Her left wand twitched, providing data she was irritated not to have prepared earlier.
“Three thousand two hundred and eighteen Sverdlovsk crowns.”
The Klimovs looked startled that she’d been the one to answer. Daniel only smiled, though now that Adele thought about it she guessed he wouldn’t have realized she’d amassed quite so much information so quickly.
The spacer who’d steadied Klimovna now gripped the Count, keeping himself anchored by a toe against the hatch coaming. Klimov lifted his tunic to expose a money belt, then began counting Alliance marks into the palm of his left hand.
“Captain, there’s a ship approaching,” said Sun, speaking loudly enough to be heard while keeping his whole attention on his Gunnery display.
“Ship, port control is about to board us,” Daniel said on the general push. The Klimovs listened intently; they weren’t wearing the commo helmets they’d been issued, so he made a point of speaking directly to them. “We should be splashing down in half an hour, thanks to the owners’ reasonable attitude regarding port charges.”
“Good-oh for the Klimovs!” somebody shouted over the PA system. It was probably Dorst, since only the bridge and the Battle Center could access the speakers at the moment. There was a general ragged cheer.
“And Sun?” Daniel said, leaning closer to the gunner. “If your turrets aren’t locked fore and aft, I’ll derate you right now.”
Sun turned and grinned at him. “They’re locked, sir,” he said. “But they aren’t stowed. I figure we’re in the North, now, so we can take a little knocking around on descent just so we don’t look like patsies to the wogs, right?”
Adele winced. When the Klimovs were safely off the bridge, she’d remind Sun that “wog” wasn’t a word you used when the owners traveling with you were from Novy Sverdlovsk. . . .
“There’s a customs boat docking with us, Captain,” Woetjans warned over the hard-wired connection from the Princess Cecile’s hull. As soon as the corvette dropped into orbit, the riggers had furled the sails, rotated the spars vertical, and locked them to the antennas which they telescoped and folded for landing. The bosun sent the port watch below then, but she and the starboard watch remained outside.
“Acknowledged, Woetjans,” Daniel replied. “Bring them through dorsal forward and follow them aboard.”
He smiled to the Klimovs, floating at angles to the deck. A rigger from the port watch held his arm out; the Klimovna gripped his wrist and held herself steady. “Our bosun announced the arrival of the guard vessel,” Daniel explained. “It’ll be just a few minutes.”
When a vessel was in the Matrix, the thrust of Casimir radiation against her charged sails slid her between bubble universes of varying space-time constants. Even so small an input as a radio signal or the electromagnetic field of a current-carrying wire could introduce literally incalculable variables.
The problem didn’t exist in sidereal space, but the riggers used radio frequency gear sparingly nonetheless. The handsignals and semaphores by which they set the sails in the Matrix generally sufficed for other times as well.
Adele could’ve watched the Abdul Hassan sending lines to the Sissie, but the fine points of ship-handling wouldn’t have been any of her affair even if the locals were likely to teach her something that the corvette’s crew didn’t know. Instead she entered the computer of the other port control vessel, the Piri Reis, and pirated the information the local inspectors were sending back from the Goldenfels.
The boarding team unreeled a fiber-optic cable to their own vessel, making the data impossible to jam or intercept—until it got to the Piri Reis. At that point it became Adele’s at literally the speed of light. Her wands flickered as she watched the images cascade through her display.
The airlock just aft of the Sissie’s bridge cycled, then purred open. A pair of helmeted strangers came out, followed by crewmen whose rigging suits made them look huge and clumsy compared to the others in flexible airsuits. The crystalline flex joining the first local’s helmet to his ship was hair fine. Even knowing it must be there, Adele could see only a quiver in the air.
The rig was expensive and of the highest quality. The only justification for it she could imagine was that it kept the inspectors honest—in the sense that their superiors knew exactly how much the bribe had been so that those superiors could extract their proper portion.