Transference Station (2 page)

Descended from the dumb and the desperate
. Lana snorted to herself. Calder Durk would fit in just fine on her crew; as long as he stopped trying to seduce her, that is. She glanced around the bridge. Its design gave the effect of being open to space between its reinforced girders. Hyperspace’s rainbow smears had replaced the velvet star-studded night of normal space. Flying through a dimensionless, colourful plane – a little like being gift-wrapped by the Northern Lights. Lana loved watching the planets and the stars from her command chair, but there was something about hyperspace’s flat alien depths that always left her unnerved.

‘Granny,’ said Lana. ‘Opaque the bridge’s hull. Then run a systems check and crew tally. Did we take any damage?’

‘All six members of crew are present and uninjured. No systems damage that I can sense,’ said the computer, blank walls replacing the view of hyperspace flashing past outside. ‘Zeno’s robots are running manual inspections across all areas, but I don’t anticipate locating combat damage. Gunnery logs indicate all warheads were intercepted or destroyed during transit. Jump fatigue may be an issue, however. That was not a clean hyperspace translation.’

Lana winced at the censorious tone in the computer’s voice.
Jump fatigue. Another damn cost we can’t afford.
She looked at Polter. ‘Any sign of Rex Matobo’s ship?’

‘Not on our transit plane,’ said the navigator. ‘And praise the holy of holies, no sign of the enemy vessel in pursuit.’

Lana grimaced.
Of course not. Rex, you cheap mope.
With whatever monkey Rex was paying for navigator duties on his small ship, Lana’s ex-crewman would be lucky to end up in the same galaxy he took off from. ‘Well, whoever that was shooting at us, I’m guessing that it was Rex who they were really after.’

And Lana wasn’t nearly lucky enough to have them actually take out the conniving rogue. Sly old Rex must have suspected that there was going to be an ambush at the system’s exit point. Rex had slipped behind the
Gravity Rose’s
engine wake, set them up to occupy the attacker’s attention for long enough for him to get a firing solution on the people hunting him, then made his own jump while the attacker was dodging his missiles.
You’re an idiot, Lana Fiveworlds. Every time you trust Rex, you end up in this position.
Well,
hindsight is a wonderful thing
.

‘You know, old girl,’ moaned Skrat, coming out of the fug of the jump, ‘I really rather resent being dangled as bait.’

Lana looked at her first mate. ‘Now you know why I didn’t want to travel to Hesperus system. Settling an obligation to Rex always costs me more than I ever care to pay.’

‘And you humans are unkind enough to stereotype my race as disingenuous.’

Lana shrugged at the six-foot tall humanoid lizard. ‘Maybe he’s got a few skirl genes spliced in, somewhere.’

‘Oh, I think we can safely say that fellow is
all
-human.’

‘Lay in an exit translation for Transference Station,’ Lana ordered Polter. ‘Let’s see if civilization is going to bring us a job that pays well enough to keep us flying for a while.’

‘I am not certain if I would characterize Transference as civilized, old girl,’ warned Skrat.

‘Civilized enough for me,’ sighed Lana. Better than the fallen civilization they had just left, at any rate. After visiting the Dark Ages, returning to the fortieth century was going to be a blessing. Lana saw a comms flash from the engine room light up on her board. It wasn’t Chief Paopao, though; it was his royal highness-in-exile, Prince Calder Durk.

‘Skipper,’ said Calder, as the hologram of his face floated up from her chair. ‘It worked, then?’

‘Better than I thought, Mister Durk,’ said Lana. ‘Better than you thought too, maybe.’

‘It seemed like a sound plan at the time.’ Her new crewman sounded pleased with himself. Shit, a couple of sim entertainment series under Calder’s belt and you’d think the barbarian nobleman hadn’t been living in medieval squalor for his first couple of decades. A week ago, he hadn’t known there was a world beyond snow-driven battlefields, clashing broadswords and a castle’s warm fireplace. Now he was lecturing her about starship combat tactics. Calder Durk didn’t lack for cheek, whatever the technological level of his upbringing.

‘I don’t suppose you know who it was that Rex had pissed off enough to send a frigate hunting after his ass?’

