Home: Interstellar: Merchant Princess

by Strong, Ray

  He didn’t care about the scars, she thought again and watched him walk away. But when Ferrell turned the corner, his aura turned the corner with him. She felt ashamed and stared at the empty doorway.

  Lev came back into the cargo bay, caught her closing her shirt, and shook his head. “Ah, the rake targets another willing victim,” he said and went back to work.

  “Ferrell’s a doctor,” Meriel said, but her blush betrayed her. Who am I kidding, she thought. I’m nothing special. He’s a doctor and wouldn’t be squeamish around scars. Then she blushed again, realizing that she thought of him as a man, not as an enemy who could destroy her future if he found out what she was doing. Meriel cued up a text to Molly.

  Tell Ferrell not to bother me when I’m on duty. It’s dangerous.

  Molly’s reply was quick.

  Dangerous to the cargo? For the crew?

  Meriel replied.

  Dangerous for Ferrell.

  ***

  Meriel walked back to the galley, grabbed a snack, and sat with her feet up on the neighboring chair to read the messages they’d picked up outbound from Enterprise. She wondered what useful thing she could do until Nick safely read the sim-chip. They may have a lead on the why but not on the who. If hijackers had attacked the Princess for the cargo, then who were the hijackers? Who would have done it? It might be on the chip, but she would need Nick to disarm it or scrub the data first.

  Remembering the nondescript man she had seen on Enterprise, she pulled up the vid from Nick’s temporary link and zoomed the image on her visor. He was a graying, middle-aged man: a little severe, as though he’d just cleaned himself up after spending a lifetime in the sewer.

  “Zoom,” she said. A long, thin scar appeared over his left temple. She forwarded the clearest images to an app with the galaxy’s facial-recognition database.

  “Search all,” Meriel said and set the ship’s computer to work in the background.

  Her link beeped with an incoming message, a message sent just as they had left the Procyon A system.

  From nz: i’m working on the data files in a clean room. in the meantime, i’ve scrubbed the files in the home and personal directories. too much to send without more time. attached is the vid you wanted along with another file i think will interest you. i cleaned up the signal so you can hear some of the garbled audio. i also improved the video resolution at the end. the original has a noise reduction algorithm overmodulating the signal, and that’s why the popular version is 2-d and so hard to understand. tell me what you think.

  She tapped her visor’s heads-up display to view the still of her and her mother after her first EVA. Then she cued up the vid that Nick said would interest her. At first, she was surprised to see a full holovid image, but she was quickly disappointed. She had seen this vid many times before. It was the familiar Mouldersen interview about the discovery of an Earthlike body by a survey probe, the one that came back late after getting lost in a dust cloud, the same one she had written off as amateur theater. The garbled voice was much clearer now, and she could make out every word. Meriel turned her head to view different parts of the room and then rose and walked through the audience displayed by the holovid. But the faces were hidden from the camera’s view, and she spotted nothing more of interest. She played it through to the familiar scuffling when the camera fell under the chair, but she had learned nothing new.

  “Meeting over. Stop recording,” the familiar voice on the vid said, but the speaker was off camera. “Everyone back to work, please, and thank you very much for attending. Director, a word, please.”

  Expecting the holo to end just as the vid did, Meriel picked up her trash and walked to the recycle chute. However, the holo did not end, and Meriel stopped in her tracks, trash still in her hands.

  “Pause. Length,” she said, and the display said eight minutes. Other copies of this video stopped at about two minutes. Meriel sat down in the nearest chair. “Play.” The camera still pointed to the ceiling, but she heard someone talking and turned up the volume.

  “You cannot withhold news like this,” Jeannine said.

  “Of course you are right, Ms. Aldersen,” a man’s voice responded.

  “Pause,” Meriel instructed her link. Aldersen, not Mouldersen, she thought. “Search Jeannine Aldersen.” Her visor displayed a brief news vid: scientist for BioLuna, found alone in her apartment on Europa, apparent victim of starvation due to brain damage during a multimonth Stim bender. She forgot how to eat, Meriel thought. Huh, a responsible astrophysicist and team director suddenly has a Stim addiction. Killed by sudden success? “Play.”

