Home: Interstellar: Merchant Princess

by Strong, Ray

  Twenty-one days and I don’t have a clue, she thought and played with the sim-chip on her necklace. “It’s all here,” her mother had said ten years ago. But it wasn’t all there. The files were unreadable after the police returned the chip to her. She rubbed the medal, a symbol of the Church of Jesus Christ Spaceman, between her fingers. Is this what she meant? Have faith? No. Esther believed, but Meriel was sure she meant the sim-chip. They would have to try again.

  Meriel thumbed a text to her only nonspacer friend, a hacker named Nickolai Zanek on Enterprise.

  To nz:

  Panic. I need your help. I’ve got twenty-one days to prove the Princess was not a drug boat, or we lose her. Forever. We need to bang on the sim-chip again. There has to be something there. See you on Enterprise.

  Love, M

  It would be a week before she could see him. What could she do until then?

  She scanned the schedules for the other kids. Tommy Spurell’s ship, the Jennifer Edwards, would dock at Enterprise about the same time as the Tiger would. He was twenty now and stable as a rock. She texted him.

  Let’s touch base on Enterprise. M.

  What else? she thought. There’s gotta be something we’ve missed all this time.

  The police filed the case as “unexplained,” but that left everyone with only the wrong explanation—that their cargo was contraband, and contraband meant drugs. Meriel knew it could not be true, but the slander would stick if she just walked away.

  OK, then. Space is huge. How could pirates have found the Princess in deep space? Aunt Teddy might know, but she’s not here. How about a navy guy?

  Meriel pulled up the display on the cargo loader and keyed in a search of the crew and, specifically, marine qualifications. Let’s see, she thought, marine-2, another two, a six. Meriel whistled aloud. Wow, a marine-6 as chief of security. Sergeant Major of the Marines, Charles Cook. That’s fleet class. How’d this little ship get somebody that good? She left to visit the security office and find Sergeant Cook. Instead, she found a note that said, “At the gym.”

  ***

  The Tiger’s gym was unusual because it had open mats and did not smell like stale sweat. Meriel found a big man with short blond hair demolishing a training droid. Faster than his bulk, she thought and went to the mats and stretched.

  She began her kata on the mats almost as a meditation, a ritual she’d started as physical therapy for her wounds. Her movements were smooth, except for the strike at the end of each position. The big man stopped to watch her during her second iteration, and on the ninth position, he intervened.

  “May I?” he asked. Meriel stopped and nodded, skeptical that he might have useful coaching. “Your rear knee should be bent, not stiff, and your heel off the mat when you begin your strike.” He leaned over and touched the outside edge of his hand to the inside of her knee to flex it.

  Meriel smiled. “And you are?”

  “They call me Cookie. You’re marine qualified?”

  “Yes, sir. Name’s Meriel Hope.”

  Cookie raised his eyebrows at her show of respect. “Oh yeah, new cargo chief. Marine-three, huh? Weapons?”

  “Blasters, pulse rifles, nothing heavy.”

  “Combat?” he asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “S’OK. Shooting for marine-four?”

  Meriel shook her head. “Not yet. I want to get better where I am.”

  “OK, good. Then you do your kata, and I’ll oppose you.”

  “I’ve never done that before,” she said.

  “Yeah, that’s what happens when you train by holo,” he said and put an instrumentation cuff on his forearm. “Now, repeat position nine beginning from eight.”

  Meriel lined up in position eight and rotated both feet for a downward strike with the blade of her hand. Cookie stepped back and blocked with his forearm raised and left hand poised for a punch, but he did not strike. Meriel struck his padded forearm.

  “Hold that position,” he said and moved to her side. “See, if your heel is down before you begin your strike, the power comes from your muscles. That’s weak. We want the power from your center.” He slapped his tummy with his palm. “Drop the heel with your center and then strike simultaneously. Like this.” He demonstrated the strike and drop. “Now you.”

  Meriel repeated the move. He frowned and tapped her forehead with his index finger. “Get out of your head. Your body knows the pattern. See from your center, not your eyes,” he said and patted his tummy again.

