Starfarer's Dream (Kinsella Universe Book 4)

by Gina Marie Wylie

  "Tangerine's a habitat, sir?" David asked, confused.

  "Of course. Why is that a surprise?" David thought Dennis Booth looked as confused as he did.

  "My father was told it's a mineral extraction and factory complex on New Texas."

  David wasn't sure what the look was in Dennis Booth's eyes; he was very glad it wasn't being directed at him.

  David was surprised when Dennis Booth finally broke into a grin, shaking his head. "Dirty-feet! Lord, you gotta love them! Otherwise you'd have to kill ’em! Run along, Mr. Zinder, and I will see you at 0800 tomorrow. Look over the syllabus between now and then and see what else you might be interested in.

  "And, in case you are the least bit curious: Tangerine is a consolidated nickel-steel body about two hundred and fifty kilometers in diameter; it's in the inner gas giant leading Trojan position in the New Texas system."

  III

  Captain Bill Travers wrapped his large hands around a steaming cup of coffee and put his brain into neutral. There had been a lot of work this morning, getting ready to go to High Fan -- more than a lot. Now it was time to relax a bit and unwind. You always wanted to do the jump in the most alert frame of mind you could manage. He was a tall, heavy-built, taciturn man of forty-two, his once red hair now slightly graying, His pale blue eyes seemed to hold the secrets of the universe.

  His wife sat down next to him. Naomi Travers was his exec, wife and lover for more than half his life. The ring of ice cubes in her tea glass had signaled to him who she was. Naomi's early life, up until she'd gone to Fleet Academy, had been spent in Palm Springs, California, back on Earth. Forty-five in the shade and all of that; her fondness for drinks with ice in them had no bounds.

  Bill grinned at her and she smiled back.

  Behind them, the compartment wall of the mess deck of their ship, Starfarer’s Dream, was decorated with a mural. The painting showed a long boom ship, the crew and propulsion in a globe on one end, the long boom for cargo trailing behind. The ship’s name was written in script above it.

  "The cargo is secure, Captain," Naomi told him.

  Many people mistook the husband and wife team for brother and sister. If nothing else, the two of them exuded quiet confidence, as if in the manner of command born.

  Jake Warren came in and he too sat down. For Jake an ice-cold beer was his beverage of preference. There was no alcohol in this one, but he was a pot-bellied beer drinker and, so he maintained, would he be on the last day of his life. "Engineering is in all respects ready, Captain."

  "And your captain is pleased to report that we are riding down a sweet groove and we'll go to High Fan on schedule. Assuming one of our training wheels doesn't fall off." The other two laughed.

  Three more people had entered the mess deck a moment before he spoke. Unlike the three already seated, two of these were in Fleet shipsuits, black for weapons. The last of the trio was a burley, bullet-headed man in a tiger-striped green shipsuit: a Fleet Marine.

  "Captain Travers, Mrs. Travers, Chief Warren," Fleet Commander Richard Hoyt said, trying to look serious and official. "I'm sure neither captain in either of the frigates is planning on having his rubber band break. I too wish to report that my group is settling in." He gestured at the second man with him. "This is Lieutenant Jerial, my exec. Master Gunner Will Hodges, my senior ranker."

  "Pleased to meet you, Lieutenant, Gunny," Bill Travers responded, followed by hand shakes all around. The young lieutenant had a bemused look on his face, but then that was the way of these things. One minute he'd been doing whatever he’d been doing, then the next, he was en route to Starfarer’s Dream with no warning. It was as random a choice as the computers could make -- and absolutely no notice.

  "Well, if you'll excuse us, I'm sure you don't want your elbows jiggled more than a minimum during the last hours before transition," the commander commented.

  Bill shook his head. "It’s a tradition in Dream, Commander Hoyt. Two hours ahead of the jump to High Fan, we stand down for an hour. It's either ready or it’s broken. If it's broken, we turn around -- we're not in the business of taking chances. If anything looks wrong, the computer lets us know."

