"So how's it going?" asks Gressis Zont. "You under arrest yet?"
Gress gets to ask things like that. He runs a small Tarkalean freighter, like his father used to before him, and one of the cargoes his dad carried, once upon a time, was a certain family of homeless Talaxians on the run from Ferengi Alliance space before they got nickel-and-dimed to death. So Gress and I kinda go a long way back. He taught me how to cheat at tongo, which I guess might have led on to my questionably stellar career in Intelligence.
I shrug my shoulders at him. "I'm not under arrest. I'm not even under investigation, officially, as far as I know. It's just, well, my deployment orders are pending review, so I can't take my ship out... and every time I ask the transporter rooms to beam me Earth-side, they come back with a polite request to re-allocate my departure slot for more urgent traffic. So I'm not anything, I'm just stuck on Earth Spacedock. In limbo. Limbo-ized. Limboficated. Limbosticized." I take a pull on my drink. "Those aren't even words."
We're not in Club 47, we're in a smaller bar down near ESD's small-ish commercial docking ports. Gress can't get clearance for the military side of the station, which is most of it. I'm kinda worried that I can get clearance for the civilian bit. Smacks of Admiral Zorik giving me rope and hoping I'll hang myself.
Which, I suspect, is what I am about to do.
"Well," says Gress, "you just sit tight and relax, right? You haven't done anything wrong, and Starfleet's reasonably thorough and competent, yeah? So you stay put, let them investigate, wait for them to clear you, get back to work with a clear conscience, yeah?"
"Yeah," I say. "Eventually. Maybe. Assuming they don't foul up. And they don't downgrade my security clearance on general principles and put me to work in an office somewhere."
"It's still the sensible thing to do." Gress sighs. He scratches his brow ridges. "I guess you're not talking to me because you want to be sensible."
"I'm being set up. I wanna know who's doing it, and why, and I wanna drag them back to Intelligence's HQ and make them explain it. Maybe it isn't sensible, but it's what I wanna do."
"Well, I can understand that." Gress picks up his drink, takes a sip, pulls a face. "I'd help if I could. Point is, though, your bosses will know you're talking to someone, right now, with experience in moving hot Talaxians. That ain't gonna make things easy."
"No way I could just walk on board your ship," I say. "Assuming I'm not going to be sensible, and of course I am, really."
"Of course you are," says Gress. "No choice. I couldn't break through ESD's transporter interdiction and beam you out, anyway. Even if I wanted to wind up on a Federation blacklist and lose my docking privileges at every station in the quadrant."
"It'd take a lot to make that risk worth while," I say. I write something down on a piece of paper. Paper is good. PADDs leave a trace, in the computer systems. Paper is a lot less traceable. Harder to come by, I guess, since PADDs became ubiquitous, but still handy. "My assets haven't officially been frozen. I just can't transfer credit. Well, not more than twenty credits at a time." I pass Gress the piece of paper.
"Twenty credits won't get you an escape route off ESD," says Gress. "Not even for old times' sake."
His hand hovers over the piece of paper, hesitating, before he takes it.
"Well, I guess I'll just have to stay right here like a good girl," I say. "Unless I can figure some way off the station before you leave in - what is it? Twenty-two hours time?"
"About that, yeah," says Gress. "You'd have to be really smart and really lucky. I mean, you're talking about getting away from under your bosses' noses, right? And they know everything you know. I mean, they've got your record, they know what your resources are, they know the way you think. They're the guys with all the aces."
"Yeah, but they don't necessarily know how I'm gonna use my resources." I lift my glass, clink it against his. "I'll work something out." I smile. "You can't keep lightning in a bottle."
Except, of course, you can.
---
Twenty-one hours and an uncomfortable number of minutes later, I'm fumbling with an access panel up on ESD's level 927, and worrying that Zorik and his pals are monitoring my personal transporter buffer, because if they notice what I've just pulled out of it, they are going to get some ideas, and my life is apt to become very interesting, very quickly.
What I've pulled out is my Nukara-rated EV suit, and the zipline gadget we used for infiltrating Vaadwaur underground bases during the late unpleasantness in the Delta Quadrant. The use of the EV suit is fairly obvious, the zipline maybe less so. What I'm also hoping they haven't noticed is that, with my late connection to Tylha Shohl and the Experimental Engineering group, I still get cc'ed in on routine movement orders for the Exp-Engy mob.
The access panel pops open, and I thump in an override code. Fortunately, the people who built the panel knew it'd be used by people in spacesuits, with gloved hands, so the numbers are nice and big. Equally fortunately, this panel does not do any scans for biometric ID, on account of biometrics are kind of hard to read through a spacesuit. Technically, I'm not supposed to know this override code, but I've been hanging out with ESD engineers and I'm a noticing kind of person, so I learned it. Never know what's going to be useful.
The doorway slides open. I squeeze myself into the wardrobe-sized auxiliary airlock and hit the CYCLE switch. One door closes, all external sound goes away, the other door opens. I push myself through it, and immediately I'm weightless. Artificial gravity is cancelled inside the docking bay.
And that's where I am, inside the docking bay. So far, I'm not technically breaching the terms of my unofficial house arrest. I think. I'm inside the docking bay, but still, technically, inside Earth Spacedock, and not going outside any time soon, since the big external bay doors are sealed shut. I can't pick the locks on those doors, and I can't exactly jemmy them open, either.
This is where those movement orders come in. Because I know when someone is going to open them.
I glance around. There are always spectators in the galleries around the docking bay, but I'm just one more anonymous figure in a spacesuit, and there are plenty of those around too. I get my bearings and tense myself. The suit's thrusters could handle this next bit, but I need to save them for the final step of the plan....
