I smiled at her. “Relax,” I said. “Get something to eat. You know where the galley is. We’ll be on Ponce de Leon in another twelve hours, so …” I gestured at the big screen. “Maybe look at some videos, get a feel for the place. Do you know how to work the screen?”
“Pippa does.”
“Good. Call one of us if you need help.”
I drifted out into the trunk corridor. Time to tackle MF. I climbed through the child-sized pressure door at the aft end of the trunk corridor, into the dark, noisy universe of the engineering deck.
The Kroolth—the aliens who commissioned the St. Clare for their ill-fated emperor—were no more than waist high on an adult human. It was the ship’s biggest drawback. We could not replace the airlocks. We’d raised the ceilings of the trunk corridor and the berths as far as possible, which involved tearing out all the wiring and plumbing in the interdeck spaces and redoing it, a huge job that had kept me and Dolph in construction overalls for one whole summer. Raising the ceilings on the engineering deck? With every bulkhead concealing vital conduits, and gigavolt electrical equipment built into the decks themselves? Not gonna happen.
Which was one of the reasons I’d hired an engineer whose preferred animal form was a snake.
“Marty,” I yelled, floating in a hunched-over fetal position, peering into the dimness. Readouts flashed on the wall consoles and the hulking torus of the antimatter containment ring. Otherwise the engineering deck was dark … apart from the flickering light of a screen in the far corner, near the thermoelectric converter that generated the ship’s housekeeping power.
The screen’s light reflected dully on scales, and slit-pupiled golden eyes. A jet-black python slithered towards me, flexing his coils against the bramble-like knots of coolant pipes to propel himself through the air. “What’s up?” It was strange to see the snake’s lipless mouth form English words. There’s a reason there are not many reptilian Shifters. That’s pro-level Shifting.
“MF here?”
“He’s here,” Martin said. “We’re watching a movie.”
“I figured.” I flew after Martin to his cozy den behind the thermoelectric converter. He had stuck a foldable screen to the housing of one of the giant electromagnets which stood out from the AM ring. On it, a white tiger was doing something to a human woman that looked anatomically improbable.
“Oh yeah, give it to her, baby,” Mechanical Failure cawed at the screen.
“Hate to interrupt,” I said, “but if you could get your microprocessors out of the gutter for a moment …”
“C’mon Mike, this is a good one. It ain’t just the usual bestiality shtick.”
“I’ll leave that up to those who have watched enough of this crap to know the difference,” I said, keeping my eyes averted from the screen.
“Meh,” Martin said. “It’s all fake anyway. Guaranteed natural don’t mean a thing these days.” He turned the screen off.
“Oh man,” Mechanical Failure complained. “Let’s just watch the bit where he, you know, on her tits.” His googly, lamp-like optical sensors glowed in the near-darkness; the LEDs on the thermoconverter reflected off his boxy metal housing and long bendy neck.
You may be wondering how I got stuck with a hopelessly randy maintenance bot. I often wondered, too. The answer is that he came with the St. Clare. I was in a tight spot at the time I bought her, and didn’t look too closely at what I was getting. The ship’s eminently satisfactory specs and majestically tough build blinded me to the reason she had sat in that scrapyard for months: Mechanical Failure.
Our name for him reflected his unfitness for purpose. He was supposed to perform janitorial tasks, as well as assisting Martin, but he never did anything without being explicitly ordered to, which was why the ship’s living quarters were so dirty that the refugee kids had taken it on themselves to clean the toilets and scrub the bulkheads. The pornography thing, we believed, was the flip side of his disinterest in his actual job. Bots—especially those not made by humans—can occasionally “transgress” their hardwired skill sets, developing quirky obsessions and fetishes. It could have been worse. At least MF mostly favored professional porn made by consenting adults. We kept him around because he was kinda likable, in his eccentric way … and because he did occasionally come in handy.
“I was just wondering,” I said, “if you keep backups of the external camera feeds.”
“There’s backups in the system,” MF said. “Hey Mike, why isn’t there much reverse bestiality porn? Y’know, where he’s in human form and she’s in animal form.”
