Hostile Legacy, page 4
part #2 of Afterwar Saga Series
“I don’t need to believe anything. I know for a fact we survived Kaboo. We’ll survive Prince. It’s about knowing which battles to pick.”
Walking away from trouble was a foreign concept to me. Even though we were headed on an important mission, just the idea of leaving Togan Prince behind to do what he wanted grated on me. It wasn’t even my job to deal with him. I’d have to come back at some point, and we’d settle the conflict between us.
“When are you taking off?” the constable asked.
“This …,” Cassius started. He liked the constable, who was, in my experience, a decent enough guy.
“They’re throwing a party for us as a going away gift at the diner tomorrow morning,” I said. “You should come. There’ll be donuts.”
The donut reference drew an annoyed look. “I’ll do that.”
“Why don’t we tell your folks what we’re thinking,” Olivia said. “I’ll come with you. Addy and Quinn can work on lashing Smokey to Bandit.”
“I still can’t believe you named your racing sled after that movie,” Cassius said.
“You’re just mad you didn’t think of it,” I said. “Before you go, how about you show off those big muscles and help me load the rest of those crates.”
“Sure.”
It hadn’t escaped any of us that splitting up might put us at risk with Togan, but since we weren’t planning to go anywhere private, the risk was reasonable. That and the fact that the constable was looking for him, or so we hoped.
We made it to The Hanger without incident and didn’t piddle around aside from talking to a couple of the pilots we’d befriended.
“Smokey’s a little tight for two, don’t you think?” Addy asked, working the controls since she was sitting right in front of me.
“Oh, she feels just fine to me,” I said, unable to keep the grin out of my voice.
“She does, does she?” Addy answered, adding a husky quality to her voice that we both knew was only play.
“Absolutely.”
“Mind if I change the subject? Not that I don’t like a good tight snuggle,” she said.
“Sure, what’s on your mind?”
“Liv’s got me concerned. I feel like she’s scared or … I don’t know, just, I’m concerned.”
“You’re right to be,” I said. “I hope this isn’t the moment where I’m supposed to be comforting.”
“That was one option,” Addy said. “You feel it too? I know you two have that connection.”
“She doesn’t know what we’re up against, where we’re supposed to go, or what we’re supposed to do,” I said. “She knows it’s dangerous and that it’s important.”
“Do the other,” Addy said.
“The other?”
“Where you make me feel good.”
“Oh, that,” I said laughing.
“It’s the other side of the coin,” I said. “Liv doesn’t know anything for certain. We’re the ones who decide what we’re getting into. Liv won’t want us to kill ourselves, even if the Iskstar are worried. We take it slow and ease our way into things. If things get too hot, we retreat and call in the authorities. We don’t have to do everything on our own.”
Addy’s back relaxed and she settled into me. “See, that’s better,” she said. “I needed to know we’re not running to our doom.”
“Are you kidding? I just got you to be my girlfriend. There’s no way I’m taking huge risks when I’ve got all this right in front of me,” I said, hugging her close.
“That’s good right there,” she said. “That’s like ten out of ten on the settle Addy down comforting words scale. I say we hurry and get Smokey tied up. Maybe we have an epic make-out session before Liv and Cassius get back.”
“Where was all this when we were back home?” I asked. “We had time by the buckets to burn.”
“You do understand we’re going to be flying through space for the next eighteen days, right? What I don’t understand is how spacers don’t end up with more children. Really, at some point …”
“Don’t finish that thought,” I said. “We both need to take a cold shower.”
“Why Quinn Hoffen, I can feel you blushing.”
“I want to take things slowly. I don’t want to miss out on anything,” I said. And take away my man card if you need to, but I wanted the whole experience with Addy. We had the rest of our lives to get hot and heavy.
“Is this some sort of reverse psychology thing? You’re breaking my brain here.”
I laughed until tears ran down my face. I couldn’t stop. Then I took a breath. “No, I’m serious.”
“I might just jump your bones because that’s about the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“I’m not sure you’re listening.”
4
TROUBLE
Our plan to leave early was either brilliant, or Togan hadn’t yet taken to the stars in his bid to become a pirate thug. While it might be a romantic notion to sail through the stars, it gets old after about an hour. The biggest task of any crew in deep space is to find activities to keep mind and body from deteriorating. If you’re like my mother, it’s an even better time to improve on both. I guess I’m more like her than I’d like to admit.
Eighteen days of sailing seems like a relatively short time to make any real gains with training, but Bandit was set up with enhancements to facilitate what I’d always considered a standard schedule of exercise and sparring. I hadn’t even questioned the idea until day three of our voyage, when Cassius started to object. We’d all been through that phase of indoctrination. It’s not much fun. Fortunately, he was a good sport and only threw minor fits as we kept after him. And he got his payback by forcing us to watch every bad movie, including all the iterations of Spider Man ever made. Or at least that’s how it seemed.
And so, it was a significantly fitter group that approached Curie than had taken off from Grünholz. Cassius still struggled to move his bulk when sparring, but time had seen improvements in his general skill. It was frustrating for him as the other three of us were all lightweight combatants and avoided him instead of directly engaging. I can say with some authority that when he did find his mark, which mostly happened with me, it was memorable and often followed by the application of a med-patch.
