The Rim Rebels

by Zellmann, William

  Jirik sighed wearily. "I don't want to hear it, Valt. Bran will find you something else to do besides drink – something that will help us get off this mudball. And frankly," he continued, "I don't give a bloody damn about your sex life, or lack of one. You bloody fool! Don't you realize that, as a shareholder, it's costing you money to sit here, too?" Valt was staring sulkily at the table again, and made no reply. "Tomorrow, Valt," Jirik insisted, "0700. Engineering. Be there, or by deity we'll have another shareholder's meeting to assess you penalties for every delay you cause. Is that clear?" A surly bob of his head was Valt's only reply. In Jirik's Navy days, they would have called Valt's attitude "dumb insolence." Jirik flushed. "I said 'is that clear?'"

  "Yeah, Yeah," Valt sulked. "It's clear. Damn it, Captain, I'm an Astrogator, not a damned grease monkey, or cargo jockey!"

  "Well," Bran put in, "We don't need an Astrogator until we're back in space. We do need you to help us get back there as soon as possible. Be there tomorrow morning, Valt. I don't plan to let your laziness cost me more of my share." Valt flushed at the word "laziness," but nodded silently.

  "All right," Jirik resumed, "Let's move on. Bran's going to report on the progress of the repairs. Bran?"

  Bran rose tiredly to his feet, and launched into much the same report that he'd given Jirik earlier. When he mentioned that most of the parts they would need would have to be custom-made, Tor, beet-faced, began frantically waving for attention.

  At Jirik's nod, Tor spoke up. "Uh . . . Captain There're . . . uh . . . some things I d-don't understand. How could a little pebble damage a big ship like the Lass so badly that it would c-c-cost so much to fix? And how come we just can't get the parts f-f-from a Ship's chandler? Uh, isn't that what they're for?"

  Bran smiled gently. "Ship's chandlers carry supplies, right enough, but they don't carry many drive parts; they leave that to the repair yards." He raised a hand as Tor's mouth opened. "And, no, the local repair yards don't have the parts we need, either. You see, Tor," he continued in a pedantic tone, "The Lass is an Alliance Navy surplus Combat Carrier. She's a big ship. You've seen the other ships on the field?" at Tor's nod, Bran continued. "They're much smaller than the Lass. The Rim isn't very populous or very wealthy, and the planetary systems are much further apart than the inner systems. Big ships are too big for trading economically along the Rim. Now, if the Lass were a Rim Tramp, like those other ships you've seen, the yards would probably have the parts. If we were in our usual sector, along the Alliance/Empire border, they'd certainly have them. But out here, we're going to have to have them made, and that takes time and costs credits. I've told the Captain that we will be here for at least two more weeks. If the other generator isn't seriously damaged, we may make his two-week target. If it is seriously damaged," he shrugged. "I just don't know."

  "As for your first question," he continued, "We talked a little about the drive systems before. I guess you don't know much about starship propulsion systems."

  Tor shrugged. "Not much. Schoolbook stuff, and what we talked about when we got hit. I know that we use the two different drive systems, but I don't understand why we didn't just use the second one when the f-first was damaged."

  "Aw, Crap!" Valt interrupted. "Give the kid a book to study, and let's get on with the meeting!"

  "Damn it, Valt," Jirik replied irritably, "We all had to learn, once. Go ahead, Bran." Valt grunted, but made no other reply.

  Bran nodded. "All right, Tor. I'll try to explain it in words, though it really has to explained in mathematical formulae to make sense."

  "You were right, as far as you went," he continued. "We do have two separate systems. The Inertial Drive is for intrasystem travel. Actually, it's a variation of a system thousands of years old called 'ion engines'. Basically, the fusion reactor powers generators which strip subatomic particles from atoms of fuel, and projects them through the tubes at velocities approaching C; the speed of light. So, the ID is Newtonian, used in the regular universe. Unfortunately, that's the system that we lost. That little pebble was wandering around the edges of this system at a relative velocity of thousands of kilometers per second, plenty of speed to penetrate the Lass from end to end, if we'd been facing that way. We were unlucky enough to be breaking out of Supralight just as that damned little rock intersected our course. If we hadn't been powering up the Inertial Drive generators when the damned thing hit, it would've just punched a hole through them, and would have been fairly easy and cheap to fix. But the generators were powering up, and ate themselves. Nearly total losses."

