Ace of Thralls (Freelance Courier Book 3)

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  “Not that I believe this thing is possible, but what do you gain from such a deal?”

  “I know that the Cliveden are motivated by avarice and you couldn’t begin to take me seriously if I told you I don’t want anything for myself—”

  Srin snorted.

  “—so I will cut myself in for a tiny percentage of the income you’ll receive from the portal. Trust me, you won’t miss it.”

  “Trust you?”

  “Yeah, that’s the only way this is going to work. So, do we have a deal?”

  The Shortest Distance Between Two Points

  Srin’s crawler trundled its way back to the forest edge and vanished within to whatever luxury encampment he’d created for himself hidden among the trees. Meanwhile, Gel took down the umbrella and carried it and the chairs back up the ramp, leaving them just inside the door. She rolled the table back inside as well, withdrew the ramp and lowered the hatch. Then, safe from prying eyes, she teleported everything back to its appropriate location in storage.

  She made her way down the corridor to the bridge, unlocked the command console and reviewed the boards. Everything looked ready. There was just one last thing to do before she left the moon. Opening up a new screen, Gel entered the activation codes for the Tosh excavation and farming gear and set each of the machines off on its pre-programmed purpose, beginning the preparation of the moon for its new residents.

  She’d warned Srin to ignore the Tosh’s machines, and to her surprise he’d offered little pushback once she’d shared her timetable.

  “What is it to me if your devices dig up the earth as part of my ‘trusting’ you?” he’d said. “I will follow your directions to the letter at the appointed time. If your mysterious proposal is a hoax, then at worst it will have distracted me for a time, which is not something I ever expected a Human to be able to do.”

  The first wave of Tosh was probably only fifty days out. She had a lot of space to cover, literally, before that happened. Time to go.

  Tiggly leapt into the sky and escaped the grip of the moon’s gravity. Gel assumed that Srin was monitoring her ship and angled around the bulk of Danita-V before dropping into the gas giants’ atmosphere and seeking out the Clarkeson portal. With every trip her ship had become more proficient at filtering out the portal’s beacon signal from the electromagnetic chaos and homing in. She located it in record time and transmitted the appropriate access codes. Having successfully found the needle in this haystack, she threaded it and emerged from its other side far across the galaxy in the system she had recently named for Randolv Greyce.

  The sheer number of portals the Cliveden had left hanging in this gas giant’s much greater volume of muck forced Gel to review the data she’d received from Aushthack. His notes indicated where each portal exited into the galaxy and she’d use that information to select the best route. A portion of her plan involved skipping across the galaxy from one hidden portal to another, but that would only take her so far. Well before she was done she’d be forced to follow a series of more traditional portals to reach her destination.

  When Tiggly left the swirling noise of the last gas giant that was the first portion of the route, a quick scan confirmed they had arrived in the Osborne system. Only the third planet was habitable, a world the database identified as Macbain, a mausoleum world that Gel had never visited. The ship had emerged from Osborne-I, a gas giant that had done her the courtesy of existing closest to its primary. She’d have to make a point of returning if she was going to continue using the hidden Clarkeson portals. She had to get better at leaving trails and providing plausible evidence of where she traveled on business. For now though, she joined the light flow of traffic headed toward one of the system’s four portals and began the second phase of the circuitous route she drafted to take her to her goal. In all, she needed to transit through twenty-seven different portals and systems, taking a zigzag route that spanned this spiral arm of the galaxy several times over, even as it used only a tiny fraction of the distance that straight line travel would have required.

  A team of well-placed Plenum could have managed the same thing in a matter of minutes, but that was never going to happen. She didn’t imagine the Tosh would ever entertain any other Plenum.

  In the end, Gel required thirty-nine days to reach the penultimate stage of her route. She emerged into the Meierz system, a thriving place of more than a dozen inhabited worlds and twice as many moons, one of which claimed to have the largest collection of sports paraphernalia in the galaxy. People, regardless of their race, were funny about such things, and as a result Meierz also boasted seven portals of its own. One of those seven just happened to be one of only two that in turn led to her destination. The other six had steady traffic coming into the system, tourists from thousands of worlds, but that seventh portal had an outbound line of parked vessels backed up halfway to the orbit of Meierz’s first planet and only admitted one ship every forty-six minutes.

  Gel ignored the line and began broadcasting the reservation code she’d acquired in exchange for emptying her bank account. She swept past the waiting ships and almost at once her board lit up with a flood of incoming messages. She skimmed the first few and as she’d expected read a range of bitter complaints, angry exclamations, and no few outright blistering insults from other ship captains who had been waiting their turn and expressed resentment of this line-jumping, new arrival.

  She had Tiggly file all of this ‘correspondence’ for later recall. It wouldn’t do to ignore them — even though what she was doing was perfectly legal. She was making a lot of bad first impressions and she didn’t want those to come back and haunt her. When she completed her current negotiation with Master Manager Srin, she’d need to come up with a plausible cover story, one that would garner grudging sympathy from the other vessels. She’d transmit personalized versions of it, one by one, to all the ships she had cut in front of. Tiggly cataloged every vessel in the long line by its transponder code and correlated those with such information as was in the ship’s system, including their respective captains and any individual preferences or useful data points that Gel could use to personalize the message she’d be sending.

