Friends in the Stars

by Mackey Chandler

  “On the plus side, if they want their own worlds or materials to use rather than sell, they are going to be able to afford them. There should be a surge of all sorts of new business. The sticky part is going to be that Earth will still need a lot of resources, but if they don’t have their own fast ships they are going to be at your mercy for supply. They however, will have little you want to buy to balance that trade. You might start thinking about how you are going to handle that problem.

  “It would be nice to frame a solution that doesn’t leave nine or ten billion pissed off Earthies hating your guts. You might think on it that The Three have not flooded Earth with cheap materials. I don’t know their long-range plans, they don’t discuss policy with people at my pay grade, but they have had longer to think on it than you. If I were you next time you chat with The Three I’d consider asking for their advice on avoiding economic disruptions from your discoveries.”

  “This isn’t something they told you to feed me?” Lee asked.

  “No, I just had the thoughts all come together sitting here. I’m not offering any solutions, because I haven’t thought that far ahead. How goes your drive research anyway?” Vic asked. “You are still pursuing it?”

  “As long as you have secrets you keep, I believe I’ll keep some of my own,” Lee said. “I’ll certainly think on that idea though. Do you have some other safe tidbits of news or gossip we are both free to talk about?”

  “There was an interesting news item about Home,” Vic remembered. “It had the Earthies all riled up. Two European industrialists hated each other so much they both agreed to travel to Home. Since it has been established foreigners have the right of the duel they could legally have it out with each other there. They didn’t waste any time upon arrival and went straight to the north industrial corridors and had it out with pistols. The Earth news condemned Homies as barbarians and murderous scum, even though neither of the duelists were Home citizens.

  “They made no secret of their plans, so a European court passed a law while they were still in transit, which would allow them to charge their citizens for assault and murder committed in jurisdictions that had laws at variance with their standards.”

  “What a mess that would be,” Lee said. “The survivor might never be able to go home, and neither sounds like somebody Home would want.”

  “Fortunately, the duelists agreed on autoloaders with large magazines, and though neither had any previous experience or skill, they still managed to kill each other,” Vic said. “I love a happy ending.”

  Eileen looked like she might scold Vic for that, but when she looked back and forth between them and saw Lee wasn’t horrified, she just rolled her eyes.

  Lee shared a couple of amusing stories and news about her ship nearing completion. And the Foys made polite noises about her vastly inferior ship. She didn’t use it as an opportunity to complain that they weren’t sharing their drive tech. After all, that policy was set by their sovereign, not them.

  “About trusting your agents,” Lee said, after thinking on the earlier conversation a bit. “I assume Heather hasn’t made the same mistake she sees Earth doing of micro-managing, but rather has given you very loose instructions so you can use your own judgment and initiative in dealing with the Mothers and defending Derfhome.”

  “Heather gives such sketchy instructions I’d actually be happy with far more detailed orders,” Eileen admitted, “but we have a pretty simple assignment here. Who is going to bother you but the Claims Commission? That pretty much means a Chinese or North American ship now. The smaller nations still left in the pact wouldn’t be trusted to act for the Commission by the senior members. New Japan or Fargone aren’t about to attack you, so what could possibly happen that isn’t a no-brainer?”

  “There are those alien ships Heather showed us a video of, attacking the North Americans. They may suicide rather than be captured, but they were very aggressive before they were defeated. The Earthies may encounter those aliens again or others. If they provoke them, all Humans may be seen as enemies. Apparently, there are more aliens out there than we thought. If an alien ship or an alien fleet shows up here and their intentions are unclear how will you act?” Lee wondered.

  Eileen looked horrified. “You’re just worried I might have a peaceful night’s sleep, aren’t you? Now I’m going to have to run all kinds of screwball scenarios through my head until I have a set of responses ready for anything I can imagine.”

  “That’s good,” Lee said, satisfied. “That’s exactly how Gordon became such a fantastic tactician. He sat all the quiet hours when nothing was happening on the bridge just thinking, and gamed every conceivable situation in his mind, over and over. So it will be to your great benefit.”

  Oddly, Eileen didn’t thank her.

  Chapter 2

  “I can’t believe you just asked Lee straight out if she was still working on a gravitational drive,” Eileen said. “That had no subtlety at all. Of course she is still working on it. You might as well have asked if she planned to keep breathing.”

  Subtlety is lost and wasted on that girl,” Vic insisted. “She appreciates it about as much as a certain girl who practically roped and branded me at the autumn get together,” Vic said. “The subtlety was in asking if she was pursuing it instead of asking how it was going. She could have been tempted to answer yes without elaborating. What would that have harmed to answer since it’s so obvious? But once you get someone to answer anything, even a very obvious question yes or no, it opens the door in their mind a little bit to get them to consider answering other less obvious things.”

  “That’s not subtle, that’s just pretending to be obtuse,” Eileen objected.

  “Then you have not been observing Heather closely enough,” Vic said, refusing to take offense. “I’ve seen her use that as an interrogation technique several times. She said she learned it from that Swiss fellow who came to Home, Jan.”

