Pandora’s Crew (StarWings Book 1)

by Gorg Huff

  Location: Pandora, in orbit off Station Kiva

  Bonks System, Drake Space

  Standard Date: 03 24 630

  Danny was lying in the accel couch on the bridge, operating one of the new drones that was fixing a scratch on the lower left cable of the C midship wing, when Pandora spoke up.

  “We have enough supplies to fabricate a hundred Bangers, and by my estimate, one Banger every week to ten days should be sufficient to keep Checkgok comfortable,” Pan told Danny. “We are topped up on fuel and have loaded all supplies and trade goods. It’s time to leave, Captain.”

  Danny set the drone to auto and pulled himself half out of the link, shifting to a virtual presence in the lounge. John was behind the bar in the cooking area and Checkgok was in its usual place, working on the books. Jenny was there too, at a table going through a programmed learning text on her computer.

  “Right. Where are we going?” Danny asked the group, but mostly Checkgok. Pan and Checkgok had been discussing trade routes for the last couple of days.

  “The Jorgan system is seven days from here, assuming all goes well.” Pan put up a jump route map that showed the vectors between the jumps and the known alternate routes. The route map looked something like the world’s worst slalom course. The gates were the jump points, and if you missed one you didn’t lose points. You had to go back around. The total distance between the jump points was a bit over an AU, but between them they would take the Pan almost nine light years in a little over a week, if all went well. If all didn’t go well, there were a number of alternate routes that would get them to Jorgan but would take longer.

  Pan continued. “Checkgok hopes that they will have good trading opportunities for its clan’s goods.”

  Danny nodded and put on the skull cap. “All right. Call the station and get departure clearance, then take us out.”

  Location: Fly Catcher

  Chaco System, Cordoba Space

  Standard Date: 03 24 630

  Captain Kesskox lowered her mouth-hand into the Parthian Banger and her first mate, Gokkox, did the same.

  After swallowing the drink, Gokkox waved his mouth-hand vaguely in the direction of the station they were approaching, then clicked, “Do you think it’s dead yet?” The syncopation of the clicks and whistles indicated regret, or even guilt.

  It was a guilt that Kesskox didn’t share, or at least didn’t want to.

  “Probably,” she clicked back. “The stuck-up fixk was so afraid of pollution that it would balk at the human drinking another Banger, even if they thought of it.” Fixk was a Parthian word that simply didn’t translate into any human language. It suggested someone who was so tradition-bound as to be incapable of thought, and represented one of the mental illnesses that Parthians could be subject to. Sort of Mrs. Grundy to pathological proportions.

  Gokkox scrunched his eyestalks and Kesskox stifled a midleg gesture that would be the equivalent of a human’s derisive snort. One of the things she liked about Gokkox was his kindness. Even if, in this instance, she thought it was misplaced.

  “Let it go. It’s gone insane. Or if it hasn’t, it will soon. At that point, it will kill the human or the human will kill it. And if it kills the human, the artificial will kill it. It’s done. It will never go back to Parthia, and we will never have to deal with it again.”

  “And if Danny Gold wins and kills it?”

  Kesskox did make the derisive midleg gesture then. “Oh, right. That will happen. Danny Gold wasn’t going to take the goods back to Clan Zheck anyway. And with a dead Checkgok to explain, the monkey never will. But that’s why we’re taking the long way around through New Argentina. We can be sure that if they aren’t in Parthia before we get there, they never will be.

  “Now leave it, Gokkox. We have a few hours before we get to the station. Let’s use them.”

  Chapter 7

  A rutter is a listing of real space locations of jump points. Like the rutters of pre-chart seafaring days on Old Earth, the modern rutter is more a description of the route than a map. That is because the jumps turn space into something that simply cannot be adequately described in even three dimensional holo maps, much less two dimensional flat maps. To represent jump space in a map without inviting false assumptions about proximity of other routes, would take a number of dimensions greater than the number of jumps on the map.