Bestiality is the awkwardly blunt Shifter term for sex where one partner is in their animal form, and the other isn’t. I cringed. “Ask Martin, he’s the expert. The files I’m looking for are missing out of the system. Don’t you have a complete mirror in there?” I tapped the brushed steel housing that concealed MF’s inner parts. It was like bot clothes. Once or twice I’d seen him open himself up to replace a component or something—he was like a coral reef in there, a motley, bulgy mass of components accreted around a hidden spine.
“Yes,” MF said. “But it’ll cost ya. Five gigs of guaranteed natural threesomes, preferably featuring big cats, with full-surround zoomable camera angles and high-fidelity audio.”
“Jesus, now I have to bribe you for my own goddamn files?”
MF laughed—a creaky haw-hawing—and rocked in the air. Martin the python laughed too, his lipless mouth gaping wide. “The bot’s just kidding. Lighten up.”
“It’s so cute the way you get all hot under the collar,” MF cackled.
I tried to take it in good part, realizing that they aimed to cheer me up. “Fine, give me the files, and if what I’m looking for is there, I’ll buy you something for your collection.” It was only fair really, since MF did not require a wage. A thought struck me. “After you do that, I have another job for you.”
“Nooo,” MF said. “Not unless Irene’s doing it, too. Is she?”
He had a total crush on Irene. It was tough for her. She had duct-taped over all the cameras in her berth to ensure MF couldn’t spy on her naked, and she’d encouraged Kimmie to do the same. The thought of Kimmie made me frown at the bot. He had had a crush on her, too … but now she was gone, he showed no grief. It destroyed the anthropomorphic illusion. “Sorry, suitcase,” I said. “I want you to give those three kids literacy tests. I don’t know if they know anything. Can they even read and write? Can they use a computer? Find out if they have any skills I could put on their asylum applications.”
“Oooh!” MF said, perking up. “Pippa! She’s such a cutie! Can I give her a physical examination, too?”
I took a secure handhold and swatted him with my other hand, sending him sailing across the engineering deck towards the exit. “Don’t you fucking dare,” I yelled after him. After the pressure door closed behind him, I sighed. “That bot is the goddamn limit.”
“You take him too seriously,” Martin said. He wound his coils loosely around me. It was cramped back here. “He’d never actually lay a finger, I mean a gripper, on any of our girls.”
“I certainly hope not.”
“What are you looking for in those files?”
“Maybe nothing. I’d rather not say until I find it.”
“Fair enough.” The AM ring hummed like a distant river. The skip field generator ticked at a panicky rate like a mouse’s heartbeat. For a moment I wished I could stay back here forever, cocooned in the dark and the reassuring noise.
“I have to go reduce the multiplier again,” I said, and pushed on the python’s smooth, muscular coils to free myself. “No one’s done the bills of lading or the customs paperwork, either. It’s all just sitting there. Jesus.”
Martin tightened his upper coil, trapping me. “Not to add to your worries, but we’re also low on water. Pushing too much mass.”
“Sorry about that,” I said dryly.
“Nothing to do about it except dump the cargo or the kids.”
“Very funny.”
“But just so you’re aware, we’re not going to have much room to maneuver once we come out of the field.”
“Got it,” I said. “Straight down to the PdL, no messing around.” I wearily headed back to the bridge.
11
We dropped out of the skip field 100,000 klicks from Ponce de Leon. You can’t travel at a significant fraction of light speed any closer to an inhabited planet. Mid-space collisions, however statistically unlikely, do happen, and the PdL has a lot of stuff in orbit around it. Satellites and space stations and on-orbit manufacturing facilities cluster in tightly managed bands out to 20,000 klicks, where the furthest observation sats roam. Another cluster of stuff, including fuel depots, FTL drone relay nodes, and the Fleet garrison’s space dock, hangs out at the Lagrange point between the PdL and its larger, closer moon, 320,000 klicks away. Then there’s more stuff in cislunar orbit, mostly related to antimatter production and defense. You get the picture. Ponce de Leon is one of humanity’s three Heartworlds in the Cluster. It’s busy.
