Pandora’s Crew

by Gorg Huff

  Pandora’s Crew

  Other Titles by Eric Flint's Ring of Fire Press

  Bartley’s Man

  Blood in Erfurt

  Essen Defiant

  Essen Steel

  Gloom Despair and Agony on You

  Incident in Alaska Prefecture

  Joseph Hanauer

  Letters from Gronow

  Letters Home

  Love and Chemistry

  Medicine and Disease after the Ring of Fire

  Muse of Music

  No ship for Tranquebar

  Second Chance Bird

  Storm Signals

  The Battle for Newfoundland

  The Danish Scheme

  The Demons of Paris

  The Evening of the Day

  The Heirloom

  The Masks of Mirada

  The Play’s the Thing

  The Persistence of Dreams

  The Society of Saint Philip of the Screwdriver

  Turn Your Radio On

  Pandora’s Crew

  by

  Gorg Huff

  Paula Goodlett

  Pandora’s Crew Copyright © 2018 by Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett All Rights Reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire Press handles DRM Digital Rights Management simply: We trust in the Honor of our readers.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art by Howard Day

  Maps by Gorg Huff

  Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett

  Visit our website at https://warspell.com/

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing: June 2018

  By Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire Press

  ISBN-13 9781983099175

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  A very rough approximation of the Pamplona Sector. It doesn’t include all the planets much less all the stations.

  The Canova Star System Canova 2 is the only habitable planet but there are many habitats thoughout the system.

  Canova to Ferguson Route

  Not even vaguely to scale. The other lines in the close-up bubbles are other jumps, mostly leading to cul de sacs

  Chapter 1

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

  Attributed to pre-space statesman Benjamin Franklin.

  Location: Concordia Station, Free Space

  Standard Date: 01 16 630

  Danny Gold settled into the bar stool and waited for the robo-tender to roll over. He was wearing ship’s slops. No one would know he was the captain save for the captain’s interface cap he wore. And the cap was worn and old. Still, he was an attractive man, so handsome as to be almost pretty, with golden hair and striking green eyes, and a body that put one in mind of a dancer or martial artist.

  He looked around. About half the augmented reality emitters were out in this bar, and on a station they weren’t kept dark to conserve energy. The half-real atmosphere was due to lack of repair and it gave the bar a drab, worn feel. As you moved through the low power fields, the bar flipped from richly decorated to bare walls and back again. The drab, worn feel was strengthened by the plastic of the bar. It was yellowing from age and scratched, even though the duraplast was as hard as iron.

  “Parthian Banger.” Danny didn’t know if there was such a drink as a Parthian Banger, but he liked to give the robot bartenders a hard time. The robo-tender would usually look at him, confusion in its sensors, and ask what the drink was. Danny would then describe some alcoholic concoction and get his drink for free. The robo-tenders were built that way.

  Not this time.

  After a couple of moments and a lot of arm waving, the robo-tender put a wide glass filled with greenish goop with red and black specks on top in front of him.

  Ain’t that just the way my luck has been running, Danny thought sardonically, then passed over the station credit chips for his drink and took a cautious sip. It probably wouldn’t actually be poisonous. The robo-tenders were programmed with basic species’ profiles, and there weren’t all that many space-going species to begin with. Still, accidents did happen. But Danny wasn’t worried. He had a greater tolerance for drugs and poisons than most people. Which made it especially hard to get drunk. In this case, the green goop tasted like something somewhere between avocado and mango. The specks on the top were peppers of some sort. Hot peppers.

  Danny gasped. He waved his hand. “Water!”

  It felt like five minutes of fiery hell in his mouth, but was probably less than thirty seconds before the water got to him. Danny gulped it down. “What the hell is that?”

  It was probably Danny’s imagination, but the robo-tender seemed to be quite satisfied as it answered. “The Parthian Banger is an aphrodisiac for Parthians. It is made by blending aspercodo from Darvin Six, powdered jalapeño originally from Old Earth and crushed fog bugs from Paradise in the Heaven system.”

  Weird, Danny thought. Just weird. Parthians didn’t mate, except for the breeding caste and breeding was all they did. The breeding caste never left the home system, so why would Parthian spacers need an aphrodisiac? The Parthians didn’t have their own interstellar capable ships. They bought them, and even the smallest hyper-capable ships were expensive, so the Parthians didn’t have much of a presence outside their home system.

  Danny had never actually met a Parthian, but had seen images of them, and analyses of their culture—if you could call it that. They were hive creatures, according to the research from . . . Danny called up a file in his internal data base. The scholarly papers were funded by the Cordoba-Jackson clan. Which made sense, since the Cordoba-Jacksons ran that corner of the Cordoba Combine. Parthians were not made for independent thought or action. They had bones that merged into shells and spiky porcupine-like hair, no heads, just eyestalks and mouth-hands. From a human perspective, they were remarkably ugly.

