Pandora’s Crew (StarWings Book 1)

by Gorg Huff

  “Which is nice,” Danny said, “but not quite what I was getting at. We’ll be running your schedule with your goods, but Pan’s over twice the size of Fly Catcher. After the stuff that’s going to stay with Fly Catcher, you’ll only be using a bit over a third of the cargo space and that’s not a great way to make the most profit on a cargo ship. Not for you and not for us. We’re going to want to fill the rest of that cargo space. And if we wait to do it until we’re back on your home world, we’re going to end up with two percent of less than half of our cargo hold filled.”

  “So you want off-the-books cargo too.” Checkgok’s mouth-hand scrunched up toward its body.

  That comment felt like a sneer to Danny. “No, I want it on the books. I’m not a member of a Parthian clan and I don’t have your cultural or biological structure. Humans are our own breeders. I’m my own clan and Bob here is his own clan. An advantage that you would expect for your clan, I want for my ship.” Danny sighed, and tried to come up with a way to explain to the Parthian what it was to be human. He’d read up on the Parthians and realized that “hive” was probably closer than “clan” in describing their social structure. Put together with what happened here on station and the meaning of the insults that they threw around, some of the differences between them and humans came clear. Now Danny was trying to make those differences clear to Checkgok. Preferably without convincing it that all humans were perverted monsters. A tall order, considering that by Parthian standards, humans are perverted monsters. It was as though humans ran into a race of intelligent black widow spiders who then tried to explain to the humans that killing and eating your partner was a natural and fulfilling way of ending a sexual encounter. Which it is . . . to a black widow spider.

  “The Pan is my clan home and I must see to the welfare of myself as you are obligated to the welfare of your clan. Which, at the moment, is my clan.”

  “Not exactly. While I have been made kothkoke to your clan—”

  “Me,” Danny interrupted, pointedly.

  “You,” Checkgok agreed, its mouth-hand scrunching up again, then continued. “You and the court have instructed me to act in this case as agent for Clan Zheck, so I am required to represent Clan Zheck.”

  “Which is made easier by the fact that in spite of the kothkoke oath, now that you have sobered up, you’re still emotionally of Clan Zheck, not Clan Danny Gold, right?”

  “Well, yes. But we of Clan Zheck hold our oaths sacred,” Checkgok said. And it was true, but there was more. It felt rather comfortable with this human though it didn’t know why. “Whatever I may feel now that I have, ah, sobered up, I swore the oath and it was within my authority to swear it, so it’s binding on Clan Zheck, and through Clan Zheck, on me.”

  Location: Hotel Lobby, Concordia Station

  Standard Date: 01 25 630

  Two days later, Checkgok sat with the monkey—human—named Barnabas Carter and discussed the tanta root that was a product of the Cordoba Alendail system. It was part of the official cargo of the Fly Catcher, and Checkgok was selling it here to raise some operating capital. Pandora had given Checkgok a list of equipment that the ship would need and the Fly Catcher’s credit was not available.

  Barnabas Carter clicked a greeting in very bad Parthian and they got down to negotiations. They were meeting in the hotel lobby. Checkgok was staying in the hotel while the legal issues were settled, cargo transferred, and finances arranged, because the judge didn’t want Checkgok under the authority of either ship until everything was settled. It was also worth noting that Magistrate Stella Jones owned a share in the station hotel and Checkgok was paying for good rooms.

  Location: Pandora, in orbit off Concordia Station

  Standard Date: 01 28 630

  Danny put on the helmet and headed for the airlock while he listened to Pan bitch.

  “I still say we should have gotten the whole cargo,” Pan said.

  “Maybe, but I understand why she didn’t rule that way,” Danny said as the air was sucked from the lock. He felt the vacuum tingle on his skin. Skin was a lot stronger than most people thought. Even a normal human wouldn’t actually blow up if they were exposed to vacuum. It would kill them, all right, but that would be because of the eyes, mouth, ears, and nose, not the skin. The skin would stretch at the loss of external pressure, and that would be both painful and debilitating for a normal human, but not immediately deadly. With his helmet, Danny wouldn’t even suffer vacuum burn. He had a sheath of subcutaneous muscles that kept his skin from expanding in vacuum.

