Dubious Heroes: a novel

by Nicholas Blue

  Earlier, she’d asked me to find out what Angie was up to, and that had been the impetus for my meeting her in IR. Now, I was involved with her in… well, I wasn’t sure what you’d call it. Whatever it was, I still wasn’t any closer to finding out what Angie was up to, and this did not please Kyra.

  About the only thing I was certain of was that Angie wouldn’t intentionally put me in jeopardy, and that by extension, everyone else was probably safe, too.

  I climbed onto the bridge to find Kyra leaning back in her chair, looking at a ship on the big main vidscreen. I recognized it immediately, but only because I’d seen pictures and vids of them before, while at TGS. I walked over and handed Kyra the sandwich and drink. She tore open the package, sniffed it, and took a tentative bite.

  “I’ll have something else sent up, if you want”, I said.

  “We have something down there that doesn’t suck?”

  “Nope”, I said.

  “Then this will do”, she said, around a mouthful of soya turkey. “It isn’t as bad as it looks.”

  “I wouldn’t read the label”, I said.

  “That’s your bad habit, not mine”, she said. I glanced up at the vidscreen.

  “To butcher a cliché, it looks like our ship has come in”, she said. “And she is seriously moving. How fast would you say, Angie?”

  “Approximately fifteen thousand, three hundred and eleven miles per second”, Angie said, throwing in the approximately just to show that like us humans, she too wasn’t infallible. “She is still accelerating at four point four gees. She will have to start decelerating in about five days.”

  “Damn”, I said. “That thing is doing like five percent of light speed.”

  “That’s not unheard of”, Kyra said, licking her fingers. “I believe the record is something like thirty-five percent. All you need is time, plenty of fuel, and room to keep accelerating. No shortage of room in space.”

  “True”, I said. “But, consider how big she is, and that she’s hit that speed just three weeks out of Europa. For most ships, it’s six weeks just to the transit point.”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t impressive”, she said. “Anyway, you told em to get here fast, and apparently someone listened. I hope there’s no crew aboard.”

  “If there is, they’re jelly by now.”

  “Well, there’s about to be a crew aboard her”, she said, “And they’re going to have to deal with some pretty radical deceleration, or that ship won’t stop until she gets to Tau Ceti Four.”

  “I wasn’t expecting her to be moving quite this fast”, I said. “I suppose we should just count ourselves lucky that they sent her at all.”

  “As soon as someone in this system gets the word, they’ll radio and order her to turn around, or at least send her somewhere else”, Kyra said. “Which means we’d better have someone aboard her, or all this effort will have been nothing more than dicking around and wasting time.”

  “That’s what I hate about you”, I said. “You never just say what you mean.”

  She scowled at me, but didn’t reply, so I continued.

  “Look on the bright side. At least we have someone with us who can do it. Provided we can talk him into it.”

  “Hey”, she said. “Don’t blame me if you end up having to do it yourself. You’re the genius who came up with the plan.”

  “I guess it’s time for a crew meeting”, I said.

  “You’d better make it a short one”, she said. “If we don’t put on some speed pronto, that ship is going to be gone. We’ll play hell catching her, as it is.”

  “If we don’t catch her, someone else will”, I said. “Angie, get everyone back to the galley, please.”

  “Aye, Captain”, she said. “Most of them are still there.”

  “Great”, I said. “Tell em to stay put, I’m coming down.”

  “Done”, she said.

  “Alright”, I said, looking over at Kyra. “I’ll be back up shortly. I may have an angry mob chasing me.”

  “Whatever”, she said, looking at the vidscreen. The hatch opened, and I dropped down into the core.

  “Hey”, she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t come back without another sandwich.”