  Tor shook his head. "But, why couldn't we just use the other drive to limp to Boondock? I couldn't believe how much that tow cost!"

  Jirik scowled. "I couldn't believe how much it cost, either, This damned planet doesn't have a tug service, so all we could do was send out a call for help."

  "In remote systems like this," he continued, "usually either lunar shuttle services double as tugs when necessary, or asteroid miners will give you a tow, for a fee. Boondock's three moons are just small hunks of rock that aren't worth developing, so there's no lunar shuttle. All we could do was hope that there was a miner who wanted to pick up some credits." His face reddened, and his scowl deepened. "That bastard that came out to us, though, was nothing but a damned pirate! If that second miner hadn't shown up, and got him into a bidding contest, we'd have had to pay that so-and-so ten percent of the salvage value of the ship and the cargo! As it was, it cost us an arm and a leg to get here!"

  Bran shrugged. "Water under the bridge, Captain." He looked at Jirik pointedly. "If I may continue, the Supralight, or Inertialess Drive consists of a field generator that, when activated, creates a field which renders the ship inertialess. In effect, it turns the ship into a giant quark, removing the constraints of Einsteinian physics. The other part of the Supralight drive operates on a photon reaction principle. Streams of photons are directed through the same tubes used by the reaction drive. Since photons have no mass, they're the only things that can be ejected from the ship while it's encased in the field, and even they have to ejected through what I guess you could call a 'hole' in the field, though that really doesn't describe it. And please don't ask me how massless photons can provide propulsion. The only answer I could give you would be 'magic." There may be a dozen people in the Alliance who understand jump space and jump physics, but they would have to use mathematics to 'explain' it. We can't maneuver when Supralight, of course, and that's why a voyage is done in a series of 'jumps' between stellar systems, with intermediate stops for astrogational course correction. That, in turn, is why a good astrogator, like Valt here, is worth his weight in iridium. The astrogator can make the difference between large profit and disastrous loss on a voyage.

  Valt smirked. "I'm glad to see that at least someone appreciates my ability!"

  "We all appreciate your ability, Valt," Jirik replied with a wink in Bran's direction.

  As Bran resumed his seat, Jirik had been watching the others' faces, which had become thoughtful. This was the first time that they realized that the parts would have to be manufactured, and the first estimate that they had received of the duration of their visit to Boondock

  Jirik rose again to his feet. "As you can imagine, we're running our operating capital seriously low. I'm going to ask each of us to withdraw 200 credits from our Share Accounts, which will constitute our spending funds for the next two weeks. If we're here longer than that, we'll allow more."

  Valt's head snapped up. "Two hundred? For two weeks? I can't live on that!"

  "Not if you keep boozing the way you have been," Jirik agreed, "But I don't think you will be. I think that you're going to be too tired from working in this damned gravity to do a lot of boozing."

  "B-b-b-but why, Captain?" Tor asked. "I'm not p-p-planning to buy anything special, but I'd like to know what's going on." He subsided into a red-faced silence, fidgeting nervously.

  Jirik smiled gently. "I was just coming to that. As you'll remember, the original ide
a that convinced us to take this long cargo run to the Rim was that we would take the proceeds and buy a cargo of heavy metals on spec, run it back to our home sector, and sell it at a good profit. Unfortunately, a pea-sized asteroid scrapped that plan. Delivery penalties ate into our profit from the run. Repairs are going to eat up the rest of them, and probably dig into our operating capital.

  "A couple of days ago, I checked into the cost of replacing an Inertial Drive Generator, and factored in a rough guess of the cost of repairs on the other one. I also factored in refueling costs, docking fees, and even the cost of lading crews if we do happen to get a cargo. We're not broke, but we're far from flush. What I want to do is take the credits in our share accounts, and try to chase down a cargo Remember, the old bitch is a big ship. We need to arrange one or maybe a number of cargoes that hopefully will let us replenish our operating capital and also, hopefully, get headed back to our home sector. As Bran mentioned, Tor, the Lass is too big a ship to try to compete with these Rim tramps. We've got to get back toward inner Alliance or Empire space, where we can operate. We're strangers here. We don't know the territory. We don't know where the cargoes are, we don't even know who knows where they are.

