Last Voyage of Delilah, Episode 105: Beaumonde Shell Game
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Monday, 12 Feb 2525 or thereabouts …
Trans-U class, Delilah
En route to Beaumonde
Vikki does her best to make Katarina Selezneva feel at home by greeting the woman in Russian whenever their paths cross, running meals and offering help with small tasks whenever possible, and basically giving her the respect she'd give an elder. Vikki is her usual bubbly self throughout, but Selezneva does not respond in kind. Instead, Selezneva regards Vikki with some suspicion. Vikki eventually gets the hint and dials back her enthusiasm but keeps herself available to offer whatever assistance Selezneva might need. The opportunities are virtually non-existent: Selezneva pretty much keeps to herself for the flight.
Valentine occupies himself by methodically going through the contents of his father's cabin aboard the ship. The Captain's quarters is a rat's nest of tchotchkes and mementos, little things gathered over an itinerant lifetime, of obscure history and obvious sentimental value. Amazingly enough, Valentine finds a leather horse saddle with no evidence of a horse being aboard. He takes a few of the tchotchkes to Rachel and asks her if she knows what they are. She examines them and tells him that they're the Captain's I.O.U.s. from customers who couldn't pay in full. Unfortunately, Rachel couldn't tell him which tchotchke was from whom owing what. Either Lazarus Quick possessed a soft heart for those in financial straits or an idiot's head for business. Valentine decides his father was a little of both.
Valentine: I can take it as both. Going by the number of things in his room, it feels like he took I.O.U.s from everybody in the Verse. Is that roughly about right?
Rachel: Uh, yeah. If you managed to collect all the stuff that people owe as, I reckon you might have enough money to actually ….
She looks around at the ship and the meaning is pretty obvious.
Valentine: Would you have an idea who gave these to him?
Rachel: I didn't do nothin' with any of the deals.
Valentine: (resigned) All right.
He chalks up the I.O.U.s as yet another empty legacy from his father. It's a shame really. He'd been thinking of tracking down the I.O.U. bearers, setting up a spreadsheet and accounts … It would be a futile endeavor, like so many things attached to this ship, apparently. Nevertheless, Valentine files it away in his head. It might come in useful someday.
It's with that frame of mind that Valentine gathers the I.O.U.s cluttering up the cabin and stores them somewhat more neatly to the side. There's a lot of other stuff in addition to the I.O.U.s, things saved in the way of extremely thrifty folk who cannot let anything possibly useful be thrown away. Used paper and periodicals, odd bits of string and wire, even clothes that need mending but might be rehabilitated. Rachel follows him back to the cabin as they talk.
Rachel: What's that pile over there?
Valentine: This? It's a shirt with what looks to be half a sleeve.
Rachel: (points) Do you want that sweater?
Valentine: No. Why do you want it?
Rachel: Yeah, I'm gonna ravel it and knit somethin' else.
Valentine: You knitted this one? Or are you just—? (rethinks) Here. Take it.
Rachel: (sniffs it) Smells like Laz.
Valentine: I don't know what good knitting will do. I don't knit.
Rachel will never admit it but she will knit a blanket for her rat Mortimer with the yarn.
Most of Valentine's time during the trip to Beaumonde is spent culling the clutter into categories: keep as is, reuse, or toss. If he's going to be on the ship for a little while—JUST a little while—he's going to need a tidier cabin for his stay. Unlike his father, the clutter is simply unbearable in its current state.
Poco finds him engaged in sorting, sometime before they arrive at Beaumonde. Valentine looks up from a pile of … something … as Poco sticks his head through the cabin door.
Valentine: (nodding) Poco.
Poco: I just wanted to say that now that I'm, you know, official on the crew and all, I feel like I probably got a right to say we ain't gonna have an incident when we land and, you know, you givin' a fuck when it ain't your turn to give a fuck, are we? Because, you know, you talk about having responsibilities and last time your responsibilities got your pilot shot.
Valentine: I agree. I don't want or plan to take on anything else that I don't have to take on. As bad enough as it is, the fact that I'm making this trip … (snorts a laugh) … I'm dealing with it.
