Pandora’s Crew (StarWings Book 1)

by Gorg Huff

  “Let me talk to them. I think that between that and their desire to avoid embarrassment we might be able to get it just for the unspecified amount they owe us,” Zhecktitick said.

  “What? The Fly Catcher is a jump-capable ship. It’s worth twice what they owe us, at least!” Zheckfiss’ eyestalks crossed.

  “It would be . . . if the passage out of the system wasn’t guarded by a fortress. And I said might. We might also have to cut them in on the product of the Oort cloud mining.”

  “That’s mostly Clan Gold’s. We can’t go . . .” Zhecktiit started.

  “I know that. But we do have authority to manage it in their absence, and if we can work a deal, there will be good profit for all the clans involved.”

  Location: Fly Catcher, Parthian orbit

  “What? You’re selling the Fly Catcher?” Captain Kesskox said, looking into the screen. She was floating just above her command pad, attached loosely by a belt. But it wasn’t the lack of gravity that was causing her discomfort.

  Siskox gestured assent.

  “What happens to us?”

  “That’s why I called.” The older Parthian spacer made a tired gesture with its mid arms. “I know why you did what you did.” Even now it was clear that Siskox was uncomfortable talking about it. “But most of the clan council simply can’t understand. They’ve never been out, not even to the inner asteroid belt, much less out alone in other star systems. But I got a chance to talk to Zhecktitick and I think it understands about the Bangers. The Zheck will need a crew and the council isn’t happy with you or any of your spacers.”

  “So we will be sold with the ship.” All Captain Kesskox felt was relief. Partly that was because she was a Parthian and the idea of being sold wasn’t something that bothered her the way it might a human. But mostly the relief was because this sale meant she would probably be able to keep her ship and the sub-clan that she had formed with the crew.

  “Yes.” Siskox signed off.

  Location: Council of Clans, Parthia

  “If the council will give me a moment?” said Zhecktitick, waving both its mid-arms at the ceiling in the traditional gesture before it was fully into the chamber.

  “We’ve agreed to take up the issue of the debt that you claim is owed you by Clan—” Gokwak started.

  Zhecktitick waved his mid-arms again in a polite gesture of interruption. “I am simply attempting to prevent a waste of the council’s time.” It shifted its eyestalks to scan the large, half-full chamber.

  “If you insist,” Gokwak agreed. “But you’re not making any friends by interrupting.”

  That much was quite obvious from the postures of the delegates. “It is simply that mediation by the council of clans is no longer needed. Clan Zheck and Clan Kox have come to an agreement and all debts between the two clans are now paid.”

  That brought silence for about two breaths, then a murmur of discussion that grew in volume and apparent consternation. It took one of the council porters pounding on a gong with its powerful mid-arms to quiet the hubbub enough for Gokwak to ask rather testily, “What agreement has been reached?”

  “Some of the details are private, of course, but in general the Fly Catcher is now owned by Clan Zheck and there is an agreement between Clan Zheck—as representatives of our allied Clan Danny Gold—and Clan Kox to exploit certain goods in the Oort cloud of the Parthia system.”

  More hubbub and more pounding on the gong followed.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The camera zoomed out and displayed the news anchor with the council chamber showing on the screen behind it. “That was the scene in the council of clans this morning, Gekjkap,” said Sikjkap. “What do you think this means to the balance of power in the council of clans?”

  “That depends on whether this is a single deal or represents the beginnings of a true alliance between Clan Zheck and her allies and Clan Kox and her allies. If it’s the beginning of a true alliance, the only word for the change is titanic. Zheck and Kox have been the leaders, or at least high in the councils, of the two largest factions of the ground-based clans. With the addition of the Danny Gold clan . . .”

  “But the Danny Gold clan isn’t here. It’s outsystem to the last worker.”

  “Sure. But its alliances aren’t. With the Gold Clan involved in this, the Kiik are almost certain to join in as well, and they have been doing quite well in space manufacturing.”

  “That’s not the half of it, Gokjkap,” added Fiffdak, an expert on business and a regular on the show. “That trader of theirs is rapidly turning into a master of business. Almost single-handedly, it has turned the fortunes of Kiik around, and with Kiik will come the Fiff and the Siki.”

