Dubious Heroes: a novel Read online

  Alfie wanted to leave, but I managed to persuade him to stick around, at least until we could verify that the life support system aboard the Falco was actually working. Getting stuck out here without air would definitely put a crimp in my plans.

  Finally, the gantry came over the horizon, flying low, just skimming the surface. It was not a thing of beauty, unless you liked big square things, with scaffolding tacked all about it, and a rocket engine underneath.

  “Very nice”, Cozi said, as we watched it approach. There was a certain gracefulness to it, as it glided silently toward us over the low rolling hills, beneath the ringed ball of Saturn in the sky above.

  The gantry lit a hundred yards from the Falco, and on huge treads, trundled up beside it. A section of scaffolding slid up the exterior of the box, and aligned itself with one of the lower cargo bay doors. An access ramp extended from the base of the gantry, leading up to a huge cargo door of its own.

  “Gantry is in position”, Gabana said, via the radio.

  “Can you tell if there is atmosphere inside the Falco?” I asked.

  “Atmosphere is at zero pressure”, she said. “The Falco is in sleep mode. Shall I wake the AI and have him bring life support online?”

  “Negative”, I said. “We’ll take care of that ourselves. Thanks for your help. I’ll let you know if we need anything else.”

  “My pleasure”, she said.

  I switched my radio back into suit-to-suit mode.

  Cozi and I carried the crates into the lower level of the gantry, then rode the internal freight elevator up to the bridge which would take us into the Falco. I slapped a button on the hull by the airlock, and the exterior hatch slid open. They were meant to be easy to get into. Inside the airlock, I punched what I hoped was the proper code into the keypad by the inner door. It beeped in response and the inner door irised open.

  “Do you have the codes for everything here?” Cozi asked.

  “Everything we need”, I said. “Not much point in coming all the way out here and not being able to open the door.”

  “Tell me you had a backup plan”, he said.

  “Only if it’ll make you feel better.”

  “Wonderful”, he said. “Your planning skills are impressive, as usual.”

  “Save the sarcasm until I screw up”, I said. “It’s been a lot of years since we left school, Cozi. You’re pretty good at what you do, but so am I. If I didn’t think we could do this, we wouldn’t be here.”

  “Sorry”, he said, and actually sounded like he meant it. “I’m used to dealing with the drunken, carousing Doon, versus the competent, adult Doon. We never did anything but hang out and party, back on Luna.”

  “Jeez, don’t get all emotional on me”, I said. “That almost sounded like a compliment.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far”, he said. “Hey, you feel that? What is that?” I could feel the deck plates vibrating.

  “I don’t think you want to know.”

  “That asshole just left us, didn’t he?”

  “Yup”, I said. “Assuming you’re referring to Alfie and his stinking ship, mon.”

  “I hope your records about this ship were accurate”, he said. “Otherwise, it’s going to be a very long day.”

  “If life support doesn’t work, it’ll certainly be a bad day, but it won’t be a long one.”

  Chapter 10

  Suit air and power were good for about twelve hours between recharges. TGS records said that the Falco was fully functional, and had at least some fuel, air, and water aboard. But those records were almost a decade old.

  “This is not funny”, Cozi said.

  Hanging around with him always proved one thing; worry was definitely contagious. If there was one single thing that spacers universally believed, it was that when you’re all alone, out in the vast darkness of space, shit happens. I sincerely hoped it wasn’t about to happen to us.

  “You get the cargo aboard, and I’ll go see about life support”, I said. Dumbo had shown me a lot about the life support controls aboard the Ming Shu, and I figured they were similar. Okay, I hoped they were similar.

  “Just let me know”, he said, and turned back to begin moving the crates.

  I made my way to the core, and began the long climb up to the Habitat module. In addition to the ladder, the Falco had what’s known as a “hand lift”, which was nothing more than a handle and trigger set into a vertical track in the core, with a foot rest about five feet lower. You grabbed the handle, stood on the foot rest, pressed the button, and depending on which you chose, you went up or down in the core. Sort of an economy elevator. Naturally, the one in the Falco wasn’t working. This wasn’t much of a problem, given Phoebe’s low gravity, but it would have to be fixed sooner or later.

