little stupid. Of course the ship would have sensors monitoring the only access lock, the one through which everyone had to go if they wanted to enter or leave.
“How do I do that?”
“Come on.” Tess unbuckled her lap belt and pushed herself away from the table. “I’ll show you.”
They floated down to the airlock deck. Tess drifted over to the control panel of the airlock and brought up a screen. The cargo container sat where they had secured it hours earlier, still just a silent piece of heavy-duty polymer.
“All right, here’s the data from when they walked in. Come here and scrub this to the point where you think they said something to each other.”
Aden floated next to her and started to drift away again slowly. He looked for a handhold but didn’t see one in reach. Tess reached up and pulled him next to her.
He took over the screen and advanced the visuals to the point where the Iron Pig crew had completed their delivery and started to make their way back. The one with the empty float went first. Then the other two stepped into the airlock. He froze it just before the left one turned his head, increased the audio volume, and tapped the CONTINUE field. It was a high-resolution image, and the audio was crystal clear, as if someone had spoken loudly into his ear.
This time he heard the words sharply. At first, he again failed to understand them, but then it was like a rusty cog in his brain had loosened and was starting to turn in sync with the machinery once more. He rushed to repeat the segment. The words didn’t change. A twisting sensation had materialized in his stomach that had nothing to do with the zero-g environment.
“We have to show this to the captain,” he said.
“Let me get this perfectly straight,” Decker said ten minutes later. The crew was assembled in front of the viewscreen on the airlock deck, and Aden had replayed the sensor recording for them half a dozen times. Now that he knew what the spacer had said to his comrade, the words became clearer and more obvious with every viewing.
“You’re saying the transport is a setup because of the slang you heard coming out of this man’s mouth,” Decker said and pointed at the frozen image of the Iron Pig spacer on the screen.
“Not just a setup,” he said. “They think we won’t be there anymore once everything’s concluded.”
“Because he said we had a nice ship.”
“That’s not quite what he said. Well, it is, but not in that way. It’s how he used that phrase.”
“Run it by the people who aren’t linguists,” Henry said. “What the fuck kind of language