Pandora’s Crew (StarWings Book 1)

by Gorg Huff

  When he turned back to face Professora Rosita Stuard, she asked a question of her own. “How much do you know about our situation, Captain?”

  “That’s a little complicated. I know that the teaching assistants live in terror of you, and I know that your husband is in some trouble with the local politics at the moment. I even know that your son is an able spacer. But a lot of details are missing.”

  Danny wasn’t lying, not exactly. He was just not listing all the details he did have. He knew, not through Pan’s talk with Sally, but rather through Checkgok’s information gathering, that there was something going on with station surveillance that had something to do with Robert or Gerhard Schmitz, perhaps both. It was enough, combined with the other bits and pieces they had picked up from Robert and the girls on their visit yesterday, for Danny to realize that the Schmitz family—or at least part of it—might need a ride out of town in the near future. He wasn’t sure how badly they would need it, and there were commercial ships to be had. But if they were going that route, what would Rosita be doing here?

  Rosita sat quietly watching him as he thought about the situation. Now she spoke up. “A reasonable assessment, and I imagine you know a bit more about the situation, but not the vital bit. Therefore, I’m just going to tell you so we can work toward a relationship of trust.”

  Danny smiled. That was actually a very astute move. He was impressed. “Go ahead.”

  The boarding tube undocked and John powered up the thrusters as the professora spoke. “Yesterday, my husband managed to give the local authorities the key they needed to get rid of him. And shortly after, I was told about it.”

  “That fast?”

  “Yes and no. They had a good idea what was going on, but were lacking any evidence. At least, that was my impression. So they had their bargaining position all set. Ted was on my comm by the time my family reached your ship.”

  “And the outcome?”

  “Gerhard is going to have to leave the university and, preferably, the Danworth system. He doesn’t have to leave on your ship, and Robert and the girls don’t have to leave at all.”

  The ship’s boat cleared the docking bay and fell away from the station.

  “On the other hand, there’s not a lot of work for a big dark spacer in a system like Danworth,” Danny said. “I imagine the companies here want three degrees and two licenses just to pilot a ship’s boat.” Danny waved at the portals showing the crowded space around them.

  “It’s true that Robert hasn’t found much work, but he doesn’t want to leave the girls at home while he goes off.”

  Danny nodded. “Another reason why, say, a commercial liner, isn’t going to work for them. What about you? Are you going to stay here while your husband and son, not to mention your granddaughters, go off into the wide universe?”

  “That, Captain, is a large part of what I am trying to decide.” Rosita sighed. “I like my job, Captain, and I’m good at it. Professor Stew Pot might be the terror of the TAs, but not unless they need terrorizing. And language and its use are important parts of our culture.”

  Danny just waited.

  “At the same time, I love my husband—even if he is an idiotic jerk who can’t leave well enough alone and has to piss off the whole bloody system just to prove how smart he is.”

  Danny tilted his head. “He is, you know. Smart, I mean. And, in this case at least, he’s right. The ship’s boats that are made here now are less capable. So are the suit-bots and other things. The limits that you people are placing on technology are going to bite you on the ass when someone who doesn’t have those limitations comes calling.”

  “I know he’s right, but that’s probably hundreds of years away. The Drakes are even more anti-artificial than the Cordobas.”

  That was true. “The system governments?” Danny asked, mostly curious about her take on the matter.

  “No. Oh, it’s theoretically possible, but they don’t trust each other. Every one of them is convinced that the others simply want to take over the trade monopoly of the Drakes and the Cordobas, and they’re right.”

  “Sooner or later,” Danny offered.

  “Sure. But probably a lot later.” Then she waved the whole issue away. “It doesn’t matter, at least as far as we’re concerned. Tell me about your ship, Captain. What do you have to offer my family?”

  So they talked about the Pan and the contract with the Zheck Clan through Checkgok. The prices that were insane here in the Danworth system.

