Pandora’s Crew (StarWings Book 1)

by Gorg Huff

  Danny Gold grinned that grin of his at her. “Why, they were very polite, Skipper. In fact, as soon as they stopped messing their drawers and we told them we were all Cordoba stockholders, they told us the news and asked for the news of Parise. I think when we showed up they were hoping the route to Parise was clear again.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No. We took a side path.”

  “We’re gonna have to play rutter tag real soon now, Captain Gold. Real soon.”

  “Funny thing. That’s just what the commander of the picket wanted to do.”

  Andri looked at the handsome, young-looking Cybrant and considered. She knew the stories of what the Pandora did to the Bonaventure, though no one knew how she did it. For that matter, she knew that the Bonny had a hunter-nuke. Cousin Janet told her about it one time when she was drunk. Now here he was—with a real warship, even if it was a little one—and with the Warchief. Andri knew the Warchief by reputation and didn’t want any closer acquaintance, so her first impulse was to keep quiet about the new fort on the way into Canova. But it wouldn’t do any good. The news was all over Ferguson. “Captain, the JCTC has declared you persona non grata in the Canova system.”

  “I don’t think they are allowed to do that, Captain. Especially not now that I’m a Cordoba stockholder.”

  “It may not be completely legal, Captain Gold, but they have a fort guarding the entrance.”

  “Not completely legal? It’s not legal at all, Andri.”

  “The fort is legally owned by the government of Canova, Danny.” Andri held up her hand as it looked like Danny was going to interrupt again. “They are using the Drake incursion as an excuse, and they are insisting that you, as a Cybrant, are a Drake sympathizer. It’s enough to keep the Cordobas from doing anything about it, especially when they are busy fighting the Drakes up around Parise. I’m just telling you, Danny, you ain’t getting through. I don’t know what you did to the Bonny and, knowing Farris like I did, it was probably deserved. But between that and what the Fly Catcher has been doing in Parthia, you’re not the favorite person of anyone in the front offices of the JCTC.”

  “What about the Fly Catcher?” Danny asked, distracted.

  “Don’t play with me, Danny. The frigging Fly Catcher has been going out to that mine you have somewhere in Parthia System, shipping in load after load of refined metals and liquid hydrogen.

  “At least, it was. The JCTC has an armed merchantman sitting on the Fly Catcher until the council of clans tells them where the jump route is.”

  “What are those cheskek doing involved with our clan’s mines?” Goldgok asked.

  “Now, Goldgok, they have a ship. I bet Clan Zheck was getting pretty desperate for funds,” Danny said. “What surprises me is that the mine bots worked so well. Shiploads?”

  “Well, one shipload,” Andri said. “We just assumed there were more.”

  “Honestly, I doubt it. Not that there couldn’t be. The rock we dropped the sucker on was two hundred kilometers by three hundred kilometers, coated in hydrogen, but with a core of iron and rare earths. The mining factory we set up could only do so much, and we’ve only been gone nine months.”

  There was an urgent message on the shipnet from Professor Schmitz. “We need to get to Parthia as quickly as possible.”

  “What’s up, Doc?”

  “Sally wanted a self-replicating function in the mine bots. We put major governors on it, but if the miner found the right elements, it might have replicated itself.”

  “You’re saying there could be an army of those mining bots out there?”

  “Maybe. There shouldn’t be, but the most likely situation for an artificial brain to go feral is if it’s operating on its own.”

  “Later, Doc,” Danny sent and went back to talking with Andri. “Okay, Andri. I know it’s not your fault, but I am a Parthian clan and, comes down to it, so is Jenny.”

  “Jenny? You mean the ship’s girl you had with you last time?”

