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Emergency Supplies

by Liam Hogan


It’d take more than a suspect ore carrier for us to call in reinforcements, whatever my instincts were telling me. Nobody wanted the reputation for jumping at shadows. Out past Mars, we were spread so thin that for all intents and purposes we were on our own, and those shadows were vast and cast by a cold, distant sun.

Down in the inner system, the Space Force rule is simple: broadcast your existence, pretty much at all times, or be prepared to be fired upon. The potential risk, if not to the Earth then to the growing number of manned satellite hubs and lunar bases, was too high to have a few rogue megatons of fusion-powered metal aimed down your throat.

Which brought its own problems as the number of craft, from pleasure to industrial to freight, increased over time. The lunar shipyards churned them out as fast as they could shape the raw materials, and as fast as the rarer metals could be extracted by autonomous drones out in the cold, lonely expanse of the asteroid belts.

Way out here, space was mostly empty, and mostly silent. Chatter was limited to daily or even weekly check-ins and to the looped sermons from colonies of religious fanatics, who came all this way to escape the godless hordes and who generally considered the Space Force heathens of the worst (i.e., interfering) kind.

All of it listened to by Ada, our ship AI, who picked over the sparse gossip for hints and rumors, oddities and strange patterns, looking for things to investigate, and who was also ever alert for actual emergencies: Save our Souls distress calls and May God Have Mercies.

Ada decided a lot of things. Our wide, looping path for one, making the most of what gravitational forces were available. It cut us through the shipping lanes, but also veered us out to the distant edges, where traffic was lighter and things were not always what they seemed.

Like this ancient K-Class, the Herman Munster, dimly glinting in the scope as our patrol ship sniffed delicately at her trail. Most ships out this way are old, ours included. The newer, shinier craft get to ply their trade in the busy inner system, but are then, if they survive that long, put out to pasture, spending their twilight years in the belts or even further beyond. The pace out here was slower, all about energy conservation, no one in a particular rush. If the worst should happen . . . . . . . . . well, no great loss. Or so the fat-cat investors back on Earth thought, happy to insure the cargo, but not the ship, or the crew.

“An antique,” Rodgers said, eyeing the hulk on the screen.

“A trusty old workhorse,” replied Jasmine, who had a soft spot for these stout, elderly ladies.

“A floating scrap pile.”

“That has proven its worth, over and over.”

“On its last legs. I’ll offer odds that even if she’s on her return trip, she never makes it home.”

Maybe they were both right, based on the engine signatures. But I knew these ships, had grown up on them, the precocious child of a spacer. And though I was the most junior of our trio, it was me that had the feeling about this one, that had us paying close scrutiny, testing the thin vapor that she, and all ships, leave in their wake.

Ada had brought the vessel to our attention, but only that. A ship, a big one, a long way out, though not unheard of. Just pootling along, belly stuffed with ore. There was nothing to suggest illegality, or worse. But Ada trusted human intuition, and so was, on this occasion, happy to listen to what my gut was telling me.

“Let’s match paths,” Ada announced, having done the astronav calculations. “And give her a friendly holler, to tell her we’re on our way.”

Which would give them plenty of time to try and hide or even space whatever it was that was playing havoc with my spider sense, but that was better than them thinking we were pirates. It would also give them a chance to alter their course. That didn’t bother us much. A K-Class is far from the most nimble of spacecraft. One of the heaviest vessels ever built, except for a few special purpose behemoths. Ponderous. Once we decided to pay it a visit, we’d be like a dog after a bone.

“Ada? How long until rendezvous?”

“Seven hours and twenty minutes.”

Albeit a rather slow dog, after a marginally less slow bone. Plenty of time to eat and get some beauty sleep. Make sure we were fully functioning, when we got close enough for that to matter.

The Herman didn’t do anything to change our ETA, which was almost disappointing. Right on schedule, we were staring at the vast bulk so close we could see the pockmarks. Spend enough time in deep space, and you’d be pockmarked as well. Tiny, and sometimes not so tiny, bits of primordial rubble traveling at frightening speeds, relatively. Sometimes relativistically. Sometimes you heard one go “pock” as you were sleeping, and there was always a giddy moment as you waited to see what alarms it might trigger, and tried to guess how long it would take to get into your survival suit.