  The Use of Rutters, Captain Vernon Netteburg of the Pamplona Merchant Academy

  Location: Drake Space, Big Dark,

  Standard Date: 03 27 630

  “W

  hat are we doing, John?” Jenny asked, looking up from her study screen at the main screen of the lounge. They were two days out from Bonks and John was watching a repeat of the bridge graphic.

  “We’re looking for jump points,” John told her. “Plug in and see.”

  Jenny made a face. Her implants were installed when she was seven, a few months before the station disaster, but there was very little chance to use them in the refugee camp on Bonks. So Jenny was out of practice and found the interface data kind of overwhelming. Instead of plugging in, she said, “I thought that took special ships.”

  “Not really,” John said, then called up a study guide on how wings worked and how they were developed from solar sails back in the Sol System before the first jump. “Most of it’s guessing right about where the jump point is. About the only way to tell for sure is to make a guess, then go there and see if there really is a jump point. You get a feel for space after a while. With practice.” He pointed to the headset and continued as Jenny put it on.

  Location: Drake Space Big Dark

  Standard Date: 03 27 630

  Two more jumps and four hours later, Danny spotted a good possibility for an undiscovered jump that wasn’t too far from their course. The Pan shifted course so they would pass through the jump point if it was there. Jenny, again in her headset, felt the difference in the feel of space when they reached the jump point. It was a section of space about a tenth of a light second or about thirty thousand kilometers across. The Pan was doing about three thousand kilometers a second, so they were in it for about ten seconds.

  Jenny had time to feel Pan’s wings adjust to two sets of space. To feel the difference in the patterns of the space dust in the two places that were almost, but not exactly, congruent. Feel the dust in both chunks of space swept aside by the massively powerful magnetic fields.

  What she couldn’t feel, couldn’t tell at all even with the augmentation, was Pan slipping from one chunk of congruent space to the other. There was no bump to it, no nothing. They were in one place with one set of stars, then in another with a slightly different set of stars.

  Location: Drake Space Jorgan System

  Standard Date: 04 02 630

  Checkgok started checking the net as soon as they emerged from the last jump and not finding a lot of potential trade. There were some robotics, but they were mostly specialized for mining and the orbital farms were growing precisely the same things that orbital farms grew all over the Pamplona Sector.

  Jorgan system had no habitable planets, but it had millions of planetoids, ranging from a few microns to a few miles across. Which made it perfect for mining everything from gold to water.

  “Captain Gold, there seems little point in continuing in-system here. There is little to buy and less to sell.”

  “Fine with me,” Danny said. “It’ll save us time to head back out-system now. What about processed ores, though? A bit of titanium, some gadolinium, perhaps? We might be able to pick them up in the out-system.”

  Checkgok looked at Danny for a moment and said it would look into it.

  Location: Drake Space, Jorgan Oort Cloud

  Standard Date: 04 04 630

  Checkgok got a jump route to a planetoid about five hundred kilometers across. It was near the inner edge of the Jorgan systems oort cloud, about three light months out from the primary. The jump route was five well-aligned short jumps, so there wasn’t much maneuvering in
volved and it only took a couple of days to make the trip.

  The planetoid was owned by a family of deep space rock miners who got lucky. A good ten percent of the planetoid was titanium and it had decent deposits of scandium, yttrium, promethium and half a dozen more. The family consisted of three wives and four husbands with eight children and, in a sense, they lived in luxury. They had plenty of room and plants to produce breathable air. They had computers and games and equipment. Food and drink from the same gardens that gave them air. And atomic batteries, using the promethium to power lights and equipment. But they got a visit from a system freighter about once a year and were well behind on the news, because even the laser commo link took three months each way.

  They didn’t have a jump capable ship, so no one could leave, save when the annual freight hauler showed up, or the rare unscheduled stopover by a ship like the Pan.

