Yessir, all in 12 hours, sir. Eight, rightly, as Lilly was on the offloading detail. Seems like, apparently, she shacked up immediately after. So, the Greg's and I were piled into this charming little shop on the concourse
Yessir, I do know it was a dive. Still, though, they do have these quaint little crackers. Call em, specifically, very clearly labeled, "Gluten free cookies"
Right, sir. So we're getting right pissed, the Gregs and I, when this lad runs in, right, makes a great stir.
Bastard's wearing our color's, right, which got the greg's a mite miffed. So they're all like, lets get up and demand an answer from the sodding,
Yessir. Well. For instance, right as we were getting up and looking menacing, Lilly came running in after him, and she was crying, sir. Bloody sodding tears running down her cheeks, makup all mucked. Then, another lad!
Right, so, now Lilly's run into the room, all mucked up. We're not sure if she's upset or hurt, her clothes are mussed too. So, then, Big Greg has got his pistol out.
Oi, I know, right? I hadn't got my gun out yet. Dress Greg down for having it. Foriegn space!
Yessir. So. Lilly, she catches up with the first man, and the second one, he catches up with them. Just as Colors boy is putting 'is arms around her, this oiler lad tosses a bit o something longarm.
Pretty sure that bloke was trying to hit colors boy, but it hit Lil. At which point..Greg, well.
You know what Greg did, yessir.
Anyhow, after the flechetting of that bloke...well, so, things got pretty hecktic. Something burst bottles of something, and they went up. So, sprinklers come on, and people are running all about. no one's armed but us, so far.
So we get Lilly, and are making for the door, when a bot bursts into the bar. So here we are, running toward a security bot. Little Greg gets tranked, just about instantly.
Well, sir, we didn't have bloody well time, you know? all happened so fast. Had time after that. Pulled lil to cover, and started laying fire on the bot
Because, Sir! Bastard thing had hit Greg!
At that point, we're punching in colors, and LPI begin pouring into the place. I take it there were grenades lobbed in. Woke up in hospital.
Back in the early times, when we weren't quite sure what to make of Ageria's Lanes, and asides, they'd not been set up to the point where this network was complete through Bretonia, there were hostilities at the edges of space...Edges of space being, for example, Old Solarius, run by Daumman bosses of the old guard, raising the pressures on everyone to pitch and haul. It was a much longer journey than you'd expect, because from Ross out, the lanes were being put up and not yet online, so we had to drop to burn for that long path out to the newly built Omega 3 gate.
Used to be we sling shotted omega 1 from Cambridge, driving ships where most of our hold was superluminal drive. Live a week in bent physics, and stars rushed by so fast you could sit and watch them shifting, says Old Mag. Then, after that burn and pull, you'd skirt the lonely stars of Omega 2 and 6, drop yourself out of superluminal hurling toward that big angry soup in 11.
Well, as I said, things were new. Ageria was tossing up these gates, said we could go from Cambridge to Omega 3, from there to 7, each of those jumps nearly instant, all we had to do was burn across the systems from gate to gate, and then drop below the elliptic and charge out at superluminal. Shorter trip, cheaper fuels...sure, Gates charged fees...but none of this is the point. Things were changing, fast, from where it had been, stations out in omegas being abandoned as the lane paths were skipping them..Omega 11, rich as it was, didn't expect to be skipped, or connected, for a long while, so the stationers there were holding hard to the old ways.
That's the point, kids, of this backdrop. Station wasn't a week or two away from recourse. It was months of superluminal drive from Rheinland, and weeks from the edge of the new path, by dint of the reasonably short stretch between 7 and 11, as the crow flew, and they stuck to the old ways, a station with a population of seven hundred, worried about pirate armies or rocks, but mainly just wondering if their next incoming contract would be on time, and completely in the dark as to news for the last four months. They knew gates were planned, but also knew they weren't getting theirs for a long time. They might end up like waystations everywhere, cut off as the highways leapfrogged once vibrant systems. They weren't the most trusting at the best of times, and their lives were in question in this revolution of speed.
So we bore in hard on omega 11, Solarius station. Basic supplies on this contract, fish in tanks of water, protein and the necessities, compressed O2, some nitrates. Stuff of life. Our return trip was to be backed on London Credit, about as far from Solarius old Terra, but a strong credit with deep pockets...and times were changing.