“Who wants the EVA?” I asked. Even if, if all went well, there’d be nothing particularly Extravehicular about it. Whoever went would still be suiting up, though. Still be wearing helmets as they went through the narrow umbilical that temporarily joined the two ships. If someone wanted to space one of us, we weren’t going to make it easy for them.

“It’s your call, Ellie,” Jasmine pointed out. Which, given how much she loved seeing these fossils up close and personal, suggested she thought there might be something funky about this one as well. That, or she was just picking up on my vibes. That, or she just wanted me to step up.

“SOP, then,” I said, feeling a tingle of excitement and of worry. “By the numbers. You two stay put with Ada. Keep scanning, for all the good it will do, and let me know what you find.”

The Herman’s solitary crew member met me at the airlock. A stolid, gray, short-haired spacer, wearing dungarees with a Rorschach pattern of oils and scorch marks. She waited as I took off my helmet.

“Space Force First Lieutenant Ellie Rodriguez, of the Patrol Ship Thelxinoe,” I said, perhaps a little too crisply. “Routine inspection.”

“Kait Symons,” she said, taking the proffered hand, her skin a patchwork of rough calluses and smooth burn marks. “Of the Herman Munster.”

I gave her a tight smile. Obviously of the Herman Munster, since we were on it. The crew quarters, life support part of it. K-Class freighters were mostly not pressurized. Ore doesn’t need it, doesn’t really need much in the way of shielding either, since it does that job well enough itself. The crew could range from anything from a lonely one, as now, up to about a dozen or so if you didn’t mind fending off other people’s feet and elbows. But more usually, out this far, pairs of spacers who bickered like old married couples and spent far more time together than those ever did. With an AI as the third wheel, doing the best to keep the peace.

“Not often you see a K-Class anymore, outside of a museum,” I said, pulling out my flimsy. You always look more official, with paperwork.

She grunted. I guessed she wasn’t going to make things easy. Or maybe she’d been out here too long, and had forgotten the strange art of conversation.

“Original engines?” I asked.

“No—” She bit off her reply a moment too late.

“Didn’t think so. Replaced by Klusky T7s?”

“T5s,” she begrudgingly admitted.

“That so?” That much I already knew, Ada had done the pattern matching. “Temperamental?”

“Sure.” She shrugged. “But nothing I can’t handle.”

“And it’s just you and the ship AI on board, is it?”

She nodded, but didn’t risk saying anything. I liked her. Kait Symons was the sort of fiercely independent loner it took to spend time out on the fringes with nothing but a souped-up chess computer. Able to turn their hands to pretty much anything, because if they didn’t, who would? But she was a terrible liar. And it’s always suspicious, when a ship’s AI doesn’t want to talk.

I tapped my comms. “Thel? I’m about to inspect the cargo—two hundred tons of assorted rare earths. It’s likely to block my signal, so I’m switching comms off. Engage protocol Prodigal Son. One hour.”

“Roger that, Ellie. Stay frosty. Thelxinoe out.”

I eyed the spacer as I unclipped the comms badge, her darting gaze watching my every move. “Do you know what that protocol is, Kait?”

She shook her head—a rabbit, cornered by a fox, but perhaps sensing a bolt hole behind her.

“Basically, if I don’t reestablish contact at the end of the hour, then your freighter is to be considered hostile. I don’t need to explain what that means, right?”

She frowned, wary as hell.

“Well then.” I smiled again, a little more expansively. “Let’s go inspect the cargo, shall we? Both of them.”

There’s not much to say about the ore. The autonomous drones that harvest it take their own sweet time, working away at a decent-sized asteroid for years, picking and choosing and extracting only the rarest, most useful elements. When they have a full hopper, they push it out along with a beacon, and the first ore freighter to pick it up gets the delivery fee. Some never got picked up—the fee wasn’t always very generous and depended on the fluctuating values of rare ores. To make any money at all, ore freighters had to compute the most energy efficient paths through the belt, hoping to pass enough full hoppers to make it worth their while. The Herman had done well enough, though by Ada’s records, it had taken her the best part of three long years to fill her cavernous bays.

The other cargo, though . . . . . . . . . The one in the spaces left behind when a bulky Tolmach fusion engine is ripped out and replaced by twin Klusky Fives. Still lined by the same thick panels the leaky old drives needed, radiation and everything proof, impenetrable to external scans. Not exactly spacious, but roomy enough.

