Pandora’s Crew (StarWings Book 1)

by Gorg Huff

  “Possible, but not probable,” Pandora chimed in. “Over ninety-eight percent of jumps are short range, from a few light hours to a few light months. Long jumps like the Concordia links are rare, and even the six-light-month jumps like the one we are heading for are not overly common.”

  “Come on, Pan. We found the shortcut to Concordia Station just that way,” Danny tried to argue, though it wasn’t a very good argument and he knew it. But what else could he say? They were right. He could order the Pandora to go look and she would, and Checkgok would go along, whether it wanted to or not. But Danny had agreed to take on the Parthian’s responsibilities, and he was serious about fulfilling his obligation. So, grumpily, after a little more argument, he agreed, and they went on to the known jump point. But as they passed, he had Pan adjust her flapping to try and get the best feel for the location of the possible jump point.

  Pan recorded the most likely location in her rutter. Her rutter was more like the rutters of the early days of sea travel than the later charts, because jumps and jump routes are shortcuts that bypass large amounts of space. You couldn’t draw a chart of such routes because they didn’t go through three-dimensional space. You could draw lines between the ends of the jump points, but that wouldn’t be an accurate representation, because even a few light days takes a very long time to travel at the sort of speeds that even the best ships could reach. The good news was that there were flows to the jump points. They had a tendency to clump together, with several of them going in roughly the same direction. So most of the time, there were alternate jump routes between given points. Known jump points could often be bypassed by finding a string of nearby jumps to get you to the same place.

  Chapter 6

  Biochemistry and the interactions of species to chemical and other physiological stimuli are made more complex and difficult to interpret by intelligence. The natural desire to follow a scent trail or pet a fellow sentient are often masked by cultural prohibitions and taboos.

  From Parthian Sexual Mores by Eric Lock, MPD

  Standard Date: November 23, 674

  Location: Canda outsystem, Drake

  Standard Date: 02 16 630

  Canda was a star still two light days away when they exited the jump into the system. They were met by a Canda system patrol boat. “We have a request for ID, Captain,” Pan said.

  “Send the standard ID for Drake space,” Danny told her. “And ask for the news.”

  “Their skipper wants to talk to you.”

  “Put ‘em on,” Danny said.

  “Welcome, Pandora,” said a male voice. “I’m Commodore Johnson of the Canda System Patrol.”

  “Howdy, Commodore. Danny Gold, captain of the Pandora, here. What can I do for you?”

  “What news from Drakar?”

  “I haven’t got a clue, Commodore. I was out scouting routes and went right by it without stopping.”

  “Find anything?”

  “Nothing faster than the standard.”

  “Perhaps we could share rutters?”

  “Is the Canda system planning on getting into trade?”

  “I wish,” the commodore said, and Danny figured he and Checkgok were in good shape for their trading. The Canda system was no happier about the Drakes controlling their trade than he’d expected.

  “What sort of cargo do you have on board, Captain Gold?”

  “I sent them a manifest,” Pan said.

  “You should have our manifest, Commodore,” Danny said, thinking about the situation here. The Drakes were even worse than the Cordobas about controlling access to the rest of the universe. Everything had to travel on Drake-licensed hulls and a planetary government didn’t get licensed. The jump-capable Spaceforce of Canda couldn’t trade with other worlds controlled by the Drakes because the Drakes would consider that smuggling and might even decide it was an act of war. They could use the mapped short jumps to get around their system, but unless they found a gray route they were stuck, which was probably why the commodore wanted Pan’s rutters. He was looking for a way around the Drake checkpoints.

  “These are some interesting items, Captain. Where did you get the filter material?”

  “You’d want to talk to our trader about that. It’s a Parthian worker from the Zheck clan, name of Checkgok. Its people are pretty good at biotech. Checkgok, why don’t you tell the commodore about the filters?”

