Clarion: The Sequel to Voyage (Paul's Travels)

by C. Paul Lockman

  Qelandian banks were the only places of their kind in the system. They owned as much land area as did the spaceport, but almost every square yard was covered in small hillocks topped by ornate stone markers, each one unique. A large field behind the white building was crammed with several thousand of these small prominences, each containing within it the physical capital invested in a particular venture. Some were empty, their profits as yet unrealized. Others – mostly the older deposits – were home to large sums, testament to the wisdom of the bank’s investment office.

  Despite the huge size of the field and the paucity of security, theft was extremely rare. To steal from a bank would be to insult The Five, undermine the Qelandi way of life, and invite immediate and terminal punishment. No one had been found guilty of such theft in living memory. Qelandi’s very economy depended absolutely on a culture of respect for the banks, something which they paid handsomely to cultivate.

  Julius had never been in such a place before. His family saw entrusting money to others as foolish, and taught him that investment led to greed, which could only bring pain. Furthermore, all banking on Qelandi was done only by professionals, all of whom had been born elsewhere; dealing with foreigners was frowned upon in his village.

  But Julius knew that such prejudice was nonsense. He had befriended beings from five different planets, some of them even non-humanoid. Not once had he felt ripped off or mistreated in his dealings with the community of ex-patriots who, for whatever reason and for however long, called Qelandi home. It was just one more way in which he’d moved – literally and philosophically – out of the village and into the broad, welcoming world.

  His credentials confirmed at a security gate, Julius was waved through into the shade of the bank itself. The functionary to whom he was promptly introduced was a smiling, shaven-headed man with a bent back. “It is always a pleasure,” the banker said in syrupy welcome, “to receive a new investor”. He took Julius into a cool side office where he transferred the particulars from his lectern to the banker’s. He read them quickly, with an experienced eye. “I see,” the financier said. “Interesting. It is a hybrid instrument, is it not?”

  Julius nodded, inwardly uncertain but determined not to show naïveté. “A hybrid, yes, quite so. Does everything appear to be in order?” he said, trying to choose a tone which, despite his obvious youth, might convey experience gained through years of similar transaction.

  “Perfectly so. The bond issue will mature in seven cycles, at a rate of 4.6% per cycle. Upon its maturity, the sum may be liquidated, or converted to equity and reinvested in any manner of your choosing.”

  “Naturally,” Julius waved, trying to sound unconcerned. On request, he typed a complex passphrase into the banker’s lectern while the older man courteously turned his back.

  “And are there any particular reasons why Frejudium mining has piqued your interest at this time?”

  Julius blinked for half a second. What the fuck is Frejudium? But he regained his composure quickly and smiled to hide the odd pause. “A hunch, plus some good advice,” was all he said.

  “Well, I wish you the best of fortune.” They shook hands, Julius silently tolerating the effeminately dainty grip. “The Frejudium sector has been receiving a steadily increasing level of investment, so you may consider converting your gains to equity shares in the company once the bond has matured. If, of course, you cherish – as we do – the commitment to a long-term investment?”

  Julius stood and offered his hand. “I cherish the will of The Five, and my own unfailing good luck.” The manager grinned reverently and shepherded Julius to the door, retreating quickly back into the cool of the building as Julius stepped out to roast once more in the obscene midday heat. The walk back the way he came seemed shorter, but no less unbearably hot. Back at the Spaceport, Julius wiped his brow and quickly downed a flagon of cool water from the shuttle’s refrigeration system.

  “Is all rosy in the garden of the banks?” asked Zak. It was a Qelandian saying which could mean either, ‘Are your investments holding up?’ or ‘Don’t you agree this society is divided, unequal and hopelessly corrupt?’

  Julius decided the former meaning was more suited. “I’m sure they’re digging a new little mound for your money right now,” Julius reassured him.

  “Great. Then it’s time to go,” he said simply.

  Julius’ heart nearly stopped. “Go?” he managed to whisper.

  “Up, up and away, moon-boy!” cooed Mesilla from within the ship. “Get up here! We’ve got work to do before liftoff.”