  “Of course you are right, Ms. Aldersen, but all in good time. This is wonderful news, but something so momentous needs subtlety in the presentation. Now, the great news for you is the chairman has a special project and would like a word with you. He suggested you might be the perfect representative to the UNE/IS regarding this wonderful discovery.”

  “Well…” Jeannine stammered, “this is so sudden.”

  “Rather. The timing is perfect for you, Jeannine. This news will impact all of known space and must be handled with care to avert panic and a land rush. This position will require technical expertise and discretion like you have exhibited during this project.”

  “But I—” Jeannine said, but the man interrupted again.

  “Come now, Ms. Aldersen. Carpe diem. Some opportunities must be grasped when they arise. Officer, please escort Ms. Aldersen to the chairman’s office. Good day, Director.”

  Meriel heard a door close, and the voice returned, but now much less charming. “You, clean up. Leave nothing.”

  She heard doors close in the holo followed by a long silence. There was much more to the recording, so Meriel waited. After a few minutes, someone picked up the camera and went to the table, where Ms. Aldersen had stood during her announcement. The camera scanned the empty table and then focused on a clipboard under the table. Meriel stopped the holo and zoomed in on the clipboard to see the data sheet from the survey probe. The holographer tore the sheet off the clipboard and scribbled “TTL-5B” in the margin.

  Meriel heard, “Hey, you!” on the holo. The picture jerked abruptly, and the holo ended.

  She leaned back in her chair. She was very familiar with the torn-off data sheet. It was famous, or rather infamous, and available everywhere on the net. Meriel and Elizabeth had found many copies on conspiracy sites. It was considered one of the greatest frauds of the century.

  The survey data clearly showed an Earthlike atmosphere, gravity, nitrogen-rich soil, and two moons. The data was so explicit and self-consistent that people believed it on sight. And in a galaxy hungry for land, it drove a frenzy of speculators and prospectors to stake their claims. But when they arrived, they found only a dead rock. People condemned it as a sophisticated fraud or theoretical exercise, but they could not figure out who would benefit. They wrote it off as a prank and stopped looking, never knowing why someone would go to all the trouble.

  Meriel backed up the holo to a shot of the data sheet on the clipboard and froze it. Well, Nick, she thought, let’s just see how much you’ve improved the resolution. “Zoom, two x,” she said to enlarge the clipboard, but it remained too small to read and distorted by the lighting in the mess hall. “Four x.” The data sheet filled her low-res heads-up display, but the image was still fuzzy.

  She got up, threw her trash away, and went to the entertainment center. Near the high-resolution holographic display she waved her link. The data sheet appeared on the deck, full size but still a bit fuzzy. “Times eight,” she said. And there it was.

  The designation was TTL-5B3, not TTL-5B. That would make it a moon, not a planet: the third moon orbiting the second planet. People had expected a planet and found a dead rock. Still, they would not likely miss a habitable moon nearby after traveling all that way. Her mother had not seen this but still believed. What did she guess?

  If I presume everything printed on the sheet is correct, then what do I have?
If the data were real and the coordinates were real, then the origin or orientation must have been off. Jeannine had said that the survey probe could not orient itself for a return to Earth and used the Magellanic cloud to get its bearings. That meant that it could not see Sol. That also meant that Sol could not see TTL-5.

  “It’s a new star,” she said aloud. The coordinates were not referenced from Earth or Sol but from somewhere else.

  Meriel looked at the image of the data sheet on the deck again. The survey sheet specified the coordinates in the familiar declination, right ascension and distance, but the little boxes for EQS, or EES, specifying the Earth equatorial or Earth ecliptic system, remained unchecked.

  “And not referenced from Earth.”

  A handwritten note above the boxes, a note not included on the torn-off data sheet circulated throughout the galaxy, read: “ref: DXC.” DX? DX Cancri. That’s Dexter Station.

