Pandora’s Crew (StarWings Book 1)

by Gorg Huff

  “Fine, almost twelve. That’s still pretty young to be a warship commander.”

  “I agree,” said John Gabriel as he came in with a cup of coffee. “But I’ve talked about it with Captain Gold and Tanya Cordoba-Davis. Jenny will be owner aboard, but Danny thinks Tanya should be in command. At least until you’re sixteen.”

  Jenny wasn’t at all sure she agreed, but she figured it was the best deal she was going to get. Also, she knew that no matter who was officially in command, Jenny—through Arachne—could control the ship if she ever had to.

  On the other hand, it might be wiser not to make an issue of that. Jenny wasn’t sure whether that thought originated with the Jenny or the Arachne part of her brain. But maybe it didn’t really matter.

  “I guess I should talk to Tanya and see if she wants a job, but I don’t know how I’m going to pay anyone. I don’t want to be a pirate.”

  “Well, there is some loot locked away on board. The pirates fired off the last nuke and it got destroyed, but everything else on board belongs to you. Captain Gold and King Edward are in negotiations with Skull System over the shield missiles.”

  “Oh, no, not Eddy!” Jenny wailed.

  “He’s not so bad, Jenny,” John said. “He saved us both, you know.”

  “He did?” Jenny remembered walking along in the foodmart, then nothing until she woke up in the Arachne. She found herself automatically contacting the station brain, Crossbones, and accessing the station records.

  Crossbones wasn’t a very smart station brain, about as intelligent as a monkey. It was good at filing and stuff, though, and added a level of intuitiveness to things like searching the records. She got to see the pictures of them walking along and Eddy reacting to something. She couldn’t tell what, but he pushed her into John and was turning to face three people with guns. Then one of them fired a burst, and Eddy fired. And fired again, and a third time. . . . It was over just that fast.

  “I guess he did, but he’s still a boy. And he’s still stuck up.”

  Chapter 31

  Revolutions, Mr. Dickinson, come into this world like bastard children—half improvised and half compromised.

  Attributed to pre-space statesman Benjamin Franklin

  Location: Skull System Council Room, Skull Station

  Standard Date: 01 04 632

  The table was a large circle with robot servers embedded. Hanging above the center of the table was a large, translucent holo globe. In the globe was a star map showing the Pamplona Sector and the Skull System.

  Captain Jack Allenby pointed, and a particular jump locus expanded to fill the globe, then expanded again to show a large rock with masts and other structures dotting it. “We use forts. We have to.”

  Tanya considered the point that Captain Allenby was making while she looked around the room. It was a big room and it needed to be. There were twenty-three captains, Tanya, Danny, Gerhard Schmitz, Rosita Stuard, Eddy, Sara Electrum, and—oddly enough—John Gabriel, as Jenny Starchild’s official representative.

  Allenby adjusted the view on the holo globe back to a view of the Pamplona Sector and the Skull System, highlighted in blue for the Drakes, purple for the Cordobas, and white for the Skull system. “Distance limits the ways the Drakes and Cordobas can get at us. That and the forts is all that keeps us safe.” The massive forts arrayed next to the two publicly known jump points blinked red.

  They were both very long jumps. It would take the Drakes or Cordobas years to go around them. The forts were big and heavy and armored with powerful launchers and heavy armaments; they would be horribly expensive to fight through.

  Neither of the jumps were all that large in area, so it would be very hard to slip something in behind the forts.

  “All that being said,” Allenby continued, “if the Drakes or Cordobas were willing to commit enough force, they could take out the forts and take the jumps. And going to the aid of King Edward in Franklin or Clan Gold in Parthia might well be enough to persuade the Cordobas that expending the force is worth it.”

  Tanya, as the person on their side of the table with the most military experience, answered, “I understand, Captain, but what do you expect us to do about it?”

