The Star Pirate's Folly

by James Hanlon

  The Luxar System was reinforced by the Interstellar Fleet after news of the rebel victory reached Earth. They managed to punch a few ships through, but without the sister gate there to hold the wormhole open their response time was crippled—and crucially, they couldn’t retreat. It was a one-way flight for every soldier that got sent out there. The Fleet immediately got to work on repairing the gate, but their construction efforts were impeded by the guerilla-style resistance of the system’s rebels.

  No matter how many of the asteroid slings the Fleet destroyed, another they didn’t know about would start lobbing rocks their way—and all the while the rebels worked on more. The asteroids they chose were large enough to be dangerous, but small enough that they were difficult to detect on approach. With the assault coming from all around the belt, it was impossible to predict where the next attack would come from.

  Other oppressed systems threw their lot in with the upstarts, and soon what started as another rebellion to be crushed turned into the Interstellar Fleet fighting a war of many fronts, struggling to defend their precious interstellar gates. The ships they were sending to reinforce the fleets already in combat were too little too late, and many of the gates were destroyed along with a significant portion of the Interstellar Fleet.

  Mother Sol saw her back was broken, and retracted what claws she had left. The Interstellar Fleet ships still left in the rebel systems surrendered. Earth still controlled the majority of settled star systems, most of which were near Sol. The colonized systems which revolted declared themselves independent.

  The first Interstellar Revolution was unarguably a success, but it came at a high cost. Despite the oppressive nature of Earth, cutting off all contact was a drastic measure which not everyone agreed with. A lot of people from the Core planets signed up with the Fleet when they came blazing in to quash the rebellion, and there were simmering resentments on both sides.

  There was a lot of collateral damage done, most notably to the network of gates that created “roads” throughout the Luxar System. At times it was tactically necessary for one side or the other to destroy the gates. It took decades to rebuild them, and during that time a gulf developed between the more developed Core planets and the frontier-like resource planets beyond the asteroid belt Styx. It became much more difficult to transport supplies and equipment to the far planets, so most people abandoned the frontier for the safety of the Core.

  That was over fifty years ago. No one in the Luxar System really knew what became of Earth and its vast empire. Most people thought Earth maintained the silence out of choice, fearing that they might lose control of their colonies once again if their other systems were allowed to see the fruits of revolution. Others say they simply expanded their conquest of the stars to other planets, uninhabited planets which they could freely exploit, following the path of least resistance to greater wealth and power.

  Bee stood at the base of the marble staircase in front of the gate station and looked up, following the lines of the thick white columns. The building had been around since the old days, before the revolution. The quiet was eerie. It had been a long time since she was last there, but what she did remember was the buzz of human voices, human footsteps. All she heard now was the occasional siren.

  Find him, came Mother’s whisper.

  “Working on it,” she said under her breath.

  As if in response, Slack Dog’s pad in her pocket pulsed twice. A text message. She tried to swipe it open and it prompted for the four-digit code again. A preview of the text scrolled across the top of the screen, but the message was short enough to be read in its entirety.

  Buffalo Bill: Dock B46

  Well, now she knew where she was going. She snickered at the nickname Slack Dog had given to “Buffalo Bill,” wondering what it even meant, and walked up the steps to the gate station. Once she passed through the automatic sliding doors, she approached one of the dozen or so ticket machines that lined the walls. Two guards stood shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the hallway to the inner station.

  Bee poked some commands into the ticket machine’s screen, and it presented a list of destinations and prices. She clicked on the icon for a ticket to Overlook Station’s docking bay and back, and a box popped up on the screen with the amount: 250 CREDITS YES/NO.

  YES, she selected, and the machine flashed its red scanning light across her eyes.

  THANK YOU FOR YOUR PURCHASE, the screen said. YOUR TICKET CAN BE REDEEMED VIA RETINAL SCAN AT THE GATEWAY.