‘Sorry, skipper,’ said Calder. ‘Only that they are nobody I’m likely to have met. Hesperus doesn’t have steam power, let alone interstellar travel. The sorcerer… I mean Rex Matobo… he certainly has a talent for making enemies.’

‘That he does. Shit, I’d compile a list, but I don’t think our data core is big enough to hold all the names of the planets that would like to see Rex dead.’

Part of Lana felt sorry for Calder, tangled up in Rex’s latest failed get-rich-quick scheme. Calder had lost his family, friends and kingdom, and all because Rex has chosen to play Wizard of Oz with Hesperus’s slipped-back society. Calder had joined the “Screwed-by-Matobo Club”. It wasn’t a particularly exclusive establishment, Lana was a member herself. But as Rex’s favours went, maybe having Calder on board wouldn’t be too bad. Part of Lana hoped the nobleman-in-exile wouldn’t be tempted to jump ship when they made planet-fall. That he would choose to remain on board as crew. A nice warm planet with a decent welfare system and a stable society… that was going to be a hell of a temptation for a man as new to the modern galaxy as Prince Calder. And her feelings were clearly nothing to do with the kiss that Calder planted on her lips before they jumped away from his home system. Lana needed extra crew, and the neo-barbarian prince was cheap and fresh, and that was all there was to it. ‘You and the chief give the engines a thorough examination before we arrive at Transference Station. That was a dirty jump we made out of your system,’ chided Lana. ‘It’s a wonder we didn’t tear off a few vanes diving through a hole that unstable.’

The chief of the drive room’s cantankerous voice emerged from her chair’s comm. ‘Only thorough maintenance, here! Do you say that I am not doing my job?’

‘Calm down, chief. We’re creaking around the gunnels now, and you know it. Just the way it is. Nobody’s fault.’

‘Hesperus isn’t my home anymore,’ said Calder, a tinge of sadness in his voice. ‘I can never go back, can I?’

‘No,’ agreed Lana. ‘You can never get back what you’ve lost, Mister Durk. The only trick is not to miss it.’ Calder signed off. Maybe after a few years of repeating those sentiments, Lana might even believe it herself.

***

Lana wasn’t pleased. Half the time, hands-on flying a starship the size of the
Gravity Rose
wasn’t much of a challenge. All you could really do with her was boost out of a system until you got to gravity-clean space and made your hyperspace jump. Arriving at a system wasn’t any better. Translate down into real space well clear of its gravity well and decelerate until you made orbit at your destination. The single piece of half-demanding flying Lana ever got to make was closing with an orbital station and gently nosing into the docking clamps. And here the tugs were, spoiling her fun. Hologram telemetry bobbed either side of Lana’s command chair, her crane-suspended seat elevated under the bridge’s topside viewing dome. She was watching the two tugs hovering a mile off her position, each vessel packing antimatter engines large enough to make a game attempt at dragging a small moon into a new orbit. Frankly, their presence was insulting. Or perhaps the pilots’ fees that Transference Station would undoubtedly try and sting Lana for was just another way for the locals to shake a few dollars out of her on top of cargo duties. Lana glanced down towards Skrat’s chair hovering below hers, the first mate running search algorithms across the terabytes of data they were downloading from the world’s data sphere. If there was a currency differential to be squeezed out of a trade or an intersystem commodities discrepancy to be leveraged, Skrat would seize onto that nugget like a prospector panning for gold.

‘Tugs,’ she called down, not even bothering to signal it chair-to-chair. ‘Two of them!’ The tone she used indicated she wouldn’t have been more surprised if they had arrived to find a pair of winged unicorns galloping through the void. ‘I must be getting old. Jesus, and you were worried about Transference Station not being civilized enough.’

‘Compared to the alliance,’ said Skrat. ‘Only compared to the alliance, dear lady.’

From the way his thick, muscled tail was quivering through the perfectly Skrat-sized tail-hole in his seat, the first mate might have honed in on an opportunity or two for her vessel. Or so Lana hoped. Every year the lawless border systems of the Edge got a bit closer to being fully absorbed inside the Triple Alliance, and when that sad day occurred, Lana wouldn’t be sliding void any more. She’d be flying through a meteor storm of safety rating agencies, ship insurance claims, export documentation and health and safety directives. And she’d be competing against the big commercial space lines and corporate houses, and then pickings would get real slim, real quick. Might as well convert her vessel to a casino ship and select a gas giant in a T3 system with a pretty weather system to orbit. She could slit her wrists to the sounds of games of baccarat and the endless clink of slot machines.

