Stars Uncharted

by S. K. Dunstall

  “Too dangerous,” Roystan said. “As soon as anyone hears about it they’ll be after us. Better to get rid of it before anyone knows we had it. Plus, people will pay more for this ship whole than they will for its parts. Who knows what secrets are stored inside it somewhere?”

  He disappeared onto the bridge after that—presumably to find a buyer—while the rest of them congregated in the crew room to try to read the memory.

  Pol had collected jewelry and other valuables from the Hassim’s crew quarters. She doled it out now, keeping the most striking for herself. A long, crimson nen-silk jacket—an exotic purchase that had taken a month of Reba’s profit—and a bracelet of Josune’s, made from rock Josune had collected from the world the Hassim crew had named Sassia.

  Josune had machined the rocks so thin they were translucent except for the red veins that showed through. She’d ground up more of the rock to extract the unknown red veins. The red had turned out to be a metal composite, malleable at body temperature, hard and strong when allowed to cool to the regular eighteen degrees Celsius of a spaceship.

  At body temperature, the mineral leached red dye that didn’t come off. Josune had learned that the hard way. Her wrist had stayed red until she’d gone into the machine to change her appearance before securing passage on Roystan’s ship.

  Josune shook her head when Pol got around to her.

  The Hassim crew had marked Sassia as a potential source of income. The red mineral, three plant species that might be medicinal, and another one that might be a potential drug. All this information would be available in the memory of the Hassim, which contained a record of everything that happened on a ship. Everything. From the simplest temperature change, to the camera feeds, to every message sent or received, and to every nullspace jump. It was write once, store forever, and practically indestructible. And extremely hard to hack if you didn’t have the right access codes.

  Josune didn’t expect the crew on The Road to access the memory any time soon.

  She didn’t care where the Hassim had been, which was what The Road crew wanted. She had her own records on the reader behind her eyelid; had backups of that stored off-site. But if they could hack Feyodor’s access codes, Josune could find how the company men had got on board the Hassim. She would see who had died first. Might find out which company they were by the questions they asked. If they had asked any.

  And she wanted Feyodor’s research.

  * * *

  • • •

  Roystan joined them two hours later. There were lines of exhaustion around his mouth and his eyes. “Jacques, can you reschedule the next delivery? I’ve sold the ship.”

  That was faster than Josune expected.

  “Roystan, I told you not to do any deals without us,” Pol said. “You’re too soft.”

  Roystan sounded meek. “It was a good deal.”

  “What about her cargo?”

  “Everything that’s left, all in the one deal. Ten million.”

  It was a good price. “Who did you sell it to?” Josune asked.

  “Brown Combine.”

  The Brown family had sponsored expeditions of their own to find Goberling’s lode. Had Roystan known that? If so, he knew more than he was saying about the big companies. Not only that, Brown was almost ethical, the company least likely to shoot them all and take The Road as a prize.

  Least likely, but it didn’t mean they wouldn’t. As far as Josune knew, The Road was unarmed. It wouldn’t stay that way, and Josune knew where to get the weapons from. And which weapons she wanted.

  “I hope you told them the memory was gone.”

  “I did. Not sure they believed me, but they’ll take it anyway. The meet-up is in ten hours.” Roystan ran his fingers through his hair. “We’ve never run behind on a cargo drop before.”

  “I’ll reschedule,” Jacques said. “We have a three-day window, Roystan.”

  “I know, but—” He stared at the plate Jacques put in front of him.

  Josune wasn’t sure if it was a mealtime or just a snack. She’d lost track of the time. She discreetly tested a fold of her skin. She’d need time in a machine soon to get rid of the excess weight. Life revolved around food on The Road.

  “Some of these places go close to the line on supplies. Delays can be problematic. I don’t want us to—” Roystan breathed out hard, looked away from the plate. “Is there anything to drink, Jacques? I’d kill for a coffee.”

  “Coming right up.”

  Jacques had never said how long he’d worked on The Road. Jacques’s mission, or passion, seemed to be feeding Roystan. He’d wait on him hand and foot if Roystan would let him. Cargo took second place, but no one seemed to mind.

  Roystan cupped his hands around the hot mug and sat back. He looked cold. “How’s the decoding going?”

  Josune indicated the memory on the table. With its nobbled ends, it looked like a giant femur stripped of meat. The nodes Carlos had attached to it were the color of muscle. “Not good.”

  “What’s taking so long, Carlos?” Pol demanded.

  “If you think you can do it faster, you do it.”

  Ship memory was designed to be indestructible. Even Pol’s meddling shouldn’t wipe it. Josune didn’t believe anything was indestructible. Maybe she should offer to swap her certain knowledge for the memory stick, where she could work on it in her own time. “You might not find anything.”

  “This is the Hassim,” Qiang said. “There’ll be something.”

  “And when we find it”—Pol held up her wrist, and the bracelet, to the light—“we’ll go exploring. We have a memory full of information that will help us find all the worlds the Hassim found.”

  Roystan finished his coffee quickly. “We’ve a cargo to deliver. People are waiting on us. Relying on us. Let’s not forget that. We’re contracted, and a ship that doesn’t deliver on time doesn’t get any more contracts.”

