by L.H. Thomson
Chapter Two
All human behavior begins, ends and is ultimately governed by the inherently selfish – and necessary – act of self-preservation. – from The Handbook of Joshua, Chapter 1, Verse 2.
The Traveler’s Rest had a bad reputation for being full of the galaxy’s most nefarious characters. In other words, it was packed with clientele from the commerce block nearby, on their breaks from trading in intergalactic commodities and emerging tech derivatives.
These guys made Harrison look like a saint.
They were all way more socially acceptable than the customers at Anderson’s.
But without ever having fired a shot in anger, these people were nonetheless why Earth was such a shithole.
When they’d bled it dry of most useful resources other than workers, they just packed up and, thanks to the wonder of satellite terraforming, moved to the NTC.
Then, they’d used the threat of Earther firepower – already evidenced against the Jofari – to deregulate commodities and complex financial instruments across Sol System.
Compared to your typical middle-management traders, the assorted smugglers and information brokers on G’farg Station were a bunch of real straight shooters.
We avoided the handful of humanoid sex pros at the door and pushed our way inside.
We were a foot from the bar when a hand clamped down on my shoulder. I turned around slowly. The bouncer was bigger than a thruster jet.
“Lose the kid if you want to drink here.”
“She’s older than this city,” I said. “Genetic abnormality.” It was easier than explaining RDH history to this meathead.
He squinted, but this was a man at a bar thousands of miles from Earth, and stranger things happened there regularly.
“Got ID?”
I took a slow, deep breath. One of these days, one of these guys was going to piss Jayde off, and that would be it for him. She’d embarrass him, and make sure every bouncer in South Pole region knew about the beating he’d taken..
We each pulled out a few inches of sleeve connector, hooking the fingernail-sized plastic chip at the end of the thread to a bar console.
“Should have realized something was up, teenage girl with a piece that big on her hip,” he said with enough casual interest to demonstrate how odd the clientele here could get.
“That almost sounded like an apology,” Jayde said, shooting me an irritated glance for speaking up for her.
He looked at my chip again, and my Wear-Tech jacket. Then he grabbed my lapel and inspected it, noticing a few threadbare spots.
“Pretty old model. You a Freeverser on vacation in the real world, or something?” He said it with a dash of contempt.
Then he leaned in close, towering over me – and I’m not that short.
“We’re not here to make trouble,” I said.
“Maybe you’re a lowdown, no good, piece of dirt Smith. You sure look like a Smith. We don’t allow Smiths in our place.”
Now, that got to me. You see, Smiths don’t “look different.” We’re just people whose parents didn’t want us or weren’t allowed to keep us.
A few hundred years ago, when there was a hell of a lot fewer of us, they’d have just called us orphans. But now there were billions across the five systems.
“John Smith” and “Jane Doe” stripped us of any humanity in the eyes of some, and that made it easy for the Big Six – and their many ancillary holdings – to take advantage of us.
Who gave a shit if a Smith was paid half as much, they’d tell their kids; he was twice as much of a burden on society.
Biologically, we look the same as everyone else. So stereotypes like “you can spot them because they have narrow foreheads” really pissed me off.
Meathead didn’t give a damn about my ethno-cultural sensitivities. He unhooked my chip then leaned in menacingly, hot stinking breath and stubble in my face. “Beat it, Smith, we don’t want your….”
And then his eyes widened, shocked.
He bent forward slightly, as if torn by stomach cramps, chewing his lower lip and trying not to cry.
He’d lost track of Jayde, who moved behind the man and, with one swift motion, used the butt end of her pistol to whip the man’s groin from behind.
The traders and assorted other bar staff ignored the situation, suggesting the bouncer was not a popular man. It was always disarming to a big guy like him, to have a young girl talk down to him.
He dropped to both knees and she leaned forward to whisper in his ear.