‘Give me some hope here, Skrat. Toss the skipper a bone. At least tell me they haven’t rescinded their open weapons policy on the station?’

‘Rather the contrary, they are currently insisting that all ship crews enter the station board armed. It seems there is a disturbing new trend in gang violence… since we last visited, a youth subculture has emerged called “monking”. Gangs are roaming the station sporting habits, tonsures and speaking tape-learnt Latin. That’s an ancient human language.’

‘So I recall, Skrat. I am human, you know.’

‘I forget, skipper. Quite frequently, you act so relatively reasonably that I often think of you as skirl with an unfortunate scale deficiency about your skin.’

In the navigator’s chair, Polter rose up to hover off Lana’s side. ‘Did I hear you correctly? There are gangs masquerading as servants of God and offering violence to honest citizens? This is blasphemy!’

‘The little scamps are only speaking Latin to fuck with their parents and cut their folks out of the street jive,’ said Lana. ‘It was the original Esperanto. Maybe they’re being ironic.’

Skrat shook his head, sadly. ‘If there was a significant skirl population at Transference there would be order and discipline.’

‘A place for everyone and everyone in their place?’ smiled Lana. Maybe that’s why there were so many interlocking pyramids of hierarchy in skirl society, layers piled on top of each other like social landfill. Everyone got a position and a title and most got someone to boss around below them. Even the skirls at the bottom of the heap had dirt-cheap robots to abuse. Lana glanced at the image of Transference Station on the screen, the globe-girdling structure reduced to an engineer’s blueprint, a 3D model of the station rotating around the blue-green orb of the world of Transference itself. Just looking a the station, you knew that it was the oldest trading hub in Edge – that glorious crescent of independent space hugging the alliance like a cracked leather money belt around a tourist’s paunch. A little more shaved off the crescent each year, but what the hell.

Unlike some of the
Gravity Rose
’s more recent layovers, the world didn’t feature a comet-sized spinning top as its space station, nor a ten mile-long O’Neill cylinder, nor that cycle store classic – a multi-tiered donut of linked wheels spinning to simulate gravity on the cheap. No, Transference Station was a band circling the world below like one of Saturn’s rings made solid in steel, plastic, glass and shining ceramic composite; arms extending off it like ribs from a whale’s carcass. There were purportedly more people living on the station now than the world below. Lana could imagine that one day in the future, her descendants would arrive here on the
Gravity Rose
and the station’s structure would have completely enveloped the planet, only a few patches of world left visible through gaps in the surface. The planet plunged into perpetual darkness by the trading station’s success. With this many people in orbit, you weren’t dealing with a commercial operation any more. You were dealing with a
culture
. And much like the cultures Lana found growing in the bottom of her abandoned coffee cups, dealing with it was always going to leave you feeling queasy.

‘It seems that our approach has been noted, old girl. We have an e-mail from Dollar-sign Dillard,’ said Skrat. ‘He’s offering to pay our docking fees if we mate at port nine-two-hundred and hear out a proposal he has to make.’

Lana frowned. That was a far better neighbourhood than they could afford to dock at on their own; but she’d been hoping for a legit job. ‘Dollar-sign Dillard, shit. Haven’t we got any offers from upright brokers? How about the Hansard Combine? They’ve always got a cattle run or two out to some shiny new colony world.’

‘It appears not this time around.’

‘We’ve got a reputation, Skrat. We’ve got a reputation here, as well as a ship.’

‘I warned you,’ said Skrat. ‘Economies of scale. Have a look at the station’s docked list. Since our last visit here, another seven per cent of vessels listed as independents are now re-flagged flying for corporate houses. Skippers are still selling out. Cutting their losses before there’s a freight monopoly in operation so tight they would obtain more funds selling their ships to an aerospace museum.’

‘This is my ship and this is all I know how to do. All I
want
to do.’

‘There will come a time…’ said Skrat.

‘Fuck that,’ said Lana. She jabbed a finger towards the coin-shaped world suspended against the night. ‘If the Edge isn’t in that direction anymore, then it has to lie behind our stern. Not every system wants to join the alliance.’