“First Four Eyes, then coffee, then a nap, then the rest of the damages. We’re still functioning, we still have air, we still have gravity, and we sure as hell know our weapons work. Everything else can wait.”
“Including your love life?” she asked with a smile.
“Take a tranquilizer,” he replied. “I’ve got captainly things to do.”
“I don’t want a tranquilizer.”
“Fine. Pay a visit to David. He’ll explain to you that we’re old school chums and we share everything.”
“Seven thousand, one hundred and forty-five,” said Sharon.
“What’s that supposed to be?”
“The number of nights you’re sleeping alone for that remark.”
2
Forrice, the burly, three-legged Molarian First Officer, spun down the corridor with surprising grace, waited for the Spy-Eye above the door to Cole’s office to identify him, and entered.
“That was nice work you did today, Four Eyes,” said Cole.
“I thought so too,” replied Forrice. “Shuttles weren’t made for those kinds of maneuvers.” He paused. “I see we lost the Alice.”
“Yeah,” said Cole. “Teddy Roosevelt would never forgive us. We’ve lost three of his kids—Quentin, Archie, and Alice. The only original shuttle we have left is the Kermit.”
“The two new ones—the Edith and the Junior—did pretty well,” said the Molarian. “The Valkyrie put the Edith through maneuvers that should have broken it in half.”
“I know. But she was lucky. So were you.”
“I’d rather be lucky than good.”
“I’d rather be safe than either,” said Cole. “What’s the injury list like?”
“Some burns, some breaks, everyone’s alive. I wish we had a medic.”
“We’re supposed to have two—one for humans, one for non-humans,” said Cole. “Problem is, we’ve been so busy getting shot at that we haven’t had time to hunt up anyone who can patch us up.” He paused. “How about the ship? What kind of damage did it sustain?”
“Well, it’s still running,” said Forrice. “I’ve got Slick out there now, walking the exterior, checking it out.”
“I don’t know what we’d do without him,” said Cole, referring to the ship’s sole Tolobite, a unique alien that, protected by its symbiotic Gorib, which acted as a protective second skin, was able to function in the airless cold of space for hours at a time.
“Every ship ought to have a Tolobite,” agreed the Molarian. “Have you killed David yet?” he added pleasantly.
“The thought has crossed my mind.”
“Where the hell did those five ships come from?” continued Forrice. “I thought we were preparing for a couple of class-H vessels—an easy day’s work.”
“It’s as much my fault as his,” said Cole. “There are close to two thousand mining worlds on the Inner Frontier. You have to figure a jewelers’ convention will draw every fucking thief for five hundred light-years. I should have figured they were sugar-coating the threat for David so he wouldn’t ask a higher price.”
“He’s a fence, not a military man,” agreed Forrice. “If you trust him again, it’ll happen again.”
“I know. From this moment on, all he is is a conduit. He brings offers to me, and I say yes or no.”
“I can live with that,” said Forrice. “Longer, if not richer.”
“The convention’s over tomorrow,” said Cole. “We’re obligated to stay on call until then, though I don’t imagine there’ll be another attack. Tomorrow, when the planet’s rotated enough so that the convention’s on the nightside, take Bull Pampas and a couple of other formidable-looking crewmen and collect our money.”
“Val’s the most formidable of all,” noted the Molarian. “There’s not a man or alien on board she can’t whip without working up a sweat—including Bull.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Cole. “But if they’re reluctant to come up with the money, you’ll threaten to shoot ’em all and eventually they’ll pay what they owe. If I send her down and they’re slow to produce the money, she’ll kill them all.”
“She would at that,” agreed Forrice. “I suppose that’s the benefit of a nonmilitary education.” He emitted a few hoots of alien laughter at his own observation. “Still, she probably saved the ship today.”
“It wasn’t the first time, it won’t be the last,” said Cole. “That’s why she’s here.”
“She’s the only one who looks fresh and ready to fight again,” observed Forrice. “If she was a Molarian, I’d stick around for years until she came into season.”
“Spare me your sexual obsessions,” said Cole. “It’s been a long day.”
Suddenly the ship shuddered.
“And about to get longer,” muttered Forrice. “I’m off to the bridge.”
“No,” said Cole. “Get down to Gunnery and make sure everything’s working. I’ll go to the bridge.”
They left the office together, and a moment later Cole entered the bridge.
“What’s going on?” he demanded of Christine Mboya, who was the ranking officer there.
“One of the class-K ships we killed today just exploded,” she replied. “A big chunk of the hull hit one of our shuttle bays.”
“Is Slick still out there?”
“I don’t know, sir,” she said. “I’ll check.” She scanned her computer screens. “Yes, sir.”
“Put it on audio,” ordered Cole. “Slick, can you hear me?”
“Yes, sir,” said the Tolobite.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, not sure, but my Gorib has suffered some superficial injuries. I’m going to have to come inside very soon.”
“Have you got time to check and make sure that the ship’s physical integrity hasn’t been compromised?”
“Yes, sir, I’m sure I have.”
“Good. Get right on it, and then come back inside.” Cole signaled Christine to break the connection. “Is Mustapha Odom awake?” he asked, referring to the ship’s master engineer.
