Confidence Game

by Britt Ringel

  The game chirped. “We’re being hailed,” Brooke said. She scrolled around the screen. “Oh, there’s a ‘Vic frigate fifteen light-seconds from us.” She accepted its communications request.

  Unlike the life-like, three-dimensional projection of Chief Engineer Shi, the frigate captain’s image was a still portrait. “This is BRS Bayonet, are you responding to the distress signal sent from Harmleikur Two?”

  Dialogue options appeared on the screen and Brooke read them over. “Yes, Captain. We stand ready to assist the evacuation effort,” she murmured as she highlighted her choice.

  The portrait of the handsome ship captain did not change but the words below him did. “Proceed in-system and contact the outpost’s manager. Please note that you must depart Harmleikur via the Adrastea tunnel point. The Ctama tunnel point is closed to out-bound traffic. Once you arrive in Adrastea, the refugees will be off-loaded and you will submit your ship to a safety inspection.”

  “Wait a minute,” Lochlain blurted. “That’s a load of bull. I don’t want the ‘Vic navy on our ship. Besides, our shipping plans call for us to return to Ctama.”

  Brooke frowned as well. She skimmed her new dialogue options. “I think we’re stuck. There’s no way to refuse now.”

  “Can we turn around and dive back to Ctama?” Lochlain asked as he folded her arms over his chest. He huffed unhappily. “Leave it to the Brevic Republic to make you regret helping them.”

  Brooke brought a hand to her chin. “The frigate is taking a position between us and the tunnel point. There’s not even an option to tell him that we’re abandoning the rescue.” She tapped a few keys on the game panel and shook her head.

  Lochlain grumbled. He pointed at the trail of ships sailing away from Harmleikur-2. “Is there even anyone left on the science base to rescue?” The distress signal emanated from the hidden, far side of the planet’s surface.

  “I assume so,” she answered. “I’d hate to have come all this way and be late to the party. I’m setting course for the planet.” She entered more commands and looked up to Lochlain. “It’s going to take a while to reach orbit.” She looked dejectedly at the game screen and added, “I guess this ends our session.”

  “We can play again tomorrow. Are you going back to sleep?” Lochlain’s question was subtly insistent.

  She pointed at an exercise machine in the corner of the compartment. “I was thinking about starting my physical therapy a little early. I have a few hours before I need to start prepping Zanshin for the dive.”

  “Don’t overdo it,” he cautioned as he moved away from her. “I’m going to do a sweep through the bridge and then make some lunch.”

  “How’s Elease dealing with the nightshift?” Brooke asked, testing her shoulder again as she powered off the game’s display.

  “She said once you get used to the sleep cycle, it’s just like the day shift.” He offered a final nod and left the compartment.

  Lochlain spent under five minutes on Zanshin’s bridge. The ship was well trimmed and on course inside the tunnel. Lingenfelter’s navigation console had a running countdown showing when they should initiate the tunnel effect with the Deltic drive. There were still nearly seven hours remaining.

  After entering a quick note into the ship’s log, he left the bridge for the mess. It was empty when he arrived and he resigned himself to a quiet lunch. Down the hall, he could hear the thrumming of Brooke’s fitness machine. He opened his datapad and browsed the trade pages of Vulsia. Vulsia was the last inhabitable star system between Kett and Carinae on the trailing side of the tunnel loop. Menali, the intervening system between Vulsia and Carinae, possessed an ultra-rare white giant that blasted away any chance for indigenous life inside the system. Ever since the Federation’s push to colonize the Carinae star system, Vulsia’s trade pages had boomed.

  The cargo consignment pages alone ran five deep. Vulsia was truly the last stop for freighters on this side of the Carinae loop as most captains were unwilling to risk their ship and crew to a run inside the Izari Nebula. After dropping off cargo at the Federation trade station orbiting the fourth planet, the overwhelmingly favored routes used the tunnel points leading back to Ancera or into Tengying-controlled space.

