Chapter Ten
The planet was only a couple of ring jumps away, but it might as well have been like traveling back in time, Sketch thought, considering just how primitive and backwater the planet they were going to was. It wasn't as though they didn't
know
about technology; it was that they refused to
use
it voluntarily, for what they claimed were religious reasons. They didn't have a problem with people bringing them food, building them shelter or even providing them protection, but they weren't allowed to travel off-world, they weren't allowed to accept medical help, they weren't allowed to use technology themselves and they certainly weren't allowed to do anything that went against all the obscure, arcane and, frankly ridiculous religious precepts they clung to.
The planet was called Jeratine, the religion was called Exovitism and the practitioners were among the stupidest people Sketch had ever been forced to deal with.
He'd been to this planet once before and had sworn he wouldn't come back unless it was for an exceptionally good cause.
Cola was lucky Sketch had a soft spot in his heart for unwed mothers.
Pertixi was a young woman who belonged to the Exovites, and her husband had died in a farming accident a month before the wedding. As it turned out, Pertixi and her late fiancé weren't
so
good of Exovites that they had followed the rule banning premarital sex, and when Pertixi's husband-to-be had been heavily wounded, because they forbid 'outsider medicine,' he had died and left Pertixi alone, and with an in-utero child.
Cola had sent word that Pertixi hadn't been born into the Exovites, but had converted when she'd come of age, having gone to study them as part of her university studies and having fallen in love with Dwaliet, her late partner. And Pertixi had sent word to her sister via an actual physical
letter
that had arrived a few weeks after she'd sent it, begging her sister to find a solution for her predicament.
That solution had led her to Cola which had led her to Sketch.
"I fucking hate this rock," Sketch grumbled from his captain's chair. It felt strange being sat there, since until recently he'd always just been over in the pilot's seat most of the time, the seat Lara now currently sat in.
"You've been to Jeratine before?" Lara asked. "You don't strike me as the religious type." The two of them were the only ones on the bridge at the moment, so they'd been making small chat on and off for the last few hours.
"I'm not, but their coin spends as good as anyone else's," Sketch sighed. "And last time I didn't really have a choice. It was very early on in my career working for Jez's mom, and I didn't really have the luxury to say no to gigs that I didn't like. And it was shipping them food, so it didn't really even feel much like smuggling," he laughed. "But as it turns out, it was, because there was a trade embargo on at the time forbidding anyone from bringing food onto the planet. The local government had said something that had pissed off the local Starless Dominion constable, and as such, she'd decided to let them have a year without getting food imports, to 'teach them some manners.'"
"Fuckin' hell, Sketch," Lara laughed. "How'd you get past that one?"
"Argued I was returning a thousand reams of fabric that they hadn't screened for pervasive infestations before giving it to me, so I was returning the fabric and demanding a replacement," Sketch said. "The fact that I was basically leaving with nearly the same weight I arrived with delighted the constable, although she demanded to see the textiles on the way out, so thankfully I had set up about a dozen reams to form a false wall, and that was good enough. Had she wanted to really get in there and count them all, I'd have been fucked, but nobody wants to do ten hours of work when two minutes is good enough 95% of the time. That's one of the ground rules of how us smugglers get things where we want to take them."
"Think that'll buy you any good will with the local harbormaster?"
"Not really," Sketch said. "They nearly tried to run me off the planet in the middle of my delivery. It's one of the reasons I stopped doing in person hand offs for a long while."
"Why? What happened?"
"Kid, barely in his teens, was coughing constantly while they were unloading the food, so I gave him a jab of nanocells, nothing permanent, just enough to clear up the case of tuberculosis that he'd picked up and likely was going to be spreading to the rest of the colony," Sketch said. "Thought I did it quick enough that nobody would've seen me, but the guy in charge of the parish did, and he threatened to kill the boy unless I undid what I'd just done to him."
"How do you
undo
fixing someone?" Lara asked him.
"Truthfully? You don't. But you can
convince
someone who doesn't know shit about tech that you did," Sketch said with a chuckle. "I gave the kid a placebo pill, told them it would nullify the medicine I'd injected him with, and they were none the wiser. I was told if I ever set foot on their planet again, I would be greeted with 'open hostilities.'"
"And we're still going back there?"
"They didn't mean it, or at least we better hope they didn't," Sketch laughed. "Of course, the turnover for parish leaders there is so constant, we could be on that guy's fifth replacement by now. Anyway, even if he's still angry, I'll figure it out and find a way to get him to back down."
"I gotta ask you, while it's just the two of us here, boss," Lara said to him, "you're
really
involved with them
both
sexually? Even the Princess?"