  Meriel repeated the move until Cookie nodded. She felt as if her whole body had struck his forearm. He raised the instrumentation cuff to show her the readout. “See. Twice the impact force.”

  Meriel raised her eyebrows.

  “OK, next position,” he said, and Meriel pivoted.

  “Stop,” he said. “Good. Pivot is fine, but just before the end, your rear foot is planted, and your body turns from the hips in a motion to strike, like a coiled spring.”

  Again, Meriel repeated the moves while Cookie opposed her, and they finished her kata.

  “OK, now from the start and speed it up. Don’t think,” he said.

  Now her kata looked like a fight, each strike opposed by a block, each block followed by another strike. Cookie was huge but moved like a lion. At the end, they were both sweaty, and welts rose on Meriel’s forearms and shins.

  “Don’t take the impact of my blows,” Cookie said as he toweled the sweat from his forehead. “Sure, it’s a kata, but I outweigh you two to one in muscle. Divert my blows, and don’t try to absorb the impact. Blend until you can strike. Improvise.”

  Meriel nodded.

  They bowed to each other and went into the showers.

  “Say, you’re marine-three,” he said over the shower partition. “You passed zero-g defense, right? Gymnastics and center of gravity?”

  “Yes.”

  “That makes you an optional for my security team,” he said. “You OK with that? It’ll bump your pay a grade.”

  “Sure.”

  “OK, let’s call that your interview.”

  “Who’s on the team?”

  “There’s Suzanne Soquette in comm, Nobu Draeger in the galley, and Lev Tyler, who works for you in cargo. Lev is my number two. Staff Sergeant Tyler, actually. Good man. Your marine-three cert will make you a squad leader like Socket. The captain’s marine-two rated, but I don’t count him. I’ll let you know when we meet.”

  “Sure,” Meriel said. “Say, do they teach you how to attack ships in space?”

  “Uh, yeah. Hull breach, hand-to-hand weightless, EMP weapons. It’s history mostly, not practice. Why?”

  “How about defense in open space?”

  “No,” he said. “They always tell us that surprise is unlikely, even impossible without betrayal.”

  “How so?” she asked and finished her shower to listen.

  “Well, if you are smaller than a moon, it’s too hard to find you in open space unless your attacker knows right where you’re going to be,” he said and left his shower. “If your attacker is waiting for you, you can see him before he sees you.”

  “How does that work?” Meriel asked.

  “Well, if you want a better explanation, you need to ask a pilot about coordinating in space and how hard it is. It’s just easier to find relatively fixed targets like stations. Nothing like sublight in atmosphere. Jerri will know, and Smith would too.”

  Meriel nodded slowly, going over the implications. “What about smugglers? If it’s so hard to locate each other, why even try a drug drop in space?”

  “Expense and time aren’t issues when it’s illegal or when secrecy is paramount,” he said.

  Drugs again. This doesn’t help. She finished dressing and saw John’s text calling her bet. Then she met Cookie in the passageway.

  “Just let me know when you want to do this again,” he said. “You can usually find me in the gym or the galley. I can qualify you to marine-four, if that’s your goal.”

&nbs
p; Meriel nodded again. “Eventually, sir. Thank you.” She smiled, grateful for her good luck, and turned to leave.

  “Hey, I don’t mean to pry, but is this about the Princess?”

  Meriel looked at him silently. She did not talk about the Princess, because the first thing people usually said was “sorry” or “poor girl” or “oh my God!” The last thing she wanted was pity.

  “Don’t misunderstand, Chief,” he said. “I got nothing against you. I’m head of security. I read the files. If you qualified marine-three and logistics-five, you’re good on my team.”

  “Appreciate it. Just not ready to talk about it yet.”

  Cookie nodded. “No problem. I’m off to the galley. Where you headed?”

  “The mess to study. I have a nav-three test coming up.

  “Isn’t it noisy there?”

  “Sure, but studying gets lonely, especially since that’s all I do when I’m off duty.”

  They walked together to the mess hall, and Meriel sat down at a table. Cookie brought her coffee.