  The result was a stockpile of cargo containers languishing in the orbital’s storage facilities and a market favoring haulers willing to proceed to Carinae. Lochlain salivated at the ransoms freighter captains commanded for carrying even the most benign freight. He performed some rudimentary mathematics and the sums had him up and moving to Zanshin’s chartroom.

  Once inside the cramped compartment, he sat at the head of the chart table and opened the sector map. Menali was a two-day dive from Vulsia. The tunnel at Menali leading to Carinae spanned just over another four days. If Zanshin successfully navigated the depths of tunnel space and found the exit, she would have traversed one of the most inhospitable environments in space due to the nebula. Inside the compressed reality of tunnel space, lethal amounts of radiation would be pumped into Zanshin that could not only kill biological life but destroy mechanical constructs as well.

  Even the normal space inside Carinae was not without hazard. The only safe refuge in the system was near the second planet, whose enormous iron core generated enough of a magnetic shield to deflect the massive amounts of radiation away from the planet. The cost of such a dense planet core was a superearth with gravity almost four times standard. While human life would never thrive on Carinae-2, cities with robust artificial gravity systems could counteract enough of the crushing forces to make them habitable.

  Overall, Carinae’s colonization was a mammoth Federation enterprise but the government was in desperate need of a new coreward district system. With the Federation’s expansion away from Kett, that old anchor system had slipped farther and farther away from the frontier. If Carinae could be established and navigation made safer, the system would provide the much-needed springboard to maintain Solarian influence in that direction of the galaxy. Failure could mean ceding that frontier to the ever-expanding Brevic ambition.

  Lochlain rotated the view of the star system. Leaving Carinae would be much easier than entering. One of the system’s priceless Type-B tunnel points offered instant access to Iaslone, a star system outside of the Izari Nebula’s influence. Iaslone opened the second half of the tunnel loop back to deeper inside the Federation. He frowned slightly as he counted the three, barren star systems Zanshin would have to negotiate to arrive at the major star system of Vellin. Given his ship’s limited endurance, it would spend an entire fuel cell run just returning to populated space. He scrutinized the trade pages again while rehashing the promising math.

  Chapter 26

  Lochlain felt crushing nausea hit him as Zanshin dove into normal space. He likened it to being flipped upside down dozens of times while spinning rapidly in a circle. Even clutching his chair’s armrests did little to diminish the sense of tumbling vertigo. Having no choice, he accepted the sickening sensations and panted to ride out the disorientation as he had always done before.

  Truesworth’s wavering voice cut through the curtain of discomfort. “We are inside the Vulsia system, Captain. The tunnel point beacon is green.” There was a pause before the sensorman added, “Elease, you’re cleared out of the immediate vicinity up to the middle marker.”

  Lochlain forced open his eyes and saw his navigator nodding feebly as she continued to cover her mouth with a hand. She finally swallowed successfully and croaked, “Wow, that was a bad one. I’m sorry.”

  There was strong evidence supporting a theory that the level of disorientation experienced in a tunnel dive was proportional to the physical distance the ship was from the center point of the tunnel when its dive was initiated. The principle explained why a dive into tunnel space was usually gentler on a crew than dives coming out of the altered realm of physics. It was much easier to plot a position inside a star system and hit a tunnel point’s center than in the featureless, compressed folds of t-space.


  The rough transition seemed like a harbinger of disaster to Lochlain. Earlier, he had come to the chilling conclusion that Carinae not only offered Zanshin the best chance to extricate herself from her economic predicament but possibly her only chance. Lingenfelter’s less than encouraging navigation performance with the present dive had resulted in fiercer than normal disorientation for his crew. If she encountered similar problems fixing the exit point of the radiation-saturated Menali-Carinae tunnel, Zanshin could miss the tunnel exit entirely.

  No one was exactly sure what happened to starships that missed their exit dives, mostly because those starships were never heard from again. Such tragic events were a rarity given advances in navigation; however, tales of poorly timed tunnel drive malfunctions and near-miss dive events were still whispered in the darker corners of orbital taverns. The latest apparent victim was a super-massive Cape-sized freighter that failed to return to normal space several years ago. The insurance underwriters insisted the cause was “navigator error” but the freighter company had attempted to pass the loss off to a loading company in Helwan that mislabeled some of its cargo. The only certainty was that the 725,000-tonne cargo ship and her fifty-seven crewmembers were lost to tunnel space.

