Milk Run (Smuggler's Tales From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1)

by Nathan Lowell

  “Will she settle down?”

  “I think so. It’s funny. We’ve been roommates for four stanyers. The academy is tough and put us both through the wringer.”

  Inge nodded but said nothing.

  “We never talked.”

  “Never?”

  “Oh, about homework, assignments. The instructors. Summer cruises. We always just talked about the academy. It was all-consuming.”

  “But nothing about your pasts.”

  “Yeah. She knew I had a ship. I spent every weekend I could get away on the orbital working on her. Cleaning, polishing. It took me one whole weekend to paint the engine room and it’s not much bigger than a closet.”

  “You never invited her along?”

  Natalya shook her head. “Never considered it.”

  “Any idea why?”

  Natalya sipped more coffee and let her gaze rest on the navigation plot. “The Peregrine was my escape. It helped keep me sane.”

  “It was a connection to your father.”

  Natalya nodded without looking over. “Yeah. That, too. I guess I didn’t want to share it.”

  “How about now?”

  Natalya grinned at Inge. “Now? Just being out here in Toe-Hold space is a connection to him. The ship is freedom. We can go where we need to. If I could be sure I wouldn’t get arrested, the ship would be the perfect courier between Toe-Hold and Confederation ports.”

  “Why would you get arrested? You mean for smuggling?”

  “They said I killed a TIC agent on graduation night. CPJCT doesn’t really approve of that.”

  Inge’s eyes grew wide. “Really? How long ago was that?”

  Natalya looked at the console. “About three days.”

  Inge started a quiet laugh. “So, in less than a week, you’ve escaped from TIC, made contact with Verkol Kondur, and got a job. With your academy roommate as—what? Observer?”

  “I think of her as my wing man.”

  Inge settled into the couch and took a few sips from her own mug. “I’m not going to steal your ship.” Her voice barely reached Natalya’s ears.

  “Were you planning on it?” Natalya asked.

  Inge wrinkled her nose. “No. I really do need to see Bjorn about Kristiana. Kondur said you were going that way so I thought I’d thumb a ride. Why didn’t you charge me for passage, by the way?”

  Natalya took a moment to process the question. “I honestly don’t know. I probably should have, but you’re like family. It just didn’t seem right.”

  Inge gave Natalya a strange, penetrating look. “Like family?”

  “Well, you knew my father. You have pet names for each other. This was some time ago, right?”

  “Yes. Before you were born.”

  “So, you were more than just friends. You’ve sailed on the Peregrine before.” Natalya looked a little sideways at Inge. “Any friend of my father’s is a friend of mine. I don’t make money off friends.”

  “How do you know we were friends? We may not have parted amicably.”

  Natalya shrugged. “Possible. Not probable.”

  The navigation display beeped as they cleared the outer markers. Natalya triggered the computed burn to put them onto the course for Odin’s and sat back, listening to the small whooshes of the maneuvering jets. The kickers came online with a low growl and pushed them along the vector, gaining velocity with each passing heartbeat. She looked out at the shards of light all around.

  “It’s beautiful out here, isn’t it,” Inge said.

  “It is.”

  After a long, comfortable pause, Inge asked, “What did she do?”

  “To be dragged out here?”

  Inge smiled and shook her head. “I was thinking about before. You spent your down time here on the ship. What did she do? Did she have a circle of friends that will miss her?”

  Natalya sighed and shrugged. “I don’t know. Studied. She spent time in town, I know.” She shook her head. “I suspect some of that time was spent on extra training.”

  “Must have been lonely for her,” Inge said. “What about you?”

  “I never thought about it. Peregrine seemed enough.” Natalya felt a chuckle bubble up from her chest. “After all the forced togetherness in school, I really needed to get away to recharge.”

  “And now here you are, jammed in a ship built for two with an extra stranger.” Inge’s eyes practically twinkled.

  “It won’t be for long and there’s always the staterooms.” Natalya nodded toward the passageway. “If you want to nap, you can use mine. This is too short a run for me to get much sleep.”

