Dubious Heroes: a novel Read online

“A bit”, I said, “But I’d like to hear your take on the place.”

  He scowled at me for a long moment, then continued.

  “Tzing Ma Chu is a jungle planet”, he said. “It’s hotter than hell around the equator, but the poles are temperate. Naturally, most of the population lives around the poles, so you can’t land there, unless you’re trying to get caught. Good news is, it rains a lot, so finding cloud cover over a good water source is not a big deal. The indigenous life, however, is a very big deal. None of it is particularly intelligent, but most of it has a very healthy appetite, and isn’t too picky about what it eats. We may not look, smell, or even taste anything like what they’re used to, but they all seem willing to try new foods. The critters range from tiny insects, some of which are poisonous, to some truly scary things big enough to carry off a human, which, by the way, I’ve seen happen twice. Not much point in going after anyone who’s taken, unless you’re just determined to bring back the pieces. Whoever has to be outside loading water is going to have a grand time. Still interested in doing a water run?”

  “Well, I’m still listening”, I said.

  “I don’t think you are”, he said, “Or you wouldn’t still be here.”

  “Can’t hurt to hear everything you have to say, can it?”

  “True enough”, he said, shrugging. “Anyway, assuming you make it off the planet, and get by the UP cruisers again, once you get back up here, you’d better make damn sure the Directorate gets a cut of your profit, which is all under the table, of course, since they’ve already issued a directive banning raids on the planet for water. Figure that you’ll make two bucks a gallon on the run, and they’ll take fifteen percent of that, and will pretend to impound your ship, mostly to maintain the illusion that you’re in trouble, and keep the UP at least somewhat happy.”

  “Impound my ship? That’s kinda harsh”, I said.

  “That’s smuggling”, he said. “It’s the price of doing business, wherever you are.”

  “True enough”, I said. “Any other advice?”

  “Spend whatever you have on countermeasures, jammers in particular. Their missiles are AI-controlled, but they do have onboard guidance as well; fairly elaborate, multiplexed systems, using microwave, laser, and even sight. Frankly, if they get close enough to shoot at you, you’re dead, and they will shoot, no warnings first. Still interested?”

  “I’m going to think about it”, I said, and reached over and shook his hand. “If I wanted to talk to you again, would that be alright?”

  “If I’m in port, I’m usually here”, he said. “Just ask one of the hostesses.”

  “By the way”, I said, “What do I owe you?”

  “You can buy me a drink next time we meet”, he said. “If you decide to do this, I doubt we’ll see each other again. If you don’t mind my asking, what’s your ship?

  “The Enigma“, I said. “Yours?”

  “The Defender“, he said. “I’ve never heard of the Enigma.”

  “We’re new out here.”

  “Whatever you decide to do”, he said, “Good luck.”

  “Thanks again”, I said, and the meeting was over.

  Lola and I were at dinner the next evening, when my Pod beeped. It was Cozi.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I was hoping you could tell me”, Cozi said. “I just woke up and came on shift for my watch. There’s a bunch of guys down in the engine room. I can’t see without suiting up, but I think they’re outside too, dicking around with my engines.”

  “What did Kyra say when you relieved her?”

  “To talk to you.”

  “Patch Angie in”, I said.

  “I’m here”, Angie said.

  “What’s going on?” I asked her. “Who authorized this?”

  “You did”, she said, “In a manner of speaking. You said you’d like the engines tweaked, if possible. It was possible, so they’re being tweaked, to use your term. I can replay our conversation verbatim if you like.”

  “Never mind that”, I said. “Who is on my ship, and what are they doing?”

  “Jack’s Drive Jacks is who”, she said. “They subcontract with the Port Authority and they’re refitting both the main and atmospheric drives. A team from Sensor Tech is due here shortly for a couple of sensor upgrades, but they’ll need access to the Bridge, and I thought you should be here for that.”

  “No shit”, I said. “A little advance notice of this would have been nice. How can we afford this stuff?”

  “Owen said we have ample funds on account to cover the work.”