  The lock pumped empty and Danny opened the door, still talking. “She has to keep everyone happy, Pan, or at least not so pissed off that they don’t figure they have anything to lose by calling the cops.”

  “There are no cops. The Cordoba and Drake families are simply trading houses.”

  Danny snorted a laugh. That was technically true, in the same way it was technically true that Julius Caesar was just a Roman general. “You know better, Pan. You’re just pissed that your quoting of precedent didn’t carry the day. Now, where is that relay you want me to look at?”

  “Section Fifteen E, forty meters sternward.”

  Danny looked, saw the stanchion, and leapt. He loved zero-g.

  “Did you have to leap, Captain? You know that is an unsafe procedure, and calling a dutchman to the station would cost us five hundred credits.”

  Danny ignored the complaint. “What about new crew?”

  “We have an offer in the trades, but no takers,” Pandora told him.

  “I was afraid of that,” Danny said. “We aren’t looking all that spry.” He reached out a hand and grabbed the stanchion as he flew by, and swung around it. He was wearing gloves because the stanchion was cold and he didn’t want to freeze the skin on his hands. Danny used the stanchion to make his way back to the hull of the Pan and took a look at the relay. It was four inches across, greenish gold, and slightly misaligned. Danny locked his boots in the foot holds to keep his position and started the realignment, while Pan gave him a report on Checkgok’s negotiations.

  Part of the problem with crew was the cost of flexsuits. The flexsuit was a hand-crafted piece of specialized clothing that cost thousands of credits. It was made one micro link at a time by an artificial-brain-controlled machine over the course of weeks, and each one was made to fit the individual wearer. They did what Danny’s genetically modified skin did, and more. They controlled heat loss and provided directional magnetic fields that made it possible to operate in space almost as though you were operating in a station. Danny owned one, though he tried not to wear it any more than necessary, because it was twenty years old and well past its safe life expectancy. So, in relatively safe environments, like next to Concordia Station, he went for space walks in his skivvies.

  Danny couldn’t afford to buy flexsuits for new crew, and crew that had their own could afford to be picky about the ships they signed onto.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Checkgok squatted before the console in its hotel room and considered the screen. The Pandora was a larger ship than the Fly Catcher. Both ships’ cargo holds were about a third full. With the roots it just sold, they could buy enough hydrogen to fill the Pandora’s tanks and pay the fines and docking fees, but that was about all. It debated trying to sell the foff seeds, but the station prices were outrageous and it wasn’t getting good prices for the cargo it had to sell. There would be better prices once they got back to Cordoba space.

  Location: CSFS James Bond, Aegean Cluster, Cordoba space

  Standard Date: 02 18 630

  Lieutenant Commander Tanya Cordoba-Davis was tied into the ship system as the Double O7 went through the jump. She immediately saw the light cruiser four and a half light seconds away along the route toward the next jump. It would be four and a half seconds before the Drake cruiser would see them, but five point three seconds before any sand or grape shot she threw could reach the point in space it was located. That would give it over a second to dodge, and it was a
safe bet its sensors were pointed right at them. The jump point wasn’t all that big. Still, it was worth a try. She sent the order Lieutenant Sanders was waiting for and the magnetized BBs shot out. Tanya was jerked against her harness as Newton’s second law slammed the Double O7 in reaction to the wings grabbing the magnetized BBs and flinging them away.

  At the same time, tied into ship’s systems, Tanya got the precise value and duration of vector change caused by the grapeshot as the massive magnetic fields of the Double O7’s wings flung them at the Drake Falcon-class cruiser. The Drakes used birds of prey from owls to eagles to hawks as names for their Falcon-class ships, the Drake equivalent of the Cordoba Hero-class.