The half-assembled frame of the Constitution-class cruiser is already drifting towards me, towed by work bees, the saucer completed, the secondary hull and the nacelles a latticework of naked structural members. I aim the zipline and fire. The grapple locks on to a stanchion near the port Bussard collector. The ship is moving at a fair clip already, the jolt nearly dislocates my shoulder as I'm pulled along.... I reel in the line quickly, clamber into the half-built engine, settle down where I'm less likely to be spotted.
I have no idea what Tylha wants this antique for - I've learned not to question a moody Andorian when she goes screwdriver-happy - but, right now, it's my ticket out of here. I rest my back against a warp coil and watch the sights of ESD drift by. Starships, mostly... I can see the big blunt shape of the Topkapi, somewhere below me, and I feel a bit of a lump in my throat, wondering what will happen to that one, now....
Then something else starts to drift by, a big slanting line that cuts across the view like the universe's largest punctuation mark; the edge of the spacedock door. Tylha is having this thing moved to an external docking cradle for the final assembly and testing stages, and that's why I get a free ride out of here.... The doorway slips on past, and on the other side of it there are stars, free and shining in the endless night. ESD is over Earth's night side at the moment, and beneath me - far, far beneath me - the dark oceans are rimmed with the jewel-bright lights of cities.
I tense myself. I disengage the zipline, because I may need it, and anyway things are neater this way. The cruiser is still under intermittent acceleration, nudges from the work bees as they guide it to its new home. I feel one nudge, and I let it nudge me off my resting place and into the night.
This is where the thrusters come in.
I twist myself about, falling freely through space, and I call the flight path up on my suit HUD. It's a long way... but that shouldn't be a problem. I line myself up on the flight line and fire the thrusters.
Acceleration. A feeling of weight comes back. Bizarrely, it feels like I'm rising, though my eyes tell me I'm moving down, parallel to the long axis of ESD, towards the stem of that kilometres-long mushroom. Both are illusions, really, there's no up or down in free fall. The two illusions meet somewhere in my middle ear and try to make me spacesick. I ignore them.
This is the risky bit. Well, the most risky bit. OK, there's plenty of guys in EV suits floating around the outside of ESD, too, but not many moving in my sort of direction, at my sort of speed... and space traffic control, too, necessarily tries to keep tabs on spacewalkers....
But there's nothing I can do about that, except keep accelerating and keep my eyes peeled. Any moment now, a transporter beam could lock on, and this flight could end in a very undignified way, sprawling across the pad while Zorik and his minions look down at me. I bet he's got minions. He looks the type.
Motion ahead of me - beneath me - whichever direction I'm facing, anyway. The shining stars are occulted, hidden behind something grey and blocky with a faintly glowing impulse drive. I check my HUD. I'm a little off. Rather than correct with the thrusters, though, I take aim with the zipline again, and fire it at the point of closest approach. Another punishing jolt through my arms and my shoulders -
And I'm flying along, pulled in the wake of a stubby G-class transporter like a fisherman who's snagged a way too big catch. I hand-over-hand along the zipline, dragging myself up towards the boxy hull. The impulse drive is idling, which is kind of Gress, I guess. I reach the hull, pull myself from handhold to handhold until I reach an airlock. The controls respond to my gloved fumbling, and I'm in.
Safe. For the moment, at least. I feel, more than hear, a dim murmur as the engines step up to full power. I pop my helmet, take a deep breath, and transfer the suit back into my transporter buffer.
The interior of the freighter is dimly lit and basic - lots of bare metal, exposed piping, and a smell of machine oil and imperfectly recycled organics. Smells like home. I make my way down a narrow corridor, and into the mess hall.
Gress is there, looking faintly relieved. The other things are there, too. "No security alerts," Gress says. "No questions. We're at full impulse now, heading for our assigned warp-out point in Jupiter orbit. I think we got away with it."
"Looks like it." Or Zorik has decided to hand me some more rope. I'll know when I run into the knot with a violent jerk, I guess. I reach out and touch one of the things by Gress. They're shaped like urns, only they're solid, cased in metal-ceramic, and humming gently. Each one is nearly as tall as me. There are five of them.
"I'm keeping one of those," says Gress.
"Fair enough." I shrug. It's a reasonable price, in the circumstances. Gress is taking a big risk, he deserves a big payout. And it comes courtesy of whoever's framing me.
Money's a way of rationing resources, and different cultures use different things for the ration tokens. The Ferengi use stuff that's hard to replicate, that they figure carries intrinsic value. The Klingon darsek is backed by the honour of the Great Houses of the Empire, and how you calculate the intrinsic value of that, well, it beats me. The Federation takes a different view. With replicators and holodecks and so on, the Federation is a post-scarcity economy, and they figure the only thing that holds value... is the power to make those replicators run. The Federation energy credit, then, is literally backed by energy - each credit value is good for some number of kilowatt-hours. And you can transmit energy, and store it.
I'm not allowed to access my dubious funds. It took a bit of finagling, though, but I managed to get the sequestered funds stored, in containers full of highly charged electroplasma. It took a lot more finagling to arrange for those containers to be picked up for transfer to another location. They'll get there. They might be a lot more empty when they finally arrive, though. And I know ways to get charged electroplasma converted to a harder currency....
I stroke the curved side of one container. You can too keep lightning in a bottle.
"So," says Gress. "They'll catch up pretty quickly, you know. You can't stay here."
"I know." I sigh. "First, the trading station at Shamira Gamma. I'm gonna take a heck of a loss on the exchange rate, but what the heck, it's not my money anyway, right? Then on to the Neutral Zone. OK, the former Neutral Zone, but there's still some shady corners, I got some contacts." Despite everything, I chuckle. "One of 'em just loves shady corners."
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