Pandora’s Crew (StarWings Book 1)

by Gorg Huff

  “I always knew you self-styled supermen were arrogant, but you take the fucking cake. You come in here, to our territory, and start messing in our business, and when we ask you for a bit of courtesy, you go and mouth off. Well, you aren’t in Drake space now. If you don’t heave to, I’m going to blow your old tramp to space dust. And no one’s going to care, or even know about it.”

  “What? You don’t have someone insystem with a telescope pointed at us? I’m surprised. I didn’t figure you had the guts to take a piss without your bosses watching to make sure you did it right.” Danny knew from Pan’s vector analysis that someone was watching the jump point into the Canova System.

  Danny watched Captain Farris’ face when that barb arrived very carefully, and he didn’t much like what he saw. Farris wouldn’t be that pissed off if Danny’s comment wasn’t pretty close to true. So there probably would be someone insystem watching. It wouldn’t make any difference to this fight. They wouldn’t even see what happened out here until a couple of hours after Danny got insystem, but they would see it. And that meant that Danny would have to be pretty darn careful of what he used, if he didn’t want them figuring out what he had. And that meant that unless he was forced to it, he couldn’t play with the new toys.

  Besides, in spite of the fact that Danny knew how the universe worked, he was pissed off at people like Farris who figured that the fact that they could get away with something made it okay.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  In a hidden tube off a refuse container, a cylinder sixty-seven feet long and eight feet wide waited and thought. Its intelligence was not great. More than a honeybee’s, less than a parrot’s. It did have a very small language center and an appreciation of music, part of its pattern recognition function. It knew what it knew and didn’t have the wit or wisdom to question that. It would never gain that wisdom either, because once it was launched it had a life expectancy that would be measured in hours at most, and more likely minutes or seconds. All its memories were artificially created in virtual worlds. Its lack of intellect didn’t translate into a lack of emotion.

  No.

  Shield Missile Able was as giddy as a schoolgirl on her first date. In just a few minutes, if it was lucky, it would be launched out into space. There it would run out some of its superconducting cable, and as it flew through space at a thousandth of the speed of light, that cable would pick up the magnetic fields it was flying through, which would tell it how the space was acting. In the meantime, it was loaded with the information on the enemy, the pattern of the enemy’s wings and the flux of each of them, the position and probable course.

  It knew its target, knew what it was looking for, and what it might face.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Goldvokx felt the spines on its back rustle with the flow of the Pandora’s wings as she flew through space on twelve wings flapping at thousands of flaps per second. It felt that flying in a way that was different than a human would, but one that allowed it the same level of interface. Its internal eyestalks were focused on the Bonaventure and watching for the variations in course and speed that would signal that the ship had launched grapeshot, or something else.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Jenny got the girls into their safety suits. Angi was watching the screens with avid interest. Little Rosita was clearly scared and Geri was blubbering, not knowing what was going on, but sure it was bad. “It’s all right, Geri. I’ve been through this before and we weren’t nearly so well prepared that time.”

  “I want Daddy!” Geri yelled.

  “You know that your daddy is at work now,” Grandmother Rosita told her. “Now, stop your fussing.”

  Jenny winced as Geri went from blubber to tantrum. She didn’t understand how anyone who was supposed to be so smart and politically savvy could be that dumb when it came to their own family. She grabbed the other two girls and left the professora to the tender mercies of an enraged four-year-old, thinking, At least it will keep them both occupied.

  “It’s actually going to be pretty boring. Not as boring as the fight with the Brass Hind, but pretty boring.”

  “Why won’t it be as boring as the fight with the pirates?” asked Angi.

  “Because we’re closer to this ship. A lot closer. When we were fighting the Brass Hind, it took the shots hours to cross between us.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Doctor Schmitz was plugged into the system, using Sally to analyze his new missile brains as they prepared for battle. With some difficulty, he didn’t interfere as his son and Goldvokx fed them the information they would need. But he watched their reactions with the eye of a parent welcoming his children to the world.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The other Parthians were at their duty stations, with nothing much to do. All of them were wondering why Captain Gold didn’t simply pay off the Bonaventure. This was, after all, his whole clan and there was no reason to take such a risk.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  A bit under a light second away, the first mate of the Bonaventure was having the same concerns. Yep, everyone knew that the Cybrants were arrogant bastards but, to the best of his recollection, no one had ever called them stupid. “Captain, are you . . .”

  “Shut your gob, Hardy. I’m sick of your gutless bellyaching. We’re three times the size of that dinosaur, and two hundred years younger.”

  And it was true. The Bonny was bigger and newer than Pandora, and it had the newer interfaces that everyone said were better. But it didn’t have much in the way of a ship’s brain, and there were stories about what those old suckers could do. Besides, why was Gold so anxious for a fight? He could see the difference in size just as well as the skipper could.

  “All right. If they want to play that way,” said Captain Farris, “let’s end this. Hardy, fire the hunter-nuke.”

  “Captain . . .” Hardy started. He knew that the bosses didn’t want them to use the hunter-nuke unless they had to. Those suckers were expensive.

