by Jeff Wheeler
Kelsie was dumbstruck. If reading without the school knowing was hard, writing had to be twice as difficult. He would have to write it all by hand. No computer could check it.
Troy pulled a notebook from his backpack and held it out to her. Inside, the first page contained just a title in a tidy script, “The Jupiter Dilemma.”
“You’re a pirate writer,” she said.
Troy blushed. “It’s what’s in my head.”
His handwriting covered page after page. He’d even drawn illustrations. Characters in space suits. Rockets balanced on long exhaust tails. A comet streaking above an alien mountain range.
“I’m honored,” said Kelsie. “Thank you for sharing your work with me.”
“I have other notebooks.” Troy moved the hair away from his eyes. They were deep blue.
Suddenly, the school didn’t feel so small.
James Van Pelt
James Van Pelt is a part-time high school English teacher and full-time writer in western Colorado. He’s been a finalist for a Nebula Award and been reprinted in many year’s-best collections. His first young adult novel, Pandora’s Gun, was released from Fairwood Press in August of 2015.
James blogs at http://www.jamesvanpelt.com and can be found on Facebook.
The Tariff
By Allen Shoff | 6,100 words
Dimitrios Eleftheriou idly twirled a medal around his finger, disinterestedly watching the graven image of the bearded bishop spin in the microgravity. Like the illusions of a zoetrope, St. Nicholas seemed animated, appearing to extend his hand and offer anew his three bags of gold with each revolution. Dimitrios smiled thinly at this, humor dimly reflected in his dark Grecian eyes framed by sun-kissed Levantine skin—the latter a gift from his mother, God rest her soul. A nervous cough interrupted his reverie, and he turned his head to look at the timid clerk strapped in at his right.
“A problem, Yuri?”
The young assistant, barely twenty years of age, shook his head rapidly.
“No, Captain Eleftheriou, none. None at all,” he quickly stuttered.
The older man snorted aloud.
“Yuri, please, Dimitrios. Call me Dimitrios. To the porters and the technicians, Captain, but you, young Yuri, are no mere hired hand—this is, after all, your father’s ship.”
The youth forced a humorless laugh and continued to watch the lazy revolutions of the medal in the captain’s hand. Dimitrios, following his gaze, grinned and splayed the chain across his fingers, abruptly halting the necklace’s orbit.
“Oh, this? This is what has you worried?”
“Well, Capta— Dimitrios, sir, yes. What if you lost it?”
The captain shrugged his broad shoulders dismissively.
“What if I lost it? Where could it go?”
“She’s a large ship, sir. What with free fall, I don’t think you’d ever be able to find it—”
He trailed off, interrupted by Dimitrios’s hearty laugh. The ebullient Greek reached out and slapped the youth on the shoulder before settling back into his command chair with a well-practiced slide.
“Have you ever been out of atmo, Yuri? Been out in the black?”
Yuri, averting his eyes, responded sheepishly.
“No, Dimitrios, sir. This is the first time.”
The captain’s eyes widened.
“Your father is the deputy guildmaster for Saturn and her moons, and you’ve never left the surface of Titan?”
“No.”
Dimitrios opened his mouth as if to say something—twice—but then finally closed it and shrugged.
“Well, then, first lesson: lost and found.”
He held up the medal again and made a gesture as if he were tossing it, causing the youth to twitch unconsciously. Dimitrios half smiled and explained.
“In free fall, air only moves when we move it, and we move it through the air vents. If I drop this, it’ll make its way through the ship and end up at a return. Nothing is ever lost up here, lad, just temporarily out of place.”
He twirled the medal once more around his finger before clasping it again to his neck and dropping it under the collar of his jumpsuit. He smirked.
“You’ll find spacers don’t have much recourse to St. Anthony, Yuri. At least where their shipboard possessions are concerned.”
