Privateer Tales 3: Parley

by Jamie McFarlane

  After an hour, we agreed it was time to get back underway.

  “Liam, would you like to pilot the circumvolve? It’d be good experience for you,” Ada said.

  “Absolutely!”

  Back on the tug, I slid down into the pilot’s seat, with Ada in the seat to my right. Jordy was interested enough to stand behind us and watch.

  “Do you remember the checklist?” Ada asked.

  “Not all of it,” I said.

  “Okay, I’ll run it, but you have to check ‘em off.” I appreciated that Ada wasn’t giving me a hard time about this. I recorded her list so I could transcribe it to my own reminder list later.

  “… release the glad-hands … “

  “Check.”

  “Stow the tongue and wait for the green light.”

  “Check … we’re green.”

  “Replace the dead-heads.”

  “Why not leave the dead-heads off, we’re just going to release them when we get to the other side?” I asked.

  “Technically you could, but if you always put them on you never have to question if you’ve done it.”

  “Check.”

  “We’re free. Captain, bring us around.”

  I pulled the sticks out from beneath the arm rests and locked them into place. I felt a lot more comfortable with them this time. I slid the tug up and rotated in a slow cartwheel, stopping the rotation once we could look straight down on the barges.

  “Ugh,” I heard from Jordy. I turned to see him sit down on the floor. I’d heard of people who couldn’t take orientation shifts, but I was surprised that someone with Jordy’s background was one of them.

  “Sorry man,” I said. I’d wanted a good look at the barges, but they weren’t anything more than large metallic platforms. I rotated the ship around so we were sailing in line with the string.

  “Thank you Liam, that was very thoughtful,” Ada said.

  “Not everyone’s born in space.” I said. I could hear Jordy breathing hard.

  I slid the ship around and lowered it to be in line with the barges. “Hit the big switch?”

  “Nicely done, yes.”

  I flicked the switch and watched as tongues slid out of the barge toward the freighter.

  “How are you doing back there, Jordy?” Ada asked.

  “I’m fine ...” He sounded anything but fine.

  “Ada, tell me why this ship sails so slowly when not attached to the string. It has significantly more power than Sterra's Gift.” It was a problem that’d been bothering me since I first sailed it around.

  “Inertial and gravity systems wouldn’t be able to keep up. It’s something I can override in an emergency, but normally it’s best to leave that alone. It’s also very easy to get out of control with those safeties off.”

  “You’ve done it?”

  “All the time when I was younger. You’d have trouble keeping up with me in that lug of a ship you sail.”

  “Did you seriously just challenge me to tag?”

  “Don’t start something you can’t finish, pal.”

  A final clunk was felt as the tongue finished seating itself into the frame of the freighter.

  “Back to work then. Thanks for thinking of me,” I said. I walked past Jordy who was still looking a little green. “Sorry, Jordy.” I patted him on the back and slid down the railing.

  “Never sail with a spacer …” He muttered above me.

  I exited the airlock and arc-jetted back to Sterra's Gift. I took it slowly so I could see all the upgrades that had been made by the shipyard mechanics. Of all of the changes, I was most excited by the armor added to the belly of the ship. It made us a little slower, but would pay for itself in repairs alone if we kept getting shot at.

  Back on board, Marny, Nick and Tali were still hanging out at the galley table. “Ready to get underway?”

  “Let me run a check,” Nick said.

  “Can we skip the bad country music?” Marny asked.

  “Hah … You never know.” I didn’t have anything planned, but I wasn’t telling them that. I palmed my way onto the bridge and slid into the chair.

  Open comm with Adela Chen. “Ada, we’re about to start our burn.”

  “Okay, I’ve got the nav plan plugged in and we’re ready to go.”

  “Happy Sailing! Over and out.” I said. End comm.

  “All sections, check in, status for departure.” Nick and Marny reported green.

  Engage deceleration burn plan.

