Fleetfoot Interstellar
P. Joseph Cherubino
© Copyright 2016 P. Joseph Cherubino
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Cherubino Press
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Table of Contents
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1
Holographic figures pulsing on multiple spreadsheets described in sickening detail how the Fleetfoot Interstellar Freight Company hemorrhaged money. Captain Drexler Fleetfoot struggled to flatten the curling display scroll corners against the loose panels of the loading bridge console. He muttered curses under his breath, and the console seemed to return the sentiment in the form of squeaks and groans. As he fumed at the worn-out displays, two things grew painfully clear. First, more than a few fasteners did not make it back into the console after a recent repair job. Second, the company was beyond broke. Drexler ran a hand across the bristles of his cropped black hair, then turned his eyes to space.
A kilometer-long line of cargo streaming past the transparent bulkhead represented one more run down the Trade Lanes. It was not enough. If he was lucky, Drexler might make payroll, fuel costs, and at least one loan payment. No matter where it went, Fleetfoot I always returned to orbit within the immense gravity well of Planet Debt. Escaping the pull of financial mass seemed an impossible task. It appeared that an actual gravity field was not enough to escape the artificial gravity of finance. Drexler found that perverse.
But outside in the vacuum, all was well. The Insectoids went about their work with finely-honed professional skill. Drexler found comfort in the graceful motions of his stevedores moving between containers. The Insectoids flicked their wings and pumped their many appendages to hop back and forth between three-ton crates. They maintained a long, arrow-straight line of containers that flowed from the freighter's primary hold into the sole receiving dock of the Kelgar 7 space station.
Even though there was no air for their wings to beat against, multiple limbs let the Insectoids maneuver as if there was. One flick of a limb or wing spun them around, and another flick canceled momentum. When they moved their six legs in series, they propelled themselves through space as easily crawling on the ground. They barely needed to use the small thrusters fastened directly to their glossy black shells.
Drexler recently found that Insectoids made natural commercial astronauts. They needed minimal hard space protection; their visual acuity surpassed most humanoids, and they thrived in zero-g. As a bonus, their social structure made them easy to command. Best of all, the price was right. It was a minor nuisance in port that most other races looked down on them, but that was why their labor market value was so low. Fleetfoot Interstellar fed and housed them, and they didn't ask for much beyond that. These Insectoids had it all under control
What was not under control was Drexler's financial plan. This run was supposed to get him ahead of the debt his father piled onto the ship like so much loose cargo. Drexler's earlier projections showed that he should have been able to take a big chunk out of the fifth mortgage. After that, it would be 20 or 30 more hauls at most to pay the entire debt, and then he could work on building his fortune for retirement. Instead, all the bottom lines appeared blood red. He would be further in debt for the next seven runs. This should not be happening. How did his father run this boat for so long?
Drexler's attention spilled from the viewing bulkhead and soaked into the display scrolls again. Instead of showing close-up views of his cargo bay, inventory listings, and the station loading dock as they should have, the flexible screens were alive with pulsing columns of holographic figures accounting for fuel costs, labor rates, Blinkpoint counts, route estimations and course projections. Drexler needed to turn those column bases from red to green somehow. His best bet to make that happen involved unloading freight as quickly as possible. The odds of making a profit increased the faster he moved on to the next haul.
When he read the spreadsheets and asked himself again how his father supported a family of six on the ship, the answer came down to one word: debt. The more Drexler paid it off, the more layers of debt he discovered. He assumed that was why the old man disappeared with Drexler's second middle brother more than ten years ago. The Old Man had enough, but Drexler promised himself never to quit. He had too much invested in this life and the ship.
If it got bad enough, Drexler figured he could strip out all the transponders, do a quick and dirty retrofit then blow the trade lanes for some undocumented planet or outback colony. He knew the ship AI wouldn't complain. His Dad compromised the computer's ethical programs decades ago. Drex counted himself lucky that the AI hadn't sold him to slavers and bought the company itself. The musing brought a grim smirk to his hawkish face, and his dark-brown eyes twinkled to no one in the large, empty loading bridge.
But he didn't want to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder. And even that wild scheme required credits. The ideal move would be to eliminate the debt. Drexler resolved himself to get more creative. His mind wandered to thoughts of contraband. Smuggling was always an option. Illegal freight had saved his company more than once.
"Captain," a voice interrupted his concentration. It was Gajrup, his new engineer. Drexler ignored the call for several minutes.
"Captain," the voice said again, this time, more urgently.
"Yes," Drexler snapped, still focused on the financial screens.
"Captain, I'm over here on the loading dock—" Gajrup began. That got Drex's attention.