  “Yep, Skipper. She owns the Arachne. She has Tanya Cordoba-Davis, late of the Cordoba Spaceforce, as her captain, but Jenny is owner aboard. And I gave her a couple of Parthians to start her clan. The JCTC may not want me, but they have to let Jenny through.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “This isn’t going anywhere, Andri,” Danny said. “I’ll give you a call next time I’m through Ferguson if you’re here.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  As Pandora, Arachne, and Warchief made their way back out from Ferguson, they discussed tactics and—hesitantly—Janis mentioned that there was a backdoor into the Canova System. The cul de sac that was one jump out from the main Canova jump wasn’t actually a cul de sac. There was a jump at an acute angle from the exit, and it had a short chain that took it to another part of the Canova outsystem. “It’s a good place to sit and watch the traffic to spot targets.”

  Lasers between the three ships sent packets of information as they moved from jump to jump. The ships together, flying in formation with Arachne in the lead and Pan and Warchief flanking her, gave them a combined coverage of almost two thousand kilometers and a mapping range of almost a light second. It was a trick they could only do with Arachne in the mix, and it picked up at least five potential new jumps on the trip from Ferguson to Canova.

  Location: Cordoba Space, One Jump out from Canova Outsystem

  Standard Date: 03 18 632

  They came out of jump and could see the fort clearly. It was a big sucker. A rotating two-headed sledgehammer, big enough so that the heads had a standard gravity from spin.

  It also had specialized wings. Most ship’s wings were designed to produce thrust. They were optimized to move plasma and space dust, but it was possible to optimize wings for moving heavier loads by making the wings narrower and focusing the magnetic fields more tightly. These were nuclear-powered catapults and they could throw missiles like hunter-nukes at nearly twice the velocity of a ship’s wings. Round shot also went faster, though not twice as fast. And because the forts could see a ship coming, they could blow it out of space mostly before it got into its own firing range.

  The drawback was that these sorts of wings were expensive. They cost twice what a warship wing of similar size cost, and the forts were generally as large as the largest warships.

  “It’s amazing,” Tanya said. “That must have taken their profit margin for a year.”

  “And, according to Andri, there’s another one in Parthia System,” Danny said.

  “The Parthian trade must be worth even more than I thought,” Tanya said.

  “We shouldn’t be surprised,” Eddy said. “Franklin has a population of less than a hundred million, and controlling the import and export trade from Franklin would make a great house-sized fortune.” He called up Tanya’s image from the bridge of the Arachne and spoke directly to her. “If they were getting this sort of profit out of Parthia, they probably simply bought your great aunt.”

  Tanya’s return look wasn’t happy, but she nodded.

  “Okay, folks,” Danny said, “we’ve gawked at the locals long enough. Let’s head for the side route.”

  They shifted their course and proceeded to the unguarded jump in plain sight of the fortress thirty light seconds away. At this range lasers were no good for anything but communications, and any shot—missile or round shot—would be immediately obvious and easy to avoid.

  It took them seven hours to make the transit, with the fort yammering at them the whole time. But they never answered.

  Location: Big Dark, Janis’ route, approaching Canova Jump

  Standard Date: 03 20 632

  Jenny felt the wings and the delayed reports of Pandora and Warchief’s wings. She was getting a feel for space and finally understood why Danny loved hunting jumps so much. It felt much the same as a hawk must feel riding the air currents looking for game, or a surfer in the curl of a wave. You could leave yourself behind and just be in the moment.

  Yet, as much as she enjoyed it, it didn�
��t consume her the way it did Danny. She was too interested in other things. In the design of artificial brains, and the analysis of culture, in the workaday jobs of Startak or Fred. No one thing called to her the way they called to other people, and she wondered what she was going to do with her life.

  Still, it was beautiful out here and there were those little jumps she kept spotting. Jenny turned her attention back to the upcoming jump. At Tanya’s insistence, they were jumping in formation. They moved up, and with the help of Arachne, they were even flapping in sync. Then they were through, in the Canova outsystem, a quarter of the way around the orbital plane from the standard Ferguson route.

