Torchship Pilot Read online

  “Hundreds,” said the metallurgist. “Maybe a dozen truly profitable ones. We’re only set up to do half of those fields. We’d need a three month trade study just to narrow down the options.”

  “If Amalgamated isn’t a likely user, who should we be talking to?”

  “Oh, no, no, we’d use it, I just don’t know what’s the best option. Doping nanochips maybe. How much do you want for it?”

  Schwartzenberger and Okida had rehearsed this part. “One million keys,” said the captain.

  “Oh, I can get you that.”

  “Per gram.”

  “That’s just—are you serious?”

  Okida said calmly, “I’m sure some other outfit would pay that much or more. But they’d have to find an analysis lab we and they can trust. Time-consuming. Your advantage is that you don’t have to waste our time.”

  “I can’t sign for that kind of money,” said McClendon.

  “But you know who can.”

  ***

  Three hours later Schwartzenberger and Okida walked out of Amalgamated Foundries’ building. “No hard feelings about the three percent?” asked the captain.

  The middleman laughed. “My punishment for being greedy. ‘Five, or three and I’ll give you five thousand keys up front.’ I thought I was taking advantage of you being a reckless optimist. And it’s still the most I’ve ever made for one day’s work.”

  Schwartzenberger endured a hug. “You spend some of your share on something fashionable,” said Okida, tugging on the spacer’s jumpsuit.

  “It’s comfortable.”

  “It’s noticeable. A Disker shouldn’t try to be noticed these days.” From some Fuzies ‘Disker’ would have been an insult. From Okida it just meant he was from the Disconnected Worlds.

  “I’m leaving as soon as the deal’s done.” Amalgamated was concealing its payment by overpaying Fives Full to haul some material. The logistics VP had promised to find an innocuous load by tomorrow.

  “Go straight home, my friend.” Okida walked briskly away.

  Schwartzenberger patted his cargo pocket to make sure the tens of millions of keys box was still there. The day was lovely, sunny with just enough breeze not to be too warm. He strolled down the sidewalk toward the spaceport.

  Two-thirds of the way there he had to stop. A line of people was blocking the sidewalk. They didn’t move at his “Excuse me.” He tried to see what they were staring at but just saw more of a crowd. Possibly another of Pintoy’s stipend kids was preparing public art. Elbowing his way through them would earn Schwartzenberger a fine for Anti-Social Contact and accumulate points toward being banned from the world. He decided to wait.

  A few minutes went by without any visible performance or a shift in the crowd. The sidewalk on the other side had more traffic than normal. People must be bypassing the obstruction. He opened up his datasheet and ordered a local search to see what was going on.

  The hot subject was “Disker.” He brought up the chatter. His skin prickled as he read it.

  “Look at him, standing there like he owns our world.”

  “Probably looking for security holes.”

  “Or stealing our tech for their AI developments.”

  “Bastards shoot holes in our ships and act innocent.”

  “Wish we’d nuked the whole planet, not just one town.”

  “Think he’s working for a Betrayer?”

  “How long until he realizes he’s trapped?”

  “You can get away with all sorts of stuff as long as you don’t physically harm him.”

  “The best trick is to get him to punch you. Then it’s all self-defense.”

  “Shouldn’t let the damn Diskers on our planet.”

  Schwartzenberger looked up from the sheet. A second line of people had formed behind him. He ran out into the street.

  Traffic was heavy but the autocars stopped clear of him. Schwartzenberger’s datasheet squawked with traffic fines. He tried running down the middle of the street to get around the crowd. Two drivers slid their cars gently together to block him. He dashed into a gap on the far sidewalk. Some of the pedestrians formed up in lines to block him.

  He tapped the emergency code into the datasheet.

  “Public Safety Services, how may I help you?”

  “Hello, my name is Alois Schwartzenberger, I am being harassed by a large number of people.”

  “Let me see if any Safety Officers are near—oh. Are you sure there’s a problem?” Her voice had changed from cheerful to harsh. His identity must have come up on her display.

