Chapter 4
The most costly part of space travel in the old days had been the takeoff. Escaping a planet’s gravity well took a huge amount of energy, and it all had to be done under conventional propulsion. Ways had been found to do an end-run around the laws of physics in terms of exceeding light speed without needing the energy of an exploding star to pull it off, but those methods were dangerous to do inside a star system, and more or less impossible in an atmosphere. An early and still popular method to ease the energy cost of this first step in space-faring was the invention of the space elevator. It wasn’t anything special, just a very long tether hooked up to a space station in low orbit--but it allowed for load-lifting and hauling material into space without pesky concerns about thrust and escape velocity.
Lex puttered to a stop at one of the four service tethers at Golana Interstellar. They were skinny things compared to the mighty commuter and cargo tethers, but they let the maintenance crew ferry parts and personnel to the station without interrupting scheduled trams. He shouldered his bike and pressed a thumb to the scanner. It gave a satisfying bleep and the security door swished open.
Back in his racing days, Lex had done a fair amount of performance tuning on his ships, cars, and sleds. He wasn’t the best mechanic around, but he knew his way around an engine, so Blake registered him as a part-timer at his garage for those times when things were getting a little backed up and he needed the extra help. One of the added benefits was free, ‘round the clock access to “The Upstairs,” Golana Interstellar’s orbital section.
“Hey, Denny. Mention the tux and I’ll slap you,” Lex said, with a nod to the teenager working the security desk.
“Hi, Mr. Alexander. Reason for tram usage?” he squeaked.
“I need to shuttle some ships around for Blake. I’ll be taking one off-planet, so it’s going to be a multi-day thing.”
“Sure thing.”
A few minutes later, a tram the size of a shipping container came zipping up from below the loading deck. Maintenance tethers were in pairs, one up and one down. It helped keep the traffic flowing when a schedule wasn’t possible. The gate released a pressurized hiss as it disengaged and he stepped inside. It was a no-frills vehicle, little more than a super-sized elevator, with a row of seats along one wall, and a matching one upside-down above them. A few more minutes passed while they waited to see if anyone else was going to be burning the midnight oil, then the doors closed and sealed. A control panel on the door worked its way through a sequence of safety checks. Air pressure: Nominal. Tether Integrity: Nominal. Power Integrity: Nominal. Inertial Inhibitor: Active. A pair of heavy-duty electric motors whined with effort and the tram began to accelerate upward.
If he were a first-timer, he would have been awed by the speed of it. The various floors of the maintenance building shot by in a blur of stone and metal, and then the ground was dropping away as though gravity had decided to reverse and he was now falling upward. The acceleration should have been enough to pin him painfully to the floor, but the very same thing that made the limo stunt survivable was at work here as well, doing the job it was actually invented to do. Through the sort of complex quantum physics that a science geek would spend three hours gushing over and the average person would write off as magic, a field generator inside the tram canceled out the excess acceleration, keeping the ride at a rock steady 1 G. Without it, the whole ride would either be much slower, much less comfortable, or likely a combination of the two.
About a third of the way through the trip, the motors approached their top speed and the acceleration started to drop, the gravity going along with it. Lex grabbed one of the hand rails scattered liberally along the walls and pivoted himself upside-down with a yawn. Artificial gravity was possible, but it was a much larger and more expensive process, so the elevator and most small ships did without. A warning light began to blink on a panel, and the readout listing motor status switched from “Powered” to “Regenerative Breaking.” The gravity came back, though this time on the ceiling, and he took a seat on one of the chairs that seemed so out of place at the beginning of the trip. Barely three minutes after he’d left the surface, the gravity drifted away again and the tram clicked into the docking section of The Upstairs.
“Hey! T-Lex!” said the orbiting counterpart of the squeaky teen.
“Just Lex, thanks. Heading to Blake’s. Ignore the tux.”
“You said it, T-Man!”
Lex grumbled. There were a lot of people up here that he’d had semi-professional ties with back when he was a C-list celebrity, so it still came as a thrill to them when he showed up. They were having an even harder time adjusting to his fall from grace than he’d had. For the first few dozen visits, it had been like having salt in an open wound to hear them ask what starlets he’d been partying with, but now it was just background noise. If zero-G and working in orbit could become humdrum, what chance did a few behind the times security guards have?
A few quick lift rides and a few minutes drifting down zero-G hallways led Lex to the employee entrance at Blake’s. The civilian sections of The Upstairs were situated at the outer rim of long, rotating rings that provided the sensation of gravity. The service tunnels and other nuts and bolts sections were stuck wherever they were needed, and thus ranged from almost normal gravity to microgravity. Blake’s was one of the places with no gravity at all, and it served his purposes just fine. Between moving heavy equipment around and having to interact with naked space so often, zero-G was more of a convenience than an annoyance.
