And then there are the, shall we say, professionals that deal with earthtech. Militaries, police, freelancers, the Vatican. Either you know where it comes from, or you know better than to ask questions of those that do. That black market is one of the most closely guarded secrets in the solar system.
Boris Metcalf
Freelancer on Titan
Died 103 AM
“THIS WOULDN’T BE NEARLY as much of a nuisance if we’d allowed even a day between these meetings,” Yvonne said.
Matthew finished shoving the last few things he’d need overnight into his bag and looked up to where she leaned against the doorframe of his cabin. “You don’t have to tell me that. Unfortunately, this was the only time both crews would be in the Jupiter neighborhood. You guys will be back from Callisto in a day.”
“I just... Look, I’m not a fan of us splitting up.”
He zipped the bag and threw it over his shoulder. Just clothes for a couple of nights in case something delayed the Sparrow. It was that chance of a delay that was worrying Yvonne. “I know,” he said. “This won’t be like Ceres, I promise. We won’t make this a habit.”
Her features relaxed ever so slightly. “Hurry up then. I’m ready to deorbit.”
Matthew stepped out into the hall and rapped his knuckles on Davey’s door. “Time to go.”
It slid open. “I’m on my way,” he muttered around the ration bar that stuck out of his mouth. “There’s never enough time in the mornings.”
“You’ve known this was the plan for three days,” Matthew said as they walked to the common room. “You could have been packed already.”
“You just finished packing yourself!” Yvonne shouted from the cockpit.
“Except I got up early enough to eat something better than a ration bar,” Matthew said. “See you soon, Yvonne.”
“Stay out of trouble.”
He and Davey climbed down the ladder into the hold where Grace and Abigail were prepping the bikes.
“We aren’t going to take Vanquisher,” Davey said. “Just Matthew’s bike.”
Grace stopped pushing the chopper toward the lift. “Why not?”
“To save fuel,” Matthew said. “We’re not going to be splitting up anyway.”
She grumbled and returned the bike to its corner. Davey ran to help her lock it down. Matthew joined Abigail at the lift. “You good on this?”
“I don’t see what could possibly go wrong,” she said. “Gebre’elwa’s crew was one of the first to contact us and what I know of her fits.”
“Have you guys met?”
She shook her head. “I know the freelancers that frequent Mars pretty well and anyone that worked with Mistress Medvedev, but the shipboard crews and I didn’t cross paths that often. Everyone in the business knows her reputation though. Don’t worry. I’ve got the sales pitch. You weren’t going to be able to do all of the recruiting by yourself, anyway.”
“Deorbiting now,” Yvonne said over the intercom. The engines roared as the Sparrow slowed its velocity on approach to Ganymede’s surface. In just a few minutes, they were at their destination. Matthew and Davey stepped out onto the lift and mounted the bike.
“Take care!” Grace said. “We’ll be back soon. Call if you need us.”
Matthew frowned. “It isn’t us I’m worried about.”
“Don’t let Grace do anything reckless,” Davey said.
“As if anyone could stop me,” Grace replied.
Abigail waved a quick goodbye and activated the lift. The platform lowered Matthew and Davey down, but not to the ground. The icy surface of Ganymede was an indistinct blur around a hundred feet below them. The Sparrow cruised over the colony’s outskirts to keep from wasting fuel on landing. “Hang on,” Matthew said and gunned the bike’s engines. They flew off the platform and plummeted toward the ground. As they approached, the bike’s grav plates kicked in and slowed their breakneck descent. Even so, they nearly bottomed out as Matthew fired the brakes and slid to a stop.
The Sparrow pulled up, and the main engines flared brightly as it burned for orbit and Callisto beyond. “There they go,” he mumbled.
“I’m surprised you’re okay with this,” Davey said from behind him.
“I’m not, but we do what we must to redeem the time. Let’s get into town.”