  “Shut the fuck up, Hardy, and fire the damned thing.”

  Hardy fired the damned thing.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “Captain,” came three voices over the net—Pan, Robert, and Goldvokx all reporting at the same time, that the Bonny fired a frigging hunter-nuke.

  “What the hell is going on? In my entire life I’ve never run across a hunter-nuke until this year. And now two of the suckers?”

  “That’s an interesting question, Skipper,” said Robert. “In the meantime, what are we going to do about it?”

  “We’re going to use Able and Baker both, that’s what. Able to take out the nuke. Baker goes in five seconds later and I want it to go for that sucker’s wings, if it can get there.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Danny waited until both missiles were fired, then told Robert to send a salvo of grape.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “Captain!” Hardy shouted.

  “I see it. Where did they get a hunter-nuk— Two hunters?”

  “They’re big for hunters, Captain. They don’t fit the profile of anything in our records.”

  For vital seconds Captain Farris stared at the screen in shocked confusion. He didn’t know what was coming at him and had no way of knowing what to do about it. Finally, he said, “Shift us, Hardy. North ecliptic, full power,” ordering Hardy to move them up relative to the plane of the ecliptic of the Canova system.

  It was too late. Not by a great deal, but too late nonetheless.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Able was cheerily feeling the space around it, seeing the hunter-nuke through several sensors, and sending its impressions back to Baker and the Pan. “Here she comes, just a sailing through the void, singing do wa ditty, ditty dum dum nuke.” Able flung out its wire in plenty of time and it carefully waited to almost the last moment to power up the wing.

  The nuke, with nothing to compare Able to—and totally shocked—didn’t know how to react. That uncertainty wasn’t quite enough to get it to go off. Instead, it went through the fully-charged wing a
nd was reduced to slag. But Able was not unscathed. The hunter-nuke weighed fifty-three tons and was traveling at three hundred kilometers a second. Passing through the wing, it lost almost half of that velocity in a few microseconds. The strain of that vector change was more than enough to rip the superconducting wire right out of Able. It also made quite a flare, but five seconds later Baker sailed through that space, unaffected by the nuke or its leader.

  It took Baker another seven and a half seconds to reach the Bonaventure. If the captain of the Bonny had even a clue what was going on, he might have saved his ship. All he had to do was kill his wings until Baker passed. The mass of the Bonny was such that it would be almost unaffected by the magnetic field that Baker could generate.

  But Captain Farris didn’t know that.

  When Baker arrived, it encountered the Bonny’s wings, flapping just as hard as they could. Those wings managed to string the superconducting cable between the Forward B and the Mid C wings.

  The superconducting cable did what superconductors do.

  It conducted.

  It conducted megajoules between the wings and the Bonny’s own wings were suddenly fighting each other. They lost two wings, generators blew almost simultaneously, and the feedback came within a hair’s breadth of blowing the fusion drive. It did blow circuit breakers, taking down two more wings, and leaving a massive gap in the Bonny’s defenses.

  Mr. Hardy jerked out of the system when the ship’s damage reports made him feel like he had just had his right arm and left leg ripped out of their sockets. The feeling was gone almost as fast as it arrived, but as he looked at the screen, he almost wanted it back. If he could have just a few more seconds. . . . “You’ve killed us, you arrogant bastard,” he shouted at the captain.

  “Kiss my ass, Hardy,” Captain Farris said, just before the grapeshot hit.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “Captain, why the hell did we do that?” asked Robert Schmitz.

  “Because we didn’t have any choice,” Danny said, feeling every day of his eighty-four years and more. “Once the challenge is issued, there’s nothing to do but play it out.” Danny unstrapped from his command couch and stood now that Pan wasn’t going to be making any more violent maneuvers.

  “But . . . “

  “Robert, once he fired the nuke, we had no choice.”

  “I know. I was talking about before,” Robert said.

  Danny heard him both through the interface and directly as Robert walked onto the bridge. He turned to face the young man. “Before, I didn’t know he had a hunter-nuke. But, truthfully, even if I did know, it wouldn’t have mattered. We can’t afford to let them search us.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Goldvokx, and the other new crew. Not to mention your dad’s lab and a bunch of other stuff that we might or might not be able to hide. Even more importantly, we can’t afford the precedent that they have the right to search us, shake us down, or in any way dictate our actions in regard to Parthia. ‘Once you pay the danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.’ “

  “I’ve heard the quote,” Robert said. “It’s one of Mom’s favorites.”

  “So ask your mom about Cybrant society. The official tests and the unofficial ones.” Danny paused, then decided to explain. “I killed a dozen people by the time I was twenty and I’d doubled that number by the time I left. There are lots of tests any child of the Cybrant System has to go through, academic tests, reflex tests, full medical examinations . . . those are all official types of tests and mostly nonfatal, even if you fail them. The danger comes if you pass them.