  “How are the Fkis and the Gok going to respond?”

  “That’s the question, all right. They were already in trouble because they are too closely tied to the JCTC for most Parthians’ comfort. Word that the JCTC is building a fort to keep us locked into our system has been a great embarrassment to them. With this new coalition, they have to be hurting.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Zheckfiss turned off the viewer on the Fly Catcher and gestured to Captain Zheckess. “You understand that ‘off-the-books’ cargo will not be acceptable this time?”

  Zheckess, formerly Kesskox, nodded its—possibly, her—mouth-hand in an oddly human gesture that made Zheckfiss uncomfortable. “We . . . the crew, I mean . . . do have needs. Foods, equipment.”

  It was clear to Zheckfiss that Zheckess was trying to sound polite, but the intonations of a female breeder slipped out of its secondary voicebox. That made Zheckfiss more uncomfortable. “Yes, I understand. And the Zheck clan will make sure those needs are met. Including the Bangers.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Zheckess tried not to wince at the tone of that last.

  Zheckfiss continued. “What do you need to get your ship ready to travel?”

  “Travel where, exactly? A trip to the Oort cloud would take years.”

  “To a jump route discovered by the Pandora. A jump route that is a closely held secret of the Gold and Zheck clans.”

  “How?” Zheckess started, then tried to explain. “It takes a special ship to find jumps. And I’m not just going by what the humans told us. I’ve been trying to find jumps for years, and you just can’t.”

  “It is apparently the feedback from the wings that makes the jumps more obvious, and that is much easier to understand with an interface.”

  “So we are to be forever denied—” Something in Zheckfiss’ expression stopped her. “What?”

  “We don’t know how it worked, but we do know that Doctor Schmitz thought he had a workable interface for Parthians.”

  “Which isn’t going to do us a lot of good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean there are forts out there now,” Zheckess said. “With the best will in the world, Danny Gold won’t be able to get through them to come back. We’re stuck in here and they are stuck out there.”

  Chapter 33

  The technique of folding wings wasn’t possible in the early days of jump travel. A wing must be at least a certain size relative to the mass of the ship making the jump. The level of overpowering that modern warships maintain simply didn’t exist. Even now a ship like the Pandora, fully loaded, cannot “fold” its wings to any great degree and still make jump. Unloaded, the Pandora could decrease her wing reach by as much as twenty-five percent and still make jump.

  The Arachne, on the other hand, can fold her wings to as little as twenty-five kilometers in length and still make jump. That represents a tremendous advantage if you know the small jumps of the system.

  Tanya Cordoba-Davis to the Council of Clans, Canova, Standard Year 633

  Location: Arachne, Skull System Station

  Standard Date: 01 22 632

  For the next couple of weeks, Jenny found herself interviewing potential crew, with the guidance of Tanya, Arachne, and John. The captain’s council was fairly insistent that the chain o
f command not be all Cordoba spacers. John agreed with them. So they interviewed six candidates from the Skull System and selected Petey Li, Captain Allenby’s suggested candidate from the Bontemps.

  Petey was easy-going and didn’t have a problem with Startak or Starvokx. Jenny was always rather good at reading people, even when she was a kid. With the addition of the Arachne and her sensors, Jenny was almost like a walking lie detector. This was something that she decided not to mention to anyone.

  Petey was willing to forgo shares if he didn’t have to attack merchant ships anymore. “A pirate’s life seemed glamorous when I started out, lass, but it’s a hard life that requires hard acts. I don’t mind a fight, but there’s something about going after a fat freighter that’s too scared to fight and too slow to run that . . .” He shrugged. “I just don’t like it.”

  “Well, that’s good. We have an agreement with Captain Gold. We will be escorting the Pandora, and in exchange we will get a bonus based on the sale of goods once we get back to Parthia. But as a part of that, we will be getting flexsuits for the crew. Real flexsuits, made by Hirum’s suit bot.” Jenny sniffed disdainfully. “Not these stupid modern suits. So you will need to go over to the Pandora and get fitted. We don’t have room for the tailor shop here. Besides, Hirum doesn’t want to be on a warship.”

