Storm Between the Stars: Book 1 in the Fall of the Censor

by Karl K Gallagher

  He stepped aside to make room for the first mate. Rubbing the ball of his thumb smeared a barely visible drop of blood. Had the gadget injected something? Or taken a sample? Either way it didn’t hurt.

  The crew rotated through efficiently. When sweat drops landed on the gadget the ensign wiped it clean with a handkerchief.

  Landry wished he’d brought a cloth to wipe his face. Swiping his hand over his forehead sent stray drops into his eyes. The salt stung. He was glad he’d worn a short sleeve shipsuit. A formal outfit would give him heat stroke.

  Not that the Censorial officer seemed bothered by the heat.

  When the last crewman intoned, “Welly Smat. Azure Tarn,” the officer tucked the gadget away again.

  “Thank you for your cooperation,” said the officer. “If you need any assistance contact Spaceport Control.”

  He pivoted on his heel and marched back to the two seater. A black box clung to the center of the jacket. Hairs on the back of his neck waved in the breeze blowing out of the collar.

  Crap, thought Landry. These guys would rather wear portable coolers than dress for the weather.

  The inspector and his driver left with a barely audible hum.

  “That was strange,” declared Lane.

  Landry nodded. “Didn’t ask about our itinerary, didn’t look at the cargo. Least curious customs guy I ever saw.”

  “Was he customs?” asked Marcus. “He just cared about people. Felt like Immigration or law enforcement.”

  Gander grumbled, “It’s too hot to care. The thruster’s due for a tear down. Let’s get started.” A jerk of his thumb sent Tets into the ship ahead of him. The apprentice looked back over his shoulder at the fascinating new world as he went through the airlock.

  Over the next hour most of the crew went back into the cool of the spaceship. The Bundoran spaceport didn’t look that different from the ones back home except in its stolid hurricane-proofing.

  Landry kept watching. He could do that without creating a traceable record in the planetary data network. He soaked up the size of the ships in port, the efficiency of loading and unloading, and the traffic to the monolithic city.

  The people mostly fell into two categories—ornately uniformed government people supervising or interrupting work, and locals wearing hats and sometimes not much else. The locals were a consistent ethnic group, sharp straight-nosed faces with a coffee-with-two-creams complexion. The government ones had every kind of face Landry had seen before and a few not found in the Fieran Bubble. The handful of spacers from other worlds were as varied as the uniformed ones.

  Walking around his ship let Landry survey the rest of the spaceport. Traffic wasn’t overwhelming it. Only half the hangars had a ship in them. The landing circles on the flat expanse were three quarters empty. Past the hangars he could see a fleet of sailing ships with yellow sails headed toward the city.

  A floater turned off the lane into Azure Tarn’s landing circle. It slowed, not making the aggressive approach of the inspector’s craft. The driver sat on a bench wide enough for three. The rear was a square open-topped cargo compartment, not holding anything big enough to stick up over the sides.

  It stopped a dozen yards away. “Is this Azure Tarn?” called the driver.

  “Aye,” answered Landry.

  The driver hopped out and walked forward, hand extended. He wore a short sleeve shirt and pants stopping just above his knee. They were made of shimmering fabric in complementary shades of grey. A green vest was decorated with white piping. Pockets held markers and a hand screen. His head was protected by a conical hat held on with a string under the chin.

  “Greetings! I’m Vychan Goch. Heard you had something for me.”

  He took Landry’s hand in both of his. The captain brought his left up for a full double-handed clasp. The broker was an inch or two below Landry’s six feet. Grey hair and smile lines around the mouth and eyes said age, but he still had a firm grasp.

  “We came from the far side of Fwynwr Ystaen. We’re being paid in metal to transport some of their output here. We have some cargo of our own that might be of interest.” Landry waved toward the cargo hatch, now open to let the sea breeze blow some of the musty air out of their life support system.

  Vychan stepped forward. “I didn’t know there was anything past there. The Censorate says it is a dead end.”

  “We, ah, stumbled over a new route.”

  “By-passing the Censorial tariffs. That could be profitable, until they cover the gap.” The local said this with a slight smile.