Rolling out of our bays, barrels and hex canisters of the cargo, nothing was wrong. Only Merchanter in station, a slim line of concourse shops, a restaurant, a sleepover, a pub. Down the docks, mining ships dumped loads of ore straight onto concourse deck, and trawlers and scoops shoveled them into open train cars, Dust in the air. Dirty, old place, kids, remember. Automation hasn't taken off, scrubbers aren't so good, company men are coughing into re-breathers and us? stood out we did, shiny Tonnammar colors, clean, nearly new re-breathers, assault rifles slung over our shoulders, sidearms strapped to us. Policy, on a base that might turn pirate out in the deep dark, forty heavily armed Hallorans looking all the world like assault marines, showing we'd teeth while our ship was tied umbilicals and clamps to their life support..
Well, kids. Regular happened, and our cargo was unloaded. Made just enough in their script to fill us with air and fuel, and they rolled canisters of diamonds up to the empty birth aside us, put it under arms. Old lady went in, while we piled into restaurant, pub, and sleepover, having our twelve or so hour leave, kids running through markets and seeing what good their London chits were against their Cambridge or Stuttgart chits, who'd been saving what and how clever their bargains were, as much a trade between them as it was between the marketers. Same as when we land on a far out Zoner base, where currencies fly six different ways and are often discounted by their distance from home.
Day wears on, we pile into bunk after bunk in the sleepovers, our ship upside down against the spin of the station. Old lady and her accounts crew are still in negotiations, that's not unusual, but something went sour there, and their stationmaster made a move. Rough times, remember.
And we're asleep in our beds, on their station, or pissed in their pubs, lone few sitting awake at dockside, when the shooting started. Snipers take our dockmen, police our drunks. Colors start beeping, our alaurms go off, and they wake up, all those kids and olds, some wrapped around a stationer, others coming too alone, and out on the concourse, there's an assault mech residing over Tonnammar's berth.
Thirty sleep addled kids strap into assault gear on that morning, confused angry little ones. Their doors are locked from the outside, but they've got emergency beepers going off, and fairly quickly have blown holes in the bulkheads. We weren't armed with just flechette pistols in those days. Sleepover's ours in short order, three staff up against thirty kids in assault gear, and only one of the staff dead. There's militia outside, now, and not a damn word from the Old Lady...our alert marines are scattered dead across the concourse, that they saw from windows in their sleepover.
Twelve kids, no older than you, die cutting their way through the mech and the militia, to the ship, where things go from violent to mutually assured destruction in short order. Ship's still got superluminals, remember, and is clamped to a station...so when those things lit on, station started talking. Got the Old Lady on the line, our drunks out of the tank, all the while our drives buzzing away at reality right next to a gravity well.
Station took London credit. We lost seventeen of a fifty cousin crew, built a bit of reputation for ourselves.
Reputation's got to be maintained, Cousins. So get those guns cleaned and run those sims.
Don't believe me? Talk to Old Mag about what happened on Freeport Five.
Part of it is time differentials, kids. They get older than us way faster. Because when we're out, most of the time, we're not coasting in lanes, they get older than us a lot faster than most of the House Shippers.
No. Write Mag if you want to know why they get older faster than us.
But you gotta think about yourselves like the elves out of stories. Them on stations, or down on worlds, they're like men. Or goblins, even, on some stations.
Us, we're on the move, so, to some extent, we're frozen in time. That set of punks you scrapped with last week...next time we're back around here, they could have lived five years, and you just a couple months.
Tommy, damnit, I know you know this. Shut it.
Roight. So, we're slower than other folk. We're aware of that, too. Legal and Comms, they take courses in this, about interacting with people for whom the nomad scare was long enough ago that they can believe it was a hoax.
For people who've lived sixteen, seventeen whole years since 800 past landing.
Yeah, kids, I know. There's a point to this.
The punks you just smeared in arcade...they're going to have a decade on you for every three years you age. They're going to have three times the experience, three times the space to set up traps and train up. Three times the space to make mistakes, and three times the space to live.
Oh shut up.
But that's not the best way to think about it. Think about it like this. Those bastards are clever-er than you. They're faster than you.
Yes, yes, you run faster and punch harder, that's not what I mean. You've reflexes on them, and you likely will have reflexes on this batch of kids all their lives. They're going to get older much faster than you.
But consider. You drop into concourses on Norfolk again, after a run out deep, and suddenly those punks aren't kids you beat up. They own shops, run gantries. A few of them will pass exams, and get into station control. Next long loop, and how old are they? There's new shipping concerns, these kids are old, with kids of their own, sitting on stacked up station-shares and planning long views of the future...and here you come in again, still looking like the wet behind the
I will send you upstairs, the lot of you. I'll send each and every one of you to sit in front of the old man an explain yourselves.
