Home: Interstellar: Merchant Princess

by Strong, Ray

  Meriel and John joined the Tiger crew at the TarnGirl in the middle of a raucous party and pulled chairs over to the table. Cookie flirted with a buxom blonde at the next table, which annoyed a large bald man sitting beside her. Their shoulder patches identified them as crew on another ship in their league, the JSS Rowley. Both crews had already reached stage 5—loud and bawdy—of Meriel’s ten stages of a spacer’s party with Alf Martin, Socket’s alternate, acting surly and heavily invested in a severe hangover. Socket was there as well, enhancing her legend with two muscular escorts.

  John scrolled through the list of premium scotches. “What do you think, Alf, a single malt or blended?”

  Alf Martin blinked with his mouth open, and Meriel looked away and bit her lip. She let her breath out slowly when John ordered a scotch-flavored alcohol replica.

  “So why the secrecy?” Meriel asked John.

  “Our competitors hunger for information about our products and customers. I can travel under the noses of our competition when I work crew.”

  “Competitive products?”

  “Not really,” John said, “but they control the product buzz and the media. Our tactic is for loyal customers to post testimonials on the net and spread the word before BioLuna and others can suck the air out of our message.”

  “Who’s the ‘we’ in your story?”

  “LGen Inc. You heard of them?”

  “No,” Meriel said.

  “Good. That’s the idea.”

  “What are you selling?”

  “Information,” John said. “It’s too expensive to ship finished goods, so we sell replicator data sets so partners can mass produce locally.”

  “Everybody does that,” Meriel said.

  “Yes, but ours mimic an individual’s genetic markers—implants are guaranteed nonrejection; drugs are guaranteed compatible; drug blends without contraindications. We just need to have our nanoscale replicators on site to execute the data sets.”

  “Why haven’t I heard of LGen before?”

  “The big corporations have a media blackout to keep LGen out of retail,” he said, “so we need to sell through channels. Even BioLuna sells our stuff. Actually, the anonymity gives us lots of flexibility.”

  “How does a small group like yours compete with BioLuna and the other conglomerates?”

  “They need us. We’re still a big part of their R and D,” John said. “Most of the technology, the research threads, started on L5. You know about L5?”

  Meriel raised her eyebrows, remembering that was where John came from. “Not much,” she said with a skeptical tone.

  “What’s the matter? Why the look?”

  “You look too normal, too healthy, to come from L5,” Meriel said.

  John stood up and grabbed a pool cue from the wall and then hit his leg with a loud whack without flinching. “Nobody’s perfect.”

  “Prosthetic?” Meriel asked.

  “That’s us—prosthetics, genomics, pharma. They built L5 for research and development of products that could be mass-produced back on Earth. Well, L5 got old and worn, and the residents, including my parents, took a chance and left for a habitat called Haven. Our station is called LeHavre.”

  “Haven’t heard of it,” she said. Sheesh, refugees from a condemned habitat moving up to a low-grav hellhole like Ceres. Meriel shook her head. “Rumor has it that L5ers were sterile from radiation and went extinct.”

  John smiled and shook his head. “Nope. We’re doing fine.” He reached for his link and pulled up a vid of two girls, perhaps nine and eleven, and a woman kneeling between them. The older girl had a patch over her left eye. “See? I got two of the sweetest and healthiest little girls in the galaxy there. Becky and Sandy.”

  Meriel raised her eyebrows and smiled. Good thing he didn’t surprise me about that, she thought. “They’re beautiful. Is that their mom in the middle?” Meriel asked.

  “Yeah. She died some years ago.”

  “Sorry,” she said and paused. “People out here don’t know anything about LeHavre either.”

  “Only LGen ships fly in and out. The catalog coordinates are wrong, and BioLuna keeps them wrong.”

  “How come?”

  “BioLuna thinks they still own us. They want to control immigration and don’t want squatters,” he said. “It’s just as well. The ecosystem can’t handle a large influx of immigrants.”

