“Maybe not,” Shig agreed. “But trouble still. We finally got an explanation for some of the hesitation they’ve expressed through their messages. They’ve been ten years in that bucket. Out there in the black for almost seven now. Popped back in more than a half a light-year from Capella.”
“Shit. And let me guess. Didn’t have the fuel to pop back out?”
Aguila’s gaze thinned as she gestured down the bar to Inga. “Miracle and tragedy all in one. The miracle’s that they’re alive. The tragedy is what they had to do to stay that way for seven years in a ship that couldn’t feed them all.”
“They murder the transportees like the crew of Freelander did?”
“Might just as well have,” Kalico told her. “Captain Galluzzi sent his official log to Vixen, along with the Observer/Advisor’s reports. Shig and I gave them a quick scan. The transportees tried to take the ship. It got bloody. Failed. So Galluzzi had them sealed onto the transportee deck. And left them there.”
“Bet they’re ready to get the hell out.”
Shig glanced at her. “It’s just Galluzzi’s word, of course, but it may be a bit more complicated than that. If the good captain and the records are to be believed, things turned remarkably brutal among the transportees. Over the last six years they have apparently developed some sort of messianic cult based on the notion of controlled violence and eating one’s fellows as a reflection of the universe. At this stage we can only guess at the depth of the belief and its intricacies. If there’s good news, it is that there’s only about a hundred of them left.”
Aguila added, “Just talking about it, Galluzzi broke into a cold sweat. The guy’s almost a basket case, and he’s scared. Really scared.” She shot Shig an evaluative look. “So much so that he sent me a private com just before we stepped off Vixen. Asked me to consider blowing up Ashanti as soon as he could get his crew off.”
Shig’s round face puckered. “That’s a bit extreme, even for cannibals, don’t you think?”
“Excuse me? Cannibals?” Talina asked.
Kalico gave her a dead stare. “Think locked on Deck Three with insufficient food. It’s eat your neighbor or be eaten by him. One or the other.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Blowing up the ship would solve some of Galluzzi’s problems,” Shig mused.
“Hey?” Talina asked. “What about the cargo? Ashanti’s holds must be full of things we need. Equipment. Parts. Seeds, maybe cacao, or cotton, or who knows what? And unlike Freelander it wasn’t lost in space for a hundred and twenty-nine years.”
Aguila laid a 10-SDR coin out for Inga, saying, “My party tonight. Put whatever’s left on my tab.”
“Thought I was buying,” Shig said. “That was the deal.”
“How’s the vegetable market these days?” Aguila asked.
“I sold a couple of squash last week,” Shig told her proudly.
Shig made most of his income from his garden. One of the most influential men on Donovan, Shig Mosadek was also one of the poorest. He was a third of the triumvirate—the three-person government of Port Authority. Shig was the conscience, the public face, and liaison to the community. Yvette Dushane—a pragmatic woman in her fifties—did the nuts and bolts daily administration and record keeping. Talina Perez served as security chief, enforcer, and protector.
Inga set a whiskey down before Aguila and placed a half-full glass of wine before Shig, saying, “My latest red from those sirah grapes they transplanted from Mundo Base.” Then she scooped up the coin, heading back down the bar before reaching up to credit Kalico’s account on her big board.
Talina asked, “We’re not seriously blowing up a starship, are we?”
“Of course not.” Aguila raised her whiskey and swished it around, inhaled, and took a sip. “Oh, that’s her new barrel. Much better than last month’s.”
“So, remind me. That leaves us with how many traumatized maniac religious cannibal nuts?” Talina asked. “A hundred, you say? What are you thinking? Put ’em in the domes in the residential section? Let them rub elbows with us locals until they come back to their senses?”
Shig studied his half glass of wine. “I think that would be a bad idea. At least given what we currently know about them.”
“I can’t put them up at Corporate Mine,” Aguila said. “First, I don’t have the dormitory space. Second, we’re a pretty tight organization down there these days. If I drop a hundred soft meat into the mix, I’m going to have chaos. And who knows what kind of skills these people have?”
“Not to mention that they eat people. That will go over big in the cafeteria,” Shig noted.
“So that brings us back to some of the empty domes in the residential district.” Talina shrugged. “If they start to get out of line, it may take a couple of head whacks, but my guess is that between us, we can civilize them.”
Shig held up his hand for attention. “I don’t think that’s wise, let alone an operative plan of action.”
“Okay,” Talina told him. “Since when is having someone like me, Talbot, or Step coming down on a bit of misbehaving—”
“I took the opportunity to read some of the ravings the Irredenta sent to Captain Galluzzi.”
“The irrawho?”
“The Irredenta,” Shig told her. “That’s what they’re calling themselves. That, and they often refer to themselves as the Unreconciled. The words attributed to their Prophets reek of demented religious fanaticism. These people believe that they have passed through a brutal selection, that they have been given absolute truth. That they’ve been chosen to possess the one true understanding of God and the ultimate reality of the universe. Worse, they’ve been locked away, isolated, and survived a most terrible winnowing. Events stripped them of their humanity. They committed atrocities, acts that abnegated the kind of people they were before the trauma.”
“So what? Donovan is no one’s idea of a picnic,” Talina retorted.
Shig softly said, “In my view, turning them loose in PA or Corporate Mine would be to unleash a calamity.”
“Bit melodramatic, don’t you think?” Talina asked.
Shig arched a bushy eyebrow. “After the rise of The Corporation, religious fundamentalism was suppressed, monitored. But think back to your security training. You must have run across historical references to fringe beliefs, fanatical interpretations of scripture. Millenarians. Radical cults. Most were led by charismatic individuals thought of as messiahs by their followers.”