You gotta consider that all the wealth we have, all the piles of good will and station shares, the chits, the credits, the references, they're all old. Some of them are very, very old, by station standards, and the stationers, they're all new.
Mike hadn’t heard about the antimatter storm approaching the far side of Rhineland. Often while he was traveling, he didn’t keep up with anything but the most extreme navigational alerts. The military alerts came and went, and he usually had the deltaV to skirt any real threats. That was one of the benefits of spending most of his time at relativistic burns: news caught up to him the old fashioned way, as it happened to him.
He had dropped off a shipment of gold after a long, lonely haul from Dublin. He’d passed stations and the more inhabited House space, but mostly at speed, so he’d only been able to exchange media with relay satellites that he passed on an intermittent basis, and only on tight data budgets. Though he’d received some letters, and been able to get the occasional package of news and local media, he was mostly out of touch.
So, he’d read fiction and consumed media, while slowly eating down his stocks of flash frozen meals and aged liquors. He’d made a planned detour to Planet Sprague to refuel and re-supply. Weeks later he landed on New Berlin to sell his shipment, and exchanged news dumps with the system authority. Somewhere in his packet, unread, he probably had that information: that there was a gods-thrice-damned antimatter cloud falling through the sector, tilting Munich closer to industrial and ecological disaster and throwing the whole damn planet into shade.
But regardless, he’d been here before, first in 746, then in the 80s, and now he found himself headed back again almost forty years later.
The place had been an thriving colony, bustling, free of the stink of industrial overrun. Sure, food was expensive, but the wages were high. There had been shops on the concourse, and holidayers flitted through metropolitan areas still vibrant and colorful after a hundred years. He’d been told that his hydrocarbons would turn a good profit here, hadn’t thought much past that. Holidaying on Nuremberg had been one hell of a good time. Tongue curling against the roof of his mouth, feeling a taste he couldn’t quite remember, he could almost hear the quiet roar of tittering crowds, and taste the crisp sweet splash of the best saffron cider Rhineland could offer. Oh man, the thin spiral of bitter rind they threaded into the rim of his glass like it was their fucking art, just... The nightlife here had been soo...
Gnawing on old synth-paste and dreaming, Mike hauled himself out of his couch. His muscles torqing against 1.5Gs, he slowly descended against the “down” toward the cargo bay. Below him, an airlock with a flashing Nitrogen 15% -20* sign. He grabbed a flimsy face mask, and slammed meaty fingers across one of the canisters of breathing air mounted to his right. He pulled it from the wall, grabbed its dangling cord, slowly turned the valve, and slung it over his shoulder. The strap bit.
He pulled the mask over his nose and chin, released the elastic, and it sapped against his face, pressed into his beard by the pressure. He knelt down, ground his knees painfully into the bulkhead, and turned the lock below him. It cracked, and a slight breeze blew past him, the air leaving the chamber. A he hauled the lock up, it blew harder, bowing his body between the floor and the top of the lock. His mask ballooned up, now the highest pressure thing, offgassing.
Below him, 14 meters of pyramid stacks of hex cubes, bright lights, nearly no atmosphere, and blood-steaming cold. He clambered down. Hex cubes hung from the...ceiling? Labels gleaming. Collectables, rare consumables, guns, meats and fish, rare diamonds cut from the Blood two hundred years ago, given to his mother. He pulled himself across the ladders, arm over arm, and dropped himself onto a canister with half open drawers, slightly bent from time and weight.
A haze of steam rising from his skin, his eyes blurry with tears, he pulled a few packs of meat, and other frost covered packages, dropping them onto a pan at his feet. Snuffling, he pulled on the stinging ropes, wrapping his net around the tray. The cold chewed through his fingers with a feeling of cold, and nothing. He clipped it to his belt, and pulled himself, his gas canister, and his groceries up the ladder.
He ate well, and would continue to, on his way into Nuremberg, missing the out of alignment lanes.He was used to operating under burn, and couldn’t remember if they’d even been fully constructed in the 780s. Maybe they had just never been finished?