  But that was a task for another day and the portal’s automated systems responded to the VIP priority of her reservation code, halting the next ship in line and assigning its spot to her. She’d have to send an especially effective letter to that captain, and probably a basket of preserves as well.

  In the blink of an eye and after thirty-nine days Gel transited through and emerged from the portal above Laurel, the star orbited by Finiskifel, where this entire affair had started. Even before initiating a scan, she mentally locked in her location. Unlike every place she’d been of late, this system contained no gas giants, only a single world, its pair of moons, and twenty-six rotating space stations in orbit above Finiskifel’s equator to provide ringside views of the shining emerald in space that the Trelniki had created.

  The last time she’d arrived — and just the idea of anyone being able to afford a second visit was almost ludicrous — for her meeting with Aushthack, she’d done so through the system’s other portal. It had assigned her a temporary beacon code so that Trelniki drones could identify her ship and guide Tiggly to a pre-arranged berth at one of the stations. Visitors were not allowed to dawdle in-system, and anyone not proceeding to their designated docking assignments were quickly isolated by a team of heavily armed drones and escorted back out of the system.

  This time around, Gel had no such beacon. Her reservation signal superseded such things. She’d been very precise as to her needs — she didn’t care which of the twenty-six orbitals she was assigned to, so long as she secured a specific spot in its rotation above Finiskifel and could claim a particular view at a particular time.

  The appropriate station pinged her ship, welcoming her and offering coordinates for priority docking in a space far larger than her small ship required, with room to actually accommodate several craft of Tiggly’s siz
e. Once again other vessels were put on hold, allowing her to sweep past them.

  She’d cut things rather finely but managed to arrive a day ahead of the time she’d given to Srin. In theory, the Cliveden had already left Dawn and was en route to the portal near Danita. Even so, once she’d settled Tiggly securely into place she prepared a message reminding him of the precise details. They were simple enough. He was to transit through the portal to the hub in Cliveden space and then, at the time she’d specified — not a moment earlier — he was to head back through his portal.

  Gel spent the last bit of the funds in her account to tag her message with ultra high priorities and pass it up the line to the station’s communications office. It would reach Srin before he left the Danita system. After hustling portal to portal on the longest string of transitions in her career as a courier, there was nothing to do now except wait. But that was all right, she’d earned a rest, and a hot shower followed by a long night’s sleep was exactly what she needed.

  In making her reservation Gel had been quite particular. Not only had she secured priority passage through the portal to the Laurel system and a VIP docking berth, but also a premier table at her station’s top viewing lounge had been set aside for her sole use for the duration of her stay. Shortly before the appointed hour, she arrived at that lounge, fully rested and scrubbed head to toe. Her long blonde hair held a light scent from the violet shampoo she’d purchased at one of the station’s shops the day before because it reminded her of Aushthack. She wore what was essentially her standard uniform: boots and jeans, an oversized tuxedo shirt, and her leather flight jacket. Gel presented herself at the otherwise empty viewing lounge. It was the wrong time for gazing out on the emerald garden planet below. Other viewing lounges had that privilege at the moment, but Gel ignored the confused expressions from the waitstaff and took her reserved seat, gazing out into space, or more specifically inward toward the star the Trelniki had named Laurel. Too small to be seen by the naked eye, she nonetheless could sense the precise locations of the two portals, one positioned high above the star and one below. She’d come through the one below the first time and the upper portal more recently.

  Which side was top and which bottom had always struck Gel as arbitrary, but she’d been assured more than once by astronomical scholars that there was a method to the labeling and for a billion years the beings who pushed portals into positions around stars had followed the same plan. First above, then below, then the next one above that, and the fourth one below that first, bottom side portal, alternating over and again for as many portals as the star was fortunate enough to possess.

  There were a few exceptions to this pattern, most significantly the Cliveden’s hub systems, where there might be as many as one hundred portals scattered in ever-deepening orbits around their primary like miniature planets, ten to twenty in each orbit. The arrangement was an ever changing nightmare of navigation, but the Cliveden didn’t care. It served their needs and that was that.

  The other ends of those portals were even more eclectic. Unlike the other portals throughout the galaxy, the Cliveden did not necessarily place theirs above or below a system’s stars. More often than not they were close to the star, but in some instances the Cliveden had simply left them on the edge of space — much as the Clarkesons had placed their own first portal — as if having pushed the portal for generations across the galaxy they had had enough and quit upon reaching the limits of the system. Various explanations had been suggested, and the one Gel liked best was that it discouraged ships from attempting to quickly emerge from the more common free portals and quickly slip through a Cliveden portal without properly arranging for the toll. That didn’t apply to the Danita system which had no other portals, but nonetheless Srin’s ancestor had parked his portal in an orbit around the star, midway between what had once been the system’s closest two planets, the first which had never been more than barren rock and the second which, like three other worlds there, had been destroyed by the Bwill.