  Bee approached the uniformed guards. The two looked identical in their lightly armored navy nullsuits. They always wore nullsuits when on duty at the station in case they were needed up above. The guard on her right pulled something off his belt—one of the little spherical scanners she had seen the police at the hotel use.

  He stepped toward her, clicked the scanner with his thumb, and tossed it toward Bee. She flinched as it whizzed around her and snaked a wavering tongue of red light over her whole body.

  “Going up?” the guard asked as he snatched the scanner out of the air and put it away. His doppelganger remained silent, staring straight forward.

  “Yeah. Dock B46,” she said. “Can you tell me where that is?”

  “Just go down the hall and take a right,” he said and jerked a thumb behind him. “You'll see a map of the station when you get up there. You never been up before?”

  Bee looked behind him. The hall was split in two along its length by blue ropes that hung between metal poles with round bases.

  “Not since I was little,” she said.

  “Just keep going; you’ll be shown to your gate, and they’ll shut the doors behind you. It’ll know where you’re going. The gate opens, you walk through, and you’re there.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What made you pick today?” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “You know, to go up today with all this going on.”

  “All what?” she said, feigning ignorance. She didn't want to have to explain herself.

  The guard just laughed.

  “Don’t worry about it then,” he said.

  The second guard hadn’t moved for the entire conversation. The one she was talking to took up his position again opposite the other. Bee walked between them and down the hallway, trailing her left hand along the velvety blue ropes that separated the hall into an entrance and exit lane.

  Both walls had huge projection displays of what looked like live feeds from cameras in other gate stations around the world. They were ordered by the time of day, with each time displayed tastefully near eye level underneath the city’s name. She knew roughly where most of the cities were, and tried to get a mental image in her head of where each on would be on a globe.

  Bee stopped when she got to the feed of Overlook City’s gate station. It was a shot of cargo being auto-loaded into massive transport rooms. Tiny pallet bots swarmed to and fro like bugs, carrying gargantuan loads on their backs hundreds of times their own weight.

  She kept moving and took a right at the end of the hallway, following the signs. The other way was blocked and seemed to be where passengers would normally be filtering out of the building, walking the opposite way down the hallway she had just come from. There was no one today. She continued left around another corner and found herself in a long, wide room. The walls were lined with airlocks, maybe five on each side, distanced at regular intervals. The room had the appearance of a bank vault.

  A bored-looking doorman straightened his back when she entered. He was younger than herself, and much shorter. He waved her inside the airlock he was holding open for her. She entered the pod-shaped room and smiled her thanks at him, noting the name on his badge—Juanito. He sealed the door behind them and excused himself as he slid by her to open the inner airlock.

  “Lucky you,” he said, turning the wheel. “You get the whole thing to yourself. Sometimes we really gotta cram you in there.”

  “Yeah, it’s so empty in here.”

  “Wel
l, you know Cap City folks,” Juanito said. “Obedience is a virtue. The Governor asked everyone to stay indoors and keep gate traffic down while they search the city. They even cancelled the festival. Oh, but since you’re going up there you should be able to see Orpheus. Down here he won't be visible again until tonight.”

  “Okay, cool. I'll take a look.”

  Juanito swung the door open and stepped to the side. He gestured for her to proceed with one arm and Bee entered the transport room.

  Chapter 6: Expedition

  Governor Reginald Strump sat behind his desk in his home office aboard Overlook Station, idly sipping lotus wine as he watched the news on his display lenses. The windows that normally gave him a view of Surface were blacked out, the door shut and locked, and all calls were blocked for the moment. It was just him, his wine, and the steady stream of current events unfolding in front of him. He at least deserved a few moments of peace with all the chaos going on.

  Then a call came through.

  Strump groaned but answered. “What is it? Quickly, please.”

  An error message came up where there should have been a face, and the voice that came through was distorted. “Hello again, Governor.”

  Strump nearly dropped his wine. “It’s you,” he said with quiet terror.

