In a moment the night sounds were shut out and the small nursing home room was silent except for the ticking of the clock.

To the empty room and no one in particular Captain Brian Sable of the Earth Protection League said, "Thank you," very softly. "The honor was all mine."

ENDPOINT INSURANCE

by Jane Lindskold

In the course of watching old movie serials, Jane Lindskold discovered the hidden powers of insurance investigators. In this story, Captain "Allie" Ah Lee1 discovers that working for an insurance company can mean taking real risks. Lindskold is the author of over thirty-five short stories and several novels- including Changer and Legends Walking. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with her husband, archaeologist Jim Moore, and is currently at work on another novel.

Q1 pike was the one who told me that pirates were using Othe Endpoint system to launder stolen goods.

Allen "Spike" West worked for AASU Insurance, a st.u.r.dy, reliable company that had offices on any world or s.p.a.ce station with a population of five thousand or more. As the Endpoint system had recently topped the fifteen thousand mark, AASU practically qualified as an old timer.

AASU insured both my ship-the Mercury-and my life, so I guess I thought pretty highly of them.

Spike had visited the Mercury so that we could discuss possible changes in the ship"s policy. I"d thought his coming to me rather strange since we usually met in his office and the Mercury"s cabin was pretty small-indeed, we were practically sitting knee to knee. However, my own concerns "Allie also appears in "Winner Takes Trouble" published in Alien Pets, edited by Denise Little, DAW, 1998.

about my current financial woes kept me from pursuing these thoughts further.

I make my living as a freelance courier, carrying messages and small goods from system to system. The only reason I made a living at all was that I was willing to go out to fringe colonies with just a couple dozen inhabitants. I also knew more about the shady side of commerce than any proper courier would admit, but more about that later.

Knowing that Spike"s gaze was safely locked in the middle s.p.a.ce in front of his eyes while the computer jacked into a port beneath his right ear presented my account for his inspection, I studied him, trying to guess what his answer would be.

Spike wasn"t a bad-looking fellow if you liked tall, lanky, dark-haired men with large noses, brilliant blue eyes, and goony expressions. When he wasn"t staring vacantly into empty s.p.a.ce, Spike had an appealing grin and enough intensity to power a stardrive. Most of the time I even liked him. Today, he had too much power over my financial future for me to feel at all relaxed in his presence.

In contrast to Spike"s long leanness, I"m diminutive by modern standards-a result of growing up on a forgotten colony world where rations were limited for most of my childhood. My hair is glossy black and my eyes, beneath the epicanthic folds of my eyelids, are dark as well. Some have told me I look like a doll.

Happily, I"m more than a toy. When my birth colony"s sponsors back in China settled their then most recent war, they"d sent out a belated supply ship. Help had come before permanent damage had been done to any of the colonists-except that most of the children remained rather small. I enjoyed being regularly misjudged-as if size and ability have anything to do with each other!

When Spike frowned slightly and blinked twice, prepara-tory to banishing my files from his virtual screen, I straightened and studied the Mercury"s message reader, making a few notes for future business. Spike might have even been fooled. I have a great poker face.

"You could reduce the coverage, Allie," Spike began, "but I wouldn"t recommend it. Moreover, yourlienholder on the Mercury might not okay such minimal coverage."

"AASU," I reminded him, "is also the lienholder."

"Well, then," Spike said, a slight grin tugging the left corner of his mouth, "I can say that your lienholder would not permit such minimal coverage. We take enough risks with you."

"Bosh!" I protested, knowing that he knew as well as I did that I ran a tight ship.

Spike laughed loudly.

"I"d think," I said stiffly, "that AASU could make an exception for a faithful customer like myself. I"ve always paid my premiums on time and my claims have been modest."

"True," Spike said, "but we are a.s.signed certain guidelines for underwriting policies. I"ve already stretched the limits for you. Now, if you worked for AASU..."

He let the sentence trail off, and if I wasn"t a skilled haggler and poker player, I might have missed his hint.

I glanced at him sharply. "What"s on your mind? AASU has its own courier fleet. You don"t need to hire me."

"Not as a courier," Spike said, "but we could use your help catching some pirates."

"Me?" I felt my expression turn suspicious and schooled it into a comfortable neutrality. "Why me? I"m just a freelance courier."

"Bosh," Spike said, deliberately echoing my inflection of a moment before. "Captain Ah-Lee, you have a good many skills and lots of knowledge you don"t advertise, but before I puff up your ego, let me tell you about AASU"s problem."

"Go ahead," I replied, settling back in my chair. "For all my much-vaunted knowledge, I haven"t heard that pirates are using Endpoint."