Poco: A'right. As long as we're not windin' up in any outright revolutions, we're good.
Valentine: You do your part not to force me to owe somebody else to pull your ass out of the fire at some point. Don't get into any trouble.
Poco: A'right. I don't recall getting' into any trouble.
Valentine: I didn't say that you had. But it wouldn't be so far out there from the realm of possibility, would it, that you might have got into some small bits of trouble here in the past.
Poco: Nah. (waves off) That's never happened.
Valentine: All right.
Poco: That's it. I just wanted to make sure that we were, you know, that we were clear. No need to go helpin' the locals.
Valentine: I don't know who you think I am, but I'm not the White Knight.
The rest of the flight to Beaumonde passes uneventfully. A blessing. Before they make orbit, Valentine searches out Katerina Selezneva.
Valentine: Is there anything that needs to be done upon our arrival?
Katerina: Yes. Is good you ask. You will need to arrange for ground transport to take the merchandise to this location.
She hands him a capture. It's obviously a satellite image of what appears to be what was once a thriving lumber mill town on a river. It's now abandoned, the buildings and the mill dilapidated in their decay.
It's a fair ways out from town. It's the perfect place for illegal goings-on.
Valentine: Is there anything I or my crew need to be concerned about?
Katerina: Well, in addition to arranging transport to take this, it's very important that the police not know about this.
Valentine: No polic—is there a reason why the police would know about it, upon landing?
Katerina: It depends.
Valentine: What does it depend on?
Katerina: How fast news travels. We left very quickly.
Valentine: We did leave very quickly, that is true.
Katerina: There is good reason to believe there is no advance notice but the speed of light is fast.
Valentine: So. No police officers. No police presence.
Katerina: Well, obviously you don't want anyone interfering. Now you will be driving it to a boat.
Valentine: To a boat?
Katerina: Yes. (puts finger on picture) It should be docked there.
Valentine: Okay.
Katerina: I have arrangements to make myself so I require you to be responsible for this.
Valentine: I see. Am I not delivering you to the … ?
Katerina: No, I'll find my own way. As I said, I have things to do in Nouveau Lyon.
Valentine: Okay.
Katerina: Everyone happy? Of course, I still require you to exercise discretion. It might be good to go at night.
Valentine: It sounds like that might be an excellent idea, indeed. Do you want to know anything about this arrangement?
Katerina: Mr. Jann assured me that you would be trustworthy in these matters. He said you would treat it as if your life depended on it.
Sister, you don't know the half of it.
Valentine: I certainly will. I believe in customer service.
Katerina: Yes. So. Insure the safety of merchandise. Avoid police interference. No customs, obviously. I assume I didn't have to say this.
Valentine: That did not need to be said. I will pretend you didn't say it.
Katerina: Get it there during the night. Everyone happy. And then we'll part ways. I will be sad to leave this beautiful ship.
Valentine: You said that with an amazingly straight face.
Katerina: I still need to go wash off.
Valentine: That's—All right. Thank you.
Valentine's already done a little preliminary planning. We don't have anything on us that could transport the cargo. We will have to rent a vehicle to move it. As it's supposed to be a covert job, Valentine goes to his go-to covert guy: Poco. Who is, as usual, in the engine room.
Valentine: Poco? We need to get the … (points down at the cargo deck) .. whatever you want to call it—
Poco: Wine.
Valentine: Fine, let's call it wine. We need to get it off-ship at night to a location many miles out, avoiding customs.
Poco: Uhn-Hn. And we got money to make this happen?
Valentine: We got some.
Poco: All right. (thinks) Your choices are the safe way and the cheap way. And the cheap way could become expensive very quickly.
Out here on the Rim, one can often … just kind of … avoid customs by declaring the cargo as something unlikely to make customs look twice. The cargo containers are refrigerated, however, and if we're stopped and checked, it's likely to be when they're loaded on the truck. At that stage, it might be good to have the bribe money ready. Or we could find a customs agent on the ground willing to take a bribe to look the other way when we land. There are several ways to do it, actually.
