Firestar
Copyright© 2009 by Prince von Vlox
Chapter 22
Families Catalogue K-303, 12 Years Before Present
The freighter came out of hyper at the intended time and right on the intended spot. It accelerated towards the inner system at a cautious 20 Gs, every sensor alert and scanning for trouble. The Captain ran a careful position check. They were on course and close to the desired location for their first delivery. He called up a display listing their cargo disposition.
“Stand-by to deliver the cargo in Pod 3,” he told the crewman on the controls.
The crewman scratched his head. “Sure, Skip. What’s this out-system snowball delivery all about? This is screwy.”
“All I was told by the owner was to do it,” the Captain said, reciting the story he had been given by his ship’s owner. He showed the crewman their cargo handling instructions. “I gather they have some sort of monarchy or other primitive government on a planet in the inner system, and for the high mucky-muck’s birthday they want multiple comets in the sky at the same time. It’ll be some big thing rebounding to his glory or something. That’s what we’re being paid to give them.”
“You mean someone paid thousands of Prenger Stellars for us to deliver a bunch of damn snowballs to some damned barbarian?” The crewman laughed.
“That’s right.”
“Idiots.” The crewman shook his head and concentrated on programming his controls. “All right, opening the hatch on Pod 3.” He studied the instructions on his screen. “Looks like they have these programmed to a fare-thee-well. First release in 16 T-minutes.”
“And five more after that at 18-minute intervals,” the Captain added, scrolling down through their instructions. “Oh, well, easy money. Better than hauling that zoo around like we did a year ago. Because they were live cargo, we had to keep those stinking animals in the special handling module.”
“I heard about that,” the crewman said. “Didn’t you end up junking the whole module?”
“Yeah, it was a total write-off. It turns out the crap from those animals was toxic everywhere except their planet of origin, where some bacteria native to the soil reduced it to almost bearable. That crap got into everything in the module, and it stank to high heaven. Nothing we could do got rid of the smell. After we got rid of the zoo, anything we shipped in that module ended up smelling like those blasted animals. We tried everything to clean it. Nothing worked, not even a month of hard vacuum.”
The Captain made a face. “When we thought we were smelling it in the crew module, that was the end. The only way to get rid of the stench was to scrap the module itself. That cost our owner a pretty Stellar, I’ll tell you. You should have heard him go off about it. Took three astrogators burning their contracts to make a believer out of him. The story was in every bar by then. You don’t even want to hear some of the names they had for this tub. Nobody would sign on. The only way he could hire crew was by actually getting rid of the old module and replacing it.”
The Captain sat at the Comm console. “You know,” he said, grinning, “the funny thing is, a month after the refit we ran into someone who told me he was an agent for a firm that made perfume out of smelly stuff. He was in the market for a super strong stench like that crap for their R&D effort, and he was paying top Stellar for delivery. If I’d known that two months earlier I would have hauled the 27 tons of animal crap all 40 light years for him.”
The crewman keyed a note into his log. “In other words, one man’s crap is...”
“ ... another man’s stellar,” the Captain finished with a laugh. “Yeah, exactly. It just depends on the location. And the timing.” He checked their course. “I’ll be back in a minute. I need to get something from my quarters. The owners of the cargo want proof we delivered.”
“Sure,” the crewman replied. As the Captain went below, the crewman checked his displays, then pulled up an adventure story, high adventure in ancient times on Old Earth in the era of swashbuckling pirates. Great stuff, much more exciting than this job.
The half-dozen dirty snowballs were duly dropped off on their specified vectors, and the ship altered course to leave the system. The theatrics of a bunch of ragged barbarians around a jumped-up kinglet were of no further concern.
Behind them, all six dirty snowballs fell towards the system’s distant primary. They soon shed most of their ice, revealing battered-looking rocks tumbling slowly in the void. Over the course of the next two years, some of the rocks grew smaller as pieces were detached to alter their trajectory. Some of these pieces fell toward the inner system, but not as far as would be needed to fulfill the merchant captain’s contract to provide “celebration” comets. The “barbarian kinglet” the Captain spoke about never existed because the planet was nominally uninhabited, but he didn’t have to know that.
Vigilant watchships spotted the rocks as they fell sunward. On one such vessel, the junior officer manning the late watch scan swore quietly to himself. Ships that came out of hyper were always disturbing the random rock here and there, but this was rather too much. He ran a quick check of the cluster of rocks and found they contained no single-shot energy weapons or hidden missiles. There was nothing even remotely suspicious, just a few empty internal voids and a bit of ice here and there. These were nothing to worry about. They were just pieces of failed comets, and none of their orbits took them anywhere near the inner system.
