Friends in the Stars

by Mackey Chandler

  He paused like he wanted to say more but went on in a business-like manner.

  “You have berth seven reserved if you wish, and a shuttle schedule is appended to the data screen. Your amended flight plan is received and any updates would be appreciated. Customs has a list of items prohibited to the planetary surface for safety and ecological reasons. If you would examine the list, we request you discuss the need for any variance with their officers, even if you have items under diplomatic seal.

  “Auto docking is available and recommended from a kilometer stand-off. Local traffic and chatter are on standard suit frequencies. Thank you, Providence Control out.”

  “Well, one would like to have heard what the captains told the head honcho. I’m guessing that they probably said they wouldn’t dock under the same circumstances,” Gordon said. “Note they didn’t approve our amended flight plan, just acknowledged it. I’m satisfied they are much more mannerly. Cut the radar back to five percent power to watch for local debris and let’s look over this system scan to see if it looks honest. In particular, the inter-ship chatter.

  “I’m not comfortable,” Lee said.

  Gordon looked over face neutral. “Too much boost? Belt pinching? Too much pepper relish on the ham sandwich? Don’t trust the sneaky bastards?”

  “We are going to leave the Kurofune docked crewless and all of us go down to the planet. It’s like an itch between my shoulder blades I can’t reach. I’ve never met him but no, I don’t trust this Claims Commission administrator not to mess with her,” Lee said.

  “That would be a very serious breach to interfere with a diplomatic vessel,” Gordon said. “I believe that’s why the Mothers told you to run under their flag all the time instead of on specific missions. They value you and wanted to offer that protection.”

  “It should work that way, but I remember my time with my cousin on Earth. Sometimes these minor officials can be full of themselves and do things people with real power would be scared to try.”

  “A question, if I may?” Mike asked from the rear seat.

  “Ask! I don’t bite,” Lee insisted.

  Both Gordon and Mike broke into simultaneous laughter. The dirty looks they got from Lee just made it worse. “That’s one of those unfortunate expressions I picked up hanging around Humans that just isn’t appropriate for dealing with uncouth fanged monsters,” Lee said.

  “Indeed, we are much better equipped to do any biting needed, and your clawing equipment is similarly limited,” Gordon pointed out. “But to feel it is necessary to assure us of your peaceful intent . . . you can see how amusing that is.”

  “This is why we invented the pointy stick,” Lee told them, making a jabbing motion.

  Gordon twitched at that. “If only you’d stopped there, but no . . . you had to make spaceships and hydrogen bombs.”

  “And that has made things a lot more interesting,” Lee said. “You seemed to have adapted to using both just fine. If we didn’t outnumber you a few hundred million to one you might have conquered Earth and been ruling over it by now.”

  “There’s a critical difference,” Gordon said, “I can’t imagine wanting to rule that madhouse. I suspect they’d never consider the matter settled and keep a treaty.”

  “That’s pretty much my own worry, just over the matter of the Claims Commission,” Lee said. “I have yet to see them keep a bargain in good faith.”

  “OK, I know about the war, if not every little detail, but what is this about the Claims Commission?” Mike asked from the back seat.

  “That’s who pays us for discovering this world,” Lee explained. “When we came back from taking the Little Fleet on a voyage of exploration, they balked at accepting the responsibility of taking our claims for discoveries at such an extreme distance. At least their minor members with only single ships balked hard at them being gone for possibly years. So we are setting up our own Claims Commission for the Far Beyond. The Mothers don’t teach you any of this?” Lee asked.

  “I knew the clan had an interest in the Little Fleet when it went off,” Mike said, “because they picked people for spacer training and sent them off. But what you found and all this stuff about claims they don’t tell us little people who it doesn’t concern.”

  “I guess that’s one way to keep from getting any dissent to what you are doing,” Lee decided. “Don’t tell anybody what is going on.”

  “You’re just figuring that out?” Gordon asked her.

  “I’ll put the public release about our trip on your phone too. It’s the logical next history for you after the account of the war. You aren’t going to sit and read them in a day,” Lee warned Mike.

  “Thank you. But what I wanted to ask was, why not hire some security to guard the ship while you go down to the planet?” Mike asked.

  Lee thought about it. Gordon didn’t seem inclined to answer Mike, though she’d have rather he did it. He knew how Mike lived and could explain it better, but she’d try.

  “It won’t work,” Lee finally said. “There isn’t anybody in the system who isn’t subject to the Commission authority. No matter what we paid or what their instructions were the Administrator could just order them to stand aside. If we were going to do that we should have brought our own guards along. I just never expected such a hostile arrogant reception.”

  “And yet the ship mounts missiles,” Mike noted.

  “Well yeah, because we know things can go very bad, and you have to be ready for that,” Lee said. “But it’s hard to cover all the little ways things can go bad.”

  “Those keep some idiot from telling us to stand to and be boarded,” Gordon said. “You do have a point. Perhaps we should change our plans. Lee could accompany you to the island and arrange the transport of our cargo, and I can remain with the ship since our welcome was not very warm.”

  “Or I could stay here and you take Mike down,” Lee offered.