  Danny shuddered just thinking about them. “Glass of milk.” The cool white liquid would act as a chaser for the way-too-spicy drink. With the chaser ready, he gulped down the evil brew. Danny’s biggest flaw was also his biggest virtue. He was stubborn about following his own rules. If he bought a drink, he drank it. The milk followed the Parthian Banger as quickly as he could manage.

  Danny might have broken his rule, jus
t this once, if he had known the consequences of his actions . . . or maybe not. In any case, the robo-tender, through malice or a lack of programming, declined to mention the effects of the drink.

  “Gimme a Paguly Stroke,” Danny ordered.

  He got the robotic confusion he was hoping for. “A Paguly Stroke,” Danny explained, making it up as he went along, “is two shots of New Kentucky Bourbon and a shot of thon juice.” Danny turned his head and slipped into the field of an emitter. The robotic arms of the bartender took on flesh. When the robo-tender passed him his free drink, Danny sipped it and thought about how he got into this mess. Was it when I diverted to find the jump point? No. I was in trouble before Casa Verde station.

  Danny ordered another drink. This time he had to pay for it. Then, giving up getting drunk as a bad job, he stood up and left the bar. As he was leaving, Danny sniffed. There was a faint scent that wasn’t part of the normal bar aroma. Danny’s sense of smell was enhanced by genetic modification. It was more discerning than a normal’s, and that let him categorize and discount known smells. This smell was kind of spicy and didn’t fit what he would expect from a station bar. Also, he couldn’t place where it was coming from.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Checkgok was not one of those Parthians who took being away from the clan as license for perversion. When the scent reached it, Checkgok did its best to avoid the stimulus. Checkgok was—by the standards of its race—a fairly handsome neuter female. Its body was shaped sort of like a flattened oval, covered with spikes a bit thicker than hair and not quite as thick as a porcupine’s spines. The spikes were longer and thicker on top of its body. It had no head. The eyestalks and the mouth-hand protruded directly from the front of its body, the eyes going up and the mouth down. Both were flexible and in constant motion. Like all Parthians, it walked—scuttled—on its fore and aft legs, using the center pair as heavy object manipulators. Its mouth doubled as a hand for delicate manipulation.

  Checkgok’s eyestalks swiveled and extended, searching. Scent isn’t a great way to locate something, especially in a space station. Checkgok made the obvious guess about where the scent was coming from. It must be the group of Parthians who crewed the Fly Catcher. Probably the captain and first mate. The captain was a neuter female and the first mate a neuter male. Both were—in Checkgok’s opinion—reprehensible . . . individuals . . . who had, more than once before, attempted to subvert Checkgok’s loyalty to clan.

  Its guess was quite wrong. Its attempt to avoid the captain and—especially—the first mate, led it to run right into Danny Gold. Checkgok weighed just over three hundred pounds and was—depending on its stance—from three to six feet tall. It was moving fast at the moment, which put its body low.

  Danny fell on it.

  Going from three foot scuttle to a six foot extension was reflexive. Given the circumstances, Checkgok couldn’t help it. Its spiky, hair-like protrusions would not have punctured a Parthian, female or male, neuter or not.

  Unfortunately, human skin is rather less resistant than Parthian cartilage. Now blood was involved, which carried all sorts of implications in Parthian society. It wasn’t that much blood; the punctures weren’t deep. The amount was not nearly as important as the mere fact that blood was spilled.

  Besides, Checkgok wasn’t thinking too clearly, what with the pheromones coursing through its system. Checkgok got a full load of pheromones when Danny fell on it.

  It was as high as a paper kite.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The incident in the station corridor might have ended with no more than a few scrapes, but Kesskox, the captain of the Fly Catcher, had just about given up on persuading Checkgok to see reason. Checkgok was an excellent merchant in terms of calculating what might be of value at the next port, but unwilling to see the advantages of a bit of extra on the side. It was also—in Kesskox’s view—a supercilious snob with delusions of grandeur. Kesskox, like just about every Parthian on the station, scented the pheromones. It took her a while to find the source.

  She arrived in time to witness the last of Checkgok’s semi-coherent rambling apology and offer of . . . kothkoke.

  The human was trying to wave the whole thing off. “No harm done. Right. You’re apologizing. I accept.”