  The Fleet officer grinned. "How do Rim Runners get away with things like this?"

  "Runners, Commander," Naomi told him, "have a number of ways of doing things that seem a little strange at first. But, like Runners themselves, after a while they grow on you."

  Commander Hoyt laughed at that, then he and the others left the wardroom.

  The three sets of eyes that followed them as they left weren't exactly hostile -- after all, they'd all worn the same sort of shipsuits themselves, although different colors.

  "Hell of a way to make a buck," Jake said, shaking his head. "I still can't figure out if we should just forget it, or be pissed as hell that they don't trust us."

  "If it was just a buck," Naomi told them firmly, "we'd not have done it. But it's a whole pile of bucks -- what we would normally make in two or three years. Add to that maintenance and upgrades -- it comes to a rather tidy sum. Another year’s income. We all know why they don't trust us -- we wouldn't trust us either, if we were in their shoes."

  "Marines and frigates," Jake opined. "At least this time Fleet is just doubly redundant."

  Bill didn't want the conversation to go in that direction, so he laughed. "Not to worry! Besides, Jake, in a couple of months we'll be out at Agincourt. By then a few of the Marines will have learned a thing or two about how not to play poker -- you having educated them in the error of their ways."

  They all laughed at that. Jake Warren's poker playing had been legendary in the Fleet. Who knew if the stories about him had ended with his retirement? If so, that would be just too bad for the Marines who'd be exposed to the tender mercies of his instruction for the next few months.

  Four years before, the three of them had retired from the Fleet. They had done something relatively few did on retiring: opted for lump sum cash outs of their pensions. Bill had been a captain then, commanding a Fleet cruiser, Jake had been his chief engineer, Naomi a Port logistics officer that Bill had met years before and after a lengthy (eighteen years) courtship, had the two of them had finally married. The three of them had combined their pensions to buy a cargo ship, then named her Starfarer’s Dream and had gone into the interstellar cargo hauling business.

  Naomi had a lot of contacts, inside the Fleet and out. She'd been a logistics analyst from the time she'd graduated from the Academy. They'd made money almost from the start, and then good money. And this trip -- this was the icing on the cake. Eleven weeks and a bit from Earth to Agincourt, a full cargo load and then some. Piece of cake! And they would make almost as much in four months as they had since they’d bought the ship.

  The Federation Fleet was putting in a Class III base in the Agincourt system; there was already a cruiser assigned there, and the two frigates riding shotgun with Dream were being assigned there as well. Starfarer’s Dream was ferrying twenty million tons of logistics for the new base: consumables, spare parts, all sorts of things, including nearly a thousand missiles, ten tons of tritium and other warhead materials, plus lasers and other weapons and fire control paraphernalia.

  The Fleet quite rightly trusted no one with a thousand nuclear-capable missiles, even in Transit Mode. The two frigates riding shotgun weren't along to protect Starfarer’s Dream. Their task was to destroy the Dream if it looked like the weapons might be lost. And, in case that didn't work, the Fleet had Commander Hoyt and a platoon of Fleet Marines actually aboard the ship; three Marines for each person of Dream's regular fourteen person crew, to insure that they didn't do anything untoward. The job of the Marines wasn't to repel boarders -- it was to ensure that the ship destructed before capture -- and to make very sure it wasn't an inside job.

  None of them talked about it, but there was almost certainly something else since the Fleet was fond of triple redundancy. The ship's computer was part of that; all of ship’s crew knew that the upgrade to their
AI that had been installed was state of the art. Their AI had been as good as they could afford already, letting them run with just fourteen people on the crew. The new AI was light years better that the old one, but it was a Fleet Aloft AI, installed and programmed by Fleet Aloft technicians. It could and would take control of the ship if it decided that they were attempting to contravene their mission orders.

  When it came time, two hours later, Jake twisted space for them and a light hour beyond Earth, Starfarer’s Dream stopped being “here” and began moving “there” at multiples of the speed of light. “There” in this case, was nearly sixty light years from Earth, which they would traverse at the rate of roughly one light year each day.