  “Contracts.” Pol touched the bracelet. “Who cares when we have the Hassim’s records?”

  “I do. And given we’re about to break our perfect delivery record, let’s be ready to unhook the cargo as soon as we arrive.” Roystan took a top-up of coffee from Jacques with absentminded thanks as he watched Carlos work.

  “We’re rendezvousing with Brown Combine in ten hours. We have a delivery after that. How do we lock this away so Brown doesn’t get it?” He addressed his question to everyone, but he looked to the engineers for answers.

  Even a trustworthy company could only be trusted so far. Especially when the Hassim memory was involved.

  “Strongbox.” Josune had a lot of experience locking things away. What could she set up with what they had on the ship? “Start with IDs.” Iris recognition and voice. They could do that easily enough. “A minimum number to unlock.” So one person couldn’t sneak in and steal it from the others. “Three should be enough.” She’d like to use all of them in the ID, but if Brown came in fighting, they might not all live.

  She didn’t mention that to Roystan.

  “Later, once we have the time, I’ll build extra security into the ship itself. Something only the captain can override.” It was poetic, really. “Like the authentications on ship memory.” Funny to realize they were planning on using similar security to that they were trying to hack. “It will take time to do properly, and I need you, Roystan, to code in something you’ll remember for the override.”

  Pol said, “What if something happens to Roystan? How do we get the code?”

  If only it were that easy. “Captain Feyodor didn’t give her codes to her crew.” Josune realized too late what she’d said, but no one seemed to notice.

  In fact, Roystan said, “What captain would?” Then he made a sound that might have been an Oh and smacked his palm against his forehead. “Give it to me.” He snatched up the memory and set off at a fast clip for the bridge.
r />   They all followed.

  Roystan slid under the panels. “Tools, please.”

  Josune handed over her repair kit.

  Carlos shifted from foot to foot. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’d rather I was doing it.”

  “You won’t know what to do.” Roystan opened the memory slot.

  Carlos looked to Josune. “Tell me he’s not pulling out our memory.”

  She couldn’t lie to him.

  Roystan slid out from under the panel and handed Josune the ship’s memory. “Don’t lose that.” He slid back under with the Hassim’s memory.

  “It’s not going to work automatically if you put it into our backup slot,” Josune told Roystan. “It’s coded to the captain. It won’t record. It won’t display.”

  “These old ships have a writeable secondary memory. Back then you couldn’t rely on the backup. Sometimes it failed. So they wrote to a secondary memory on the ship itself.”

  “Never heard of a memory that failed,” Carlos said.

  Josune hadn’t either, but she had heard of secondary memory. Every Goberlingophile had. Goberling’s first ship—he’d traded it in after he’d sold his first batch of transurides—had it. The memory had contained the first two months of Goberling’s trip. After that, it had stopped recording because the memory had been full.

  “I can’t believe this ship is old enough to have secondary memory.” Goberling’s ship had been fifth-hand when he’d bought it, and almost ready for scrap. “What does it prove, anyway?”

  Roystan’s voice was muffled. “The write to the second memory drops a level of security, because it has to write.”

  “You’re telling me it’s going to read a fully encoded master memory and write it to memory here on ship?”

  “Not just write it,” Roystan said. “It bypasses ship security to do so.”

  “You’re deoxygenated,” Carlos said. “Spacing out. No old equipment will bypass modern security.”

  Josune agreed with him.

  Roystan poked his head up and over the panel. “Secondary memory used to be for emergencies. To find out what happened in those last moments before a ship was destroyed.”

  “Never heard of that.”

  Neither had Josune.

  “They had to be able to override it. You’ll find you can still do so on modern memory, although most people don’t know that.”

  “Tell us what’s happening,” Pol demanded. “In plain words. We’re not technical like them. And when do we get the Hassim memory back?”

  “Simple words someone like you can understand, Pol,” Carlos said. “Might be—”

  Roystan frowned at him.

  “He’s got old technology on this ship.” Josune didn’t care what Carlos said, but they were all tired and ready to snap. “Roystan thinks that by swapping the Hassim’s memory with The Road’s memory, The Road will read the memory, and we might be able to hack the read, rather than the memory itself.”

  “He’d better hurry up and do it,” Carlos said. “I don’t like not having our own ship’s memory in place.”

  Neither did Josune.

  “That’s the trouble with this ship,” Pol said. “It’s cobbled together. So much of it is old.”

  “Might come in useful now.” Roystan smiled as data started scrolling across the screen. “Look at that.”

  Except the data was only being recorded in the secondary backup memory, and if it was anything like the secondary memory on Goberling’s original ship, they’d only get two months’ worth. The Hassim’s memory stick contained years of data. They’d lose most of it. Josune scrambled for the panel. She still had The Road’s memory in her hands. She had to connect it back in. “Carlos, grab me a T5 cable.”

  She kept one eye on the panel, and prayed. Roystan was crazy. He could lose it all. Was he trying to? It felt like hours before Carlos put the cable into her hand.