  With Petey’s help they were able to find the necessary crew. Petra, by her own choice, was staying on the Pan, and Jenny was giggly certain that she was going to marry Robert Schmitz. Fred Markum wanted to go back to being a fighting spacer, and this was the ship to do that on. Jimmy Dugan was coming with Tanya and would train the Arachne’s exspatio force. But Jenny wanted everyone cross-trained. She wasn’t any more interested in stealing merchant ships than Petey was, but she had a hunch that there would be prizes. Military prizes.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Jenny sank into the simulation and felt the crew. It was a new experience for her. During simulations on Pandora there was almost a wall between her and the crew, but Arachne was different. Warships have to have fast reactions. Warship crews need the tight interface for rapid transfer of orders and information. That was part of what Jenny felt, but there was something else as well. Arachne, from the beginning, never tried to be an independent entity, not since they installed bits of it in Jenny. Arachne worked actively at being part of Jenny. So Jenny felt Tanya, Petey, and the rest. She could tell what they were doing, and it was clear and natural.

  Carla Creger was looking for targets for the C-D laser array and running sims. This was a warship. It had lasers for close-in defense against nukes, something that merchantmen weren’t allowed. Carla was anticipating the incoming nukes with something like glee, while Edgar Rush was praying that there would be no nukes close enough to shoot, even in a sim. But Jenny knew from the records that Edgar’s hit percentage was better than Carla’s. It was as though everyone in the crew was part of her.

  Tanya sent a quiet thought, “This is different,” with sidebars defining the difference from what she was used to. This lacked the hard-edged artificiality that made Jenny so uncomfortable when she first started interfacing with the Pan. “I’m uncomfortable that I’m so comfortable,” Tanya added. “There is supposed to be a clear distinction between my thought and what I am getting from the shipnet.”

  Jenny made an adjustment and Arachne’s net added a marker to Tanya’s interface that simulated that sense of artificiality.

  Other crew members liked the intimacy of the net. Some of them liked it a bit too well. When Jenny caught someone’s fleeting thought, a thought that made her blush, she tweaked the net again to keep that sort of thought outside her head. It wasn’t that she wasn’t interested, but she didn’t want to invade the crew’s privacy.

  The sim went on, using the ship’s systems and virtual enemies. They were introducing the crew to the new shield missiles, and Edgar immediately saw the danger that didn’t occur to Jenny, Tanya, or anyone. The shield missiles were vulnerable to laser fire.

  Tanya thought at Edgar, “What about spread?”

  “Some,” Edgar conceded, “but a lot of the spread when you shoot them at other ships is that last hundred klicks or so, when they are encountering the plasma field.”

  Suddenly there were numbers and simulations flashing back and forth. Edgar, Carla, Tanya, and Jimmy, all tweaking the sims, and Jenny was following it all. It was Carla who thought of adding an umbrella, a small, reflective sheet on a short pole, that would stick out in front of the missile.

  “It would block the sensors and a side shot would go right by it.”

  More simulations, more math, contacting Pandora, and getting Hirum in on the conversation, and Doctor Schmitz, and Danny.

  Jenny was pleased, and so was Tanya. The crew was integrating surprisingly well.

  Location: Skull Station

  Standard Date: 01 25 632

  Danny smiled at Captain Janis Tecumseh and lifted the champagne flute to his lips.

  Janis smiled back, and showed him the bottle.

  Things proceeded in a mostly predictable manner after that, and later they talked about routes. Janis and her ship, the Warchief, mostly operated in Cordoba space and knew a number of hidden routes. Janis was a straightforward, openly amoral woman, and made no bones at all about the fact that she was using Danny.

  “I figure that with you as a Parthian clan, I can sell loot in the Parthia System. What I need is a route to Parthia that doesn’t go through Canova.”

  “So do I,” Danny admitted ruefully. “I spent the better part of a year in the Parthian outsystem looking for another route.”

  “Find anything?”

  “Cul de sacs. A couple of fairly long ones. One of them is a five-jump chain that goes through a fairly dense section of the Parthian Oort cloud. There are some decent resources off jump three in the chain.”

