Secrets in the Stars (Family Law)

by Mackey Chandler

  Gordon identified his group and indicated they were on the way to Earth, offered to relay data or news if it could catch up to he before he jumped out. He had no significant news from Derfhome or Fargone he wished to share. But he did warn them they had a large alien traveling companion who was peaceful dogging their route, and might pass through.

  When they were past the halfway mark headed out of the system, well into the next shift the miners sent an encrypted message for their parent company. Other than the address header it was all code, but the header guaranteed fees to deliver it to Earth. Gordon had Brownie acknowledge next shift, but they'd be gone to the next system before the miners received it.

  The Caterpillars emerged behind them as they transited the next system, undoubtedly giving the miners an eyeful. Perhaps their snail's pace bored them as they again rushed ahead and took an alternative route. That detour would take them through Lucky Strike which had a marginally habitable world. But there was a station and always a few stars ships as well as local craft in the system.

  "You know, if they keep zigzagging like this, the Caterpillars are going to pass through several inhabited systems before Earth," Gordon realized. "Somebody is going to send a drone to Earth about them, and we aren't going to roll in with them as a surprise like we imagined."

  "They must be about ready to fuel again too," Lee worried. "This region of space is so heavily settled most systems have claims on the gas giants for fueling rights. If they dip unawares somebody is going to have a complaint of fuel rustling."

  "Do you think you could compose a grid statement to explain that?" Gordon asked.

  "Not with any confidence," Lee decided. "It would be easier to just pay their bill for them."

  "Well, at least you can afford it," Gordon said.

  "I can't charge it off to the Fleet?" Lee asked.

  "What share does the Fleet get to tap?" Gordon countered.

  "Not a share, but it's an expense of the Fleet, deducted before the shares are tallied," Lee insisted.

  "How does it profit the fleet to fuel up your pet aliens?" Gordon demanded.

  "They'll get shares of whatever we learn from their refining machine. Maybe a great deal of money if it can be scaled up. There's the gravity plate we haven't started to analyze, and staying on good terms with them will pay off, I'm convinced. Even if we did expend a couple very expensive missiles to save their butts," Lee added herself, before Gordon could bring that up.

  "I suppose it may show a profit in time," Gordon grudgingly allowed. "I wonder. How much will a rights holder charge for an unauthorized dip?"

  "Gods only know. How much is a fill up for a deep space battleplate?" Lee wondered. "That's as big as Humans build. Right now," she added after a pause.

  Gordon refused to be sidetracked into a discussion of why they needed kilometer long spaceships. Lee would undoubtedly make it sound reasonable to build on a couple kilometers long just to prove the fabbers could do it.

  "I believe the number I heard at one time was a bit over a half million dollars Ceres," Brownie said.

  "Ow... They'll look at the size and demand two or three times that," Lee decided.

  "Again, I'm happy to have our own scoops," Gordon said. "Even this close to Earth there are systems one can divert to along your general route and scoop your own. Can you imagine the bill for us both ways on this voyage if we had to buy fuel?"

  "But anybody developing the brown dwarfs is going to need to buy fuel somewhere along the way," Lee said, looking concerned about that.

  "If you haul a thousand TONS of platinum to Earth you can budget for that," Gordon said. "Of course you may drive the market price down a bit, but if it's cheaper people will use it more."

  "In my opinion growth around the brown dwarfs will create a bigger market than long range transport. The population will shift," Brownie said.

  "Providence is closer than Earth," Lee pointed out. "Pretty and a good location."

  "And orbital habs in the brown dwarf system closer yet. There will have to be workers there anyway," Brownie insisted.

  "Oh yeah,” Lee agreed. “But if you can afford to live there, people like a real sky with mountains and forests. For some reason I haven't figured out they love to look out over water too."

  "Be glad, since you own an island," Gordon said.

  "Now that interests me, because the Hinth share this water gazing fixation," Ha-bob-bob-brie said.

  "I can't gift you a plot on the island, because except for personal use I have ceded most of it to the Red Tree clan to develop, but if you would be happy with a mountain stream or a river I'll gift you a place for a home and life tenancy on Providence," Lee offered.

  "I shall accept," Ha-bob-bob-brie said quickly. "It is almost impossible to own land on Hin. The government owns almost all of it. The priesthood the rest."

  "There's just too much to know," Lee complained. "I haven't read near enough Human history and haven't touched on Hin yet. I'm trying to track down all this stuff Precious told us about last century now, and not finding much."

  "Look at news articles instead of history texts," Brownie suggested. "They take days to come up with plausible lies. The fresh news is better and they never hide it all."

  When nobody contradicted him, Lee agreed she'd do that. It sounded so cynical she expected some objection, but instead she saw a couple nods of agreement. It bothered her.

  * * *

  They transited two more system. One almost empty and another fairly busy. The Caterpillars went on one more diversion and rejoined them. Lee followed Brownie's suggestion and started looking at archived news sources. She got engrossed in it and wasn't following the bridge chatter much. What really made a difference was the origin. The old web fraction they'd bought when her parents were alive and working the High Hopes exploring was from North America, and had almost nothing about space news from the last century.