  Josune snapped the cable into The Road’s memory and plugged into a nearby console. She didn’t breathe until she was sure data was being rerouted back through The Road’s memory.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Now what?” she asked, when the data had finished copying and they were back in the crew room. “We can read the data, but we still have to decode it. We need Feyodor’s personal code for that.” If Josune didn’t have that, how in the galaxy was Roystan going to get it?

  Roystan took the time to drink half a coffee before he looked at what had been transferred to their own ship.

  “Well,” Pol demanded.

  “I’m thinking, Pol. Trying to think like Taki Feyodor.”

  Did Josune imagine he looked at her?

  “She was a sentimental woman. A dreamer.”

  Dreamer, yes. “Sentimental? Never.” Not the woman Josune had known.

  Roystan’s look was more direct this time. Almost challenging. “You think not?”

  “No.” Her return look was as challenging as his. He might have told Taki Feyodor she was a formidable foe, but Josune had worked for the woman for more than ten years.

  He tilted his head. Looked at her. The hazel in his eyes caught the light of the system statuses on the screens around him and reflected back green with the gray.

  They might have been the only two in the crew room.

  Jacques cleared his throat. Loudly.

  Roystan looked around, then turned back to smile at Josune. “I can do this. Watch.” He cupped his hands together. Blew on them. Cleared his throat, took a deep breath.

  Josune didn’t know why she was breathing fast.

  Roystan took another breath. Nodded to himself, rubbed his palms together. “I am—” His voice faded. He took one more deep breath and started off more naturally. “I am the ruler of the galaxy. With my ship, and my determination, no one can stop me.”

  Josune knew the rest. She whispered it with him.

  “I am off to find my fortune. I go places no human has gone before. When I return, I will be rich, rich, rich.”

  The poem young Goberling had stenciled on the outside of his ship before he’d left to go exploring. It wasn’t common knowledge.

  Even less common was the wording. Biographer Sandi Tann had transcribed the original words as I am off to seek my fortune. Anyone who knew to use find instead of seek was a serious Goberlingophile.

  “He was young.” Roystan wrinkled his nose. “Egotistical.”

  He’d had a reason to be. And it hadn’t unlocked the memory.

  Josune poured herself a coffee. Her hand shook. “Sentiment isn’t cutting it. It’s still locked.” In fact, it was waiting. “It wants biometric ID.” Finger or iris print.

  “It won’t need it now.” Roystan leaned across to thumb off the request on the screen.

  Something clicked. Data started scrolling. Words, images, statistics.

  It couldn’t be that easy.

  Roystan looked up and caught Josune staring at him. His smile was half a grimace.

  It really couldn’t, shouldn’t, be that easy. Josune was missing something important.

  “It’s open,” Pol announced, and Josune and Roystan turned to see what the Hassim’s records showed.

  * * *

  • • •

  The explorer Goberling had worked a small, one-man ship somewhere out on the edges of the known galaxy. There were hundreds like him, hunting for exotics—drugs, spices, dyes, and minerals—from the planets that no one had thought to catalog yet, let alone consider for habitation.

  His first three trips had been failures. On his fourth he’d come back with chunks of pure transurides kilometers wide.

  Transurides were metals—eight stable elements, atomic numbers 122 to 129—never found, or made artificially, on Earth, because they required cosmic forces to create them. They were discovered when hum
ans ventured into areas that had been subjected to immense gravitational stresses unknown on Earth. Despite their high atomic weight, the number of protons and neutrons made them unusually stable—the long-expected island of stability that scientists had predicted for so long in the higher metals.

  Although there were eight metals in the series, most people thought of only one element when they talked about transurides. Element 126. Dellarine. Wonder metal that was used for everything from high-end communications—the bionics in Josune’s eye were only possible because of dellarine—to body modding. Modders loved it because dellarine had an affinity with the human body that made extreme mods possible.

  Goberling’s return with an unimaginable prize in the precious metal had sparked a mining rush of immense proportions. Unfortunately, all anyone knew was the rough direction Goberling had gone. They tried everything. Placing tracers on his ship, straight-out following him. But he’d hidden his trail well.

  He had made three further trips, bringing back a fortune in heavy metals every time. Then he’d disappeared. That had been more than eighty years ago. People had been searching for the lode ever since.

  Captain Taki Feyodor, on the Hassim, had been one of those searchers.

  Exploration was an expensive business. The Hassim regularly ran out of money. When that happened, Feyodor dug into her data banks to find what she could sell. Information about mineral deposits she’d run across in her hunt but had been too single-minded to follow up, potential new spices and drugs from worlds no one knew existed. Exactly the sort of thing, in fact, that Goberling had been looking for when he’d stumbled across his find.

  Her journey log was in the Hassim’s memory, along with everything else that had happened on ship.

  That log was the prize the crew of The Road wanted.

  Josune didn’t care about that. She’d been to those places. She could get to those worlds long before The Road did. No, she was interested in the big prize. The one set of information Feyodor’s crew hadn’t had access to. Feyodor’s research into Goberling himself.

  Everyone on the Hassim had been obsessed with Goberling. That was why they were on the ship in the first place.