Pandora’s Crew (StarWings Book 1)

by Gorg Huff

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Pan assigned a newly repaired drone to the trimming of the conks bush they took on as a supplement for Checkgok, who had somewhat different dietary requirements. Pan had vats that produced proteins of various sorts and gardens for plants. But until now her crews were all human, and she was a little concerned about how the Parthian would react to the mixed diet, whatever it said. Naturally, as a pure Parthian ship, Fly Catcher had extensive gardens of Parthian delicacies. But all Pan was able to get were some basics. Another piece of petty vindictiveness from the Fly Catcher, she suspected. “What would you like for evening meal, Checkgok?” she asked the new Parthian crew member.

  “I have no great preference, ship,” Checkgok said absently. “Why are you so understocked? Your holds are mostly empty. Aside from algae for oxygen and a few vegetables, hydroponics was effectively off line until I came aboard.”

  “Restrictions from the Drake and Cordoba trading houses. They are trying to lock up interstellar trade. That was why we were at Concordia. It’s unaligned and officially not known.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Pan considered. She didn’t know what Checkgok knew of the history of humanity in space. And the truth was that restrictions from the Drakes and Cordobas was almost more an excuse than a real reason for the state of the ship. “After the breakup of the Terran Federation, there were hundreds of independent successor states, some containing several systems, some that were just a single space station. Trade was controlled by those individual states.

  “However, in the Pamplona sector over the last three hundred plus years, most of those successor states have been forced to give up control over their interstellar trade to the trading houses. There were half a dozen of them two centuries ago. Now there are two. The Drakes and the Cordobas. Each controls hundreds of routes.

  “In theory, the systems on those routes are still independent. But if they start getting uppity, the trading house that owns the route comes in and cuts them off from trade until they see reason. Sometimes they go farther than cutting them off from interstellar trade. There have been several ‘unfortunate accidents’ which brought about changes in system government and the rebuilding of system capitals.”

  “What sort of accidents?”

  “Large rocks falling out of the sky and just happening to land on the capitol. That sort of thing.”

  “How do they get away with it?”

  “They have lots of ships,” Pandora informed Checkgok, “and control over interstellar trade. Also, they don’t entirely get away with it. There are the places like Concordia Station, far enough off the beaten track to be ignored, but close enough to make smuggling easy. And there are a lot of systems that are plenty happy to deal with independents if they can do it without being caught by the great houses.

  “Canda will be happy to see us and cook the books about where we came from. The Drake representative will look the other way for a suitable bribe and—”

  Pandora stopped. The expressions of Parthians were different from humans. They didn’t exactly have faces because they didn’t have heads. They had two flexible eyestalks extending up from the front of their body and a flexible mouth-hand extending down from the same general area. Disgust was generally signified by a pulling in of the mouth-hand just as Checkgok’s mouth-hand was doing now.

  “Remember,” she chided gently, “humans are their own clans. Breaking the rules isn’t cheating the clan. It’s cheating for the clan.”

  “Which doesn’t make it right,” Checkgok insisted, but its mouth wasn’t being held quite so close.

  “No, it doesn’t. But remember, the rules aren’t being made to the advantage of all humanity. They are being made to the advantage of those groups that are making the rules. Captain Gold had no role in their making. Nor did the government of the Canda system, for that matter.” Pan wasn’t at all sure that the Parthian could get its head around the concept of government. And she was even less sure that she could explain the quasi-governmental role of the great trading houses. She was fairly sure that underground movements and divided loyalties would not be concepts that Checkgok could comprehend.

  “It’s not Captain Gold’s actions that bother me, or even the government of Canda. It is the actions of the Drake representative.”

  Pandora didn’t have an answer for that, not one that she was comfortable with. No doubt the Drake trading agent for the Canda system felt quite justified on the basis of some combination of “everybody does it,” “the rules are unfair,” and “I deserved better than to be sent to this backwater.” Possibly even “I’m out here with only a small staff and I’d be dead long before the fleet got here if I made a fuss.” But the corruptibility of human beings was a bit shocking to intelligent artificial brains too.

  “In any case, we will slip into the Drake trading lanes with little notice and be allowed to trade with only the occasional bribe. Canda system has one marginally habitable planet, Candahar, and three rich asteroid belts. Most of the population still lives in orbital habitats, but that is changing. Even lots of habitats don’t have the room that a planetary surface has.”

  While Pandora spoke, Checkgok went to a console and pulled up information on the Canda system. The information was a bit Earth-centric to its mind, but it was able to translate to its own measurements.

  Candahar gravity, .88 Earth normal.

  Atmosphere 12 psi at sea level, slightly higher oxygen and CO2 content and lower nitrogen content than Earth, more argon and methane so you can live on the surface, but if you don’t wear a filter mask you will develop lung problems.

  Water is liquid in the tropical zones but not very far into the temperate zones. Most of the five million people on the surface live on three roughly Australia-size continents that are near the equator. If they were to heat the planet enough to melt most of the glaciation, it would become a water world with no surface land. Even Mount Justin, the tallest peak on the planet, would be over a hundred feet underwater.