  “If we can find the right partnerships to make it work.”

  “I’m sure we can.” Vychan cocked his head at the other crew standing outside.

  Landry introduced them. “Mr. Goch, this is the ship’s first mate, and my wife, Lane. Our son Marcus. And Spacer Vissen.”

  Vychan Goch shook hands all around. “Delighted to meet you. Welcome to Corwynt. I’m glad to see you have a family crew.”

  “Just the three of us are family. The rest are contract crew.” Though Alys seemed to want to change that.

  “Ah. Would you be willing to say they are family? That would make things easier when they’re off-ship.”

  Landry glanced at his wife. She nodded. “Certainly,” he said. “Unless there’s penalties for misrepresenting a relationship?”

  “No, no, it’s an expected fiction. But it allows the law to turn miscreants over to you for punishment.”

  “Then they’re my cousins.”

  “Good. Now let’s see this cargo.”

  Marcus handled the tour of the cargo hold. Vychan took notes on his screen. Alys helped with the speculative cargo, using the overhead crane to lift the top items off stacks to reveal the pallets underneath.

  The ship had a full inventory of the cargo. Trying to transfer that from Azure Tarn’s core to Vychan’s gadget failed. Vychan set up a data connection with the spaceport. Only basic text worked but that let a message go through.

  “We may extract extra value for the foods for their novelty. An auction would maximize that, but I’ll need time to set it up. How long do you plan to be on world?”

  “We don’t have a schedule. We can stay a few weeks to maximize the profit.” And find out as much about this Censorate as we can.

  “On an open pad? If you stay through the next storm you’ll need a hangar.”

  Landry chuckled. “I’d take a hangar. But we don’t have any cash to rent one.”

  “You will. That Ytterbium isn’t enough to cover the standard shipping fees for this much mass. I’ll deposit the difference into an account for you.” Vychan tapped on his screen. “A temporary account? Or do you want to reserve some cash for your next visit?”

  “We’ll be back. But I’d rather convert everything to goods when we leave.”

  “Of course.” The broker was unsurprised. “There. Deposit will go through as soon as we unload the ingots. When can we do that?”

  “Now.”

  “I’ll call my nephew.”

  The nephew and a few other members of the Goch family arrived with three floaters, two cargo haulers, and a mid-size vehicle holding a forklift on treads. Landry was relieved to see Corwynt’s cheap antigravity couldn’t handle every function.

  The Gochs were efficient. The stacks of ingots were offloaded in half the time it had taken to bring them on. As the forklift was loaded onto its carrier again, Vychan turned to Landry.

  “My clan can’t feed your whole crew on this short notice but we can squeeze in two or three. May I treat you to dinner, Captain?”

  “Certainly. Let me see who else is available.” Landry jerked his head at his first mate. They moved to the side to discuss it. Vychan obligingly had Marcus lead him back to the stack of speculative cargo.

  “If you’re asking me out to dinner, I say yes,” said Lane.

  Landry gave her a wry smile. “I’d love to. But not yet. I want you here in command in case Vychan pulls a fast one. We don’t know a thing about hi
m or this planet.”

  “Welly found a text-only news feed we can get through that connection. There’s even a weather forecast.”

  “Good.” He looked over the forecast, which was unsurprisingly focused on hurricane movements. “Find out everything you can. I’m going to bring Marcus for his education. And in case it gets ugly—Tets.”

  Lane pursed her lips. “Gander is a better brawler than Tets.”

  “Yeah. But he starts too many fights. Tets does as he’s told.”

  “All right. Shall I get some pistols out of the armory?”

  The captain shook his head. “Not until we know the rules here. We’ll have knives. It’s easier to claim ignorance with them.”

  ***

  Landry shared the floater’s bench with Vychan. Marcus and Tets sat in the back, their elbows resting on a toolbox. The massive side of the city rose above them. The wall was smooth. Lines of windows and hatches showed but didn’t rise above the surface.

  They were headed for a tunnel, the smallest of the openings where the structure met the spaceport. The hatch to close it during storms rested against the wall. Landry studied it as they went through. It was three feet thick at the edge. The center held crisscrossing girders to strengthen it against tidal surges.