"The local government," Spike admitted, "has tried to keep it quiet. Pirates aren"t good for business. Up to a point, AASU is willing to support this view, but not when the local government"s unwillingness to act means that the pirates have easy use of the system."

"I can see that," I agreed. "You"re sure it"s pirates, not smugglers? I don"t have anything against smugglers."

"Pirates," Spike a.s.sured me. "A rather large consortium of pirates, if I don"t miss my guess. Let me fill you in."

According to Spike, about a hundred standards ago, End-point took a large leap in population. Part of the increase was due to the arrival of refugees from the war between the Absolutes and the Loyalists in the Bath system, part to a successful advertising campaign.

Nearly five thousand new colonists registered for permanent taxpayer status. Fifteen thousand isn"t many people by the standards of a world like Home Earth, where I hear even a small city can number in the millions, but by the time you add in visitors like myself, resident aliens, and nonpermanent residents, you have a large enough population that no one can know everyone else.

Right on the heels of this new influx came the pirates. Endpoint didn"t provide enough traffic to betempting for actual piracy-though I didn"t doubt that this would follow in time. However, there was plenty of cover for illicit shipping "Pirates are like epidemics and property taxes," I commented cynically when Spike paused, "they come with growth. Why are you so worried?"

Spike frowned. "Because AASU insures many of the ships and businesses the pirates prey on. Whether it"s a cargo that doesn"t get to its destination or a local business that gets undercut by black market compet.i.tion, piracy hurts our clients. Most of the time we can"t touch the pirates- AASU doesn"t maintain a private military fleet..."

"But fences and money laundering are less violent crimes," I said, just to show him I was with him, "and you want me..."

"To help me trace this end of the pirate"s operation," Spike replied promptly. "AASU would hire you and everything."

He grinned slyly. "We even can offer you a special insurance rate reserved for employees in good standing."

"That"s right." I couldn"t help laughing, though the problem was serious. "Twist my arm. Seriously, Spike, why me? AASU must have lots of people more qualified to take on this job."

"More people," Spike agreed. "More qualified? That"s questionable. As much as I hate to admit it, the pirates could have spies inside AASU. I didn"t go into the details before, but there has been a small but significant upturn in the number of valuable cargos being taken. One way the pirates could learn about these cargos is by having a mole inside AASU. That"s why I wanted to meet you here rather than having you come to my office."

I frowned thoughtfully. Someone working with the pirates from inside an insurance company did make sense.

"How about working with the local militia?" I asked.

Spike looked disgusted. "Remember, Endpoint"s system government is not yet acknowledging that there is local pirate activity."

"That seems impossible!" I protested.

"Not really," Spike shrugged. "Nonviolent crime is always easier to overlook."

"I see." I kept my tone noncommittal Spike"s voice took on a pleading note. "Allie, you know this system-everyone who counts, both in legitimate business and otherwise."

"Hardly," I demurred dryly, but Spike did have a point. I"d been coming to Endpoint since the original hundred settled. I knew the system pretty well.

Spike persisted. "You know the jump points the smugglers use, the likely places to cache fuel or supplies. You even know the surrounding systems. Besides, you and I get along."

"What," I asked frostily, "does that have to do with anything?"

"Why," Spike beamed, glancing around the crowded confines of the singleship"s cabin, "I"ll be comingwith you. Certainly you don"t think I"m going to let you have the fun of catching the pirates all by yourself!"

I gave in, of course. The salary AASU was offering was generous, especially when I factored in company insurance rates. Even after taking out a much more comprehensive policy, I was now making enough money to cover my expenses and to put a substantial amount aside for the future.

The data disk containing our contract was hand-carried to AASU headquarters by a private courier I personally selected for discretion and reliability. Thus, as far as regional AASU was concerned, Captain Ah-Lee remained nothing more than a freelance courier. Anyone on the inside of the company who might be working with the pirates shouldn"t be able to discover my new involvement.

Next, my new partner went undercover. Allen "Spike" West took a liner out-system to investigate a claim on heav-ily populated Fyolyn. He would slip back in-system a few standards later on the ship of a smuggler who owed me more than a few favors.

While Spike was away, I hunted for signs of the pirates" operations. Since I"d carried a few cargoes of dubious legality in my time-mostly information rather than actual goods-folks would talk to me who would never talk to a more usual insurance investigator. I played poker with smugglers and black-marketeers, hung out in seedy s.p.a.ceport bars. It didn"t take long to learn that the local operators were feeling pressure from outside.

"It"s them Batherite refugees, Allie," one smuggler told me. "It"s not just displaced parents and sad-eyed kids who"ve come in on those ships. Somebody else has come in with "em."