“Hey, Lex!” Blake said, tapping at a pad tethered to his wrist, as various jump-suited employees drifted about their daily tasks around him, “Fresh from the chauffeur job?”
“Not exactly fresh, but yeah. You said you needed me to get Betsy out of here for a few days, right?”
“Yeah, just for a few days. The ships are already coming in. I guarantee I’ll need the dock.”
“No problem. I have to take a trip around the corner anyway. You had that delivery for me?”
“It is in the storage locker outside your airlock.”
“Thanks loads, man. I just got a decent payoff. You sure you don’t want any money for this?”
“Just make sure you get your ass up here if I get someone looking for race tuning. No one I’ve got does it half as good as you.”
“That’s because you’re too busy taking instrument readings to actually listen to the engines, Blake. Listen to what she says, she’ll tell you what she wants.”
“Whatever, Lex.”
Another few corridors of weightless coasting brought him to the airlock that led to his delivery ship, Betsy. The name didn’t have any deep meaning behind it. The ship needed a name, and it seemed like a good one. He swiped his pad over the door’s mechanism and fetched his package. It would be a minute or two before the access way was pressurized, so he drifted over to the view window to admire the vessel. One of his lingering fans wandered over and glanced out.
“That’s your ship?”
“Yep!” Lex said proudly. “Why so surprised?”
“I don’t know, I was expecting something . . . sexier.”
“Hey, hey, hey. It isn’t a pleasure cruiser. This baby is built for speed.”
Betsy wasn’t much to look at. It had, at one point, been a Cantrell Aerospace Intrasystem Interceptor. One step above police, one step below military, the CAII (or CA2I, or CA double-I, or Kai, depending on who you were) was once the ship of choice for chasing down smugglers, but that had been many years ago. Ironically--or, perhaps, inevitably--they’d become the ships of choice for smuggling just as soon as they’d started to show up on the used market. They weren’t well-favored for either, these days. There were faster alternatives.
He’d found this one in a salvage yard and picked it up for next to nothing. Then he’d gone to work on it. A pair of engines from a second scrapped CA2I were grafted onto the rear, along with a pair from something he hadn’t been able to identify. Stuck bet
ween the two massive banks of engines was the power plant from a full-sized freighter. The result was a ship that was about eighty-five percent propulsion system. It was a stack of engines with a place to sit. Not pretty, not graceful, but fast.
“She might have a little junk in the trunk,” he said, pointing to the preposterous cluster of engines, “but that’s the way Daddy likes it.”
“It looks like crap.”
The access door hissed open. Lex drifted inside, looking back.
“You don’t bet on the best-looking horse, you bet on the fastest one,” he said.
“Who bets on horses?”
He climbed into the cramped cockpit, stowed the client’s package and his own, and pulled the backup flight suit from the storage compartment.
“You’re clear for departure, Lex. Take the long way around,” squawked Blake’s voice over the com. “And if you’re going to get changed, please don’t do it until you’re out of the damn hanger this time.”
Lex looked out of the view window to see Blake in the control tower halfway across the dock, microphone in hand and looking irritated.
“The tint isn’t on?”
His jacket and shirt were already off.
“The tint is broken, remember?”
“Clearly I don’t.”
“Just get out of here.”
“Fine. I’ll be back in two, two and a half weeks. That cool?”
“Yeah, sure. We’ll be cleared out by then.”
“Righto, buddy. See you then.”
The engines purred to life at a touch of the control panel, and he maneuvered the ship out of the dock and into an exit pattern while he worked out the path he’d be taking. It wasn’t an easy task. Space was extremely big and mostly empty. Those two little adverbs--extremely and mostly--were the key words. The “extremely” came in because even light--which, for most of history, was the fastest thing in existence--took years to get from star to star. Since then, science had one-upped Mother Nature, as it tended to do, but finding the shortest and quickest path was still a big concern in space travel.
No problem, though, right? Someone could just draw a straight line between where they were and where they wanted to be, scoot around any stars or planets that got in their way, and they'd be set, right?
Well, unfortunately, that was where “mostly” came in. Space was mostly empty--but , then, a shotgun blast was mostly empty, too. That didn’t make it any less dangerous. There were all sorts of things drifting in the vast interstellar wastes. Micro meteoroids, variable density gas and dust clouds, and, for the last few hundred years, human beings sealed in glorified tin cans called spaceships.
Sure, a ship probably wouldn’t hit anything, but when it involved the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of passengers, not to mention the freight workers and the planets they supplied, probably didn’t cut it. The only remotely safe way to keep people from smacking into each other was regulation. Air traffic control on a galactic scale. Flights were scheduled, routes were designated.