  Parthia was located in a Cordoba chain, so it was going to be clear that someone had crossed from Cordoba space to Drake space. On the other hand, Pan and the helpful folks on Concordia Station had produced excellent documentation that Checkgok and his cargo had amicably shifted from the Fly Catcher to the Pan two systems the other side of Drakar. And what the Fly Catcher was doing there was none of Danny’s business.

  Location: Pandora, Candahar Orbit, Drake Space

  Standard Date: 02 19 630

  After an actual physical inspection of the holds, which seemed a bit excessive to Danny, they were directed to a jump chain that would take them into the Canda system proper, and they finally made orbit around Candahar three days later.

  Checkgok was getting irritable, and it didn’t know why. It threw itself into the work of trading with the monkeys . . . humans . . . and tried to ignore their ugliness.

  The system industry was located in the Kuiper belt and the asteroid belts, on large space stations where everything from gravity to pressure could be controlled. They built molecular circuitry and servos, plus thousands of other goods. Many of the goods were amazingly cheap, but not noticeably different from the same thing bought in any of a hundred other systems. The unique things were mostly from the planet, where billions of years of separate evolution had produced biologicals that were not anything that a genetic engineer would imagine.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Checkgok, irritable as it was, waved its eyestalks in tentative agreement. “Yes, Captain, Clan Zheck is responsible for operating expenses and the debt and interest payments are part of that. But payments made now will amount to transferring part of your debt to SMOG to the Zheck clan.”

  That was fair, so Danny nodded and called the local SMOG branch on Candahar Station, and arranged a payment on the loan, enough to keep the local SMOG branch from initiating repossession of the Pandora. Loan payments, due to the simple fact of distance in space, tended to be flexible. The interest, however, was exorbitant. Payments made every time the ship was near a SMOG branch kept Danny and Pandora in space. Too many avoidances of the SMOG branches would lead to them repossessing Pandora.

  Location: Pandora, Candahar Orbit, Drake Space

  Standard Date: 02 27 630

  Danny was lying on his back on the bridge floor with a pair of pliers and a sensor pack, adjusting the tension on his accel couch stand. His couch was sticking, and that wouldn’t do if the Pan needed to shift course in a hurry.

  Pan brought up Checkgok’s irritability. “I am worried about Checkgok’s mood, Captain.”

  “Are you sure that’s not normal for it?” Danny asked. He sat up as Pan answered.

  “I can’t be certain, but its attitude here doesn’t match its attitude from the records of the Fly Catcher. And it has been getting progressively worse since we left Concordia.”

  “And just how did you come into possession of the records of the Fly Catcher?” The bridge was a small room located near the bow A wing. All of the crew quarters were located around the outer edge of the bow, so that gravity could be simulated by spinning the ship. As was the case now, in orbit around the planet Candahar, seven hundred kilometers behind Candahar Station.

  “I stole them,” Pan said, with not the least hint of regret or apology in her tone. “You know perfectly well that we should have gotten all the cargo from the Fly Catcher. I just wanted to see what they were up to.”

  “And what were they up to?”

  “It’s a little hard to tell since they are an alien species with different biological imperatives, but they seem to have been trying to make the Fly
Catcher into its own clan, with the captain and first mate as the breeders of the clan. I don’t know why, since all the Parthian Bangers in the universe weren’t going to make the captain and first mate fertile.”

  Danny laughed. “Well, we don’t do it just to have babies, either. At least not most of the time.”

  “But it wasn’t the whole crew that used the Bangers. Just the captain and first mate. Even the records show that the captain was thinking of itself as female. Not neuter female, female. The personal pronoun that she used for herself equated to she, not it. While Checkgok is insistent on the use of neuter female. Or, in English, it.”

  Danny and Pan examined the question some more but, not having any solid evidence, didn’t come to any conclusions.

  Location: Canda Outsystem, Drake Space

  Standard Date: 02 28 630

  A small part of Pandora’s attention was on the Parthian as it used its mouth-hand on the keyboard. It was watching two screens, one showing fuel consumption and other consumables, the other showing a jump map of the route to Bonks. While the information was there, it didn’t rise to the level of consciousness until the Parthian spoke.