  “They’re deliberately keeping me from moving. I’m feeling threatened.”

  “Crowds blocking you happens to everyone. It’s one of the prices of living in civilization. Just wait a bit and I’m sure you’ll be on your way.” The Public Safety dispatcher ended the connection.

  While he’d been talking the lines had spread out onto the curb. Now they were only separated by the trunk of the tree casting gentle shade on the scene.

  Schwartzenberger fought down his fear. He had to find a way out. Taking someone’s clothing was “mischief,” not assault, by Fusion law. If he bruised someone resisting they’d beat him senseless. There was no way he’d keep the box of ansonium.

  He called a cab. The datasheet displayed a countdown to its arrival.

  The lines were closing in on him. Everyone faced away, still pretending they weren’t paying attention to him. They’d take a step backward when he wasn’t looking.

  A low fence guarded the tree’s root system. Captain Schwartzenberger took three fast steps, put a foot on top of it, and pushed off hard. He grabbed a branch and pulled up hard enough for his feet to clear the heads of the line.

  Not installing an elevator in the cargo hold had been stinginess, not virtue. But all the hours of climbing the ladder to the main deck on high-grav worlds paid off now. He dropped to the road as the autocab came to a stop and popped its door open.

  Schwartzenberger fell across the seats and pulled his feet in. “Close the door and drive!”

  “Driving westbound, sir. Do you have a specific destination in mind, sir?” asked the autocab.

  “Spaceport. Landing pad twenty-two,” said the captain as he squirmed back upright.

  “Arrival in seven minutes, sir.”

  “Good.” He took the datasheet out of his pocket. It informed him that a two thousand key fine for arboreal vandalism had been added to his other infractions. Checking the buzz showed the mob had dispersed. No one hated him enough to risk the wrath of the cab company.

  Schwartzenberger started dictating a message to Okida. “Hi, buddy. I’d like you to do a renegotiation for me. Take an extra percent for it. Knock a tenth off the total price. I want it half as cash, half as export-level goods. Have them hire me to take the load to Bonaventure and I’ll keep it as the other half of my payment. Like you said, just go straight home.”

  ***

  Shi Bingrong, the First Mate, leapt to her feet as Schwartzenberger entered the galley. “What the hell happened to you?” she demanded.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Your hands are bleeding,” said Bing.

  The tree bark cuts had broken open again on the ladder up from the hold. “Just climbed a tree to avoid a crowd who took a dislike to me. Anyone else noticed Diskers getting worse treatment here?”

  Billy the deckhand said, “I’ve been getting thrown out of clubs just for being one.”

  “Some,” said Guo. “The local Confucian Revival groups split on Fusion-Disconnect lines. But it wasn’t anything overt, just people only socializing with their own.”

  “Heck of a thing for a philosophy that preaches social harmony,” quipped Mitchie.

  Guo shrugged. “If it was easy, we wouldn’t need a movement to work on it.” He turned back to the captain. “Why do you ask, sir?”

  Schwartzenberger winced as Bing applied antiseptic. “Some locals tried to throw a riot in my honor. I’m wondering if it was random or if so
meone set it up to get the loot off me.”

  Mitchie extracted the key details from him and spread out her datasheet. “It wasn’t newsworthy. I’ll dig into the buzz.”

  Bing’s datasheet announced a container had arrived. She headed down to sign for it. Billy followed to handle loading it into the hold.

  Ten minutes later Mitchie pushed the datasheet away. “Started with two guys who noticed you on the street. They got into a positive feedback loop of making nasty remarks and drew other people in. Both on stipend, no criminal history. They’re three degrees of separation from a bunch of Amalgamated employees, but so’s most of the planet. If someone arranged it he did a very professional job of covering his tracks.”

  “So we don’t know.”

  Mitchie shrugged. “It’s enough money to justify arranging something. But it’s not that unusual behavior.” She looked around to make sure the purely civilian members of the crew were still gone. “Speaking of the money, did you get any in advance? I got a note from DCC asking me to pick up some parts.”