  “It’s because you have Checkgok doing your trading, Captain. Parthians and Catta aren’t a lot more popular than artificials here in stodgy old Danworth,” Rosita said.

  Danny felt his face go hard and was pleased by that. It was a sign of his humanity, something that Danny was none too sure of. “Checkgok is a member of our crew.”

  “He’s a Parthian, isn’t he? He will be willing enough to use a human front if it’s best for the clan.”

  Danny knew that was true, but still resented the necessity, even though he knew that Checkgok wouldn’t.

  The ship’s boat docked and they went aboard the Pan, at which point Danny left the professora to chat with Pan and Checkgok. He decided to take a little nap before getting back to work. He hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep last night and there was no great rush. Besides, he wanted to give Professora Rosita Stuard plenty of time to talk things out with Pandora and the crew.

  Danny was learning to trust his Parthian master of trade.

  And if Professora Stuard was unable to get along with John, Jenny, and Hirum, she wouldn’t be going with them, whatever she decided.

  Pandora, off Danworth Station Seven

  Standard Date: 06 23 630

  Robert and Gerhard sat down in Pandora’s lounge and Danny asked, “Who owns what? And while we’re at it, just how much of a factory do you have?”

  “I apparently own just about all of it,” Robert said, with a smirk at his father. “But Dad can probably tell you what I own.” Robert looked over at Gerhard, who was obviously not happy, and relented a little. “Well, Dad can probably tell you what we own.”

  “So, Professor, what do you have?”

  “Sally, would you send an inventory to the Pandora, please?”

  The inventory was sent and Pan passed it to Danny.

  Three Wilson-Clark III molecular printers, top quality, not the sort of stuff that kids had, or even the sort of repair equipment that Pan carried. They were the big ones, even if that didn’t make them big in an absolute sense. They had an internal workspace of less than a half meter cube, and the whole device was little more than two cubic meters. But that was monstrously large for a molecular printer. The largest molecular printer in the Pan had a print space of three by four by four centimeters. The size of the workspace determined the maximum possible computer core size, whether you were building an artificial brain or a standard processor. The Wilson-Clark IIIs were the biggest and fastest molecular printers available.

  There were also chem baths and interface constructors, the sort of thing that Danny knew were used to make the microscopic injectable components that could attach to one another to construct cybernetic interfaces while doing the least possible damage to the brains and nervous systems of people and animals.

  Danny looked at the listing and said, “Professor, I know just enough to know that I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

  “Okay, Captain.” Gerhard used his interface to throw images of the various devices up on the screen as he talked. “Even a standard child’s toy molecular printer can make an artificial brain. Assuming, of course, that you could program it adequately. Sally could, for instance, make the brain for a floor cleaner or dishwasher on little Geri’s molecular printer. On one of the larger ones, like you have on the Pandora, Sally could make a wing controller or—given enough time—the brain for a ship’s boat, or a farmbot . . . even a tailor bot, like the one you want me to repair. Though with your unit, it would probably take six months or so. With the Wil
son-Clark IIIs, we can work rather faster. The Wilson-Clark IIIs have ten thousand printheads to the five hundred that your devices have, or the fifteen that Geri’s toy has. To use those effectively, the Wilson-Clark IIIs have to have a fairly decent artificial brain of their own, which Sally is modified to manage.”

  Danny held up a hand.” What does that mean in terms of production, Professor?”

  “That’s hard to quantify, Captain. It’s not just the number of heads or the size of the work area, but the combination. And it depends on what sort of artificial brains you’re looking to build. A Wilson-Clark III can print several small brains at once, or a few mid-size brains, or a single large brain. It can print a single layer in about a day, but a single layer is only a micron or so thick and a single layered neural net, no matter how large, isn’t good for much. You have to have at least three layers to do much of anything, and what you want is hundreds of layers.” Gerhard stopped. “Well, Sally and I can design a ten-layer brain using the Wilson-Clark IIIs that would run a farm bot. I wouldn’t expect to produce a brain for a ship’s boat in less than twenty days or so. But with Sally coordinating, we can be making several at once.

