Chapter 3

By the time I got back to my ship, I’d made up my mind on a couple of things. Selling even one diamond would earn enough to build a new ship. Since I had no use for more ships, I wanted my new-to-me ship to be the best it could be. It already had the best impulse engines and shielding available. I called a company specializing in AIs and asked them to upgrade the ship’s AI to a Class 5, the best available.

I also wanted each of my current androids upgraded as well. Once upgraded, they would integrate seamlessly with the ship’s AI, becoming extensions of it. The company that did the AI retrofit was able to do it in just an hour but required two more hours to upgrade all my androids. I arranged for them to upgrade the AI and all the androids aboard the Jump To It the next time it was in port and transferred a copy of the data from Alexis into the new AI. I adjusted the personality settings so they matched those of Alexis and named my new AI Lexi since the name would be so similar to Alexis.

The next day I got a message from my dad saying that they would love to experiment with lenses cut from a diamond, but nobody had any research requiring them.

Two hours later, I had a visitor, an attractive woman about the age of my parents. “May I help you?” I asked.

“Captain Reynolds, it’s good to finally meet you. I’m Diane Moore from Congressman Morgan’s office. I’m here about the request you sent to the Congressman.

“I have to apologize, but, at first, I thought your request was a hoax. Then I recognized the name and commed Captain Krejak to see if you were in the area. He assured me that you were, and that you had a wormhole generator aboard your ship. What exactly do you want?” she asked.

“I want to know if the government is willing to donate or let me buy a thirty-thousand-hectare property to build a twenty-five-thousand-hectare shielded dome so I can bring back some of these creatures,” I said, showing her vids and pictures. “I’ll start with vegetation and let it grow until the land looks like the other world. Then I’ll bring back eggs and hatch them, releasing the small animals into the wild, as it were. Scientists can watch them, and I want to make access to the public available so they can pay to watch them on live video feeds. When the animals grow big enough, people will want to come to see them. Five thousand hectares is to build shuttle parking structures, a hatchery, a nursery for plants, another for the baby animals, and places for visitors to eat and stay.”

“I’ll pass the information along. I’m excited just thinking about seeing some of the animals live. Do you think you might let people pet some of the baby animals?” she asked.

“I hadn’t thought about it, but if I can make sure it won’t hurt people or the animals, I might do it,” I agreed. “Huh! A baby dinosaur petting zoo,” I chuckled mentally.

I spent the rest of the day and much of the next guiding my androids as we worked on the new wormhole generator, although I did have to stop mid-morning for visitors. The visitor was a Chief Petty Officer who was a Master at Arms (Navy version of an MP).

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“Captain Krejak asked me to give this to you, compliments of Captain D’Anzico,” he said as he handed me a credit chip.

“Ah yes, for the pirates I turned over on Luboro,” I replied when I realized what it was for. “Thank you.”

He nodded, turned, and walked away. While we worked on the new wormhole generator, other androids loaded eighteen mining pods and the single shuttle we had left, and installed the four healing pods.

The representative from the jewelry company called me mid-afternoon wanting to know if I was still interested in selling them the diamond. They wanted to meet with me and check it. I knew right then that they were more than interested, having gotten their people here in just two days. I commed Captain Krejak and asked if the Navy had a secure conference room I could pay to use for a few hours to conduct a large business transaction. He assured me that they did and gave me directions. I called the jeweler back and gave them the directions. He liked the idea of using the Navy facility since it was a neutral site and both parties would feel secure. Once I transferred the payment for the room to the Navy’s account that I was told to use, I started getting ready to go. We met half an hour later.

I arrived first, leading twenty androids, each carrying one of the twenty biggest of the perfect diamonds. Captain Krejak met us and gawked at the diamonds when I explained what they were. When the five men from Quelkane Jewelers arrived, they were dumbstruck to see twenty of the gigantic diamonds. “We don’t have nearly enough available to buy all of those,” one of the men in the group said nervously.

“I doubt that the government has enough to buy them,” I chuckled, setting the men more at ease. “I brought the twenty biggest diamonds for you to check. You may buy one or more, or none if you so choose. I have even more of the smaller ones available aboard my ship if you prefer.”

“No, these will do. Depending on the down payment that you explained, we can probably purchase two of these magnificent stones,” the man who seemed to be in charge said as he continued to stare at the diamonds.

The men finally started working, using the same scanning device that they had used two days ago. Eight hours later, they all agreed with what I already knew. Each of these was a real, flawless, white diamond.

“How long do you foresee yourself having these for sale?” the man in charge asked.

“To be honest, I plan to sell them all to your company at whatever pace you can handle them. I’m guessing there’s not much of a market for diamonds so large that they will need to be a conversation piece. Still, not knowing your clientele as well as you do, there may be some sort of battle between your wealthiest clients trying to see who has the biggest dick ... I mean diamond,” I laughed.

