Free The Science Officer by Blaze Ward Page B

map the hallway and the first cargo hold they had entered. The humans hadn’t heard, but they missed everything anyway.
    Now she was studying a small lizard–looking creature on a wall. Maybe the philosophical offspring of a gecko and a chameleon. It blended well, but moved quickly and gracefully. And couldn’t have been more than six centimeters long.
    She watched it munch happily on the local equivalent of a spider that hadn’t heard him coming either. There was probably a moral to that story.
    Suvi launched another aggressive series of pings, but nothing moved.
    She flitted over to a crate and scanned the weathered coding on the side. The language of shipping containers was probably the first universal stellar language. You could write and speak in any number of tongues and get by, but you had to talk to a very limited intelligence computer to move big things around.
    That meant simple codes, with descriptive tags built in, so that someone could point a laser scanner at a stack of containers, scan the whole wall, and inventory everything in seconds. Here, she was stuck thinking at almost human speeds, so it took much longer, and the flitter–ship had a very limited scanning laser, so she had to get close.
    But it was fun.
    This one contained quality glasswork, cups and vases and such, designed to be sold boutique–style on a frontier colony with some money. The sort of place that had been too poor to take anything initially that wasn’t directly related to immediate survival. And had then survived the first few years in the wilderness, and prospered enough that people were ready to have nice things. Suvi added it to the list.
    There weren’t any great prizes here. No precious metal alloys, or objects d’art, or high–end machine parts that Javier could use to build her a new ship. And this freighter was never flying again without more time in a space–dock than was worth considering. From what she had overheard, the others were mostly interested in ripping out the reactors and engines anyway.
    Then she remembered the Black Flag. Being stuck thinking at only human speeds really sucked. These people were the pirates who had jumped them. Javier was a prisoner, of sorts, and that’s why they thought she was dead.
    Duh.
    Gods, she hated slow processing hardware.
    Well, that changed everything. If Javier was working with them, he had some sort of deal going, and she was his ace in the hole. She could do that.
    Now she really missed all the extra brain horsepower. It would be nice to be able to read these people at the unconscious level, with all sorts of extra scanners and thermometers so she had a solid hold on their biometrics. Hmmm. She’d have to settle for turning up the audio channels and putting in a cutout in case it got loud suddenly.
    Time to watch, and wait, and prepare. Javier was going to need her.
    Ξ
    Javier smiled but grumbled. Having an honest deal with a bunch of pirates was one thing, but it would have been nice if this wreck had had some sort of big score. If he had to work with Sykora for four years, one of them would end up messily dead. No doubt about that.
    He was under no illusion that he’d have any chance to escape or communicate with anybody, any time they got close to civilization. Even with a lot of planning. Ogre Lady would just lock him in a broom closet for a day if she had to.
    And the old man was going to be no help at all. He seemed lost in a fugue of some sort. Probably spent too long alone here and gone totally nuts. He certainly didn’t realize he mumbled, not that anything coherent came out.
    And Sykora…Yeah. Don’t let her too close behind you. Simple as that. At least he had Suvi watching his back. Not that she could do much, but she was going to make his work a whole lot easier while he was here. And she could keep his back safer.
    Javier watched as another box came up on the screen, inventoried, mapped, and tagged. If nothing else, at least they had something to show