  “Cozi”, I said, “You hearing all this?”

  “I’m hearing it”, he said. “Can’t say I’m happy about it, though.”

  “Sorry, I said. “I didn’t know it was going to happen. Keep an eye on them as best as you can. Who else is aboard?”

  “Kyra and Eng left when I came on”, he said. “and I don’t know where Lola is. I’m it.”

  “Lola is with me. We’ll be back in a couple of hours”, I said. “Let me know if you have a problem with anything. Well, anything besides what they’re doing already.”

  “Will do”, he said. “Enigma out.”

  He’d be in a snit for days about this, so I figured Lola and I might as well enjoy the rest of our evening out. In a few days, we’d be back in space, if everything went as planned. I raised my glass, and Lola raised hers, and we clinked them together gently.

  “Cheers”, I said, and smiled.

  “Cheers”, she said, smiling back.

  I wondered if she would still be happy, if she knew we all might be killed shortly.

  Probably not.

  “We lift in fourteen hours”, I said, as I looked around at everyone. Eng’s eyebrows went up a notch, but otherwise, he remained expressionless. Everyone knew some part of what was going on, but I hadn’t been completely forthcoming with any of them, except Angie.

  “Lola, we’ll be loading eight water containers into the cargo bays, and they’ll all have to be piped together, at least in each bay. There’s also what I’ve been assured is a mother-humper of a pump coming aboard. Use the lowest holds possible, please.”

  “Gotcha”, she said. “What size are the containers?”

  “Standard ten-thousand gallon”, I said.

  “Can we lift with that much weight?” Eng asked, looking over at Cozi.

  “I have no fucking idea anymore”, Cozi said. “If that was just a tweak, I’d hate to see what a full-blown refit looks like.”

  “Angie?” I asked. “What do you have on the drives?”

  “The drivejacks say we’re good for a minimum of three hundred twenty tons, at one gee, which is about what eighty thousand gallons of water would weigh.”

  “And the gravity on Tzing Ma Chu is only point eight gee”, I said. “That gives us a little safety margin.”

  “Don’t even talk about safety margins”, Kyra said. She didn’t look particularly happy.

  “Cozi’s right”, Eng said. “That’s one helluva tweak.”

  I shrugged.

  “From what I understand, they were already modified to exceed spec, so the increase in power isn’t as substantial as it might seem.”

  No one spoke, so I went on.

  “I know some of you aren’t thrilled about this-”

  Kyra snorted and gave me a look, but didn’t say anything.

  “-and even consider it ill advised.”

  “Just for the record, I believe insane was the word I used”, Cozi said.

  “Duly noted”, I said. “But I’ve done a lot of research, and talked to people who’ve done this. We can do this. While Lola handles getting the containers in and connected, the rest of you need to go over the plan Angie and I have put together. Everything is online, including stuff you’ll need to know about the planet. I won’t sugarcoat this; if we’re able to reach the surface, it’s one nasty place. The locals fence off and heavily protect anywhere they want to live, and they still have probl
ems. Our chemistry may be different from the indigenous lifeforms, but they aren’t known for being particularly picky.”

  “Given the hazard level, I’m not comfortable lifting without a medical officer”, Eng said. “I’m sure Lola can handle a lot, but she’s going to be busy handling the cargo, and will be at risk herself.”

  “I didn’t really want to add a new crewmember before taking on something like this”, I said. “We’ve all spaced together before, and have at least a few months aboard the Enigma. Plus, that’s one more person we’ll have to split the profit with.”

  “Speaking of which… ”, Cozi said.

  “Sorry”, I said. “We should have gone over this earlier. Let’s keep it simple. Normally, ship’s officers get extra shares, but everyone here is in charge of something. Given that, I figure one share per person, plus one share for the ship to cover operating costs, ought to be fair. Objections?”

  “I’m okay with that, but I still think we need a medical officer”, Eng said. “No one’s life is worth risking just to save a few bucks. This is a high-risk, high pay job. Put a notice out on the job board, and someone will bite.”