  As promised, they were all waiting for me in the galley; Lola, Cozi, Big Mike, and the four mercs. I knew their names were Cisco, Donner, Malach, and Jones, but I still had trouble connecting names with faces. They’d been a team even before Kyra hired them, all of them ex-military, some sort of commando’s who’d banded together to find work. There were three men and one woman, and I believed the latter was Donner. There wasn’t a helluva lot of proof she was a woman, not that it mattered one way or the other. I’d noticed her admiring Kyra in much the same way I did. I wasn’t surprised.

  “Angie”, I said. “Pipe the main vidscreen into here, please.”

  “Aye, Sir”, she said, as the view of our target popped onto the galley vidscreen. It was already getting smaller. Everyone leaned forward to look at it.

  “That”, I said, “Is what we’re about to intercept and take control of. She is the TGS Princess of Arabia and yes, aside from being weird looking, she is quite large. She’s an ice hauler out of Europa, and she’s carrying two hundred forty thousand tons of ice. That works out to be something like sixty million gallons of water.”

  “Yow”, one of the soldiers said.

  “Yow is right”, I said. “She was originally headed for somewhere else, but by various means, she was diverted here. I imagine the people who own her, namely TGS, are not happy about this, and I expect them to try to return her to her original course, as soon as they can make contact.”

  “Which would be when?” Cozi asked. “There’s like a ninety minute lag this far out, but they can still reach her if they want.”

  “That will happen when they realize what’s going on”, I said. “This is why I had her come here with all possible speed. You can’t tell from the view, but the Princess of Arabia is hauling ass, and her deceleration, when it starts in a few days, will be, in a word, brutal.”

  “So, she’s already headed for New London”, Cozi said.

  “Yep”, I said. “Which is exactly where we want her to go. She will stay on that course, unless the ship’s AI gets orders telling her otherwise.”

  “Which could happen at any time”, Cozi said.

  “They’re expecting her somewhere else in about a week”, I said. “When she doesn’t show, TGS will figure out where she really went, then make moves to turn her around. They may even bring the UP in on this, if they can’t do it on their own. What they can’t have is for her to reach New London. Aside from their planetary forces, the UP has one serious ship in the area. It’s the real thing, too; a full-blown UPDF frigate.”

  “What’s the plan, then?” Lola asked. She still wasn’t talking to me, but at least I understood why, now. She probably thought I’d had someone tell her to back off, dumping her by proxy, as it were. I’d have been pissed off, too. I thought about trying to set the record straight, but figured she wouldn’t believe me. On top of that, while it was far less flattering to my own character, I was glad it was over. So, I’d said nothing. Yeah, she had plenty of reason to be pissed.

  “The plan”, I said, “Is to take the Princess of Arabia first, and bring her into New London, regardless of whoever tries to stop us.”

  “What sort of opposition are we looking at from that frigate?” One of the mercs asked. I thought it was Cisco.

  “Kyra has put together a full intel package on the ship, such as it is”, I said. “Primarily, what we know is derived from some generic information about this class of UPDF ships. We figure she has a crew of eight, and about ten UPDF troopers aboard.”

  “Our guys are going to be seriously outnumbered”, Cozi said.

  “I don’t think that will be the case”, Mike said. He’d been sitting and listening quietly. I was worried he was going to chime in at some point, and tell me I was an id
iot, and my plan was folly, but he hadn’t, and it looked like he wasn’t going to.

  “Outnumbered”, another soldier said, “But not outmatched.”

  “Boo-rah”, Cisco said, and they slapped each other’s hands. Must have been a military thing.

  “Yeah”, I said, continuing. “We do have an idea how to deal with that, assuming it ever comes up.”

  “So we’re just taking the ship to New London, and giving her to them?” Lola asked. “What does that solve?”

  “It solves a couple of problems”, I said. “First, to a small colony like New London, that much water is priceless. It represents about two years of their needs. We put the colony in a bad position, and the water will give them some breathing room. For us, I intend to trade the water for Eng, and have them throw in a few million credits, as well. It is not my intention to try and save New London. By my thinking, they don’t really need saving, anyway. No one, not the New London government, nor even the idiots at United Planets, are going to let two hundred thousand people die. One side will give in, and that will be that. True, if we’re successful, we do put the colony in a much stronger position. I’m okay with that. If I have to pick sides, you know which one I’m picking.”