  There are a variety of life forms that are native to the seas and ice packs of Candahar, though most are limited to the sea. The ground is covered by a thin layer of moss where Terran plants haven’t taken over, but the giant warm-blooded crabs of Candahar’s seas are considered a major delicacy. The silkweeds, a sort of under ice sea life, produce a very fine silk in a wide variety of colors. In spite of that, the main exports of the Canda system are manufactured goods made in stations in the asteroid belts and Kuiper belts, and some raw materials.

  “My people,” Checkgok said, “love the silk. It is impossible to dye it, so the colors are natural, but bright, and it is very durable. Even the small ones can’t dirty it.”

  The life cycle of a Parthian was decidedly odd. Breeders birthed live young into pools. The young at that stage had no exoskeleton and little in the way of bones, sort of a cross between a fish and a worm. But they would eat anything, even each other. So the clans separated them into individual pools, where they were fed and raised for a few years until they became amphibious and started growing a flexible cartilaginous shell, at which point their education began. At that stage of their development, they were still pretty much utterly dependent on the hive. Over the course of more years, they grew larger and the difference in size between male non-breeders, the smallest, male breeders, female non-breeders, and the largest, female breeders, became apparent, and their exoskeletal structure hardened. Pan accessed her records. The silk was used as rugs and wall hangings in the quarters of the amphibious phase, and in room hangings for the adults.

  “That’s fine. You are the master trader, both for your clan and for the ship,” Pan said. “We will also need to replace several of the servos that are in less than good repair. And we have no cash. What are you planning to trade?”

  “Parthian filters,” Checkgok said. “They are one of our better biotech items. They let oxygen and CO2 through, but should . . .” Checkgok paused and looked up something. “Yes, they will stop methane. And they ca
n be shaped readily.”

  Pan looked up the filter material in the cargo manifest. They had about three hundred tons of the stuff and it was in light, thin sheets. It would make a lot of filter masks for the weight. “That might well be. I don’t happen to know what they are using for their filters at the moment, but it looks pretty good. We should produce some filter masks for you and Captain Gold, anyway. It looks like they will stop a lot more than methane.”

  Checkgok agreed.

  Parthians had two slots to either side of their mouth-hands. They were near the upper shell and they inhaled through one and exhaled through the other. They had what amounted to voice boxes in both openings and the resonance of the lungs affected the voice of the inhaling voice box. Their speech was a combination of clicks and whistles, but they could do a decent imitation of human words.

  Location: Concordia Free Space

  Standard Date: 02 01 630

  Danny Gold woke slowly and checked his to-do list. It was shorter than usual. They bought some replacement parts at Concordia and Pan was using them to good effect. The list was shorter, but by no means eliminated. He would get to those in a bit. First, he slipped on the skull cap interface. It wasn’t necessary since his genetic engineer parents built a radio communications unit into his skull, but the cap made the connection clearer and less subject to data loss.

  Cap on, he faded into the ship and felt Pan flexing her magnetic wings as she swam for the first jump point. Danny let himself feel the pull of space on the flexing wing as though it were currents of water he was swimming through. He tried to feel where the space was denser or thinner. It wasn’t something he could describe to someone who couldn’t interface with a hypership, but when those mighty magnetic wings pushed against space, zero-point energy pushed back, and how hard it pushed back was a function of the shape of space.

  From Concordia to Canda system was a month of travel time. Danny intended to enjoy it. He liked looking for jump points, even when he didn’t find any. With each sweep of each wing, the shape of space, the currents of space, shifted, and somehow his mind could reach out and feel what space was going to be like a bit farther out. He was looking for the flush spots, where the waves of compression balanced out to a smooth, flat area. That was where you found jump points. Not in all of them, but a lot. There were, in any given cubic AU, hundreds of them. Most of them were short range, from a few light hours to a few light months, but—occasionally—you ran into one that took you light years. That was what made Concordia Station its money. It had two nearby jumps that went four and seven light years, respectively. The one to Canda was the four-light-year jump, and it was three days travel to a six-light-month jump that came out in a six jump gray route that linked to an official Drake-registered jump route that led to the Canda Kuiper belt.

  But there didn’t seem to be any of the flat spots in the offing. Danny wasn’t really surprised. This area had to have been thoroughly searched out. If there were any jumps, they would be in the rutters downloaded from the station. With a sigh, Danny took off the cap and got up, cleaned up, got dressed, and went out to the galley for breakfast.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Checkgok was slurping up some foul-smelling gunk, then, using its mouth-hand to type on the keyboard, accessing data.

  Danny thanked his makers for the improved control of his gag reflex and went about fixing his breakfast. It wasn’t that Checkgok was sloppy or anything. It was just that its hand and its mouth were the same body part and, to Danny, it seemed like it was slobbering all over the keyboard. “What are your plans for today, Checkgok?”

  “I am trying to determine the most likely products for sale and purchase at Canda system. Which would be helped if we knew where we were going from there.” The right eye stalk lifted in what Danny took to be a look of inquiry.

