Ballistic (The Palladium Wars), стр. 44
“That’s the point,” Aden said. “It’s a cryptolect.”
“A cryptolect,” Decker repeated.
“Yeah. A cant. What you speak when you don’t want to be overheard. You know how the dockhands and the mechanics at the stations have their own slang? Sort of like that. Only it’s like a whole different language altogether.”
“And you know that slang,” Henry said. “Without a doubt.”
Aden nodded.
“So what the fuck is it?”
“It’s from Gretia. It’s a cant the bad boys use among themselves. The crime syndicates.”
“But it’s not Gretian,” Decker said. Aden shook his head.
“They carried it over from some Old Earth language. I mean, they still speak Gretian to each other. They just pepper it with this cant. Use different verbs and nouns. Make such a hash of it that even the AI can’t figure it out past the basics.”
“And you would know this how exactly? Studied it in language school?”
Aden shook his head. “I told you my mother was Gretian. I spent a lot of time there when I was a child. Three months every summer.”
“And you worked your way into the local criminal underworld at age twelve,” Henry said. “That’s how you recognize their vocabulary.”
Aden looked around, anxiety squeezing his chest and constricting his lungs. Everyone looked back at him with various degrees of incredulity. Only Maya had a neutral expression on her face as she listened to his continued attempts at an explanation.
“Some of it worked its way into slang over the decades,” he said. “The kids in Sandvik use a bunch of loanwords from it. It’s what you speak when you want to sound tough. Because the real tough guys speak it.”
He played back the sensor record again.
“Three words. The first means ‘not good.’ The other two mean ‘nice ship.’ But the way he used the first one, it’s more like ‘too bad.’ You use that word in that context, you mean a regrettable event. He was saying, ‘What a shame, that’s a nice ship.’ And it was casual. Dismissive. Like it was unavoidable.”
The airlock deck was silent for a moment. Decker studied the frozen faces of the Iron Pig spacers on the viewscreen with a frown.
“I believe him,” Maya said. “I mean, I believe that he believes in what he’s saying. Look at him. He’s scared.”
Tess coasted over to the cargo box and placed a hand on the lid.
“What are we hauling here?” she said softly.
“All right,” Decker said. “Let’s hear opinions. Aden says that there’s evidence these people aren’t going to honor their end of the contract. Likely in a bad way.”
She nodded over at the cargo container.
“If we break contract, we’ll piss off the customer. We’ll lose the fee and the money for all the fuel we’ve burned so far. And we’ll take a hit to our reputation. They’ll give us bad marks on the exchange.”
“We don’t break contract and Aden’s right, we all end up dead maybe,” Tess said.
There was another silence, this one longer than the first. Aden had never wanted more in his life to be wrong. If they blew off the contract because of him, it would harm their livelihoods, maybe even cost them the ship.
“I don’t think we have enough evidence to make that call yet,” Maya said. “But I know that I would really like to see what’s in that container. Because I don’t want to get killed over it. And I think that the contents may help with our decision.”
“Breaking customer confidentiality,” Henry cautioned. “That’s almost as bad as skipping out on a contract and just stealing the cargo.”
“I vote to open it and have a look, take it from there,” Tristan said.
“Same here,” Tess said.
“I’d love to be proven wrong,” Aden said. “I want us to open that and find a thousand counterfeit comtabs or something.”
“All right,” Decker said. “Tess, how do you feel about that security lock on the container? Think you can hack it?”
“Officially? That’s a high-grade lock, best encryption money can buy. Takes years to hack, if you can do it at all.”
“And unofficially?”
“Unofficially, let me float down to engineering and get my data deck,” Tess said. “I’ll have that thing open in five minutes.”
Tess hadn’t oversold her abilities. Four minutes and forty seconds after she had connected her data link, the latches of the container receded with an authoritative click that made everyone on the deck jump a little.
“Let’s see what you are,” she said. She unplugged her data link from the lock and tucked away her deck before it could float off and get damaged. Then she popped the locking latches on the container lid and carefully opened it to peek inside.
“Huh,” she said.
She swung the lid open all the way so they could all see the contents. There was a second container nestled into the first one, set into an elaborate latticework of spacers and buffers. This container was flat black, and it had handling warnings in bright-yellow writing all around it.
“That’s a Category Six hard-shielded cargo box,” Tess said. “No wonder the scanners didn’t pick up shit. That’s for critical freight. Valuable critical freight. Like a memory core with half a billion ags on it.”
“Or two hundred kilos of palladium,” Henry said.
“Still want to open it?” Tess asked. “This might make an entire planet fall on our heads, people.”
“Do it,” Decker said.
Tess opened the lock on the second container as well. This one took more time, and when she was finished, the locking bolts retracted into the casing with a barely audible little snap. She grasped the lid with both hands and lifted it up. It came away cleanly, displaying a layer of impact foam. In the middle of it, a meter-long matte gray cylinder with the diameter of a dinner plate was snugly embedded in a precise cutout. It had markings on it, but Aden couldn’t read them from his angle.
“Motherfucker,” Tess said. Her tone was almost casual, but if they hadn’t been in zero g, Aden