He completed a more complete vector analysis on the rocks and determined that none of them were going anywhere near a shipping lane either. They were just junk left over from the initial formation of the system, probably knocked out of more distant orbits by the gravity shear of some ship. The individual chunks were big enough to cause real damage if they impacted anything valuable, but did not currently have the vector to do so. He assigned them a catalogue number, reported their vital statistics, and dismissed them from his mind. His vessel’s computer issued a standard astrogation warning, other ships noted the warning, and there was no further official interest in them.
Over the next four years, a few of the rocks approached the warmth of the inner system in orbits that left them on the distant periphery of the habitable zone. On each of them, a polished surface reflected concentrated sunlight into the interior voids, waking intelligences from their sleep. These intelligences could do nothing more than watch and, when queried properly, report. As they came to life, they also brought to life their passive receivers, recording the flow of ships and the flow of communications throughout the system. Gravity sensors tracked the movement of ships’ drives. Radio and radar receivers tracked the volume of signals, the frequencies used, and the sources of broadcasts. Neutron detectors tracked fusion power plants. All of this information was tallied with a time-stamp and the location of the rock at the time it recorded it. It was then indexed and stored for later retrieval.
Years passed. The rocks tumbled slowly through their inconspicuous orbits. War flared across that arm of the galaxy, and the patient collectors continued their work, preparing for the time when they would be queried and their information drained.
Fortessa Station, Two Years Before Current Day
The Fortessa Cargo Control Officer bent down and pointed at a small hole in the plastic cargo canister. “Vermin,” he said in Standard. “I don’t know what kind of animal you have in this pod, but it’s not coming on my station or my planet.”
“We’re clean,” the Captain said. “That’s got to be something that somebody on your station introduced to our cargo pod.”
The Cargo Control Officer eyed the Captain patiently, raising one brow in silent question as if to say, ‘You don’t really expect me to believe that, do you?’
The Captain looked away. They were the first two people to enter this pod since it was loaded at DePoy 65 T-days before. There was no way anyone could have entered it until now. The Cargo Control Officer entered a code into his data viewer.
“Grain. 2,000 metric tons per canister, 200 canisters per pod, four pods. That’s 160,000 tons of grain. We’ll have to sample every canister, of course, inspect each of them for damage, and so on. It shouldn’t take more than, oh, twenty days.”
The Captain gulped noisily, but didn’t complain. He knew that if he did, twenty days could easily become sixty days, or longer. He was entirely at the mercy of this man who would schedule the investigating team.
“What do you need me to do?” he asked when he could trust his voice. Twenty days! That would blow his schedule completely out of the sky. He thought of bribery, and forgot it right away. Attempted bribery of a Fortessa official was punished in unique and painful ways. “Isn’t there something I can do? I can’t sit here for 20 days while we look at everything.”
“I’d bring in something to track down the vermin if I were you,” the Cargo Control Officer suggested. He was clearly happy to have somebody to talk to. His was a lonely job, manning Fortessa’s Quarantine Inspection Post. “Ordinarily, we would just depressurize the pod. Never seen a vermin yet that could breathe vacuum for an hour. Too bad your customer couldn’t afford better canisters. Then you could have evacuated them before loading. Even if you lost some grain in the blow-out and some time in the process, you’d still be ahead.”
“I will next time, cheap fool customer be damned,” the Captain said.
The chatty Cargo Control Officer nodded. “Of course, if one canister’s been breached, it’s likely some others have too. And if we drop the pressure in the pod, it’ll fill the place with grain. None of us wants to spend the next month or so cleaning organic material out of every filter, nook, cranny, and piece of machinery in here.” He shook his head. “No, there’s a vermin clearing service on the station. They send in small predators and let them hunt the vermin down. You should contract with them.”
“How long does it take?”
“Last case we had like this was Amalia’s Belt,” the Cargo Control Officer said. He glanced down at his data viewer. “Come to think of it, he spaced from DePoy, the same place you did. Same kind of damage when he stopped here. Probably turn out to be the same vermin. Funny guy, patch over his eye, put in here short two crew he had left at Pepper’s Planet because they’d been fighting on the docks. They had a disagreement with some locals over a card game. You ever play in the gaming halls on Pepper’s Planet you remember what I tell you today. Stay away from the card games. They’re rigged beyond all imagination. Why, I heard tell...”
