Ion 417: Raiju

by James Darcey

  I must have sounded diamond dense with my question, "You really are Kanari?"

  Panzo answered for her, "Yes, and if they had listened to her, instead of thinking of her as a machine, then we wouldn't be here. On one of those trial flights she tried to warn them about an asteroid, but they shut her off instead. Seeing that they weren't going to make it, she attempted to take control of the flight panel. The technicians saw it as her exceeding the parameters they had set, and disconnected the interface.

  The asteroid she had warned them of tore through just in front of the engineering section. A third of the crew was lost, and her project was deemed a failure. Her fate was to be torn up for scrap. Fate is a funny thing sometimes. The wrecked hull was brought to me for dismantling.

  What started out as curiosity for the newest gadget to tinker on, became a mission to save her. My oath kept me from telling her family what had really happened, but maybe someday she can do that herself. In the meantime, what they saw as a failure, I saw as the grand chance to make Kanari ships fully Kanari. To satisfy the paperwork I scrapped a couple of obsolete computers."

  "He stuck me inside an onet dispenser, vending drinks for the repair crews to keep me hidden. Not a glorious occupation, but I had company as he talked to me every day."

  "When your ship came along needing a new AI, I was going to install the FGVII that I listed. That is, until I discovered your secret. The FGVII is in your hold because I had to make it disappear, and you have the improved FGVIIIx installed."

  "I hate that name! Please call me Lafiel."

  I had to laugh at that, "As long as you never call me project 417."

  TOC

  SHICHI

  Three months went by faster than you might believe. It didn't take long for Panzo to make sure that Lafiel's connections were perfect. Lafiel would have been bouncing off the walls if she could, but she was the walls. I'd rather not have her bouncing the ship off asteroids as a substitute. This was her very first high drive trip and she was loving it. With the broad spectrum of sensors on the ship she could watch the systems slide by as the zeta field pushed us along.

  Traxel spent a lot of time in his room when he wasn't hunched in the pilot's seat staring at the grey view-port, or trouncing us at Rampari. It turned out that Lafiel knew the game as well. Two weeks of playing and getting further confused with each game before I made a stunning discovery. There were official rules, and then there were Traxel's special rules, and what's more Lafiel had her own version of the rules. She had wanted to take the gold ship on a zeta slide, but give it a hard turn in the middle of the slide due to the diplomat aboard. Traxel brought up the rules saying nothing about curved slides, and she retorted that the rules didn't cover his down shift at the end of zeta slide. They had been covering for each other's modifications to the rules. It was infuriatingly funny, but now I knew why I couldn't beat him at Rampari. Many of the military geniuses that I'd studied had the same thoughts about rules. If the rules don't cover it, make your own rules that do.

  Traxel had the pilot seat, with Lafiel to back him up there. That was a bit of a touchy subject for him. He was accustomed to being the only pilot. Panzo had the engineering seat, and that left me standing around looking useless. A few more of Teyrn's little secrets came out when I had Panzo start teaching me how to work the auxiliary panel.

  It seems that Teyrn had a few surprises hidden in the ship. The dorsal pod was a sophisticated electronic countermeasures array. It could nullify several versions of radar, or give out a false image of us. We could be made to look like a battle cruiser on their sensors, or disappear altogether. More than half of the systems' governments had banned such devices on civilian ships.

  The ventral pod contained a rack of forty missiles, correction, thirty eight remaining missiles. These weren't as powerful as the skip missiles Teryn had sent after us, but they would still hurt. These were relics that had been part of the ship's original design and never removed after it was sold. Though weaker than even the Reliance Guard ship missiles, they could cause quite a problem for anyone fool enough to come after us. This was also only a secondary sting for the corvette.