  Meriel nodded, only half listening. She was thinking about Haven and how impossible it sounded that a viable station and habitable body she’d not heard of could even exist. Before she could ask John about Haven’s location and livability, he interrupted her train of thought.

  “Back there,” John said, “what did you mean when you said you’d lose the kids?”

  “The kids from my ship when I was a kid.”

  “The Princess?” John asked, but Meriel remained silent. “Sorry. Word gets around. I didn’t mean to pry.”

  Meriel did not hear a note of pity in his voice and gave him a friendly smile. “You’re not…yet. I try not to talk about them. What did you hear about the Princess?”

  “Only the announcement. The story disappeared pretty quick.”

  “Yeah, instantly.”

  “You’re the kid who survived?”

  “One of them,” she said. “I’m trying to get our ship and the kids back together. There are lots of lawyers involved, and I need to act like I’m a good influence—or at least not a bad one.” Meriel finished her second drink and felt it. She wondered if any of the station lawyers might be taking vids of her here.

  “Where are the others now?”

  I should not be talking openly like this. “I really don’t know.” She lied. “Sometimes, I want to go AWOL to see them, especially my sister and little Harry.” She knew she had said too much. The drinks had affected her mood. Time to change the subject. “Say, Cookie told me you could help with some questions about coordinating in space.”

  “OK, shoot.”

  “How could one ship ambush another between stations?” she asked. “Cookie says they teach marines that it’s impossible.”

  “Not impossible, just improbable, and that’s the issue—probability.”

  “They don’t teach two-ship coordination.”

  “That’s because they don’t do it anymore. Let me get Cookie.”

  John turned around, and Meriel stole a look at his profile. A nice face, she thought, and honest eyes. He’s the most straight-arrow guy I’ve met in my life. But he’s not some station hookup. I still need to work with this guy tomorrow.

  When John turned back to her, she felt the blush returning to her face. Cookie had a similar blush, and she suspected that the nearby blonde still held his attention. It appeared that the table next to theirs had already achieved stage 6 on Meriel’s party scale, and at the current rate of alcohol consumption, they would soon enter stage 7.

  “You’re nav two, right?” John asked, and Meriel nodded. “OK, so I’ll just take it for granted you know about jumping and the sphere,” he said. Meriel nodded again. “Before they built all the stations, spacers tried to transfer cargo at jump points but gave up. Bottom line is that merchants could not make their margins trying to transfer cargo at jump points, and thieves gave up looking for them.”

  “How so?”

  Cookie turned to join their conversation. “’Cause you need to know exactly where something’s gonna be.” He swayed in his chair and grinned, oblivious to the balled up napkins that the blonde bounced off his head and the growing annoyance of the muscle beside her. Meriel wondered if they had reached stage 7 already.

  “That’s right,” John said. “You need to know exactly where something is going to be, and you just can’t know that exactly. Even if they tell you where they plan to be, no one can hit the mark exactly.”

  “The sphere,” Meriel said. She wondered if she should have invited them back to Teddy’s to discuss nav with an expert.

  “Right,” John said.

  “Ri
ght,” Cookie repeated and hit the table for emphasis. Meriel wondered if he would fall from his chair.

  John continued, “OK, even if you know where your partner is supposed to be and wait there for him, you will not actually know he is there until his EM broadcast appears on your scopes.”

  “When they wink-in,” Meriel said.

  “Right. EM travels at light speed, so you don’t see their signals until then. Let’s say your sphere is one AU, which is pretty good for a jump. That’s still hundreds of millions of miles. It takes nearly ten minutes before you can see the signal and still lots more time and energy to get there. It’s much easier to build a station on the high-traffic routes.”

  The big blonde had been listening and tried to wedge her way into Cookie’s conversation. She poked him on the shoulder, and he turned around. “Say, so why do we still use AU anyway?” she asked. “Earth is eight light years away.”

  “It’s just a convention, like meters and feet,” Cookie said.

  The blonde swung a dainty shoe onto the table in a most undainty manner. “Sure, but we bring our feet with us; we don’t bring Earth with us.”