Poco: So we could either try to contact somebody to get the truck and to label the stuff as whatever, something that they won't ever check or we can get the truck and try to get it through customs on our own and then if they check it, then you're lookin' at trying to pay our way out of trouble. So it's cheap unless they check.
Vikki: Am I privy to this conversation?
Vikki crawls out from a cranny in the engine room where she's been working on something … and eavesdropping.
Valentine: Feel free.
Vikki: I was thinking of shifting the IRP container contents, shifting the cargo to the back and stack the meds on top. So if anyone opens it up, they're gonna see the meds, take a look, and say, "Oh, this shipment's fine. Never mind. Move along."
Poco: The only problem with that is I think he told somebody who has a lot of people who kill that we don't have those anymore.
Valentine: That's true. I did mention.
Vikki: Well, look. We’re supposed to be doing this under cover of night anyway, right? And she's going to be off the ship before we even dig out the IRP containers, so who's she gonna rat us out to?
Translation: "she" = Selezneva.
Valentine: That's actually not an unfair point.
Vikki: We have to go out and make nice anyway.
Valentine gathers the rest of the crew and has them weigh in on the idea.
Poco: It's obviously up to you, Boss, but havin' those IRP containers out in daylight? I dunno. Seems like a lotta people want'em.
Vikki: Okay. It was just an idea.
Poco: Not sayin' it's not a good idea.
Tian: She's not referring to the actual container, right?
Vikki: Not the ones with the guns in it.
Tian: So she means taking the meds out, stacking them in there, and stacking our meds around them?
Vikki: Yeah.
Poco: We could do that. Now that's a good idea.
Vikki: Yeah. That's what I thought I said back there.
Poco: The idea of hiding the cargo behind something innocuous will work. All we need to do is get a truck on the quiet and that's probably not too hard.
Tian: And Vikki and I both have our papers for that.
Vikki: Cuz we're supposed to be going out to the back of beyond anyway.
Well, the original orders weren't to have us travel but to set up the clinic where we drop anchor on the ship.
Vikki: Yeah but why make the impoverished come in all the way from the back of beyond for our little inoculations when we could take it to them? Save them the trip.
Tian: Who the hell is going to know the IRP said set it up where the ship lands?
Valentine: That seems like a reasonable amount of risk to accomplish what we want to accomplish. The other thing I'm going to throw out here and I'm not stating this for sure, but she's having us drive out to a mysterious place out in the middle of nowhere at night, with dangerous cargo. And she's going to be gone, off doing whatever she's doing, to basically give herself an alibi. There could be any reason why she's not going to be here but the point is, she won't be here. So the question is: how much value is there in trying to find out the value of what's in there, as opposed to the risk involved in opening one up and not being able to close it back up and then having my head cut off?
Poco: I don't wanna know.
Vikki: I don't think we should do that. Because, quite frankly, she was very very … meticulous about taking care of these things, getting them onto our ship and during the entire time she and they were on our ship, until we land. And then she's just going to take off and leave them in our possibly incompetent hands? As if Oh, la-la-la, her obligations are over to them? Why?
Valentine: She knows I'm doing this because the boss of my boss, who is in good with running the—whatever you want to call it—the Triad, she knows I'm on the hook for this. So if they don't get delivered the proper way and form, he'll hear back and then it will be … (draws finger across his throat) … it, for me. So I'm not asking this out of curiosity. I don't care really what's in them, other than if knowing will help us not get killed out in the middle of nowhere.
Poco: What are the odds that somebody put something in those containers that is dangerous or is something we're not supposed to be found with and then sends us off with it with the expectation of us being discovered with contraband?
Like that hasn't happened already?
Valentine: It feels like a high one.
Tian: The odds are pretty good, actually.
Poco: I meant to say, what are the odds of that happening again?
Tian: I don't believe in coincidence.
Vikki: Yeah, that's what I mean—
Valentine: Look, if I were the House, I would be offering this bet every day and twice on Sunday.
Poco: I dunno. I feel like she just don't wanna be there if the truck gets jumped or she actually has somethin' to do to set up for wherever we're takin' the cargo.