He turned the bike and drove towards the lights below them. The southern polar colony of Gilgamesh was one that Matthew had seldom visited. Named after the ancient crater basin in which it was built, Gilgamesh was an industrial city, built around one of the solar system’s two grav plate factories. Owned and operated by the colony itself, the factory was one of the key pieces of infrastructure that kept life in the colonies possible. Between it and its sister in Kyoto, thousands of grav plates were produced each year to make grav vehicles, outfit ships with gravity, and replace aging colony infrastructure.
Ultimately it was a losing battle on that last one. As the colonies aged, more and more of the grav plates that maintained standard gravity were beginning to fail. They were expensive to replace, and output from the factories was increasingly being divided between the creation of new vehicles and the maintenance of old systems. It was a ticking time bomb, one that, in a generation or two, would throw the solar system into chaos as economies were forced to make hard choices. The pressure was already being felt in cities like Blight that couldn’t afford to renew what was lost.
And living in low gravity was more than just an inconvenience. Loss of muscle and bone mass brought a rapid deterioration of health unless vigorous calisthenic regimens were maintained. No way the entire human race was going to be able pull that off.
“I’m guessing that’s the factory?” Davey shouted from behind him.
Matthew nodded, exaggerating the gesture so Davey could see it from the back. He slowed the bike so they wouldn’t have to shout over the roar of the wind. “Gilgamesh exists to support the one facility.” The city was arranged in concentric circles around a massive building visible from miles away. Those rings were punctured by spokes of raised monorails branching outward from the center hub of the factory.
“I thought the factory was mostly automated.” Matthew half turned in surprise. “I was reading up on Gilgamesh on the way here,” Davey said with a shrug.
“Good,” Matthew said. “It’s never a bad thing for a freelancer to know the territory. The production lines themselves are automated, but logistics are handled by human hands. Plus, a lot of the plates are modified as needed. Moses may have made sure that we couldn’t reverse engineer the production lines themselves, but that hasn’t stopped us from tinkering with the finished product.”
“I thought we didn’t understand grav plates or how they worked?”
Matthew pulled the bike onto a road in an outlying residential area. It looked to be the end of one of the main spokes leading into the city. “We understand the principles involved and most of the math. Grav plates actually aren’t all that different from the frameshift devices that move us from place to place.”
“They don’t seem all that alike to me.”
“You’d be wrong there. Both work by changing the reference frame in a shaped area around the device. Gravity and motion aren’t so different at a fundamental level.”
Davey huffed. “This is about relativity again, isn’t it?”
“Exactly. We figured out the math even before Moses left. You can thank Jose Eschevarria, the same physicist that worked out the limitations of the frameshift device in his famous Eschevarria Equations. It’s the actual engineering work we can’t reproduce. We have no way of manufacturing the atomic level crystalline lattices used in grav plates. At that scale, quantum effects get in the way, and whatever techniques Moses used to get around those inconveniences were lost with him.”
The residential areas were growing denser, and now there were other vehicles on the road with them. Davey was quiet for a few minutes. Finally, he spoke up. “Why did Moses keep that kind of knowledge from us?”
“A question for the ages,” Matthew said. “The short answer is we don’t know, but a popular theory is the invention of the thumper.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Moses didn’t invent the thumper.”
Davey paused briefly before filling in the lines. “We did. We took his grav plates, applied what we knew of them, probably from that Eschevarria guy’s research, and made a weapon. So then he hid how to make grav plates from us. To slow us down, I guess. Or maybe punish us.”
Matthew smiled, pleased that Davey had come to the correct conclusion. “That’s the theory.”
“But it doesn’t really make sense. It seems... short-sighted. He had to have known we’d make weapons. Why would he condemn us to death for doing the sort of things humans have always done?”
“More good questions. And your guess is as good as the so-called experts. Perhaps he miscalculated. He was an AI, not God. And maybe that’s the real takeaway. We’re never too clever, never too wise, not to make a mess of things.” Traffic ground to a halt as they reached a major intersection. He frowned at the sudden congestion. “It’s a good thing we’re early because we’re going to be stuck here for a while.”