Eventually his story wound down. “How long will it take the vermin service to clear the canisters in this pod?” the Captain patiently asked.
“No more than a couple of days,” the Cargo Control Officer said. “Call Station Control and they’ll put you right through.” He entered a note on his data viewer. “Best of all, they’re Certified and Bonded. If they say the pod is clean, it’s clean. The insurance company takes their word for it. Twelve years in the business and they haven’t been wrong yet.”
“I’ll contact them right away,” the Captain promised. Only two days! He might be able to maintain his schedule after all. “Shall we go look at the next pod?”
Two days later the Captain watched in amazement as a short old chubby woman coaxed a cat, a cat! out of the third grain canister in his #2 cargo pod. The cat squirmed through a loading vent, pranced across the top of the canister, jumped the meter to the deck in the pod’s half gravity and waltzed into the airlock with its tail held high and its jaws clamped around something furry, brown and dead. The cat stretched each of its short powerful legs, then it circled around its owner once and dropped its kill at her feet, right next to three others that it had already laid out there over the previous hour.
“Well, what do we have here?” the woman asked, clearly addressing her cat. She put on a surgical glove and opened a small, clear container. “Looks like a variation of the old Terran rat,” she said as she scooped the carcass into the container. She repeated that precaution for each of the other carcasses before opening the door to a pet carrier. Her cat entered proudly, obviously content with its job. It settled in one corner and began industriously washing itself with a faint buzz of pleasure.
“Squeak is my best hunter,” she commented absently as she sealed the carrier. She held out a data viewer in a hand brown with liver spots. “The invoice is in here,” she added. “As well as the certification bond and the other paperwork. That’s four pods at 150 Fortessa Dijbatti each per day.”
The Captain nodded and pressed his thumb to the small plate. “And worth every bit of it,” he acknowledged. The light came on, and the money was transferred. At the same time, the computer transferred his quarantine clearance documents to the Cargo Control Office. “A pleasure doing business with you, Ma’am,” he assured her. “I’ll be sure to recommend you to every other captain I talk to.”
“Pleasure was all mine,” the woman said. She gestured at the pod. “Hopefully, you won’t have to call on my services again.”
The Captain nodded emphatically. “Happens again, I may sign your Squeak aboard as Cargo Master.”
She gave him a bright-eyed, measuring look. “Won’t be long now before Squeak has kittens looking for berths like this one. You ask for me next time you pass through here.” She gave him her business card. The Captain laughed and escorted her off his ship.
Returning to the bridge, he confirmed that quarantine was lifted, and then contacted his firm’s commodities broker to tell him to enter 160,000 tons of DePoy grain on the local exchange. Rumors about the hold-up at Quarantine had made the price of grain on the local exchange fluctuate wildly. With a little luck, they could profit by this, catching the price on the upswing. This could turn into a profitable trip after all. Then he looked thoughtfully at the vermin hunter’s business card. A cat. Why not? He filed the card and entered a reminder in the ship’s log.
Back on Fortessa Station, the old woman shut the door to her lab. “My, my,” she commented to the cat twining itself around her feet. “Four of the little beauties, Squeak, you did well.”
She busied herself dissecting the rats. One of them proved to be disappointingly normal. The others brought a pleased smile to her lips. She carefully recovered the information collected by sensory organs and stored in the enhanced brain cells co-opted by Families biotechs years before. When she was done, she prepared a summary and three copies of the information. She encrypted the information and posted it via commercial mailing services. Then she took the key parts of the remains of all four rats and carefully placed them in a specially prepared container. Everywhere the rat had been, everything the rat had seen, and everything the rat had experienced was contained in the rat’s brain and certain other tissues. This she sent by a private courier service to an entirely different address.
She knew some who cremated the unwanted parts of the rats when the dissections were finished. She took hers to a private garden plot she maintained in a room behind her apartment. She didn’t say anything special. She quietly buried them near the others and placed a small stone over the new grave. Then she paused for a moment of reflection.
Why? the cat asked her. Not directly, of course, but she caught the sense of the cat’s question through her shunt. The cat stood with one paw on a section of a small plate configured for its tiny shunt contacts.
“They gave their lives to find my sib-sister,” she replied, her own hand resting on the human-configured half of the contact plate. “It is the least I can do for them.”