  His legs moved and he somehow managed a smile, but Julius’ chest was contorted by emotional hammer-blows. There had been so many ‘firsts’ in these few weeks, but the next moments would redefine his life, he knew. He would see Qelandi from space. He would float in zero-G. He would willingly enter an environment which had been expressly forbidden by all of his teachers: Julius was going into space.

  It was exhilarating. And completely terrifying.

  He stopped at the foot of the ramp, knelt unsteadily and grasped its metal stanchion. With the other hand he picked at the broken concrete of the landing platform until he touched true Qelandian soil. There, in honor of his home and family, and in new commitment to The Five, he said a muttered prayer which he had composed only for this occasion, back in his village. Never before, in all his entreaties to the great celestial orbs which guided his life, had he hoped more fervently for their attention and compassion.

  His first task, short of simply staying out of the way, was to learn the shuttle’s interior. It was slightly larger than the standard Cruiser model he had seen so frequently at the Spaceport, and it was clearly a ship designed to operate in atmospheres; it had stubby wings and an aerodynamic shape, with a cockpit up front and thrusters in the rear. There was a lot of storage behind the cockpit, as well as extra seats, so that the shuttle could, in a pinch, carry six in safety. So far, Julius only counted three.

  “Oh, the engineer will be along in a minute. Arby’s just haggling over fuel.”

  “Fuel? Don’t these ships have nuclear engines?”

  Zak punched some buttons and motioned out of the cockpit window. “Oh sure, those nice, expensive cruisers are all-nuclear, but we’re a little more limited. But don’t you worry,” said the Captain, jerking a thumb rearward to the engines. “A little oxygen, and little hydrogen, and boom!”

  “Just make sure the ratios are right this time,” said a wary Mesilla, poking her head into the cockpit.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Julius strapped himself laboriously into the co-pilot’s seat while Mesilla crouched behind him, lacing her space boots. “Last time we left Qelandi,” she related quietly to the rapt Julius, “Zak left behind a highly flammable cloud of hydrogen. It did his reputation around here no favors at all.”

  “People don’t hire me because I’m a propulsion specialist,” the Captain argued.

  “Good that they don’t, we’d all be out of work,” Mesilla quipped.

  “You’ll be out of work if we don’t haul ass back to Orion. Is she warmed up?”

  Six hundred miles above them, the giant container ship Orion waited in her elliptical orbit, modules largely empty but fuel stores full. Only days ago, the canisters had been packed with three kinds of ore, scavenged from uninhabited planets in two different systems a few light years apart. It had been a two-year voyage, full of complexity and awkward decisions, but its denouement, one of Zak’s most carefully planned deals with a syndicate of local traders, had been spectacularly lucrative. It had also been dangerous, Zak remembered darkly, hence the need to recruit a new fourth crewman on this barren moon.

  “The ship checks out, Captain. Heaters on, payload and orbit stable. We’re ready to go.”

  “Great.” He clicked a call button on his lapel. “Arby? Get your butt in here.”

  The radio gave only scratches, then a muffled, “Yeah, on my way”. Moments later, Julius heard the steady whirr of the ramp mec
hanism retracting and knew, for better or worse, that his fate was sealed. D’Arbus, the ship’s engineer and Zak’s long-term dogsbody, was a heaving, sweaty figure as he struggled into his jump seat in the mid-deck.

  “All set, Arby?” Zak called back.

  The big man grumbled something, locked his harness in place and wiped his brow with a grubby sleeve. He seemed relieved to be out of the sun and then, as a moment passed, became tremendously excited to be headed, yet again, into space. He closed his eyes for a second, took a deep breath as though anticipating a long-relished experience. Then he looked straight at Julius and grinned broadly in a happy, childlike welcome. “Hey.”

  “Anybody having second thoughts?” the Captain asked, jangling Julius’ nerves yet further. But before anyone had time to respond, the ship seemed to lurch as if pushed backward. Then there was a bizarre sensation of being shoved from beneath. Strapped into his seat and shaking with excitement, Julius watched the segmented dome of Qelandi’s spaceport recede beneath them, and then the whole Capital appeared laid out at his feet.