  Location: Canova Outsystem

  Standard Date: 03 20 632

  Once they were through, they went dark and listened. The Canova government had a Gentry class courier boat at the fort. It was all wings and fusion plant, and it reported their trip across to the so-called cul de sac. The Canova sent a ship to follow them, and it wasn’t back yet. At this point the whole system was wondering whether Danny Gold blew up another ship.

  Tanya was feeling almost insulted that these idiots didn’t realize that the Arachne was a real warship, and if anyone was going to be exploding spaceships, it would be her. Jenny grinned at that. She liked Tanya’s attitude and liked that it was shared by most of the crew.

  “Well, they don’t seem to have noticed us,” Tanya sent over the fleetnet.

  “I didn’t think they would,” Janis sent in return. “But we probably ought to keep emissions low. No plasma. We should make a slow sweep.” She sent a graphic that had them accelerating at a tenth of a standard gravity and slowly shifting their course to another jump. “This will put us in the standard traffic lanes for the system, but I don’t think we’re going to be able to get out of Canova without being spotted.”

  “As long as we’re ahead of them, I don’t really care,” Tanya sent back.

  “If the fort is where it’s supposed to be and the shield missiles act as advertised, it’s going to be like shooting fish in a barrel.” Janis Tecumseh’s thought carried overtones of satisfaction.

  Location: Canova Insystem, System Control

  “They got around us!” Debra Massingale reported. She was the duty scan tech on the scope that was directed at the Parthian jump chain. She had just seen a very dim fluctuation in her screen and called up the raw data. The fluctuation was way too small to make out details with the naked eye, but the augmentation programs showed it. Debra was a skilled tech, and to her eyes the fluctuations in the light indicated three ships. They were not venting plasma at all, so all their thrust was from the ambient system dust and zero-point energy. But even that produced a dim aurora that fit the profiles of the Pandora, Arachne and Warchief. They also fit the profiles of any number of other ships, but Debra was sure.

  The word went out from System Control and general panic ensued. Just at the moment, Canova System had eight merchantmen and two construction ships. The two construction ships were owned by the Cordoba-Davis family, and had been leased at great expense to build the two forts they already had and one more on the third main route into Canova System. There hadn’t been any rush on that last one, and it was still in the early stages of construction.

  Suddenly the merchantmen captains were finding reasons to be elsewhere, and the government of Canova was having harsh words with the JCTC.

  Location: Canova Outsystem

  Standard Date: 03 21 632

  The last normal space leg in the Canova outsystem took seventeen hours. Just as Arachne and the others were getting close to it, they got a series of orders from the Canova System Defense Force. Not that the CSDF was near enough to have any hope of enforcing the orders. The orders originated at Canova System Control, and had been traveling in the form of a pulsed laser for over four hours.

  “Ships Pandora, Arachne and Warchief are ordered to stand to for inspection, and are hereby informed that a state of armed conflict does exist between Canova System and Parthia System. Further, until the discussions with the council of clans have reached a successful conclusion, Parthia System is under blockade. You are denied transit right, by order of the Canova System government.”

  Tanya looked around and sent over the ship and fleetnets, “Are they nuts? They just gave us a cause bellum on a silver platter.”

  There was a pause. Then the professora’s voice came back over the net. “Humanocentric thinking. That’s got to be it. Danny is human. So are Jenny and Janis. All ships owned by humans, and while Danny may be legally a Parthian clan, he’s still human. And Jenny hasn’t been recognized by the council of clans.”

  “I think it may be more basic than that,” Danny sent. “I think they just panicked. They had this carefully prepared legal argument for why what they were doing was justified. When they saw us over here, they realized that they couldn’t physically stop us, so they just used the canned argument.”

  “Frankly,” Janis sent, “I don’t give a crap. We were going to trash the fort in Parthia the moment we came out of jump, anyway. This just makes it legal.”

  “It was already legal,” Tanya sent, and she sounded officious even to herself.

  Location: Parthia Outsystem

  Standard Date: 03 22 632

  Three ships emerged from the jump in formation with their lasers already pointed in almost the right direction. The corrections and coordination took only microseconds, then they fired every laser they could bring to bear. The massed lasers of the Arachne and the Warchief blinded the fort almost before it got a glimpse of the attacking force.