  The second leg of the trip was as uneventful as the first. I spent time working on my yoga with Tali and Marny, who both seemed to enjoy my pain, and Nick and I continued training with Marny in Krav Maga. We weren’t getting drastically better, but at least I was starting to grasp some of the fundamentals.

  We were three hours out from Jeratorn and I would be back at the helm in less than an hour. I found Marny and Tali talking at the galley table, so I grabbed a pouch of orange juice and joined them.

  “I’d like to meet with Qiu today and discuss a communication plan while she’s on the station. Would either of you like to join me?”

  “We’d both like to be there for that. I tried to approach her about it, but she’s a might bit reserved,” Marny said.

  “She in her cabin?” I asked. Bunk Room 2 (BR-2) was no more than five meters from where we were sitting.

  “Aye,” Marny said.

  I walked up the hallway and knocked on her door.

  “One moment, please.”

  After a few moments she opened the door and looked at me questioningly.

  “Would you be available for a short meeting?”

  “Give me five minutes?”

  “In my quarters.”

  Qiu nodded and shut the door.

  After several minutes Qiu knocked on the doorframe of my quarters. Tali, Marny and I were sitting on the L-shaped couch. “Come on in.”

  “What’s up, Mr. Hoffen?”

  “Captain,” Marny corrected. If being corrected was annoying to Qiu, she didn’t show it.

  “Captain,” she acknowledged.

  I had no idea how to handle the tension so I pushed on. “Lieutenant, I would like to have an established communication protocol while you’re on station.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.

  I thought I’d said it so darn Navy-like I was disappointed to discover she didn’t know what I was asking.

  “Sure you do,” Tali said without looking up from a reading pad she was gesturing to. “How about - no less than every six hours you will communicate with this ship or we’ll come looking for you.”

  “It would destroy my mission if you did that,” Qiu said.

  “Do you have a reason why you wouldn’t want to communicate with us?” I asked.

  “I will do as you request and communicate every six hours.”

  “We’ll give you as much leeway as possible, Lieutenant,” Marny said.

  “Thank you, is there anything else?”

  “Once we’ve off-loaded the cargo and taken some shore leave, we’ll be standing off several thousand kilometers, close enough for quick communication but far enough away not to cause problems.”

  “That will work fine.” Qiu stood and left the room.

  “Grab the door, Cap?” I was seated closest to the door and swung it closed.

  “All good?” Marny asked. She was looking at Tali.

  Tali placed a small device on the table and my ears popped, like they often did when pressurization occurred. “All good,” Tali said.

  I looked at the device that I suspected generated a sort of privacy field and asked, “What am I missing?” My voice sounded strange, like I was talking next to a fan.

  “We’ve infested the reluctant Lieutenant Loo with nanite trackers. For the next twenty days, she’ll be exhaling these little guys everywhere she goes.”

  “You get this from the Navy quartermaster?” I asked.

  “No,” Tali said.

  “Is that what y
ou were doing with the reading pad?”

  “Yes, I was transferring them from the chair to her suit. They’ll migrate into her respiratory system, where they can reproduce.”

  “Frak, that’s disgusting. Won’t she be pissed if she finds ‘em.”

  “Not going to happen, Cap. These little buggers are biological and they don’t show up on scans unless you know specifically what you’re looking for. Even to bio-scans they look like bad breath. I’ve got a specially tuned sniffer that recognizes their signature. It’ll tell us when any surface we’re looking at had contact with her.”

  “So this junk’s all over the ship and reproducing?”

  “Paranoid much?” Tali asked. “No, I programmed them to target Loo. Here, look.” Tali handed me her reading pad. It looked like I was seeing directly through the pad at the table in front of me. There was a small smudge of yellow on the table and when I lifted it up I could see a large cloud on the door.

  “That’s just the baseline data. Your AI will analyze the data for you,” she said.

  I hit the button and the smudges turned into more obvious shapes resembling chat balloons you might see in an old-school comic strip. There was a lot of information, including the time when the contact occurred. It also included more invasive information, like blood pressure, respiration rate and body temperature.

