Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The bead Polly was trying to string slipped off the wire again, rolled across the low table, and disappeared in the fur beneath it.
Tess looked up from the stack of records spread around her. “That’s the fourth one.”
“I know.”
“You’re getting worse at this.”
“I’m distracted.”
“Clearly,” Tess said dryly.
Polly retrieved the bead and dropped it back into the little bowl with more force than necessary. “I thought you were supposed to be looking at ship records.”
“I am. I’m also watching you lose a fight with a bead.”
She glared at the other woman, but Tess had already bent over the records again.
The healer’s cave had gradually become less of a healer’s cave and more of a records office over the past several days.
Printed manifests covered one end of the low table.
Two datapads borrowed from Baralt sat among bowls of beads and lengths of sinew, and Polly had started using different colored stones to mark ships, ports, and dates.
Cera had complained about the mess twice, but the fact that she’d made no attempt to clear it away meant she approved.
She sighed and abandoned the necklace, pulling another stack of records towards her.
They had been working for most of the morning, trying to trace the ship Tess had escaped from, but it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Baralt had already established that the vehicle registration actually belonged to a freighter that had been dismantled years ago in another part of the Empire.
After that, every trail seemed to split into three more.
Tess scowled and shoved another manifest aside.
“This is useless.”
“We don’t know that.”
“I’ve been looking at these things for days and I know exactly as much as I did when we started.”
“That’s not true.”
“Fine. I know that criminals lie on paperwork. Shocking revelation.”
She bit back a smile. Tess’s temper had improved considerably as her strength returned, although perhaps improved wasn’t quite the right word.
When they’d first found Tess, most of her personality had been buried beneath fear disguised as hostility.
Now Polly was discovering a dry wit, an impressive vocabulary for profanity, and a stubborn impatience that could flare into irritation.
She liked this side of Tess much better.
“Maybe we’re looking at it the wrong way,” she said.
Tess dropped the manifest onto her lap. “I’m listening.”
“We keep trying to find your ship.”
“Yes,” Tess said with exaggerated patience. “Because that’s the ship I was on.”
“But what if we looked for other ships? Other illegal slaving operations.”
Tess frowned. “Why?”
“Because it’s like Baralt said. A lot of these ships follow the same patterns, right? They falsify their registrations. They use certain routes. They trade with certain traders. If we can identify those patterns, it might give us more information about your ship.”
Tess stared at her for a long moment.
“That’s not a bad idea.”
“I have them sometimes.”
“I’ll admit to being surprised.”
“You’re too kind.”
Tess snorted, but her eyes were already moving back over the records, this time with a new intensity. “All right, what’s the most obvious pattern? Ship ID’s?”
“No, Baralt said those are all fake.”
“Then what?”
“What about the routes they follow? You said they moved you from ship to ship.”
“Yes.”
“So maybe we need to focus on the locations rather than the ships.” She reached for another record. “You said the last transfer happened shortly before you escaped.”
“I think so.”
“And you remembered the station because of the noise.”
Tess’s expression tightened slightly.
“Cargo lifts,” she said. “All night. And some kind of alarm every few hours. Three short bursts. It drove me crazy.”
“And you smelled something.”
“Fuel. Grease.” Tess shrugged. “The usual.”
“You also told Baralt that you smelled something sweet when they opened the cargo doors,” she reminded her.
Tess frowned, then nodded. “That’s right. Like burnt sugar.”
She began sorting through the records again.
Baralt had included transit information from several stations within range of Hothrest, along with the movements of vessels whose registrations had later proved false or questionable.
Most of it meant nothing to Polly. Columns of numbers, symbols, port designations and translated notes blurred together after a while.
But she had spent the better part of a year learning to make jewelry, and she understood patterns.
“Here.” She pulled out a manifest and showed it to Tess. “This ship refueled at Nareth Station eleven days before you arrived on Hothrest.”
“So?”
“Nareth Station’s primary export is a refined fuel that burns with a sweet smell.” She pulled out another manifest. “This ship used a different registration. Baralt flagged it because the identification belonged to a ship that was supposedly on the other side of the Empire at the time.”
Tess’s eyes narrowed. “It stopped at Nareth too.”
“Two days later.”
For the first time all morning, Tess went completely still.
She found the third record. “And this one.”
“Another false registration.”
“Another stop at Nareth.”
Tess snatched the manifest out of her hand and scanned it.