“I think you understand our clients very well,” the head guy laughed. “It is my hope to auction these beautiful specimens, starting with the largest. The losers will have to bid on the next largest, and so on,” he explained.

“I suppose it will ruin your plan to know there are hundreds, if not thousands more still in the kimberlitic pipes where these were mined,” I commented.

“Perhaps we should keep that tidbit of information to ourselves for now,” the head guy mused aloud with a smirk. “I think that the market for these will quickly be saturated with just these twenty. I’m afraid that any smaller than these will have to be cut into smaller stones to sell.”

“I can live with that,” I replied. “I will probably take the two largest remaining diamonds and donate them to the government with the requirement that one be kept in a museum where the public can see it. If they renege, the diamond must be returned to me. The other will have to be sliced up and used as lenses for different scientific experiments.”

“It sounds as if you’ve dealt with the government before,” one of the men laughed.

“Remember the teenager who developed the wormhole generator they took away? That was me,” I explained, and they all nodded in understanding.

“That explains how you found these,” one of the men commented. “You’re able to reach systems nobody has explored before.”

“The one where I found these would take everyone else more than three years to reach, assuming they knew where to look at the beginning of the journey. It would probably take at least several decades to find.”

The men agreed on my pricing method. Once the legal paperwork was completed and signed, they transferred the down payment on the two largest stones into my account. “Since you have dealt with me in good faith and will attempt to auction all twenty diamonds, I will allow you to take the other eighteen diamonds without a down payment. Once you receive payment for one of the eighteen, you have twenty-four hours to transfer the agreed-upon sixty percent of the selling price to my account,” I explained.

“After the auction, any that don’t sell are to be returned to my possession within forty-eight hours of you receiving notice of my arrival here. If you wish to purchase any or all of the remaining stones, we can negotiate a price at that time. As I hope you’ve seen, I’m trying to be fair and flexible to make both of us as much money as possible.

“More than fair,” the head guy quickly agreed.

“If you need stones to cut up, don’t forget that I have at least this many stones in similar sizes with tiny flaws in them,” I reminded the men.

“How many flaws and how tiny?” the head guy asked.

“One or at most two flaws, and tiny enough to be hard to detect,” I replied.

“Perhaps...” the head guy commented, although it was easy to see that he was scheming. Aside from the fact that his gaze wasn’t focused on anything, he had one finger tapping his lips as his brain worked overtime.

“Perhaps we could announce a second auction at the conclusion of the first. We could announce the upcoming auction of twenty similar stones with minor flaws. That would attract the attention of the wanna-bes who knew they couldn’t afford one of the flawless diamonds.

“You, sir, are a devious man. I love it,” I laughed. “It’s rather late today, so why don’t you bring the people you need to my ship tomorrow morning? I’ll be working aboard the ship, but you can look at everything I have left and decide which, if any, of the remaining diamonds you want to sell as is. It will also give you a better idea of what I have in smaller stones. Of course, by smaller stones, I mean roughly fist-sized,” I chuckled.

“Nine o’clock?” the head guy asked excitedly.

“Whatever time you want to show up is fine. If I’m busy or not awake yet, the androids will let you in,” I replied. I had the androids carry the stones to the shuttle the jewelers were using.

On the way back to the ship, I commed a rental company and ordered forty large collapsible tables, each with a black velvet tablecloth. They arrived about an hour after I got back to the ship. In the meantime, the androids were getting the remaining diamonds out and sorting them. Once the tables arrived and were set up, the androids began laying the stones out. The flawless stones went on one set of tables; the stones with minor flaws were on others. There still wasn’t enough room, and the androids left most of the smallest stones in crates on the floor beneath the tables.

In the morning, I was up early. I’d eaten and had been working on the new wormhole generator for at least an hour when the buyers showed up. They were excited, having released a news bulletin yesterday. The bulletin announced the discovery of the diamonds and their pending auction in two weeks. The bulletin was sent via FTL (faster than light) torpedoes that carried news and messages between the various planets of the Confederation.

I went back to work while they studied the remaining diamonds. They decided to try auctioning the twenty-five largest of the flawed stones. “For now, if you bring back more, try to keep the sizes between one kilogram and five kilograms. Any diamonds significantly smaller than one kilogram are cheaper for us to make artificially. Any stones larger than five will be too expensive per carat to cut up,” the head guy explained. The agreement for those stones was the same as the one for the eighteen flawless diamonds I gave them on consignment with no down payment.

Once they left, I took the remaining diamonds to a branch of the bank I use and paid for eight of the largest safety deposit boxes they had available, filling the boxes with diamonds.