  The expanded web fraction that Gordon bought on Fargone was a different story. It was heavily space weighed and just comparing word counts Lee suspected the earlier cut was flat out censored. In the version purchased from Fargone there was a list of spacecraft destroyed or removed from service in a document comparing insured civilian and sovereign risks. They included both civilian craft for which claims were possible and military for which sovereign nations had to accept the risk.

  Lee wanted very much to see the source documents, but all their partial web had was the summary. It was awfully suspicious that the list showed a big spike from 2083 to 2087 of vessels lost to military action.

  The tack of the article was that in the early 2090s more owners were going naked to their risk, because insurance was prohibitively expensive. They were right. It got to be near universal for any vessel that didn't take off and land from the same political entity. Pretty much only orbital shuttles were insurable.

  By the time the first jump ships were making actual voyages of exploration instead of test flights nobody would write a meaningful policy to cover the cargo, much less the vessel. There simply wasn't enough history for the actuaries to gauge the risk, and a new starship ran to hundreds of millions of USNA dollars despite the ten to one devaluation earlier in the century.

  In the critical period she was interested in the list included the Chinese vessel Pretty as Jade and the USNA James Kelly listed as lost to the Happy Lewis in high orbit. The USNA Cincinnati and Big 'Nuf were destroyed days later with no cause given. It was some time before the first Home vessel was on the list. The Home Boy was listed as destroyed in Lunar orbit along with the USNA shuttle Dallas. But it didn't say if they had engaged each other or what. And when Lee checked for references the web fraction didn't have any more on either ship.

  The USNA Frank B. Kellogg and Henry A. Kissinger were listed as destroyed the same date on Luna, but again, not how. There were no extra files on them. Another Home vessel, the Eddie's Rascal, was listed as destroyed in China by bombardment along with eleven Chinese vessels. That shocked Lee. What the heck was a Home
vessel doing on the ground in China? The list and web portion gave no clue why, or who bombarded them.

  There was a pause and then the Chinese vessels The Straight Path, Guan, and Anchun were all listed as destroyed in lunar orbit. The Ruyi was listed for the same date as 'captured', but no indication who captured it. It was frustrating, but there sure were a lot more ships lost than Lee imagined for the era. There weren't as many flying then and this many had to be a substantial fraction.

  Lee went back to the first entry as it at least identified who destroyed the Pretty as Jade and the James Kelly. When she enter the name Happy Lewis she got a surprise. The picture was of a really small vessel, smaller than one of their landing shuttles, hanging from the ceiling of the Space Museum in the Lunar Republic, with tourists looking up at it. She'd been in the Lunar Republic and nobody had even told her there was a Space Museum. There was a rover to be seen in the background and things beyond. It appeared to be a pretty big facility.

  There was a story board for the tourists and Lee drew a rectangle around it and expanded it hoping the resolution was sufficient to read it. It was. It listed April Lewis as the pilot (Apprentice) at the vessel's first flight, and noted she flew under the direction of Master Pilot Washington Carter Dixon (Easy), commanding. The ship hanging there was noted to be the third major revision to the vessel. It had two command seats and up to four passenger seats could be inserted or removed. It was capable of lunar landings, which it had done frequently, and had been loaned to the collection by Singh Industries. It mentioned the drive and power plants had been removed for display. It was listed as fourteen point six meters long and seventeen metric tons dry.

  What made Lee choke on her coffee and made everybody turn and look concerned at her was the next line. It said the maximum acceleration of the vessel in its final configuration was unpublished but it had been observed on public traffic scan to pull a sustained 14G. Lee was amazed they put that right out on a sign in front of God and everybody. 14G? Did nobody twig to the fact that was a lethal level of acceleration? Unless you were a Caterpillar... with either much more tolerance, or gravity manipulation one supposed.

  "Are you OK?" Gordon asked Lee, mildly worried.

  "Yeah, but I'm finding out some stuff has been what you'd call hidden in plain sight that puts a new light on things," Lee told him. "If I told you Home had an armed vessel back about 2090 that could pull 14G and the damn thing is now retired, and hanging in a museum, what would you think?"

  Gordon did one of those slow blinks that she'd come to know meant all his neural circuits were busy and he was overwhelmed processing a new reality. It was pretty hard to overload him like that.

  "If... that is accurate. What do they have now?" Gordon immediately jumped to the correct question.

  "I don't know, but I think we better find out when we get to Earth," Lee said. "I'm sending all this to your screen. If we only had the tiny old web fraction from our exploring days I couldn't have found any of this. As it is, even with the big download you bought on Fargone I'm just getting tantalizing glimpses of what went on.

  "But there sure were a lot of ships lost in a narrow time frame. I try to find more data on the ship's names and it's a blank. You really have to dig for it. Once we are able to buy deeper access I'll have a whole long list of people and ships I want to research. I don't care if we have to buy access to the whole damn web real time, we need it, not just archived and in English."