“Don’t insult my friend, you fat piece of crap,” Jayde told him as he doubled over in pain. “This isn’t a flyer bar, and I’m betting I could blow your brains all over the wall without a single other customer pulling a piece, or even paying much attention. We understand each other?”
He nodded twice then half stumbled away, retreating to the office area behind the club to lick his wounds. So to speak.
I looked at her, frustrated. “You mind?”
“What?”
“We’re trying to keep a low profile, for creds’ sake. The bouncer’s probably dialing the SP as we speak.”
She scoffed at that. “No one even moved.”
“Jayde…”
“We’re on G’farg Station. Nobody here cares.”
“I swear, sometimes you are such a …”
“Don’t say it Bob. Seriously. Not if you like eating solid food.”
She knew the ‘c’ word was coming next: Child.
“Then don’t act like one. You know what the doc said.”
Jayde had been seeing a shrink about her anger issues, trying to come to terms with the fact that she had 250 years of wisdom but the emotional self-control of a teenager. Her hormonal development was as arrested as the rest of her.
She crossed her arms and pouted angrily. I ignored her and asked if she wanted a drink.
“Gimme a Nickel Glory.”
I shook my head. “You’re flying in 20 minutes.”
“Fuck you, Bob.”
“Jayde, sweetie… “
“Fuck you, Bob. You’re not my father. I want a Nickel Glory. I’m a fucking adult and you better start treating me like one or I’ll …”
Another man had been standing nearby, listening in. He intervened sympathetically. “Miss, are you flying in 20 minutes?”
She looked at me. “Loud mouth. Fuck you both. Kiss my ass.”
He’d been polishing the glasses hanging by the synth server.
“I can’t let you drink booze if I know you’re flying. I could lose my license.”
“What if we pretend you didn’t hear me?”
He looked fatigued. “Everybody in the bar heard you, miss. Plus, you just about crippled my best bouncer, and even though he’s a complete bastard, we do kind of need him around here. So could we keep it to you just injuring my staff, and not costing me my license as well?”
I shrugged. “Tough break kid”
She looked at the bar owner. Then she batted her eyes…which almost never worked.
Jayde was very pretty, but she still looked like a kid, and some things were still sacred. True enough, he didn’t bite. “Miss, I’m old enough to be your father’s father.”
We grabbed a couple of coffees from the dispenser and then a booth in the back corner.
Jayde still looked unhappy, but she got down to business and asked, “What’s the game plan? You got any ideas where this guy might be?”
I did. “He’s either there to lockdown rights on a design, or he was tipped off that we were gonna serve him and he’s hiding out. Either way, G’Farg is a pretty busy licensing station; he’s probably got a dozen pending copyrights, which means at least a dozen reasons why some enterprising individual might try to kill him. So he’s going to be security heavy.”
She nodded. “So that means he’s going to a major center, because he’ll need accommodations for an entourage, his portable operation, the works. We know from his file that he
specializes in tech registrations, which favors the Eurasian Trade Zone. But that’s still a hell of a lot of cities, each with millions of residents.”
I took a sip of coffee. “I stopped by another joint in the market before we hooked up. A helpful Drax had him on a charter to New Tokyo this morning.”
“F-Class?”
“M.”
“They’ll beat us there, easy. Tough to find a guy in New Tokyo, boss.”
True enough.
She tentatively added, “If we bought a new ship with a Jofari Psychic Core we could be waiting for them at Tokyo Station when they…”
“Geez, Jayde. Really? Again?”
She was like a tenacious terrier when we had a debate point that I refused to concede. She just couldn’t be wrong, just couldn’t take it.
Even on occasions where she’d apologize, it was always a tricky prelude to reopening a debate about why my behavior was even worse. If that didn’t work, she’d turn it into a debate about why I needed to argue with her.
She said, “I think we need to talk about why this is such an issue for you.”
“Jayde, we’re using another intelligent species as a galactic compass.”
“Inter-dimensional, pan galactic, if you think about it.”
She wasn’t helping. “I think you’re missing the point.”