  “Canda to Bonks is fifteen jumps,” Checkgok said.

  Pandora didn’t say anything. That statement was incomplete, but true as far as it went. Besides, the number of jumps was less important than the distance between them. Finally, it was a statement, not a question, and Pandora wasn’t sure it was directed at her, though there was no one else in the galley at the moment.

  “That will entail how much time?” Checkgok asked.

  “Approximately three weeks, if there are no problems.”

  “What sort of problems?” Checkgok took one of its eyes off the small screens and focused it on the main screen, the same place where Danny looked when he spoke to Pandora when he was in the galley.

  “Sometimes jumps close for no known reason. That generally means taking a longer route around the blockage. Also, the Drake and Cordoba trading houses sometimes set up custom patrols along the main routes, making it wiser to find an alternate. If it’s necessary to take an alternate route, that could add from a week to a month to the travel time.”

  “How likely is that?”

  “Taken all together, there is perhaps a one in twenty chance that we will have to divert.”

  Checkgok’s left eyestalk, the one looking at the big screen, bobbed. “That will work well enough then.” There was a pause. Then the Parthian said, “Why is the ship so empty? Do humans need so much space?”

  “The ship is designed for a crew of from ten to twenty,” Pandora said.

  “Why? From what I have seen, you could run the ship and the shuttles all by yourself. Leaving Captain Gold safely on a planet or a station while you did the trading.”

  “Some ships were made to do that, but it was never common,” Pan explained. “For one thing, most people would rather be doing something. For another, this ship is as much a home as a means of transport.” Pan didn’t mention the third reason. Most people didn’t trust artificial brains on their own.

  “In that case, why is there only the captain?”

  “There are a number of reasons,” Pan said, trying to decide how much to explain. Ultimately, she decided to give the Parthian the whole story. “Captain Gold is a fair man, but not the best manager in the universe. And the restrictions that the trading houses put on the trade routes can cut deeply into the profit made by a cargo hauler. Also, when Captain Gold received title to the Pandora, there was already a considerable debt attached to the ship. A debt that he was able to make payments on but not significantly decrease.

  “Then, we were stopped three years ago by a Cordoba family patrol ship, carrying what they chose to see as contraband. The fines and bribes left Captain Gold somewhat in the red and short of cargo. The captain likes searching out jump routes, and we have spent considerable time following cul de sacs to their ends, which means no profit for the ship, of course.

  “But there are still the expenses of fuel, maintenance, and paying the crew, all of which left us farther in the red, and we had to let some of the less essential crew go. Which meant more work for the others, and an increasing level of dissatisfaction among them. Then there were a couple of bad trades, and it became a choice between paying crew and buying fuel, so more crew was let go. It became a downward spiral.”

  Checkgok nodded both his eyestalks in understanding. “Breeders are not really suited for management but, unfortunately, they often think they are.”

  Pandora forebore to comment on that statement, and after a moment Checkgok asked another question. “So what is the proper complement of crew?”

  “I was designed for a crew of ten. Two shuttle pilots, an engineer and an assistant engineer, a cargo officer and two cargo hands, a cook and a captain to run it all. With suggested additions of a ship’s merchant, first mate, ship’s boy or girl, and general hands as needed. The original designers planned for a family-owned ship where the family would be the crew. I can hold up to twenty persons comfortably.”

  Pandora moved one of the drones into the galley. “As you can see, several of the drones that Captain Gold and I control are jerry rigged to let the captain and I do jobs that should, by preference, be handled by crew.”

  The drone was uncovered. Its motors, pulleys, and cables visible and greasy. This was a welder drone that carried three arc welders of varying power and configuration. Pandora or Danny could use one welder at a time.

  There were six hundred square meters of floor space located near the front of the ship. That was just living space and didn’t include hydroponics, the shops or the bridge. It was divided into twenty rooms—each with their own head, including toilet and shower or bath—as well as a kitchen and a lounge that were shared by all.

