Pandora’s Crew (StarWings Book 1)

by Gorg Huff

  “Who did you have in mind to send with us?” Captain Gold asked.

  Sylvia brought her mind back to the original topic. “You seem to get along with Janis fairly well.”

  Janis Tecumseh was an old friend of Sylvia’s and her father’s before her. Janis’ ship was a converted merchantman but the conversion was major, and there was no way the Warchief was going to survive inspection by any Spaceforce ship, Drake or Cordoba. It had thirty-two lasers in eight banks, and it carried fifteen hunter-nukes and a heavy load of round shot. It also had a set of sweep wings at the bow and stern, not that useful for speed but helpful in aiming roundshot and hunter-nukes. All that cut into its cargo capacity rather drastically, so the Warchief carried less than half the cargo of the Pandora. As well, it was a less capable warship than the Arachne had been when it was the Brass Ass. Oh, it was fine for chasing down a fat freighter and taking their cargo. Or part of their cargo.

  “Janis didn’t seem in any hurry to give up her life of crime,” Danny said, “and women get tired of me soon enough.” He shrugged.

  Sylvia lifted an eyebrow. “No good between the sheets, Captain?”

  “You’d have to judge that for yourself.”

  “I think I’ll pass.”

  Danny shrugged again, then got back to the subject. “What concerns me about the Warchief is that it’s likely to invite the sort of scrutiny that we don’t want.”

  “Janis is good at going quiet, and she knows all the back ways in the area around Ferguson.”

  “What about the formerly gray route between Drake and Cordoba space? Is there a way around it?”

  “I don’t know of one, but Janis might know a place to hide and watch until the guards are looking the other way.”

  “All right,” Danny agreed. He would have a talk with Janis about the chain of command. The thing that would probably surprise Janis was that Danny wasn’t angling for that command. He wanted Tanya—or at least the Arachne—running things. Tanya had real military training and he talked to Pan and Sally about the Arachne and how it was interfacing with Jenny. Danny trusted Jenny. He trusted the girl’s judgment and he’d seen her come up with good ideas several times, if not always as obviously as when the thought of the whole concept of the shield missile came to her. With the built-in knowledge of Arachne, Jenny would give good orders.

  Location: Arachne, Skull Outsystem

  Standard Date: 01 27 632

  Jenny/Arachne swam through space and the rest of her clan was with her, feeling the wings flex and the flow of the plasma. Startak and Starvokx were both sensing the input from the wings with the Parthian extra sense of “pathing.” Pathing was different, more textured, than Jenny would feel on her own. It allowed more of the awareness of the shape of what was there in the Arachne to reach Jenny, and it was letting them all feel things that they couldn’t have felt without it.

  “It’s like there are jumps everywhere. Hundreds of them, thousands of them. It’s just that they’re too little to use.”

  Fred’s sense of wonder came back to Jenny, as did Jay’s and Tiny’s, and the rest. They were all tied into the shipnet and feeling it. Their emotions fed back to Jenny as a wonder-tinged appreciation, with overtones of cynicism, as several of her crew wondered what use the information might be. “I don’t know yet, but I bet between me and Professor Schmitz, we can think of something.”

  Tanya’s “Back to work, people,” brought them back to their jobs. Even with Arachne and the drones it ran, there was a lot of work to running this ship, a lot more than there was on the Pandora. Jenny let Tanya hand out assignments and spent her time studying space.

  Arachne’s sensors weren’t all she had. The wings gave feedback. The ship had radar and lidar, as well as passive receivers all across the electromagnetic spectrum. There were sensor techs manning those as well, and along with the raw data and Arachne’s interpretation, she was also getting the sensor techs’ interpretations. It should have been utterly overwhelming. But that was what the artificial brain Arachne was ultimately designed for, to make available all that data without letting it overload Jenny.

