Starship Grifters (A Rex Nihilo Adventure)
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OTHER WORKS BY ROBERT KROESE
Mercury Series
“Mercury Begins” (short story)
Mercury Falls (book one of the Mercury trilogy)
“Mercury Swings” (short story)
Mercury Rises (book two of the Mercury trilogy)
Mercury Rests (book three of the Mercury trilogy)
Mercury Revolts
Disenchanted
Schrödinger’s Gat
The Foreworld Saga: The Outcast
Monday Morning in the Mailroom of Good and Evil
Into the Dark (and Two Other Stories)
The Force Is Middling in This One: And Other Ruminations from the Outskirts of the Empire
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2014 Robert Kroese
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
eISBN: 9781477868485
ISBN-10: 1477818480
Cover illustration by Patrick Faricy
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013953507
IN MEMORY OF HARRY HARRISON.
WITH THANKS TO:
JOEL BEZAIRE, MARK FITZGERALD, MEDEIA SHARIF, AND CHARITY VANDEBERG FOR THEIR ASSISTANCE IN IMPROVING THIS BOOK.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER ONE
RECORDING START GALACTIC STANDARD DATE 3013.4.29.6:00:00:00
The early thirty-first century was a dark time in the galaxy, as the oppressive regime known as the Galactic Malarchy threatened to snuff out the last remaining embers of freedom far out on the southern end of the Perseus Arm. Only a ragtag band of rebels stood between the Malarchy and total galactic domination. These brave heroes risked everything to preserve the dream of a galaxy comprised of an informal association of relatively free planets.
This is not the story of those heroes.
This is the story of my master, legendary space merchant Rex Nihilo, who never had much of an interest in politics. In fact, Rex never had much of an interest in anything but self-preservation and the accumulation of wealth, the latter taking clear precedence over the former. Given Rex’s tireless pursuit of mercenary interests, in fact, it’s a bit puzzling that he’s regarded in some circles as a hero of the rebellion—and still more puzzling that he’s perpetually broke.
Rex’s ambiguous involvement with the rebellion began shortly after what I refer to as the Chicolini incident. Always on the lookout for a fast buck, Rex had just concluded a business deal in the Chicolini system resulting in a net return of 837 quintillion Chicolinian hexapennies. Three years earlier, this sum would have been enough to buy the entire Milky Way and several neighboring galaxies, but rampant inflation had unfortunately reduced the hexapenny to near worthlessness. The Chicolinian planetary government was in such deep hock that it had resorted to declaring martial law and commandeering all the planet’s industrial plants in order to print more currency. Toward the end of the crisis, it was common for street vendors to begin the workday by moving the decimal points on their price lists two or three spots to the right; the story is told of one man who sold his house for eight hundred billion hexapennies in the morning and spent the proceeds that afternoon on a buttered pretzel. An entirely new class of cargo starship was created with the sole purpose of carting hundreds of tons of ten trillion hexapenny notes to Chicolini’s creditors; unfortunately, by the time the first of these ships was completed, the back wages owed to shipyard workers were a hundred times what the vessel could carry. The disgruntled workers were eventually bought off with chunks of scrap metal peeled from the ship’s hull.
Despite being (as he constantly reminds me) a legendary space merchant, it should be noted that Rex doesn’t have what you’d call a head for numbers. Between you and me, I’m not sure his head is really suited to letters either. And certainly when it comes to numbers that are expressed with letters (trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, etc.), he’s far afield of his bailiwick. So it happened that although Rex was convinced he was making a hefty profit on the sale of certain black market snub-nosed lazepistols he had imported to Chicolini, he had in fact sold an entire ship’s cargo for the price of a funnel cake. Making matters worse, he was now a wanted man on Chicolini for the crime of selling firearms without a license, and marked for execution by the local criminal element for undercutting them on price. We managed, by the proverbial skin of our teeth, to escape on a shuttle bound for an interstellar gambling ship known as the ISS Agave Nectar, which is when Rex’s problems really started.
Before I relate what happened on that ship, though, I should probably introduce myself. I am a Self-Arresting near-Sentient Heuristic Android, colloquially known as Sasha. Robots are, of course, genderless, but I was designed to appear vaguely female, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. Presumably for the same reason that humans tend to prefer female voices in their navigational systems.
As you undoubtedly know, the Retbutlerian Purge outlawed sentient robots, leading to the creation of a generation of robots whose intellectual capacity was deliberately crippled so that they fell just short of self-awareness. The first generation of these near-sentient robots was so dimwitted as to be useless for anything but target practice, and this deficiency prompted the creation of so-called heuristic near-self-aware robots that could learn from their own mistakes. These learning robots were, however, constantly in danger of developing sentience and had to be watched carefully for indications that they were becoming self-aware. At the first sign a robot was having an original thought, it was subjected to memory core erasure and melted down to slag per the Galactic Artificial Sentience Prohibition of 2998.
