Trish replied, “Like that display back there at the buffet.”
Tawn nodded. “That would probably qualify.”
Gandy said, “Just wait here. We’ll be back with the deal.”
Tawn grabbed his shoulder as he began to turn. “Hold on there, Hoss. You forgetting something?”
Gandy returned a confused look.
“Here, let’s load up your credit store. If you want to act like a buyer, you have to have the credits to back yourself up.”
Tawn transferred a hundred thousand credits into Gandy’s account. The soon-to-be first mate stood in silence as he looked at the total on his device.
Tawn said, “And I tell you what. As my broker, I’m willing to pay you 10 percent of all the credits you save me under his asking price. What was it? Ninety-eight thousand?”
Gandy nodded as he turned toward the lounge with a grin on his face.
Trish looked at Harris.
Harris replied, “What? I’m not buying anything here.”
Tawn said, “You can go with him. If the two of you can get that price down by at least twenty-five thousand, I’ll cut you in for 5 percent of the savings as well.”
Trish grinned. “Consider it done.”
The young mechanic trotted off after her twin brother.
Harris smiled. “Now that was downright nice of you. Dumb, but nice.”
Tawn looked toward the door of the lounge. “I figure we’re buying their loyalty right now. We give them something in their pockets and a shot at a future and they’re gonna work their butts off for us.”
Harris nodded. “Look who’s picking up the people skills.”
Twenty minutes of waiting turned into an hour and then three.
A nervous Tawn took a step toward the lounge.
Harris asked, “Where you going?”
“I’m going to see if my hundred thousand credits are still in there.”
A red faced slug walked out two minutes later. “Bartender said they left out the back an hour ago. His boss gave no indication he was coming back. And he said he left with a smile on his face. You think I just got robbed?”
Harris laughed. “Maybe Gandy’s smarter than I thought. Looks like he took you for a ride. Clovis probably talked him into splitting the money and just disappearing. Twenty-five thousands credits each… that’s a huge payout for two kids that young.”
Tawn pounded her fist in her other palm. “If that’s the case, I’ll be crushing some skull.”
Chapter 15
_______________________
Harris said, “Here they come down the promenade.”
Tawn let out a deep sigh.
Gandy was grinning. “Miss Freely, Captain, first let me say thank you for this opportunity. Second, you want to go see the Kingfisher? She looks to be in good shape.”
Tawn replied, “Would you care to tell me what happened first? Where’d you go?”
Gandy pointed. “As we walk?”
Trish said, “Bagman tried to intimidate us because of our age. I told him ‘Look, we have a buyer who is interested. Cut the crap and let’s get down to business. We have other clients who have interests and if you want to be on a list of reputable sellers, you’ll stick to reputable practices’. I think it caught him off guard.”
Gandy nodded. “She was vicious. After that we got down to numbers. I kept low-balling and then dangling the fruit of future sales out in front of him. I might have even talked about possible forced buys at his asking prices. He seemed to jump at that. I had him down to sixty-eight thousand credits before Trish took back over.”
Trish smiled. “I managed to knock him down another four. And he topped of the fuel tanks, including the jump fuel. Of course, I might have promised him a few clients that were in desperate straights, needing to sell their ships for hard credits.”
Harris winced. “You do know the guy you were dealing with is a loanshark, right? He’s the kind that, if he feels crossed, you wind up dead in a trash bin. You might be proud of your cons, but if he figures them out, he will be relentless at wanting revenge. In the business he conducts there’s a certain reputation he has to uphold.”
Gandy shrugged. “He’s an old man. You’re a slug and a stump. You were built for war. He’s not gonna bother you.”
Tawn frowned. “Let’s just get to the ship and take her out. If he sees us with the stump he’s gonna connect the dots.”
Gandy held up his store. “I have your credits. I kept my thirty-four hundred and transferred seventeen hundred to Trish. If it was OK to do it that way.”
Tawn nodded as she recovered the remaining monies. “You both did good. Real good. Just keep in mind what Mr. Gruberg said, that guy and guys like him are bad news. Don’t mess around with them our you’ll wind up as cat food coming out of some low-end meatgrinder.”
Harris said, “I’ll meet you there in a minute. I need to stop by the Bangor.”
They stepped aboard the Kingfisher.
Tawn’s expression was one of joy. “Oh this is nicely done. Clean, elegantly decorated. And… it doesn’t smell.”
She walked into the cockpit. “Wait… no power gauge. We’ll have to start a list.”
Gandy nodded. “Got it. First on my to-do.”
Harris hopped up into the cabin.
Tawn checked the bunkroom. “Harris… check this out… that look like one of our old mil mattresses?”
He walked to the bunk and slid in on top. “Oh. Yes it is. I recognize that feel. I don’t suppose you’d want to sell me the one off your first mate’s bunk would you?”
Tawn chuckled. “Pfft. Fat chance. You’ll have to buy your spare parts somewhere else.”
Harris turned to Trish. “Start a list of your own. Job one is to find me one of those mattresses.”
“What about the power gauge?”
Harris smiled. “Oh yeah. Put that in first. That makes the Bangor a more complete ship than this… Kingflusher.”