  It was comfortable. Jenny saw, as if she were physically looking at it, the Warchief paralleling their course. Pan was still loading shieldgold back at Skull Station. She sent out a laser comm to the Warchief. It was another artificial brain ship, but its brain was smaller and more focused than Pandora’s. Jenny and Arachne traded data on the shape of space with the Warchief’s brain, and suddenly the Warchief was complaining loudly that Arachne must be seeing things. Chief had been through this space before, and even if that chunk of space looked like a possible jump to Arachne, it couldn’t be, because Warchief would have seen it.

  “Arachne, this is Janis Tecumseh. What have you been saying to my ship?”

  “It’s the combination of data, Captain,” Jenny shot back before Tanya could say anything. “Your Chief is very proud of her ability to find jumps, and justifiably so. But that can make it a bit hard for her to admit when someone else sees one that she missed.”

  “And just where is this jump located?”

  Again Jenny didn’t wait for Tanya’s permission, though she sent Tanya an apology and explanation even as she was sending the coordinates to Captain Tecumseh.

  “Sorry, kid, but there ain’t a jump there,” Janis reported. “We’ve been over that exact spot in the past and never a trace of a jump.” That was not literally true, since the whole galaxy was moving along with everything in it, but it was still true for any reasonable notion of practicality. On the other hand, Jenny knew what she had seen.

  “Tanya, take us through that jump,” Jenny sent.

  Then she looked across the bridge at the Arachne’s captain. Tanya looked first annoyed, then intrigued, as she examined the data. Then she started to smile. “It’s a small jump.”

  “We’ll decrease power to our wings,” Jenny sent back with a set of values and a graphic of the effect on the space.

  Suddenly the Arachne was shifting course, making a loop.

  The Warchief followed along, Janis complaining that they were wasting time and adding comments about letting kids run the show. Tanya was sending back, saying basically that it was Jenny’s ship. What Tanya wasn’t doing, Jenny noted with a giggle, was sending the Warchief the data on how you had to operate to make the jump. Mostly, jumps were much bigger than the ships that passed through them, even including the area of wings. The average jump was several times the total wingspan in every direction. The jump they were looping back to was only one hundred eighty kilometers across. To use it, the Arachne would have to underpower its wings just as it entered the jump and jump through quickly.

  Looping around to the jump took a bit over an hour. They hadn’t been going that fast.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Tanya felt the Arachne’s wings flapping more clearly than on any other ship, and she watched the approaching jump with all the avid interest of a cat watching a mouse hole.

  Closer. Closer.

  Now.

  They were through.

  It was a short jump. They were two light seconds to system anti-spinward from where they were. Tanya put a targeting laser on the Warchief and sent, “Tag, you’re it.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The Arachne disappeared and the Chief’s brain set up a howl. “They cheated.”

  “How’d they cheat, Warchief?” Janis asked.

  “They folded their wings.” On the Warchief’s main screen, a graphic of the Arachne’s wings was proceeding in slow motion. Flap, flap, no flap, then the wings—underpowered—flapping again, but reaching out only three-quarters of the distance they reached before.

  Then, out of nowhere, there was an alarm. A targeting laser pinged them, followed immediately by the words, “Tag, you’re it.”

  There, off their up port stern, was the Arachne.

  Janis felt a cold rush of fear as her mind reached out to what something like that might mean in a combat situation, assuming that Cordoba-Davis
knew about the jump and where it came out, and if they had been in a real fight. They were too far for a laser to damage them, but a load of sand or round shot . . . She wouldn’t have the timing. She would have been hit. She could have died.

  “Warchief, can you fold your wings?” There was almost no time. They were approaching the jump. “If you can, do it. People, give control of the wings to the Chief.”

  They hit the jump and Janis, even with her interface, couldn’t follow what happened. But they were through the jump, and following the Arachne again. Janis was just getting ready to send a scathing reply, but they got tagged by another targeting laser, one that had to have been sent before they even hit this space.

  “All sorts of opportunities, don’t you think, Captain?” Tanya Cordoba-Davis’ voice came over the speakers.