  “However, it will still be cheaper to buy broken brains, analyze and repair them. To make a brain needs lots of layers. To repair one only takes a few layers. How many depends on the amount and placement of the damage. In part because of the structure of the neural networks, but mostly because of the materials, the artificial brains tend to be fragile crystalline structures. They can handle considerable compression, but not much in the way of fracturing force. To repair them, we either finish the break and build up a connecting structure and . . .”

  Danny held up a hand to halt what was starting to sound like the opening lecture for a graduate course in artificial brain repair. “Okay, Doc. Assume for a moment that you have no broken brains and you want to build brains for ship’s boats. How many could you build in a week using all the Wilson-Clark III molecular printers?”

  “None.” Gerhard was apparently not happy with Danny’s interruption.

  “Okay. How many in a month?

  “Twelve. Four in each Wilson-Clark III.” There was a short pause while Gerhard consulted with Sally. “Fourteen, if we were also using your ship’s printers.”

  The problem with the Wilson-Clark IIIs and Gerhard’s whole production facility was the same as the problem with a lot of the micro tech that was developed in the last three centuries: it didn’t lend itself well to the sort of mass production that was the norm in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A lot of one-offs were built, and by their nature one-offs were more expensive.

  Location: Office of the Chair of Linguistics

  Standard Date: 06 24 630

  Fredric Colampoore stood as his office door opened and he waved Rosita Stuard to a chair. Fredric didn’t personally dislike Rosita. Given other circumstances, he might even have been quite fond of her. Still, he was making plans to use her husband’s disgrace as another roadblock to her career. He was comfortable in his position and didn’t want to give it up.

  He was not overly surprised to learn that she wanted to talk to him, but he was surprised at the content of her conversation.

  She sat in the chair on the other side of his desk and said, “I’m prepared to let you buy me off, Fredric.”

  He sat as well. “Do I even need to bother?” He leaned back in his swivel chair. “After all, it looks like your whole family is about to flounder on the rocks of Gerhard’s arrogance.”

  Rosita smiled, and suddenly Fredric feared that he was the one in hot water.

  “I’m afraid that’s not quite true,” Rosita said. “I already talked to Gerhard. He’s going to take the university’s deal. And don’t forget that I have friends. Good friends. Besides, Tom’s grateful to avoid the whole scandal. He won’t thank you for pushing it into the open. So I stay here, a thorn in your side and a threat to your position . . . and pissed at you to boot. Or, we make a deal, I go away happy, and you don’t have to worry about me.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “I am about to take a sabbatical of indeterminate duration, to perform a survey of languages and accents in the Cordoba chains. I’ll be sending back my observations of the linguistic shifts and the effects of electronic data transfers on linguistic trends. It will take years. In fact, as long as it’s adequately funded, I probably won’t come back at all.” She smiled.

  Then they got down to brass tacks.

  Even after it was settled there were arrangements to be made. Meanwhile, Gerhard, Sally, Robert and the girls transferred to the Pandora, and the Pandora headed outsystem to buy used components. Robert took on the job of being the local face for Checkgok, and Gerhard started examining the artificials in the outsystem.

  Location: Danworth Asteroid Belt

  Standard Date: 06 29 630

  Robert sailed along in his suit and chatted with the woman who owned this particular part of the rock.

  “They’re cherry,” she assured him.

  The asteroid was seven hundred meters across on its long axis and about three hundred on the short. It was not so much hollow as swiss-cheesed. There were sealed mine shafts all through the sucker that had been converted into living quarters and storage space. A few living quarters, and a lot of storage space.

  “That’s good to hear, ma’am,” Robert said politely. “The Pan lost a ship’s boat a few months back in an accident, so it’s down to one and some spare parts.” Actually the Pan was down to one, period, at least in terms of such things as engines, rocket nozzles, and tankage. Also boat brains.