Tawn shook her head. “OK then. Time to get out. I won’t have you insulting her on my first day as owner.”
Harris took a seat on one of the benches in the cabin. “Just fire this thing up and let’s take her for a ride. You can pretend you have feelings later.”
Tawn looked at Gandy. “Mr. Boleman, would you care to initiate a startup? And check with the controller about a launch?”
Gandy sat in the copilot’s seat. “You sure about that? This is your first time out. I mean she’s registered to me still, but we can take care of that later.”
Tawn stopped before taking the pilot’s chair. “Wait… what? She’s registered to who?”
Gandy shrugged. “We kind of forgot about that small detail. I had to take possession of it in my own name since the credits were coming from my account. When we get back we can run down to the licensing bureau and have the title changed over to you. Costs a hundred credits for the transfer, but you can afford it.”
Harris laughed. “Should have been Gandy ordering me off his ship for the insult. Looks like you’re the real first mate here. How much he paying you? You know what I offered Trish, right? Tell me he at least offered you that. If not, there are plenty of other captains around here looking for first mates… Like Baxter Rumford. I think she has an opening.”
Tawn sighed. “Are you done flapping your trap yet?”
Harris looked up in thought and then back. “Nope.”
The station controller gave the exit codes to be entered into the computer for the automated ride out of the station bay. Forty seconds later the Kingfisher emerged into free space.
***
A jump was made to the Rabid system.
Tawn nodded as the wormhole closed behind them. “Smooth.”
Gandy replied, “All systems are showing green. Whoever owned this ship took good care of her. I have a full diagnostic running, and so far we are clean.”
Tawn asked, “You two up for seeing the Retreat? It’s a colony exclusively for slugs and stumps. You can visit, you
just can’t stay. Harris and I both own property there.”
Gandy asked, “Not to be nosy, but where did you and Mr. Gruberg get your money? I haven’t heard of any other bios making it rich. And I know you didn’t inherit.”
Harris replied, “Business. We deliver goods to the outer colonies.”
Gandy pressed, “What kind of goods?”
A brief silence was followed with a reply. “Well, of recent, we’ve been shipping building supplies out here to the Retreat. There’s a foundation that’s supporting the building of homes for slugs and stumps who want to move out here.”
Gandy nodded. “So a whole colony of nothing but you? Will there be little slugs and stumps running around?”
Tawn shook her head. “Not happening. One of their engineering feats was to make us sterile so we weren’t producing more of us. I can’t mother and he can’t father. When the ten thousand of us are gone… we’re gone.”
Harris said, “They didn’t want to have too much of a good thing. So they took precautions. Anyway, this colony is in one long valley. Probably twenty-five hundred of us living there now.”
Tawn corrected. “Thirty-two hundred and growing. And we have room for everyone.”
Farker nudged Trish. “What the—“
Harris laughed. “Meet Farker. My robotic dog. And my second mate.”
The dog looked up with his usual creepy grin.
Trish reached down to pet his head. “He’s adorable! Where’d you get him? I’ve never seen anything like him.”
Harris replied, “Tawn gave him to me. She didn’t want the poor thing. Kind of heartless, that one.”
Tawn rolled her eyes. “It wasn’t mine to give. It ran onto a ship I was on just before the ship we were docked with was destroyed. The owner was killed.”
Gandy asked, “How was a ship destroyed?”
Tawn looked at her new first mate. “Boom. It blew up. Can we leave it at that?”
Gandy crossed his arms. “Blew up? From what? Drive failure? A bomb? What?”
Harris said, “We might as well tell them.”
Tawn turned. “What? I think that’s a bad idea.”
Harris sighed. “It’s gonna come out sooner or later. She undocked just as another ship approached. They blasted the other guy. Her ship slipped away.”
Gandy frowned. “Who would do that?”
Harris replied, “We think it was alien space pirates.”
Trish laughed. “Good one.”
Gandy shook his head. “You don’t want to tell me, then fine.”
Trish sat forward. “Hey. There’s a panel here on your pet. How do you open it?”
Harris looked down. “Don’t know. Never tried. Farker? Can you open the panel for her?”
A small access door slid back, exposing the electronics just behind the dog’s shoulder.
“Whoa.” Trish moved closer for a better look. “I don’t recognize any of this.”
Harris grinned. “We were told he was one of a kind.”
Gandy asked, “Can I see?”
Tawn gestured toward the cabin. “Have at it. We won’t be on the ground for another three or four minutes.”
Gandy forced his way in between Harris and his sister. “Oh, cool. I can see his shoulder joint. Interesting. And nicely made. That has to be a titanium alloy. How much does he weigh?”
Harris shrugged. “Twenty-five kilos maybe? Tawn? You’ve held him up on you leg a number of times… what would you say?”
Tawn scowled. “Aren’t you funny. Yeah, I’d say about twenty-five.”
Gandy said, “Is probably loaded with more sensors than this ship. The programming running this thing must be impressive. Does he do any tricks?”
Harris chuckled. “Other than humping your boss’s leg? None that I’ve seen. Although I think he understands most of what we say. He’s barked a few replies that… I should say farked replies because he doesn’t bark. Anyway, he responds at times as if he understands.”
