Galaxy's End: Book One Read online

  Fang may have smiled. Perhaps it was simply how its race reacted to a sudden, unexpected treat leaping in front of its face. I’d prefer a surprise of an imitation chockalott drop, if not real chocolate, which I’d never tasted. But who could afford the real thing? I was used to the imitation and might not like chocolate.

  Fang and Stone seemed old hands at what was transpiring between them. Fang had probably snared his share of wanted criminals. Stone was a captain on a trader-ship and had encountered endless buyers and shippers who wanted to take advantage of her in their business transactions.

  Fang turned two of his eyestalks to me, while still looking at Stone with the others. “I want to see that vibro-knife.”

  I placed a hand on my hip where it might be stored and asked in a voice that I tried to make sound surprised, “Really? You heard Stone call me Balaclavas. Right?”

  He shifted two more eyestalks uneasily in my direction. “So?”

  “A religious sect, as she said. If an enemy sees weapons in my hands, it must die. Nothing personal. Just business, as you say.”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Stone put her fist to her mouth trying to prevent the laughter from escaping.

  Fang said quickly, “Perhaps I’ll see the knife another time. Where did you say you purchased it?”

  “It was a gift from my father a moment before I used it to kill him. He was a good man, and I sincerely regret that he didn’t wait another decade or two before sending me to make my first twenty-kills so I can be elevated to the grade of Ellar warrior.”

  My voice had been flat, unemotional. If it was possible for a green frog-creature to turn white, Fang tried. Stone went into a coughing fit that looked and sounded suspiciously like repressed laughter.

  Fang held his tablet out to Stone. When she had control of herself, she accepted it. “Not bad,” she said as she eyed his money balances.

  “It is all I have. Please do not take all of it. And if you do, leave me a little something for food. It’s only right.”

  Stone shifted her position to look at me. She said as if speaking to a child, “It’s my time to tell you a story. The account visible on my tablet is enough to pay for a few tickets to travel well, personal needs, and a little more. You’ve seen the balance, of course.”

  I nodded, not understanding her point.

  She kicked off her shoe and picked it up. Her fingers explored the inside near her toe and retrieved a small data chip. She held it up for me to examine as she said, “A hundred times that amount is stored in the account on this data chip. If anyone ever forced me to give them what is on my tablet, I’d wail and cry and beg for them to leave me a little something to buy a meal. That would convince them it was all I had.”

  Fang looked ready to sink under the slimy water and disappear in disgrace.

  Stone held out her hand, palm up, and silently waited.

  After a momentary impasse, Fang upchucked into his flipper, rinsed it off, and handed a data chip to Stone.

  Stone said, “I will hold onto this until we depart Franklin. You can retrieve it from the captain of this vessel. I’ll place it in his or her possession just before you lift-off. If you try or do anything else, including telling others about the reward for us, I will drop this in acid and watch the smoke rise as it melts. Do we have an agreement?”

  Fang nodded silently.

  “That is all I want from you. Leave us alone.”

  Fang hesitated, then shifted his last set of eyes to me. “Kat, will you do me the honor of having dinner with me this evening?”

  “I will not.”

  Fang turned to Stone. “Breakfast? With you?”

  “Not in this lifetime.”

  “Come, come. The sorry business of capture and threats has been conducted. We have an agreement. Is there any reason why we cannot be friends? No, don’t answer that. I’ll tell you what, if I should happen to run into you aboard the ship, I’ll ask permission to join as if we are strangers and we can start over. Perhaps we’ll all have cooler heads by then.”

  Stone stood with Fang’s data chip and access to his bank account in hand. “Come on, Kat.”

  We left.

  As we walked across the passage to our rooms, she said fiercely, “You’re a bigger liar than me!”

  “It seemed called for,” I defended myself.

  She was giggling like a schoolgirl as we went inside, an action uncommon for a starship captain. I believed we were going to work well together and have some fun along the way. Maybe I could teach her a thing or two. I was wondering how difficult it might be to steal a starship of my own and make myself captain. Say, the one we were inside. It probably was not the time to mention it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Captain Stone

  The girl, Kat, the empath weighed heavily on Stone’s mind. Kat’s presence was as heavy as dragging the anchor on any sea-bound ship. Kat didn’t need a mental power to be remarkable: it was a welcome bonus. Stone snorted again with humor at the very thought of her and their dealings with the frog. Kat had almost ruined that encounter with her humorous lies, and they had almost caused the captain to almost burst out laughing and ruin the encounter. It had been a thin disguise to pretend to cough, one she was not certain that Fang believed.

  The encounter also displayed the girl’s ability to think quickly and adapt to changing situations. Of course, surviving on the streets in any slum on a planet tended to teach those skills. Those who didn’t learn them died young.