CALLISTO WAS JUST A short frameshift away from Ganymede. The furthest out of the four Galilean moons was a dark patchwork of craters beneath them. Yvonne checked her controls and then made a slight adjustment to her orbit. “We’ll rendezvous with the Queen of Sheba in just a few minutes,” she said.
“Wait, we don’t get to go down to the surface?” Grace asked.
“Not this time,” Abigail said. “The Queen isn’t the sort of ship you take planetside, so we’re going to meet her in orbit.”
Grace leaned forward to peer out the window. “Why’s that?”
“You’ll see,” Yvonne said. She rechecked their position and used the maneuvering thrusters to rotate the Sparrow away from the moon’s surface. She burned the engines for another brief second. “Right about now,” she said as she swung the Sparrow back around.
Between them and Callisto was the super-freighter, the Queen of Sheba. The largest part of the ship was an elegant structure easily four times the dimensions of the Sparrow. Behind that, a long spine extended nearly seven hundred meters. Periodic spurs jutted from either side, to which were attached hundreds of cargo containers. Behind that sat the massive primary engine structure.
Abigail whistled. “Can you imagine making enough money as a freelancer that you can afford a monster like that?”
Yvonne smirked. “When you’re not running your ship like a charity? Maybe.”
Grace leaned forward. “Are those smaller ships on the belly?”
“Probably,” Yvonne said. “Super-freighters usually carry a dozen or more single-pilot interceptors for defense. Pick a fight with this one and you’ll get swarmed.” She flipped on the comm. “Queen of Sheba, this is the Sparrow. Thanks for agreeing to meet us.”
“We were in the area,” came the dry rasp of an older woman. “I’m glad you could make it before we had to set out for Mars. You’re welcome to come aboard. I’ll light a beacon at our ventral half-dock.”
“Half-dock?” Grace asked.
“It’s exactly what it sounds like,” Yvonne said, beginning the process of maneuvering beneath the behemoth. “You know how if you push an upside-down cup into the sink, it’ll stay filled with air? Think of it like that. Only in a half-dock, the air is trying to escape and is held in with an environmental shield. We’ll just slip the top of the Sparrow through the shield and climb out the top hatch.”
The Queen of Sheba’s mass was now directly above them. Yvonne watched the instruments as she guided the Sparrow up toward the beacon and the pair of magnetic clamps. She felt a brief moment of resistance as the Sparrow pushed up into the shield, and then they made contact. “That should do it.”
“Are you coming with us?” Grace asked.
“I wasn’t planning on it,” Yvonne said as she began going through the shutdown sequence.
“Oh come on,” the teen begged. “It’s girl’s day. Besides, you’re not stuck here anymore. Enjoy your freedom.”
“She’s got you there,” Abigail said. “You’ve no need to be a recluse anymore. Live a little.”
Yvonne thought about turning her down, wanted to even. Instead, she said, “Let me finish things up here. I’ll be right behind you.”
Grace turned to leave, but as she passed Abigail, she gave her a thumbs up. “You’re right. That was easy.”
“Why is it always a bar?” Davey asked. “Have a meeting with a client or ally? Just find the nearest place serving alcohol.” They’d located the cozy little establishment a few hours back, and after killing some time, had stepped in to grab a bite to eat before the other freelancer arrived.
“It’s a pub,” Matthew said. “And where else should we meet Ewan? A shadowy back alley?”
Davey scratched the back of his head. Fair enough. This was as neutral a place as any. He finished the last few bites of his panini. “Given how well thought of freelancers are in polite society, I figured the alley was the way to go. You know. Keep the trash out back.”
Matthew grinned at that. “We’re trying to change that, you know.”
“Pretty soon, we’ll be upstanding members of society. We’ll get invited to all sorts of fancy functions where we have to wear ties.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” a new voice said. Davey twisted his neck to see Ewan Hywel standing behind him. The man wore an old fashion bomber style jacket and an easy smile. Davey had once blown a hole through Ewan’s ship during a scuffle over a metal-rich asteroid. Matthew had given him strict instructions not to bring up the incident. Which was a serious fun killer, but then Matthew wasn’t known for his capacity to have fun.