  “Hmm… maybe,” Eileen allowed, “but it didn’t work, did it?”

  “No, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say. It will bother her every time she has to turn us down. She would rather be friendly and open if she could be, unlike her father Gordon who is just naturally secretive.”

  “You think?” Eileen asked.

  Vic just looked at her.

  “You could have shared that economic idea with me first,” Eileen complained.

  “Everybody benefits from an open exchange of that sort of thing,” Vic said. “She may punch holes in my ideas, and we’ll benefit from her doing so. And by we, I mean Central and even the Earthies in the long run if it contributes to stability.”

  “I believe Lee is a person of her word,” Eileen said, after a long silent pause in which she’d had time to mull it over in her own mind. She’d obviously been thinking on it quite deeply and reported her conclusion in a serious voice. “If she does find out the secret of Jeff’s drive system like Heather expects will happen soon, it will complicate our lives, and everybody under Heather’s rule, but it wouldn’t be the unmitigated disaster that the Earthies getting it would be.”

  Vic looked at her amused.

  “What? I hate it when you get all smug.”

  “You gave it so much thought, but only within certain comfortable boundaries,” Victor accused her. “What if they find a better drive?”

  Eileen looked stricken. That wasn’t going to help her sleep any better either.

  * * *

  “It’s beautiful,” Gordon said looking out the front ports of the yard scooter at Lee’s new ship. They were squeezed into a two-man scooter which meant one Derf, and one Human willing to be very, very friendly with him, and still be squished against the hull. “It still bothers me it carries the two X-head missiles externally instead of in tubes. I know that would increase your internal volume an easy ten percent, but it lacks subtlety to have them stuck out there in everybody’s face.”

  “Says the guy who will dress up all fancy, then hang a big ax on front of
it all.”

  “Well, the hardpoints are recessed in a bit of a groove, and on opposite sides so you only see one at a time. Are you going to take her back to Fargone to get them mounted after all the interior work and subsystems are done? I doubt they will send them as freight. They tend to be pretty controlling about the current generation missile. If somebody managed to snatch one to reverse engineer, it would be a disaster.”

  “The Deep Space Cruiser Quantum Queer will deliver them while making a friendly port call. We just have to let them know when the weapons control systems are finished and the New Japan installers have gone home. They didn’t want to mount them to a dead ship, unable to launch them, and I think they were miffed they didn’t get the bid for that system. Theirs was good but not as good as the one New Japan could offer. There’s a lot of other work on furnishings for the Derf cabins and accommodations I’d rather not interrupt. It was ferried over with absolute minimum functional systems to make a jump and an escort in case they had troubles. It didn’t even have running environmental systems, just a portable air pack on the bridge.”

  “The manufacturer couldn’t deliver them on a civilian vessel, not even under guard?” That seemed odd to Gordon. “Will they pay the Fargone navy to deliver them?”

  “They mentioned it was a condition of an export license to have secure delivery so they may have had to pay. They didn’t tell me their internal arrangements.”

  Gordon’s continued thoughtful silence worried Lee. “We will have some security of our own on the delivery process,” Lee promised. “I’ll request it of the Mothers.”

  “That would make me feel much better. Have you told the Foys to expect a Fargone warship?” Gordon asked.

  “Indeed, I had them to a pleasant breakfast this morning, and that was one of the few things of substance exchanged. They did say the Earthies are still bickering internally over who to blame for snubbing both us and the first real alien star-spanning civilization found. They intimated they still expect them to try to weasel out of their earlier rejection of our deep space claims. It just takes them forever to decide what to do. I read an interesting folk saying the other day that seems to apply. It said, ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth.’ I have no idea why my parents never used that expression. They used plenty of other idioms and folksy expressions.”

  “Phrases wane and grow in cycles,” Gordon said. “They sometimes die out completely or reoccur when a new generation that has never heard them finds one fresh and starts using it again. Learning English I once found an entire book devoted to them, and some were truly strange. I remember some that seem lost permanently. That’s the bee’s knees, or, Tell it to Sweeny, come to mind. You can look in old newspaper records or flat movies and you have no idea what they are talking about when they use a phrase like that and you have no context.”

  “Do Derf do the same thing?” Lee wondered.

  “Slowly,” Gordon admitted. “Most written records until very recently involved the Mothers, and they have been a force for stability in language just like everything else. With the rise in the influence of trade towns that may change.

  “You know,” he said, changing the subject, “it almost looks like an atmospheric lander with the big flat panels sticking out on each side like real wings.”

  “I wish we could carry a lander. We just don’t have the tech to do it without killing the performance. A lander doesn’t really make sense until you get to something as big as the Retribution. Even the Sharp Claws can’t really haul a lander around without slowing it down, and speed is the whole point of this design. When we were talking about how to get a more powerful radar on a smaller ship, the design people started with the assumption we’d mount the elements on fold-out wings. That created all sorts of potential failure points and added mass with limited benefit.

  “It couldn’t be made to work extended under heavy acceleration, and it was a nightmare of bracing and rigging to make secure folded down against the hull. Plus, you couldn’t get to various things it would cover up on the hull. A lander grappled on anywhere would just make it worse.