  “I’ll bet Smith can help you with nav,” Cookie said with a glint in his eye.

  “Uh-huh,” Meriel said with a look that said, “Mind your own business.”

  “Hey, just saying,” Cookie said and went back to the galley.

  Meriel used her link to cast a holo of her test prep but could not concentrate. She was preoccupied by the threat of losing the Princess to the station lawyers and her helplessness to stop it. Calm down. Jeremy will have an idea.

  The five-minute claxon interrupted Meriel, and she returned to her cabin to prepare for the jump. There she drank the nutrients, took the tranq without boost, and had another nightmare.

  Chapter 3 Lander Station, Lalande 21185 System

  Lander Station—Inbound

  The Tiger dropped out of jump at the edge of the Lalande system and made a few short jumps to synch its velocity to that of Lander Station. Lander was the interstellar hub for the system and another transshipment logistics center. It was also the financial center for the sector and had the highest concentration of wealth outside of Earth and Sirius.

  There would still be a few hours of one-g deceleration until the pilot ships and tugs met them near Lander, so Meriel returned to her cabin after checking the cargo. Her lawyer said he’d be on the station, so Meriel thumbed a text to him.

  Will be on Lander by 2300. Where should we meet? M

  Then another to John.

  I owe you a scotch. M

  To which she received an immediate reply.

  Ack. On duty. Will collect at TarnGirl.

  Meriel knew the place, a spacer bar in Lander’s blue-zone docks, just around the rim. Her thoughts drifted to John standing at the window gazing at the nebula. Like a tree rooted to the deck, she thought, looking up at the stars. She shook her head. No time for that now.

  She pulled up her personal log and added a new category, attacks in open space, and included what she had learned from Cookie. In her calendar, she added a reminder to talk to John or Jerri about coordinating in space.

  Nav, she thought and fiddled with the sim-chip on her necklace, the chip with the jump program that had rescued them a decade ago. She took off her necklace and plugged the sim-chip into her link. So what was it that Mom wanted me to know?

  She opened the research on Home and scrolled to a holo file. It was unreadable, like all of the other files on the sim-chip, but she knew from the file name what it was—the single thing that said that her mom was right about Home, the most sought-after real estate for everyone who didn’t already live on Earth.

  She cued up a copy from a conspiracy site that had the same name as her mother’s file: “Interview with J. Mouldersen.” The vid was a low-res, fuzzy version of a hologram squeezed onto 2-D, maybe shot using a personal link held in an unsteady hand while autofocus struggled to find the right subject—or by a holographer trying to hide. A forest of white jackets filled the foreground beyond which two men and a woman sat at a table looking haggard, or maybe tipsy, but smiling. Meriel could not make out any insignia of affiliation.

  The woman behind the table stood. “Ladies and gentlemen, I have the most wonderful news,” she said. “A few years ago, one of our remote survey probes returned and found what we’ve all been searching for. The data looked crazy until we found a key. We discovered something wonderful that—”

  A woman’s voice interrupted the speaker. “Cut the hyperbole, Jeannine. What did you find?”

  “An earthlike object that—”

  Loud grumblings interrupted Jeannine again. The conversation was almost inaudible and sounded like they were speaking inside a tin can with their mouths full of bread.

  “We’ve found lots of earthlike objects but not like enough to be livable,” said another voice.

  Livability was the issue. People existed on lots of habitable bodies in space, but habitable referred to what humans could survive. The best were domed structures like Mars and Moon-1, that had enough wealth and energy to provide continual artificial gravity. The worst were low-g communes or overcrowded arcologies. These were hellholes that stretched the limits of what could be called human life.

  Jeannine continued. “It’s really earthlike—liquid water, [incomprehensible static] high oxygen atmosphere, close to one-g, temperate—” she said, her voice disappearing in loud mumblings.

  “It’s bad data, Jeannine,” said a new voice. “This is a scam or faulty instrumentation. The probe should have come back with the others decades ago.”

  “Yeah, how did it get lost?” someone asked.