Matthew shook Ewan’s hand as he sat. “How’s the captain of the Red Dragon doing these days?”
The man slid into the booth beside Davey. “The Ddraig Goch is still flying, so that means it’s a good day.” He turned to Davey and snapped his fingers. “I’ve forgotten your name entirely. Wasn’t it you that tried to shoot me down?”
Davey coughed out a laugh and gave Matthew a look. “Davey Long. And if I remember correctly, the Red Dragon opened fire first.”
“Aye. We made the mistake of starting a fight we couldn’t finish. But that was back when I still thought Matthew Cole was a loser with no friends.”
Matthew raised an eyebrow but didn’t take the bait.
Ewan continued. “Turns out he was just biding his time before trying to join into a group with all the cool kids.”
“And you were the first crew I thought of,” Matthew said.
That seemed to surprise Ewan, and he leaned back in the seat. “I’ve met Dominic. I know about his flair for the dramatic and wouldn’t put it past him to just be having some fun. But I guess you’re serious about this.”
Matthew shook his head. “This is the real deal. We’re gathering the best in the business to form a guild, the Guild of Lanterns. The ones that the public knows they can trust.”
“Well, that sounds like a hell of a thing.” Ewan scratched the back of his head, and Davey thought he even seemed a little nervous. “Look. Matthew. I’m not going to sit here and pretend that the Ddraig Goch is crewed by saints. We’ve delivered shipments that we knew better than to ask what was inside. I’ve heard about how you used to be a priest, and it explains a few things, that’s for sure. But there’s no way we can live up to that standard and still cut a profit.”
“We’re going to keep things profitable. And we know there are no perfect people out there. Here’s the plan,” Matthew said. “To start, we’re going to recruit about a dozen freelancers. Between the Sparrow, the Red Dragon, and the Queen of Sheba, we’ll have spaceboard crews covered.”
“Wait, the Queen? You talked the old lady into this already?”
“Actually,” Davey said. “She contacted us. Abigail... err, the Shield Maiden sh
ould be meeting with her right about now.”
“And then we’ll recruit from around the various hubs in the solar system. A couple from Mars, Ceres, Ganymede, Titan.”
Ewan snapped his fingers. “Have you thought about the Jameson brothers?”
Matthew just smiled. “Already on the list. So that’s the first dozen. See if there are enough jobs on the market to support us without tripping over each other and fighting for scraps. If it works, we invite more as time goes on.”
“So we get the publicity and the glory of being the solar system’s heroes. I like it. What is this going to cost us?”
“Emperor Dominic has offered to pay the bills of the organization itself, but I’m not interested in the Lanterns mooching off of a patron permanently. Two percent of every job run as a Lantern. Dominic’s daughter Julia and one of my crew members, Yvonne Naude, are going to be handling the paperwork, the business side, talking to press, etc.”
“Two percent.” Ewan glanced upward as if running numbers in his head. “Easily covered if the public starts looking for Lanterns.”
“That’s what we hope.”
Ewan chewed on his lip for a moment and Davey could tell he was almost sold. “Why my crew?”
“Remember when we met?” Matthew asked. “Over Dione in the Saturn neighborhood? Six years ago.”
“That was an outlier,” Ewan said.
“I’m not so sure about that, and even if it was, it doesn’t have to be. You helped me save a lot of people on that transport and didn’t get paid a dime.”
Ewan eyed Davey. “I don’t know why I didn’t see the priest thing coming. Pretty soon, he’ll have me confessing.”
“He’s good at that.” Davey took this as a sign that the battle was over. Ewan was convinced.
“I’m not agreeing yet,” Ewan said. “Let’s just assume I’m going to decline for now. But I’ll take a look at whatever paperwork you have. Just in case. I’m sure the dos and don’ts list for the Guild of Lanterns will be as long as the Bible. It probably is the Bible.”
After Moses: Wormwood Page 6