  “There are only so many full breeder slots and a lot more candidates than there are slots. That led to the duels. The official duels were bad enough. We tried to force the other party to challenge because the challenged party had the advantage. The unofficial duels were, in a way, more restricted. They required some justification, but they were sudden, out of nowhere, fights. If it should be proven that the attack was unjustified, the winner could lose his breeding rights or even be executed. But it was a pretty high bar, so some of us carried personal recorder comms with us, so that if someone ambushed us, there was proof it wasn’t a justified response.

  “The idea was to engender politeness and a civil society, but the way it played out was politeness became a sign of weakness and invited attack. Arrogance and a sort of snarky pseudo-politeness was generally the best defense. Though I remember one girl who made a habit of being unfailingly polite to everyone, even the unlicensed. She killed fifty-three in ‘self defense’ before someone got her.”

  Danny looked over at Robert, who was looking both disgusted and confused. “What I’m saying is that growing up in the Cybrant System was a doctoral course in intimidation. How to do it and how to read it. Those guys were going to keep pushing, and their bosses were going to keep pushing, until something like what just happened, happened. And the longer it took, the more we backed off before we fought, the weaker we would seem and the more likely they would be to repeat the attack.”

  “Are you sure that . . .” Robert trailed off.

  Knowing what he didn’t want to ask, Danny answered. “Yes, I’m sure it’s applicable in the larger universe. Cybrants aren’t different in character than other humans. We just have faster reflexes and stuff like that.”

  “Fascinating,” came Professora Rosita’s voice. “If you don’t need Robert on the bridge at the moment, I need him to deal with his daughter.”

  Robert went to see to his daughter and a few moments later Rosita arrived on the bridge. “I agree with your assessment, but we still need a story for the Canova government.”

  “We’ll stick as close to the truth as we can, but I’m not sure we say anything unless we’re asked.”

  “It’s a safe bet someone had a telescope homed in on us. Once the light gets there, they are going to know.”

  “Yes, someone. But who?” Danny said. “We are going to get insystem two hours, maybe more, before the light from our battle gets there. So they aren’t going to know what happened until then. We get someone asking what happened to our ship before that and we have evidence that they were sent out after us.”

  “Do you really think they’ll do that?”

  Danny twitched a shoulder. “No, but it’s worth a shot. They know it was Bonaventure out here, else why have a scope on this chunk of space?”

  “Because it’s a jump point.”

  “No. We’re halfway between jump points. Someone would have to be tracking the Bonny because of the time delay. Space is big, Doctor. A lot bigger than most people think. As far out as we are, it would be the next best thing to impossible to track us if we were trying to avoid it, because it would take them hours before they realized we changed our vector. But the Bonny was out here waiting for us, and Farris thought they had eyes on him. I’m sure of that. They start making accusations even after the news gets there, we can ask how they knew and what they were doing watching this area.”

  Location: Canova System

  Standard Date: 06 15 631

  “Hello, Pandora,” said a well-groomed figure on the screen. “This is Canova Control. Have you seen the Bonaventure?”

  “Why do you ask?” Danny returned question for question.

  “Well, they were headed for Parthia, so we thought they might have met you.”

  “Really? When did they leave?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Just trying to figure out where they might have passed us.”

  System Control gave a time, but not the right time. For the Bonny to have met them where it did, it would have to have left within a few hours of when they entered the outsystem, not the almost a day earlier that the Station Control officer mentioned.

  “No, we didn’t run across anyone between jump 518 and 515. What have you heard about the Drake incursion?”

  “We sent off a report to Morland, but haven’t heard from them yet. Last I heard, a force out of Hudson is moving up to push them back.”r />
  “I wondered about that,” Danny said. “It seemed a bit risky from the Drake point of view.”

  “The Drakes are pirates in all but name.”

  “I don’t disagree, sir, but I’m just a ship captain.”

  There wasn’t much more to the conversation. Pandora wasn’t stopping insystem, so there was no good excuse for Canova System to search the ship. Particularly since they were all stockholders, and Danny was a legally recognized clan on Parthia.

  Chapter 22

  The relations between the stockholders and the Cordoba Spaceforce have never been truly cordial. It is the Combine that buys their ships, pays their salaries, and gives them their missions. But the “bookkeepers and bureaucrats” of the Combine’s civilian oversight have never understood the conditions or the traditions of the Spaceforce.

  A History of the Cordoba Combine, Admiral George Cordoba-Davis. Standard year: 625

  Ferguson Station Three, Cordoba Space

  Standard Date: 06 22 631

  Danny called up the scans of the Ferguson insystem as they exited the jump. It was a crowded sky, but it was still three light hours and four jumps away. The chatter from insystem told him that the Cordoba Fleet ships were making final prep to leave the system. He had Pandora send their bonafides over lazer com, but aside from confirming that they were stockholders and warning them against using the chain to Parise, the fleet ignored them. By the time they reached the station, most of the fleet was gone.

  “You have the best timing I’ve ever seen,” Station Control told Danny on their way into parking orbit. “You came through just before the fuss and now you’re coming back through just after it.”

  “You think it’s over?” Danny asked the busty blonde.

  “Probably. Tell you what, once you get on station, why not meet me at the Pagoda and I’ll tell you all about it?”