  She sighed. “Everybody had looked in the wrong place,” she said, “and for the wrong thing.” She put in the coordinates and translated from DX Cancri to Earth ecliptic. Nothing appeared on the charts; dust clouds obscured observations from Sol and the familiar stations, just like Jeannine had said, but you could see it from DX Cancri. They called it Jira-1, but no one knew the system that surrounded the star. And no one there would care: Dexter Station was another low-grav logistics hellhole, and no one there would have time to think about anything other than staying alive long enough to escape.

  Jeannine’s genius had put her on that survey probe. She had looked through its eyes and found an Earthlike habitat. The probe had to figure out its location but could not see Earth through the dust clouds. So it used another star to orient itself, a star it knew well—DX Cancri—and posted the coordinates relative to the DXC ecliptic rather than to Earth’s. That’s what the scientists celebrated—they had solved the puzzle.

  So, Mom almost found Home and would have if she’d had time to open the latest holo. Using TTL-5B as clues, she almost found TTL-5B3, a moon in the Goldilocks zone, a place that had all of the major requirements for human life. The speaker on the vid was right to be afraid of a land rush. It was unique and priceless.

  There was one thing Meriel knew—this was not Haven. TTL-5B3 was a moon, and John said Haven was a colony? Maybe I should ask. Nah. He’ll think I’m crazy or some conspiracy nut if I tell him he’s living on the biggest fraud in the galaxy.

  So, has anyone been to 5B3 since the probe?

  “Jump in ten minutes,” she heard on the intercom system.

  She walked back to her cabin. After taking the nutria-pack and boost, she reviewed her other messages, including one from Teddy.

  Meriel, impressive work on the nav program and congrats to Pilot Smith.

  However, scenarios you provided only exclude the possibilities of coordinating from a different station and random encounters.

  To meet within the duration available (2:48), the two ships would need to a) coordinate their jumps, b) leave from the same point at about the same time, and c) jump short before the sphere gets too large. Meeting is conceivable, but too improbable unless the two ships coordinated intentionally. This data means someone on the Princess crew must have programmed nav with the same jump coordinates. Sorry.

  I provided similar information to the court ten years ago, and unfortunately, they concluded that the meeting was intentional and coordinated, not what I intended or what you intend now.

  Jeremy stopped by, and he offered this: There is no technical difference between someone forcing you to go somewhere, or you agreeing to go there. You end up at the same place. However, there is a big difference in culpability for what happens when you get there. Focus on means and motive.

  LU, T

  Meriel mentally appended Jeremy’s guidance to include, “Send money.”

  Crap, she thought. Nick needs to find something more on the sim-chip, or we won’t have enough to reopen the bidding.

  “Reply,” Meriel said. “Teddy, what if the traitor is nav, not a crewman? What if nav got infected somehow? Send.”

  And Meriel knew how: an aggressive virus in the cargo manifest, a manifest they would review before every jump.

  “Transcribe message to Jeremy Bell. Begin. Jeremy, please be alert for information from Nick Zanek regarding mil-tech virus found on Esther Hope’s sim-chip in cargo manifest at the time of the Princess attack. Means and motive may be there. Send.” And she made sure not to disclose how that miracle had occurred.

  Another message had come in from Nick with just a GRL. Meriel pulled up the link:

  “Improbability of Nav-RR9I Complicity in Ship Disappearances.”

  Interstellar Journal of Navigation. ET/2174:26

  Theodore Duncan, et al.

  Abstract: The frequency of ship disappearances per light year traveled is gratefully low. However, the disappearances are much higher than predicted by analysis of the reliability and failure modes of current generation of nav systems (Nav-RR9I) and the ships themselves. This paper reviews the state of the art, estimates the anticipated disappearances due to ship infrastructure failures, and speculates on other causes of ship disappearances.

  That was written in 2174—years before the Princess attack, Meriel thought. Teddy proved the ships did not disappear by accident but did not know the cause. But I know that pirates tried to kill the Princess. Maybe there are more pirate attacks than anyone knows about.