I’d half expected to find a dead hopper, the dual-purpose beacon and ID fried or just utterly drained, something half-forgotten whose contents could be sold on the black market, no questions asked. Or contraband—each space station and colony had its own rules on what was and what wasn’t allowed, from soft narcotics like alcohol, to any of a thousand blasphemous tracts at one of the religious settlements out toward the frozen edges, be it in infidel book form or heathen digital format.

I hadn’t expected a dozen pairs of eyes, staring wordlessly up at me. Small eyes. Young eyes. Fearful eyes.

Kait was still at my shoulder, breathing heavily. I was horribly aware that she was about twice my size. She hadn’t helped as I’d opened up the bay, had only muttered curses that I knew these old birds so damned well. But she hadn’t offered active resistance, either, and in my eagerness to root out the smuggler’s secrets I’d found myself ignoring her. A potentially dangerous and possibly fatal mistake. For both of us.

“Orphans,” she muttered, in weary explanation, opening her meaty scarred hands to show they were still empty. “Destined probably for Triton, though they would never have got there. Not in a leaky shuttle with no crew and not even a functioning AI; whoever set the course must have turned back well before the belts. And whatever signal was supposed to be guiding them has long since stopped. Pure chance I stumbled across them.”

“Triton? D’hell!”

Even as I said it, the pieces clicked into place. There were a dozen rarely heard from religious cults set up around frigid Neptune, out on the very edges of the solar system and way beyond our regular patrols. Whenever anyone did make the effort to go check on them, they were met either by extreme hostility, sometimes backed up by aging ordnance, or dead silence. It was an unforgiving place to set up camp, and the cults had a life expectancy not much beyond a dozen years.

The surprise was that any of them lasted even that long. Fervor alone did not make for well-prepared colonists, and they were always too few in number to be viable that far from the warmth of the sun. It’s hard to recruit followers when you’re a billion miles from anyone and anything. Rumors persisted on how they managed it. Rumors now backed up by a dozen frightened eyes.

Sometimes, so those rumors went, a cult would put the call out. Splash what remained of their founders cash to get a shipment of those who wouldn’t be missed. That their recruits most likely had no choice in the matter, that they might be treated abominably, both on route and on arrival, that a failing religious settlement at the ass end of the solar system was no place for a young kid, for anyone, really, didn’t matter—to the cult leaders.

But while rescuing them was a noble act, Kait had saddled herself, and me, with a thorny problem. Someone might still claim they were theirs, if word got out. And even if the original cult members had collectively gone to meet their maker without even waiting for the new disciples to arrive, any and all of the other Neptunian cults would battle for possession of such a valuable, innocent, blessed cargo.

Space is an expensive business. No one would be willing to pay the exorbitant costs to return these orphans all the way back to Earth or the Moon, and no one would want them when they got there. Just another problem to be shuttled back and forth, until, yet again, some cult with cash came a-calling.

Despite our status as the upholders of law out here, there wasn’t much the Space Force could do about it. The standard approach in all matters was to ensure safety, and let the lawyers battle over ownership. But once they were in the grasp of a Neptunian cult, all the civil rights lawyers could do was to send strongly worded messages into the inky void.

Which explained why the Herman wasn’t singing to the cosmos about what she had found. But not what her plan was.

“Where are you taking them?” I asked, as pale, delicate fingers emerged from the dark to tug at my belt, my hands, trying to give me something.

“It’s a stretch,” she admitted with a deep sigh. “But there’s always the freighter academy.”

Definitely a stretch. The ore the Herman was carrying would barely pay for the fuel that particular trip into the inner system would cost. Most outer ore freighters only went as far as Mars, where the bulk of the ore was offloaded and/or further refined, and smaller craft transported the more valuable stuff on to Earth and the Moon. Kait was sacrificing three years of lonely, hard work, for nothing.

Almost nothing. I looked the orphans over once more, and their snug hidey-hole. There was a crate of food and water in there. Supplies were expensive this far out, and I wondered whether Kait had been depriving herself to eke them out for her unexpected charges.

I glanced down at the small hand that kept pushing at mine, at the thing it—she—was trying to give me. An odd, amorphous lump.