Her head lolled back in overt frustration. “Bob, they’re honored to do it. It’s a cultural thing for the Jofari. It’s a great honor to be picked to fulfill the armistice terms. And in case you’ve forgotten, they attacked us.”
That was true.
Of course, the Jofari were a thousand years ahead of us in medicine, education and flight technology and had, after watching our space efforts for some time, decided we were primitive-but-dangerous, and needed a stern talking to.
How right they were. But without having been involved in a war for more than 10,000 years, their long-standing reliance on the general civility of their K’Laar system neighbors meant the Jofari took the butt-kicking of a lifetime.
Of several hundred thousand lifetimes, actually.
Annually.
For two decades.
A culture driven by concepts of respect and honor, some 20 million Jofari died before they finally admitted defeat and unconditionally surrendered.
In that time, Earth’s R&D, funded by Hui-Matsumori, had figured out how to technologically incorporate the Jofari’s ability to self-locate, no matter where they were in the five systems, based on their relative position to Jofar.
Perfecting Hui-Matsumori’s quantum drive had taken another few decades, and by that time, Jofari had begun describing the practice of enslaving their oldest male to an engine as “The Great Sacrifice”, as if there could be no greater calling than to lead idiot Earthers around by the nose.
Like a lot of people, I thought history was pretty clear: the Big Six prolonged the war deliberately, using it to develop massive new markets, particularly in weapons-related tech.
But I didn’t put it that way to Jayde, who was a veteran.
Instead, I said, “I’m not saying we shouldn’t have taken some of the spoils of war or nothing, I’m just saying that you of all people know it was obvious after six months that the Jofari could never have defeated us.”
“So?”
“So … I don’t know. It just seems wrong, using an entire race just to avoid Short Space.”
The Jofari’s real allure was their ability to guarantee a near-perfect Quantum jump. The Quantum Drive was Hui-Matsumori’s trump card, its revolutionary tech.
By 2040, Earthers had figured out light speed was more than hypothetically possible and by 2050, both Hui-Matsumori and the nascent Cardale Group had spent billions trying to achieve it.
Then, in 2051, an engineer at Hui-Matsumori developed the Quantum Drive. Its theory was simple, its practical applications astonishing.
Instead of trying to travel over huge distances at great speed, the Quantum Drive moved the vehicle in question sideways, into one of countless other dimensions similar to this one. It then jumped back into our dimension, ideally at its new desired location.
A Hui-Matsumori drive would identify “Short Space”, a relatively small dimension near devoid of potential object conflicts – jumping into the center of a planet would be fatal, after all. The distance across the dimension, however, was irrelevant: the ship was only there for as long as it took its nav system to determine a return point in home space, ideally near its destination. A trip that would have taken decades of Earth years had been reduced to a day.
Short Space wasn’t always accommodating. Other species in other dimensions weren’t particularly fond of us dropping in unannounced, and plenty of Short Space dimensions were downright hostile. Plus, a fair number of our less-than-ethical pirates found it a handy place to hide out. Short Space was usually free of local contact for a few days, at least.
The Jofari’s psychic navigation took hanging around Short Space out of the equation. The vessel jumped in, with the Jofari guidance helping it avoid local contacts or foreign bodies, then charted a re-entry and jumped back, usually within a few hours’ flight from its final destination. It was beyond safe and it took about a minute, compared to 20 minutes to an hour for a standard Quantum Drive.
And the only extra cost was the life of one Jofari male for each engine. Once grafted in, they could never leave.
“Think about it, Bob: they love it, they feel honored, they live their normal life expectancy. They’re just not… independent.”
I’ve always liked Jayde, so I honored her request: I thought about it.
“No. Never gonna happen.”
She shrugged. “Suit yourself. But we could be docking at New Tokyo station by tonight if you weren’t so damn stubborn.”
Taking a little longer and facing a little risk to get to Earth, versus compromising my principles?
Well, like I said … Earth is a cesspool. It wasn’t such a tough decision.