  “All sorts,” Janis agreed sourly.

  Chapter 34

  “Hit ‘em where they ain’t.”

  Nathan Bedford Forrest

  Location: Skull Fort, Cordoba Space

  Standard Date: 02 04 632

  Commander Aksel Swenson of the Cordoba Spaceforce watched the three ships exit the Skull jump—in formation. He was surprised because the Skull System pirates weren’t in the habit of showing off like that. It was the sort of crap that you would expect of a Spaceforce officer, and not most of those. Then the identifications came over. All three ships reported themselves as having stockholders aboard. In fact, all three ships reported themselves as being owned by stockholders. Even the frigging Warchief, which came through here three or four times a year, was suddenly claiming to be owned by a stockholder.

  For just a moment, Aksel was tempted to drag them all in.

  For just a moment.

  Aksel didn’t want to call attention to himself. He was here because he knew how to keep his mouth shut. And because he was already in so much trouble with the force that he couldn’t afford to do anything else. So he sat out here, half a light second from the Skull jump, and watched who came and went. He then reported to the Cordoba fort that was just over thirty light seconds away, next to the main jump point into Cordoba space.

  “Do you wish to speak to our Stockholder Rep?” Aksel asked.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,” said a voice with a slight upper-crust Yagan accent. “I am Grand Stockholder Tanya Cordoba-Davis, and I’m going to want to certify some stock transfers and arrange for some hand-carried documents to go to my family.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Tanya knew how she wanted to play this, and—after talking extensively with Professora Stuard, Goldgok, and the other Parthians, and sitting down with Jenny Starchild and the Arachne—she was convinced of the danger that the Cordoba Combine might collapse. She was less certain that the Drakes were in a similar situation, and that was what scared her. If the Cordobas collapsed and the Drakes didn’t, the Pamplona Sector would slip into totalitarianism. The semi-independent little fiefdoms of people like the Cordoba-Jacksons and her own family were a part of the problem.

  On the other hand, given the circumstances, she couldn’t do much about that from within the Cordoba Combine. So she needed allies. There were, according to Goldgok, nine billion Parthians in the Parthia System, which was a bit startling to Tanya. Even the Cordoba capital world of New Argentina had a population of less than two hundred million, and most systems in the Pamplona sector had populations measured in the hundreds of thousands or millions. The whole human population of the Pamplona Sector probably wasn’t more than twenty billion. So the Parthians were a potential counterbalance for both the Drakes and the Cordobas, and the Jackson-Cordoba efforts to contain them took on a much more sinister light.

  She wrote up her conclusions and the message was ready to send in a tightly encrypted package to her great aunt. Her problem was . . . she wasn’t at all sure how Great Aunt Angela would react.

  “If it’s hand-carried stuff, you probably want to handle it at the fort,” said the Cordoba skipper of the Ulysses, an old ship Tanya suspected was in less than apple pie order. “We’re going to be sitting out here sculling around for another month before we head back in where we can deliver any hand-carries.”

  “Good enough, Captain Swenson,” Tanya said. “What can you tell us about the situation around Parise?”

  “The system has changed hands three times since the initial attack. Right now we hold it, but the Drakes are only four jumps back, at the long jump.” He sent the coordinates for a jump along the Parise/Ferguson route.

  “You know a way around? We have cargo for Parthia.”

  “Not a short one. There is a route, but it goes through New Argentina and Delta.”

  “We know that one.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t be more help. Maybe they can help you at the fort,” Commander Swenson said, then added, “Not to be blunt, but Captain Tecumseh knows the drill. You either pay here or go through the jump at the fort and pay there. So if you’re going to the fort, I’ll be watching you all the way.”

  “We have been informed of the procedures.”

  Location: Cordoba Space, Fort at the Skull Jump

  Standard date: 02 05 632

  The fort was an asteroid that was brought in at considerable expense. It was heavily worked and two kilometers across. It rotated and maintained a set of wings that produced a shield for the background radiation of space, but also offered defense against attack.