  "I'm suggesting that we use our Share Account funds to grease palms, pay bribes, or even just buy drinks; whatever it takes to track down some cargoes that will let us get back to our own territory, with at least enough credits to refuel once we get there. I not only want your credits, I want your help! I know that I'm usually responsible for the Purser's duties, arranging and negotiating cargoes, and so on. But this time, we're all going to have to pitch in. Keep your ears open. Valt, if any of your drinking buddies are off any of these tramps, start asking questions. I've been too busy to have any free time, but that's going to change. I'm planning to begin socializing, especially with tramp Captains, Traders, and shipping agents.

  "Any contact with any of these people could lead to a cargo, and we need one badly. Remember that we're interested in large, bulky cargoes, or a lot of smaller ones; but the ones we're interested in are the ones headed inward! We can't survive on the Rim. We'd be out of business in a standard month, and stranded on some rim world. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm not interested in becoming a rim world settler. Are there any objections to my plan to use the Share Accounts?"

  Jirik looked at the circle of grim faces in the silence that followed. Even Valt was looking thoughtful, and Tor's face betrayed his fear that the spacing career that he wanted so badly seemed to be slipping away.

  The next morning, Tor accompanied Jirik to the rented office for a full day of appointments, the first of which was with a shipping agent. Jirik's hopes were not high. He suspected that the agent was merely comparison-shopping for rates, and that the cargo's destination was another Rim world. He couldn't afford to take a chance, however. A full schedule of repair contractors, ship's chandlers and more shipping agents would follow this.

  He trudged heavily across the field apron, Tor lumbering at his side, apparently unaffected by the crushing gravity, and chattering incessantly.

  Tor had just left on an errand when there was a quiet knock on the office door. Since he knew that he had no appointments scheduled, Jirik growled in annoyance and shouted, "Come in, Damn it!" ready to pounce on whatever unfortunate being walked through the door

  His irritation turned to incredulity and amusement when his visitor entered. The man was virtually a caricature, a cartoon. He looked exactly like everyone's conception of a bookkeeper: small, slight, and rabbity. He was barely over 160 centimeters in height and couldn't possibly have weighed much more than 50 kilos in a one-G field, even soaking wet. He had a narrow face and frame and hunched shoulders. His old-fashioned eyeglasses had to be an affectation in this day and age, but they helped mark him as the eternal loser, destined forever to wear "kick me" signs, and to be the target of bullies. He had a quick, nervous manner and self-conscious smile that only served to reinforce the whipped dog image. Jirik controlled himself with an effort, and his irritation reappeared. "Well?" he grunted, "What is it?"

  The visitor eyed Jirik appraisingly. The Captain was about 170 centimeters in height, burly and muscular, with mediterranean features and complexion. He had massive shoulders and thick arms that were probably very helpful in Outback's heavy 1.4G gravity. His rumpled appearance and curly, rebellious hair emphasized his harassed air.

  The smile never left the visitor's face. "Captain Jeffson of the independent freighter Bonny Lass?" he inquired in a high, nasal voice.

  Jirik was irked by his visitor's querulous tone. He growled a graceless acknowledgment. "Yeah, so who the hell are you, and what the hell do you want?"

  The visitor glanced nervously around the office. "My name is Ralf Tomys, Captain." His darting eyes fixed on his ring watch as he continued conversationally, "Tell me, have there been any repairmen working in this office today?"

  Jirik was startled and annoyed. "No. And what the hell business is it of yours?" He began to rise, bristling. "If you don't get to the point, I'm going to toss you out of here on your head. Now What the hell do you want?"

  The rabbity smile never wavered. "Quietly, Captain. I'm coming to the point. I merely had to be sure that no surveillance equipment is being used here. After all, this is a rented office, and what I have to discuss is highly confidential.