  “No,” said Schwartzenberger. “I wanted to keep the deal simple.”

  “Okay. I won’t mind telling them no. They act like it’s their money.”

  “About that.” The captain hesitated. “I got a copy of the DCC regulations from the consulate.”

  “Oh?” asked Mitchie. The tension in her voice made Guo look up from his book.

  “There’s specific rules on undercover agents keeping profits from their operations. Anything over your military pay is supposed to be turned in. Sorry.”

  Mitchie remembered screen after screen of forms she’d had to sign off on. Halfway through she’d stopped reading them. Then she started cursing.

  Guo put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, we can live nicely on my share.” The curses dropped in volume.

  “Don’t make people think she’s just marrying you for your money,” said Schwartzenberger.

  “No worries, sir. Right, baobei?”

  Mitchie looked up at Guo and smiled. “I’m only marrying you for your money.” She kissed him firmly.

  “See?” Guo said to the captain. “It’s true love.”

  Captain Schwartzenberger kept his mouth shut.

  Mitchie changed the subject. “Oh, sir, I ran into a, um, professional colleague of mine. He’s worried about conditions here and wants to hitch a ride home. He might bring the wrong kind of attention down on us though.”

  “We’ll take him,” said the captain. “Any Disker who wants a ride out of the Fusion, we’ll take.”

  “There might be a lot of them,” said Guo. “The Council of Stakeholders just announced that because of the blockade against the Fusion Navy they’ve expelled all the observers from Disconnected Worlds and ordered them out of Fusion space.”

  Mitchie said, “That’s politics. Nothing to do with working stiffs like us.”

  “Our turn may be coming.”

  Corcyra, gravity 17.2 m/s2

  Mitchie decided the best thing she could do for the ship was make sympathetic noises while the captain ranted. Which he’d been doing ever since they left the Corcyra Groundport Administration Building.

  “They’re not even trying to be consistent,” continued Schwartzenberger. “If we’re such an unregulated danger to public safety, why are they letting us have a fully fueled ship right by their capital? It’s just another excuse to lock us down here. Fine, they’re pissed about one of their destroyers getting blown up. I didn’t do it. I ought to be mad at them for destroying two of the blockade ships.”

  Mitchie murmured agreement as she followed him up the ramp to Fives Full’s airlock.

  Bing was in the cargo hold, restowing some of the safety gear that had been strewn about by the latest inspections. “How’d it go?” she asked.

  Captain Schwartzenberger lay down on a crate, trying to catch his breath from climbing the ramp in high gravity.

  Mitchie answered her. “Complete waste of time. They ran us in circles around the building. Nobody’s willing to admit to issuing the grounding order in the first place.” She sniffed at the air, then took a deeper breath through her nose. “Have you guys been welding or something?”

  “Something,” said Bing with a smirk. “Talk to Guo.”

  A clang made Mitchie look up. The elevator basket had been attached to the crane and positioned by the top of the ladder. Billy had just tossed something into it from the main deck hatch. She decided to go see Guo’s project.

  Mitchie eyed the elevator basket. It would be so much easier than climbing the ten meter ladder in this gravity. But the captain kept doing it the hard way, and she was damned if she’d look weak while he was watching.

  The rungs were close enough together that she’d take every other one when she was hurrying at normal acceleration. With Corcyra nearly doubling her weight she didn’t even think of skipping one. She didn’t lift her feet to alternate rungs. She put both of them on the same rung so she could rest for an instant between steps. No wonder the other Fusion worlds didn’t slow down our paperwork. They wanted us to get here so we’d be stuck in the worst gravity well around.

  The climb was easier near the top. As the hull curved in the ladder followed so she didn’t have to haul herself straight up anymore. Still, she was thrilled when Guo stuck his hand through the hatch and pulled her up to the main deck. He gave her a quick kiss – she was panting too hard for anything more. Instead he wrapped an arm around her shoulders as she sat with her feet dangling out of the hatch.