"Why the hell aren't you working on my particle emitters like I told you?" Drex barked. When his attention returned to space again, he found another ship in the loading position beside his. Some other crew was pushing crates into the queue.
This unwelcome freighter sidled up to port around a kilometer distant. He didn’t recognize the design, but its gleaming, curved white surfaces were as fresh and pit-less as the space station. He had the impression they were made from the same material.
Why had nobody else told him some other ship
was in his loading queue? Why was his engineer minding boxes? Where the hell was the rest of the crew? Then Drexler remembered that, by his own orders, the remainder of his skeleton crew was assigned to much-needed maintenance duty. Planet Debt-struck again. With a full crew, more than one person would be around to manage the stevedores. Drexler couldn’t afford a whole crew, much less, dry-dock repairs.
"Well, a call came in, sir, and nobody answered. I was suited up and on the hull anyway, so I thought I'd pitch in to help," Gajrup explained. "We're sharing the dock rather well."
“Sharing the dock …” Drexler trailed off as his blood caught fire.
Drex wasted no time. He grabbed his helmet and pulled it down violently onto the collar of his light-duty EV suit. He didn't confirm the helmet seal before diving face first down the deck slide under 1:1 earth gravity to the decompression bay below. He skidded across the airlock floor on the suit chest panel.
"Open!" he shouted to the AI, who blew the outer hatch without closing the breech door to the cargo bridge.
The move was in violation of nearly twenty regulations, but Drexler didn't care. His AI would purge the records and hack the station AI just for fun and games. Reggie was never happier than when covering up a petty crime. But there was no time for Reggie to adjust the Boson field. The transition from artificial gravity to normal space nearly made him vomit and almost broke his spine.
The helmet wasn't completely sealed. Drexler didn't care about that either. That was what emergency sealant was for, and this was an emergency. He was losing money fast. Oxygen escaping his EV suit was less of an issue than that. His company got paid on a sliding scale based on delivery times, and these intruders were cutting into his profit in a major way. Not only that, it was just plain rude. Professional Astronauts lived by a code, no matter what species they came from.
Drex covered the distance between his ship and Kelgar 7 at a suicidal rate. He skidded across the loading dock observation platform, then bounced off the space station hull. He barely managed to land on his magnetic cleats in front of the opposing crew member. And then, the situation grew clear. Reptilians. Big, nasty, aggressive, Reptilians were moving in on his cargo.
Drex paused but didn't back down. He poked the four-armed Goliath in the chest and looked up at the bottom of its snout, said, "Get your drip-scaled tail out of my freight queue!"
The Reptilian's tongue flicked toward him inside its oblong bubble helmet. It tasted nothing, but not even the vacuum of space prevented it from trying. This one resembled an Old Earth Chameleon, but with thick scales, sharper teeth, and eyes attached to stalks. It focused on him with both of its eyes and smiled. Reptilians only smiled at Humans when they had the upper hand. It was not a natural expression for them, but one they learned as another form of the mockery for which they were famed. There was nothing friendly about the Lizards, so when they appeared to be, some other creature was about to get screwed.
"Your crew is sloppy, slow and weak. We booked this dock weeks ago for this time," the Lizard said through his translator in very precise Tradespeak. "You are on our time now."
Drex was about to push the Lizard off the observation deck when Gajrup stepped in. He placed himself between the Reptilian and Drex. It was the worst move he could have made. Drex was displaying signs of aggression. Gajrup's presence told this Alpha Reptile that Drex was weak; he could not make a challenge alone. Drex pushed Gajrup off the platform instead. It was the only right move. Gajrup was in mid-sentence, still trying to diffuse the situation as he pinwheeled into space.
"Why—" Drex heard Gajrup ask before he cut off the channel. Drex saved a little face, but the reptile was still in a challenge stance. He was still smiling. When one of his eyes swiveled out in the direction the cargo, Drex saw why.
"Not over!" the Captain shouted to his opponent as he launched himself from the deck. Some member of the opposing crew sent a column of bulky creates on a collision course for two of his stevedores. Drex hurtled towards his crew members while broadcasting shouts of warning.
So intent were the insects on their work, that they didn't heed their Captain's call to get out of the way. It was almost as if they couldn't hear him at all. Drex snatched them both, each by a single wing, just before a three-ton crate slammed into the cube face where his workers were the instant before. He'd seen this trick before from the Reptilians. They wanted to create chaos, then try to hack the crate transponders and claim Drex's haul credits as their own. They'd try to knock a few of his crates off into space if they could. If a few people got hurt or killed, they'd just cite hazards of the job. Drexler hated Lizards.
"Watch what you're doing!" Drex barked at the hapless hexapods.