  Benko-Chang fans were turbines that rotated at very high rates, fans that generated rotating magnetic fields of extreme density, magnetic fields that did bizarre things to space-time. Spun it, folded it, mutilated it. A Benko-Chang turbine created a point gravity source at a remove from the turbine. In "low fan" mode, a ship “fell” through space in the direction of the “gravity point.” In the Newtonian universe, the ship thought it was rolling down a very long, very steep hill.

  However, at a certain point when the turbines were spinning fast enough, and the magnetic fields strong enough, the slope reached infinity and the ship left Newton's Universe and went elsewhere. The location of a vessel under High Fan moved in respect to the rest of the universe at a rate that would exceed that of light, except ships in High Fan weren't detectable in the “real” universe. A ship couldn't be detected while it was on High Fan. Ships were detectable when they came and went and they were detectable in the low fan mode. The High Fan transition caused ripples in space, gravity waves that were as visible as ripples on a pond to modern gravity wave detectors.

  Like ripples on a pond, you could tell something had dropped into the pond or had jumped out. You could make a fairly good measure of the mass of the object by the amplitude of the ripples and a good measure of the intrinsic velocity of the object by the distance between wave crests. Beyond that, nothing. There was nothing to hint that ripples were about to appear; nothing about what direction the vessel was arriving from or departing in. A ship on low fan was detectable to a lesser extent. Any fan made ripples in the pond, but on low fan the ripples were far smaller; like a duck cruising across a lake, in the early morning sun.

  The flight plan for their voyage wasn’t complicated. The two frigates had accompanied Dream until the ship went to High Fan, then the two frigates went to High Fan themselves. Except the frigates were faster than the much more massive freighter. Dream was running the fans at 84% of their max rated power. They weren't so much in a hurry, as they were desirous of arriving safely. Ships that ran with fans close to their maximum rated power tended not to arrive. The higher the power, the more often a ship was lost. It was more than enough to make people very cautious.

  The frigates would arrive several days earlier than Dream. It wasn’t a large difference over that distance, but still, it wasn't very efficient to have two ships with nothing to do for that long. Thus, the two frigates would close with the Agincourt Navigation Point -- a six hundred kilometer rock some 100 AUs from the star. They would drop off supplies and personnel, before returning to the rendezvous area to await Dream’s arrival.

  43

  Starfarer’s Dream

  Chapter 2 -- Malfs

  I

  Joachim Wolf stared at the list of waypoints displayed on the navigational computer’s screen; the next one was the third and there were three more on this orbit. Each was a navigational checkpoint or a change of course to keep a proper separation from something that they might otherwise have come too close to.

  Next to him he could hear his daughter’s fingers running over the keys of her comp; even as he thought that, she spoke. “The numbers are firming up. We’re running right down the middle of the groove!”

  He glanced at her. She was sixteen and very tall. His daughter, Wilhelmina -- Willow to her friends and family -- wasn’t as chubby as she’d been a few years before -- the growth spurt that had added a meter to her height had moved a lot of weight around and burned off considerable body fat. Willow had short, curly black hair and she always had a serious expression on her face.

  “Very good, Willow.” He was very formal, but four hundred years of space flight had taught the human race a lot of things. One of them was that formal procedures reduced procedural errors. Errors that could kill you and perhaps others and maybe, if you were really unlucky, lots of others.

  The board beeped at the same second Willow muttered under her breath, “Foo!”

  His eyes flicked and saw the red blazon. “The lidar?”

  Willow was running checks; the computer was running checks. He checked the course plot. The numbers were firm after the last course change -- Willow had it right. They were running down the middle of their planned course. They had eleven hours until the next change.

  The computer could fly Wolf’s Daughters on dead reckoning over the entire course. But intra-system freight tug pilots don’t grow old taking more chances than they have to. And with his wife and their two daughters aboard -- Joachim took no chances at all.