On the way back to the ship, I bought several more items, including an antimatter generator and three capsules, which each contained a single positron. No ordinary ship captain could buy something like that! I was only able to purchase it because I was still a recognized researcher with a valid weapons research license from the government.

I wanted to make sure my new ship could continue to operate if an attack were able to knock out my standard power supply. The antimatter generator formed extremely strong magnetic fields to contain the reaction created when the antimatter reacted with the normal matter in a separate capsule.

Even if the ship’s power went out, the generator and the antimatter could generate enough energy to operate the ship at full power, including shields and weapons, for nine hundred twenty-six minutes. That energy would initially be directed into a series of super heavy-duty capacitors which would allow me plenty of time and energy to create and use a wormhole to escape, even if I was still using all the ship’s weapons and shields.

I ordered thirty of the large capacitors for delivery in the morning. There was plenty of room to hold the capacitors in the spaces created for the lasers, and they weren’t as sensitive to the extremely low temperatures of space. The antimatter reactor would go into the spaces, too. That way, it wouldn’t be noticeable to any officials entering the ship for a customs or safety inspection.

As I ate dinner, I thought about names for the new ship. My first thought was Jump To It 2 but I decided against it. I had a feeling that the Jump To It was going to pay handsomely in rewards for pirates and pirate ships and their cargo and didn’t want the name Jump To It 2 to advertise that it was a sibling to that ship. After this trip, I’d start building lasers and a wormhole generator for another small cargo ship. I needed to ask the Jump To It to start saving shuttles and healing pods from the pirate ships they captured.

The names that floated through my mind were rejected as quickly as I came up with them. I decided to avoid anything with the word “jump” and anything that made the ship sound more powerful than a common cargo ship. I thought momentarily about Centaurus but didn’t want to divulge where I was finding everything. I finally decided on a simple declarative name, the Faraway.

I was beginning the installation of the antimatter generator that evening when Lexi warned me about a government-issued travel advisory. The warning had been issued to all ships in the system, A rare combination of simultaneous heavy solar flare activity from both the system’s primary sun and the small secondary sun orbiting the system would make space travel too dangerous. The warning had been issued early enough so everyone who was able had a chance to leave, although they had to make the first leg of their departure away from the two suns. After today, heavy solar particle storms would prevent any ships from arriving or departing for at least four days.

I wasn’t worried about it. I had enough work to keep me busy for three full days, even with the androids doing the work of installing the antimatter generator and the capacitors for me. I was nearly done building the new wormhole generator but wanted to start the installation before leaving it for the androids to complete. Gratefully, both the antimatter generator and the capacitors were designed to be installed by androids and were “install and use” technology. Aside from moving the heavy, bulky, units into place, the hardest part would be running and insulating all the heavy-duty electrical cabling necessary to connect everything and then making all the connections.

Three days later, I looked over my new ship proudly. Everything was done. The ship would be at least twice as fast as the Jump To It. The secondary shielding was twice as strong as the better shield aboard the Jump To It. The primary shielding on the Faraway, the shielding that would be attacked first, was the same strength as the better shielding aboard the Jump To It.

The Faraway looked neither fast nor deadly. The ship still looked like what it had been when I bought it, a large, slow, cargo ship. Even inside, unless you looked inside the hidden and locked compartments, and knew what you were looking at, it looked like an ordinary cargo ship.

In actuality, it was deadlier than a cruiser, and would probably win against a battleship. It was definitely faster than either ship and I could escape if necessary. I had to laugh. Without my help, the government was still trying to design wormhole generators powerful enough for their ships. They hadn’t yet figured out the proper power-to-mass ratio necessary for them to work. THAT was one bit of data not in my notes. It was locked in my brain.

Once they finally finished designing them, they’d realize they didn’t have a place to put them and would have to redesign their ships to accommodate the wormhole generators. Which meant only their newest ships would have wormhole generators at first. Right now, only my two ships and the original test ship I had equipped with my first wormhole generator had them. That I knew of. The government, however, might have copied what I built and installed copies in more ships of the same mass as the original one, although that would be a waste of money.

Wearing a personal shield and with a contingent of eight androids to guard me, I went to the marketplace and bought supplies for the trip I intended to start tomorrow. Everything was complete and had been tested except for the antimatter generator. I’d used those before and decided to wait and test it during the trip so I could burn off the energy it generated.

One of the androids tapped my shoulder to get my attention, drawing me from my musings. I was wearing a uniform for my new ship with the captain’s insignia and the new logo for the Faraway, the symbols for Perseus, Sagittarius, Orion, and Centaurus arranged in a diamond formation.

“You leaving the planet soon?” some guy who was hawking something hollered at me. I instantly felt a sense of danger from him. The ban on travel would be lifted this evening and ships would start arriving several hours afterwards.