Prey. Small. Prey. There was an unmistakable sense of satisfaction as the cat remembered the final moments of her hunt. The cat looked over the small graveyard. Why? it repeated.
“My hunt,” the woman said as she straightened the stone.
The cat seemed satisfied with that and stepped off the contact plate.
New Families Catalogue, System K-303, Two Years Before Present
The Families Scout Investigator entered the system with nearly all equipment shut down. Its crew took every precaution to minimize their risk of being detected. Moving like a blind person searching for tacks with bare feet, they eased past the hyperjump limit on their reaction engines. Finding and matching orbits with a rock of the right size, they altered its orbit so it would pass through the inner system. The crew then busied themselves planting carefully developed receivers and data recorders all through the rock. Their work done, they departed the rock, moving on to other star systems on their list.
Months passed, and the rock fell through the inner system. When the strength of light reached a certain critical value, a single coded pulse at a pre-set frequency strobed outward from the rock. The intelligences waiting at the periphery of the inner system encoded their accumulation of recorded data in one burst and broadcast it. The recorders on the rock, each of them heavily shielded, stored that information and went dormant again. On the watchships protecting the system, the brief, highly encrypted burst of activity passed unnoticed in the general cacophony of communications and other signals from ships and stations and planet-bound sources.
Months later, the rock spun only slightly as it coasted over the ill-defined gravity slope that marked the limit of hyperjump reliability. The scout ship, back from its seeding mission, tracked it on passive sensors. When it looked like they were alone, the scout moved in. The crew waited, watching nervously in all directions and in every part of the spectrum. They were there to harvest, not to fight; fighting was for other people. When the scout finally rendezvoused with the rock, a team in suits quickly stripped out full data recorders and replaced them with empty ones. As quickly as they had swarmed over the rock, they left. The rock continued on to perihelion, beginning once again its long, slow fall towards the inner system and the waiting observers.
The scout, reaping what had long ago been planted by the second oldest running Intelligence Operation in the Families Navy, edged away from the star system. On reaction drive, it was five days before they were far enough out that their jump into hyper would not register on any detector in that system. Then, as quietly as they’d appeared, they vanished, leaving their patient collectors of information still working behind them.
First Landing, Current Day
The information gathered from the K-303 surveillance resources made its way to a scout that worked strictly as a courier. The courier added the new pickup to information already collected from other systems by other scouts. Two months after being collected, the K-303 evidence was delivered to the Analysis Department, Fleet Intelligence Service. Parts were shed as various offices claimed their pieces. Even without those, it was five cartons of evidence, including information gathered by human agents, by cats, by rodents, and gleaned from the near-ubiquitous cargo pallets. It all arrived within a 48-hour period on the desk of the collator for that sector.
Like most collators, she was quiet and bookish. Her previous job as a statistician in First Landing had seemed like a dead-end position. She knew there had to be something more interesting to do than developing new mathematical models for measuring the ionization and drift of DNA molecules in plants. One day, a vaguely worded flier had landed on her desk. Sheer boredom had led her to explore the offer. In less than five days, she knew this was how she would contribute to the war. Best of all, she also recruited a friend, Sonia Andersen.
Sonia had been just as bored with modeling plant genera and was easily convinced to interview for a job in the building nobody talked about. Now she was a Senior Analyst, tracking specific details the collators found. Neither of them could talk about what they were doing to anyone outside the building, not even to their sib-sisters, so it was good to have a friend inside, “in the know.”
The collator eyed her new stack of cartons critically. At least six days of work, she decided. Beside it were several racks of dozens of small ceramic cylinders, each containing the playback representations of the bionic part of the collection. She had wanted something more interesting to do, and this certainly was. But at times, it could be very boring, too.
She sighed and picked up the index from the top of carton Number One. This listed what reports had come in for each system. Once, that alone had given her a clue that had uncovered a nest of Idenux nobody had known about on a rock orbiting a brown dwarf. That success helped keep her interest up when the workload increased, and every month it seemed to increase exponentially.
She was first drawn to K-303 by the sheer volume of radio, neutrino, and gravitational information. She couldn’t read the radio messages, nor did she even try. The people in that system were probably not speaking in Standard; they had probably encrypted their signals and were using colloquial abbreviations unique to their culture. Why even consider wasting time trying to translate it? But you could squeeze a lot of knowledge from the kind of traffic that was sent, when it was sent, where it was sent from, and what happened to the sender afterwards.
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