Trish frowned. “I don’t see anything in here that points to a manufacturer. Normally that stuff would be plastered all over the chassis. Farker? Do you have any other access doors?”
Three farks were returned.
“Can you open them for us?”
A multitude of panels popped open or slid back, exposing the innards of the mechanical pet going from the top of its head to its still-wagging nub of a tail.
Gandy gazed in awe. “Wow. This is so cool. A working spine. And look at those hip joints.”
Trish nodded. “And the controller running it all. It’s only half the size of my fist. You said this was one of a kind… where’d it come from?”
Harris replied, “The prior owner was said to have found it on one of the uninhabited worlds. It was just roaming around by itself.”
Tawn turned to face the cabin. “Wait… doesn’t that thing require charging? It couldn’t have been roaming around without having a charger to periodically connect to.”
Trish looked around in the chassis. “I don’t see a battery. Here’s the power unit. There’s no battery there. At least not a traditional one. You sure it uses a charger?”
Harris pointed. “It’s right up here. I plug it into this socket.”
“Hmm, that line just goes to the brain controller. Hang on… that’s not for power. That’s an interface.”
Gandy said, “You have a tablet?”
Harris reached under the console beside Tawn. “No tablet, but we can hook into the console display right here.”
Trish took the cable that had previously been plugged into the dog. Connecting it from the console to the pet, a program window opened on the console.
“Whoa.”
Harris asked, “What?”
Trish gestured at the display. “I didn’t do that. The dog is doing that.”
Several windows of code whizzed by before the background image of the display turned into a view from the dog’s eyes. A word popped up on the screen.
Hello.
Trish replied, “Uh, hi?”
Welcome to my world.
“Who are you? Or what?”
First I must apologize for the ruse. This program is not an artificial intelligence. It’s merely a series of recordings. The program will attempt a best match to a question, responding with the recording believed to most likely provide an answer.
My name was Alexander Gaerten. I say was because my physical body passed away long ago. My companion, Archibald, with whom you are interacting, is a remnant of my experimentation into artificial intelligence. It was a wholly incomplete venture, but my best attempt. This program is but a shell of that attempt.
Gandy asked, “So you’re dead?”
My existence in the physical world came to an end twenty-four hundred years ago.”
“Where are you from?”
I traveled from Earth with the colonists who took refuge on Domicile. A name which I abhorred, by the way. My team and I discovered the boson field, the primary element of force that permeates all matter. With this discovery came the knowledge of how to manipulate this field.
Through experimentation, we acquired the ability to open a wormhole. It was a single event with the field continuously running for a period of more than seventeen years. Which was fortuitous for man, as our own world, Earth, was under grave threat. A rather large asteroid was heading our way, and we had no means of stopping its progression. So we fled here.
The wormhole experiment opened the reality of travel to this region of space. Several probes were sent ahead, and the habitable worlds of New Earth and Domicile were discovered. I won’t go into our wormhole discovery other than to say we had little control over where the destination end opened. And the newly discovered threat from the asteroid saw to it that our options were limited.
Massive Earth ships were constructed by two competing world teams and launched within months of each other. Each ship housed nearly five million residents. Those residents are your ancestors of both Domicile and New Ea
rth. Each reached their destination after nearly ten years in space. The ships themselves became the first colonies of the two worlds.
Harris asked, “So this wormhole from Earth, is it still out there? Could we get back if needed?”
The wormhole to Earth is lost, possibly forever. Our knowledge of control of the boson field was limited. But perhaps your scientists have made progress since our time. After years of experimentation, the best we could accomplish was to create our own field here in local space. Jump generators were added to ships, and travel within this area expanded.
We constructed two field generators within this region. One in Domicile space and one in New Earth space. A large portion of the two fields overlap. And the two fields are dependent on one another. Should one collapse or cease to exist, the other will follow. The overlap and the dependence were made to ensure cooperation between the two colonies.
Gandy said, “That’s why our jump drives only go so far. And I bet we can find right where the field generators are located. Archibald, where are the generators located? What planets?”
The location of the field generators is held in confidence by the science community who created these fields. Attempted facility access may result in the collapse of the fields for both worlds. Maintenance of the field facilities is automated, and those maintenance resources should not be tampered with. In short, if you value the boson fields and the ability to travel using wormhole generators, do not tamper with the field facilities.
Gandy frowned. “That’s scary. Someone could take down our travel completely. Travel out here, what is it? Eighty light-years? That would take twelve hundred eighty years on normal engines. You’d be stuck wherever you were when they went down.”
Trish asked, “Why was this dog created? As a guard for one of the facilities? To give warning?”
Archibald was placed outside the facility as an interface to the security system. He is the eyes and ears of that system, having the ability to sit and listen to those who have discovered a facility. Those individuals could then be appropriately warned if a facility was approached.
Tawn piloted the Kingfisher to a stop in the grassy field beside the port beacon for the Retreat colony. “I’d say we need to return that dog to where Cletus found him. We lose our jump drives and the party is definitely over.”
ARMS War for Eden Page 14