"Yes, Captain," the insects said in unison, "Thank you, Captain." Their voices came through garbled and laced with static. Drexler didn’t bother to ask why communications were so poor, but he should have.
Drex cut them off. He found their ritual courtesy tiring and their voice synthesizers maddening. Their language was so different that most Insectoids had no idea how to tune their translators to sound like other species. That was one of the things that made humanoids uncomfortable around them.
Drex sailed back to the observation deck by way of aggressive boot thruster firings. He was aiming for the Lizard but missed. At least, he stuck a proper, two-footed landing this time. To his credit, the Lizard didn't flinch. Drex probably would have gotten the worst of the impact anyway. The monster would have swatted him aside with his thick tail. The Alpha was, at least, two feet taller than him and twice as heavy. He was still smiling.
When he followed the telltale eye stalks again, he finally understood the game. Drexler had saved the lives of two Insectoids. The entire stevedore crew abandoned their work to perform the "thank you" dance.
"No... guys... no... come on..." Drexler pleaded. Behind his eyes, the bottom line of his internal balance sheet sprayed money like a severed artery. The job was hopelessly delayed. They would never get the freight logged before the deadline. That meant a complete flight plan reschedule and several extra days of new calculations.
Crates were drifting past the dock boundary and would need manual retrieval. He would be stuck on an outback space station with a rival crew of Lizards and his crew of 80 humanoids and 150 insects. The joys of space travel kept on giving.
Meanwhile, the Insectoids danced in space. They formed synchronized geometric patterns. First, they made a five-pointed star, then a series of lines representing their sacred prime numbers. They formed spirals and circles and pyramids, and Drexler was humiliated. The Lizard won, and they both knew it. Kelgar Seven’s supervisor AI accepted the queue, and living station supervisors seemed absent or indifferent. It was likely an entirely automated system on the receiving end.
Drexler launched himself back towards his ship without another look at the reptile. "Where the hell were you, jackass," he asked through an exclusive channel to his AI.
"I do so enjoy the 'thank you' dance," Reggie replied. Drexler's fortune moved further away by the minute. At this rate, he would be lucky make next month's payroll.
Drexler made his way back to the ship at a leisurely pace. He found no sense in hurrying. He might as well enjoy a spacewalk. His EV suit managed to adjust itself so that his helmet was on tight in spite of the quickly drying sealant gumming up the mechanism. The suit collar was still creaking and grinding as its outer threaded ring rotated in search of optimal tension. Drexler finally canceled the glaring safety alarm lights he had ignored during the ill-fated conflict. The collar settled down.
It would be hell getting the emergency sealant out of the locking ring. He figured he’d have plenty of time for equipment maintenance now. That would give him something to do besides fret over finances.
Even from a few hundred meters, the freighter showed its age. The main-sequence star of this system was just removing the last of the planet shadow from the hull. Drex felt the star warming his suit at the light exposed all the ship’s flaws. A cool
ing pump between his shoulder blades vibrated to life, and his helmet fogged before temperatures stabilized.
Drexler aimed his flight toward the ship’s underside. He decided he might as well get a good look while he could. It wasn’t that inspection never hurt, because it often did, especially when he lacked the resources to fix things. He only wanted the opportunity to catch early the issues he could not afford to remedy.
“You know Reggie,” Drexler said, “you really should launch an inspection probe and check yourself out. You look like crap.”
“You should hope to look half as good when you are my age,” Reggie replied haughtily.
The helmet viewport cleared just as Drexler reached the edge of the ship’s Boson field, about 400 meters out. He slowed himself with wrist thrusters, both fists facing the ship, and let the artificial gravity gently pull him in as he turned the soles of his boots to the splotchy, slate-gray hull. The gravity effect grew stronger as the distance closed.
Drexler landed on a slightly convex particle emitter panel just below the flight bridge. When he gained stable footing, he started a careful walk up the underside of the angled nose section. He reached the rounded leading edge of the bow and bent forward with his hands up.
The feeling of vertigo was intense as his body passed between gravity planes. For an odd moment, it felt as if he was standing on his feet and his head at the same time. Drexler pulled himself up to stand on the upward slope that was the blunted arrow shape of the tractor section bow. From there, he walked about another 30 meters to where the hull flattened. Drexler stood facing the Freighter’s stern. His eye followed the pattern of blue-black emitters spaced at even intervals along the 500-meter length of the ship’s ridged spine.
From this perspective, things didn’t look quite so bad. The hull was pocked, pitted and burnished with age by the action of stellar dust and gasses. The irregular lines where the hundreds of outer hull panels fit together were still reasonably tight. He did spot some areas of concern that generated entries in his mental notebook.
Fleetfoot Interstellar: Fleetfoot Interstellar Series, Book 1 Page 1
