A Hop, Skip and a Jump (Family Law Book 4)

by Mackey Chandler

  "Sure, parity. No special privileges or diminished sovereignty," Lee said.

  "Exactly. You affirm our confidence in you. Whatever Central can ask of us, I'm sure we can live with it if it applies equally to them. Surely we have something to offer?" The Second and Third Mothers nodded agreement.

  "Derfhome is not the center of the universe, and Red Tree is not even the center of Derfhome in any sense. To be secure and prosper we have to reach out beyond Clan and Keep. Already, we would never want to go back to depending on our own hand and territory to survive. We were at risk even from a bad turn in the weather for a growing season. You are opening up new territory on Providence to us, to be even more secure. Strong allies seem a wise addition too."

  Lee sat and thought on it quite a while with a frown on her face.

  "Is there something you don't feel free to say?" the First Mum finally asked.

  "Do I have freedom to advise you without being thought presumptuous?" Lee asked.

  The First Mother laughed. "Speak! You already advised us to send an emissary to the Lunarians. Why are you suddenly shy?"

  "Because that involves space and people I know, but now I'd speak about matters here on Derfhome that you undoubtedly feel your prerogative. I don't wish to offend."

  "Speak anyway," the First offered. "We aren't timid to reject your ideas if we don't like them, and I'll even add that I'll tell you why, which I wouldn't offer to everyone."

  Lee gave a nod that was deep, almost a bow. Gordon looked concerned.

  "If it is wise for Central to seek allies close by, even if they aren't their peers, shouldn't you be figuring out how to gather allies among the clans? As you said, times change. How long can the clans stay completely isolated from each other? Look at Earth. They have a couple hundred nations just like Derfhome has clans. Hasn't this been a weakness? The rebellion of the lesser members gave us the opportunity to leave the Claims structure and form our own. I think they will regret this in the long run." Lee looked worried waiting their response.

  "But how is the question?" the First Mother asked. Cupping a true hand out in front of her like the issue could rest in her palm. "The new Third Mother nudged us, I admit, starting with our time on Derfhome Station, negotiating with the Earthies. She asked pointed questions to which we didn't have answers. The things the clanless and even Humans said to us showed they felt a greater kinship with us than we extended back. It was humbling and a little embarrassing. But I can tell you that before then, we'd have rejected without any serious consideration anything that touched the slightest on our long held authority.

  "We can't count on other clan Mothers having a precipitating event like we did. Most are isolated. They will never go to Derfhome station. Some still live and die on their land and never go to anything outside but the annual meeting of the Mothers. Not even a trade town or other clan. We still don't even have a worldwide meeting of Mothers. They are still on three continents. Why? Are airplanes that scary?"

  "I'm not sure it isn't for the best right now," the Second Mother said. "If the meeting tripled in size there would be more dissent and the discussion might be drawn out until people left without finalizing anything. Perhaps it will happen in time, with adjustments in custom."

  "Then how can you do it, without war or a great slaughter of Champions?" Lee asked.

  "By our drawing the trade towns and clanless into a closer relationship with us before other clans," the First insisted. "If others see we prosper, better than them, most will act in their own interest. Even the very stubborn will come around once an obstructing Mother retires or dies. So we are taking a long view. The trouble right now is which faction in town do we befriend? They have so many competing interests."

  "Use Talker," Gordon suggested. "Give him a guarantee of protection for his embassy, something the guilds and unions in the trade towns never had, and favor him with trade and business so the others see his prosperity. If they ask why he has a favored status, and they don't, just tell them they never sought it out. That's the simple truth and puts the blame on them to correct. Talk to him. Ask him how to do so. He may have some ideas from his own culture how to make it work. I've noticed they have a low conflict form of governance with many independent jurisdictions. The central authorities that do exist are much more limited and like us than Humans."

  "They are a hereditary patriarchal society instead of an appointive linear matriarchy, but they do seem to make it work without constant war," the Second Mother said.

  Lee decided maybe the Second Mum, though quieter, was the deeper thinker of the three.

  "If I'm representing you I'd like to be transported on the Sharp Claws," Lee requested. "I want to be able go in differently than my previous visit. I want to announce to Traffic Control we are a Red Tree flagged vessel on a Red Tree mission. We can leave the Retribution behind to guard Derfhome."

  "Granted easily," the First Mother said. "Do you have any requests for crew?"

  Lee looked at Gordon. Guessing her thought, and he shook his head no, gently.

  "I'd leave that to Captain Frost to decide what level of staffing he needs for an Earth trip," Lee said, "but I'll take Gordon along if he'll consent to go with me."

  "By all means," the First Mother agreed. "Take Gordon, and take this." She tossed something across the table that Lee snatched out of the air. When she opened her hand it was the carved seal the Mothers used to sign clan business.

  Chapter 11

  In the quiet of their rooms Gordon made himself comfortable and waved Lee over.

  "I was speaking with our bank today. It seems a few of the crew with shares are anxious to have a payout and have been inquiring of the bank if they would be interested in buying their share, or a fraction of it, at a discount."