  “I don’t see that we’re solving anything for New London”, Big Mike said.

  “You’re right”, I said. “We aren’t. Like I just said, it’s breathing room. Whatever issues they have with the UP or the Tzing Ma Chu government, they’re going to have to work out themselves.”

  Whatever Mike thought of this, he didn’t say; his expression remained enigmatic. He tended to be more reserved than usual, when the soldiers were around. He clearly made them nervous, though they pretended otherwise. I figured he was trying to put them at ease, or at least not make them more uncomfortable.

  “Now for the bad news”, I said. “We still have to catch that ship, and it’s going to take everything we have to do it. We’ll be practically living on our acceleration couches for the next few days.”

  Someone groaned, but I wasn’t sure who. I continued.

  “We’ll kill the engines for brief intervals so we can get up and move around, but most of the time, we’re going to be looking at dealing with as much as four gees.”

  “This ship will do four gees?” Mike asked.

  “Probably higher”, Cozi said. “Not that I’d want to be aboard, if she did.”

  I looked around the room. No one seemed to be particularly happy, but no one was bitching, either. Not yet, anyway.

  “There aren’t many of us”, I said. “That makes everything that each of us does that much more important. The intel package that Kyra and Angie put together is online, and available to everyone. Read it, and if you have any questions, just ask. Everyone should know exactly what their job is in this. Anyone have any questions right now?”

  No one said anything.

  “Okay. Anything you need to take care of, do so now. We begin high gee boost in one hour.”

  I left the galley, and headed back up to the Bridge. There’d be some grumbling, but not much. Everyone knew that Angie was always watching and listening.

  About the time I reached the Bridge, I realized I was being an idiot. There was something I should have tried, and it wasn’t something any of the others were likely to think of. I looked at the quickly diminishing view of the Princess of Arabia on the vidscreen. She might be leaving us behind, but she was still within easy comm link range.

  “Angie”, I said. “See if you can open a channel to that ship.”

  “Channel open”, she said, almost instantly. Kyra looked around, a puzzled expression on her face.

  “Princess of Arabia“, I said. “This is Orel Doon of TGS.”

  The response was immediate.

  “Hello, Mister Doon”, a female voice said. “This is Winifred of the TGS Princess of Arabia. How may I help you?”

  I suppose the oddest thing about these conversations is that they happen at all. Here was a ship, crewed by an AI, blasting through interstellar space billions of miles from anyone or anything. Said AI gets a call from someone who should be, by all rights, somewhere very far away. Like back on Luna. Yet she doesn’t see the slightest thing unusual with the encounter, not at all. A human’s first response would have been what the fuck? With an AI, not even so much as a fancy meeting you here. Even as the person who’d largely set it up, the whole thing still struck me as profoundly bizarre.

  “Um… Winifred”, I said. “How do you know this is really me?” I had a full set of authorization codes, but she hadn’t asked for them. I didn’t remember ever talking to her, but with ten thousand TGS ships out there, and almost as many AI’s, there weren’t many of them I had regular contact with.

  “Voiceprint”, she said.

  “You have that on file?” I asked. I didn’t think I was remotely important enough that TGS ships were spacing with my voiceprint in their databases.

  “We’ve spoken before”, she said. “Seven years, two months, and thirteen days ago, I had to contact your office on Luna when we had a docking problem on Phobos.” I detected a hint of smugness in her voice.

  “Oh yeah, I remember now”, I said, lying. “How have you been?”

  “To be perfectly honest”, she said, “A little bored. This trip has been interesting, though. I’ve never been to Tau Ceti Three. I do wish the crew were here, though. I had to leave them back on Europa.”

  “That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about”, I said. “We’re en route to New London as well. How about if I put a few of our crew aboard? They can help out, and you’ll have some company.”