“Hey Cass, you might want to come forward,” I called back.
He and Olivia were in the crew area. He’d asked to be alerted when the planet was initially viewable by the naked eye. In his entire life, his first view of a planet from space had been when he’d seen Grünholz as we took off. It was almost unthinkable to me as I’d grown up next to a giant gas planet and daily traveled between Elea Station and the nearby moon, Kito, where our house was located. Don’t get me wrong, when you’ve been in deep space and finally reach a planet, it’s not the sort of thing that gets old. That it was Cassius’s inaugural deep space flight made the rest of us grin with joy at his unabashed excitement.
“Holy cow, that’s Curie?” he asked, pointing out the window like I might miss what he was referring to.
“Sure is,” I said. “It’ll take us a couple of hours to get close enough for orbit.”
“You can take my seat,” Addy said, sliding out of the pilot’s chair next to me. “I’m going to take a shower and do some stretching. I strained my back sparring with Liv yesterday. I’d like to be fresh when we get there.”
Cassius clapped his hands together and rubbed them with excitement as he took her spot. “What do you think, try to make planetfall tonight or dock at the big station?”
I knew what he wanted because he’d expressed his desire to explore a real space station more than a couple of times. I preferred planet-side existence to station, but we had time, and I didn’t need to squish his dreams.
“Today’s lesson is in local time,” I said, adopting my professorial persona. Cassius grinned and shook his head. “All of humanity synchronizes universal time based on easily accessible astrophysics and astronavigation. Most planets establish a local time based on their position on the globe with relationship to sunrise and sunset.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ll get to the spaceport in the middle of the night for the habituated portion of Curie,” he finished quickly.
I gave him a break from the rest of the talk. The next moment of excitement was when the most notable feature of Curie could be seen slipping from view as the planet rotated.
“Paradise Crater, I’ve read so much about that place. I can’t believe I’m seeing it,” Cassius said. I wasn’t about to point out to him that we could barely see it and in a few minutes, it’d be lost to the planet’s dark side. It was an interesting feature. “Makes you wonder if there was a civilization before the asteroid plowed into the side of the planet and made that big hole. I’ve seen projections of what Curie could have looked like before. At first, most of the water was vaporized. It’s thought that it was a pretty great place to live before that asteroid.”
“Our folks visited back in the day,” I said. “I have pictures of Mom surfing in the Radium Sea. It was a happening place forty years ago.”
“Show me,” Cassius said excitedly. I tossed the small video clips onto the forward display and let them roll. “Wow, I see where Liv gets her looks. Your mom really rocked a bikini. No offense.”
“That’s disturbing,” I said. “For the record, she pretty much looks like that still, so take it easy on the mom-love.”
“What? I’m just saying.”
“They look so happy,” Olivia said. I’d felt her approach. She leaned over Cassius and draped her arms over his chest. “And, Quinn, Mom’s beautiful. There’s no shame in that.”
I closed my eyes and shook my head, willing the conversation to end.
“Oh, hey, we’re getting hailed,” Cassius said.
I saw the request on the console and tipped my head forward, toggling acceptance on my HUD controls. A pleasant-looking, middle-aged man appeared on the screen. He had the bored, attempt-at-being-friendly look that people who regularly communicate with strangers often have.
“Grünholz flagged vessel Bandit, you have entered a semi-restricted space,” he said. “Please accept the weapons lockdown protocol attached to this message. Do you have any contraband you wish to place in escrow?”
“Curie Protectorate, this is Bandit,” Cassius answered. “We’re an unarmed vessel and accept the attached security protocol. I’m transmitting our manifest and we have no contraband requiring escrow.”
“Thank you for your cooperation, Bandit. Welcome to the Curie Consortium. May your visit be as profitable as it is rejuvenating,” he said with minimal enthusiasm, terminating comms at the end of his statement.
“Liv, you want to hang out for a while? I have the navigation punched into Terminal-A,” I said. “Addy and I will make sure that’s right and update it if things change.”
“Thanks Q, we’ve got it,” she said, sliding into my seat as I exited.
Addy wasn’t in the crew area, which meant she was either in one of the small bunks, the head, or the cargo hold. She’d had enough time to take a shower and I gambled that she was in one of the three small bunks, sized for about one and a quarter people and designed to be hot-bunked by crews larger than three.
I knocked softly.
“Q?” she asked.
The bunk was closed in by a rounded door. I opened it enough to slip inside and lie on my side next to her. She anticipated my company and turned toward me, our knees interlacing while we faced each other. She’d been asleep and kissed me, not bothering to lift her head from the pillow.
“Sorry I woke you,” I said.
“It’s a good surprise,” she said. “How close are we?”
“An hour,” I said. “Now that we’re closer, we should find a place to eat at the spaceport, and decide where we want to stay planet side if it’s not Rim.”
She picked my hand up and placed it on her hip. She’d been a little frustrated that I wasn’t moving more quickly. I gave her side a nice squeeze, and she slid onto her back, projecting station services onto the ceiling of the bunk, a meter overhead. We shifted so she lay partially atop me.