  “I have identified myself as the master of the vessel,” Gordon said with slow measured words. “You will serve as master eventually, but it is by no means an empty formalism. If the ship was lost because I left it while at dock in uncertain circumstances, I can assure you that those who command a vessel would never regard my judgment well again. I would feel that way about others.”

  In the back, Mike was nodding, not in agreement, but at a lesson learned.

  “OK, I’ll take him down. I did want to see the island anyway. We picked it off orbital images,” Lee said over her shoulder to Mike. “I picked it because it is far enough from the main continent not to have the dino packs that killed my folks. But by then we were leaving and cut our survey work short. The two of us couldn’t safely continue it.”

  “I had no idea you’d never seen it,” Mike said, surprised. “I’m amazed you’d give away something so valuable sight unseen.”

  “I ‘m not left poor by its loss,” Lee said. “I have another major claim on the planet that I have visited, and I retained rights to live on the island and use its resources. I don’t expect to want or need enough to put myself in conflict with the Mothers.”

  “That opens an interesting door,” Mike said.

  “How so?” Lee asked, and Gordon perked up and cocked an ear too.

  “You’ve established a clan member can hold private property, land even, not subject to the Mothers’ whims,” Mike said.

  “When I came back from doing voyages of exploration with Lee’s parents and some others before them, the Mothers never tried to attach my prize money as belonging to the clan like a contract worker they sent to town,” Gordon said. “So Lee’s situation just broadens that a little.”

  “I like to see it headed that direction,” Mike said. “I’m going to think about how to nudge it in that direction if I have the opportunity.”

  Gordon did an elaborate copy of a Human shrug. “That’s easy to do if you give them a reason to allow you wider privileges. Both Lee and I were allowed to do so because we brought more to the table for the clan than it cost th
em to grant. They’ll do so for you in an instant if it is to their advantage to do so. Just be careful you don’t try getting them to do it before you are ready to live independently. They can still banish you from the clan with a word if you miscalculate the value of what you are offering them.”

  “I’ll be very careful,” Mike promised.

  “Read the history of the clan’s war with North America I’ll load to your phone,” Lee said. “If that and the synopsis of the voyage of the Little Fleet retains your interest you can ask me for more later. I have thousands of hours of personal recordings about my time on Earth and the logs and landing records from the voyage of the Little Fleet. If you read all that, then we have all sorts of material about Human history and endless skills and specialized occupations. You can go down a rabbit hole for a month just reading some interesting thing that diverted you.”

  “What’s a rabbit?” Mike asked.

  “Think tusfid,” Gordon said, naming a small burrowing animal on Derfhome. “Too small to make cooking them worth bothering, but they bred like crazy and can disrupt the ecology. Humans messed up and ravaged a continent by thoughtlessly introducing them. We won’t make that mistake and allow them on Derfhome.”

  Mike nodded, overwhelmed by the prospects of that huge a volume to read.

  Chapter 11

  “The Earthies have launched an unprecedented number of shuttle flights to service all the Claims Commission ships in Low Earth Orbit, both explorers and enforcement vessels,” Chen reported to The Three. “Not just Chinese and North American ships, but even some long-neglected ships of the minor nations who have effectively left the commission rather than go on multi-year cruises.

  “We have no indication of who will crew these vessels, but supposedly they are being fixed up and made usable. That could be a sham if they have problems too severe to really bring them back in service. The supply of national armed vessels has also increased, but less so since they are always maintained better.”

  “Are the Chinese or North American shuttles taking workers or materials to these ships of smaller nations?” Heather asked.

  “In some cases, yes” Chen reported, “but of course we have no idea who is paying to restore these ill kept ships, or who will crew them. Some of the ships have English signage and instruments, but some have everything labeled in other languages and it would be quite a project to relabel everything.”

  “Do you have any idea they are being armed in violation of our limits imposed on vessels of exploration?” Heather asked.

  “I’m trying to find out, but it is difficult. Everyone has the tightest security on nuclear weapons. That’s one reason they aren’t kept on a vessel that is effectively in mothballs. When they reactivate a ship and resupply it we can’t really tell what is in the warhead. Even the performance characteristics of a missile can vary a lot without external changes.”

  “Do you think they are massing a fleet to flood across the L1 line to attack us in numbers we’d hesitate to stop?” Jeff asked his ladies.

  “I do not,” Heather answered. “If they thought such a thing possible they’d bring in every ship from their forward bases and other guarded star systems scattered everywhere. We’d be seeing at least some of them coming home already. I predict they will all seek clearance to depart Sol System as meek as can be until Earth orbit is almost empty of any star capable vessel.”

  “Will they harass Derfhome or Fargone?” Chen asked, which was unusual to seek additional clarification from her. He seemed dubious of her statement.

  “No, the danger is if they challenge us from outside the Solar System. They then have the high ground, gravitationally speaking. They can attack from any angle and part of the sky with velocity. That’s a superior tactic to trying to attack climbing out of Earth’s gravity well.