I would never be entirely at home on Ponce de Leon. I came from San Damiano, the Shifter homeworld, outside the Cluster. So did Dolph. Martin came from some kind of screwed-up orbital habitat in the Cloudworlds. Irene, however, was PdL born and bred, and her eyes shone with anticipation and relief as we acquired our first images of “the Puddle,” its oceans mostly obscured by the characteristic brownish haze of cloud.
My expression probably mirrored hers. While Ponce de Leon may not be the home of my dreams, it was where Lucy was. And wherever she was, was home to me.
Dolph flipped the ship, opened the throttle, and switched on the exhaust field, in the reverse of the acceleration burn that had begun our voyage. The St. Clare rattled and howled as we decelerated towards Ponce de Leon. I reached for the comms and reported our arrival.
“Welcome back, St. Clare,” said a warm female voice. Mainstream humans are so nice, when they aren’t provoked. “Y’all are cleared to land at Mag-Ingat Spaceport at 14:37 local time. You can go ahead and transmit your customs declaration, a copy of your landing license, and your port fee. Have a great day.”
“Thanks, and you have a great day, too,” I started to say. Then Irene interrupted me.
“What do you want to bet that’s them?” she drawled in weary disbelief.
*
I let out a string of curses that would have made my old commanding officer in the 15th Recon proud.
The image on our now-repaired radar clearly showed a Traveller ship. Zane’s ship. It was about 10,000 klicks away, but overhauling us steadily as we decelerated.
“Holy crap,” Dolph said. “They chased us all the way from Gvm Uye Sachttra?!”
Now I remembered that I’d seen a dot behind us just as we entered the skip field. Goddammit. The Travellers must have burned straight after us. Their ship had been invisible to our optics and IR because it had been plumb on our six, hidden by our own exhaust plume.
I broke out in a cold sweat.
We were trapped.
“They’ve got a HERF mast,” Irene said urgently.
“If they get caught with that in PdL space, they’re screwed,” Dolph said.
“Yeah, but here’s the thing,” I said. “We’re screwed.”
Now that we were in Ponce de Leon space, every move we made would be observed by the authorities. And they had my transponder tag and my voiceprint. They knew exactly who I was.
“It won’t do us much good,” I said, “to disable or destroy them, and then get charged with a felony.” I had hesitated to fight the Travellers in Gvm Uye Sachttra’s orbital space, and the same considerations applied here to the power of ten. There was far more stuff around Ponce de Leon for a dead ship to collide with. Space debris is a massive problem that gets worse every time a satellite fails, never mind a 200-tonne spaceship. Orbital wrecking is a misdemeanor; ship killing is a felony. “We can’t fight them,” I said through clenched teeth, staring at the Traveller ship.
“You’re breaking my heart here,” Dolph said. “In that case, we’ll just have to outrun them.” Without waiting for my OK, he bent to the controls. “Pausing our deceleration burn.” The ship jolted. When we switched off the external field, we had been moving at 0.25% of light speed, having steadily dialed down our multiplier since the midpoint of our voyage. But to decelerate outside of the field, you have to increase your exhaust field multiplier, blasting against your direction of travel. Now we were no longer decelerating. The Traveller ship began to shrink again.
But this, too, was a risky move. As Martin had warned me, we were low on water. If we were going too fast when we reached PdL orbital space, we wouldn’t have enough thrust left to get into orbit. We’d slingshot away from the planet again, and end up drifting in space, a sitting duck for the Travellers.
“Can’t fight them, can’t outrun them,” I muttered. “One option left.” Without glancing at the others, I punched the comms. “Mayday,” I snapped. “Independent freighter St. Clare to PdL garrison. This ship is under attack.” The Travellers hadn’t actually attacked us yet, but we all knew they were going to. “Request assistance, over.”
“Oh boy,” Irene said.
“Are you crazy?” Dolph yelped.
“Probably,” I said.
“If the Fleet catches them,” Dolph said patiently, through gritted teeth, “they’ll sing. Then what?”
I was all too aware of the risk. If the Travellers were taken into custody, they’d tell the authorities what we did on Gvm Uye Sachttra. An explosion in orbit, dead Travellers on the ground—how many? I didn’t even know. We might have left as many as a dozen corpses bleeding out on the alien dirt. All of them pirates, to be sure, but all of them men and women. Lives with as much value as anyone else’s. The Sophia saga would come to light, as well. I saw a nightmare vision of myself paraded through a courtroom, electronic restraints on my wrists and ankles, Lucy watching.