  "That doesn't seem unreasonable," Lee said. "They expected to start getting cash payments through the Claims Commission very quickly and that fell through. We can't keep full crews working without some project or voyage planned, and not everybody wanted to sign up for a second trip even if we could go back out right away." Lee looked at him sharply. "You aren't rethinking Timilo's offer of mercenary work are you?"

  "No! It's certainly not that desperate yet. Almost certainly somebody will be angry at us for not anticipating the Claims Commission committing suicide. If I thought somebody was in real hardship because of the wait I'd be tempted to buy them out myself. But then everybody would want it," Gordon said.

  "And as rich as we are we couldn't start to buy out all the shares from this voyage," Lee said.

  "Also, if I do that somebody would protest my act of charity is profiteering on my own crew," Gordon predicted. "So if the bank wants to buy shares, fine, they can do it without anyone painting it as a bad thing. That's just their normal sort of business. In fact if they want to make a regular market in the things like they were stock that's fine with me. I told them as much. There are probably enough sellers to post public weekly quotes and discount rates. Let the market decide what they are worth and let it float wherever price discovery takes it. It may help recruiting for our next voyage if the same thing is expected to happen to those new crew shares. That could offset the disappointment of the Claims Commission begging off."

  Lee looked thoughtful. "We might not have the funds to buy out a tenth of the people who want to sell, but if it's a public offering by the bank to buy them, we could still try to make sure the price doesn't collapse too far. If it looks to take a dip we could start buying some ourselves. It's not like a public contract that has to be published. We could tell the bank to do it anonymously for us any time the price looked to dip too far. Just set a number with them of what we are willing to spend, so we don't have another thing to track closely."

  "Have you been reading about economics too?" Gordon asked. "I think that's legal on Derfhome, but some people might object that it's price manipulation."

  "Well of course it's price manipulation," Lee said. "But why is that a bad thing? I have eight shares for personal servic
e and my ship service and outfitting. Why wouldn't I try to make sure they retain their value? And I'm taking on new risks. If my intervention doesn't work I just dropped a chunk of cash the seller gets to keep."

  "That sounds reasonable, but there's a long history of it being used in bad ways. If people drive prices down to buy and then up to sell. Or if they manage to buy so much they can control the market in an item. That's called cornering the market. Economics is a whole new area for you to learn."

  "Well we already said I don't have enough money to control the whole thing, and I'm never going to do anything to make the price drop. That would be crooked, and dangerous. What if it worked and then it didn't come back up?" Lee asked."Ka-Boom!" she predicted.

  "I can't see how keeping the price boosted hurts anybody who actually worked for their shares, only the sort of crooked speculators you're talking about. I'd be happy to read some on economics when you want, but it seems mostly like common sense stuff to me."

  Gordon look distressed at that, but it slowly turned to a thoughtful look. "I can't find fault with doing it the way you describe," Gordon admitted.

  "Good. It really does matter to me that you approve of what I do, you know."

  "Thank you, I was pretty sure of that, but it's nice to hear. Others, like our bank and the Mothers, really matter too," Gordon insisted.

  "Yeah, but not as much as you," Lee said, and making a rocking motion with her hand.

  Lee could tell that bothered him.

  Gordon went off to bed in his own room. They took no room in common at the Keep like the hotel suites they'd grown used to. Neither did Lee sleep with him near now for emotional support, like she had when the night terrors easily visited her after her parent's deaths. She'd made a good adjustment to that horror and didn't dwell on it regularly.

  Lee looked to see if her search and investigation was returning anything useful on the Lunar powers. There were already years of easily found public resources like news releases from Earth sources and a lesser number from the Lunar Republic and Armstrong. More than she could read if she devoted months to doing so. Yet this was supposedly distilled down to what might interest her with repetitions of the same news release from multiple sources eliminated. She was going to have to scroll through just the headers and pick what jumped out and seemed relevant to her. Lee told the program to order them chronologically and looked at a few from earlier in the century, closer to the time when she knew the Chinese ships were destroyed in lunar orbit.

  “Western Autonomous Region denies Lunar link,” read one headline from the Vancouver Vision. “We don’t monitor our counties trade, and impose no restraints. We don’t actually have any trade policy. We’re no Jeremiahs,” their spox insisted.

  Lee highlighted Jeremiahs for a later search and refused to get sidetracked researching regional or time specific idioms this early.

  “Aerospace tire production to resume in the state of Hidalgo,” said another. That made Lee look up why it had stopped. The gap in time didn’t make any sense. The facility was destroyed in the war, but why would it take them that long after the war to start making them again? Why move it from North Carolina instead of rebuilding in place?

  “Brazil cautioned by Central spox on L1 limit,” Was in the Eastern News, translated from Portuguese. That at least made sense. The South American country announced plans to build an armed vessel. The warning was public, which spoke to Central wanting to remind others too. Doing a date limited search over the next week it didn’t appear that Brazil made any public reply to the warning.

  There was a whole series of posts and news releases about the new star drive.