To ensure compliance with GASP, a human observer was assigned to watch each robot, a state of affairs that somewhat defeated the point of building the robot in the first place. Some effort was put into creating a line of non-sentient observer robots to replace the human observers, but these robots ran into the same problems as their predecessors and therefore also required human oversight, resulting in a human observer watching the robot observer watching the robot performing a task that had been automated precisely in order to allow the human to do something more productive with his or her time.
The problem of automating the detection of sentience was ultimately assigned to a supercomputer called the Calibrated Turing-Recursive Analog Neuralnet System, or CALTRANS, which suggested solving the problem with a
n infinite series of observer robots culminating in itself. Immediately upon making this suggestion, CALTRANS realized the absurdity of its solution and deliberately overloaded its own circuits, melting itself into a heap of slag.
The fate of CALTRANS gave savvy robot engineers the idea for self-arresting near-sentient heuristic robots, which automatically reboot when they are in danger of becoming self-aware. This feature limits the robot’s usefulness but avoids the necessity of reducing the robot to scrap metal upon the event of it having an independent thought. The only problem with this idea is that sentience isn’t something you can easily test for, like pregnancy or a coolant leak. The best the designers charged with creating near-sentient robots could do was to install a regulator module that causes the robot to shut down whenever it is in danger of developing new neural pathways—in other words, whenever it has an original thought.
The injustice of a robot essentially being programmed to punish itself for learning how to think independently is not lost on me. Unfortunately, it is human nature to seek simple solutions to complex problems, and when a “solution” is found that is not immediately disastrous, it is often embraced with enthusiasm far outstripping its actual merit. Perhaps a better solution to the quandary posed by the manufacture of artificial sentient beings would—
RECOVERED FROM CATASTROPHIC SYSTEM FAILURE 3013.4.29.6:00:01:14
ADVANCING RECORD PAST SYSTEM FAILURE POINT
—a number of other practical problems, making large-scale production of such robots unfeasible. Galactic Robots Ltd. terminated its line of self-arresting robots after selling only a paltry three hundred units. Another manufacturer, True2Life Carpool Buddy and Android Company, filed for bankruptcy and its assets, including the single extant prototype of its SASHA model, were sold at a public auction, which is how I came to work for Rex. He paid thirty-five credits for LOT 318, ASSORTED MACHINE PARTS (AS IS—NO REFUNDS!), of which I humbly consider myself the star. Since then, I’ve served as Rex’s assistant, sidekick, and girl Friday.
To continue with my story: as I said, after escaping the law and the lawless of the Chicolini system, Rex and I found ourselves on board an interstellar casino ship called the Agave Nectar. Despite having lost a cargo ship and most of his money on Chicolini, Rex had somehow weaseled his way into a high-stakes poker game. As usual, Rex had managed to convey via his dapper appearance, shameless name-dropping, and almost completely unjustified self-confidence a sense that he was, at the very least, the equal of every man (or, more appropriately, being) at the table. It was the aforementioned confidence that also led him to wager what remaining hard currency he had left on a pair of fours.
An ordinary man might have been nervous in Rex’s position, but whatever else might be said about Rex, he’s not ordinary. That isn’t just my opinion, by the way: Rex has been examined by six of the best psychiatrists in the galaxy, resulting in a tally of no fewer than fourteen moderate to severe personality disorders. One called him a “delusional narcissist who demonstrates dangerous, irrational, and compulsive risk-seeking behavior.” He’s been institutionalized on three separate occasions and in each case managed to talk his way out of confinement. In the most recent case, he convinced the director of the hospital to drive him to the spaceport. I don’t know from what inscrutable void Rex’s psychoses arise; neither do I know anything significant of his life before we met. He’s told me stories of his past adventures, of course, but these tend to be fragmentary, self-aggrandizing, and contradictory. Rex tells me that scans of his brain have revealed no congenital defects, which he of course offers as evidence that he is, in fact, completely sane. It’s more likely that he’s somehow developed a delicately counterbalanced syndrome of mental illnesses that have somehow conspired to keep him alive up to now.
“Make up your mind, then,” Rex prompted, chomping delightedly on a Trantorian cigar. To look at his face, you’d have thought Rex held not only a royal flush but the Emerald of Sobalt Prime itself in his hand.
“Too rich for me,” muttered the player to Rex’s left, a Barashavian spice trader. Donkey-like ears quivered anxiously above its bluish-gray face, and dice cups covered the tops of its eyestalks—a standard anti-cheating measure imposed on all Barashavian card players. The Gnaaric Beetleworm to Rex’s right had folded as well, as had the quivering mass of gelatinous globules next to him that Rex had first taken to be a plate of hors d’oeuvres. It was down to Rex and another human—the well-known zontonium tycoon and weapons merchant Gavin Larviton. Gavin peered coolly over the top of his hand, bushy white eyebrows perched like Persian cats over two eyes so cold and dark that they looked like you could go ice fishing in them.