  Cookie slammed his boot onto the table, dwarfing hers. “Your foot is different than mine, but we all agreed on what a foot of distance is, just like meters and AU,” he said, removed his boot from the table, and turned back to rejoin the conversation with John and Meriel.

  The blonde tried to swing her foot off the table but leaned back too far and would have fallen over if not for the nearby muscle, who caught her chair. Meriel guessed that the blonde would either pass out or be the first to reach stage 7 on the party scale.

  “What if they don’t broadcast their position?” Meriel said, and Cookie frowned.

  John continued, “If they don’t broadcast when they wink-in, you’ll need to find them against the background of stars. A ship’s albedo is really small at one AU and it can take hours to compute contrasts and displacements. Hell, it’s really hard to find anything smaller than a moon at that distance, if you find it at all.”

  “And it could jump away first…” Meriel said.

  John caught Cookie’s frown, and they exchanged glances. “So what’s this about? The question isn’t academic, is it?”

  “No, sorry. I’m trying to figure out how pirates attacked my ship when I was a kid. Pirates have the same problem you two are talking about.”

  “Right, pirates gave up because it’s too hard to find the victim.”

  “Everyone says it couldn’t happen, but it did,” Meriel said. “I just can’t figure out how or why.”

  John dropped his casual smile and looked at her. “Are you sure that the meeting was not…intentional?”

  Meriel clenched her jaw and balled her fists but restrained the urge to punch him in the face at the insinuation of a clandestine drug drop. She held her temper and glared at him instead. “Absolutely.”

  Cookie leaned over the table. “Then someone sent you somewhere your pilot didn’t intend.” He looked coldly serious but then blinked twice slowly as if the last drink had just reached his brain. The blonde escalated to cocktail olives to get his attention again, but stage 7 impaired her aim. From the look on her companion’s face, violence was imminent, but Meriel could not leave just yet.

  “They could not just follow you in,” John said. “It would take too long to find you. They’d need two spheres to put you there and keep you there.”

  Cookie nodded slowly as if he had uncovered a priceless gem. “And lock your nav so you couldn’t jump away before they got to you.”

  Meriel frowned and fiddled with the sim-chip on her necklace. “But you can’t lock nav, right?”

  Cookie leaned back with a smile and said loudly, “Right. Nav is more secure than a hooker’s client list.” He laughed, but Meriel shook her head with disappointment.

  The blonde turned to Cookie. “Who you calling a hooker, sailor?” she said with a jiggle and a teasing smile. Apparently, all of the Rowley’s crew had reached stage 7—looking for trouble—and Cookie was where they were looking. He opened his mouth to reply, but the big man sitting with the blonde stood up.

  “Yeah, who you calling a hooker?” the big man said.

  Cookie stood up with open arms and a generous smile on his face, but the big guy swung at him anyway. Cookie leaned back and deflected the punch, but the big man lost his balance and fell on the table, spilling all of their drinks. It looked like Cookie had knocked him down, and both crews stood and squared off for a yelling match complete with shaking fists and threatening postures. Alf Martin escalated to a pool cue, which started the punches. Meriel backed away and looked for the door but could not maneuver around the fighters.

  She grabbed John’s sleeve. “I’ve got to get out of here, John. I can’t get caught in a fight,” she said, intentionally leaving out again.

  “It’s just a bar fight. They’ll let us all go in a few hours.”

  “My sheet is too long, and I’m marine-three,” she said. “If I hurt someone, even by accident, I’ll lose my ship. I’ll lose my kids, John.”

  “We can just blame it all on Cookie.”

  “I’m serious. I gotta get out of here.”

  John nodded and led her to the back of the TarnGirl as the bartenders and bouncers rushed past them to form a cordon in front of the liquor inventory. They found a door behind the bar, and Meriel went outside to a service corridor. John tried to follow, but someone pulled him back and threw a punch. The door slammed closed before she could stop it and would not open from the outside. She leaned against the wall to wait for him, but when the police sirens wailed, she knew she had to leave.