The deputy guildmaster’s son nodded thoughtfully, clearly trying to absorb as much knowledge as he could from the older spacer. Then he lay back in the chair, struggling briefly with the harness that kept his limbs from floating freely, before casting a sideways glance at the captain, trying to learn something about the man without attracting too much attention. The Doukas had been underway for the better part of the day, but her captain had thus far eluded categorization. His mood and his manner shifted from euphoric to melancholic in an instant, his bearing from breezy to stiffly formal—yet his penetrating gaze remained unchanged. The captain’s eyes betrayed an intelligence far beyond that which was customarily displayed by a merchantman’s master—always calculating, forever analyzing, and never dulled by indecision.
“—Yuri! You want to learn something about astrogation or not?”
The assistant, startled, stammered an apology, unaware that he had drifted off into his thoughts, but the captain continued without pause, quizzing his young pupil.
“We’ve arrived at the Titan-Saturn L2 EGR. Why do we care?”
The youth thought for a moment, desperately wishing he had paid more attention in secondary.
“Uh, EGRs are equipotential gravitational regions—calculated solutions to the n-body problem. We can ghost only from these regions; the translocation drive won’t work anywhere else.”
Dimitrios snorted.
“If by ‘won’t work’ you mean if we bypass the safeties and try anyway, every atom of this ship will be torn asunder , then yes, full points.”
He cleared his throat.
“And now, young master Yuri, are you familiar with Schliemann’s first law?”
The guildmaster’s son was ashamed that he had to shake his head. Dimitrios considered making a remark about scholarship on Titan, but he abstained.
“Schliemann’s first states that momentum is preserved across a translocation. Remember: the drive bridges two points in space. Our velocity and heading don’t change as we push through in that brief instant the bridge exists.”
He pulled the console down from above him and began tapping commands into the screen.
“The art, my boy, is getting gravity to work for us. For today’s run, we chose this particular EGR because Titan’s position takes it on a heading that will work out nicely to slingshot us into Mimir orbit with only a brief burn on the far side.”
He looked back at the youth, who seemed to feel physical pain as he tried to work out the physics of the maneuver, and chuckled.
“Save yourself the work, Yuri. Take a look at the astrogation computer’s plot simulation and you’ll see what we’re doing.” He tapped the microphone that clung to the side of his face.
“Shipwide. Now hear this, now hear this: translocation maneuver in thirty seconds. Take your positions.”
An automated klaxon wailed, and the computer began calling out the countdown. The captain adjusted the harnesses at his chest, and Yuri did the same. Dimitrios looked back at his young charge, and saw the sun-shy youth’s face blanched even paler than normal.
“First ghost?”
The youth nodded. The captain grinned.
“Close your eyes. Trust me.”
The boy shut his eyes tightly and gripped the arms of his chair with an uncharacteristically ferocious strength. A low whine, almost imperceptible at first, began to build throughout the compartment. Outside, in the void, the radiators abruptly glowed a dull red, dissipating the waste heat as the reactor pumped more and more reactants into the sun-hot fusion chamber. The wire-thin superconducting coils encircling the Doukas began to vibrate as the current increased, fields growing stronger and stronger, enwrapping the vessel in a frighteningly powe
rful electromagnetic display. Few on board could have explained how exactly the drive worked; even fewer of those millions who lived in Terra’s scattered colonies understood the mathematics necessary to allow this travesty of relativity. And yet, inside, the roiling crescendo of sound, so loud as to be almost deafening, reached its peak, and the computer performed the final half billion calculations necessary to precisely fix the point of arrival. The drive activated.
CRACK
To the hypothetical observer orbiting Titan, it all happened too quickly to perceive: in an instant, the nascent bridge swallowed the Doukas and vanished just as quickly, leaving nothing but a ghostly afterimage of the vessel burned on the retinas. Near the L4 Lagrange point of Mimir and Alpha Centauri B, the Doukas appeared just as suddenly, the crackling energy in the coils entirely spent. Panel radiators extended all along the ship’s spine, liquid lithium within already heated to near boiling. The reactor’s fire slowly died down to manageable levels.