Sketch shrugged slightly. "My Storm abilities were out of control until recently. That figures into it, some. The Princess hit on me first, and then we picked up Aliara, who used to be part of the royal guard, when she was on border patrol and Serena basically pushed me into using my abilities on her. And then Aliara renounced her place among the Starless Dominion, faked her own death and joined my crew."
"So if you're captain, I'm pilot, Jez is doctor, Aliara's muscle, what job does the Princess fill?"
"Cock holster," Serena said bawdily as she walked onto the bridge. "If Sketch wants someone to fuck, I should always be his first choice. I'm a better fuck than anyone else on this damn boat anyway."
"She's certainly the most confident, anyway," Sketch said.
"Who was having trouble walking this morning?" Serena asked as Sketch turned his head to shoot her a confused look. "Okay, fair, we
both
were, but I very much had a hand in that!"
"I don't think it was your hand that was getting the most use there, your majesty," Aliara said as she moved onto the bridge to join them. "Or did you forget I was spectating for much of it?"
"
Only
spectating!" Serena stressed, mostly for Lara's benefit. "I got my man off the hard way, with blood, sweat and tears!"
"I dispute two of those three claims," the P'nox laughed. "But I will allow the sweat claim to stand."
"You're way less fun than I thought you would be, Aliara," Serena said as she moved to sit in one of the open chairs on the bridge.
"Only when you aren't allowing me to do more than spectate, your Highness," Aliara said smugly.
"I can't believe you turned the Princess O'Quincy into a slut," Jez said as she walked onto the bridge, the last to arrive for the meeting.
"Turned me
into
?" Serena said, glaring at the slightly older woman. "I'll have you know that nobody makes me do anything I don't want to do."
"Technically that isn't true," Helen's voice said from all around them, "as Sketch's Storm abilities were definitely affecting you when you arrived on board the ship."
"But they haven't been for a while now, Helen," Serena countered.
"Approximately three weeks," Helen offered by way of retort.
"That might as well be a lifetime in our business," Serena snorted.
"Look at you, adopting the role of the smuggler so quickly, your highness," Lara chuckled.
"Adapt or die."
"Death isn't everything it's cracked up to be," Sketch said, reinserting himself to the conversation. "Take it from someone who spent several lifetimes basically dead."
"So, what
is
the story with that, Sketch?" Jez asked.
"I'll tell it to you another time," he said. "For now, we need to concentrate on the mission. We're only a couple of hours away from Jeratine and I would much rather have a plan going into this than just trying to stumble our way through it."
"Stumbling our way through things seems to be our standard operating procedure, Cap'n," Aliara said with a grin. At first, Sketch had thought the change from Y'bari to P'nox was going to be mostly a cosmetic thing, but it turned out that the longer Aliara had been loose from the yoke of her oppressive masters in the Starless Dominion, the more swaggery she had become. The new attitude had a certain appeal to it, but also gave him cause for concern. The last thing he wanted was twitchy muscle operating in his defense. Maybe he would be able to help calm her down, or, better still, maybe she would only get that way when dealing with Serena, because the Princess was a shipload of mischief in a bag a hundred times too small.
"So maybe let's try something else for a change," Sketch said. "You know, just to try it on, see if we're feeling it or not."
"Tell you what I'm feeling," Serena said, "and that's bowlegged."
"Enough, Serena," Sketch said.
"That's what
I
was saying last night, but..."
"One more sexual innuendo before this briefing's done, Serena, and I'll make
you
spend the next two weeks watching
me
enjoy Aliara while
you're
all tied up."
"That actually sounds kinda fucking hot," Lara said with a laugh, leaning back in her pilot's chair, folding her hands behind her head.
"Don't
you
start," Sketch sighed. "One sex addict on this boat's enough. Right. The mission. We need to get onto Jeratine, get a woman from there back to our ship without anyone knowing we're doing that, get the ship off planet and over to neighboring Reltbex, help her deliver the baby, then get her back onto Jeratine,
then
get off with nobody noticing anything changed the whole time."
"How the hell does no one notice she's pregnant, Captain?" Jez asked, and rightfully so.
"That part we don't have to worry about," Sketch said. "She's technically been in quarantine for the last three months, passing it off as her fighting off an infectious disease."
"How do they not know that's bullshit?" Serena asked.
"Medicine's not allowed on the planet, so they tend to be pretty jumpy and superstitious," Sketch said. "Someone says they're sick, everyone else is happy to stay away and let you either get better or die."
"Real loving bunch of folks, these people," Serena grumbled.