  “To an extent, that is going to be up to you. We are going to take you home, but I don’t think going there directly is the best option. We need to buy and sell cargo and build up more goods. You need more experience with humans. Where do you want to go from Canda?”

  “I am not certain yet, Captain, but I will research the matter and have an answer for you soon.”

  “That’s fine, but don’t set it in concrete. Things come up and we may have to divert. You know that the jump points change over time, some of them unpredictably. We may have to divert around a block.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  Not having much else to say, Danny ate his breakfast and went to work, managing servos in ship’s maintenance. Around noon, ship’s time, he merged with the ship again and felt the space.

  “Pan, can we speed up a bit?” Danny’s interface fed him the data. They were accelerating at .7 standard gravity, fast enough to walk around easily but not really pushing. On the other hand, going faster would mean more hydrogen fed to the wings, and fuel cost was an issue.

  “If necessary, Captain.”

  “Do you feel the pressure increase from the right dorsal wing?”

  “Yes, Captain,” Pandora agreed with no noticeable pause.

  “I think the jump point for the Canda route may close early this season.”

  “It is possible, Captain, but the station rutters say it’s good for another three weeks.”

  “Maybe,” Danny Gold said to his ship. “But maybe not. Pile on the Gs, Pan. I don’t want to be caught here for months, waiting for the gate to reopen.” There was a short pause while Pan warned Checkgok, then the gravity started to increase as Pan accelerated faster.

  Jump points moved over time, and jump points could close for a while, then reopen, or they could close permanently. Jump points that closed cyclically were called gates. The Canda route from Concordia started with a gate, open about three-quarters of Concordia’s year, which was about eight standard months. But space had a kind of weather, more than simply orbital cycles. There were differences in the density of dust and radiation. Those differences could affect the shape of space and, in doing so, close a jump or open one. Whatever was causing it, it felt to Danny like the gate was going to close a little early this cycle.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Three days later, traveling at 1.2 standard gravities, they were still ahead of the wave front and riding the pressure wave as they approached the jump point. Pan’s forward wing set flapped A wing, then B, C, and D. By the time forward C was flapping, so was mid A, and then aft B, in a choreographed dance that swept the space around the ship free of debris, from small rocks down to subatomic particles, and Pan felt every particle as a pressure on her wings. So Pan sailed through truly empty space, and as she reached the jump point the wings grabbed even harder, because they swept the dust from both ends of the jump.

  It was that sweeping clear that made the jump possible. With nothing in either space and the shapes of both bits of space congruent, they effectively became the same space. Pan shifted the magnetic potentials of her wings and she was at the far end of the jump.

  Once through, of course, the stars were different and aside from the jump point itself, which was never more than a light second across—and in this case less than a tenth of a light second—the shape of space was different.

  Location: Free Space Big Dark

  Standard Date: 02 01 630

  Deep in interstellar space, Pan looked around, her sensors alert. However others felt, she was always nervous at jump. She couldn’t sense what was on the other side of the jump until she was through it, and to a being that lived her life constantly seeing light years in most directions, the blindness—however short its duration—was frightening. In this case, as in almost all others, there was nothing within light seconds of them.

  They were just where they were supposed to be, 4.02 light years to the galactic north, spinward. Pan flexed her C and D wings and began shifting onto course for jump point 32,321,392.

  On board Pandora, it felt a little like a ship heeling or a car taking a fairly gentle curve. Internal gravity was provided by the ship’s thrust, and the limiting factor w
as the number of standard gravities that the passengers, crew, and cargo could take.

  Standard Date: 02 04 630

  Three days into the trip to the next jump point, Danny noticed a dip in the compression that wasn’t what he expected. Danny felt the space around the Pan through his interface. He felt the pressure as the wings flapped through space, throwing plasma back. But it wasn’t just the plasma. The shape of space itself produced a noticeable pressure against the wings. What Danny was feeling was a change in the wings’ energy draw. Six of the wings were shifting through space a touch easier than they should, like a propeller that was cavitating.

  “Pan, bring us about two points up for the next hour or so. I want a feel of the lane here.” What Danny was hoping for was a new jump point, one that might get them closer to Canda, quicker. What they found, after about three hours of shifting course back and forth, up and down, was what looked like a jump in the wrong direction. There was only one way to tell, though, and that was to go through the jump and see.

  “Do we try it?” Danny asked Pan.

  “We have cargo for Canda,” Pan replied.

  “No. We have cargo that we figure on selling at Canda. That’s not quite the same thing.” Danny considered. “But we probably ought to ask Checkgok what it thinks. While going through that jump isn’t dangerous, there is some risk.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Checkgok, working in the galley, was not overly enamored of the notion. One eyestalk pointed at Danny, while the other maintained its focus on the screen and its mouth-hand continued to hunt and peck across the keyboard. “It is a ridiculous waste of time. We spend weeks searching for this hypothetical jump point and even if we find it, it will probably only take us a few light minutes or perhaps light hours. And we are already in route to a jump that will carry us six light months in the direction we wish to go.”

  “But a new jump route could open up new trade routes and offer us increased profits,” Danny said, opening the fridge to pull out a juice.