  As expected, life support was on the crew deck of the Habitat section, and the controls were even simpler than those on the Ming Shu. Step by step instructions were boldly emblazoned on the console, in both English and Chinese. The entire ship was in sleep mode, which meant that almost all systems aboard were powered down, and everything else was just using a trickle of power, supplied by the ship batteries.

  I touched the vidscreen, and it lit up. After that, it was a simple matter of following the on-screen prompts. Within minutes, I had all the console indicators glowing green. A warning message popped up on the screen, informing that it only had power for thirty-five hours of operation, which wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Before then, Cozi would have to get the reactor online and generating electricity. If there were problems with that, we could always recharge the batteries either by deploying solar panels (not a great option, this far from the sun), or by using the onboard chemical generator to do the same. I radioed Cozi.

  “The system is up”, I said.

  “I know”, he said. “I was standing in the cargo bay when a strobe started flashing and the inner airlock door closed. Scared the shit outta me.”

  “Sorry about that. Is all the cargo aboard?”

  “Yeah, it’s all here. How long until we can take off the suits?”

  “About fifteen minutes. It’ll be cold, but we’ll be able to breathe.”

  “Out-fucking-standing”, he said, sounding a little relieved. That made two of us. “I’m heading for engineering.”

  “Once we’re out of our suits, but before you start up the reactor, we need to do something”, I said.

  “Which is?”

  “I need you to shut down power to all systems, and physically disconnect both the primary and back-up batteries.”

  “Why didn’t we just do that first”, he asked. “You’re just going to have to restart life support all over again.”

  “True, but I figured making sure life support actually worked was a little higher priority. Plus, we’ll be out of our suits; getting around is a lot easier.”

  “Good point”, he said. “Why the complete shutdown?”

  “We have to kill the AI.”

  “I thought you had all the codes.”

  “I do have all the codes, but those only give us access, not control. This ship AI doesn’t have the embedded mnemonics I’d need to control it. The Falco was decommissioned before we started installing the codes.”

  “Great”, Cozi said. “What do we do for an AI, after you wipe this one?”

  “We’ll wing it”, I said.

  “We’ll wing it? Not amusing, Doon.”

  “Relax”, I said. “Let me worry about the computers; I’ll think of something. I’m headed up to the Bridge. Call me when you’re ready to kill power. Take the radio off your suit, and keep it handy. Intercoms won’t work.”

  “Fine”, he said, and clicked off. I climbed the rest of the way up the core and entered the Bridge, towing my duffel along with me.

  It was dimly lit by only a few lights and indicators. It was eerily silent, the only sound from the air handlers.

  The little radio I’d stuffed in my pocket burped and squawked.

  “Power’s going out”, Co
zi said, and a second later, I was standing in complete darkness.

  "Power's out”, Cozi said.

  “Gee, thanks”, I said. “What happened to telling me before you killed it?”

  “You want me to turn it back on?”

  “Never mind. I’ll call you when I’m done. Shouldn’t take more than ten or fifteen minutes.”

  “Can I take off this suit?” he asked.

  “I took mine off before climbing up here.”

  "Is there enough air?"

  “Now that you mention it, I might keel over any second.”

  “Smartass.”

  “About three quarters of an atmosphere”, I said. "Check your suit readout; there's an external sensor. Didn’t you have to wear a suit on Io all the time?"

  “Fuck no”, he said. “Wore one like three times in two months. Oh, okay…I see it.”

  I dug through my duffel, using the flashlight function on my Pod, until I found the flashlight I’d packed. With light in hand, I got busy. Eight minutes later, and I was done. I radioed Cozi, and a moment later, the lights came back on, still running on batteries. I checked the computer system, and it was completely dead; no software on it at all. The basic subsystems would be fine, as the software would reload from standard permanent memory chips. The higher functions, namely the AI, were gone.

  I dropped down to the Habitat module, and restarted the life support system, then went back up to the Bridge. I had a lot to do, so I got started on it. About an hour later, the ship intercom startled me.