  It would easily take a force of a dozen ships to give this place a good workout.

  The fort maintained a crew of three hundred and a civilian population of half again that number. There were two dispatch boats allocated to the fort, and Tanya used her status as a grand stockholder to commandeer one to send her messages to New Argentina, where the one to her family would catch the regular mails.

  Tanya also sent a message to the stockholder’s office of the Cordoba Combine, complaining about Admiral Chin’s restraint of the legitimate movement of Cordoba flagged merchants.

  Location: Cordoba Space, Parise Outsystem

  Standard date: 03 02 632

  It was a Cordoba picket ship that stopped them.

  Well, not stopped them.

  Asked politely.

  Tanya recognized the face, but there was a wan look about it, and lines around the eyes that hadn’t been there the last time she saw the woman. Now a captain, Katherine Allen Iminate had apparently gained her rank the hard way.

  Tanya was actually tempted to let Danny, or perhaps Janis, handle Captain Iminate, but she didn’t. “What’s the situation, Captain?” she asked over the comm, bringing her image live with a thought to Arachne.

  “You?” Iminate said. “I thought you were cashiered. I guess grand stockholders can buy their own navies.”

  “Not exactly cashiered. Thrown to the wolves, perhaps. But that’s not important now. Is there a situation we need to know about, Captain? We’d like to get on with our trading.”

  “A situation? You arrogant— Good people have been dying out here.”

  Tanya was trying to be sympathetic, she really was. But it wasn’t easy. “I am aware of that, Captain. Some of those people were in my command, ordered to sacrifice ourselves as a rearguard when Senior Captain Rodriguez finally decided to run, hours too late. The only reason any of my people are alive is because the Drakes thought we were dead. In any case, I am no longer in your chain of command and I am a grand stockholder. So I ask you again, what is the situation in and around Parise?”

  Again, as Tanya saw before, Katherine’s face went white and her freckles stood out like a star map. There was a pause, then apparently getting herself under control, Katherine explained. They had, with much fighting, retaken Parise, but the chain between Parise and Ferguson was still in dispute. Travel past Parise was at the merchant’s own risk. The report was clear and concise. Katherine Iminate had always been a smart and capable woman . . . when she wasn’t being ruled by her resentments.

  “How is it that you are in a Drake cutter, Grand Stockholder?”

>   “The Brass Hind mutinied from the Drakes and was awarded as recompense when her captain attempted to kill Jenny Starchild. Jenny is underage and hired me to command the ship.” Tanya didn’t mention where they were when that happened. It wasn’t Katherine’s business.

  Besides, the woman was a prig.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  They sold some of their shieldgold in Parise, where the navy would have willingly bought it all.

  In fact, the navy probably would have forced them to “sell” it all, if Tanya wasn’t a grand stockholder.

  Then they started on the route to Ferguson, but three jumps out from Parise, they switched to a side route Janis knew about. It wasn’t that far out of the way, only a few light hours from the standard route, but no one not knowing where to look would see them. Plus, it was actually shorter than the standard route. It only took them ten days to reach Ferguson, rather than the fourteen that the standard route took.

  Location: Cordoba Space, Ferguson Insystem

  Standard Date: 03 12 632

  Andri Jackson, captain of the human-owned Fortune Find, was in Ferguson for a short layover on her way to Layabout Station, a not-quite star system made up of a barely brown dwarf and its planets—or a not-quite brown dwarf and its moons, depending on how you looked at it. It was located on a side route to Hudson, and the main industry was the mining of green tar. Not like Alenbie, but they got some.

  She was a bit surprised to see Danny Gold show back up, and even more surprised to see him in company with two clearly armed ships. “What did they think of you lot when you hit the picket?” she asked. There was a Cordoba picket one jump out from Ferguson now, blocking the main jump to the Ferguson outsystem.