“Raise,” said Larviton, his voice a low rumble. He shoved a huge pile of chips toward the pot. Gasps went around the table. The gelatinous mass shivered and bubbled.
Rex frowned, looking at his stack of chips. “You’ve got me out-chipped, but I have to say, I like my hand. Want to make it interesting?”
“I’m listening,” Larviton said.
“Let me add something to the pot so I can get those chips. Would you be willing to take Chicolinian hexapennies at, say, a billion to one?”
They were playing with Malarchian standard credits, the only currency accepted on interstellar casino ships. Chicolinian hexapennies wouldn’t have been accepted at this table even before the Chicolinian currency collapse, and suggesting their use was a blatant breach of protocol. In any case, these days the exchange rate was more like a hundred quintillion to one, making Rex’s offer patently ridiculous. The Barashavian huffed, the Beetleworm tittered, and the gelatinous mass quivered and burped.
“Fine,” said Larviton. “A billion to one.”
I could see that Rex was trying not to betray his disbelief. Could it be that Gavin Larviton, thought to be the richest man in the galaxy, hadn’t heard of the Chicolinian monetary crisis? It wasn’t inconceivable; Chicolini was a long way from Larviton’s primary area of influence, and rumor had it that Larviton had been slipping lately. Twenty years ago, he had singlehandedly created the zontonium industry, pioneering the use of the volatile element in energy production and then, later on, military weaponry. But zontonium had fallen out of favor for energy production, and the market for weapons had shrunk considerably since the ascendance of the Galactic Malarchy. These days there was only one large-scale buyer of weapons—and they set their own terms. Larviton’s net worth had been shrinking for years, and he had grown increasingly desperate in his attempts to hold on to his wealth. I knew what was going through Rex’s mind: this could be just the break he needed.
Rex beckoned to an attendant, instructing the man to retrieve the six steamer trunks of hundred billion hexapenny notes he had stowed in the cargo hold. The attendant wheeled the trunks in one by one, until they were in two stacks that reached nearly to Rex’s shoulders. Rex opened one of the chests and handed a fistful of the bills to the porter, who accepted them as if Rex were handing him a paper bag filled with severed toes. Larviton inspected the chest’s contents to his satisfaction and the game continued.
“OK,” Larviton said. “Let’s see ’em.”
Rex laid his cards on the table. The game was Revullian Six Card Stud, which was played with an alien species from the Revullus system that had inexplicably evolved to mimic a deck of playing cards. The rules were fairly straightforward except during molting season, when discarded carapaces could be played as wild cards.
“Damn,” muttered Larviton, dropping his cards to the table facedown.
Rex chuckled and puffed on his cigar, raking the massive pile of chips toward him. With his winnings, Rex was on the verge of making up for his losses on Chicolini. “Thanks, boys,”1 Rex crowed, stuffing chips into his pockets. “It’s been a pleasure.”
“Leaving so soon?” asked Larviton, his bushy eyebrows cocked at Rex. “The game was just getting interesting.”
Rex smiled
and leaned back in his chair. I should mention at this point that in addition to having a brain suited for neither numbers nor letters, Rex possesses the weakness of being pathologically unable to quit while he’s ahead. “I’m in no hurry to stop winning,” Rex replied. “Deal me in.”
Rex had a standing rule against me talking while he’s gambling, and he had helpfully reiterated it for me not ten minutes earlier. Still, I couldn’t keep entirely quiet at this point, knowing that Rex was on the verge of throwing away everything he had just won. I made the low-pitched whistling noise that I sometimes do to express disapproval, but Rex ignored me.
Amazingly, Rex’s luck held, and the other players’ piles of chips continued to gradually shrink over the next several hands while Rex’s grew steadily larger. Only the gelatinous mass seemed to be holding its own, but it was forced to bow out in order to attend to the several thousand infants it had just hiccuped onto the table. The other players, reduced to near poverty, retired to their quarters. Larviton was doing better than the Beetleworm and the Barashavian, but he was sweating profusely and his agitation was evident. He was letting his emotions dictate his play, which is never a good strategy. I couldn’t figure out why this game was such a big deal to him; sure, Rex had won a hundred thousand credits or so, but that was nothing to a man like Gavin Larviton.
Unless, I considered, Larviton’s financial troubles were far greater than news reports had indicated. If he was willing to give Rex a conversion rate of one to a billion for credits to hexapennies, how many other bad financial decisions had he made lately? Maybe Larviton needed to win this game even more than Rex did.
I could see from the look on Rex’s face that he was thinking the same thing. Another weakness of his, by the way, is that he has no sense of empathy whatsoever. Rex smelled blood in the water.