  “That would be wonderful”, she said. “The only problem is, I don’t think your people will be able to tolerate the deceleration. I’m supposed to get to New London with all possible speed.”

  “I know”, I said. “I’m the one who issued the order. The situation isn’t as critical as it was; I don’t think a few days will make a difference, at this point. What’s your maximum thrust?”

  “Seven point three gees”, she said.

  My eyebrows must have shot up. I looked over at Kyra, and saw a similar expression on her face. Given the load the Princess was carrying, those had to be some of the largest engines ever made.

  “Okay”, I said, “How long will you have to do a seven gee burn, before you can drop back to maybe one point five for the rest of the trip into port?”

  “Three days, six hours at seven gee thrust”, she said. “One and a quarter gee for the remainder of the voyage.”

  “Let’s do that”, I said. “You’ll leave us behind in a few minutes, but we’ll catch back up once you’ve slowed down. Sound okay?”

  “Sounds good”, she said. “We’ll talk again in three days.”

  “See you then”, I said. “Doon out.”

  “Princess of Arabia out.”

  “Freaking unbelievable”, Kyra said.

  “I know, right?” I said. “Why go to all the trouble to hijack a ship, when they just hand you the keys? I’d forgotten that until the Princess talks to someone at TGS, she’s still under the impression that I can issue orders.”

  “You’ve burned that bridge”, she said.

  “Yeah, in a big way”, I said. “They’re not going to like losing the cargo, but really, they’ll just be happy to get the ship back. She’s worth a helluva lot more than the ice. I imagine they’re annoyed with me for the whole New London thing, too. The UP has probably been bitching to them for weeks, now.”

  “You are aware that if the UP catches you”, Kyra said, “You’re done. They’ll bury you someplace. You’re officially an outlaw, now.”

  “I figured as much”, I said, shrugging. “Probably only a matter of time until they catch me. Not much I can do to change that now.”

  “Not necessarily”, she said. “I know of people they’ve wanted for years, decades even, and they’re still out there.”

  “When we have time, you’ll have to tell me how they’re doing i
t”, I said. “For now, we need to boost. Not as much as before, but we still have some catching up to do. What’s your best estimate, Angie? Balance speed and comfort.”

  “Sixty hours until intercept, at two gees”, she said.

  “Ouch”, I said. “No reason to get there that fast. Two gee is not comfortable; most of us can’t move around in that. The Princess won’t drop from her big decel for seventy-eight hours. What about if we hold it at a gee and a half?”

  “Ninety-two hours”, Angie said.

  “Okay”, I said, “Do it. I’ve spent too much time on the couch the last few weeks, as it is.”

  “Gotcha, Boss.”

  “Patch me ship-wide”, I said. She did so, and I let everyone else know about our change of plans.

  “This doesn’t change all that much”, Kyra said, when I was done.

  “No, it doesn’t”, I said. “We’ll still want the same people over there, and here, when the time comes. I’ll also have to address the AI issue on the Princess, or we’ll have our own little mutiny, as soon as TGS relays a message out here.”

  “I don’t believe she’ll be a problem”, Angie said.

  “So you’ve said”, I said. “But unless you can tell me why, I have no choice but to believe it’s still an issue.”

  Angie didn’t say anything.

  “Alright”, Kyra said, clearly annoyed. “I’m tired of this bullshit. You don’t want to tell me what’s going on, fine. I’ll be in my quarters.”

  She left the bridge, and the hatch slid closed, leaving me with the quiet whisper of the air movers.

  “She’s angry with us”, Angie said.

  “Yes, she is. With you, specifically, because I don’t know shit, either”, I said. “She’s been angry for a while now. We both know why she’s pissed off, and that you’re the only one who can do anything about it. I can’t very well tell her something I don’t know.”

  “I can’t do that”, she said.

  “Or you won’t.”

  “Please don’t be angry with me”, she said.