  Pan, just out of Bonks, was well-stocked with things like Bonks chicken thighs and five thousand gallons of Bonks homemade strawberry ice cream with real strawberries. Most of which ended up staying on the planetoid.

  While Checkgok was being taken to the cleaners by Agness Sunderland, Danny and Pan played Rutter Tag with Elijah Sunderland.

  “Have you got anything near locus—” Elijah used his implants to send a location to the others.

  The rules of Rutter Tag were simple, though they depended at least some on trust. Each person at his turn was allowed to ask about any real space coordinate he chose, and the other players were required to answer honestly. There was no way of enforcing the honest answers, but there wasn’t much point in asking about random points in space. You wanted jump points near one you knew about, so each question gave the other player information. And tradition among spacers was that you didn’t lie when playing Rutter Tag.

  “Just the one that led us here,” Pan said. “And I assume you know that one.”

  “So, for our question, I’ll ask the same,” Danny added. “You know any others?”

  “Yep. A cul de sac chain with three jumps.” He gave the jump points and their exits. Pan entered them in her rutter. Then Elijah asked another question. There was very little overlap between Elijah Sunderland’s rutter and Pan and Danny’s. Elijah’s was mostly local. He had a couple of side routes to nearby systems, and Danny gave him the cul de sac jump that they found on the way here. That seemed to please him.

  Mostly it was a pleasant way to spend an evening. Elijah wasn’t a spacer. He’d been a miner all his life and never been out of the Jorgan system, but collecting rutters was his hobby. So it was natural that most of what he had picked up was from local or semilocal transports.

  Aside from the three jump cul de sac they got from Elijah, they also got the known orbits of a great deal of space junk in the vicinity.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Trading done and everyone back on board, Danny went to the bridge and lay down in his acceleration couch. “Pandora, plot the course back out.”

  “There may be an unmarked jump about three light minutes to the solar north, spinward,” Pan said, sending him its coordinates, and showing the markers on the main screen.

  Danny looked over the data she sent. “You figured this out from the data we got from Elijah, didn’t you?” He added his own markers to the main screen.

  “In part, Captain, but mostly from the data we collected coming in.” She fed him another data set.

  Danny nodded. “Two parts of the key. It’s probably there, all right. Any guess where it will take us?”

  “I am unsure, Captain.”

  “What about it, Checkgok? Shall we see if there is at least a useful jump?”

  Checkgok hissed its equivalent of a sigh and said, “Very well, Captain, if we must,” but its heart wasn’t in the complaint. After Danny drank a Banger the day before, the Parthian was pretty mellow.

  Location: Free space Gold Route, Big Dark,

  Standard Date: 04 04 630

  “Well that’s interesting,” Danny said, looking at the bridge screen. “What’s the nearest known point, Pan? And put this up in the galley for Checkgok, John, and Jenny.”

  “Searching, Captain.” Then a few moments later she threw a schematic of a jump route up on both screens. It was a series of connected lines in various colors. Each line represented a vector in real space from the exit of one jump to the entrance of the next. The main route was in Drake blue, then in Cordoba purple, but faded. The alternates were in green, the cul de sacs in red. As they watched, a new point was added in blinking white. From that point, a line in gold extended to one end of a line on a cul de sac route that connected to the main route on the Cordoba side.

  Danny looked at the screen and grinned. “Isn’t that the Old Granny?”

  “Yes, Captain,” said Pan.

  “What are we looking at?” John asked from the galley.

  “It seems the jump Pan found out of Jorgan got us close to an old cul de sac that was in Pan’s rutters. The cul de sac was off a gray route from Drake space to Cordoba space. It’s called the Old Granny. It hits Cordoba space on the route between Hudson and Morland.”

  “You said a gray route. The Cordobas and the Drakes don’t know about it?”