  “Okay”, I said. “You want a Medical Officer, you’re in charge of it. You find em and hire em. The schedule does not change, though; you’ve got fourteen hours. There’s a huge weather system over the part of the planet where our primary and backup targets are located. Angie has analyzed the patrol patterns of the UP ships, and while it’s not perfect, it’s about as good an opportunity as we’ll get.

  “Once we drop below the clouds, it’ll take them awhile to figure out where we landed, because we’ll be jamming their electronics. By the time they do find us, we should be loaded and on our way back up.”

  “I need to get on this”, Eng said. “Anything else I need to know?

  “One other thing”, I said, as I opened a duffle on the table before me. “I did a little shopping over the last few days.” I pulled out a black jumpsuit, and held it up. “New ships uniforms. They’re the best I could find.”

  “What’s that emblem on the breast?” Lola asked.

  “It’s the new crest of the Enigma“, I said. “That’s an old-fashioned, stylized rocket, overlaid by a sun and moon. The latter two were on the standard of a fellow named Drake, who gained some notoriety several hundred years ago through a fair amount of daring and bold action. I don’t pretend we’re doing anything more noble or heroic than trying to make a buck, but there are worse role models out there.”

  “What kind of ship did this guy have?” Lola asked.

  “A wooden one”, I said. “with sails. Read a lot about him when I was a kid. By the way, the jumpsuits are bulletproof, to a degree. Probably won’t stop the heavier stuff, but it beats nothing. You’ll also find belts and holsters. As long as we’re aboard, I want everyone armed. Our new motto is Be Prepared.“

  “That’s the Crater Scouts motto”, Cozi said, “Which by the way, you got us both kicked out of.”

  “Only because Scout Masters have no sense of humor”, I said. “But the motto still applies. One last thing… we all know we could pool our cash, buy a load of ore, haul that somewhere, and make a decent profit at it. And we could keep on doing that. But that’s not what I came out here to do. This will be risky, but I truly believe we can be successful. We take a few chances for a bigger return, and at the very least, we shouldn’t be bored. Anyway, if it doesn’t look like we can pull this off in a reasonably safe manner, we’ll bug out and try something else. If anyone doesn’t want to be a part of this, feel free to say so now, or look me up later.”

  I looked around at everyone. They appeared thoughtful, but no one said anything.

  “Alright then”, I said. “Let’s get busy. We have a planet to raid.”

  Chapter 18

  You tell yourself that landing on a planet is just another trip, no big deal. I told myself that, but at the same time, I knew that ninety percent of all crashes happened during planetary landings and takeoffs. There were numerous reasons for this, many of them highly technical, though none as succinct as this: gravity is a bitch, and she does not fuck around.

  You could design ships that performed well in an atmosphere, but they didn’t do well in space. The reverse was true for ships designed to function well in space. Atmospheric ships were sleek and aerodynamic, using the air to buoy them aloft. Sure, they could fail and crash, but when they worked, they owned the sky.

  On the other hand, spaceships were bulky, powerful beasts of burden. They needed huge engines to push them to speeds that were unimaginable in an atmosphere, where friction would burn you to a crisp in an instant. Since you were going to the trouble to traverse the huge distances of space, it made sense to make it worth your while, and carry a load of cargo, or passengers, or both.

  Out in space, there’s no atmosphere to protect humans from all the lethal radiation which stellar bodies generate, so spaceships are wrapped in heavy, elaborate shielding. You add in all the systems need to keep people alive, and get them to where they’re going, and you have a starship; a thing that to the uninitiated looks like a monstrosity, a Frankenstein of engineering. However, to those who understand them, they too are things of beauty.

  The idea of landing starships on a planet was the result of one thing: economics. Atmospheric ships simply couldn’t handle the rigors of space, other than for brief periods. Yet, it proved to be damned expensive to shuttle people and cargo piecemeal up to the big starships waiting in orbit. It seemed like it would make a lot of sense to just land the damn starship on the planet, fill it to its gills and take off again. It was this kind of corporate logic (or lack thereof) that for decades caused many engineers to pull their hair out in frustration. But, after some time (and a few very spectacular failures), they solved the problem. The situation wasn’t elegant, but it worked. Most of the time.