  The primary sting of the corvette was the charged particle accelerator cannon the ship was built around; our spinal mount. When these ships were decommissioned after the Garand War the guns were supposedly removed. Somehow this one had escaped that fate. It could send a fifty kilo slug with enough speed to punch through a battle cruiser. Not just through the armor, but in one side and out the other. We had thirty of the slugs, some of which were the splintering version. During the war half had been micro-nukes. Pirates beware! It was listed as our secondary cargo hold; what a joke. It was also why I had to squeeze past equipment when I'd fried the electrical system.

  Panzo puffed up with his deductive abilities, "A true director would have known that I'd discover such things, and would have insisted upon my bond immediately."

  Even after the discovery that I wasn't a senior director, it was decided that I was still captain. Cordovans weren't good in command positions, unless they were female. Traxel could make quick decisions, unless it was a critical situation, and then he cracked without leadership. Panzo had his oath to me. He couldn't be in command over me, and still take orders from me. Lafiel was the ship. If a patrol ship captain wanted to meet our captain that just wouldn't work.

  I may have been the captain, but I was also the least experienced when it came to space travel. We were coming up fast on Rage, and needed a good plan for entering the system. I spent the last week before dropout running firing simulations with the missiles. Lafiel fed simulated scans into the displays, and I practiced blowing them up with imaginary missiles, or playing decoy tactics with the ECM.

  I know I wasn't all that good, but it didn't help any to have the other two watching as I practiced. The sudden intakes of breath, and not so soft sighs did little for my confidence. I returned the favor by setting up a static charge on the meal table a few times. I especially loved the time when the static charge had built to the point where Panzo's skewer repulsed out of his hand to stick in the ceiling. It was better than watching a two centimeter arc jump from his food to tongue.

  On her installation, Panzo had given Lafiel full control over the auto comm, and so she programmed it to send out the identity of a merchant out of Muuaca system. With our departure from Reliance, Sugnoff, the traffic control computer had given us a burst of the latest news. Luckily the batch had included some from Muuaca to improve our appearance. The Rage central controller would pick that up as old news and dump it as irrelevant. We certainly couldn't use the old name of Chanda's Folly, so we voted and came up with Denkou Comet. Denkou was a word I had learned watching the scans of my mother. It meant lightning in her tongue. I tried to argue that it didn't represent Traxel and Panzo in the name, but they declined naming it Bug-Zapper Fuzzy Comet.

  I guess you could say that it was Teyrn Elon and Flux Genetics making our escape possible. Coming into Rage I charged up the ECM pod just before the zeta field collapsed, and set it to total obscurity. Anyone close enough to visually see us would have noted the auto comm burst that flashed out carrying the news and our name as Denkou Comet. Panzo suggested that we complete the disappearance by changing the looks of the ship while here.

  "This is a bit of a rough port, rife with corruptible bureaucrats. It will be easy as a hot bath to find someone to give us a new look."

  As the final count scrolled downward toward zero my nerves began to clench up again. This was a critical stop along the way, and it would allow us to drop completely out of his sights. Everything had to work right or else. If that stress wasn't enough, Lafiel had warned us that nav info for this system might be a bit rough. The repair scans at Reliance hadn't shown a problem in the nav systems, but she found some damage to the data banks there. She warned us that there might be minor inaccuracies with the nav plot. The worst error might be the misplacing of one of the moons.

  System information had detailed
the existence of three governing factions on the main world that all lay exclusive claim to the space above. All three had outposts on both moons, that occasionally participated in armed skirmishes. That was the problem that Lafiel had noted. Only one of the moons was listed in the nav information.

  Normally ships arrive above the orbital plane to avoid major shipping lanes. This meant that collisions were virtually non-existent. We dropped back into normal drive relatively close to Rage. This was Lafiel's first high drive run, and she had wanted to make a dramatic entrance. Instead of the normal drop out above the system elliptical, she had actually brought the ship to within a few hundred kilometers of the missing moon's surface. Lafiel was apologizing for the close call as Traxel turned the ship toward the moon. We hadn't had enough information to make an informed selection of landing spots, so I had told him to go to whichever one was closest.