  “A set of those anti-nuke missiles of yours would make the forts a hell of a lot harder to take out. Their best bet is to throw dozens of nukes at the forts, and even with our round shot we won’t be able to get them all. But with your—”

  “We call them shield missiles,” Danny said. “We think they will work fairly well against round shot, and we know they will take down a ship’s wing if they hit it right.”

  Tanya sent Danny a dirty look that he apparently didn’t even notice.

  “That just makes them more valuable to us,” Allenby said.

  Danny did something and in place of the star map, the holo globe now held an image of a shield missile. “Under the circumstances, we’re willing enough to sell you the designs. But ours use artificial brains, and even for something as small as a missile brain, that takes time.”

  “What about expert systems?” Allenby asked. “That’s just software.”

  “Sure. But you’ll have to develop—” Gerhard was shaking his head, so Danny stopped. “What is it, Doctor?”

  “An expert system missile will work. But it wouldn’t have stopped the nuke that was aimed at Skull Station.”

  Tanya was surprised at that, and apparently so was everyone else. “Why not, Doctor Schmitz?”

  “Because the brain of the missile felt the magnetic field and felt the impact of the hunter-nuke on it. It reacted on the basis of those feelings in a way that I would never have thought to put into an expert system, and in a way that I doubt I could replicate, even if I had the missile’s brain to work from. I frankly don’t understand how it did it, and Pan isn’t entirely sure she does.”

  “That makes three of us, Doc,” said Sylvia Avery. “I watched it happen, and I still don’t believe it.”

  “Fine. But the expert systems will work,” Captain Allenby insisted. “Look, Syl, I got nothing against the brains. I’m fond of Pal and Crossbones, and you know that. What bothers me is the time. You know that even simple brains take a long time to make.”

  “I know, Jack, and I want to have as many of these new missiles as we can get. But the Doc has a point. When it comes down to it, I want a brain guiding a—” She looked at Danny. “—shield missile, when my life is depending on it.”

  “How are you set up for manufacturing brains?” Tanya asked.

  “Not as well as I would like,” Sylvia said cautiously.

  Jack Allenby laughed out loud. Sylvia shot Jack the same sort of glance that Tanya shot at Danny before, and Tanya was suddenly sure that Skull System didn’t have any manufacturing facilities for artificial brains at all.

  “I’ll need something more precise than that,” Gerhard said, apparently having missed Sylvia’s look.

  “Nothing,” Roger Avery said. Then, with a look at his daughter, he continued. “I know it may hurt our bargaining position, but we have never had any facilities for the manufacture of artificial brains. They were never common and we, uh, acquired . . . what brains we needed.” He took control of the globe and brought up an information listing. “We still have some tailor bots in the system, but real flexsuits have gotten rare. We have Pal for the system and Crossbones for the station, and some of our shuttles and twelve of our ships have brains, but that’s about it.”

  Roger shrugged and continued softly, “I didn’t realize just how scarce brains have become until I got to talking with Dr. Cox about the surgery on the Starchild girl.” He looked around the room, mostly at the Skull System captains. “You do understand, if one of our people were to receive injuries of that nature, they would spend the rest of their days in a life-support chair. I am frankly amazed that what you did was even possible. So is Doctor Cox.”

  “No, I didn’t realize that, Admiral,” said Gerhard. “I can . . .” Then he stopped talking, and everyone waite
d because it was clear to see there was something more. “I was about to offer to fix that for you, but the truth is, I can’t.”

  Now it was Gerhard’s turn to take over the holo globe. He filled it with a model of Jenny, the brains, and pseudo-neurons installed in her. Then a schematic showing the production times on the brains and which printer made each. “Sally and several micro brain printers make up my factory and Sally is the crucial irreplaceable part. I could give or sell you one of the printers.” He highlighted the printers in the schematic. “But without Sally it would do you only limited good.” He wiped the holo of his images.

  “I can sell you a few specialized brains, wing controllers, fusion plant managers, that sort of thing.” Gerhard shrugged. “But I had to repurpose a set of brains that were to do everything from run a vacuum cleaner to control a watering system in order to have the parts to help Jenny. And I couldn’t have done that without Sally. Also, they wouldn’t work without Arachne’s manager unit managing them.”