A dealer in slightly-used ship parts nodded.

"My business has dried up," she said, "just when things should be hot as a nuclear plant. I nosed around a bit and learned that somebody else is selling-and not just parts. I"ve seen ships come in that I could swear I"d seen listed as missing by the Watch."

"And the black ships don"t interfere?" I asked, Normally the members of the Silent Watch couldn"t wait to cause trouble for people.

"I guess they try," the black-marketeer shrugged, "but what can they do if the registration is all in order?"

Another smuggler, one who augmented a perfectly legitimate business carrying food supplies by transporting the occasional crate of high-duty luxury goods, added: "I"ve been hit, too. You should see what"s being sold in the market at the edge of the Bathtub. Oh, on the surface they"re just poor folks trying to make do by selling homemade delicacies or whatever they salvaged before they got off planet, but if you keep your eyes open, you"ll see that they"re selling things that no refugee could have grabbed."

"Like?" I said, reaching for the deck of cards-it was my turn to deal.

""Like," the food merchant said, ""cases of stabilized wines in the kind of packing that the luxury cruisers use. I swear I caught a glimpse of the Orion Lines logo on the side of one crate. It had been painted over, but you could still see the curves."

He didn"t need to add more. The word "pirates." though unspoken, hung in the air. The suspicion of pirates also answered the question of why these normally feisty outlaws weren"t going after the compet.i.tion. No s.p.a.cers in their right mind tangled with pirates. The pirates" reach was too long and their methods of retribution too ruthless.I wondered what I"d let Spike get me into.

Obviously, the place for me to continue my hunt was the Batherite refugee section that the news services had dubbed-rather derisively-the Bathtub.

Early the next morning, I put the Mercury into a parking orbit, then hailed one of Endpoint"s squat, in-system shuttles to take me down to the main planet"s largest-and pretty much only-city.

Endpoint"s major inhabited planet was named Gilbert, after the explorer who had organized the initial colony group. The capital city, with great originality, was called Gilbert City. It had started out as a couple of pressurized domes meant to protect the colonists from whatever secret horrors the planet might hold. The domes weren"t bad. In fact, I"d grown up in similar structures.

Once the colonists confirmed that the worst hazards were weather-related, they tailored their architecture to combat these. It wasn"t long before Gilbert City sprawled out around the original domes. These had eventually been torn down and recycled, leaving no trace of that historical first settlement other than the position of the main s.p.a.ceport.

When the shuttle unloaded at the s.p.a.ceport, I hopped a tube to the end of the line where the Bathtub had evolved into a small town of its own.

Clearly the residents of Gilbert City had tried to make the refugees welcome. From where I stood packed flank to flank in a crowded tube car, I could see that when the refugee camp had been initially designed the registration center had been positioned as a hub from which neat rows of prefab dwellings extended like spokes on a wheel.

As the war between the Absolutists and the Loyalists grew uglier and uglier, more refugees flooded out.

To remain was to be forced to take sides-and the Absolutist fanatics didn"t care if this was against your will. With the new influx, the tidy order of the camp had broken down. Now buildings were being put up any old way, the only criteria being access to water, sewage, and power.

Between the prefab units, huts like you might see on some primitive world had been erected, shelters where the spillover residents from the houses slept and perhaps dreamed of the day when they could return home.

Gilbert City had provided only one tube stop to serve all the inhabitants of the Bathtub. No one had antic.i.p.ated that the camp might grow large enough to need more than one. I shuffled my way to the station exit, glancing at the tired faces of men and women burdened down with packages of goods dearly bought in the main city. Some were empty-handed, burdened only with sorrow and disappointment.

Fortunately, at least for now, there was plenty of work available throughout the Endpoint system-one of the reasons that it had become a popular choice for the refugees. As I walked briskly down the wide avenue leading toward the registration center, I had a feeling who one of the less reputable employers might be.

Pirates would find this refugee camp a good recruiting ground. As my smuggler friends had noted so acidly, it would serve even better as an outlet for black market goods and as a place from which the pirates" planetside spies could gather information.

From the pirates" point of view, the Bathtub would be all the more attractive because of the secondary s.p.a.ceport that had been erected nearby. Theoretically, the port was solely for refugee ships-there having been complaints that refugee traffic was crowding the main s.p.a.ceport. Realistically, other ships could get clearance to land and take off. Endpoint"s...o...b..tal traffic control, like everything else, wa.s.strained these days.

Thinking thus, I bypa.s.sed the registration center and walked through the prefab sprawl to where a makeshift market had grown up on the fringes of the Bathtub. Here, if my contacts were correct, evidence of illicit commerce could be found.