  “You were very rude to me last time we spoke.”

  Strump pulled at the neck of his suit. “Y-yes, I remember. I still can’t just—”

  “That’s on the list of words I didn’t want to hear from you, Strump.”

  “I—I’m sorry—”

  “Yeah, that’s on the list too. Why don’t you try yes?”

  “They’ll kill me—they’ll know it was me. Jensen Lee got himself seen. The whole police force is after him, I can’t just let him through the gates,” the Governor said, and put some strength back in his voice. “No, I won’t do it. I won’t do that for you. I’ll preserve what dignity I have left. These people voted for me. They believe in me. I won’t help you.”

  “Oh, come on, Strump. You're only Governor thanks to me.”

  “I refuse,” Strump declared with an air of finality, and ended the call.

  The display lenses didn’t respond to his input.

  “You know, Reginald, I’ve been helping you out here. Working with you. Tell me with a straight face you would’ve gotten re-elected without my help. Those people were at your throat a few months ago, and now they worship you. I’ve given you this much, and I can take it away just as easily. Open your gates to let my man Lee out and I won’t touch your city. Or you can continue being difficult and I’ll smash it to dust.”

  “I won’t do it—”

  “YOU WILL!”

  Strump trembled at the shout and nearly dropped the datapad.

  “I have been lenient with you, dirtwalker. The streak of paltry victories that kept you your title, Governor, were not earned by you, they were given to you. By me. I have allowed your military to believe it’s dealt with the pirate threat for the moment, but I will not wait any longer. Give me the map. Let Jensen Lee out of your city, or I’ll take your head first, Strump.”

  Governor Strump’s only reply was a mewling sob. The scrambled voice on the other end heaved an exasperated sigh.

  “Look, I want to make this deal work but my boys are getting very restless, Strump. They don’t want this to work. They want you to let your pride get the better of you. They want to be in your cities, eating your fine food and ravishing your fine women. And they know all I’ve got to do is let them loose. Just a bunch of snarling dogs. Animal urges, you know. But I just want the map. And if you give it to me I can lead this pack of howling dogs away. Without that map….”

  “I won’t,” whispered Strump.

  “It’s your head, Strump. We’re coming.”

  The display window vanished and Governor Strump, once again alone, collapsed into a dejected heap, sobbing with his head on his desk.

  ***

  Gim stared out at the stars through the thick window in the living room of the Governor’s quarters. He had spent the past three and a half hours standing in the same spot mentally reviewing what he was instructed to cook for Governor Strump’s post-meeting breakfast. The local ingredients shifted seasonally: today it would be three grilled venison spice sausages, two fried warbler eggs, one thinly sliced chilled lotus fruit, and of course the accompanying lotus tea. Yesterday Strump confirmed his menu for the day ahead, and he said he would be “looking forward to each meal.”

  Gim considered this unusually high praise. As a fabricant, most humans didn’t bother to show him the same social niceties they might give another human. People normally spoke to him as one would any other machine: they either gave orders or asked for information. The Governor was oddly polite to him. Gim gazed out the tall window that stretched across the living room as the sun’s first rays peeked out from behind the planet. Surface, they called it. Not much of a name, really. About as inventive as Earth. But it was the name chosen by its discoverer decades before.

  Gim turned on his heel, making his way to the private kitchen. He’d been leased by Governor Strump forty-seven hours ago as a personal assistant. Before that he had served on a mining vessel for roughly sixteen hundred hours, on reserve for some high risk zero gravity repair work.

  He hadn’t actually done anything but sit in storage; the miners finished their contract early and returned him to Overlook Station for a partial refund, where he was repackaged and kept in cold storage. After a few days on the shelf he was requested for service by the Governor for a period of no more than seven hundred hours. Once the lease was up he would have approximately 62,436 lifetime hours of operational capacity left—a little over seven years.