  He gripped the seat arm and tried to quell a rebellious stomach. As the ship gained speed, and the loose grid pattern of the Capital became impossible to make out, Julius felt his body being pressed deeper into his seat, squashed inward towards his center of gravity, as if the seat harness were forcing him to miniaturize.

  Their ascent was punishingly swift. “OK, we’re above the K-line,” Zak informed him. “The ship’s transitioning now to burning atmospheric oxygen.”

  Mesilla called over above the roar. “We could never liquefy enough oxygen to generate lift-off power, so we have to use on-board tanks.” The ship tilted up, the horizon disappearing beneath its nose as Zak added power.

  “But once we’ve got some speed and the engine needs less oxidizer, we can let her breathe just like you and I do,” Zak added.

  “Only when you breathe,” Mesilla retorted, “you don’t produce a shit-load of specific impulse and a contrail seen for five hundred miles.”

  “Depends on what I’ve been eating,” Arby offered, cracking up the mid-deck.

  Their shuttle gained power as it rose, the thinning, yellow air allowing its engines to push the ship towards orbital velocity. “Hey, Moon-boy,” yelled Mesilla from her mid-deck seat, “are you loving the shit out of this, or what?”

  “Yeah!” Julius heard himself say. Then, “It kinda feels like I’m being sat on by a herd of camels!”

  Zak hooted merrily in his pilot’s seat, visibly more relaxed now that they had left the surface. “Well, that’s not going to last more than few more seconds. Did you ever jump off a high cliff, or the roof of your house?”

  “Sure.” In fact, improvised trampolines were the closest his school break-times ever approached to frivolity.

  “You know that feeling in your stomach, when it rises up?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re going to feel that just now,” he warned, “but it’s never going to end!” As he spoke, the engines quit. “Shutdown!” It had taken only seven minutes but they had enough speed to generate an orbital trajectory, a cannonball shot which was so fast it would never come back down. “And here it comes...”

  Within seconds, every loose item in the cockpit rose up from the floor and began a balletic zero-G dance. Julius’ medallions, thin strings of local glass beads, floated under his chin. Mesilla was the first to unbuckle her harness, and pushed herself over to Julius’ seat. “Welcome to orbit, Space-boy,” she said, and kissed his cheek.

  The next three hours were among the happiest of Julius’ life. He found the initial shock of zero-G much more exhilarating than troublesome, although the conditions did bring on a sequence of burps. Arby, losing no chance for a cheap laugh, echoed each of Julius’ gassy outbursts, launching his offering across the cockpit with a baseball-bat mime. The giant engineer found the whole thing so funny that he laughed himself head-first into a mid-deck table fitting, nearly knocking him senseless.

  Zak calmed his crew and got them working through a long-established checklist. The shuttle’s own systems were thoroughly tested, something which made Zak curious. “I thought we’d be transferring to the Orion once we get there?”

  Zak was punching buttons and consulting a thick manual which floated steadily in front of his face. “Of course! I wouldn’t make you spend any more than a few minutes in this cramped rust bucket.”

  “Be nice to her, she’ll be nice to you,” called Arby from his jump seat. He was happier by the minute.

  Mesilla whispered, “Being overweight doesn’t really matter in space. He loves it up here because everyone weighs the same – nothing!”

  “It’s just that once we dock,” Zak explained, “this shuttle will be mothballed for a good while. It’s best to make sure her pipes and tanks, her electronics and such, will all hold up to an extended space-soak.”

  “You’ll like the Orion’s crew quarters,” Mesilla promised him. “Much more comfortable.”

  “Much, much, much more comfortable!” Arby agreed, clearly relishing the transition.

  Gradually mastering his querulous stomach, Julius found it possible to look out of the cockpit windows without a wave of nausea ruining the moment. Every cell of his body tingled. “By The Five...” was almost all he could say. And with good reason.

  Qelandi was a beautifully bright, fractured, yellow-orange billiard ball, stunningly lit by stark, triple-sunlight. Ancient ravines, carved during the big moon’s watery past, seemed to span its surface, splitting its plains and shaping its very history, before their primeval rivers had succumbed to the mounting, inexorable heat. Lurid, green splotches were the only evidence that this baked dustbowl could possibly harbor life; they contrasted so obviously with the great surrounding dust fields that they could easily be counted from orbit.