  Jirik's flare of anger faded into bafflement. "What the hell . . . Who the hell would want to spy on me? And what the hell could we have to discuss that's so confidential? And who the hell are you, anyway?"

  The little man slipped a card from his belt pouch and presented it without a word. It was an ordinary flitter license; but when Ralf Tomys touched a corner of it, the flitter license faded, to be replaced by credentials identifying him as a Class I agent of Alliance Intelligence. Jirik gulped. Class I! There were only a dozen or so Class I agents in the Alliance. From his Alliance Navy days, Jirik knew that a Class I agent ranked with a Vice Admiral, and had the power to commandeer any Alliance warship without warning or permission. There were also few civilian captains that would dare to refuse to "cooperate" with a Class I. They could make life very difficult for anyone who got on their wrong side. They were responsible only to the Director of Alliance Security, a member of the Alliance Cabinet. And this little rabbit of a man was one of them! Jirik sat with his mouth open, astounded. Tomys' nervous smile had steadied into a confident grin. The eyes behind the anachronistic glasses glinted with humor. "I know, Captain. The holovids show us all as tall, tanned supermen. It's very handy in my line of work, but it does sometimes make things awkward. Anyway, Captain, I didn't come here to impress you. I need your help and the Alliance needs your help."

  Jirik was regaining his composure. "Hold it!" he bellowed. "I did ten years in the Marines, so don't run that patriotism crap on me. I'm an independent trader with my own ship and crew, and the last thing I need is to get involved in some weird spook caper. So, do me a favor, and don't unpack your cloak and dagger. I've got enough troubles!"

  The confident grin was still in place. "Relax, Captain. I'm not trying to get you or your crew involved in some desperate mission. I certainly don't want you to be some kind of superspy – you're not temperamentally suited for it. The fact is, I need your eyes – yours and those of your crew. Now, if you are quite finished erupting like a volcano, we can get down to business. May I sit down?" Without waiting for Jirik's answering nod, Ralf Tomys hooked a chair with his foot, pulled it to him, and primly sat down.

  For once, Jirik was speechless. His mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. Things were happening too fast. His graceless nod helped conceal his racing thoughts. Of one thing he was sure. He must be very careful in his dealings with this Tomys. He decided that his best course was to say as little as possible, and to try to control his already seething temper. That last wouldn't be easy in the face of Tomys' smirking air of superiority. With an almost visible effort, he regained control of himself.

  "All right," He dem
anded coldly, "Are you ready to tell me what this is all about, or are you having too much fun?"

  Tomys chuckled. "I'm sorry, Captain, I guess I was enjoying myself a little. I apologize." The little man's sincerity seemed real, and Jirik could relax his control slightly as his boiling anger began to subside. "I really do need your help, though." Tomys continued, more briskly. "How familiar are you and your crew with this part of the Alliance?"

  "That's easy," Jirik growled, "We're not. I'm sure you knew before you came in here that we normally work the inner rim, Between the Alliance and the Empire. This is our first trip to the outer rim." He grimaced. "And our last, if I have anything to say about it – and I do."

  Tomys nodded. "I heard about your ship's damage. Just how bad is it?"

  Despite himself, Jirik's anger and frustration flared at this reminder of his misfortune. "Pretty damned bad, damn it!" he roared. "Holed by a bloody hunk of rock. Bloody Inertial Drive generators scrapped. Delays and repairs eating up our profit margin, not to mention the bloody damned fortune in towing fees. And these bloody damned yard birds takin' forever to fix the old bitch!" An impressive stream of cursing continued until Tomys stopped it with an impatient wave of his hand.

  "I don't have time to sit here and admire your command of invective, Captain," He stated flatly. "I gather that you'll be on Boondock for a while, and that's what matters to me."

  "Since you're a stranger to this part of the Alliance, I'm afraid that I'm going to have to lecture a bit." He held up his hand to forestall Jirik's angry retort. "Have you ever heard of Dr. Ran Atmos?"

  "Not until last night," Jirik replied "He's some kind of writer that's got everybody here excited."