Vikki: Well, here's another question so I'll ask it and then just let it lie, cuz this is obviously a done deal.
Valentine: Go on.
Vikki: If it doesn't matter to her that she's there when we deliver it to the location, because she knows we're on the hook and we’re obligated to do it anyway regardless of whether she's there or not, why the hell did she ride with us in the beginning?
Valentine: To make sure we didn't eff it up along the trip.
Poco: If she wants to be there when they get there—
Valentine: She didn't say one way or the other. So it's possible she will be there. Unless someone tells me that I can get into one of these things and close it back up and not get killed—and convince me strongly that that will be the case—we'll leave them the way they are and just be prepared for all hell to break loose at some point on delivery.
So, it's business as usual then?
Poco: Do we have anything to scan them with, to detect what's in them without opening them?
No. It would take something more sophisticated than Tian has on hand.
Vikki: Can we build one? Or wait a minute. What if we hooked it up to the scanners on the bridge?
Yes. It would take time to do that though. And we don't have that.
Valentine: Okay, no. I think we're done. We can't do that without her seeing it. No one's coinvinced me yet that there's value in that risk to make me want to do it.
Vikki: Then I'd rather not. Let's pick the battles we know we can win.
Poco: Search of the exterior?
Valentine: We may do that once she disembarks.
The cargo does really look like coffins and it's not unusual for coffins that are to be shipped in space to have environmental controls to maintain proper stasis of the remains, on the chance that an open casket service is needed at the end of the journey. Given Poco's knowledge of the criminal element and general bureaucracy, he knows there aren't many inspectors who are eager to open up and inspect a coffin if they really believe it's a coffin. Only if they suspect drugs or contraband are they going to open a coffin up, as it would be a good place to transport that sort of thing.
And we don't have any documentation to prove that the cargo itself is anything other than what we claim.
Poco: We could forge the documents I suppose.
Tian: It wouldn't be that difficult, you realize.
Poco: If you know what you're doin', I imagine.
Tian: Uh, guys? Death certificates. If that's all the paper work we need …
Poco: Well, then, there you go.
Valentine: So, that's the question. Is the plan is to write out the death certificates to have them available in case we get inspected? Are planning to skip customs or are we planning to …?
Tian: Oh, no. We're skipping customs.
Poco: And yeah, she doesn't want any trace of these in customs.
Valentine: So these are in case something goes horribly wrong and we get inspected somewhere down the line on the truck, we'll have these death certificates to say that these are what they are. Is that what they are?
Tian: That sounds reasonable.
Along with possible bribes, yes.
Valentine: (to Poco) You're going to go out and figure who can get us a truck to get past customs. (to Tian) And you can get us some death certificates written up, for if it all goes horrible wrong.
Of course, it might not go horrible wrong. The IRP manifest and visual confirmation of the meds should be good enough to get us past customs. Or rather, through customs, as one doesn't really go past customs. There are things that might flag us nevertheless. When transporting bodies, there are usually seals accompanying the paperwork that we won't have. However, we can always claim that we've only a short time left on the refrigerant batteries and do we really want to delay delivery and end up with a rotting corpse? Chances are good we can get waved through on that, because nobody wants to deal with dead bodies, much less rotting ones.
Not even Reavers will touch those.
Even so, we've got boxes and boxes of nice official IRP stuff, as Poco so eloquently puts it, and with the coffins hidden behind them, along with the IRP manifest to show the officials, it's highly unlikely we'll get more than a cursory glance to verify that yes, those boxes are IRP meds as listed on the manifest. See? It's printed so, right on the box.
That being the only thing left to do, we get ready for landfall.
Poco: So we'll land safely, there's no checks required or anything …
Tian: (laughs) Ha! You wish.
Valentine: (smiles) Well played.
Tuesday, 20 Feb 2525
Beaumonde, Kalidasa (Xuan Wu) system
The day has arrived. We're to land on Beaumonde, the planet spinning serenely below us. Aboard our ship, things are a little less serene. Given her condition, anything could happen … catastrophically. Poco moves for the engine room. Rachel hauls off for the bridge, muttering about avoiding any complications.