  “Want to know where home is?” Zak asked him quietly.

  “All of those oases are home, Zak,” he explained. “I could have born in any one of them, to any family, and my life would have been the same.”

  “Up to a point,” Mesilla reminded him. “How many of your classmates ended up in space?”

  “You’re joking, right?” He turned to her. “I’d have been given detention, maybe a couple of lashes, even for daydreaming about coming up here and seeing this.”

  “Well, no lashes here,” she assured him. “Unless, you know, that’s your thing.” Zak cracked up yet again but took control once more as his console lit up. “Wait… Hey, guys? There’s some kind of massive ship in orbit with us.”

  Arby’s head snapped round. “Huh?”

  “It’s just ... huge,” Zak warned them. “I’ve not seen anything this big since...”

  Mesilla rolled her eyes as she returned from the cockpit windows. “Since you were last approaching the Orion, you unbelievable dumbass?”

  There were gales of general laughter, punched shoulders and a giggling, rotating Arby, freed at last from his harness, as the shuttle closed on her target. Julius felt his mouth go dry. “This truly is a week of superlatives.”

  “Super what?” Arby asked from his steady, gyroscope spin in the mid-deck.

  “It’s the biggest damn thing he ever saw,” translated Mesilla. “Welcome to Orion, bulk haulage, deep-space, sub-lightspeed freighter. And our home for the next coupla years.”

  The Orion was like a giant city in space, waiting patiently in orbit for its crew to conclude their business on Qelandi. Perhaps two miles long in total, the ship was powered by nuclear engines, arranged in a tight, concentric bundle at the very opposite end to the crew quarters. These, Zak explained, would generate the incredible power required to haul millions of tons to near light-speed.

  As they approached, a giant, rectangular stack of canisters filled the cockpit windows. Julius tried to count but, as they closed, the extremities of the vast ship were lost beyond the window frames. There must have been a thousand – maybe ten thousand – of the ore canisters, housed in a hexagonal matrix which formed
the ship’s superstructure. The Orion was a workhorse, as unlovely as she was efficient.

  Mesilla gave Julius a guided tour as they approached. “We had to install a suite of hardware modifications to keep Orion fast, so she’d be more difficult to track.” Although expensive in propellant, ‘misdirection burns’ skewed the ship’s trajectory and kept the authorities guessing. “Zak designed the thruster system himself. ‘Numerous, Nuanced, Nimble’, he always says”. Orion’s avoidance radar was first-class and her crew was experienced, professional and zealous in their precautions. “If there’s any trouble, we’ve got a pretty nasty coil-beam device. Anyone who gets in our way will find out what a million volts feels like.” In all, she was the perfect bulk hauler of illicit material.

  “It’s bigger than…” Julius began, thunderstruck.

  “If you’re going to travel light-years to get it, you may as well bring back a lot,” Zak told him. “We don’t leave a planetary surface until we’ve topped a million tons. In a perfect world, we’d fill every canister we’ve got.”

  “Full canisters make a happy crew,” Arby confirmed.

  Zak smiled back at his engineer. “It is this sage wisdom which has ensured our commercial success these past years,” he said. “Arby knows exactly how to make a trip profitable. He’s a smooth operator, right Arby?” The big man grinned, continuing his playful rotation as though levitating above the mid-deck seating. “A man of simple pleasures.”

  Docking with this vast freighter required a mix of methods. Visible beacons on the superstructure were combined with constantly updated radar data, and Zak’s own considerable experience, to bring them to within a few yards of their goal. The uppermost canister on the near side of Orion had been converted into a rudimentary spacedock. Julius saw that each canister could easily have accommodated a hundred shuttles. His mind boggled at the outrageous scale of the ship.

  “There’s no point in us pressurizing a whole canister,” Zak told him as they lined up neatly at the huge opening of the docking canister. “So we’ll spacewalk from the shuttle to the airlock.”