  Tanya’s mind sorted through the data provided by the link and searched for the enemy blocking force. It should be near the next jump point, almost a light minute from here. But at almost a light minute, they would be hard to spot unless their wings were up. Something the size of a spaceship, even the largest spaceship, would be like spotting a grain of blue sand on a green sand beach a mile away.

  Tanya knew that even a lucky hit on the watcher wouldn’t do any good. It would have already sent a full description of their force, position, and vector to the waiting drakes. In just under a minute the enemy force would know precisely where to aim their telescopes. Besides, the Double O7 and the rest of the squadron were coming through the jump under full sail.

  The Falcon-class was flapping like mad to get out of the path of her grapeshot. Yes, it made it. She shifted her vector to intercept it. Her job was to push it away from the jump exit so that the enemy reads on the rest of the fleet would be less precise.

  The problem with space combat was that there was no place to hide in ambush, and most tactics were based on some variation of “hide in ambush.” Making the enemy think something was happening, but the wrong something.

  Tanya checked her systems and called up the vectors and data. They were traveling at seventy-five kilometers per second, but their exit vector from the jump was almost forty degrees off the vector they needed to hit the next jump, and it would take them almost a day to get there. Tanya ordered the Double O7 to two standard gravities, twenty meters per second acceleration, and went in pursuit of the picket ship. The rest of the fleet would be maintaining one standard g until they got some distance from the jump, then kill their accel to see if they could get the enemy looking in the wrong direction. It was a standard tactic, but it was standard because it was hard to counter.

  At distances like these, the delay between an action taken and an action observed made targeting, or even keeping your eyes on a target, difficult. But that wasn’t Tanya’s problem. She was after the Falcon-class ship out there.

  “Do we have an ID on that ship?” she asked Lieutenant Vance, who was acting as her sensors officer at the moment.

  “Not yet. No . . . wait one. It’s the Sparrow Hawk, built in 613 at the Granger Yards in the Drakar system. They have a good rep, but it’s seventeen standards old.”

  “That’s not old,” said Chief Petty Officer Ralph Howard, who was chief of ship and the senior NCO on the Double O7.

  “Check for upgrades anyway,” Tanya sent and grinned at the byplay. Ralph was mostly right. Ships were expensive to build and kept in service as long as possible, and if that was more true of cargo ships than warships, it was still true. The Double O7 herself was fifteen years old, and there were ships in the squadron that were upwards of fifty.

  Vance sent a vector projection. “Captain, it’s trying to curl around to stay in range of the squadron.”

  In Tanya’s mind, the vector projection ran out and several options presented themselves. She could shift immediately and keep the pressure up. She could let the Sparrow Hawk think she was getting away with it. Or she could split the difference, delay her response a little so that the Sparrow Hawk might think her sloppy, and make a risky move based on that. “What do we know about the skipper over there, Bosun?”

  Ralph dove into the shipnet and came up with a name and a service history. “Sir Douglas Gillette. He’s old for his rank and . . . Captain, he received his knighthood for service to the Drake Combine. He was born on Pabang and was an enlisted spacer for almost ten years before he got knighted and received his commission.”

  “Respond, Mr. Vance, but be sloppy about it, like you just noticed and are overcompensating. Rather like I am.” Tanya sent him a vector correction, and he looked up at her.

  Tanya grinned. “I am a spoiled darling of the aristocracy, Mr. Vance, not expected to be competent. Let’s see if we can encourage the ‘grizzled old spacer’ over there in that belief, shall we?”

  They continued their dance for hour after hour, Tanya and the Double O7 forcing Sparrow Hawk away from the squadron, but sloppily. The tension on the bridge got more and more intense as they got farther from the support of the rest of the squadron and closer to the Sparrow Hawk. Making mistakes meant taking chances. Even when you were intentionally leaving yourself open, you were left open. The crew of the Double O7 wanted the Sparrow Hawk to take the bait, but when it did they might get mauled.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “What the fuck?” Vance exclaimed. “Sorry, Captain. They are running. Just deadout running.”