Valentine: (teasing) Our ship has complications? What?
Tian: As if she already doesn't have enough.
Vikki: She's got us.
Tian: I was about to say, she's got us on board. That's complication enough.
Valentine: You guys are assets.
Tian: I dunno about that.
Valentine: Actually, you are. I'm not certain about much else, but that I'm certain of.
Poco: (calling back) Stange way of pronouncin' "asses", with a "t" in it.
Vikki: He was just trying to be diplomatic.
Tian: Oh yeah, that's very nice of him. Right neighborly.
Valentine: (unruffled) I know good people. I know people who are good at what they do. Without judgment on their personality or whatnot, everybody on this ship knows what they're doing. I'll say this much, too—(breathes a laugh)—there's something to be said about going willingly along with this ship.
Rachel straps into her chair and gets back to the job of flying. The rest of us help her do it. Our flight is relatively smooth, all things considering, but our deceleration rockets are mushy. We come in a little hot. Once we're on the dirt, Rachel hails the engine room.
Rachel: Poppa?
Poco: Yeah?
Rachel: I pushed the brakes pedals and they're soft. I had to pump them a little bit. Could ya lookit the deceleration rockets an' see what's goin' on?
Poco: You don't really need that, do ya?
Rachel: Well if we smack into the planet real hard …
Poco: I mean, you don't need that to land again. Cuz odds are, we're gonna be runnin' when we take off.
Rachel: I reckon we could run til we run outa fuel but I personally like to land ever' so often.
Poco: A'right. I'll take a look at it after I get back. I'm finding a truck.
Add one more thing to our To Do list. Poco scrawls it on the metal plate on the way out the engine room door. He stops in the hold to get the measurements of the cargo so as to know what size truck we'll need. Tian and Vikki are already shifting the meds out of their containers for loading onto the truck that Poco will bring back. They quickly decided against using the IRP containers for transport, just in case the APB on them got out this far.
Poco: At least we know that Tian can drive one of these things.
Tian: What?
Poco: You drove the one to the ship.
Tian: Yes and did you see how badly I was shaking when I got out?
Poco: No, oddly enough I missed you shakin' when you got out of the truck. I don't know why I wasn't.
Tian: I haven't driven a ten-ton truck in … decades.
Poco: Well, you're about to do it again.
Vikki: You drove that double-downer one really well.
Tian: Again, decades.
Poco: She hasn't driven one well in decades.
Tian: No. I haven't driven one in decades. I have driven personnel carriers before but it's literally been twenty years since I've been on the battlefield driving personnel carriers.
Valentine: Do you want me to drive?
Vikki: Do you want to teach me to drive?
Tian: Hell no, I'm not teaching you to drive. Do I look gorram crazy to you?
Poco leaves and surreptitiously alters the information on our status board at curbside. We have a flag out for our ship over the IRP-smuggled weapons and he's not too keen on having people connect the dots concerning our ship's prior whereabouts.
Poco's not the only one keen to cover tracks. Katerina Selezneva is out of there pretty fast, too. Not that we can blame her. Traveling aboard our ship was a level of slumming it that she found distasteful. Vikki sees her off anyway.
Vikki: Do svidaniya! ... (gets no response) ... Maybe it's my accent …?
Valentine: (pats her arm) We're good.
Nouvea Lyon is a heavily industrialized city. As Poco leaves, Vikki takes a deep sniff of the atmo outside.
Vikki: (laughs) Oh wow. It's so much cleaner than the air inside our ship.
Rachel meanwhile is stretching her legs after the hours she's put in the chair, just walking around the ship and getting the kinks out, when she notices someone else sniffing around our landing pad. It's a man and he seems to be avidly looking at some sort of hand-held device. He points the device at Delilah, reads the device, looks up …. and starts backing away. He turns and leaves. She can tell he's trying to be sneaky about it and he's not really good at it.
Rachel decides to double back around him and follow him to see where he's going. She's still stiff, however, and lacks her usual grace. He spots her, his eyes narrowing as he sees she's following him. Rachel smiles.