  The forecast guaranteed no hurricanes would hit Bundoran in the next six days. Landry resolved to move his ship into a hangar sooner rather than later.

  A glowing strip down the center of the tunnel roof shed bright light. It still felt gloomy after the cloudless sky over the spaceport.

  It was hard to tell how fast they were going. At least twice the speed they’d used in the spaceport. A truck flew past in the other direction too fast for him to get a look at it.

  Then they were out of the tunnel in a park. Sunlight shone through the clear wall high above. People picnicked under the trees. A game or brawl rolled across the grass.

  It took Landry a moment to realize the sky overhead was painted on the ceiling. The interior of the pyramid was half open space, half smaller pyramids stacked with their corners on the peaks of the ones below.

  Vychan turned right at an intersection in the park. They were pointed at a truncated pyramid painted in pastel greens and blues with brown rectangles. Balconies and glowing windows interrupted the curves of color.

  The entry had a less robust version of the hatch closing off the outside of the city. The inside had only artificial light and was broken up into substructures each about the size of Landry’s ship. Animated signs bore a mix of news and advertisements.

  “Welcome to East Docks!” declared Vychan. “Goch Home is right over there.”

  He pointed at an upper level block. The vehicle elevator was a large ring carrying the floater up a triangular shaft. Then they were getting out at a door.

  Or rather a hatch. The wall was sloped in. The door was more solid than the pressure hatches on Azure Tarn. Well, those only had to hold one atmosphere of force. Landry was impressed that they needed to build to be stormproof even inside the city.

  Goch Home was a flurry of introductions, too many names for Landry to catch. He did memorize Vychan’s wife’s name, Emlyn.

  When the commotion died down (you’d think the man had been away from home for a month. Or did everyone want to see the off-worlders?), Vychan sniffed the air. “What’s cooking for dinner?”

  “Dinner will be late,” said Emlyn. “The Jaaphisii have brought a kraken into port. We’re waiting for the market to open.”

  Vychan turned to the Fierans. “You are lucky men. We’ll introduce you to the best of our food.”

  A young woman said, “Papa, we should go down now and be ready when they open.”

  “Very well,” said Vychan. His wife nodded and tossed her daughter a small sack.

  “Do you two feel up to carrying the cut?” the youngster asked Marcus and Tets. Wynny, that was her name.

  The boys eagerly agreed. Well, she was cute. Marcus looked to his father for permission. Landry nodded.

  ***

  Wynny filled the trip to the fish market with questions about living in space. Marcus answered without revealing they’d come from outside the Censorate, per his father’s orders. Tets stayed silent.

  An elevator took them down to the base of the pyramid. Wynny led them down a corridor that had a salt air tang.

  Nothing in this city was bare concrete or metal, Marcus noticed. This corridor was decorated with monstrous sea creatures. She pointed to a many-tentacled thing dwarfing the sailboats harpooning it. “That’s a kraken. We’re picking up a filet of it for the family’s dinner.”

  “A native species?” asked Marcus.

  “Uh-huh. The ecology is mostly compatible with humans. Don’t eat something you pull out of the sea at random. But the Jaaphisii know what’s good to eat.”

  “Who are the—Jaaphisii?” asked Marcus, fumbling over the unfamiliar word.

  “The sailors. They live at sea.” The corridor widened out into a harbor. Sailing ships were tied up at the piers.

  Marcus stared at the ships. He’d seen sailboats on Fiera. They had wood hulls and woven sails. These ships were strange to him. The sails had veins on them. The hulls looked organic.

  The center pier didn’t have a ship. The kraken floated there, twice the length of the largest ship in harbor. Hawsers wrapped around the tentacles to hold it in place. A severed tentacle lay on the pier. Men with knives as long as they were tall sliced it into chunks.

  “They’ve opened the market!” exclaimed Wynny. She led them to the crowd at the base of the pier.

  Marcus felt useful at last. He wasn’t as tall as Tets but he still had enough mass to shield Wynny from the jostling of the crowd. She took advantage of her protectors to force her way through the mob.

