Transference Station Read online

  ‘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.’

  ‘I’m a little old to become a deep space explorer,’ noted her lizard-snouted first mate. ‘Or, indeed, a colonist.’

  ‘So, docking fees paid, just for a face-to-face with DSD. What does that tell us?’

  ‘Possibly, that I should keep on searching the local data sphere’s “starship haulage wanted” section,’ said Skrat.

  ‘Money,’ said Lana. ‘Serious money being dangled in front of us. Com
e on, nobody loves money more than a skirl…’

  ‘You’re an ape-evolved racist. This is one skirl who loves living as much as social advancement.’

  ‘Living free, Skrat. Living free.’

  ‘Dollar-sign Dillard has lived a long time,’ noted Polter. ‘Surely the will of the devine had seeped into his bones over the centuries. Perhaps in this matter, he is a tool of God’s volition?’

  ‘There’s not much bone mass left in DSD’s body,’ said Lana. ‘Zeno’s lived a lot longer than our slimy broker friend… and how divine do you see our android acting?’ Will of the devine. Shit.

  CHAPTER TWO

  — Top Cats —

  With the Gravity Rose clamped to a spur off Transference Station’s central ring – one of dozens of docked starships – Lana waited as a station passenger arm extended towards their airlock. It was always deathly silent inside her airlock. The sounds of the vessel sealed behind her, the sounds of station life still walled off by vacuum. Polter, Skrat and Zeno waited alongside her. On many worlds, a man-sized crab, a humanoid lizard and a golden-skinned android with a wiry Afro might draw a few stares. Where her crew were heading today, they would pass as thoroughly pedestrian. A whir sounded from the heavy door behind Lana. It slid open and Calder Durk joined them. He still looked like a greenhorn in his ship overalls, as worn as the pass-me-downs were by their previous occupant. Well, a month of sim episodes and tape learning couldn’t make up for the man’s first twenty years of life stranded on a medieval hellhole of a world. Calder was a rescue cat, a favour, an exile. But there was a little bit of that in all of Lana’s crew. Maybe that was why Lana had acquiesced quite so readily to that son-of-a-bitch Matobo’s request for her to rescue the barbarian prince from burning by his political enemies.

  ‘Mister Durk,’ said Lana. ‘I presume from the fact you’re standing here on your lonesome that you couldn’t inveigle the chief out of the drive rooms for a spot of shore leave?’

  ‘He just laughed every time I mentioned the word Transference Station, captain.’

  There was a little too much naval bearing about Calder for her taste now. Lana could see that the new boy was having to resist the urge to salute every time he saw her; the hesitancy in his voice from choking off a “sir, yes sir”, each time he spoke. But she could blame that on Zeno – the android getting their latest recruit fixed on sim shows like Hell Fleet and all. The Gravity Rose wasn’t a jump carrier or a missile ship, and apart from the chief, none of her crew had ever been career fleet. That was a deliberate choice on Lana’s part. There were always ex-military types looking for work across the civilized worlds, but they were too buttoned-up for the relatively casual regime she ran on board her vessel. Be honest with yourself, girl. Too honest for some of the dicey trade you have to take on, as well.

  ‘Don’t take it too personal. The chief wouldn’t leave the engine room even if we were orbiting his home world.’

  ‘I didn’t realize the chief had a home world,’ observed Skrat, laconically. ‘I always thought the prickly fellow might have been a cloning accident on board a carrier.’

  ‘That’s an act,’ said Lana. ‘The chief was born on Quin Hon.’ She pointed Calder’s empty waist out to Skrat. ‘Get the man dressed.’

  Her first mate placed a scaly hand on the weapon locker plate and the bin swung open as it recognized his biometrics. Skrat pulled out a rail pistol attached to a tangle of black webbing and tossed it at Calder – a twin of the gun the rest of the crew were wearing for their shore leave. Well, not Polter, but with the vestigial fighting claws tucked on top of his carapace, Polter could cut his way through a steel deck if he had a mind to. A five-foot tall amphibious tank wasn’t something most humans took it into their mind to anger. You didn’t have to have been nipped by their nearest Earth analogue – a crab – to show the Kaggen race a healthy measure of respect.

  ‘There’s only one rule, Mister Durk,’ said Lana, watching Calder finger the malevolent, icy cold slab of weaponized ceramic, the green light from its magazine readout pulsing across his hand to indicate a full charge and a hundred shot magazine. ‘You draw it, you better be prepared to kill someone with it.’

  Calder grunted and pulled the straps tight around his waist and leg, clipping the holster in place.

  ‘We can buy you a longsword if you prefer to go sixth century on us.’

  ‘A longsword is two-handed,’ said Calder. ‘I was trained on a falchion. Shorter by seven inches.’

  ‘Shit, boy, there’s a job for you as a sim consultant if they ever revive the Conan franchise,’ said Zeno.