Rachel: She's a pretty ship, ain't she?
He blinks and looks around. She can't really mean that junk heap, can she?
Man: That your ship?
Rachel: (easy drawl) All the time.
Man: Where you guys came from?
Rachel: Near.
Man: I thought I heard someone said it was from Paquin. Outa Red Sun. Is that right?
Rachel: Uh, no, son. (shrugs) I'm pretty old. I don't know where the hell I just came from.
She can tell he actually knows what he's talking about and she decides to pull her grandmother act on him. Ain't nobody yet gonna suspect a lil' ol' lady like her to be lyin', but could be he'll be the first because he gives her a good long look. When he speaks, he's got the faintest of Irish Brogues.
Man: You know … I don't mean any harm to your ship. You don't need to be afraid. So actually, you could be of help and it might be valuable to you. You see, something was … stolen from back in Red Sun.
Rachel: Stolen.
Man: Yes, Ma'am.
Rachel: Well now you got me interested. So now I'm goin' to be keepin' my eye out for it?
The man reaches into his coat and pulls out a wallet and flashes a badge. He represents the New Melbourne Fisheries Union. The name is Paul O'Connell.
Rachel: So … They stole Moby Dick, did they, or what?
O'Connell: Intellectual property.
Rachel: From the fisheries.
O'Connell: Um-hmmm.
Rachel: I can swear to you—cuz my rat would'a found if there were fishy things on there and I would'a had a rat with his nose in it—and there ain't nothin' like that on this ship. Delilah smells but it's a bunch'a burnin' parts, honey.
O'Connell: So what cargo did you bring?
Rachel: People. And some weird … just boxes an' stuff.
O'Connell: Boxes and stuff.
Rachel: Yeah. Like crates. You seen those? Like wooden boxes? Things that people use?
O'Connell: These wouldn't be wooden boxes.
Rachel: They'd be tanks, right?
O'Connell: Of a sort.
Rachel: If you wave that wallet around, I'm figurin' you're givin' me some money, what?
O'Connell: There might be some in it for you, but only if the cargo is aboard. Of course, if you say the cargo isn't aboard, there's nothing.
Rachel: Well …
O'Connell: It might be worth … 300 credits.
Rachel: To find a fish tank?
O'Connell: May I have a look at what you brought?
Rachel: I'm not into givin' tours.
O'Connell: Like I say, if it's what I'm looking for, you have the potential for some real money.
Rachel: Well, O'Connell, I'll tell ya; one, I don't give tours; two, it would be kind'a strange I was to give you a tour of the ship; and three, I'd have'ta ask my Captain.
O'Connell: Perhaps you should go talk to him. I'll go with you.
Rachel looks back at Delilah. She and O'Connell aren't that far from the ship. Valentine is on the ramp keeping a weather eye on the environs but a bit of spaceport bulwark hides both of them from view.
Rachel: You're awful friendly and awful aggressive.
O'Connell: It's a just matter of considerable importance to the good hard-working fishermen of New Melbourne.
Rachel: Well, then I got a suggestion for you, Mr. Paul. Have a seat, cuz you're hard-workin' and if you wait, all that cargo is gonna off-load an' you can see it for free in all its glory.
O'Connell: Or we can bypass this problem right now and go look at it.
Rachel: Or you can sit there and just wait and it'll be off in a little bit.
O'Connell: Why don't you go to your Captain? If you are carrying illegal cargo, you may be in trouble with the law. I'm sure your ship has never had that problem before but it could cause real problems for you. Should I make a call to the local constable?
Rachel: (sighs) How old are you?
O'Connell: Forty-nine.
Rachel: Now, young'n—
O'Connell: Well, that's kind of you.
Rachel: (continuing) To be bold, you're not old enough to know when I'm tryin' to be nice about it. Wait. And you will see it. You won't be callin' the constable. You won't be callin' anything.
She pets Mortimer, who's currently riding on her shoulder, knowing she looks a little senile. It's a crap shoot if O'Connell believes her or not …
Alea iacta est, y'all.
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