Memoputty. This was one of the older ones, the sort that got discarded in the inner belt, the sort of thing a Spacer played with during the long, lonely hours. But for anyone new to them, they were still a wonder. Muscle memory took over and I twisted and pulled it into the shape of a long-eared bunny rabbit, and handed it back. A shy grin was my reward, before the kid was swallowed by her companions, soft excited whispers shared between them.

“So what are you going to do, Lieutenant?” Kait asked, half defiant, half resigned.

“Do?” I echoed, clipping my comms badge back on, the flash of light as I did saying it was active again. “Thelxinoe, this is Ellie. The Herman is running low on consumables. I’ve cited the captain, Kait Symons, for having insufficient reserves, and am requisitioning four crates of Space Force emergency supplies. Have them ready for transfer.”

There was relief in her eyes, and I could tell she almost wanted to hug me. All I’d done was give away something that wasn’t mine. Heck, the bean counters over at Space Force HQ would probably try to bill the Herman for them. Or more likely whichever shipping company owned the ancient tug, because Kait was going to end up with empty pockets at the end of all of this.

But neither of us said anything about that, now the comms badge was back in place, Ada listening and recording every word. “Go safely, Kait Symons,” I said, in way of a farewell.

“Another hungry freight driver, hey?” Rodgers said with a grin, as I clambered through the patrol ship’s airlock, and Jasmine helped me out of my suit.

I didn’t say what I’d found. I couldn’t, there was no privacy aboard the Thelxinoe. We’d taught Ada a number of things over the length of our current tour, including how to swear in Swahili, though she’d rapidly outgrown us in her inventiveness. But this . . . . . . . . . we couldn’t teach this. That turning a blind eye was sometimes better than sticking to the rulebook.

Rodgers, who had been an officer much longer than I, and even Jasmine, only a half-dozen years my senior, didn’t push for details. A conspiracy of silence. Which made me wonder if they too had ever inspected a freighter and found the same surprising hidden cargo. Those rumors, they had to start somewhere.

I did a little light digging, after. Ada, and our base quartermaster, didn’t seem to balk at the extra supplies I had to order, to make sure we were properly provisioned for any and all emergencies. Each crate was signed off without comment.

And freighter academy always seemed to have a ready crop of young recruits, for what most considered the least glamorous of nonterrestrial professions. Not a bad place to grow up, if you were an orphan. Not that they all became Spacers, of course. Not everyone takes to the lonely reaches of space. Some of them get recruited into the inner system, as shuttle pilots or lunar engineers. Some even join the Space Force.

So now I had to include Ada, as well as the Herman Munster’s taciturn AI, in that silent conspiracy. In space, no one can hear you do the right thing.

##

Liam Hogan is an award-winning short story writer, with stories in Best of British Science Fiction and in Best of British Fantasy (NewCon Press). He’s been published by Analog, Daily Science Fiction, and Flame Tree Press, among others. He helps host Liars’ League London, volunteers at the creative writing charity Ministry of Stories, and lives and avoids work in London. More at happyendingnotguaranteed.blogspot.co.uk


From the 1960s through the 1980s, Democratic Senator William Proxmire was famous for outspoken fiscal conservatism, exemplified by his annual “Golden Fleece Award” for government officials guilty in his eyes of squandering public money. While government pork is an unquestionable blight, one could argue that some of Proxmire’s crusades—like many arguments against public investment today—rested more on naïveté than reason. We do, after all, need the government to invest handsomely on important things private industry can’t or won’t, and there is always balance to be found, nuance and unintended consequence to be considered, all without the benefit of a crystal ball.

Proxmire was not one for nuance, and he was no fan of space exploration either, once declaring (as chairman of the Senate subcommittee responsible for NASA appropriations, no less), “I say not a penny for this nutty fantasy.” That attracted ire from those with ties both to science fiction and government, those like Jerry Pournelle, for example, and Larry Niven, who penned this response in 1988 for What Might Have Been? Volume 1: Alternate Empires, edited by Greg Benford.

The story has its detractors, but it’s as pleasant a romp as they come, and a natural fit for a collection of stories about space and government and politics, and it provides an entertaining reminder—in the way that almost only science fiction can do—to be careful what you wish for.


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