  “It’s okay, Elease,” Lochlain answered once he could speak. “After we’re cleared to the orbital, let’s rerun your tunnel navigation calculations and figure out what happened.”

  Lingenfelter cringed at the mild reproof but nodded dutifully. She was currently rotating Zanshin, orienting the 230-meter workhorse toward the fourth planet.

  Lochlain pressed a finger to his console. “Mercer, how’d we do on dive efficiency?”

  Brooke replied shortly, “Eight point eight percent.” The tone of her voice made her displeasure easily evident. “At this rate, we have enough for two more star systems.”

  Carinae was still within reach. “Why are we draining so much?” he asked.

  Brooke’s technical answer did little to clear matters up for him. As they discussed the disappointing dive efficiency, he watched Lingenfelter make her final course adjustments. Despite the poorly plotted tunnel dive, the bridge was running smoothly and required nothing more than minimal oversight. He once again thanked providence for his experienced deck officer at sensors. Lingenfelter calculated speed and distance and placed her results on the system plot. A cursory look at the bridge wall screen told Lochlain that Zanshin would arrive at the orbital in three hours and fifty-three minutes. He worked his controls to transfer Lingenfelter’s tunnel calculations to the chartroom. “All right, Elease, let’s step out and run the math again.”

  The post mortem of the tunnel dive attributed the miscalculations to minor but incremental navigation errors compounded by Zanshin’s vexing chronometer issue. The additive effects resulted in the ship’s Deltic drive generating the tunnel effect 1.6 seconds too early. The dive was within the acceptable margin of error but the imprecision was still significant. Lochlain forwarded their findings to Brooke with a pointed reminder of how important it was to locate and correct the ship’s timekeeping problem.

  By the time Lochlain and Lingenfelter had finished their dissection, Zanshin was nearing final approach to the trade orbital. It was nearly 01:00 ship’s time. Mercifully, the freighter had made a peaceful run in-system without garnering attention from any of the three system defense ships policing space between the Ancera tunnel point and fourth planet. Their unmolested trip was not attributable to luck. Well over ninety-five percent of inbound cargo ended up inside the storage compartments of the trade orbital and it was far easier to conduct inspections inside the safety of an orbital rather than the dark of space.

  Elements from a visiting Federation destroyer squadron bumped Zanshin back in the docking queue but she moored safely after only an hour’s delay. Once Lingenfelter announced that the ship’s virtual lines were secure, Lochlain synchronized to the docking ring, maneuvered the docking tube to Zanshin’s airlock and secured the ship’s access to the huge orbital. For the crew, it was finally time to sleep.

  Vulsia’s trade orbital was something of a Frankenstein’s monster. Originally, the orbital had served the planet below as a standard space station. When the Federation began its push to colonize Carinae, freight poured into the system and the station was hastily expanded and upgraded in a patchwork fashion. Eventually, Vulsian senators convinced the Federation Council to dedicate the orbital purely to commerce and authorize the funds necessary to construct a new orbital to serve the system.

  That new orbital was a scant five hundred kilometers from where Zanshin lie moored and scheduled to enter preliminary service in under a year. It was a smooth, aesthetic design that would greatly increase Vulsia’s commerce capacities. In contrast, Zanshin’s current harbor was a piecemeal assembly of “plug and operate” compartments, crudely grafted equipment and “temporary” cargo storage sections pressed into permanent service through necessity. The external chaos of the station translated directly to the ambiance inside as overworked and overwhelmed orbital security stretched to its limits. The station’s layout was a befuddling jumble of side passages intersecting each other in a dizzying labyrinth that would have confused most minotaurs. In short, it was a smuggler’s dream.