“Naw,” I said, with a confidence I did not feel. “They won’t catch ‘em. You know what the Fleet’s like. They live for this shit. They’ll blow ‘em into a thousand pieces.” Irene and Dolph did not look convinced. “Anyway, it would look worse not to call for assistance!” I said.
At long last my Mayday call was answered. “Reading you, St. Clare,” came a relaxed male voice. “This is the Garibaldi. We see that ship. Travellers, huh?”
“That’s what it looks like to me,” I said.
“Breaking the speed limit some, ain’t they?” It was a warning to me, as well. I was also breaking the speed limit. “We are orbiting at 200 klicks, but will be with you shortly.”
“Appreciate it, Garibaldi.” I located the Fleet orbital patrol ship’s transponder tag on the radar, and cursed. It was 40,000 goddamn kilometers away, albeit closer all the time. “I may be compelled to take defensive action.”
“Do what you gotta do, St. Clare. Out.”
That wasn’t much of a permission slip, but it was good enough for me. “Irene, get their range and put a warning shot into their armor.”
“Just a warning shot?”
“Yes.”
“OK,” she said. “I’ll put a couple of missiles in their nose shield. Scare the stinky black pants off them.”
We carried active-guided missiles with conventional warheads, skirting around the civilian ban on AI guidance and nukes. Irene loosed two of our Raptor missiles from the launchers on PAIM’s belly. They curved gracefully across the void. It was a complete waste of munitions. Twin explosions guttered out in the void.
“They’ve got point defenses as good as ours,” Irene said angrily. “I could sit here doing this all day and it wouldn’t make any difference.”
All this time we were screaming towards Ponce de Leon. I checked our reactant mass reserves again. The news was not good. On cue, Martin rang up from the engineering deck. “You planning to crash right into the PdL, Mike? Or just do a fly-by?”
I gritted my teeth. “Copy.” I thought of the ref
ugee kids, all crammed into Kimmie’s berth. They were counting on me to save them. “Dolph, we’re gonna decelerate into orbit.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yes.” We didn’t have water to burn on circularizing an irregular orbit, which was what we’d end up in if we didn’t slow down now. “Initiating thrust." I opened the throttle.
“OK, here we go,” Dolph said. He started dialing the exhaust field multipler up. Jolt. Seventy. Jolt. Ninety. Jolt. One hundred and twenty. The jolts were heavy as hell now. They felt like car crashes, each one delivering up to 40 Gs for a split second, punching us back hard against our couches. Jolt. One hundred and forty. Jolt. This was where the St. Clare really shone. No ordinary ship could decelerate this hard. In an FTL-capable ship, hull strength determines maneuverability, and my lovely ship could withstand stresses that would have crippled anything short of a Fleet fighter. Dizzied by the gees, I watched the radar altimeter spinning down. 3,000 … 2,000. “That’s it,” I shouted.
Dolph was already on it, killing the field. Our velocity had dropped right down to 20 kps, and we were on course for orbital insertion, albeit with not much of a margin for error.
The Travellers had not decelerated anything like as hard, so now they were practically on top of us. They must’ve been cheering as I seemed to drop the St. Clare right into their jaws. They’d be singing a different tune when the Garibaldi slugged them—
“Do you read me, St. Clare?” the Garibaldi’s captain yelled over the radio.
“I read you,” I shouted, scanning the radar for the patrol ship.
“What the heck was that maneuver? Why didn’t your ship just fall apart?”
“She’s a good ‘un. Where are you?”
“Where you should be!”
My heart sank. I found the Garibaldi’s transponder tag. It was attached to an arrowhead screaming through a tight turn, 10,000 klicks beyond Ponce de Leon in the direction we had been travelling,
“Oh, great,” I groaned.
The Garibaldi’s captain had not expected that a mere freighter could do what we just did. My fast braking maneuver had left him where he had thought the fight was going to be … too far away to get back before the Travellers closed with us.
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