  The merchants at the tables looked like a different ethnic group. Marcus looked closer. No, they had similar faces to Bundoran’s residents but their skin was darkened and roughened from a life on the sea.

  “Twenty green for hundred weight,” said the old woman at Wynny’s table, spitting the words out like bullets.

  “I don’t want tentacle meat,” replied Wynny. “The filet below the eye. One thirty weight.”

  “Oooh, someone wants the savory. It’ll cost you.”

  As the merchant gestured Marcus realized she wasn’t old, no older than his mother. Her face was so lined and weathered he’d misjudged her age.

  Wynny took red and gold striped plastic disks from the sack she carried and laid them on the table.

  “No so rude as some city folk you are. Five more.”

  “Do I look like a Censorial?” She put down two more.

  The older woman glared. “I said five.”

  “Will you let it rot waiting for rich folk to come down from the upper levels? You’re not the only fleet to call here.”

  “Feh.” The coins went into a sack under the table. A stream of orders sent four knife wielders trotting toward the swollen end of the tentacle on the pier.

  The trio slid over to an empty spot while the merchant began her next dicker. Wynny tapped the plastic disk hanging from her shoulder on a strap. “You’ll have to carry the meat through the crowd, but once we have some room I can put it on the minifloat.”

  Marcus nodded. He watched more flensers peeling the skin off the kraken’s head. As one piece caught the sunlight he recognized the vein pattern. “They make their sails from that!”

  “Yes. The ships are all made from the sea monsters.” Wynny pointed to ships. “That one’s hull is a leviathan shell. The masts are spines from megasharks. And there’s a triton skeleton with scales to waterproof it.”

  “Wow. Do they build their houses from them too?”

  “They don’t have houses. Just ships.”

  “So they don’t live on land at all?”

  “Just when they come into port to sell a catch. They’ll buy some parts and tools, drink up the rest of the money, and be on their way.”

  That jolted Tets out of
his silence. “They don’t keep any money?”

  “If they have money, they get taxed. This way the Censorials can’t touch them. That’s how they want it.” Her voice was wistful.

  “Jealous?” asked Marcus.

  “Not really. Do you see any Jaaphisii here older than that merchant?”

  Marcus had been watching. “No.”

  “There usually aren’t. It’s a hard life. But they’re free.”

  Two young Jaaphisii staggered up with a slab of yellowish meat weighing more than Tets. It was sloppily wrapped in clear plastic. They slapped it onto the table.

  “Gentlemen,” said Wynny.

  Even with the crane doing most of the work, cargo hauling had put muscle on Marcus. He was glad of it now. Tets was four inches taller and in better shape and his face still showed the strain of heaving the load.

  The crowd was nice enough to make way for them. Marcus’ arms were screaming when they reached an open spot. Wynny tossed down her disk. It unfolded into an X. The boys centered the slab of meat and lowered it down.

  The shoulder strap was now a leash from one end of the X. Wynny squeezed it and the whole assembly lifted a few inches off the floor.

  Tets was astonished. Marcus tried to keep his poker face. He looked around and saw a few other customers towing their purchases away on antigrav. No one seemed surprised. That said the devices were cheap enough the Landrys would be able to buy a hundred of them at least. And a hundred antigrav generators would sell on Fiera for enough to buy a new ship.

  “Oh, damn. The rush started.” The corridor they’d come through was packed with people. Wynny turned right along the docks.

  They passed a couple of closed hatches. When they reached an open one Wynny tugged on the leash and the meat followed her in. The boys walked beside her. This one wasn’t as decorated. The walls were plain tan. Niches in the walls held live plants every few yards. Some had tendrils drooping almost to the ground.

  A cross-corridor branched off to the right. As the trio passed it a clipped voice called, “Cityfolk, let’s have thanks.”

  Wynny mumbled a curse.

  A tall young Jaaphisii strode up to them with a rolling gait. He wore loose shorts and a pocketed vest. Harsh sun had burned his arms and legs despite their darkness. He wasn’t wearing a hat but the smooth tone of his face said he did at sea. His expression was angry, predatory, hungry. “Thank us Jaaphisii for your dinner.”