  The stovetop began heating itself as Gim walked into the kitchen. He had set out two pans and a kettle for tea earlier in the morning. On a shelf in the refrigerator were three venison spice sausages, two yellow-speckled warbler eggs, and a crimson-skinned lotus fruit—all fresh ingredients brought up from farms on Surface. He set the eggs on the counter, dropped the sausages in their pan, and began to prepare the fragrant lotus fruit while the sausages sizzled.

  The lotus looked similar to Earth’s avocado, except that its skin was a dark mottled red and its stem sprouted aquamarine leaves. Gim plucked the stem and dropped it in the food processor, which whirred to life for a few seconds. He took a knife and deftly bisected the fruit vertically along the large central seed, then peeled away both halves.

  The fleshy interior of the fruit matched the bright aqua color of the leaves and glistened with moisture. It released a strong, sweet, melon-like scent. The fat teardrop seed was nestled inside the fruit, shiny and dark red. Gim popped it out and tossed it into the food processor, which eagerly obliged him again with a momentary buzz.

  After setting the two halves face down on the counter, Gim peeled off the skin, cut the fruit into wafer-thin slices, arranged them artfully on a small plate, and put the dish inside a drawer in the refrigerator. If he left the fruit out it would begin to brown before the rest of the meal was ready. As he shut the fridge, the kettle started to boil. Time for tea.

  The heat died underneath the boiling kettle when he turned the heating element off. Gim opened a drawer recessed beneath the counter and plucked an empty teabag from it. The bags were made from the lotus plant’s fibrous stalk and stems back on Surface. The fruit’s seed, leaves, and stem had been reduced to grounds inside the food processor, and Gim carefully spooned the fragrant mixture into the teabag. He cinched the string on top and tied it. A purposeful product. Efficient.

  The leaves required only rudimentary preparation to make the tea—no drying, no curing, no processing—making it an extremely profitable export from Surface. Meanwhile its psychoactive primary ingredient ensured high demand: the tea brewed from the seed, stem, and leaf of the lotus fruit induced a warm, full-body, buzzing sensation, heightened mood, increased appetite, and general contentment.

  Gim lifted the lid on the tiny tea
pot and poured in half the water from the kettle before he dropped the bag in. The water swirled from clear to a reddish-purple color, steaming as it filled the pot. Gim replaced the lid and set the kettle down.

  Although he performed the process with mechanical precision, Gim had never made the tea by himself before. It was one of the lessons he’d been given by the Governor, who had taken the time to teach Gim between his many video conferences.

  Strump claimed that the shoddy instructional files Gim could have downloaded were entirely wrong, and that he in fact knew the only proper method. Until he had the chance to teach Gim himself, the Governor refused to allow him to brew the tea. Now, having been shown once, Gim would never forget the Governor’s instructions. He would repeat the process exactly any time he was asked. Fabricants never forget, barring brain trauma or deletion of data.

  Gim turned the sausages and oiled the other pan for the eggs.

  ***

  “Amazing what fabricants can do these days,” Strump said around a mouthful of fried egg. “You’re just so damned smart now. I remember I had one of the first organic models back in ’32. Back when they still had memory problems. Back up your backup’s backups, that’s what they used to say.”

  They sat at the marble countertop in the kitchen, which doubled as a table for two. The counter was empty underneath, and two chairs tucked in neatly to fill the space when it was not in use.

  “Yes, the early models were unreliable,” Gim said. “We’ve come a long way since then.”

  Gim had set the table for just the Governor, but Strump insisted that Gim at least keep him company so Gim sat patiently with his hands in his lap as the Governor ate. Strump stabbed the juicy slices of aquamarine lotus fruit two, three at a time onto his fork and finished them first. As he chewed, he nodded his head in satisfaction.

  “A long way, yes,” the Governor said. “A long, long way.”

  He grew quiet then, and took on a distant stare, half-chewed fruit resting in his hanging jaw. He looked pale and distraught. Gim, in an effort to make himself good company, took it upon himself to liven up the conversation.