“I think everyone is, sir.”
“So much for three shifts,” he muttered. “All right, tell him to inspect the shuttle bay from the inside and make sure there are no leaks, that it’s totally intact. Then, if he says it is, have him check for weak spots that we may have to reinforce in the near future.”
“Yes, sir,” said Christine.
“Pilot?”
“Yes?” said Wxakgini, the sleepless alien pilot whose brain was literally tied in to the ship’s navigational computer.
“Take us out half a light-year,” said Cole. “We can’t stay lucky forever. If anything else blows up, I want plenty of warning before any part of it can reach us. Mr. Briggs?”
“Sir?” said the young lieutenant at the sensor module.
“Track the other four ships, and let me know if they do anything besides float there dead in space.”
“It’s a pity you killed them all,” said a familiar voice, and Cole turned to face Val, his six-foot-eight-inch Third Officer.
“You’d have preferred to play bumper tag with them?” he asked sardonically.
“I need a ship,” she replied. “I could have used one of those.”
“I thought you’d joined us permanently,” said Cole.
“I have. But two ships can take on bigger, better-paying jobs than just the Teddy R,” she said. “The bigger a fleet we can put together, the more money we can make.”
“And the more bad guys we’ll attract.”
She smiled. “Attract and capture enough of them and someday we can even go to war with the Republic.”
“Yeah, we’re only ten or twelve million ships short,” he said sardonically.
“You have to start somewhere.”
“I sent David to bed without his supper,” said Cole. “That’s enough of a start for one day.”
“Want me to be your negotiator?” offered Val.
He shook his head. “How far would you get?
You’re wanted on almost as many worlds as I am.”
“But they’re different worlds,” she said.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” said Cole. “You’re most valuable doing just what you do.”
She shrugged. “You’re the captain.” Then: “But I wish you’d saved one of those ships for me.”
“Think about it,” said Cole. “Do you want a ship that can’t beat the Teddy R with four sister ships on your side?”
“I could beat it,” said Val.
He considered the statement for a few seconds. “Probably you could,” he admitted.
“So next time, don’t kill every last ship.”
“They were all shooting at us, and they’d damned near englobed us.”
“You can’t englobe with less than six ships, and twelve is optimum,” put in Malcolm Briggs helpfully.
“I said ‘damned near,’” said Cole irritably.
“Next time let me take a shuttle and approach the enemy under a flag of truce,” she said. “Slick can hide on the outside of it until we’ve docked at the ship I want.”
“Under a flag of truce?” repeated Cole.
“I promise there won’t be any survivors to file a complaint after Slick and I get done with ’em,” said Val.
“We’ll see,” said Cole.
“Okay, but remember what I told you: two ships can get more lucrative assignments.”
“I’ll remember.”
“Sir,” said Slick’s voice. “The damage is superficial. I see no reason to address it until the next time we put into port.”
“The Teddy R doesn’t put into ports, Slick,” said Cole. “It has an aversion to atmospheres.”
“I mean, the next time we dock at an orbiting station.”
“I’ll take it under advisement,” said Cole. “Now get back inside the ship. Do you need anyone to help you tend to your Gorib?”
“No, thank you, sir,” said Slick. “We can manage by ourselves.”
Too bad, thought Cole. I’ve been on this ship for more than two years, and I still don’t know what you look like without your second skin.
“We’ve moved out half a light-year,” announced Wxakgini, who seemed to have decided never to add a “sir” until Cole learned how to pronounce his name and stopped calling him “Pilot.”
“Thanks, Pilot,” said Cole. He turned back to Christine. “Tell Four Eyes he can leave the Gunnery section. It’d probably be a good idea if he went to bed. Someone on this ship ought to be wide awake ten or twelve hours from now.” He looked around, couldn’t find anything else requiring his attention, and decided to go down to the mess hall, where he sat at his usual table in the corner and ordered a sandwich and a beer.
“You look terrible,” said Sharon Blacksmith, entering the mess hall and sitting down opposite him.
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” said Cole. “There are a couple of twenty-two-year-old ensigns on this ship who happen to think that I look great.”
“That’s because they’re young and inexperienced,” said Sharon. “Seriously, when’s the last time you had any sleep?”
“Let me see. The attack came right at the end of blue shift, and I’d been up for a few hours. Then we fought through red shift, and now it’s about six hours into white shift. So I’ve been up, I don’t know, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three hours.”
“When you’re through feeding your face, go to bed.”
“Not ‘come to bed’?”
“You’d fall asleep in the middle of it,” said Sharon. “My vanity couldn’t stand that.”
“Well, if you think you’re that uninteresting . . .”
“Of course, you don’t have to drink all that beer. I could just throw it in your face.”
“You know,” said Cole after a moment, “given what we’ve been through the past couple of weeks, I think maybe the whole crew needs a rest. Nobody signed on to face the kind of odds David has been putting us up against.”
“Well, when you get right down to it,” she said thoughtfully, “we haven’t had shore leave since we were still a respected member of the Navy. That’s got to be a year and a half or so, cooped up in this damned ship.”