  “How long did it take you to build Arachne?” Jack Allenby asked.

  “A bit over a year. Mostly, Sally working on it with just guidance from me.”

  Jack Allenby shook his head. “That girl has the price of a ship—”

  “And is worth every penny of it,” John Gabriel said hotly.

  “Not arguing that.” Allenby waved a hand in a calming gesture. “If she was mine, I’d feel the same way. Just commenting was all.”

  “How much for Sally?” Roger Avery interrupted.

  “Sally is a member of the family,” said Rosita Stuard stiffly, “and not for sale at any price.”

  Roger Avery’s eyes narrowed and took on a hardness that made the hairs on the back of Tanya’s neck stand up.

  Then Danny added, “Up to and including open war.”

  Roger looked back at Danny Gold and cold black eyes met frozen green ones. No one said anything for several moments.

  Then Jack Allenby laughed again. “You’re our sort of folks, Gold.”

  Avery looked at Allenby, then back at Danny, and nodded. He leaned back in his chair.

  “Which still leaves the problem of introducing brain production into the Skull System,” Sylvia said. “What will it take, Doctor? Assume for the moment that money is no object.”

  Now both Jack Allenby and Roger Avery were looking at Sylvia like she was nuts, and the rest of the captains didn’t look thrilled either.

  Sylvia stared them all down, moving her eyes back and forth like targeting lasers. “I came within half a second and one artificial brain of losing my life and a quarter of a million people. That’s not going to happen again.”

  “And that’s the problem in a nutshell, because what getting you that capability would entail is taking the facilities that make those missiles’ brains off-line and tasking it with building a much larger brain—one that copies Sally’s abilities. It would take five years.” Gerhard paused. “Check me on this, Sally. To produce a brain with your functionality in regard to making brains, five years?”

  Over the speakers in the conference room came the voice of Sally. “Two point seven, Doctor. It would need much less of my administrative abilities.”

  “That fast? I’m amazed,” Gerhard said. “I’ve been tinkering with Sally for the last forty years, off and on.”

  “It’s that tinkering that would allow me to make a much more efficient brain maker, Doctor, along with your knowledge of what would and wouldn’t work and how processing groups can be alternately tasked to get the best results. The timing is based on the assumption that I would have you to consult with as the construction proceeded.”

  “Never mind Sally,” said a woman’s voice. It was one of the captains. “How much for the Doc?”

  Rosita sniffed. “I’d have to think about it. There have been times in the last year or so when I would have gladly traded him for a half-empty box of tissues.”

  That brought general laughter and a decrease in the tension.

  Gerhard called up the hologlobe again. “We brought three Wilson-Clark IIIs, but we left two of them on Parthia. The Wilson-Clark IIIs print and test brains in an integrated manner. A normal molecular printer doesn’t. With the proper programming, a molecular printer can print a small brain, but it would take orders of magnitude more time to do it and the brain wouldn’t be as effective.”

  “What about building a factory manager like Arachne?” Roger asked.

  “That’s what Sally was talking about, I think,” Gerhard said, then apparently consulted with Sally. “Yes, at least in part. Though, as I think about it, we might be able to trim a little off Sally’s estimate. What we’re faced with here is reasonably flexible equipment that can be turned to a lot of uses, but not all at once. We only have so many brain printers, and if we use them to make a manager like Sally, we can’t be using them to make shield missile brains or even the subsystem brains.

  “If anyone is going to Danworth, you want to buy anything you can get that can be used to print neural nets. Especially if you find any Wilson-Clark III molecular printers.”

  “Congreve in Drake space used to have a production facility for artificial brains,” added Jack Allenby. “There might be something floating around in their outsystem.”

  “Okay. If no one else is going to bring it up, I will,” Roger Avery said. “The issue is that these people are planning to leave and take the only brain-making facility available to us with them.”

  Tanya glanced around and felt like a fat lambfish surrounded by hungry nearsharks.