  “Actually, they do,” Danny said, smiling. “Someone blabbed to the Cordobas about thirty years ago. The Cordobas declared it off limits and when they have them free, they station a couple of customs cutters at F397 and seize any ship that comes through. F397 is on the Cordoba side of the longest jump in the Old Granny route, three and a half light years. But the cul de sac we’re heading for is three jumps on the Cordoba side of F397. Unless they have a cutter on its way to F397, they won’t see us. And even if they do have a cutter there, they probably won’t see us. The cul de sac jump into the main route is two light minutes from the Morland jump and eighty light seconds from the F397 jump.”

  In a way finding a jump point was like buying a lottery ticket. The odds were way against drawing a winning number or a useful route. But there was a difference. The more jump routes you already knew in an area of space, the better your chances of catching a winner. The Jorgan jump would have been a useless cul de sac if Pan hadn’t already known about the cul de sac off the gray route.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Some hours later, Pan started vectoring for the cul de sac off the Old Granny.

  “We’ll head for Morland where we can get spices and parts to bring Pan up to snuff,” Danny said.

  “What about Hudson?” John asked. “Their lambfish is a real delicacy and they’re a major wheat exporter.”

  “Not this trip. Checkgok wants to get the spices at Morland because one of them is supposed to be like the habaneros. It thinks they might be a very popular spice on Parthia. Besides, we’re short of funds. We have the room for the lambfish but not the money to buy it, not without selling goods we can get better prices on elsewhere.”

  Chapter 8

  Deep space combat between wing ships is not like any other combat in the long history of warfare. There are similarities, just as there are similarities between an army fighting in a forest and a dogfight between atmospheric craft.

  It is tempting to draw parallels between modern wing ships and the ocean-going ships of the pre-space age of sail. That temptation is made more dangerous because there are surface similarities. Those similarities are most evident in single ship combat where the addition of a third dimension has less of an effect.

  Introduction to Space War, Spaceforce Academy, Drakar

  Location: Cordoba Space, Big Dark

  Standard Date: 05 01 630

  “I

  have an anomaly, Captain,” Pan said, pulling Danny from a dream of swimming through space.

  “What have you got, Pan?” He checked his time sense. “We’re still several hours from jump.”

  “Two ships,” Pan said, and sent him vector and speed as she got it.

  Danny pulled on his interface cap to get a better read, then got up and ran for the bridge, not bothering to dress.
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  By the time he got to the bridge, Pan had enough data to let him know that the situation wasn’t urgent. At least not for them. So Danny turned around and went back to his quarters to put on some clothes.

  “Pan, wake John and have him fix us all something to eat. I have some sims to run.”

  A few moments later, while John Gabriel was still waking up, Danny said, “We can avoid them. Head for the secondary jump, but we have to do it soon.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Who is it, Pan?”

  “It is difficult to tell at this distance, but I suspect that one is a merchantman that was just a few hours ahead of us, and the other is either a customs cutter or a pirate.”

  Danny nodded. He followed Pan’s logic. As long as the merchantman was just traveling a known course, not pushing very hard, it would be very easy to miss in the big dark. But when it started pushing hard, the wings were going to put out light as it dumped plasma for more speed. To save fuel, merchantmen tried to get as much of their thrust by sweeping space dust as they could. It was slower, but cheaper. However, in an emergency—or even if they were just in a hurry—they would vent plasma and sweep it. Plasma is hot and it gives off light, so what probably happened was that a merchantman was pulling along toward the jump point until it got caught by the pirate and then it dumped plasma to try and get away. The playback Pan was showing him seemed to support that.

  “Dammit, Pan, we have a child aboard. Not to mention Checkgok and its clan’s goods.” Pan hadn’t said a thing, and Danny knew his ship wouldn’t. It was Danny himself who was insisting that they had to go to the rescue of the merchantman, and he knew it. “Put us on an intercept course.”

  “We have crew and contracts, Captain.”

  “And I will talk to them, and even give them an opportunity to try to talk me out of this. But put us on course to intercept, and keep us on that course until I say different.”

  Danny felt the ship shifting as Pandora pulled harder on one side to shift their course and more plasma was jetted into the wings.