Inside, Yuri sat blinking, head lolling as he tried to comprehend the sensations assaulting his mind. His hands seemed delayed as he moved them, and his thoughts felt sluggish and unrefined, like those immediately after waking. Dimitrios too, veteran traveler that he was, waited several moments to get his bearings before again taking to the shipwide circuit.
“Now hear this, now hear this: acceleration maneuver in thirty seconds, maintain your positions.”
While Yuri continued to shake his head to clear the fog, he and the captain felt themselves thrown back against their chairs as the engines ignited, their harnesses tightening for safety. The acceleration far exceeded the leisurely burn from Titan; this time, the men felt their weight double as the thrust from the engine clawed at their cheeks and their eyes, pulling their skin taut and blurring their vision.
The Doukas was an old ship, to be sure—a long, narrow, almost skeletal, titanium frame, capped at the bow by a cluster of habitable compartments, and at the stern by a massive filigree of superconducting wire. The rings of wire formed an invisible but potent magnetic nozzle, directing the torrent of plasma blasted out by the sunlight heat of the fusion reactor. The blade shield protecting the wire coils, an exotic combination of graphite for heat resistance and tungsten for strength, glowed so brightly as to give the vessels both their distinctive look and their obvious name: torches. Although her discolored spine and pockmarked Whipple shielding betrayed her ripe old age, the Doukas could move. Her owner had made sure of that.
As she burned hard for orbit, the captain rapidly scanned the system for any sign of other vessels. Yuri looked concerned, and spoke through gritted teeth as he felt his lungs struggle to process enough air.
“Dimitrios, sir, what if the Republic sees us? We’ve got to be giving away our position, burning like this.”
The captain took the time to turn to the youth and grunt out a laugh before looking back at the board.
“Your old man really told you nothing of the spacer life, did he, Yuri? Second lesson: stealth in space is a myth.”
His fingers flashed over the panel, tapping buttons and tracing over the sensor data, looking for any incongruities that might reveal the presence of a hostile vessel. He continued.
“What’s the background radiation of the universe—its temperature? Do you know?”
“No,” heaved Yuri.
“We’re talking under three kelvins. Even if we shut off every system and froze to death, the crew modules would still be at several hundred kelvins, and would be for months, until we slowly reached equilibrium with the surrounding space. Our radiators are above a thousand kelvins, and our engine’s plume is—well, unfathomably hot. We’re bright as a sun, Yuri, and there’s no way to hide that, not from the cheapest of sensors on the rattiest of freighters.”
He looked almost philosophical for a moment, even as the brutal pummeling of acceleration continued.
“The smallest ship is visible the moment she ghosts in system, so it’s never a question of hiding. It’s a question of running.”
The console beeped an ugly warning tone, and Captain Eleftheriou winced.
“What’s that?” gasped the young trainee, cheeks vibrating as the old ship rattled.
“Republican signature burning hard for co-orbit. Looks like a frigate. Kali’s blazes,” muttered the captain, eyes glued to his screen. He reached up again to his microphone.
“Giannis, what can you give me on mass flow? Another two, three, kilos a second?”
Yuri could almost hear the engineer’s profanity through the captain’s earpiece; under any other circumstance, it would have been humorous to witness the exchange.
“I understand, yes—yes—no, I really do. A kilo, then? We need to grab another few meters per second here; can you do it?”
Yuri listened intently, trying to overhear the other side of the captain’s conversation. He saw all he needed when he saw the captain’s face darken, and the man sullenly respond.
“Counting on you, Giannis.”
The captain threw his head back in the chair and ran a hand through his black hair, eyes closed and face set in a look of aggravation. He spoke through clenched teeth.
“Third lesson: all propulsion engineers are liars.”