Still...drifting lanes, each one skewed off of its gravity anchor...the eerie non-light of antimatter glow to the galactic north, drowning out the stars; and the lack of traffic would have been enough to warn him off. Had he not signed a contract, made promises, paid Ageria’s lane fees and pre-charged for jumps he would have kept his engines burning right across the system and jumped out the other side. Unfortunately, he was under contract, and had no idea where he might be able to make back his losses if he didn’t make this shipment. He got more and more worried, as the days went by. There might not be anyone there at all..Or it could have been overrun by pirates, or even, destroyed by aliens.
The station was misused, and only lightly staffed, further increasing his unease, but he pegged it for frugality until he got down the lift to Nuremberg. Traffic on the walks was sparse, and hurried, and buildings had broken windows, lots of lights wouldn’t come on, and he couldn’t find a cab. He had to call and call, and call.and no one answered. Finally, he stepped out in front of a rapidly passing pedestrian.
“Hey. Miss. Where...where is the Stockyard General?” he grunted out, his tongue not used to talking. She looked at him, startled, and said nothing, pointing.
He looked, and she walked briskly away. He walked the way she had pointed, not at all confident in the direction. He felt light, and his boots seemed to bounce. It was making him feel unsteady, and overbalanced. So he stumbled in, and waited. The paint needed a touchup, and the lights buzzed as though the electric wasn’t entirely on. He had been in rougher places, deep in omega, years and years ago...and as he reflected, longer ago than a weller’ would think he could have been alive. He didn’t have the physics to explain it if they didn’t know. The thought wore on him through the wait.
A man in a sharp Daumann suite approached. Bist du “Mike Halloran?” “Me” he grunts.
“Sie haben eine Lieferung von Kohlenwasserstoffen. Wir haben die Preise vorher akzeptiert. Können wir den Besitz übernehmen??”
Mike’s German was terrible, but he got something about “get the goods” and he nodded yes, and asked the guy where he could get a bed.
“Nein, geh zurück!” This derailed Mike rather badly, and he was sure he looked like an idiot. The guy could tell, and started miming climbing up a rope and aggressively pointing.
“I...I still have about 500 cubic meters of empty hold though…” he managed to stutter out.
Sweat had started to coat his palms and pearl up on his sides, and his eyes were rushing around. This wasn’t..right.
The Daumann guy tried again. “No here sleep. A...kiosk einen bekommen...Gouds.”
“What?” I...I’m sorry”
The man pointed at a line of consoles, and shrugged apologetically.
Mike shurgged, and headed a console to purchase a contract on land-destoryers, blearily staring at the contract.
Lots of zeros hanging there, clause after clause, an insurance with a very high deductible price listed over and over. High price goods, high mass...costs running over and over, destroy rather than surrender lines…
A destroy rather than surrender is an insurance line item demanding that the carrier of goods deliver those goods only to the parties listed on the contract, and issuing a series of “thou shalt not” regarding resale, loitering, misuse, and explicit lines about defending it to the death.
The thing read, literally:
Code:
“Die Übergabe dieser Ladung an eine nicht in der Vereinbarung aufgeführte Partei gilt als grobe Vertragsverletzung und wird mindestens der Beendigung weiterer Verträge mit Daumann unterliegen, einschließlich ..”
Which meant something like “we’ll take you to court about this, and that, and this, et cetera.
Mike had seen these things before, and hated the weasels who were trying to handcuff him to his hold like it wasn’t already his home. But so what, in a year, he probably wouldn’t have been back to Rhineland, and three to five will have passed here, the lawsuit will run right up against him being a spacer registered to a dead barrister on Stokes, wrap back around to the Underbridge, and then, if someone was still trying to pursue a case across three different jurisdictions, whatever it was would get dropped the next time political turmoil on New Berlin scrambled the courts. That had happened more than once. Besides, it wasn’t as though Daumann didn’t know that BMM was shooting their miners out of the Omegas, but they still had to move goods. A hold was a hold, so long as its insurance checked out.
Nuremberg was terrible after dark. Some sort of huge insect could be heard skittering all over the walls, and the clanging of machinery never stopped. Nothing was well lit, and he had to resort to using his own torch to get back to the lift. Three of the things followed him into the lift, rushing toward the lights. He squashed them, and the whole lift filled with a pungence he couldn’t describe. Maybe...maybe this is what they distill Gundey VIII from? If so...it’s going to be a collectable once Nuremberg gets fully abandoned.
The big chamber was as quieting down in fits and starts. The Old Man had just clapped his hands together, and a wave of claps had spread out around him, everyone clapping once. It was effective enough. Three men and three women sat in the middle, varying in age from early motherhood to withered by time. They were watched by some thirty odd others, who each had some interest in the results of this meeting.