  Tanya sighed. The vector of the Sparrow Hawk was shifting again, but this wasn’t a subtle attempt to close with the Cordoba squadron. Nor was it an attempt to get back to the Drake squadron that had to be out there guarding the next jump on the jump chain. It was a flat out run at three standard gravities, thirty meters per second, to get as much distance as he could from the Double O7. Tanya looked at the vector, called up her rutters, and realized that for the past hours while she was playing him, he was playing her. There was a jump along his projected course. It was a short jump, and according to Tanya’s rutters it was into a cul de sac. But the advantage of the attacker when coming through a gate was based on the fact that the defender would not know when, or precisely where, the attacked would make jump, and the attacker would see the defender first.

  When you were chasing someone through a gate, that advantage flipped. The fleeing ship knew where you were, and your options as to when and where you made jump were limited, whereas from the moment they passed through jump the fleeing prey could vector in any direction and send salvo after salvo back at the jump point.

  “Break off,” Tanya grated.

  The ship’s system came up with “simulation concluded.”

  “I wondered if you’d go for it after you realized you’d been suckered, Tanya,” Captain Hedlund said over the net. He ran the sym from his cabin interface. “Don’t underestimate old salts. Gillette is perhaps the best ship commander in Drake service.”

  “I read about him. But, honestly, sir, it all sounded like Drake propaganda. ‘See, we really do promote from the lower classes when it’s merited.’ “

  “It was Drake propaganda, and don’t doubt that the Drake old line Spaceforce officer corps resents the hell out of him. But the truth is that Gillette should be commanding a Dragon-class, not a Falcon-class, or even be a squadron commodore.”

  “If you say so, sir. But doesn’t that make it even more likely that he would expect my incompetence?”

  The Double O7 was back to half a standard G, all they could manage without venting plasma in this part of space. The starfield was empty of other ships except for the Davy Crockett, who watched the exercise from a safe distance. Tomorrow it would be the Davy that did a full-on sim, while the James Bond watched for trouble.

  Captain Hedlund stepped onto the bridge, flex suit covered by his uniform. Tanya got up and gave him the captain’s chair and he continued the talk. “Yes, but it really didn’t matter. Whether you were being stupid or clever, it still let him get to his back door out of the pocket. He’s done his job. The enemy knows our fleet’s vector and has good reads on all the ships. And we know crap about them except for the Sparrow Hawk, and it’s gone through that jump to a cul de sac or maybe a side route that we don’t know about, b
ack to the main jump route. You should have kept the known jump points, even the cul de sacs, in mind, Tanya. You’re good. In all honesty, as good a natural commander as I’ve ever seen. But you have the vices of your virtues. A tendency to expect to be able to outthink your opponent. You’re going to want to watch that.”

  Tanya nodded. The function of the Cordoba Combine Spaceforce was to protect trade in the Pamplona Sector. At least, in theory.

  Location: Drake Space, Drakar Palace, Drakar

  Standard Date: 02 16 630

  Counselor Le Wong, cousin to His Imperial Majesty Kenneth Drake and, more importantly, nephew of Ferdinand Drake, the chairman of the board and largest stockholder of the Drake Combine, strode through the corridors of the palace with a memory stick in his right hand and a severe expression on his face. Two Drake agents in Cordoba space recently met with fatal accidents, and when he combined that with the presence of a Parthian wingship in Drake space, it suggested all sorts of nasty possibilities. The Cordobas were up to something or they never would have let the bugs get hold of a ship.

  He stepped through the crystal pillars into the garden. His cousin waved. Then, seeing his expression, held up a hand. The garden, almost an acre, was full of trees, flowers, and ball courts. It was also surrounded by a plexicreat wall thirty feet tall. The emperor was, at that moment, standing on a rock over a crystal blue brook that bubbled and laughed its way through the garden. Prince Nave of Hellespont Three, the sole habitable planet in the Hellespont system, was at the base of the rock with an ash bow in hand, aiming at a target ten meters away. Prince Nave loosed his arrow as the emperor’s expression changed.

  “No, absolutely not,” the eleven-year-old emperor of the Drakar system said. “Politics are not allowed in the dragon’s garden. You know the rules.”