  “And you want us to do that,” Danny said. “Because an allied clan to mine has been making shield missile brains and bodies, or at least the parts for them, since we left. That’s roughly six standard months’ worth of production. And they were already up and running. People, you want an alliance with the Council of Clans on Parthia.”

  “Franklin has a good, solid industrial base,” Eddy added. “That industrial base could support and augment your own, once I regain my throne. We even have the technology to print neural nets, if on a very limited scale.”

  “Rather, the new Franklin Governance Corporation has that ability,” Jack Allenby said.

  Eddy’s lips tightened a bit, but he held his expression in check. “Which circumstance does you no good at all. Nor is likely to in the future.”

  “Enough. We aren’t going to settle this in one meeting,” Roger Avery said. “Look, you aren’t going to be leaving today, right?”

  Danny nodded.

  “Good enough. Let Jack and Sylvia represent the captain’s council, and pick a couple of people to sit down with them and negotiate what you expect to get for this new innovation, and we’ll leave any formal alliances until later. What about the Brass . . . no, you renamed it. What about the Arachne?”

  “What about it?”

  “You’re going to need crew. I mean, the little girl who got shot isn’t going to be able to handle it all by herself.”

  Tanya spoke up. “With Jenny’s agreement, I’ll be commanding the Arachne. I’ll take Chuck Givens as my number one, and most of the Cordoba Spaceforce personnel, because they have military experience.”

  “That’s not a good idea,” Jack Allenby said. “We don’t want a Cordoba-crewed warship wandering around loose with the knowledge of the shield missiles. It would be too easy for Miss Starchild to have an accident, leaving the ship in the hands of you people.”

  “Are you—”

  “I’m not calling anyone anything, but we have to worry about it.” Allenby faced John Gabriel. “And you should worry about it too, Gabriel, if you want that little girl of yours to grow up.”

  “We should instead crew it with pirates?”

  “Not entirely. But, for everyone’s sake, you need a mixed crew. Now, I have Petey Li. He’s the third on the Bontemps. A good man, looking for a better berth. The lad’s ready for first mate, and I dare say he has as much combat experience as your Givens.”

  At that point, several other of the capta
ins insisted that they had people who were also qualified, even several options for captain.

  Nothing was settled then, except that the ultimate decision would be Jenny Starchild’s. Young as she was, it was her ship.

  Location: Arachne, Skull System Orbit

  Standard Date: 01 05 632

  Jenny wasn’t completely healed, but she sat, belted in, at the desk in the captain’s cabin of the Arachne, with John sitting on her right. Then she opened the hatch as Danny Gold approached it. It was automatic, almost without thought. She was so integrated with Arachne that she saw the captain floating toward her hatch and used the automatics to open the hatch. She rotated the chair to face him and said, “Hi, Captain Gold.”

  “Hi, Jenny.” Danny floated to the chair she indicated and belted himself in, giving John a nod. “Have you thought about crew at all?”

  “Yes. Arachne told me about the meeting before it was over. I . . . we’ve been examining the records of the proposed new crew.”

  “That’s good, but even with Arachne you’re going to need an absolutely loyal core for your crew. I want you to take Goldvokx and Goldtak as additional security. That will make you a clan, with them as your first workers. They’ll become part of your clan, but we have to get back to Parthia before we can get you official.”

  “Jennyvokx?” Jenny asked. “That would be hard to say.”

  “Starchildvokx?” Danny offered.

  “That’s silly.”

  “So make it Starvokx,” John Gabriel said. “You made up your last name anyway.”

  “I didn’t know you knew that.”

  “I guessed as soon as I heard it.”

  “Why’d you make up your name?” Danny asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jenny said.

  In truth, she did it because she was terrified. At the time, the station had just been destroyed and she had no one. She heard a couple of older girls talking about people from important families being disappeared. Jenny didn’t know if her family was important, but she wasn’t taking chances. So when she was asked her name, she said Jenny Starchild.