  “Apparently, there’s lots of EM noise and dust nearby,” Jeannine said, “and the probe got confused. It took the AI algorithm a while to figure out where it was in order to get back home. Clever thing used spectra in the Magellanic cloud to orient itself.”

  “Did some real-estate speculator sign you up for this?”

  “No, no, really. Have an independent lab review the data,” she said, and others at the table nodded.

  Meriel heard scuffling on the vid, and the image spun and looked up—as though the camera had been dropped under a chair—as black boots and tailored cuffs walked past the link.

  “Meeting over. Stop recording,” a man’s garbled voice said. After a few unintelligible sounds, the vid cut off, either due to a dead battery or a judgment that the rest was just noise.

  After her mother’s death, this clip, and the hope it represented, gave Meriel something to hold onto and sustained her with the dream of a home for the orphans. She and Elizabeth dreamed about Home and researched it obsessively. Even after the troopers put all the orphans into protective custody and fostered them out on different ships, Meriel and Elizabeth searched the archives for different versions of this video clip that might give them additional clues.

  But before that first year ran out, the dream was gone. When Meriel was just thirteen, too young to protest, they gave her a psych evaluation and put her on meds to control her nightmares. The meds numbed her emotions, and she stopped caring about pretty much everybody and everything and hid herself in her work. She never told Elizabeth she had lost faith in Home, and she excused her apathy by calling the vid an amateur production, a teaser for a screenplay. By then it was too late; the social workers contracted Meriel out to another ship to split her from her sister, and Meriel drifted away.

  So what can I do now? she thought, playing with the sim-chip. In less than twenty days, the Princess will be gone and this will only be a dongle.

  Meriel put the sim-chip back on her necklace and fiddled with it while she switched back to her incoming messages.

  Elizabeth K ET 2187:58:14.3

  Hey, M, miss u!

  I finished nav-2 training and am ready to solo, not that I really need to solo, but I can’t rightly tell the test committee I jumped a ship when I was ten, now, can I.

  Met Penny at her last stop at eIndi. Some pretty face on the Murititius has turned her into a love-sick puppy. He’s sweet but dul
l as a bolt.

  M, regarding your last question about my well-being…squawk…hiss…reception is breaking up. Ha. How am I doing? Feeling low. My LI (love interest) swapped ships for a promotion, and I won’t see him for at least a month. I don’t know if it was me or the new contract, but either way, he dumped me. That leaves me the only eligible female on the boat. His replacement is a horror, some hairy beast who thinks he’s gonna move in, and I can’t be caught alone. There’s a slot in security on the Tjana that matches my marine-2 qual. If the troll persists, I’ll transfer.

  I’ll be at Etna about the time you are, and maybe we can meet. LU always. Littlebit.

  Crap! I don’t want her dragging spacers out of a drunk tank.

  “Reply,” Meriel said to the console. “Sis, we want you on the bridge, not in security. Don’t volunteer to be in the line of fire yet. Stay with comm for now; it’s safer. And use the marine training to tame your admirers.” What can I tell her about the Princess that would be helpful? Nothing. “Bad news from the lawyers. I’ll tell you when I see you. Love, M. End reply.”

  She clicked on the message from twelve-year-old Harry Fisher, who still missed his older sister, Anita. A vid of Harry popped up. It looked like he was in his bunk with the covers over his head.

  “Meri. I wanna be with Anni,” Harry said on the vid. “I don’t like it here. The captain’s fine, and Ms. Lanceux is OK, but the kids tease me about being a foster. They play pirates all the time, and it’s creepy. They don’t get it, and I can’t tell them.

  “I haven’t seen Anni in a year, M, and I’m not gonna see her for another month. I want to be with Anni, M. Please, please, please.”

  God, what do I say to him? she thought. His fosters have their own plans, and they’re never gonna put him back with Anita.

  “Reply. Audio,” Meriel said aloud. “Begin. Harry, hon, hang in there. I’ll do what I can. The logs show you at Cygni about the same time as Sam. I’ll make sure that you touch base. M. Stop. Send.”