“Three ships,” she said slowly.
“Three different registrations.”
“All false.”
“And all stopping at the same station within a few weeks.”
Tess was already reaching for the first manifest again. “Look at this.”
“What?”
“The authorization.”
At the bottom of each record was a block of official-looking text followed by a complicated symbol. Tess put the three pages side by side.
“Look at the station master’s signature,” she said.
She looked from one to another. They were identical. Not similar. Identical.
“Could it be an electronic signature?” she asked.
“Maybe.” Tess was already shaking her head. “But look at this.”
She pointed to a tiny mark beneath the signature, a notation Polly hadn’t paid any attention to. The same sequence appeared on all three forms. Tess sat back and looked at her.
“Someone’s running a network, and Nareth Station is part of it”
A chill shivered down her spine. “Maybe.”
“Not maybe.” For once there was no fear in Tess’s eyes. There was something harder. “Multiple ships. False papers. Coordinated movements. They move cargo through this station and change registrations somewhere along the way.”
Cargo. Neither of them said what kind.
She looked down at the records again.
“We don’t know these are the same people who took you.”
“No. But it’s the first thing we’ve found that looks like anything.”
She couldn’t argue.
Tess gathered the three manifests into a neat stack. “We need more records from Nareth.”
“We should send these to Baralt.”
“No,” Tess said immediately, frowning at her.
“Why not?”
“Because we found it.”
She frowned at the other woman. “I know that.”
“So we should keep looking.”
“I’m not suggesting we give up. I want to keep looking too.”
Tess’s jaw tightened. “But you also want to give the information to Baralt.”
“Yes, so we can both keep looking.”
“We don’t need some enormous alien male taking over because he thinks we can’t handle it,” Tess said, scowling.
“Baralt doesn’t think that.”
“You don’t know what he thinks.”
She sighed. “Maybe not, but I know how he’s acted since I met him.”
“He’s Njkall’s friend,” Tess said, as if it proved her point.
“So?”
“Njkall thinks everyone needs protecting.”
She opened her mouth to object, then closed it, unable to dispute Tess’s statement.
“All right,” she conceded. “Sometimes.”
Tess snorted. “You mean all the time.”
She looked down at the three manifests on the table. A year ago she would have understood Tess’s reaction without question. Help had strings. Help meant obligation. Help meant someone else gained a claim over you. But she didn’t believe that anymore. At least, not entirely.
“Giving Baralt information doesn’t mean giving him your choices,” she said quietly, but Tess’s expression didn’t change.
“He has contacts we don’t have,” she continued.
“He knows ships. He knows Port Eyeja. He probably knows people at Nareth. We could spend weeks trying to find out who this station master is.”
“So we hand it over and wait.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I’m saying we send him copies and keep looking. We ask if he has any additional information.”
Tess studied her suspiciously. “We?”
“Yes, we. You didn’t think I was planning to give up, did you?”
“I don’t know.” Tess shrugged uncomfortably. “Why do you care?”
The question surprised her. “Because I want to know what happened to you, of course.”
“It didn’t happen to you.”
“No, I wasn’t part of their network,” she said quietly. “But I went through something like it.”
The anger faded slightly from Tess’s face, as Polly picked up one of the blue stones and rolled it between her fingers.
“When I first came here, everyone kept trying to help me. Cera. Yasmin. Njkall. Half the clan, probably. And sometimes I hated it.”
“Because they thought you were helpless.”
“No.” She considered that. “Because I thought accepting help meant I was helpless.”
Tess looked away.
“It doesn’t mean that,” she said firmly, wanting the other woman to understand what it had taken her so long to accept.
“Easy for you to say.”
The words stung, although she knew they weren’t intended to. But then she realized something. A year ago, they wouldn’t have been easy for her to say at all.
“No,” she said. “It isn’t. But I’m saying it anyway.”
Tess looked back at her. For a moment neither of them spoke, then Tess released a long breath.
“Copies.”
“Copies.”
“And we keep everything.”
“Everything.”
“And if Baralt decides we’re delicate females who should leave this to the males—”
“We tell him he’s wrong.”
Tess’s mouth twitched.
“Njkall won’t like that.”
“I think you’re wrong. But even if you aren’t, Njkall is learning.”
That earned her an actual laugh. It was brief and rusty, but unmistakable, and she grinned at the other woman. Then she sent the records to Baralt before Tess could change her mind.
His response arrived less than an hour later.