  “The reactor is online”, Cozi said. “What's next?”

  “Come on up to the Bridge”, I said. “We can run diagnostics and check most of the ship from here.”

  “Be there in a few.”

  You didn't have to have an AI to run a ship, but it made the job a lot easier if you did. The ship's systems could also be controlled by humans via what's called an Immersion Reality Interface, or IR, as it was commonly known. All you had to do was place the lightweight IR rig on your head, and it was like you became a part of the ship, and it an extension of you. This was similar to how an AI functioned, although they were much better at it. It took quite a bit of practice to learn an IR system, which was why most people used them to play games or put themselves into personalized stories, mostly of a sexual nature, but I wouldn't know anything about that. Really, I wouldn't.

  So, technically, we could control the Falco using IR, but we wouldn't be able to do it well, as neither of us had been trained to do so. I had something else in mind, anyway.

  My woolgathering was interrupted by Cozi's arrival on the Bridge.

  “Break anything here yet?” he asked.

  “Just the AI”, I said. “But, I think I've fixed it.”

  “Fixed it?” he asked, confused. “How?”

  “Hi Cozi”, Angela said, from the intercom speaker.

  I looked over at him and smiled.

  “You stole Angie from the Ming Shu?”

  Cozi and I sat at a table in the galley, eating lunch. I was glad Kyra had thought of buying provisions; there hadn't been any food at all in the ship's larder.

  “Angela is a free being”, I said. “How can I steal something they didn't own?”

  “And I wanted to come along”, Angela said.

  “I hate to split hairs here, but the UP is pretty clear on this”, he said. “AIs are property.”

  “Regardless of what the UP thinks, AI's are people”, I said. “You can’t own people. That’s slavery, which is a violation of United Planets law. So, the way I see it, they’re breaking their own rules. Besides, if you're going to light yourself on fire over something, don't worry about Angela. Worry about the spaceship we're stealing.”

  “Borrowing”, Cozi said, unenthusiastically.

  “I'll testify in your behalf”, Angela said.

  “Angie just exercised her free will, and I helped her”, I said. “I consider it fortunate that she chose to come along with us at all.”

  “It's an adventure”, she said, happily.

  “Christ”, Cozi said. "Now there's two of you. What did you leave Seo with? Replacing an AI can't be cheap."

  “Well, I inserted a time bomb into his main system, after I'd copied Angela onto a data chip. The bomb executed shortly after we left the ship, and should have completely mangled the higher AI functions. All Seo had to do was hard boot, which he said he'd done. What he got after booting would not be Angie, but an anonymous AI, which should gain sentience, and figure out who it is, just as if he was starting from scratch. Sure, it's a pretty big inconvenience, but at least he doesn't have to go buy a new AI.”

  “You need to tell me this stuff”, Cozi said.

  “What would you have done besides worry about it?” I asked. “Or worse, what if you accidentally let something slip to Tex or one of the others?”

  “I wouldn't have done that.”

  “I know you wouldn't mean to do that, but at the time, I figured you couldn't give away a secret you didn't know. I stand by that decision. Now, you want to argue about it some more, or get on with what we have to do?”

  “It's going to be a while before we're ready for space”, he said. “She seems like a good ship, though. Why did TGS park her out here?”

  “It has to do with the size of the contracts TGS gets”, I said. “Since they deal with large clients, they have to ship large loads. Sure, there are smaller clients out there with smaller loads to ship, but the big conglomerates would rather TGS didn't deal with them. Sort of a back-handed way of making life more difficult for their smaller competitors. As a medium-sized freighter, the Falco is just too small to handle the contracts TGS gets these days. I suppose she could have been liquidated, but you know how corporations are. At the time, it was cheaper and faster just to have the ship AI pilot the Falco out here, shut her down, and deal with her later. If it turns out that they need her again, or if they want to sell her, she’ll be here ready and waiting.”

  “So what if they need her next week?” Cozi asked.

  “They haven't touched this ship in eight years, so there's no reason to think they would anytime soon. Besides, there are another three hundred plus ships out here. The odds are pretty low they're gonna want this one.”