  However, Kat was a cut above, a person that was not about to live a boring life on a backwater planet. Despite her youthful age, fourteen or fifteen, she was already gathering a crew around her. She had attracted Bill and Bert, and there seemed to be others, not as close, but equally willing to follow her.

  Her mind drifted away, to explore other subjects. What if an uneducated street urchin who had empathic abilities was educated and at the same time taught a skill, such as negotiating deals on behalf of her ship? Of what value would that person become?

  The obvious answer came quickly. She might become captain of a trading ship larger than most. The warning from her first mate about not accepting a stale sandwich in trade for the Guardia was not made in total jest.

  Kat might become the most important crewman in the history of traders.

  It was an interesting dilemma to ponder. Yet, Kat had one other trait that cannot be taught. She was loyal to her friends, as demonstrated by the reciprocal loyalty of Bill and the digging creature, Bert. Stone suspected that if they had not agreed to come along, she would have refused.

  That was interesting, too. It suggested that if Kat became a friend as well as an employee, she might someday offer the same loyalty to the Captain of the Guardia. That was worth more than her empathic abilities. Being the captain of a starship means total command—which also means isolation. Even the First Officer is a subordinate. Kat would never become her friend, but perhaps a new relationship would develop between them. They may even become equals in a sense. She would have to think long and hard about how she would use Kat in her crew. She might set her apart from them, perhaps she would create a new position for her. It was worth considering.

  Then there was Fang, the frog creature from the Dreamer’s galley to consider, a being who admittedly held no loyalties to any but himself. She had no idea of Fang’s sex. It would be simpler to refer to it as a male unless otherwise notified, which was the custom. Fang had somehow managed to acquire the captain’s description and the knowledge of her crime before liftoff. It had been too early for general knowledge to be widely known, which implied Fang had access to crime data that others didn’t. That implied the green thing routinely searched for criminals and those with rewards posted for them.

  She fingered the data disk with Fang’s bank accounts and briefly considered accessing it long enough to find his net worth. But no, that would break her rules. She had made a deal with the little green thing and unless he broke that arrangement, she would hold herself to it.<
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  That was part of being a trader in a starship. Some deals are better than others. You learn to accept that. Some jobs are financially terrible. But a trader that drops an agreement in favor of another, or cheats clients, loses more than credits. The trader loses reputation. Word travels fast, even from world to world.

  It is often said, she’d heard from her father, that traders who do not keep their word find themselves turning to piracy because they cannot make a living as word of their actions spread to buyers and sellers. Thousands of trader-ships may sound like a lot in the thousands of worlds in near space. It’s not. Word of a rogue trader passes from one captain to ten others while loading and unloading cargo on a single planet. Those ten captains travel to other worlds and tell ten more. In the third telling, a thousand captains know who to avoid dealing with.

  The example is something of an exaggeration because of overlapping tales to the same captains, but the point is sound. A thousand, or eight hundred, or three hundred makes a slight difference. The tales continue to spread, and the number of traders, buyers, and sellers expand exponentially until there are no worlds left for them to attempt a fair trade. After all, who does not like to spread sad tales of competitors to make themselves look better?

  Her thinking went round and round in much the same fashion until she finally slept fitfully. She realized that not only her life was in the process of immediate change, but the lives of those of her crew, along with Kat, Bill, and Bert. There was a lot of change happening and she needed to consider it and guide them down the best possible path.

  Not long after she went to sleep, the sounds of movement in the bunk above woke her. The digger creature shuffled, wiggled, and burrowed in the pile of clothing. She heard the tapping and clicking of claws on keyboards, the mumbling of verbal commands, and felt the slight shifts of hand motions controlling computers. It was unnerving. Who used keyboards, anyhow? She hadn’t seen one outside of a museum. And where had it gotten more computers?

  She called softly, “Bert, what the hell are you doing?”

  “Research.”

  The answer was short, curt, and almost rude, although she suspected that was not intentional. “What could you be researching at this time of night?”

  There was a pause, before Bert said softly, “It is morning on some planets, afternoon on others, and night on many. I’d think a captain of a starship would understand that. My framework of time may not be the same as yours, and I may be nocturnal.” A muffled laugh followed the words.

  She said, “I’d think a rational being sharing a room with another would understand how to act when it is dark.”

  “I am under layers and layers of clothing. I have no way of knowing if it is dark or light.”

  Ignoring the facts that the time was probably displayed on his monitors, or that his sensitive ears heard those near him snoring as they slept, Captain Stone closed her eyes and attempted to return to sleep when they sprang open in sudden understanding. Bert had those ears! He heard her sleeping, as well as those in the next room. He was either teasing or testing her.

  She whispered in the softest tones possible, “Stop screwing with me or I’ll climb up there and dig into the pile until I find you, and then I’ll reformat the memory of every computer you have, including the one embedded on your shoulder.”

  A stuttering sound from under the covers may or may not have been laughter.

  She continued in the whisper, “Why are you even using a keyboard?”