“Then I guess that’s our next order of business.”
“Aren’t you supposed to consult with your fellow officers, now that we’re a military vessel again—or at least a pseudo-military one.”
“Not necessary,” said Cole. “I already know what their responses will be.”
“Oh?”
He nodded. “Four Eyes won’t be interested unless I can find a world with lady Molarians in season. Christine will say she’s happy with whatever the rest of us decide, and then when we get there she won’t want to leave the ship anyway. And Val—Val will go anywhere they’ve got good drinkin’ stuff and she can get into a couple of bar fights before the locals realize what they’re up against.”
“So where are we going?”
He shrugged. “Wherever the crew can blow off some steam while we’re patching up the damages and making sure the shuttle bay’s not about to collapse. Wherever it is, it’d be nice if we could pick up a doctor or two there.”
“Well, there’s a pleasure planet called Calliope . . .” she began.
“No,” said Cole. “I know that world. It’s only a few light-years from the Republic. When we’re deep in the Frontier, being the notorious Wilson Cole and the Teddy R works to our advantage; everyone out there hates the Republic and loves its enemies. But when we’re only eight or ten light-years from the border, it’s too easy for someone to report our presence to the Navy—and when we’re that close, the Navy will come after us and claim hot pursuit.”
“There’s always Serengeti,” she suggested, referring to the zoo world. Then she shook her head. “No, that’s in the Republic too.”
“I suppose we ought to go to the source,” said Cole.
“Val?”
“She spent a dozen years as a successful pirate on the Inner Frontier. She’ll know where the action is.”
He touched the communicator on his wrist and uttered Val’s personal code.
“What is it?” said Val as her image suddenly appeared, hovering above the table.
“Time for some R-and-R,” said Cole. “We don’t have any pay-checks, but let’s get the money David collected for us and pay the crew.”
“Past time,” she responded.
“Where’s the best place to go, preferably a world that’s more than a thousand light-years from the Republic? Something the crew will like, with the facilities to patch up the ship.”
“There’s only one place,” answered Val, her face lighting up. “But it’s not a world.”
“What is it?”
“Have you ever heard of Singapore Station?”
“Maybe once or twice, in passing,” said Cole. “I figured it was just a space station.”
“Sure,” said Val. “And the Crab Nebula is just a little flickering light in the sky.”
3
It had taken literally a millennium for Singapore Station to attain its current form. Parts of it were almost fifteen centuries old. Parts were still being built. And parts had not yet even been conceived, let alone built.
It began almost eleven hundred years earlier, in the 883rd year of the Galactic Era. Two small space stations, built midway between the Genoa and the Kalatina systems, were splitting all the business in the sector and fast going broke. So, in desperation, their owners decided to form a partnership. The two stations were moved to a midpoint by space tugs, workmen and robots labored for a month joining them physically, and when they reopened they found that business was booming.
Word went out from that time and place that profits increased with size, and independent stations all over the Inner Frontier began joining like lost lovers. By the fourteenth century G.E. there were dozens of such super-stations across the Frontier, and they kept combining and growing. By the sixteenth century almost two hundred such stations had combined into one eno
rmous station—Singapore Station—that was as heavily populated as any colony world, and measured some seven miles in diameter (though “diameter” is a misleading term, since the station was not circular). It consisted of nine levels, and docking facilities that could handle almost ten thousand ships, from huge military and passenger vessels to the little one- and two-man jobs that were commonplace on the Frontier.
They tried a few other names, but because the super-station catered to all races, they eventually went back to Singapore Station, since men were still the dominant race on the Frontier and Singapore had been a fabled international city back on old Earth.
Singapore Station was halfway between the Republic and the huge black hole at the galactic core, and eventually it occurred to warring parties—there were always wars going on in the galaxy—that they needed a Switzerland, a neutral territory where all sides could meet in safety and secrecy, where currencies could be exchanged, where men and aliens could come and go regardless of their political and military affiliation. (In fact, there was some sentiment for renaming it Zurich Station, but the original name was already too well known to change.)
The station’s neutrality had, for the most part, been respected. Now and then a soldier, a sailor, or a diplomat was killed or kidnapped, but despite the total lack of law enforcement (or, for that matter, laws) on the station such incidents occurred much less often than on any populated world.
Singapore Station was known as a wide-open venue. Whorehouses catering to all sexes and species abounded. So did bars, drug dens, casinos, huge open black markets (because by definition no item was illegal or contraband on Singapore Station). There were elegant hotels, comparable to the finest on Deluros VIII, and because of the nature of the business that was sometimes done behind their closed doors, the security was outstanding. There were gourmet restaurants, side by side with slop houses, as well as alien restaurants catering to more than one hundred non-human species.
There was no weapon that one couldn’t buy at Singapore Station, no vessel short of a military ship that wasn’t for sale. There were assay offices that evaluated what independent miners from other worlds had dug up. There were legitimate medical facilities, and there were quacks of last resort for those who couldn’t be cured by the former. There were legal robots and illegal androids (and at least two brothels that specialized in providing androids of both sexes).
Starship: Mercenary (Starship, Book 3) Page 2