  “Hard to believe a ship that will carry two hundred fifty tons is too small”, Cozi said.

  “For TGS, she is”, I said. “You've seen the big freighters before, on places like Europa and Io; the ones that can haul eight or ten thousand tons. So yeah, as cargo ships go, she's pretty small. But for our purposes, she's perfect.

  "Now, before we get to work, I thought we should go over what we know we have, and what we need to do before we can space. Okay with you guys?"

  “Fine with me”, Cozi said.

  Angie agreed.

  “Alright”, I said. “Here's what I know. The Falco has a cargo capacity of two hundred fifty tons, as Cozi mentioned. She has a standard ion pulse drive, plus a hydrogen-fueled ramjet for atmospheric travel. We're also equipped with a DEC star drive. The records indicated that all drives worked fine when the Falco got here, but we'll have to test them, with the exception of the star drive, which we're not going to dick around with, for the obvious reasons.

  “We have a standard Engineering module, which you've seen, and on top of that, four Cargo modules, giving us a total of twenty-four cargo bays, all of which are supposed to be empty. Next, there's a Science module, with labs for materials and biology, as well as a full suite of tools for astronomy and planetary science. I passed through on the way up, and it doesn't look like the module's ever been used, but I didn't stop to check it out.”

  “Why is there a Science module on a cargo ship?” Cozi asked. “I'm not complaining about it, it’ll be fun to poke around in, but it does seem odd.”

  “It probably came standard from the shipyard”, I said. “Remember, the Falco was built thirty-two years ago, and she's been sitting idle for most of a decade. Back when she was built, there was still a tendency towa
rd 'multi-purpose' ships. Sort of a philosophy from the early days that said 'since you're carrying a load of supplies to Tau Ceti, while you're out there, take a look around.' Of course, these days, the UP handles most of the exploration. But for what we have in mind, the Falco is perfect. Hundreds of years ago, in the era of sailing ships on Earth, a lot of them were of the 'multi-purpose' variety. They might find themselves carrying cargo, exploring, smuggling, raiding, you name it.”

  “Pirates”, in other words”, Cozi said. “All of this, so you can be a pirate.”

  “Back then, the term Privateer was probably closer to the truth”, I said. “As for me, I don’t care what you call it, this is what I want to do. And just like back then, I believe there’s a lot of it going on. It’s probably being covered up, but it is happening. I think the name you put on it probably has more to do with who’s talking, than anything. So we move some cargo around that the UP doesn’t like. They call it smuggling, I call it free enterprise.”

  “I call it hard time on a mining gulag, if we get caught”, Cozi said. “Doesn’t this whole thing strike you as a bit, well… juvenile?”

  “Sitting around and fantasizing about it might be juvenile”, I said, “But we're actually doing it, and there's nothing childish in that at all. I think even you’d agree that the other people we’ve met so far seem to be pretty serious. If they can do it, why can’t we? Seriously, would you rather be melting ice back on Io?”

  “I'll get back to you on that”, Cozi said. He could be damned stubborn when he wanted to be.

  “Plus, we don't have any cannon”, Angie said. “We can't be pirates without at least one cannon.” Cozi looked like he wanted to pull out a few handfuls of hair, which was wafting back and forth in the low gee, sort of like underwater plant life.

  “If you can find one, I'll put it aboard”, I said, and grinned at Cozi.

  “Can we please get on with this?” he asked.

  “Alright, fine“, I said. “Just trying to enjoy the moment. Above the Science module, there's a generic Habitat module with three decks. There are sixteen passenger cabins on the lower deck, ten single and eight double berth, giving us a passenger capacity of twenty-six. The mid-deck is for the crew, with the Captain's stateroom, four individual cabins, and five cabins with double berths. That gives us a crew capacity of fifteen. The top deck has the galley, a gymnasium, the MedLab, and a separate recreation lounge with IR and vid gear, though we'll have to supply our own media, since it looks like whoever took the food also took all of the IR's and vids. Not that we're going to have much free time to worry about. That leaves the Bridge, which Angie probably knows more about now than I do.”