  The first thing you had to do was put your starship on a collision course with the planet. You needed to punch right into that bubble of gasses called the atmosphere. Go in too shallow and you’d skip off of it, like a flat stone skips across the water. Go in too steeply and you’d get too much friction, which translated into heat that you might or might not be able to deal with. Regardless, you picked a spot, called an insertion window, and plunged right in. Oh yeah. You needed to do it ass-end first, for a couple of reasons. One, because you would need those engines back there to fire and slow you down and two, because all that heavy shielding back there was useful in preventing your ship from melting away under the intense heat of re-entry.

  So you’d pick an insertion window, make a run at it, and before you got there, you’d turn the ship away from the target, and shut off the main drives. Sorry, but those big ion pulse drives can’t be used in a flammable atmosphere. Well, you could, but the resulting explosion would rattle windows over a continent-sized area. On the plus side, the armor needed for an ion pulse drive would handle the heat of re-entry like it wasn’t even there.

  Anyway, by this point, your spaceship is plummeting through the air with all the grace of a dropped rock. But you wait, then you wait some more, until the atmosphere outside is thick enough to light the other engines, the big hydrogen fueled ramjets. Large, armored scoops pop open and funnel the rushing air into turbines burning pure hydrogen. The resulting blast generates truly amazing amounts of thrust, the likes of which early rocket engineers would have sold their souls to get.

  As soon as the ramjets fire, chances are (depending on how much gravity you’re dealing with) you’ll black out. Most humans simply can’t tolerate the sudden onset of nine or ten gees of deceleration. Fortunately, those gee forces don’t last long, and your AI, who’s doing most of the driving anyway, doesn’t give a flying fart what the gravity is, as long as the ship holds together.

  After a few minutes of this extreme braking, the ship has slowed and gravity has decreased to tolerable levels. You move laterally through the atmosphere by the simple expedient of leaning the ship in the direction you wan
t to go, while keeping your thrusters pointed (mostly) downward. This last part is very tricky, and there aren’t even any human-based controls for it. Only a computer has the speed and degree of finesse needed to pull it off.

  This was how we intended to take the roughly one hundred ninety tons (empty weight) of the Enigma and set her down on a specific point as gently as a falling eyelash. I did leave out the part where someone might show up and shoot at us, while all this other stuff was going on.

  I’d never landed or been on a planet in my life, so it would be a completely new experience for me. I could tell you I was looking forward to it, but that would be a lie.

  I was terrified.

  Everyone aboard was at their stations, strapped into acceleration seats. Eng, Kyra, and I were on the Bridge, Cozi was down in Engineering, Lola in Cargo, and our newest crew member was in MedLab.

  The first time I saw Doctor Michael Urbano, I didn’t think he was human. I’m fairly tall, and he was at least a foot taller than me, and likely twice my weight. His skin was black as night and, as far as I could tell, he was completely hairless. He was big enough that he had to duck when going through normal doors and hatches. Still, even with his massive size, he moved with the fluidity and grace you’d associate with a dancer.

  It was his eyes, though, that truly gave him is otherworldliness. They were very light, and almost seemed silver, though not the light gray or even albino white you will sometimes see. When he looked at you, it was both eerie and unsettling, almost as though you were being regarded by an alien intelligence.

  Then, he’d catch your eye and smile, and he’d be human again. Mostly. Maybe he did it intentionally, to put people at ease. It worked.

  Dr. Michael Urbano, or Big Mike, as he asked to be called, exuded a raw power like I’d never seen in any living creature, with one exception; the pair of silverback gorillas at the Aldrin Zoo on Luna. I saw them several times when I was a kid. Once, the guide, probably trying to scare us, noted that if sufficiently provoked, a gorilla could tear a human limb from limb. I don’t know if that was true or not, but if Dr. Michael Urbano ever got into a fight with a gorilla, my money was on Big Mike.