As the space quieted, James Halloran slowly stretched his aching hands, then spoke: "Meeting starts, please begin the log"
After a beep, the woman across from him spoke up. "Our biggest issue right now is bunks, births and berths." Someone groaned at the pun, and Sally's lips twitched upwards. She went on "Greg the Younger and Xi are petitioning for a baby, bringing our list up to five. We're not totally full this year, but I've had them all stay on contraceptives. Can we budget any more space?"
The youngest woman was tapping on her tablet, and got a diagram pulled up. It was mostly red boxes, with some gaps. "I don't think we can move too many bulkheads around. It's really not an issue of cubic meters, but more about stacking. Without a serious lay-in, a complete overhaul, tear down, and re-build, I can’t do anything but add less than a meter to some spaces, and none of those spaces are in the right places. My vote stays. Everyone can see the chart, if anyone is willing to trade cabins, I can make adjustments ad hoc. Otherwise, we lay-in."
James took a moment to check expressions. No one was glad to victimize the couples, least of all the engineers who had to be opposition. He took a long breath "Okay. Finance is against laying in. Engineering is Against, Bridge is for, Consul is split, Sally, are you saying you want this put to the whole deck?"
"My constituency does." The old lady across from her snorted, and Sally ground her molars.
"Fine, the deck has a week to gather votes. Next item, an accounting from Finance"
Mag sent some charts up onto the screens, and seemed to hunch farther into her seat. Her voice quaked under the amplification: "Outstanding credit has not recovered, the wars are still spooking capital markets. Kusari chits trade rather well, but we are very much under-invested in Kusari this decade. Accounts hold for about two hundred million, Finance holding about a third, the rest in common shares, buyouts are reasonably strong toward Rheinland credit, poor in Liberty, and still stale in Bretonia. These days, if we stop moving, we lose money, and I wouldn't say we're doing well. As always, Ageria accounts for about 40% of our costs, and bribes are edging up."
Alice, Joe, and Greg the Third are managing on the bridge while second shift captain, Sally Halloran was caught below decks during the jump. As reality bent around them during the time in spooky-space, time feeling both epic in length and blissfully short, like a rubber band fully taught and pregnant with possibility while simultaneously hollow and listless...
And then, after an age or a moment had passed, the skies of Newcastle space were in front of them...and a message, timestamped from years in the future, the way such things seemed to get recorded when received in spooky-space.
Code:
tight-band communication, text only: Confirm receipt, Y/N
Squinting at it, Alice nudged Joe. "Hey, we've a text only...looks like a tight-beam...something we got while in the jump. What should we do?"
"Well, we got it, right? return a yes. Why not? Anyway, we're laid in for the tradelanes. This field is a mess, but we're getting through"
Alice, her finger already hovering over the send key, bit her lip and squashed it, and then keyed another panel "Message sent" "Hey, Sally, we got a hail while we were jumping. Am replying, can you get up here pronto?"
More text came in over tightwave...a really bizarre distress beacon, of a sort. Something that would have stopped an in house shipper in their tracks, but Alice, having dealt with so many comms protocols in their long loops around the sector, having last updated her logs in 814, and still addled from the jump took it in stride, not even noticing the strangeness.
The bridge intercom sputtered to life: "Sally here, on my way up. I guess...just answer it and be helpful, as per standard"
"Roger that, uhh..its a distress beacon, ought we re-route?"
More information streamed into their devices, spacial coordinates and terribly mangled datestamps. Alice and Greg slowly peeled off the juice packs they'd strapped to their arms for the jump, shaking off grogginess and trying to focus while Joe cussed about asteroids and untrustworthy jump holes. Most of the crew was still asleep, as people often liked to be during jumps, just the bridge and sec-opps fully awake, if feeling like you'd been awake for a year was fully awake.
Sally burst onto the bridge, panting. "Uhh, how far out of our way is this sap?"
"we'd delay off the tradelane for a few hours, not more." Says Greg, having already keyed in the coordinates the distress beacon was putting out.
"All right. Put us on that course. We'd want someone to answer our calls, right? Alice, get me Greg the third on the line, and then...I guess, tell that ship we're coming."
"Security on the line, what can we do for yah?" "Greg, in about fifty minutes, we're going to divert off the lanes and head toward a distress beacon. I need you to get all your boys on the guns, wake up Gertrude and her team, and prepare to...I dunno. Be ready to repel boarders or take on injured or render aid. As always, be ready for some sort of ambush"