  The next morning, Lochlain’s first order of business was delivery of the consignment containers to the orbital storage yards. Unsurprisingly, three of the five containers they carried were ultimately destined for Carinae and would, once again, wait in consignment until their owners bid high enough for a foolhardy ship captain to justify the dangerous trip. After Lochlain deposited the last ore container, he processed the electronic formwork to prompt the final payment. Thirty-five thousand Federation credits trickled into Zanshin’s account. That apparent fortune would shrink immediately by almost ten thousand credits when the crew’s shares were deducted. Provisions for a ten-day trip to Carinae could easily cost another five thousand. Docking fees, shore power while docked and consumables for general maintenance and life support would rapidly drain the remainder leaving Lochlain with less than five percent of his original total to place in reserve for a fuel cell recharge. In his current economic position, a pricey equipment failure on the ship would translate to insolvency. The problem would only exacerbate since Truesworth, Lingenfelter and Naslund had completed their trial runs and commanded full engineer and deck officer shares going forward. By the time Lochlain returned the shuttle to Zanshin, taking consignments to Carinae had never looked so good.

  He plodded down the main deck toward the mess in a foul mood. When he reached the common rooms, he heard the distinctive noise from the exercise machine inside the entertainment lounge. Lochlain poked his head inside and saw Brooke rowing hard on the machine. His eyes narrowed. “You’re going to aggravate your shoulder and end up costing us a fortune in medical care,” he growled. “I already had to pay to get the auto-doc rewrapped by a certified technician because of you.”

  Brooke stopped to gape briefly at his allegation before offering her captain a distinctive salute. “Yeah, sorry about that,” she replied acerbically. “Next time I’ll have the good sense to duck and let you get shot.” She resumed her rowing at a slightly more furious rate.

  Lochlain snarled but reined in his anger. He walked up to Brooke and offered in a more gentle tone, “Sorry. I’m just mad at the galaxy right now. I delivered our freight and we’re basically more in debt now than when we started.”

  “We still have the other container,” Brooke reminded him. She slowed her frantic pace on the machine back to a more reasonable level.

  Lochlain sighed. “All that money was up front.” He looked at her helplessly. “Sorry, but I needed the money for the squib.”

  She stopped the machine. “Seriously?” She grunted in disbelief and stared blankly ahead for a moment. “Well, damn. I guess we better hope your contacts here have some particularly illegal cargo they need transported.”

  “We need to deliver Isett’s container first,” Lochlain said.
“Although, after my last conversation with her, I’m a little concerned.”

  “About what?” Brooke took her feet off the rowing pedals and pulled off her fingerless gloves.

  “She suggested collecting the bounty on Zanshin. Offered to cut me in and she might decide to do it even though I declined.” Lochlain’s brow furrowed and his mouth twisted. “Hell, her people in this system may even decide to try it by themselves and she’d have genuine deniability.”

  “We could always not deliver the cargo,” Brooke suggested as she wiped her face with a towel.

  Lochlain shook his head. “We’d never get another job, smuggling or legit. Plus, Cindi Isett’s ‘to-do’ list is something you want to stay off of.”

  “Okay,” Brooke said as she rose from the machine, “then we go in expecting trouble. I still have my raid armor and we have some nice PDWs thanks to Mr. Munn or whoever he really was.”

  “Are you fit for duty?” Lochlain asked as he looked at her shoulder. Her tank top left her shoulder bare and it was still an angry pink.

  Brooke shot him a purely diabolical look. “You seemed to think I was last night.”

  Lochlain blushed despite himself. “Okay,” he surrendered with a laugh. “Who else do we take with us?”

  Brooke toweled the side of her face again as she thought. “Well, Jack is former Brevic military so he’s capable.”

  “I’m not worried that Jack won’t know how to use a gun,” Lochlain countered artfully. “I’m more concerned that, as a Brevic, he’ll just start shooting for no good reason.”

  The pair shared a laugh at the Republic’s expense but Lochlain finally said, “He does seem like he’s got a level head. What about Elease and Casper?”

  Brooke inhaled thoughtfully. “I think they’re too green. Besides, we only have three submachine guns.” Her eyes widened with inspiration. “Take Elease. She’s a pilot and can sit in the shuttle with the engines revving in case we need to leave quickly.”