  ***

  On her way back to the Tiger, Meriel stopped at a party-planner’s office to arrange a party and cake for Harry’s twelfth birthday. She used an alias because of the court orders that kept the kids’ identities and whereabouts secret—even arranging a party could put the kids at risk and her legal cases in jeopardy. While giving instructions to the party planner, she dreamed about having all of the kids together again, something that had not happened since they left the Princess all those years ago.

  She tried to call John and Cookie without response, so she returned to the blue-zone docks and the Tiger. Molly stood at the air lock talking to Lev from her cargo crew and hailed Meriel.

  “Seems our crew is in jail,” Molly said. “How’d you avoid that?”

  “I was arranging a party, ma’am.”

  “Well, they’re not getting out by themselves. Better go get them, Chief. I’ve authorized you for bail, but call me if the damages exceed your allowance.”

  “Shore patrol is Cookie’s job,” Meriel said to hide that she knew he’d been arrested with the others.

  Molly smiled. “He’s detained as well.”

  “OK,” Meriel said and looked at her link. The authorization surprised her; it was almost a blank check—limited in purpose but not in amount. Meriel turned to go, but Molly continued.

  “Oh, and Meriel, someone found this in green-zone,” she said and handed Meriel a lapel ID button that read, “LSM Tiger/Cargo.” It had fallen off Meriel’s shirt when the tough grabbed her purse. Meriel desperately tried to guess how much Molly knew so she could spin a cover story, but Molly interrupted her thoughts. “Maybe you can find the owner and return it,” she said with a smile and turned to board the Tiger.

  Meriel borrowed a cargo cart that could accommodate everyone on the ship, not just her crewmates who were in jail, and drove the short distance to red-zone and the police station. She trusts me with the ship’s funds. If this is a test, then I need to pass it. How much does she know? she wondered.

  Security spiders idled by the entrance to red-zone; their crimson lights blinked to remind everyone that they were armed. No ID was required to enter so as to expedite representation and removal of the detainees.

  She parked the cart next to the police station and went inside. The small waiting room was equipped with two wire benches, a video m
onitor on the wall, and a single opaque window opposite the entrance. No exits were visible other than the door, and she guessed that a hazmat crew could hose down the entire room and sterilize it without damaging anything—like some bachelor apartments she had nearly entered.

  Meriel approached the opaque window. It appeared to be thick and most likely made of a ballistic ceramic that would fog at ionizing wavelengths. She held her bracelet link up to the window so it could scan her ID, after which the window cleared, and the desk sergeant appeared.

  “Here for the Tiger crew,” she said.

  Without raising his head, the desk sergeant looked up at her with an asymmetric squint. “Haven’t I seen you before?”

  “Probably. Bail?”

  His gaze returned to his monitor, but he pointed to a comm button on the wall. She ran her link near it.

  “Damages?” Meriel asked. The officer nodded slightly and hit a button to display his console data on the window in front of her. Meriel synched the data again. When the data hit his screen, the officer hit a few keys.

  “The Rowdy boys are here too,” he said absently, referring to the crew of the JJS Rowley.

  Meriel turned away from the window and keyed her link. “Molly, they’ve got the Rowley crew. Can we take them?”

  “Yes, but no damages,” Molly said. Meriel turned and synched her approval on the button.

  The officer nodded. “Wait, please.”

  After examination of the bench for fresh stains and vermin, Meriel sat down in front of the monitor.

  In breaking news, elections on the Chosho colony on tau Cetu-4 have been in turmoil with the late inclusion of Fredric Allen on the Senate ballot. Allen’s candidacy is supported by the Archtrope of Calliope. His only legislation to date has been to extend the domes to include an exclusive self-governing colony for followers of the archtrope. His standing for election is seen as a referendum on the archtrope’s involvement…

  Meriel half listened while she worked on her link. News was so sequential, so linear, and so dumbed-down that she needed something to do between the endless clichés and cultural tics. She composed another text to her hacker friend, Nick.