  Captain Kesskox shook with laughter, her eyestalks twisting. “And you sneer at us. That one doesn’t even have the right equipment.” She chittered a laugh, realizing that she had Checkgok just where she wanted it. Checkgok offered kothkoke as apology and the human accepted it. “Did I hear correctly? You have sworn kothkoke to this monkey? What will your high and mighty clan think of this?” She chittered again. She couldn’t help it and didn’t feel like trying. Though more resistant, Captain Kesskox was a bit tipsy on Danny’s scent herself. Unknown to anyone, milk acted as a booster for the intoxicating effect. Checkgok, having gotten a full dose—a pheromone bath—was quite drunk. “A slime toad would be better than you, you perverted, dishonorable cheskek.” While cheskek, if directly translated into English, might well be taken as a compliment since it meant something close to “individualist,” to a Parthian it was a deadly insult. On a par with suggesting that a human preferred sex with the corpses of babies of their own gender and that they ate the corpse afterward.

  It was also, even in Captain Kesskox’s own estimation, altogether too close to the truth—which just made it hurt worse. She screamed and attacked.

  “Oh shit,” the monkey said. Somehow it had wandered into the path of conflict.

  Checkgok leapt. Checkgok was a lot faster than Kesskox expected and clearly not going to let its monkey be harmed. Using forelimbs, middle-limbs and hind-limbs, it moved itself toward Kesskox while moving the monkey out of her reach. Checkgok weighed a touch over three hundred pounds. Captain Kesskox doubted that the monkey weighed half that. The monkey ended up against the far wall and Captain Kesskox was suddenly faced with a very angry bookkeeper.

  Location: Concordia Station Infirmary

  Danny woke in a white room, one in considerably better repair than the bar. The emitters were all operating here, and he was getting feedback on heart rate, oxi content of the air, and a host of other data points that together announced “infirmary.”

  “You have a mild concussion.”

  Danny looked blearily toward the voice. The . . . doctor? Yes, she must be a doctor. White coat. Medical PDA in hand. Yep. Doctor. Tall, blond, female. Smith, the nametag said.

  “Which is less than you deserve,” added another voice.

  Danny winced. That had to be the voice of station security. Station security sounded the same all over the galaxy. He peeked in the direction of the last voice. Yep. Station security.

  “What did I do?” Danny asked plaintively.

  The station security officer sneered at him. “Aside from advertising yourself as a Parthian sex toy, starting a riot and a diplomatic incident? I haven’t a clue. Have you started a war we should know about?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Danny insisted, not for the first time in dealing with station security. In this instance, it was even true.

  “Did you or did you not consume a Parthian Banger?”

  “What’s a Parthian Banger?”

  The doctor snickered wickedly. “You are, apparently. Though from what I understand, you’re under-equipped for the endeavor.”

  The cop gave the doctor a dirty look, then returned her attention to Danny. “All right. You want to tell me what happened after you left the bar?”

  Danny considered. He really couldn’t see what he had done that was illegal. On the other hand, cops tended to find incriminating evidence in just about anything. He almost asked for a lawyer. Then he remembered the state of his finances. He was the next best thing to dead broke. He was broke, aside from his ship, and the ship was in hock to SMOG Savings and Loan in the Drake Combine. Which was why he was at the unaligned, very much gray market, Concordia Station.

  And on Concordia Station, if you desired an attorney and
could not afford one, you were shit out of luck. Danny was surprised to learn that Concordia Station had lawyers at all. Or cops, for that matter.

  Danny struggled to sit up. He decided to try and play the cooperative innocent. “I was walking along the corridor when this Parthian came scooting around the corner. We ran into each other and I tripped and landed on it. It was an accident, Officer. It, ah . . . stood up, I guess, and banged me against the ceiling. Hurt like the dickens. Then it went back down and let me off. I was a bit scratched by its spines, but not too bad.” Danny creased his forehead, thinking. “It apologized and it said a bunch of stuff in Parthian. Well, I accepted its apology and was about to be on my way when this other Parthian showed up. They started arguing. At least, I think they were arguing.”

  Danny paused, trying to remember. “It was about half in trade and half in their clicks and whistles. That’s the last thing I remember before I woke up here.”

  The cop was looking at him like he was a perp running a scam, but the doc was trying hard not to laugh. Danny didn’t have a clue what was going on.

  Location: Concordia Station Security Cells

  Security Officer Janis Marten looked at the bug in front of her. It was the first Parthian she ever saw in person, and well, it just looked like a big, furry bug. “So what exactly is your story?”

  Station security put both Checkgok and Captain Kesskox in pheromone free cells. However, they didn’t feel it necessary to wait for the effects of the pheromones to wear off before questioning them.

  Captain Kesskox, still a bit drunk, chittered more laughter and waved its midlegs. Might as well. Any hope the captain nourished of blackmailing Checkgok was gone. Now there was a public record.

  “Checkgok has sworn itself to the human. After all its protestations of loyalty to its clan and devotion to duty, it has betrayed clan and the whole Parthian race. I expel it from my ship.” Kesskox did it out of spite, mostly.

  Just wait until she got back to home world and spread this story.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Janis left the cell and went next door. She pulled up a seat and started to question the other bug. “You’re sworn to Danny Gold? Is that right?”