* * *
The Alpha Centauri trinary system was awash in conflict, and the Doukas was rocketing into a political minefield. More than a century ago, a half-dozen independent entities—joined by a hodgepodge of national and supernational governments—dived wholeheartedly into the business of interstellar colonization in the wake of the invention of the translocation drive. One of the first of the fledgling colonies was the planet Mimir, an all-encompassing archipelago of islands dotting a single world ocean, the product of overeager terraforming caused by impatient arrogance. Many different entities founded their own small outposts on the low islands, and as the population grew, conflicts began to develop between the different factions over mineral rights, territory, and borders—no different from the squabbles that infected every other group of humans throughout history. After years of fruitless talks, negotiations failed and whispered threat exploded into a brutal, internecine bloodbath. But as the troops of the Republic of American States set boots in cloying Mimir mud, many of those that had managed to avoid taking sides—the Sol Merchant Guild among them—tasted the opportunity for profit.
And so, along her venerable spine, clustered between the vast hydrogen propellant tanks and the clusters of radiators, the Doukas carried containers filled with her trade goods: platinum-group metal powders, refined for printing from Saturn’s dizzying array of moonlets; helium-3, that most valuable fusion reactant; and a wet container brimful of water melted from the gas giant’s majestic rings. Besides the helium-3, most of the rest of the goods would be worthless in the Sol System; the water-production and metallurgical facilities of the Belt were far closer to the shipyards orbiting Terra and Mars, and so their goods would always outcompete those of Cronus. But the guildsmen who worked the skies of the old titan had a trick up their sleeves: extrasolar colonies lacked the sophisticated technology necessary to maintain a modern society, and while the Republic’s colony-wide wartime blockades were in effect, those goods became that much more valuable. And so the Doukas arrived at Mimir, a streak of light deep in the black of space, laden with forbidden metals and cryogenics carved from the grasp of another star.
“—Dimitrios, sir, I don’t understand.”
Yuri’s face had slowly drained of what little color it originally held as the strain of the acceleration gnawed away at him, and now he looked expectantly at the captain. Dimitrios had been resting his eyes, content to let his crew and computer handle the minor course corrections. He opened them slowly—regretfully—and looked over in the vague direction of the deputy guildmaster’s son.
“. . . understand?”
“Obviously we need to make orbit before the Republican ship catches us—Father has explained their rules of engagement, how stations and orbital hubs are neutral ground. We get the
re first, we’re home free.”
“I fail to see the question.”
“But it’s not like it’s a mystery who will win this race, sir. That’s my quandary. We can see how fast they’re going, and they can see how fast we’re going, so don’t both of us already know who will make it first?”
The Doukas’s master grinned, impressed for once at his young pupil’s comprehension.
“So your old man did teach you something. You’re right, we both know just about everything we need to know about the other, just from our heat signatures: exhaust temperatures reveal thrust power and reactor configuration, and adding acceleration gives mass and even a good guess about likely cargo and crew complement—with a bit of math. No, they know we’ll beat them to orbit with hours to spare; they likely started their burn the moment they detected ours, but they were out of position and on an outbound heading, so they have much more ground to cover.”
“So why does Giannis need to push the engine, if we’ll beat them handily?”
The merchant captain stroked his thick black goatee thoughtfully, for a moment almost forgetting the rumbling of acceleration from the ship’s potent engine.
“That, my dear lad, is because you’ve forgotten one thing. We’re not racing the Republican frigate, Yuri, not exactly; we’re racing light.”
The youth’s look of immoderate consternation at the older man’s words left little of his confusion to the imagination.
“Think it through, Yuri. We’re not at war with them, and we sure as blazes don’t want to start one. If they warn us to stop, we’ll have little choice but to obey. But—” At this, he twisted his console toward the youth, pointing at the low ebb in their hyperbolic path traced around Mimir. “If we can move our periapse to within shuttle range of that station, we’ve won, even once they tell us to stop. Ordering us to abandon orbit violates the Delhi Accords: they are required to let us circularize rather than risk us flinging off into interplanetary space or burning up in the atmosphere. So we’ll circularize and casually discard our shipping containers within range of a shuttle; there’s just about nothing they can legally do to stop the station, and that shuttle will have our cargo aboard before the Republic ship arrives.” The captain ran some calculations on his screen before continuing.