  “Europeans lose third drone in FTL testing,” said the Capitol Watchdog. “Unable to emulate North American success, the European consortium testing a third robotic drone says the 230M EuroMark device appeared to make a quantum transition, but has not successfully returned. The device carries a radio beacon which will transmit intermittently for several years, to aid locating it in the future, but the transmitter is not powerful enough to be detected on Earth with current technology.

  A North American probe could possibly detect the transmissions while in the Centauri star system, but the North American craft made its second return and their space agency refuses to speculate when they will make a third trip or confirm if their robotic vessel is equipped to detect the emissions of the European craft.”

  Lee frowned and thought about how jump technology hadn't made any sense to her when Thor tried to explain it to her. She'd been really irritated when he suggested she might be able to understand it later, when she was more mature, and her brain had developed more.

  She backed the time line up a couple decades and did a search. It wasn't that hard to find the academic papers which were the basis for the jump drive. She saved those to her pad to look at some time. Maybe she'd understand them now. Maybe it would be easier to understand the full paper than Thor's informal lesson. Sometimes things lost their essence when you tried to simplify them. But she'd never give Thor the satisfaction of knowing she looked at the material. If it still didn't make any sense he was the last person she'd ever pick to help her with it now. She didn't want to be disrespected, as she saw it, again.

  Moving ahead another year she felt a pang of distressed empathy over the headline that said, "North American crew of two lost in failed jump." Having jumped multiple times herself, it carried an emotional impact, because it could happen to her. It caught her interest enough to make her read the first couple paragraphs.

  "A second generation experimental jump craft failed to materialize on schedule in the Alpha Centauri star system. The inflatable temporary space station in Centauri stellar orbit had four crew present, two of whom were set to exchange with the ship crew and rotate out. The failure comes after two previous successful supply missions arrived via jump drone.

  "As with early jump drone failures, and the ill fated first attempt of the Pedro Escobar, piloted by James Weir, there is no indication if the vessel failed to complete the transition or did so to a point too distant to communicate or return. As no trace to date has been found of other vessels, which failed to materialize in the intended target area, the vessel and crew are presumed to have been lost."

  Lee thought about how the three principal owners of a much better jump technology, April, Heather and Jeff, sat and watched others struggle and take risks with an inferior technology, while they withheld the much superior system she'd seen demonstrated in Gabriel's ship. It wasn't just an abstract theory that they refused to publish. As a practical matter people died trying to achieve the same thing they already knew how to do. Did they have blood on their hands? She liked April and didn't want to have to feel that way about her.

  Examining it from what bits and pieces of the total picture she had left her with conflicted feelings. The three of them didn't force the Earthies to take risks. They could have followed a safer more conservative development path and not lost people. It was the drive to be first, not only for the glory but to get out there and claim real estate and resources. Was the blame on the Earthies or The Three, as Gabriel called them? Or a little of both?

  If The Three had offered their own jump technology to everybody what would have happened? Lee had to admit she didn't have enough information to know with any certainty. She'd have to know how their drive worked to know on what terms it could be shared. Her own experiences with Earth, and North America in particular, colored her thinking. She'd been treated very badly there. It wasn't just a refusal to act on certain standards. Earthies didn't even seem to agree with her on the basics of what constituted proper behavior.

  Not every Earth person. Gordon had made that painfully clear to her. Her relatives in North America had gone out of their way to help her. Even others she'd met, the fellow her cousin hired to drive her and his mom had treated her well. Her hired security acted with a morality that seemed to extend well beyond what their contracts had demanded. It just seemed that any time their govern
ment was involved, kindness and morality went out the window. Why? It seemed universal from the highest level down to the negative tax clerk her cousin had to mollify to get housing. It wasn't just the judge who had declared Gordon an animal and felt free to turn her life upside down without even a token consultation with her. Every agency that had claimed an interest in her visit to Earth had been in conflict with her, and even with each other.

  Her cousin had given her lessons on appeasing officials and getting along while she lived with them briefly on Earth. Lee couldn't find it in her heart to blame him for not rebelling and actively opposing his tyrannical government. She had no doubt he'd made the correct assessment that doing so would throw his life away in an empty gesture. He had limited resources and ability, and there just wasn't any public support for such a course of action from what she'd seen living with them.

  Then she came to a sudden realization that April and her friends had rebelled against that same government. The situation back then on Home, and the people around them, must have been much different than how her cousin lived. The trouble with reading history was the underlying mood of the people was hard to know. Either it read like public opinion was irrelevant, and history was shaped by a few strong personalities, or the writer held forth their own opinions as absolute truth.

  Somebody, Lee couldn't remember who, told her Home moved out beyond the Moon to get away from the constant sniping and threat from Earth. So their independence wasn't settled and firmly held even after they won their war for independence. What if North America and the other Earthies had the superior drive The Three owned? How would things have happened? Trying to visualize the possible events with that as a starting point, Lee was pretty sure the L1 limit would have been unenforceable. The Solar System would be militarized factions now, and Humanity would have burst forth across a much bigger sphere of space.