“This looks promising,” she said, zooming in on the station’s Deck-12. Overall, Paradise Station’s layout was of a tall cylinder with eighteen decks numbered from top to bottom, the topside in line with the forward edge of the planet’s rotation. The entire station slowly rotated on its side, its periodicity such that every three hours made for a full turn. I wondered what that was like to live with that day in and day out.
Deck-12 was above most of the station services and was the first deck, from the bottom at least, that offered hospitality. Like most places, there was an orderliness to the deck layouts. In this case, it appeared that smaller numbered decks were where wealthier people stayed or dined. Larger numbers were less attractive services. What Addy was looking at, however, was a pub named The Racetrack.
“They have forty different types of beer on their menu and not one bit of food sounds like a vegetable,” she said.
It was likely that most of the menu was supported by tank-grown proteins and hydroponic vegetable gardens. The hydroponics were more expensive, per calorie, than the protein vats. It was just a matter of labor. One shouldn’t ask how the protein vats work. Although no, green protein is not related to people in any way at all, if you’re wondering.
“Cass will be in love.”
“You know, they have replicators that make food, right?” she asked.
The replicator technology in Dwingeloo galaxy wasn’t anywhere near as advanced as what we’d been told was commonplace for humanity. On Grünholz it seemed like replicator technology was limited. To hear Dad talk about it, replicators were everywhere when he grew up in a mining colony. If you needed something made, you transmitted a code to the city’s replicators, and it would be queued for construction. The only cost came from intellectual property or the designs for whatever you wanted made. Raw materials for the replicators had some cost, but as long as you weren’t printing jewelry, it was insignificant in comparison to the IP.
“Food and medicine, at least that’s what Mom said, too,” I agreed. “It fits. I don’t know if you saw the cost of those med patches. We got an entire case for fifteen credits.”
“Look at this place,” she said, pulling up a virtual flythrough for The Racetrack. She maneuvered through the bar and changed the camera’s viewpoint so she could look at the artwork hanging on the walls. The entire motif was racing, with cross sections of entire racing sleds built into the booths, tables and even hanging from the ceiling.
“That’s sweet, what are the prices like?” I asked.
“Looks like ten creds for a vat burger with salted green fried spuds, whatever those are,” she said. “Calories – holy cow, that’s twelve hundred calories for one meal.”
“Feed you for about a week wouldn’t it?”
“If I didn’t take one of those calorie limiters,” she said. “Maybe we could split something. If I eat that much it makes my stomach hurt.”
“We need to work on the understanding that food you eat magically disappears,” I said. “You can have a tummy ache. I’ll be sympathetic. Everything else … nope.”
“So, Liv doesn’t use the potty?”
“She’s my sister. Of course she does. It’s not weird because she’s my sister.”
“You know, your dad always ran into trouble with septic systems on ships. What if that was genetic?”
“Stop. I get queasy.”
“Talking about septic systems?”
“Not the systems. It’s the stuff in the systems. Do you know how many times Dad told me about getting covered in his crew’s poop because something bad happened? Or even worse, the poop of a pirate ship that he took? Why is it you think I don’t want to be a privateer?”
“Bad septic?” she asked, not completely believing me.
“That’s right. Pirates eat bad food. That goes somewhere and I don’t want any part of it. Also, women don’t do those things.”
Addy giggled as she looked into my face. “Good to know. You’re fortunate. I happen to be the type of person whose food magically disappears. There aren’t a lot of us, but I’m one.”
“Ooh, I knew you were a catch.”
“Darn straight. We’ll need sixty credits for food tonight, doubling up burgers for Cass, while you and I split one. Try a few beers and enough left over for tip. That’s in our budget. If we sleep aboard Bandit, it’ll be cheaper, but maybe we could find a nice hotel and change the scenery as a celebration for making the trip.”
“Good plan,” I said. “Any idea what makes a good place to stay versus a not-so-good one?”
Both of us had always stayed with our parents when visiting far-off locations. That our parents were dignitaries meant we always stayed in the nicest locations. The idea of renting a place to sleep wasn’t unfamiliar but we hadn’t a lot of practical experience.
“Let’s look at security reports,” she said, paging through menus. “Hmm, there’s some crime. Mostly theft. A couple of assaults on Deck-11. Late night … Saturday. Well, there’s a Sunday and there’s a Wednesday. Okay moving up to Deck-10.”
We were mostly just burning time and picked out a couple of different hotels, each with a large bed and a promise of spectacular views. It felt unlikely that every room had an outside-facing window, but such was how marketing worked. There was fine print, some of the so-called views were projections on screens that appeared to be windows. I’m not sure that reading the fine print was helpful. I might have been okay with less information, especially since we weren’t likely to pay the upgrade cost.
With our choice of dinner venue and hotels complete, Addy researched the terminal I’d selected. She noticed higher incidences of theft from a few weeks back and upgraded to a safer concourse. I sent updated instructions to Liv.
“Can you get an outside view of the spaceport? I’m wondering how busy it is at this time of day,” I said. “Liv isn’t as comfortable flying with Smokey strapped to the side.”