  “When they started talking about mounting them with explosive bolts, so you could blow them off if they jammed up, that’s when I killed the idea.

  “The fixed wings are hollow with cross braces inside and fuel modules right under the skin for access. The emitting elements of the radar are on the opposite face from the fuel modules. After everything was hooked up inside, it was all filled with open cell Buckey stiffener. Fixed wings instead of folding are simpler, so there’s much less there to go wrong,” Lee said.

  “You’ll have to turn it edge on to make a very close transit of a star,” Gordon said.

  “Even then, the side toward the star would heat up excessively if the star fills a very wide angle of the sky,” Lee said. “They decided to do the opposite and make the side with the fuel modules that you can’t see from here as reflective as possible. You turn that side toward the star. The radar side is the deepest possible black optimized to shed thermal radiation for cooling. That gives the ship her name, Kurofune, which is black ship in Japanese.”

  The name implied a lot more, but if Gordon knew he didn’t comment.

  “That’s a lot of surface area,” Gordon said, appraising it.

  “I’ll have as much radiant power available as a heavy cruiser,” Lee said, answering the unasked, but implied question.

  “That’s good,” Gordon said, thinking and nodding. “Nobody has a vessel in service with this kind of radiant power unless it is a cruiser or bigger. If they see you using this big of a radar rig they are going to assume you are a big warship with a dozen missiles in a magazine and beam weapons. For a long time, it may make people very reluctant to get close enough to actually find out what class of vessel you are. I expect that to stay the case for a while too. I don’t see anybody else building such a specialized ship.”

  “Now if I could just get the sort of devices Central has to compensate for acceleration. I experienced that system in Gabriel’s ship when he gave me a ride. It’s a framework that folds down over the seat and only works in that small area. It’s not as big a deal as their drive system, but it still improves your acceleration significantly.”

  “If they can reverse engineer that Badger gravity plate the Little Fleet brought back, that the Caterpillars modified for us, we might be able to make such a thing. They took it on some acceleration runs while it was operating and it no longer displays the increased momentum the Badger version did. Right now, they are trying to figure out what material the Caterpillars substituted in the working disk by X-ray diffraction, neutron scattering, and modulated laser reflection.

  Even then, they might not know why it doesn’t display increased momentum until some brilliant person advances a new theory. The Badgers are just as eager to know as us since they discovered it by serendipity.

  “I won’t OK any destructive testing, and most of the team still agrees with me on that. Just a couple of them were eager to cut a chunk off to analyze. We very reluctantly wiped the disk at low pressure with a piece of diamond, and got enough transfer to get a materials list and isotopic concentrations, but if it depends on doping with very small amounts of something to work, or if it is different in the interior than the surface that won’t tell us much.”

  “Even if you don’t see any breakthrough from the data collected, could you share it with my guys working on the drive tech at the university?” Lee asked.

  “As long as they share back anything they figure out using the data,” Gordon agreed.

  “Of course, that’s fleet property,” Lee agreed. “We’d only use it for drive tech. Any application to modifying local fields is yours and we’d have to reveal our findings and pay to use it toward those ends.”

  “I’ll tell them to share it then,” Gordon agreed.

  “Are you willing to command a test flight?” Lee asked, nodding at the ship.

  “I half expected you to ask me to sign your ticket so you cou
ld do it,” Gordon said.

  “I finally know enough to know I’m not ready,” Lee said. “I’d have to present it to each one of the crew as a disclaimer so they could withdraw without prejudice if they didn’t want to serve under such a young captain. I’d rather wait until I don’t have to do that. I’d feel terrible if anybody took me up on it and withdrew. It would taint the whole event for me.”

  “At some point, you will be aware and confident that you are capable, and you’ll just have to take command without apology. Now that you’ve started Life Extension Therapy you aren’t going to look older as fast as you should to some,” Gordon reminded her. “They may be used to that at Central and Home, and the Fargoers won’t be put off, but Humans on Derfhome won’t become accustomed to it for years after we introduce it.”

  “I’m not used to the idea,” Lee admitted. “We had a majority of Fargoers for crew in the Little Fleet. I’ll just hire Fargoers and Derf. Most Derf don’t have any preconceptions about what is appropriate for my age anyhow. Very few have lived around Humans for years like you to judge. It’s temporary anyway. With life-extension, I’ll still be around when the Derfhome humans get used to people looking young.”

  Lee wiggled a bit, uncomfortable.

  “Do you have a destination in mind for the maiden flight?” Gordon asked.

  “I kind of was thinking Providence,” Lee said. “The Mothers have a survey team there looking at sites for a keep on land I ceded them, and I might piggy-back on their work to pick a home site.”

  Gordon didn’t say anything, tried to merely look interested, and failed.

  “And yes, I can deal emotionally with going there again,” Lee assured him.

  “Let’s go back to the station,” Gordon said, ignoring Lee’s response to the question he hadn’t asked out loud. “I’m jamming you into the hull even trying to lean away. They don’t have a decent two Derf scooter. There just isn’t a big enough market.”