I sized him up, wondering why he wanted to know. I guess he realized I was sizing him up. “I have five slaves who were just convicted of piracy. They’ve been banished and have to be off the planet by late tomorrow morning,” he explained. “Normally, I’d have a dozen bidders here wanting them, but everyone left days ago and nobody I can find plans to leave in time.”

I’d only been to two slave auctions, and then, just to see what they were like. Only those convicted of capital offenses or piracy were sentenced as slaves. The men usually went to the worst of the mines. The women ... well, they were drilled a lot. Since these slaves were banished, they couldn’t set foot on any inhabited Confederation planet, or they faced execution.

Most banished female slaves ended up in brothels at the mining complexes on large asteroids and uninhabited planets, or on space platforms. The best-looking ended up performing the same function, just on cruise ships or on private yachts. Those ships usually docked at one of the large space stations orbiting each planet and couldn’t actually land on the planet.

Aside from the sense of danger I felt from him, I had no use for slaves. While I now had crew quarters for twenty people, the Faraway, like the Jump to It, was a self-sufficient ship. The AI, my androids, and I handled everything. I guess he saw my reticence, so he brought out two gorgeous women who were lightly restrained and lightly clothed, wearing just enough clothing that nobody could complain. “Buy ‘em, use ‘em, and when you’re tired of them, sell ‘em again for a profit. I’ll sell ‘em for ten percent over what I paid,” he offered. I had to admit, neither of the girls would have a problem keeping me interested, and I felt no danger from them. I wondered what they’d done to be convicted of a capital offense, then realized that they’d probably been captives aboard a pirate ship that had been captured.

Pirate ships capture ships, keeping the captured goods, and some of the people. They keep the captured ships if they can use them or if they have a contact able to retrofit them so nobody will recognize them. Rich people who are captured are immediately put into healing pods or escape pods to protect them while a ransom is being arranged. The pods keep them confined and safe in case the pirates attack someone else. Pirates also keep good-looking females who aren’t rich, as well as young boys, and use them as sex toys.

Unfortunately, nobody can differentiate positively between women and boys aboard the ship voluntarily and those being held against their will; both are treated about the same, and both insist that they are being held against their will if they are captured by the Navy. Hence, anyone aboard a captured pirate ship who isn’t in a pod is considered a pirate. And the Navy checks the pod’s computer to make sure the pirates don’t climb in after losing the battle.

More of the slaver’s androids dragged out three unkempt and rough-looking men. Them, I felt a sense of danger from. “These pirates will bring triple what I’m asking if you sell them to any mining company,” he cajoled. While it was a true statement, I had no plans to visit any mining companies for a couple of months, and probably longer. First, I had to set up my new mining pods, then explore, and then make the rounds of my existing mining pods to pick up another load of ore. But those girls ... damn they were good looking, and I hated to think about what would happen to them.

“How much?” I asked, his victorious grin nearly blinding me.

“Only ₢1,100, just ten percent more than I paid,” he practically whined. I knew he didn’t pay ₢200 for each of them. The standard fee paid to the courts was only ₢100 per slave.

“Show me the bills of sale from when you bought them,” I insisted.

“Okay, you caught me,” he answered resignedly, waving his arms in surrender, yet grinning at being caught playing the game. When he brought me the bills of sale, they were each for ₢100. The bills of sale for the three guys looked a little different from those for the girls, and gave off a sense of danger, but I was no expert on bills of sale for slaves.

“Fine, ₢550,” I agreed with an exaggerated sigh. Actually, I guess the sigh wasn’t exaggerated. Now I was going to have to find buyers for them since I couldn’t land on any populated planet to unload ore, purchase supplies, or have maintenance done to the ship if they were aboard. Of course, I’d end up making a decent profit on each one of them, but it would still require effort I didn’t want to expend. The profit would be a pittance compared to what I made from the sale of ingots each trip.

The slaver and his androids helped me load each of the three men into a healing pod aboard the Faraway to keep them under control until I found somewhere to sell them. Even as they were secured, I felt a sense of danger from each healing pod.

“Don’t trust him; all four of those men were laughing and joking together last night,” one of the girls whispered nervously while the slaver was occupied with securing one of the men in a healing pod. The other girl nodded her agreement when I looked at them. I left two androids stationed inside and two outside the hatch for the infirmary.

The second the slaver was off my ship, I armed myself and checked the healing pods. The pods were fine, but the Faraway’s AI spotted a device that had been left inside each pod that was programmed to override the pod’s locking mechanism, probably once the lights in the ship dimmed for a sleep cycle.

I locked each pod manually with an old-fashioned lock and key in addition to the electronic lock, and then hailed the Navy, asking to have a Master at Arms stop by to check a possible pirate conspiracy.