  Lafiel's drop out, virtually in the middle of a shipping lane, could have had disastrous results, and would certainly have had a few traffic controllers angry had the ECM pod not been masking us. The odds of a ship being anywhere near us at the moment we dropped in were nearly a billion to one. We lucked out.

  Panzo told me that most patrols like to cruise the area above the orbital plane to catch arriving ships fast. A few ships monitor the shipping lanes to keep them running smoothly. Only a fool, or someone with bad charts will come down from high drive within the orbital plane. And only a fool, or someone desperate, travels with bad charts. I wonder which category we fit into. A ship full of desperate fools using bad charts.

  For the first minute Traxel was twisting the ship through some very complicated maneuvers as he dodged through the shipping lanes to get us in line for the nearby moon. It didn't take long for the first message to come in demanding that we stop and prepare to be boarded for inspection. Lafiel volunteered to handle the comm demands. The patrol ship calling was also demanding to know where we were.

  It wasn't even a moment later that a second demand arrived from an opposing faction. She did a great job of pitting them against each other as they wrangled with the issue of who had jurisdiction since they weren't sure of our exact location. While the government goons were arguing with each other, she took a few comm signals from competing companies that offered all sorts of landing arrangements. I let Traxel drop us into the closest one that he could find. We were on the ground in very short order with the roof closing over us.

  Suited figures were already connecting lines as the air hissed into the landing bay. By the time we lowered the ramp there was a plump figure waiting for us. The dock master welcomed us with a smile, and a seemingly endless list of fees. I think he delighted in reading each of them off with little comments to make us feel the fees were justified, "So much air escapes each time the doors are opened that it costs a fortune to boost it up from Rage Prime. The harsh environment puts an extra strain on my dock handlers' suits. I've had to replace them twice this year."

  There were fees for everything from power non-usage to entrance fees for mechanics. The biggest fee was for air usage, which was understandable being on an airless moon. I handed him enough to pay the fees and a little extra to cover anything else that would come up in the two days we expected to be here. The fuel price was nearly double what I had paid on Reliance, but I didn't argue. I told him to fill the tanks first thing. I had no intention of being stuck on this moon with empty fuel tanks. Stacks of gold coins weren't worth getting caught. As soon as the coins fell into his hand we were awarded with blue collars to signify that the air tax had been paid. We had seventeen hours before they would shift to yellow.

  I looked around at the landing area. It was big enough to drop one of the Reliance Guard ships into, but this was nothing like the repair bays on Reliance Station. I was standing on actual dirt! The gritty stuff shifted a little with every step I took, sending up a tiny cloud of dust that slowly settled in the low gravity. Images just don't compare to feeling the sand and gravel through the thin layer of shipboard booties. Not to mention the difficulty in controlling my strides in low gravity. The first big step I took sent me several meters into the air.

  Panzo and Traxel both got a good laugh at seeing my reaction to the dirt. Panzo suggested that I find some real boots to walk around on planets with. I hadn't thought about that. I had no idea what Terra was going to be like. I guess I always thought in terms of what the orbital lab had been. That statement sent them both into laughing fits once more. Places like that were the exception it seemed.

  The door out of the landing bay slid aside bringing us to face a small band of workers offering all sorts of services. Most of them looked to be of the same type as our dock master, but there were a few that had obvious come from other planets. Before I could ask any of them about changing the look of the ship, or were to find boots, Panzo waved them away. He promised them that we would contact the dock master if any services were needed.

  I knew that they wanted to go exploring around the various establishments on their own, so I handed them each a couple rolls of the gold coins, dropping five into my own bag. Traxel wasted no time in heading off in the direction of a cantina that the workers had told him about -- something about drinks and exotic entertainment.

  The thoroughfares wound between structures carved straight from the sandstone of the moon's surface. People wandered aimlessly, seemingly oblivious to the ground transports that nudged their way through the dusty roads. Only about half of the pedestrians wore the blue collars; the others wore breathing masks. Stealing air was one of the crimes punishable with death. I thought that if they were so concerned with the air, they could at least filter it better. This whole place smelt of sweat and burned machine oil mixed with a hundred other odors.