  “Bet the bugs were happy about that.”

  “Less than you might think.” Danny didn’t correct her use of “bug.” Nor did he mention the automated miner bots. “Parthians aren’t big on operating on their own and, besides, they don’t have any jump ships. It’s all the Jackson-Cordobas.”

  “Want to play some rutter tag, Danny?”

  “I’d rather just buy anything you have within a lightyear of Parthia’s sun.”

  Janis’ eyes glazed for a minute. “I don’t have anything within a year, but I have two that are about two years. They are to galactic north spinward. Free hint!”

  Danny considered. He liked Janis and enjoyed her in bed, but he didn’t trust her as far as he could throw her. On the other hand, he really needed a new route into Parthia. “Where does it come out?”

  “Are we playing rutter tag, Captain?”

  Danny was still a bit ambivalent, but he said yes.

  Janis gave a location and Danny sighed. It was close, very close. About a light week from the far jump. He gave her the coordinates for that jump.

  “That leads into Parthia?”

  “Five jumps to the belt between TjisKee and Sikikee.”

  “Mine is two jumps to the Canova outsystem, but it’s a route that the Canovas don’t know about and it’s not all that far from the link to the Ferguson chain.”

  They played rutter tag until they each had both routes, and Danny gained a few back ways around the Ferguson area. Janis had locations for a number of cul de sacs in the area around Ferguson, good places to wait in hiding and go unseen by the Spaceforce ships.

  “The Jackson-Cordoba Trading Company has twenty-seven ships. There are only a few that go to Parthia, but Parthia is key to their success. They have these big-ass warehouses in Canova where goods from Parthia are transhipped,” Janis explained. “That’s how I know what will sell on Parthia. I picked up a JCTC ship on my last trip. It was out of Parise, taking a back route to get around the Drakes, and sailed right into my hiding place.” Janis grinned in pleased remembrance. “I loaded up my holds and let them go. No reason to cause bad blood.”

  Danny checked with
Pan, then said, “Twenty-six ships. The Bonaventure had an accident.”

  Janis raised herself to look at him, causing the sheet to fall away. “What sort of accident?”

  Danny looked into her eyes rather than at the breasts she had intentionally exposed. “It attempted an act of piracy against the Pandora.”

  She smiled and reached for him. “I knew there was a reason I liked you.”

  Location: Virtual Space, Pandora and Skull Station

  Standard Date: 01 26 632

  Silvia answered the comm to hear Captain Gold say, “It’s time for us to leave.”

  “We’d like to send a ship with you,” Sylvia said, “for security.”

  “You already have most of the crew on the Arachne and the new hires on the Pan,” Captain Gold complained.

  “Not that sort of security,” Sylvia said. “But you folks are potentially useful to the Skull System and we’re rather afraid of what the Cordobas would do to you if they realized that.” They were more than useful, Sylvia thought. They might be the difference between survival and collapse.

  “So tell us about the back doors.” Danny was referring to the persistent rumors that there were other jumps between Skull System and the rest of Pamplona Sector. Those rumors were partially proved by the jump route out of Alenbie. But they were an important state secret of Skull System, because Skull System wasn’t just one system. There were five stars and fourteen planets controlled by the captain’s council. That was something that Silvia couldn’t share with Gold.

  “If there were more back doors,” Sylvia said repressively, “they would almost certainly involve much longer routes, don’t you think? After all, thirty-seven light-year-long jumps are rare. A more likely scenario would be a thirty- or forty-jump long route that would take months of travel time.”

  “It might be worth it, depending on what’s along the route,” Danny offered.

  “So maybe it’s a shame there isn’t such a route, Captain,” Sylvia said, not giving an inch, though if she had the choice, she would have. At the moment, however, the captain’s council wasn’t sure they trusted Danny Gold. And the best security, as well as the cheapest, for those back routes was to keep them secret. And that was another problem. Sylvia knew that Rosalyn had the rutters for the Cally route, a route that was supposed to be secret. That was worrying, and Sylvia wished now that she hadn’t mentioned the fact that Rosalyn knew about it to the captain’s council. It just scared everyone. The Cally route was another one with long jumps. Three of them, averaging ten light years each.