Steeling myself to the task-for no s.p.a.cer walks when she can ride-I trudged up and down rows marked out in a more or less orderly fashion. Sound-deadening barriers along the edge of the secondary port muted the noise, but intermittently I heard the rumble of a s.p.a.ceship engine- mostly shuttles like the one that had brought me ground-side, but every so often the deeper roar of a larger vessel.

The thundering of these high-tech vessels provided an odd contrast to a market so simple that its like had existed anywhere humans had gathered. Many of the vendors merely spread a blanket or tarp on the ground and piled their wares on top. A handful had set up stalls cobbled together from packing crates or from less identifiable scavenged junk.

Along these tatty corridors of commerce, men and women sold everything from household goods and old clothes to cheap luxury goods. A few of the more ambitious sold food or offered opportunities for entertainment.

After one quick tour through the surprisingly crowded lanes, I ducked into a stall selling puffy fried cakes seasoned with curry and onions-a Batherite treat. I traded some of my una.s.signed credit vouchers for a heaping platter and something pungent, iced, and cool to drink.

Seizing a seat on a plastic crate at a table that had begun life as a cable spool, I mulled over what to do next. Overall, everything was as innocent as could be. The vendors were Batherite refugees mixed with a few entrepreneurs from Gilbert City come to take advantage of the crowds. Most of their wares were just what you"d expect.

It had been among the shoppers, not the vendors, that I"d caught a glimpse of something that didn"t fit the setting-a few men and women whose body language didn"t match the pervading mood of exhaustion and pathetic hope. They were too confident, too eager to be interested in the sort of rag-trade, used goods, and craftwork ostensibly being sold in this marketplace.

After some cautious observation I thought I even recognized a couple of these shoppers. In the parlance of the underworld, we called them "shuttlers" because they made their money buying goods of dubious legality at low prices and reselling them with the registration stamps and such mysteriously in place.

Essentially, shuttlers were high-tech fences with operations that often spanned multiple star systems. As such, they were useful to both smugglers and planet-based fences. Since shuttlers could often locate what more usual channels could not, some even had a semi-legitimate status. My most recent contact with one had involved a per-fectly legal request on the part of a well-known artist for an exotic hallucinogen.

Of course, most shuttlers were sc.u.m, buying low, selling high-often to the very people from whom the goods had been stolen in the first place. I didn"t doubt that some shuttler had made a good profit returning Orion Lines their "misplaced" wine-and perhaps more importantly, the expensive stabilizing crates.

Licking the last of the curry-seasoned oil off my fingers, I decided to wander until I spotted one of the shuttlers, then follow him or her and see with whom my mark did business. Despite my aching feet, I set off in an optimistic mood. Three days later, I was less cheerful.

Perhaps the last of the black market goods had been sold the very morning I spotted the shuttlers in themarket. Perhaps that was why enough shuttlers had been present for me to pick them out of the crowd.

For whatever reason, the Bathtub market had descended into mundanity. I did find a copy of a hard-to-locate holo-doc.u.mentary about one of my favorite musical performers, but as far as anything that would lead me to the pirates, I came up as cold as the interstellar void.

Spike was due back the next day and I wasn"t looking forward to telling him I had nothing to offer, so I put in one more tour.

Now, I hadn"t been such a rube as to roam around the market day after day without any disguise at all.

The first day I"d gone pretty much as myself. It was reasonable that I"d want to look around a new part of town. The next several days I"d gone dressed in the general style of a system local, but as a different type of person each time. Usually, I"d changed my disguise more than once in a day.

It isn"t hard to seem what you aren"t-especially when you"re small and slight to start with. Built-up shoes and padding make you seem larger. Very active body language makes you seem younger. Add in basic changes in hair or eye color or manner of dress and you"re set, especially in a crowd where no one person is in your company for too long. Really, the only thing that gave me trouble were my aching feet, especially when I wore built-up shoes.

For my last tour before Spike"s return, I went as myself. During earlier jaunts, I"d noticed a couple of gambling parlors and figured that I"d sit in on a poker game or two when my feet got too tired for wandering through the market. Since my skill at the game is well-known in some circles, I sometimes have trouble getting into a high-stakes game. If any of my local acquaintances recognized me, they"d figure I was looking for a hot game. If I was lucky, they"d even pretend not to see me.

Courtesy, you know.

I was deep into a game of seven card stud, the Fyoly-nese version that offers some real challenges when calculating the odds, when I heard the distant rumble of a large ship landing out in the field. I didn"t think anything of it. Many large ships arrived after dark. It"s all one and the same to the ship"s pilots and eases things for system traffic control by decreasing the amount of compet.i.tion from routine daytime air traffic.