  “How long do you think?”

  “I’ve plotted it at just over twenty-three stans from now.”

  “That long?” Inge’s pale eyebrows lifted toward the overhead. “How many jumps?”

  “Ten. We can make three jumps back to back, but then we need to recharge the jump capacitors for five stans and I’m allowing for one stan between for course verification and corrections.”

  Inge pursed her lips. “Odin’s about a hundred Burleson units. You’re only jumping ten at a time?”

  “Yeah. The accumulated jump errors make me nervous. At ten, we’re going to be as much as a whole unit off, one way or the other. Any longer and it’s a big distance to make up if we’re short.”

  “It’s also a big bonus if we’re not.” Inge cast a sidelong glance at Natalya. “It’s your ship, Captain. I’m just the supercargo.” She tilted her coffee cup and drained it.

  Natalya bit her lip and pondered. “You would recommend what?”

  “When your father rebuilt the engineering spaces, did he put in smaller jump drives?”

  “No. She’s still got the Origami M9s. They’re actually the M9As. They’re a bit more stable and can recharge slightly faster.”

  “Do you mind a little backseat piloting?” Inge asked.

  “You’ve got something in mind?”

  Inge nodded. “Your father always made a short jump first so he could jump longer. He liked to stretch her legs.”

  “Yeah. He taught me that, too.” Natalya pulled up her course plot. “I didn’t do it here. I’m just running out an extra couple of stans so I can get the first jump in as a ten.”

  “May I?” Inge nodded at the console in front of her.

  “Sure.”

  Inge put her cup down and flashed through to the navigation sandbox before Natalya could blink. She plopped down some points, shifted them to where she wanted them, then linked them in as a course. “There,” she said. “Look that over.”

  Natalya cloned the workspace onto her console and traced the route. “Of course,” she said, nodding at the results. “We’re far enough out to jump four units now.”

  “That saves two stans right off the top and that leaves only eight jumps at twelve.”

  Natalya nodded. “Only two extended recharge periods instead of three.”

  “If the M9As recharge faster, you’ll probably be able to carve some time off those numbers, too.”

  Natalya nodded. “Lemme run it against the model.”

  “Of course, Captain.”

  Five ticks of furious testing later, Natalya nodded again and replaced the old plot with the new one. She brought up the engineering controls and prepped the Burleson drives. While they spun up, she smiled at Inge. “Thanks. That’ll save us a few stans.”

  Inge smiled back. “You don’t get to be an expert in interstellar cartography without learning a bit about plotting and navigation. Nice consoles, by the way. Upgraded recently?”

  “Got them last stanyer for scrap value when a fast packet upgraded their systems suite. Had to upgrade the backbone and system plane, too, but it was worth it.”

  The console flashed a green light on her engineering display. “I’m showing on course now,” Natalya said. “Verify?”

  Inge pulled down the sandbox and pulled up the navigation readouts. “Six sigma. Green.”

  Natalya punched the button to bend space an
d the tiny ship jumped into the Deep Dark, leaving the sprawling station far behind.

  Chapter 11

  Odin’s Outpost: 2363, May 28

  Natalya squinted at the long-range scanner and tried to make sense out of the returns coming back from Odin’s Outpost. “What am I looking at?”

  Inge leaned over the back of Natalya’s couch to get a better look. “That’s Odin’s. It’s a relatively new station compared to Dark Knight. Bjorn started it when he got stranded out here without a Burleson drive.”

  “From this range it looks like a collection of hulls and containers,” Zoya said, tilting her head sideways as she stared at her screen.

  “It will look the same from close up,” Inge said, a smile coloring her words with amusement. “It’s a gateway station. A lot like Dark Knight. CPJCT turns a blind eye to it and it gets a lot of fast packet traffic because it’s midway between four different systems. I suspect we’ll see one or two fleet haulers transit before we dock.”

  “What do they do here? There’s nothing around,” Natalya asked.

  “Publicly they run a casino and prostitution operation. They do a good business in tourism, oddly enough.”

  “Tourism?” Zoya asked, turning wide eyes on Inge. “What’s to see?”