  “Deader than a doornail,” Willow reported. “Current going in, zip coming out. Hard malf.”

  “We just had the booger replaced,” Joachim said in frustration.

  “I’ll check it out.”

  “If you have to do an EVA, let me know. I think we should get Dee Dee’s hours up a bit.”

  “Sure,” Willow replied, before turning and heading down ship to look at the lidar electronics.

  Joachim shook his head. Such a daughter! He and his wife Alma were both medium height, slender, but dark-skinned. A long time before their great-grandparents had moved to Germany from Morocco. Willow was their natural daughter, and even as a baby Willow had been big, almost five kilos. Alma had had to have labor induced early, or she would have had more problems than she did. As it was, Willow was the only natural child they were going to have.

  A few years later, they had done particularly well and had decided to adopt a baby. Life on the Rim was dangerous; there was no two ways about it. But as dangerous as it was, everyone saw to it that kids were protected as well as humanly possible. This resulted quite often with kids surviving where their parents did not. On the Rim, someone was always there to adopt them when that happened.

  Dee Dee had been born on a planet called Tenabra. Tenabra had originally been settled by those of mostly Chinese lineage, but a considerable number of Europeans had emigrated there as well. Eight million persons, at their last census -- they would never have another.

  A cargo ship named Tiger had emerged at the Tenabra navigation point, twelve light hours out in the system. They had calculated a jump closer, to a light hour, a billion kilometers from the star and nearly that many from Tenabra. When they emerged they spent time making calculations for their next, closer jump. It was then that Tiger had spotted an inbound rock from deep space; a hundred fourteen kilometers in diameter, moving very fast, sixty kilometers a second.

  It was something that was done: anytime someone detected an unsurveyed object, they checked it out.

  Tiger determined the orbital elements of the body and transmitted them when they next reappeared in normal space, then just a few light minutes from Tenabra. Before they could achieve a stable orbit, the locals had been excited: the orbit they had reported intersected Tenabra’s. At least, it was within the error bar. Tenabra wasn’t a large system and they didn’t have many ships stopping by -- the cargo ship Tiger was it for the next few weeks. Tiger had jumped back out, made far more careful observations and the numbers changed from possible to certain: Tenabra was going to be impacted by the rock.

  A bad science fiction novel theme, but it was going to happen. One hundred and ninety two days was all Tenabra had left. The Tiger dumped her cargo, took on five hundred women and children and jumped for the Fleet base at New Cairo, eight days away. Ships t
hat could carry passengers had jumped to Tenabra, ships that couldn’t, spread the word.

  There had only been nine hundred and twelve people left on Tenabra when the rock impacted; Fleet ship Warsaw Ghetto had come down through the debris, taking considerable damage. They’d loaded the last people aboard and then lifted back out. Eleven crew members aboard Warsaw Ghetto had been killed and nearly fifty of those who’d been on the ground died. But, there had been no one left behind on Tenabra to turn off the lights.

  He shook his head, clearing his mind. Concentrate on the tasks at hand, Joachim!

  Two hours later, Joachim looked across the bridge where Willow was working the last stages of bringing up the primary lidar. At least the thing was working again!

  “Willow.”

  His daughter looked up from her screen; scrolling numbers went by faster than he really cared to think about. “Good work on the lidar,” he told her, trying to sound a thousand percent professional and zero percent fatherly.

  “The problem was with the magnetron the Port installed; it wasn’t any good. The booster stage wasn’t outputting stable frequencies; so the first lasing stage was screwed up. I put in the spare -- if it goes we’ll just have junk again.”

  Another thing different about his daughter: Joachim liked to think of himself as a competent person, but Willow was well beyond “just” competent. She was good, really good. She had in fact, finished tops at Agincourt on the Fleet Comprehensive Exam, and she would be going off to the Gagarin School on Helvetia in another few months. Not quite as good as the Fleet Academy, back on Earth, but pretty good for a simple family living on the Rim, the real Rim!