  “This stuff’s a little scary,” I pushed Tali's reading pad back toward her.

  “Yes, it’s also on loan and would cause problems if anyone found out we were using it,” Tali said.

  “No worries there. Pretty sure I don’t need you or Marny pissed at me.” We all laughed, but I was at least partially serious.

  I excused myself and grabbed a large cup of coffee from the galley. It was brewed from synthetic beans, but was pretty close to the real thing and I appreciated that Marny was saving us the significant difference in cost.

  I palmed my way onto the bridge. “Captain on the bridge.” I said it to save Nick the trouble. “I’d like to bring us in, if you’re okay with that.”

  “Yup. I’ve a few things to tend to so that’d be good,” Nick said. We exchanged the ritual words of transferring the bridge watch and I sat in the chair.

  We were still sailing backward towards Jeratorn on the decelerating burn plan and would be for the next two hours. We would only flip over for the last half hour of our trip.

  Calculate when the bow thruster will have enough thrust to complete our deceleration plan.

  The ship’s AI replied. That point was crossed fifteen hours ago.

  I rubbed my hands together in excitement. Roll ship and engage bow thruster to continue current burn plan. The ship slowly disengaged the rear engines and used the arc-jets to rotate us in a graceful tumble.

  Incoming hail from Adela Chen.

  Accept.

  Spooling down the rear engines had caused us to sail right past Ada’s position. She hadn’t missed it.

  “What’s up Liam?” she asked.

  “Trying out my new bow thrusters. I’ll slide right back.”

  “Okay, a little warning might be a good idea next time.”

  “Right, sorry.”

  “No biggie, glad everything’s okay.”

  I coaxed the bow thrusters to pull us back in line with Ada’s ship. I lined us up momentarily so we could see each other through our armor-glassed cockpits. Ada waved back at me. It wasn’t a particularly safe place to stay, so I moved back to the formation we’d been sailing in for the last couple of weeks.

  I felt a little nostalgic when I looked out into the deep dark. In the distance and with the help of my HUD, I could make out many of the outlying large asteroids in this part of the main asteroid belt. It felt both familiar and foreign. My mind tried to locate markers I was used to seeing, but of course they weren’t there.

  I wondered what my parents, Big Pete and Silver, were doing at this moment. I suppose they were working their claim. I hadn’t heard from them for a while, but the last I had, Big Pete was onto a spot he thought was really showing a lot of promise. I’d, of course, heard this from him for as long as I could remember. He was the eternal optimist and had eked out a life where many had failed before him. It seemed to me to be a hopeless life, but Dad was thrilled by it every morning when he woke up.

  Display layout of Jeratorn on forward holo, include nearby asteroids and outposts.

  Jeratorn was three independent towers, each with a spread-out cluster of habitats linked together to form a rough cylindrical shape. These three main structures were laid out in a loose triangular configuration and connected via multiple catwalks. It defied the normal logic of building one dense structure that would be easier to defend against random asteroids and space junk. A long finger-like structure stuck out from one of the buildings. This was apparently a pier for ships to dock at, as the HUD showed several ships at rest, on top and in berths.

  Only a few asteroids showed on the vid screen, a lot less than I’d expected given my experience on Colony 40. The AI showed several long range, asteroid-mounted turrets that covered the wide corridor between the co-op’s ore station and Jeratorn. They were significantly heavier weapons than we had at Colony 40 and some of my original concern about safety dissipated.

  The AI alerted me to a new comm from Sam Chen. Play Sam’s comm on main holo.

  Sam Chen was sitting at his desk in his apartment.

  “Captain Hoffen, we’ve cleared a full load for the strings. Price has been holding steady for a couple of days now. We’re priced nice and low, so get that load hooked up and sailing and we’ll clear a hefty profit. I just heard a rumor of tensions between the PDC and the North Americans. Somebody’s trying to redraw some borders. Hate to be too much of a capitalist, but they’ll need good old fashioned steel if they want to beat on their war drums too much. Send me a ping when you’re headed home. Oh, and tell Ada to listen to her comm once in a while.”