  They floated round a bend and there were rows upon rows of ships’ boats, shuttles, rocket engines, fuel tanks, and myriad other items. These were the parts for shuttles and insystem ships not big enough to support the wings and fusion plants that ships traveling the big dark needed.

  Robert pulled out his scanners and got to work.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  On board the Pan, Gerhard was tied into Sally and the micromanipulators as they worked on the suit-bot. There was extensive damage to the feedback circuits in the muscular section, and Sally, under Gerhard’s direction, was rebuilding part of the artificial brain, connection by connection. It was his fourth day working on the bot’s brain and he estimated at least another week would be necessary. He felt Sally nudge him with a request for a decision on where to place a neuron and how to weight it. He gave her a general guideline and went back to his structure analysis. The suit-bot wasn’t going to be quite the same. They were going to have to add some extra layers of interpretive circuits to make the parts physically fit together.

  Gerhard felt that it would probably give the bot a slightly more deft touch in the making of suit musculature. At least, that’s what he hoped. Either that, or the bot would have a nervous breakdown.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Danny, in his skinsuit and with a backpack tool kit, cycled the mid C lock and stepped out onto the hull. With the Pan underway, it was like standing on a narrow ledge looking down on infinity, with the wing’s auroras streaking red gold and green streamers all around him. Danny loved it. He moved over to the Mid C mast, reached behind him, and pulled out a sixteen mil wrench. He started to unbolt a cover plate as he spoke, “So, Pan, what do you think?”

  “I think this space walk is unnecessary, especially since we are underway. A drone could have made this check.”

  “No. I mean about the crew,” Danny clarified as he pulled the cover plate free and set it on the ledge. The wrench, still holding the bolt, retracted to his backpack.

  “Gerhard is working on the suit bot’s brain,” Pan said. The brain was a solid chunk of circuitry about the size of a pea. “Robert is doing a good job acting as Checkgok’s human face. He seems to know how to talk to belters. His daughters are still quite excited by shipboard life and the eldest of them seems intent on imitating Jenny. Jenny is doing well with all three girls.”

  Danny nodded and grunt
ed as a hydraulics valve insisted that it was happy with its present setting and unwilling to change. “No. I mean, do you think we can make this work over the long haul?” He tried twisting the valve the other way with no better luck. The valve was stuck and intended to stay stuck.

  “That depends. What do you have in mind?”

  He reached over his right shoulder and pulled a comealong from the toolpack. He stepped back so that his right heel was just over the edge of the ledge, placed the comealong into the opening, and set the connector over the valve.

  Danny considered both the readout and Pan’s question. He reached into the backpack for a replacement valve. “For now, we put the doc to work repairing damaged brains as we travel, then sell the repaired brains as we get farther away from the ‘civilized’ chains. Out where people will see that they need artificials. We make our way to Parthia and get Checkgok home. That should give us enough to pay off, or at least pay down, the loan. What I’m asking is, do you think the personalities will be able to work together well?”

  “What are you doing, Captain?” Pan asked. “We can’t cut the feed to that valve while underway.”

  “I know, Pan, but I’m gonna do it the messy way.”

  Pan gave an audible sigh, then continued. “Hirum has been well-behaved so far, but in the long run his prejudices may become a problem. John will do fine, as long as there is Jenny to look after. She keeps him stable by needing him.”

  “What about Checkgok?” Danny shifted the comealong to unscrew the bleed valve rather than open it. Using one foot, he shifted the cover plate farther along the ledge and then moved so that he would be out of the way of the spray.

  “In one sense,” Pan continued, “Checkgok is the easiest. It is bred to be a part of a group. Yes, it’s alien and some of the crew, Hirum and Robert, might have some issues with that, but working with it seems to be wearing away Robert’s discomfort.”

  The comealong shifted. Danny used it to unscrew the bleed-off valve and the mixture of oil and alcohol sprayed out into the opening, splattering everywhere. He tossed the old valve up and out to be captured by the wings and, one hand holding the opening, used the other to screw the new valve in. “What about the professora?”