The designated routes weren’t just lines on a map. They were monitored and scanned. If an asteroid wandered into a trade route filled with ships moving at ten times the speed of light, it would be catastrophic. By the time physics allowed anyone to see it, it would already be several hundred thousand miles behind them, having passed through the hull along the way.
Monitoring a thread of space of any reasonable length took a phenomenal amount of resources. Expecting every separate transportation firm to do so individually was ridiculous, so most routes were the result of a government-sanctioned monopoly.
The biggest of the companies that regulated space travel was VectorCorp, a gargantuan telecommunications and transit corporation that had exclusive rights to most of known space. They ran communication and shipping, and manufactured half of the devices that made use of the communications and shipping. In order to keep the inevitable trespassing and piracy under control, they’d managed to become a substantial paramilitary presence as well, along with a producer of the arms and vehicles that went along with that status.
The only thing that kept them from being the only game in town was a swath of space that neatly sliced the colonized portion of the galaxy in two. This hunk of the cosmos had sold its rights to either Rehnquist Intercom or JPW. Neither company was even half the size of VC, but they’d banded together to make sure that not a speck of usable space wasn’t owned by at least one of them. The fact that everyone had to pass through their space to get to the other side of the galaxy meant that VectorCorp had to buy time and pay fees if they wanted end-to-end service. It was pretty clear that the income from VectorCorp’s licensing was the only thing that was keeping these companies afloat.
As was the case with all local monopolies, there was no competition, so they were free to charge whatever they wanted. Sure, the government made enough of a stink to keep the price within reach of the middle class, but they were still at the whims of the corporation. If anyone disagreed with their policies, or couldn't afford the price, or required a degree of discretion that didn't fall in line with their terms of service, then, officially, they were out of luck.
Unofficially, there were alternatives for those not too choosy about speed or legality.
That’s where Lex and other freelancers came in. They were willing to carry packages to and from just about anywhere someone might want them to for the right price. Depending on the individual, and the start and end points, they might even get it there faster than the official methods. This was because they, as a rule, couldn’t use the main routes. The main routes belonged to the big corporations, and no one could fly them without their blessing--and paying their licensing fees. Freight was one of their biggest sources of income, so they weren’t letting anyone else deliver using their routes without coughing up. This forced freelancers to use more direct courses. It also forced them to risk getting blasted to pieces by nearly invisible debris and the speeding ships of other freelancers, since the space was barely mapped and completely unmonitored. Well, not completely unmonitored. Regular patrols of corporate ships swept the more useful chunks of space to try to weed out the riffraff, but the sheer size of the area involved made it rather hit or miss.
The better freelancers took a hybrid approach to their deliveries. Standard operating procedure called for a dead sprint toward a star system or asteroid cluster, then a drop down to conventional speeds to weave through it. Anyone tracking someone doing that on sensors would more often than not lose them among the other ships and space rocks. Anyone following directly would have to slow down and take the same route. At that point, it was just a test of who was the better pilot--the very fact that attracted Lex to the business to start with. While they were tied up in whatever mess he picked to hide in, he'd gun it to the next thicket.
The popular parlance had dubbed it “Sprints and Jukes.” It was like a needle hopping from haystack to haystack.
Right now, he had to find the right haystacks and the paths between that didn’t intersect corporate space, wouldn’t get him killed, and would get him to Tessera V in six days. It didn’t leave much room for error.
He tapped and swiped his way through the various stellar maps, downloaded some fresh data, and pushed the whole mess into his flight computer. Before long, he’d found a crooked, zigzag path that seemed mostly survivable, and set a course for the first sprint. All that remained was to make it out of the cluttered star system before shifting to FTL speed. He took the opportunity to finish getting out of the monkey suit and into the flight suit. It was just a reinforced and airtight jumpsuit with sealed boots and gloves, but aside from being marginally more comfortable, it could couple with a helmet and keep him from popping like a ripe tick in the event of a sudden change in cabin pressure. That sort of thing was a bit more intense in deep space.
He managed to finish the uniquely awkward dressing maneuver just in time for the autopilot to kick into FTL. One would think that such a thing would be spectacul
ar. Not as such. The inertial inhibitor wiped out any semblance of the sensation of speed--no lurch backward, no pressing into the seat. It had to, or the pilot would be a thin film of organic matter long before the ship even made it to half the speed of light. And as for the sights? Well, everything in the view field took an abrupt shift toward blue, then violet, and then on up into ultraviolet, then into the various levels of high-energy radiation, which was summarily blocked by the ship to prevent, among other things, death. Some pilots used view screens that would drop the radiation frequency down to viewable levels, probably the same sort of people who got a kick out of listening to bat sonar. They would get a groovy stretched out light show that, in reality, was a long way behind them. Lex preferred to nap or poke at a casual game on the slidepad until he reached the first stop.