“You always ask me who won the last one, and if I say you did, then I win.”
Stupid of her. Of course he had detected the pattern.
“But Kyle is funny to play with. Sometimes he flies into things by accident. I keep telling him not to fly so fast, but he always forgets. And he doesn’t get mad when he loses, like Garcia does.”
The litany of Kyle’s perfections exasperated her. She wanted to pretend that she was angry at him for ingratiating himself with the simpleminded member of her crew, worming his way into her affairs through the weakest link, but down the passageway she could hear Garcia laughing with him over one of his stupid police stories.
She took three steps in their direction before she realized what she was doing. Annoyed, she turned around and went to the bridge instead.
There she could drown her tiny fears in oceans of dread, staring at the node-charts for hours and trying to guess where the spiders came from. Where they would go next. Where they might be, even now, descending on some helpless world trapped in their web.
SIXTEEN
Fire
It was impossible to fear the sparkling blue and white jewel that slowly filled the vid screen on the bridge. Solistar was a beautiful planet, and if it hadn’t been for the star’s unfortunate tendency to belch out random storms of radiation, it would have been a friendly one.
As it was, the planetary network warned them never to go outside without heavy rad-protective clothing, and then made sure they understood by displaying twenty-seven commercials in a row for various forms of it. Kyle had never considered the merits of designer rad-suits, and now that he was exposed to them, he found himself severely underwhelmed.
“At least it’s safe,” Garcia grumbled. “Not even the spiders would want this place.”
“We don’t know that,” Prudence countered. “It has a breathable atmosphere. That’s worth something.” The source of that air, single-cell life-forms in the oceans, had evolved immunity to the occasional bursts of silent, invisible death, by the virtue of being absurdly simple. But complex, multicellular creatures like human beings fell apart in an astounding variety of creative ways after one or two exposures.
“Do we know what the spiders breathe?” Kyle asked. On Baharain they hadn’t cared about the toxic atmosphere.
“No,” Prudence conceded. “But it has to be oxygen. Everything breathes oxygen.”
“Baharain doesn’t have oxygen. And the spider I saw wasn’t wearing breathing equipment.” Between the darkness, the terror, and the flash of the plasma explosion he hadn’t gotten a very good look, but he distinctly remembered seeing the creature’s fangs. “I saw its teeth.”
“Spiders don’t breathe through their mouth.” Prudence could be amazingly contrary when she wanted to. “Maybe it had oxy feeders plugged into its trachea.”
In Kyle’s opinion, she had spent way too much time studying spider anatomy over the last few days. She kept leaving pictures of various horrible eight-legged monsters on the data screens, and it was creeping everyone out.
“They’re not actually spiders, Prudence. They just look like them. They have eight legs and fangs. Other than that, we don’t know much.”
“Except that they’re immune to tetrodotoxin.” Prudence had looked up the name of the stuff that made Baharain poisonous. You didn’t even have to breathe it—just getting it on your skin could be fatal. “And we can assume they are more resistant to radiation than we are. That fighter-craft wasn’t shielded very well.”
“Then how do we kill them?” Garcia was exasperated. “You’ve ruled out air, poison, radiation … what’s left?”
“A plasma bomb works pretty well.”
Kyle hadn’t meant to sound so bitter.
Garcia matched his bitterness, and raised him by a gallon of bile. “Maybe we have some, then. I’ll just check the cargo manifest … oh, look. We don’t have a cargo manifest. Because we don’t have cargo.” The man seemed less concerned about the fate of millions than he did about the percentages he wasn’t making.
But Kyle knew it was an act. Everybody wore a persona like a space suit, designed to insulate them from the cold emptiness of life. Most people lived in that suit so long they forgot it was on, like Garcia had. Mercenary profiteering was the only way Garcia knew how to deal with the world.
“We don’t have plasma bombs,” Jorgun said, confused. “I don’t remember those being on any cargo list.”
Kyle had to revise his cynical conclusion. Not everyone wore a fake persona.
“We disguised them as cuckoo clocks,” Garcia said. His voice was laden with withering scorn, but Jorgun was as oblivious to that as he was to sarcasm.
“I don’t remember any cuckoo clocks.”
Garcia lashed out. “Do you even know what a cuckoo clock is, you big dummy?”
“Garcia!” Prudence barked at him, and Garcia bit back whatever comment he was about to add.
“No, but I know it was never on the cargo list.” Jorgun knew something was wrong, but he stuck to his guns. The kid—because it was impossible to think of him any other way than as a child—was brave.
“There weren’t any clocks, Jorgun.” Kyle couldn’t stop himself from playing the protector. “Garcia’s just upset. He’s afraid of the spiders, and he doesn’t know what to do.”
“Garcia is upset because he’s made one commission in eight hops. Garcia is upset because instead of carrying cargo, we’re carrying a criminal who can’t even pay his own fare. Garcia is upset because that flaming planet is probably crawling with spiders, and we’re flying straight towards it.” Talking about himself in the third person robbed Garcia’s rant of vitriol. Jorgun was smiling again by the end of it.
“You can get us a transport for Monterey,” Prudence said. “No passengers, though. And try to get something low on mass. We need to be nimble.”
“Can I ask the brain trust here a question?”
“Sure, Garcia,” Prudence said. Kyle was amazed at her patience.
“If we don’t find spiders on Solistar, why are we going to go looking for them on Monterey? Isn’t the point to
Prudence answered before Kyle could.
“Can you guess how much Fleet would pay to know where the spiders’ base is?”
It wasn’t the answer he would have given.
“Information is the best cargo, Garcia.” Prudence smiled at the angry man. Kyle felt like getting angry himself. He wanted her to smile at him like that. “Its mass-to-value ratio is infinite.”
“There’s no profit in being dead,” Garcia grumbled, but he deflated like a balloon with a pinhole in it. Kyle had seen the trick done once. You stuck a piece of clear tape on the balloon, and then you could poke it with a needle and it would slowly shrink, instead of popping. Prudence was a magician, and her crew were her props. Spending days trapped in a bubble of unreal space on a tiny, fragile habitat made management a survival skill. Fleet accomplished it with discipline; corporate liners relied on the promise of money; but the captain of a free-trader had only her wits to work with.
Garcia left the bridge, grumbling, and Kyle followed after him. He needed to get out of Prudence’s presence before he said something stupid.
“Tell me the rules again, dummy.” Garcia was blocking Jorgun from leaving the ship.
“I can’t take off my hat.” Jorgun, like the rest of them, was wearing a rented rad-suit, topped off with a beekeeper’s bonnet. Multiple strips of clear plastic hung down from the broad rim, creating a bubble around the wearer’s head. It was a cosmic irony that air could penetrate the shifting, porous material, but gamma radiation could not.
“That’s right, because if you do, that stupid star will burp, and then you’ll be ugly as well as dumb. And I’m