  Inge shrugged. “Gambling and prostitution, mostly. There are those who want the thrill from participating in the illicit activities without permanently giving up their comfortable lives.”

  “What do they really do here?” Natalya asked.

  “Cargo transfer node. It’s a handy place to stash containers of cargo until they can be smuggled into CPJCT space.”

  Zoya coughed. “That’s impossible.”

  Inge looked at her with a raised eyebrow. “What? Stashing containers?”

  “No. Smuggling them into CPJCT space.”

  Inge gave a low laugh.

  “No, it’s impossible. You can’t even unload a cargo if it doesn’t have the right codes proving provenance,” Zoya said.

  “Hence the need to stash them here until that provenance can be established,” Inge said. “The very fact that nobody believes it’s possible is the greatest advantage.”

  Zoya’s jaw hinged a couple of times but no words came out of her mouth. Eventually she managed “Seriously?”

  Inge nodded. “Sure. There are several ways to get people and goods in and out of CPJCT space.”

  “Out?” Zoya asked.

  “Oh, yes. People are easy. You’re looking at one way now.”

  “Odin’s.”

  “Packet comes out with twenty registered passengers and three stowaways. Eventually, they return with twenty registered passengers.”

  “Bob goes out as blond. Bob comes back with gray hair?” Natalya looked at Inge.

  “Sometimes,” Inge said.

  “How does new-Bob and old-Bob work? How can he even thumb a restaurant tab?” Zoya asked.

  Inge shook her head. “Can’t be giving all our secrets to Fleet, now can we?”

  Zoya’s mouth twisted into a grimace.

  “Sometimes Bob just disappears from his house and shows up on a labor manifest to a mining colony.” Inge shrugged. “High Tortuga masks his bank account activity at Star Shine Station or at Mel’s or wherever he wants to go. As far as anybody in CPJCT space knows, he’s just off-grid at a mining colony.”

  “So why doesn’t CPJCT close it down?” Zoya asked. Her brow furrowed in a scowl. “They must know what’s going on.”

  “What? Odin’s?” Inge asked.

  “Yes. This close to Confederated space and getting as much traffic as you say? TIC must know about it.”

  Inge smiled. “Of course. There are TIC agents on the station.”

  “Why don’t they do something?”

  Inge shook her head. “Do what? All of Toe-Hold space is outside of CPJCT jurisdiction. They are bound by the laws they’ve created. It’s who they are. They can no more violate those laws here in Toe-Hold space than they can in Dunsany Roads, and the first problem is that none of these stations are under CPJCT jurisdiction.”

  “Then what are they doing here?” Zoya asked. The red flushed up her neck and across her face and ears.

  “Mostly observing. Some of them use the station as a base for their own black ops.”

  Zoya shook her head as if to rattle something loose. “Wait. Black ops? I thought you said they’re outside their jurisdiction.”

  “Say you’re TIC and you want to know what’s going on in Toe-Hold space. Maybe you’ve heard Iron Mountain’s pressing into Tellicheri and want to make sure they’re not encroaching. Legally, you can’t do anything to those thugs as long as they’re not breaking CPJCT regs in CPJCT space, but that doesn’t mean having intelligence on who they are, what they’re doing, and where they’re doing it isn’t of tactical advantage.” Inge spread her hands. “They can’t enforce CPJCT regulations here but there’s no law that says they can’t be here. There’s no Toe-Hold jurisdiction to enforce an embargo against them.”

  Zoya looked at Natalya, who shrugged in return. “I’ve been trying to tell you. Toe-Hold space isn’t what you think.”

  “I’m still having trouble with the concept,” Zoya said. “Why aren’t people just killing each other left and right?”

  Inge sighed. “Unfortunately, many do. Some stations have pretty lax station enforcement. They’re not the more successful ones because the risk isn’t worth it.”

  “What’s Iron Mountain?” Zoya asked after a few heartbeats. “That’s the second time I’ve heard that name.”