  "Alright, when we are at Luna we'll let you dig into this deeper," Gordon agreed. "I know our fraction is limited, but why don't you have Luke dig into what we have deeper? He seems to be pretty good at data mining and he may find something else before we get there."

  "You tell him," Lee said. "He accepts direction from you better than me. He'll just ask you to confirm it after I've told him anyway. So you still invest about as much time telling him from the start and it avoid irritating me when he asks. But yeah, I can think of a few searches he can do for us."

  "Seems to me you are pre-irritated," Gordon said, looking amused.

  Lee cut the command channel access to speak privately to Gordon. She should have done that before her previous remarks but hadn't. "Yes, next voyage if the man signs up with us fine, he's useful, but I don't want him on the same ship with us. I have no confidence if we had a whistling hole venting the compartment, and I ordered him to patch it, he wouldn't ask you if that was OK before he got his butt in gear to grab the patch kit."

  "Done," Gordon promised her. Deciding now was also not a good time to argue over when or if there'd be another voyage. They were near shift end and everybody was tired.

  * * *

  After Lee was in bed, her mind was still racing. She'd made a start on research instructions for Luke to pursue about ships and politics in the 2080s and 2090s. But something else occurred to her. Lee pulled her com tablet from the inside corner of her bunk where she always left it and activated it in the dark.

  She looked up Singh Industries. The list included shipbuilding and leasing, lunar tunneling and cubic management, food industries and industrial materials, leasing of heavy equipment and even banking. There was the System Bank, the System Bank of Central, and the System Bank of Central at Camelot. There was even a casino. There were both com and physical addresses on Home and Luna, but no stock symbols or numbers for their capitalization and activity. It must be a privately held company.

  When Lee put in Washington Carter Dixon she got no bio, no obit, just a contact, which was oddly enough Singh Industries again. April Lewis got a short bio. She was listed as a partner for Singh Industries along with Jeff Singh and Heather Anderson. Lee noted those for Luke to research. The head and shoulders portrait of April wasn't dated, but was startling. It showed a very young girl in short hair, not at all the current fashion, with modest earrings, a neck chain, and no tats. She had on old-fashioned spex and what looked like an beaded armored vest with a stiff standup collar. There was a wrapped handle sticking up behind her shoulder. Lee had no idea to what sort of tool it could be attached.

  April was also listed as associated with a pretty long list of businesses on Home and the Central Kingdom. Apparently those apparently were public documents, but the web fraction didn't detail them. It also listed as a reference the minutes of The Assembly of Home and several news articles starting with a BBC video in 2083, none of which were in the web fraction at this size. It was frustrating, but Lee could see including the uncited references must encourage sales of a greater fraction. There was no obituary. Strangely, at the end it said, Contact: Home com AL04, Central com Lady Lewis 023. That was weird. A granddaughter maybe? More likely a great-granddaughter Lee added up in her head. Lee saved the references and was finally able to sleep.

  * * *

  When they reached the last system before a jump to Sol was possible, it was a fairly complex active system, with industry and mining. Although it had no water world or living world. The low number for Survey System 17 said how close it was to Earth. It even had an old pre-Survey name of Epsilon Indi. It was a complex system to jump to with a lot of massive objects, the main star, two brown dwarfs tied together, a dark stellar remnant and a gas giant.

  Lee was reading the Survey details of the system before jump. She stopped and watched the stars change. It was beyond imagining she'd ever get so jaded she wouldn't pause and watch that miracle. But it was interesting enough she went back to it after the jump. She had some questions but they could wait while the bridge listened to the system scan and announced themselves.

  Gordon identified their three ships, making the point clear the Dart was an alien vessel associated with them, and that the Caterpillar ship also was a different species, but not under his control. He identified himself as commander and announced their intention to pass through to Earth.

  Once the messages were away Lee asked, "Why is it that this system that has two brown dwarfs and that dark thing don't have big moon systems like the ones we found?"

  "I don't know," Gord
on admitted. "If you want to ask Mr. Goddard if there is some theory advanced about that he should know. If he didn't before he must certainly have had his interest renewed after our discoveries and researched it. What I'm wondering now is if the other systems with brown dwarfs closer to Earth are like this or more like the ones we found. If they have resources there will be a renewed effort to be able to visit them, even though they are difficult jump targets."

  "We should have asked our people going to New Japan to inquire how hard it would be to make a fuel scooping drone that can dip into a brown dwarf," Lee decided. "We talked about that, but I just realized when we file claims for our finds it's going to make everybody want to find a way to tap into the closer brown dwarfs too. We should have gotten the jump on them."

  "Fear not," Gordon counseled, "we thought of that, and engineering composed some inquiries into the matter to both New Japan and Fargone. We didn't feel the need to bother you with every detail."

  "Oh good," Lee said. But she felt bad she hadn't remembered to arrange it herself.

  This close to Earth there were picket ships posted to all the close stars. that duty rotated among the nations who pledged ships to the Claims Commission. It was something nations with smaller space forces usually performed to fulfill their membership obligation. At System 17, the system scan identified the Indian frigate Sahyadri as standing the current picket watch.