  Panzo decided to follow along with me as we went in search of trinkets that we probably didn't need. We didn't have far to go before we found ourselves wandering through a market of open-air stalls serving the things that would never have made it onto Reliance Station. This whole place seemed to be tossed together from the scraps of some building project of thirty years prior. It took an act of great courage to set foot into the ramshackle shops that looked ready to fall apart at any moment

  The merchants were all very eager to boast about the things they had crammed into the shops, as being the most unique items found anywhere in the galaxy. We passed by three shops before something caught his eye enough to draw Panzo inside. The sign scrawled on the rock next to the door proclaimed the offerings of a thousand worlds awaited within. I entered in time to see him handing over a coin for a small box. When I asked about it he just smiled and said, "You'll see."

  As we exited the shop a lizard-like being ran right into me, grabbing my pouch as he tried to leave. It was merely a reflex to grab it back. In the process of which I ended up throwing him a good twenty meters. He was certainly no Selstlak; I could almost have looked over the top of his frill. It is surprising how things move in a gravity that's about a fourth of what you're used to. The lizard picked himself up and turned to face me. The frills on his neck raising as he prepared to charge. I felt the thrill rising in me, anticipating the fight.

  "I wouldn't mess with her if I were you. She might not let you walk away next time."

  The lizard paused and looked over to where Panzo was casually leaning on the shop doorway. It was probably that he wasn't threatening that caused the lizard to take a more careful look at me. I gave him the most inviting smile I could muster. The entry rules said self-defense was acceptable. Self-defense could cover most anything short of puncturing the air chamber. His eyes narrowed as the thoughts slowly sorted themselves out in his brain. He must have decided that my pouch wasn't worth risking his hide as he turned and slunk away.

  The incident bothered me, but I couldn't figure out why until Panzo let me know that the lizard had been trying to steal my pouch for the coins it held. I couldn't believe that the governments had let crime become so open. He had not been concerned about being spotted by an enforcement o
fficer, only whether he could overpower me. A few steps further I realized that wasn't the problem either. What had been a bit unsettling was that a part of me wanted that lizard to come back for more. Something in me wanted to make him pay for his crime. I wasn't used to feeling so aggressive. I would have happily laughed as I turned him into charred rodent bait.

  My mind kept mulling over the incident, and it turned toward realizing that Traxel could be a target as well. I told Panzo that we should go look for him in case he ran into the same trouble and Panzo laughed. He reassured me that Traxel could manage himself, and had enough experience to expect the trouble that I hadn't seen coming.

  "Besides, he's got one of the pistols with him."

  I hadn't expected Traxel to think he needed a pistol, but then again, he was the one that jumped for the guns anytime something happened. When I expressed this to Panzo he lifted the edge of his coat to show that he had a pistol also; that was Lafiel's idea. At least I knew they wanted to keep me safe.

  We came upon a merchant that specialized in ship accessories. I don't think there was a single item in his place that was new any time in the last decade. The little shop in front was just the bargaining area for a large yard behind it. His walls were covered with hundreds of gadgets that I had no clue as to what they could possibly be. This was Panzo's area of expertise, and I watched as he sorted through the various bits of salvaged starships.

  Some of the accessories were weapon mounts, which inspired me to get Lafiel a 'pistol' to guard her and the ship. Panzo and Traxel both had pistols, and well, I was a weapon, but Lafiel had nothing to protect her. I guess she could use a missile, but that would likely make a sizable crater; not the best way to deal with an individual person close up. I mentioned this idea to Panzo.

  Of course the dealer had just the thing we needed. With a minor exclamation to wait there, he ran through the draped cloth that exited to the rear yard. We could hear rummaging mixed with curses that I had no clue about. Finally the noise of metal being moved around ended, and footsteps announced his return. He brought out a large box on a lifter marked in a language I'd never seen.