  Checkgok waved a mid-limb. “That is still more room per person than Parthians would need, and what you have is just the captain and the trader, with you or the captain doing all the other jobs. Should I be taking on some of those jobs?”

  “What are you qualified to do? Aside from the role of trader?”

  “I am not sure. I am strong and my mouth-hand is capable of delicate work. But I lack the direct neural interface that is so common among humans. I would find it difficult to operate a drone as you do.”

  “That is a problem. How did they manage on the Fly Catcher?” Most ships that didn’t use artificial brains had human crew interfacing directly with the wing controllers. A wing could operate in automatic mode, but it was a bit like tying down a rudder on an old sailing ship. It made normal space flight both more dangerous and less efficient and was especially problematic in making jumps.

  “The Fly Catcher had a crew of sixty-three. It was a smaller ship. I was supercargo, and that was all.” That didn’t really explain it, but was probably all the explanation that Checkgok had.

  “In that case, for now at least, you will remain simply the master trader. Though there are educational programs, and we can look into the possibility of getting you the implants, if you like.”

  “I am willing to learn, but implants . . . I would prefer not.”

  Pandora sighed internally. “That is a shame. We were down to our last couple of drones when we hit Concordia. We managed to get a few more after you joined us, but we can still use all the help we can get.”

  “We should hire more crew,” Checkgok said.

  “Money is still tight, and we have to make another payment when we get to Bonks.”

  “That is a false economy,” the Parthian said pompously. “We will need the extra crew, or more of your systems will become compromised. The Zheck clan will undertake the cost of hiring the necessary additional crew.”

  Location: Bonks Orbital Station Kiva, Drake Space

  Standard Date: 03 20 630

  The diner was in much better shape than the bar back on Concordia. All the emitters were operational and it had real wall coverings that matched the projections. It was about ten meters wide with bo
oths and tables, and at this time of day wasn’t very crowded. The lock was open and large enough to fit two humans abreast, so Checkgok could fit. Danny checked that before they left the ship. Most stations weren’t designed for people the size of a small pony. Checkgok was less massive than a pony, but it was wider.

  A skinny, dark-haired girl of about ten, dressed in syntho cloth—old syntho, at that—met them at the lock and led them to a table off to the side. Checkgok made it without bumping into anyone, but only by virtue of other patrons getting out of its way.

  The table the girl showed them to was square, and she and Danny moved it over to make room for Checkgok to squat next to it. Then, handing them menu slates, she headed for the kitchen.

  Bonks, also in Drake space, was mostly an ag world. There were a wide variety of foods, some Old Earther and some native to Bonks. They wanted to let Checkgok try those foods that tested safe for it so that they could see what his people would find tasty.

  The diner was a spacer’s sort of place, with fresh foods shipped up from the planet’s surface, all designed to give a spacer a taste of planet-grown food.

  “What can I get you?” the girl asked when she returned to them with a carafe of water and two glasses. She carefully avoided looking at the weird creature with the eyestalks.

  “A little of everything,” Danny said, noting that she had a crooked front tooth and blue eyes. “We’re trying to figure what Checkgok here will like. Plug in Parthian and leave out anything likely to cause one problems.”

  The girl finally looked at Checkgok. “Does he have teeth?”

  “It,” Danny corrected. “The proper form of address for a neuter Parthian is ‘it.’ I don’t know why they care, but they do.”

  “Neuters, whether male or female, are the ones who do the work of the clan. Not that the breeders aren’t important but, really, they are just there to make more Parthians,” Checkgok said.

  “Personally, I think it’s something like an old sergeant saying. ‘Don’t call me sir. I work for a living,’ “ Danny confided to the girl, and Checkgok’s mouth drew up. Which was a bad sign. At first Checkgok was friendly, and if it didn’t get the joke, it asked. But it was getting more and more tense of late, and Danny was starting to get worried.