  ‘You can ignore him,’ said Lana, arching an eyebrow in the direction of the ship’s android. ‘The broker we’re going to see is a media geek. Zeno here is just getting himself in the zone.’

  ‘Dollar-sign Dillard is the only chap within a hundred parsecs who actually cares that Zeno played Lando Calrissian’s son in the remake of Galaxy Wars,’ noted Skrat, dryly.

  The android’s wiry Afro bristled in indignation. ‘It was the reboot of the remake of the Star Wars Golden Republic TV series, you skirl heathen. And if your species hadn’t got lucky by buddying up with humanity, you’d still think No Theatre was state-of-the-art entertainment.’ The android formed his hands together and made the shadow of a rabbit on the wall, wiggling the animal’s ears under the bright airlock light. ‘Hey, look, viewers, I’m a mighty skirl sand baron, and my nest is entangled in an indecipherable political turf war with a lower hierarchically-placed nest.’

  Skrat’s tail swished angrily behind him. It sounded a lot like a fencer testing the air with a foil before a duel. ‘Dear boy, I think we can safely classify sim addiction as cultural pollution, rather than an actual art form.’

  ‘Play nicely, boys,’ ordered Lana. ‘Or you can spend your shore leave with the chief inside one of his reactors, sponging down our anti-matter injectors.’ She saw the look on Calder’s face. ‘Just a little horseplay, your highness. We’re every bit as tight as a Triple Alliance carrier on board the Rose.’

  ‘I can tell.’

  That was the trouble with civilizing the barbarian nobleman with Zeno’s hand selected sim episodes and tape learning… you never got your facts in the round, and too many of the subtleties went straight over your head.

  ‘Finding sentients whose chain you can actually jerk is a rare and precious thing in this universe,’ said Lana. ‘Not everyone has a sense of humour you can understand.’ Lana tapped Polter’s elaborately tattooed carapace. ‘With the kaggenish, humanity also shares its belief in the one true God and the hope that we can be better than we are. That and the fact that kaggens inexplicably find humanity as cute as we think we are, ourselves.’

  ‘You mean there’s only one god?’ said Calder, but Lana ignored him.

  ‘It’s not inexplicable,’ said Polter. ‘You are just like a pet tree monkey, only larger.’

  Lana ignored her navigator, too. ‘And with the skirls we share a love of money, and given our relative propensities for violence, some would say the taste for a good war as well.’

  ‘At least when we fight them now, dear girl, we’re on the same side,’ said Skrat.

  ‘And what bang-up truths does humanity share with my kind?’ asked Zeno.

  ‘The copyright on your design and a healthy master-servant relationship?’ suggested Lana, largely in jest.

  ‘Shit, I guess that’s why you call them human rights.’

  ‘You’re always as a good as human to me,’ said Lana.

  ‘Now you’re just being nasty,’ said the android.

  Lana watched the docking arm drawing close to them, less than ten feet away now. An accordion-like passage of reinforced grey plastic, it was cheap, functional tech, but worlds rarely got rich by building better. ‘So, Skrat and myself will go and visit DSD and find out what he’s got that’s so hot he’s willing to stake our docking fees up front. Polter, I take it you’re off to the local cathedral?’

  The navigator signed agreement
with one of his bony hands. ‘As a lay preacher, it is my duty to share the blessings of crossing heaven with my fellow believers.’

  Lana looked at the android. ‘Zeno?’

  ‘I have a few errands to run, too,’ said the android. ‘I’ll catch up with you later.’

  ‘I thought you might want to take our new boy and show him a good time.’ Lana regretted saying the words almost as quickly as she had spoken. But that wasn’t trying to bribe Calder into staying around, was it? Just a common courtesy a captain would show to anyone new to the ship. New to the goddamn civilized universe, for that matter.

  ‘Ah, to feel the needs of the flesh and have flesh with needs. Thanks but no thanks. Given the gang problem on station, I though it might be safer if Calder went along to meet DSD with you. Everyone should meet Dollar-sign at least once in their lives. If only to see why getting pickled isn’t as much fun as the adverts make out.’

  ‘Okay then. We’ll meet up at the Fantasma Blanco later,’ said Lana. Part of her was pleased. She could keep an eye on Calder and make sure he didn’t get into any trouble, and the plan hadn’t even looked as if it was her idea. ‘We can chew over whether the risk-reward of this job is actually worth the potential burn.’

  Calder nodded cheerfully, just as though he knew that the Fantasma Blanco was a spacers’ bar named after the effects of a popular drug banned centuries ago. As if he had half a clue about who it was they were going to meet and how crafty DSD could prove. Well, pretending you knew what you were doing was as much a part of being crew as anything else. Bluffing had worked well enough for Lana to date.

  ‘Doesn’t the chief get a say in what cargo we take on?’ asked Calder.