  When Mitchie’s breathing was almost back to normal, Guo pulled her to her feet. “Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

  She followed him through his – their – cabin hatch. “Oh, my God! It’s huge!” No groundhog would agree with her, but for a spacer, both the room and the bed in it were astoundingly big. The bulkhead between Guo’s cabin and the unused one next to it had been cut out. The air still stank of welding gasses. “Where did you get that bed?”

  Guo had a grin as big as the bed. “We were getting a fresh food delivery. The chandlery has everything in stock so I just added a couple of things to the order.”

  Mitchie flopped onto the bed. The mattress held up her back as firmly as a teddy bear’s hug. “Ooooh. This is nice.”

  He bent down to kiss her. “Nothing but the best for my Michigan.” He stood up and pulled a bundle from a sack on the wall. It unfolded as he hooked rings onto latches on the walls. Mitchie looked up through the net as it stretched over the bed. “Free-fall hammock,” he said. “No more belting ourselves to the bed. This holds us comfortably together during coast. If someone puts on the torch, we land on the bed.”

  “I can think of all sorts of possibilities for that,” she said.

  Guo smirked. “I’ll talk to the captain about conserving fuel with longer coasts.”

  Mitchie sat up and looked around. “Where’s all your stuff?”

  “Across the hall in the empty cabin. Didn’t want any of it catching sparks while we were cutting. I’ll move it back in tomorrow.” He sat down next to her. “Where do you want to put your things?”

  She’d been sleeping in his cabin but going back to her own to change clothes and such. It’s not like I need to hide the classified files from him anymore. She pointed between the hatches. “I’d like to put my picture of the family homestead there.”

  Guo wrapped his arms around her. “Sounds good.”

  “And my teddy bears go on the bed.”

  “I’ll cope.” He kissed her. “We need to break in this bed,” he said.

  “Yes, we do.”

  “As soon as we get off this fucking planet,” they said together.

  Chapter Two: Eavesdropping

  Bonaventure System, acceleration 10 m/s2

  Escaping Corcyra came down to bribery. The Erdos system didn’t try to delay them. One more gate put them in Bonaventure. “Home at last!” yelled Captain Schwartzenberger as the G4 sun appeared.

  For Mitchie the best part of
being back in the Disconnect was getting to use computers on the ship again. Fusion regulations banned computers that weren’t continually monitored by their networks. Now they could pick up a navigation box to do the hard part for them. Once they landed. She took out her sliderule and began calculating the best turnover time.

  Permission to actually come home required a lengthy chat with Traffic Control. Halfway through Mitchie muttered, “It’s like a Turing Test for being a Disker.” The paranoia made more sense when Control mentioned a cruiser had been lost in the latest skirmish.

  TC finally admitted they were actually the Fives Full returning to her home port. The landing clearance sent them to pad A7 at Redondo Field.

  “Where the hell is Redondo?” asked the captain, reaching for the Bonaventure almanac.

  “A couple hundred klicks south of the capital,” answered Mitchie. “Joint civil and Defense Force spaceport.”

  “Really? I don’t think it ever came up in the budget discussions.”

  “It’s the DCC Intelligence headquarters. Officially it’s Refurbishment Depot Four.”

  “I see. Guess it’s time to meet my chain of command.”

  Landing at Redondo Field was no different from any other port. The Disker refugees they’d accumulated, including Singh, were turned over to Spaceport Services to find their way home. An hour after touchdown a courier came aboard, wearing a civilian jumpsuit and military haircut. He handed the captain a datasheet and left.

  The crew had been discussing possible buyers for the Eden loot in the galley. They’d dropped it while the courier was there. As the captain read through the message Billy resumed his pitch for approaching museum workers. No one else wanted to debate him.

  Captain Schwartzenberger passed the datasheet to Mitchie. He said, “Billy, you have a week’s paid leave. Pack your duffle and be off the ship in ten minutes.”