  “Station up in the northern rim, just this side of Tellicheri. The woman who established the station—Empress Nicole—saw her chance to recreate the world in her preferred image,” Inge said. “Anybody who didn’t agree got shown to the Empress’s Freezer,” Inge said. “Their frozen corpses are said to be decorating the outside of the station as a warning.”

  “Why hasn’t somebody done something?” Zoya asked.

  “Who? What?” Inge said. “Their station. Their rules. Just because they’re psychopaths doesn’t give us the right to toss them into space. They leave us alone, for the most part. We leave them alone. They rely mostly on smuggling goods and people in and out of Tellicheri because almost nobody will trade with them on this side of the line.”

  “Why not?”

  “They also make a habit of raiding neighboring stations and poaching their belts,” Inge said.

  “You just let them get away with it?” Zoya asked.

  Inge shook her head. “First rule. Your house, your rules. Somebody comes into your house and breaks your rules, they pay. Iron Mountain knows that and some of their people are fine with robbery and murder as long as it’s not against their own.”

  “That’s just not right,” Zoya said.

  “You’re hung up on a set of rules that don’t exist here. You need to get over that,” Inge said. “As long as they keep it in their own system, nobody here has the right to interfere. That’s the first rule. Your house, your rules. Leave your house and you need to be ready to play by new rules.”

  “What if you don’t like the rules in your house?” Zoya asked.

  Inge sighed and looked down. “That can be a bit of a problem. Most places are easy to leave. Even Iron Mountain doesn’t care who comes or who goes. The empress ran a very well-disciplined station and I’ve heard nothing to contradict that now that she’s gone.”

  “As long as you rape and pillage off the station, it’s all right?” Zoya asked.

  “Yes. That’s largely the case.”

  “That’s just wrong,” Zoya said, practically shouting.

  “I agree,” Inge said. “What would you have us do?”

  “Stop them.”

  “How do you suggest we do that?” Inge asked.

  Zoya stared at Inge for several long moments. The longer she stared the more she frowned. Finally, she seemed to deflate. “I don’t know.”

  “Think about it,” Inge said. “Maybe there’s a
way we haven’t thought of yet. They’re a problem—at least in part—because they are pariahs. There’s little they can do to harm their reputation because it’s already so bad. Repairing that would make life easier for all of us. I don’t see that happening any time soon.”

  Natalya smiled at Zoya. “Laws are funny things. The more you have, the more you need. You know there are more CPJCT regulations about food safety than addressing violent crimes?”

  Zoya blinked. “I never thought about it.” She looked at Inge. “Who does the arbitration when there’s a dispute?”

  Inge smiled. “Now you’re thinking. Depends on who’s got the dispute. Neighbors get the station holder or a proxy. Stations can ask a neighboring station they both agree on. If it gets ugly, they can take it to arbitration at High Tortuga.”

  “That sounds unwieldy.”

  “It can be,” Inge said. “It’s also a pain, so people figure out their own solutions more often than not.”

  Zoya shook her head. “It’s all messed up in my head.”

  “Remember three things. Right, wrong, and the law. One of those things doesn’t belong,” Inge said.

  “That makes no sense,” Zoya said.

  “Makes perfect sense. Didn’t you pay attention in philosophy class?” Natalya asked.

  “Right and wrong are moral concepts,” Inge said. “The law is a human construction.”

  Zoya looked back and forth between Natalya and Inge. “So, some ambiguity between the moral concepts but the construction aims to reduce ambiguity?”

  Natalya smiled. “You were paying attention.”

  Natalya’s comms display popped up a navigation advisory and she queued the command strings into the autopilot. “Looks like we’ll be docked in five stans.” She checked the chrono and nodded. “Leaves half a day to get to Gunderson.”

  Inge smiled. “It’s a small station. He won’t be too hard to find.”

  Natalya felt a little tickle of chill up her spine. “You just had to say that, didn’t you?”

  “Sorry.” Inge patted the back of Natalya’s couch. “He’s expecting you. He’ll probably meet you at the dock.”

  Natalya shot a side-eyed glance at Inge. “Is he expecting you?”