  “We might be able to do it, but I am disinclined to kill every ship and crew if that’s the choice with which they present us,” April said. If it gets to that point, I feel the Solar System is no longer viable for the habs.”

  “I agree,” Heather said, “however, I will not yield the Moon to them unless they are willing to trade both North America and China for it and I will tell them so in very blunt terms.”

  “Agreed,” April said.

  Jeff just nodded.

  * * *

  “We have a notice in the weekly communication to be on the lookout for two operatives missing from Fargone,” Bill King said.

  “Did they send their biometric data or are we supposed to guess who they might be on our own?” Sam Burnstein asked.

  “Full face photos, clear enough to set decent recognition parameters, but no DNA or fingerprints, no retina pix, voice, or gait patterns,” Bill said. “No hint at all of what their assignment involved on Fargone. I’m sending their pix to your screen.”

  It was the two spies who Garrett had captured on the Kurofune.

  Sam made a show of looking over each shoulder slowly. “Nope, haven’t seen them. Not our mission, not our concern. If they don’t trust us enough to give us anything but face pix they don’t want them very badly.”

  “That’s a scary preview of how hard they’d search for us if we went off the radar suddenly,” Bill said.

  “On the up-side, if we ever decide it’s safer to go missing than report in, we wouldn’t want them looking much harder,” Sam said. “Maybe they disappeared themselves.”

  “I’m not your political officer, and have far more experience than you, so I have to tell you that is dangerous talk. I can see circumstances we’d agree to such a thing, but they would be rare. A surprise change of regime, where returning home would just put us in front of a wall to be shot would be one circumstance. Why you might want to defect or go dark is not something they are going to cover in training,” Bill pointed out.

  “I suspect those skills are assumed in a low trust culture,” Sam said.

  “Regime is still a bad word,” Bill warned. “We never work for a regime, because they are evil. There was a story going around a few years back, before you were old enough to shave, that was amusing. One of our agents was in a South American country that was targeted to be destabilized. He worked himself up to chief pilot favored by El Presidente. When the revolution came, he was rushed to the airport to fly the deposed fellow to a safe haven in the Balkans with a small group of his most trusted guards and about thirty tons of gold. He shot the copilot and depressurized the rear compartment with the President and his thugs. The aircraft was eventually found on an airstrip in Africa where it would have been challenging enough to land, and impossible to take off. The bodies were present but sadly the gold was gone and never found.”

  “That’s an interesting story, but to pull that off he’d have had to be planning it for a long time to have everything in place to pull it off,” Sam said. “What would you need to do an operation like that?”

  “A friend in-country with a big truck like a farmer would use, or the ability to rent one on short notice, a cell phone, and lots and lots of nerve,” Bill said.

  Sam sat and thought about it but couldn’t find any fault with it. “I know a lot of agents will vacuum up valuables they find in the course of an operation. They just regard it as an unofficial bonus system. Things like cash or jewels or things that can be slipped in a pocket, but thirty tons of gold?”

  “My question is, would you split it with me or get all greedy and decide you had to have the whole thing yourself?” Bill asked.

  “I’d have to cut you in and hope you wouldn’t be the one to go greedy because I can’t imagine how I’d start to liquidate thirty tons of gold without getting myself killed. Do you really think you could do it?” Sam asked.

  “Sure. You don’t try to sell thirty tons. You sell a few ounces here and there and get known to a couple of refiners. Maybe buy or start a jewelry store and put some ads out you will buy scrap. Work your way up to buying one of the refiners with whom you liked doing business, a business with experienced people who can show you how to
re-melt and refine it. Then it just becomes a matter of moving it off the books. You have a cover for possessing significant amounts of the metal. It would require a little patience to do it safely and maximize the profits,” Bill admitted.

  “You devious bastard, you could do it,” Sam decided.

  “That’s just an example. One never knows what will come along. It could be gems or a trade secret or a design that isn’t patented. Something like a single piece of art or any object that can’t be divided up might be challenging,” Bill said.

  “I’d do it with you. My software says you mean it and aren’t trying to entrap me,” Sam said. It was special software designed to read other deeper signs than the sort civilians used on each other.

  “Mine says the same thing,” Bill said. “Trust is a wonderful thing, but having a solid metric as the basis for conspiring is golden.”

  * * *

  The centrifuge was flipped over and secured by two stout bolts and a pair of pins in that position. There was a stack of foam box stock on the floor beneath it with a plain old brick holding each corner down well away from the rotor axis. Musical and Born both had on safety glasses. They waited until after the usual quitting time for others using the building and set a camera up looking at the foam board and a mirror propped to the side viewing the foil covered port added to the containment above the new hollow rotor. Now flipped and pointed at the floor.

  “I’m a bit nervous,” Born admitted to his partner.

  “Do you want to walk around and check if anybody is still in the building working this late?” Musical asked.

  “No, if somebody is still here that’s more suspicious than making a loud noise. How would I explain why I was being so nosy?” Born asked.

  “Let’s do it then,” Musical urged, putting his safety glasses on. They were made for a Badger’s face they looked more like old-fashioned aviator goggles than the Human style. Born’s were more conventional with frames but held on by an elastic strap.