  Gel studied the small padd she had brought with her. A timer on the screen was counting down to the deadline for Srin to exit the Danita system for the last time. Feeling pleased with herself and perhaps a touch nostalgic, Gel summoned a waitron and ordered the same meal that Aushthack had waiting for her the last time she’d been in this system. The timer reached zero before she was done with her first course, but she waited. She wanted to give the Master Manager enough time to ensure he would go through before turning around and coming back.

  Not that she was worried, not really. The Cliveden were enraptured by protocols, and Srin would wait on the other side of the portal for the appointed hour. No member of his race would ever want to be known for being premature. Gel waited a while longer, wanting to minimize the predictable chaos that would ripple through every station in the system. Communication bands would flood with questions and speculations, but Gel had pre-recorded her own message and queued it to release on a little-used frequency, beamed at a location well above Laurel’s upper portal, an empty region of space. Gel finished her meal and sat gazing out at the star while savoring the fine liquor made from a two thousand-year-old tree sap that had been harvested on the garden world below.

  A few minutes before the designated time of Master Manager Srin’s transition back through is side of the portal, Gel acted. She didn’t want to cut it too close. Tucking her right hand under the table, she brought it back out, holding her plush buffalito. She turned his head to face her.

  “It’s showtime, Barry. You ready?”

  With the four fingers at the back of the toy’s head she had him nod. Then Gel closed her eyes, reaching out across space back to the Danita system. She imagined a box, the sides defined by her memories of multiple points surrounding the economically useless Cliveden portal where it hung in space in orbit around its star. And then it didn’t. In an instant it moved, relocating to a carefully calculated distance above the coordinates Gel had locked into her mind, above Laurel’s first portal.

  Gel set Barry in her lap and leaned back in the sinfully comfortable chair of her table in the viewing lounge. The hard work was done.

  As she’d anticipated, it wasn’t long before the station took notice of the new portal and erupted in confusion. The secondary timer on Gel’s padd had nearly completed its countdown. Her new Cliveden business partner would be coming through that portal at any moment. Before coming to the viewing lounge Gel had made arrangements with station officials to share her docking berth with an incoming vessel. They probably assumed her guest was in line to transit through one of the system’s two portals and had yet to be assigned a beacon code. But they were more than happy to provide her with a unique signal she could pass along to her guest that the system would use to wrangle him through to the proper docking.

  She’d encoded the particulars of that signal at the back end of her pre-recorded message. The Cliveden liked to go on and on about how superior they were to everyone else, and Gel was confident that Srin would discover and make use of the codes she’d just sent his way well before he was halfway to the orbit of the garden planet and its ring of stations.

  As for the message itself, she’d kept it quite simple, just a dozen words in Traveler to seal their deal:

  Welcome,

  to your future

  and your fortune.

  See you soon,

  Angela Colson

  Raising the liquor to her lips Gel smiled, tapped her padd, and sent the message.

  Acknowledgments

  This was an odd book to write in many ways. A major part of it goes back to an early story of the Amazing Conroy, his origin story in fact, as told in “Requiem.” In one scene, a young Conroy is doing one of his first hypnosis shows. He’s the only Human for lightyears and so the volunteers he calls up to his stage are, of necessity, aliens. One of them is a Clarkeson. At the time, I had no idea who the Clarkesons were, and only through the benefit of hindsight did I question how an inexperienced hypnotist could trance
a colony being. Over the years, more than a few astute readers have asked me about it. The answer was obvious: Conroy got it wrong, and the alien in question wasn’t a Clarkeson. But… it’s not like even the most clueless of Humans would be able to mistake any other alien for a Clarkeson, unless… Right, the answer to that “unless” led to this novel.

  Because of that I need to thank Stephanie Clarkson, a wonderful person who came to my aid at a convention when my back inexplicably went out and left me unable to walk. In appreciation, I named the Clarkesons for her (misremembering the spelling of her name). Stephanie passed away from cancer in 2016. When writing this book and visiting the homeworld of the Clarkesons for the first time it only made sense to name it Stefnal.

  I completed the first draft of this book in about sixteen days, a new personal best, and it was done entirely as dictation while taking morning walks around a local park. In theory, I should have been able to go through that draft and clean up any rough patches in about a week. But that didn’t happen. I fell into a malaise for about five weeks and the edits dragged on and on. The situation worsened in mid-May when I learned that because of my illness, I was basically immune to the COVID vaccines, and the jabs I’d received back in January had failed to yield any antibodies. I’d been in lockdown mode since before the pandemic, and this last bit pushed me over the edge. Then, about a week later, I came up with the idea of a “safe” road trip. I could get in my car and drive for a couple hours, pick up a bucket of chicken, and meet up with some writer friends in a local park and enjoy the pleasure of their socially-distanced company. I began making plans, and while I haven’t actually hit the road yet, just working on the logistics of it improved my mood and I was able to finish editing this book. So thank you to Charles E. Gannon, Catherine M. Petrini, and R. R. Virdi, your friendship, proximity, and willingness to entertain the idea of me crashing your respective schedules have restored me to productivity.