  Record response.

  “Got it Sam. Thanks for setting that up. We have a layover here, but I’ll send Ada packing in four to five days no matter what. Hoffen, out.”

  End comm.

  When you’re sailing long distances, time can get away from you. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that for days on end you’re simply looking forward to your point of arrival. It seemed like I had barely sat down when the AI started spooling down the forward thrusters as it was programmed to do when we were thirty minutes out. I thought I might be able to make out the station, unaided, through the armor glass.

  Hail Jeratorn control tower. I didn’t know what they called it out here, but my AI would be able to translate that just fine.

  “Jeratorn control. What’s up?” It was a significantly less formal response than I’d expected. Even on Colony 40, we used more formality than that.

  “I’ve got two ships on approach. We should be at the ore station in thirty minutes. Any protocol you need us to follow?”

  “Nah, we’re pretty laid back here. I’ll give ‘em a shout and let them know you’re inbound. Are you tying up here?”

  “We’re planning on refueling and taking some shore leave. We’ll need two medium berths, one of those needs to be a bay for unloading.”

  “Total will be six hundred for each twenty-four hour period. How long’re you staying?”

  “Put us down for twenty-four, we’re on a tight schedule. Any problem if we need to extend that?”

  “We don’t get that busy, I’ve got you down, Captain …” He was obviously fishing for my name.

  “Liam. Thank you. Over and out.” Terminate Comm.

  All ship announcement. “We’ll be arriving at the ore station in thirty minutes. Prepare for arrival.”

  Incoming hail from Adela Chen.

  “Hey there Ada, what’s up?”

  “Have you called in our arrival to Jeratorn?”

  “Just did.”

  “Stay on the comm. I’m going to talk to the co-op ore station.”

  “Roger that,” I said.
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  “Jeratorn Ore Control, this is Adela Chen arriving with an empty string. Please provide instructions.”

  “Say again? That sounds like my girl from the Baux. That you Ada?” The man’s voice was pretty high and his inflections made him sound like he would be able to sing my old earth country music pretty well.

  “Yes, hello Elvard. How have you been?”

  “Can’t complain. Well, I suppose that’s not true, but good enough. Hey, I heard an awful rumor about your momma. Tell me it ain’t true.”

  I winced. I suppose he felt like he was on a private communication but what a thing to ask.

  “Mom and I got attacked on our way back from Delta. She didn’t make it.”

  “Sure sorry to hear about that. Is that the reason you’re sailing with a gun ship?”

  “Yes, at least partly.”

  “You’ll have to tell me all about it. You gonna be at the Welded Tongue later? I get off in a couple hours. You still owe me a date.”

  “Don’t make me hurt you. Tell you what though, I’ll buy you a beer.”

  “It’s a date.” Elvard’s voice was triumphant. “You have your pick of bays today, but we won’t have a shift until tomorrow that can load it. Things have been real slow.”

  “Tell me about it tonight?” Ada asked.

  “Talking sure is a thirsty business.”

  “See you tonight, Elvard.”

  “Count on it.”

  BUSINESS AS USUAL

  The Jeratorn Cooperative ore station sounded more impressive than it was. There was a total of three buildings sitting on a large, conveniently flat, asteroid. In this case, ‘large’ was a general description and did not indicate size on a solar system scale. This rock was only one kilometer long by five-hundred meters wide – nothing particularly spectacular. But from a ‘really great place to sift and stack a few hundred million tonnes of refinery grade ore’ perspective, this was one of the coolest asteroids and largest rocks I’d ever seen. I suspected someone had located it and paid to have it towed into its current location. Or possibly, Jeratorn station had been moved nearby because of this rock’s particular utility.

  The power plant, machine shop, and control tower were located on the narrow side of the asteroid. Blinking blue lights marked the location of the gravity generators placed every twenty meters along the circumference. The generators were connected by thick power cables to each in series, finally ending back at the power plant.