  Then they launched the birds, two from each ship, a total of six, in a staggered launch pattern. Three, then three more. After that, they kept up the lasers, as you might shine a flashlight at an opponent in a knife fight in a darkened room.

  Anything to make the other guy blink.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  On the fort, the crew was looking the other way . . . and not looking very hard. There were four ships in Parthia System, and the Jackson-Cordoba family owned—or at least controlled—three of them. The fourth ship was the Fly Catcher, and it was in orbit around the planet.

  The first warning the fort crew had was an emergency signal, followed a few microseconds later by the lasers that burned out most of their sensors. After that was a short delay as backups came online. Then they were looking at three ships, and their computers were telling them that the ships threw something while they were blinded, but they didn’t know what, or what vector it was on. It took them a second to respond and one of the crew managed to order the launch of a hunter-nuke.

  Order it.

  It took the fort three seconds to physically launch the ready hunter, and it took the Alert Fire Control Officer two seconds to decide. . . .

  And it was too late.

  The hunter exited the tube, but wasn’t at the wing. The first of the wings was moving to reach it as three shield missiles with their superconducting cables half unfurled reached the location where the fort’s wings were coming on line. As had happened before, the superconducting cable conducted, and the electromagnetic energy of two fusion-powered magnetic fields interacted in conflict.

  The wings of a fort are very powerful and more focused than the wings on a ship. They are optimized for heavy masses and the energy density is higher. One of the wings blew.

  And that was all it took. The rest of the shield missiles went through an expanding ball of plasma that moments before had been a five-billion-credit fort with a crew of one hundred fifty-seven people.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “Damn,” Danny muttered. “I was hoping to capture the fort.”

  “We all were,” Tanya sent back over the fleetnet. “But someone over there was on the ball.”

  Jenny was shocked and upset by the deaths. But she also remembered her family and the end of the space station she lived on until she was eight. At least these were soldiers, paid to take the risk. Her parents were civilians. There was a hardness in Jenny that h
ad grown up since that day. It wasn’t that she didn’t care, but she could weigh and balance things. “What’s the situation in the system?” she asked.

  There was light from the insystem, but they didn’t know where to look for ships, so it took some minutes to find out what was going on. By that time, they were heading for the first of the jumps that would take them insystem.

  Location: Parthia, Council of Clans

  Standard Date: 03 22 632

  Conrad Cordoba-Jackson was actually in the great hall of the Council of Clans when the news of the destruction of the fort reached Parthia. Zhecktoss was droning on about the importance of independent polities to the Cordoba Combine and trying to get the council to reject Conrad’s latest offer. It wasn’t going to work. Conrad had the votes on the council. They weren’t exactly willing, but enough of the Parthian economy was dependent on foreign trade that he could destroy dozens of prominent clans if the council didn’t take his deal.

  There was a disturbance at one of the doors. A messenger.

  Conrad accessed his data link and got word from the Bonafortuna in orbit. Someone blew the fort. It had happened just over eight hours ago, and the light just reached the planet. He tried for further information and got that there were three ships, a medium small freighter, no, two medium small freighters, and a patrol boat.

  The messenger reached Zhecktoss, who listened for a moment, then turned to the dais where the council speaker was resting on a Parthian couch. “I have just received word that the fort the Canova government illegally placed in our space has blown up. I would call on the council to recess for a day while we determine what has happened.”

  Other messengers were entering the chamber and one of them was heading for the speaker’s couch.

  Conrad’s interface called him back. It was the Bonafortuna, sending, “It’s the Pandora and two other ships. They sent a signal to someone here on the planet. Probably the Zheck or the Kiig. It’s in the same code that Gold and his crew used while they were here.”

  “Can you crack it?”

  “No, sir. It’s a book code and we don’t have the book. But we can recognize it.”