  ***

  Cookie scooped up the poker chips on the table and added them to his pile. “You’re slipping, John,” he said. “I’ve got nothing showing to your pair, and you didn’t bluff.”

  John looked at Cookie from across the table and blinked.

  Socket collected the cards and began to shuffle. “Ante up,” she said.

  Cookie reached over to Lev whose head lay on the table next to him. He grabbed Lev by the hair and lifted his head off the table, but Lev just drooled from a slack mouth and snored. “He’s out this hand,” Cookie said and laid Lev’s head back on the table.

  Socket threw a few chips into the pile and hit John on the shoulder. “Ante,” she said, and John pushed too many chips into the pile.

  “He’s loaded, Socket,” Cookie said.

  “Shush,” Socket said. “His money is still good.”

  “You’d take advantage of a drunk?”

  “This is poker, Sergeant,” she said. “He’s still awake and sitting at the table. We’ll leave him his pants.” She hit John again. “So where’s Meriel?”

  “Busy,” John said with a frown. His head bobbed, and he blinked slowly.

  “I thought you guys had a thing,” Socket said.

  “Work in progress,” John said and wobbled in his chair.

  “You oddballs are meant for each other,” Socket said. “You’re the only spacers I know who don’t like station sleepovers.”

  John sighed. “She’s always busy trying to get her kids together on the same ship.” He slammed his drink on the table. “Damn,” he said, “I want someone like her, someone true.”

  “Jeez, John. You’re gonna drown in your own BS,” Socket said. “She’s young and hot. Don’t confuse yourself.”

  “All spacers are hot,” John said and grinned at Socket. “This one’s got a purpose. She’s giving everything she’s got for the kids from the Princess. Can you imagine being loved like that?”

  Socket looked down. “Yeah, I had that once,” she said quietly and dealt the three of them the first hole card in a round of five card stud.

  “Keep at it. She’ll come around,” Cookie said.

  John continued as if he had not heard, “And she has this dream of a place out there she calls Home.” He raised his arm in the air and seemed to point to something outside the porthole.

  “That old myth?” Socket said.

  John smiled. “Yeah, but I know something she’d love to…” he started to say, but his eyes closed, and his arm drooped slowly to his side. His head fell back, and he started to snore.


  Cookie bet and frowned when Socket took a few chips from John and threw them into the pile. They continued with two more rounds of betting on two up cards.

  “You ever had someone like that?” Socket asked.

  “Like what?” Cookie asked.

  “Someone true who loved you completely and only you.”

  Cookie nodded. “For a while.” He put his hole card back on the table and leaned back with his hands behind his head. “She was like a comet that blew through my life and lit me up like a star. Made me feel like a teenager.”

  “What happened?”

  Cookie took a drink. “She followed her orbit back to the stars. I just couldn’t hold on to her. You met her.”

  Socket smiled. “Really? The blonde?” she said, and Cookie nodded. “You old fart,” she said. “You find a love like that again, and it’ll burn you to a cinder.”

  “So what?” he said. “And what about you?”

  “Coulda’ been,” Socket said. “His ship disappeared on a long haul to Seiyei station. It was a humanitarian run to an asteroid colony. Never heard from.”

  “Accident?”

  Socket shrugged. “No one knows.” She looked at her hole card, and her face softened. “They sent me his medal.”

  Cookie watched her and the reflection of the cabin lights in her eyes.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You compare everyone to him.”

  Socket stared at her card and bit her lip.

  “But you’d do it all again,” he said and patted her hand. “Regardless of how it ends.”

  Socket smiled a big smile. “In a heartbeat,” she said with a sigh and dealt the fourth card to each of them face up. She pushed some chips into the pile and added a few more from John’s pile. “John raises,” she said.

  Cookie threw some chips into the pile. “I know she likes him,” he said. “Maybe she really loves him.”

  “You’re a romantic, Sergeant,” Socket said and dealt the fifth card face down. “She’s a spacer.”