  “It is one of my designs and works well with my manipulative digits.”

  “Use a touchscreen or voice input.” Her irritation was growing.

  “I do,” Bert said seriously. “I find several manners of user-to-machine interface satisfactory, however audio input only works well when using one machine, otherwise they become confused as to which one you are speaking to and carry out commands not intended for them.”

  “You came aboard with nothing.”

  “The crew of the ship has been most helpful. They donated a few of their personal computers in exchange for a minimum of credits exchanged between us.”

  She sighed and added in a defeated tone, “I suppose my credit chip paid for all that helpfulness.”

  “If I were doing my research for myself and my benefit, I should pay the costs. If I am going to work for you, as I hope to, the hardware should be at your expense.”

  The tapping on the computer keys had ceased. Captain Stone relaxed but realized she wore a smile for the first time in what seemed a long time. Her thoughts shifted from Bert and Kat to Bill, the one Kat sometimes called Snotnose. She would have to ask about that name.

  Bill remained an enigma. He had said little since the three of them escaped the Coliseum police and went off-planet. In contrast to the talkative Bert, he was a pleasant surprise of quiet confidence. She’d verified he had been with Kat for as long as she remembered. Again, unquestioned loyalty reciprocated.

  Bill was smart in his way. He watched and learned. He would make a good crewman on any ship, perhaps a competent bridge officer one day.

  If she could convince Kat to join her crew, she would not only gain an empath but the other two. Since the financial scare with the rotted fruit that had almost cost her the Guardia, hiring the right crew had been a major concern. Every person had to perform at least two essential functions, plus they needed to fit in with the rest of the crew. She had rejected numerous candidates over the years.

  Traveling for months and years together in a confined space created friction among any crew. Since the incident with the fruit where many of the crewmen had departed, the remaining crew had worked well together, if short-handed. She had only brought on one new engineer and a small Triennium multi-sexed housekeeper in the time since. A ship as large as the Guardia needed at least seven crew, and it made sense to have more.

  Now she had the chance to add three more valuable members, and the oddity of it was that the most important one might not be the empath or a possible engineer, but the digger underneath the clothing on the bunk above her. Bert was an insatiable investigator; one might say a “digger” of information. She snorted at the pun, a weakness that she always found enjoyable.

  In their brief time together, Bert had already earned his keep by warning of the approaching police, then directing their escape and avoiding the traps.

  With his future input for which cargo would bring the best prices, she foresaw better trades. There was no way to anticipate what else Bert might do for them. If she could choose only one of the three for her ship, it might be Bert.

  However, she sensed and understood they were a package deal. The money the ship had made on Roma betting on her to win the gladiator match would be dwarfed with what they might earn with the help of the three recruits.

  A soft knock on the connecting door brought her upright.

  Bert said softly, “It’s Bill.”

  She opened the door and found him dressed and looking uncertain. His eyes went to the room where Kat was sleeping. He was asking to enter. She motioned for him to advance, and he closed the door quietly.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Can we go somewhere and talk?”

  A while ago she’s been wondering how to approach him on the same subject. She found a heavy, oversized shirt that fell nearly to her knees to cover the shorts and thin top she had been sleeping in. Her feet slipped into her boots and she sealed them with a swipe of her palms on the sides. She led the way.

  Once in the main corridor, she took him directly to the dining room, the only place on the passenger ship large enough to accommodate several passengers at once. Larger, more luxurious ships had game rooms, gambling, dancing, and a few even had swimming pools. The Dreamer they traveled on was basic accommodations and “entertain yourself in your cabin” recreation.

  They said nothing until they entered the small, square room and sat at the only unoccupied table. Four tables held beings from many worlds. A game of dice rattled at one, a complica
ted puzzle of interlocking pieces formed the emerging image of a tree with crisp blue leaves at another. Two more held people talking softly as they imbibed liquids.

  Bill sat across from her as a steward rushed to their table.

  Stone ordered a small square plastic container of inexpensive white wine for them. Square containers store far better than bottles that break and take up excess room. That’s the trader in her even when a passenger.

  She said, “What’s on your mind, Bill?”

  “Me. Bert. Kat. You’ve been pushed into accepting all three of us, or none.”

  She should have expected his reaction. He was going to take the high road. She’d wait to be sure. “Go on.”

  “I have no education, training, or anything of value to offer a starship captain. I want the best for my friends, so I’ll agree to quietly leave this ship at Franklin and make a life there. No-fuss and you don’t have to look bad to my friends. It will be my idea. Everyone is happy.”

  Stone kept her face and voice stern, “I’d rather identify myself as a fellow captain to the captain of this ship and ask if he would put you out an airlock as a professional favor.”

  “What?”

  Stone smiled. “Bill, listen to me. I’m in a rough business surrounded by scoundrels, crooks, thieves, and worse. Many would put me out an airlock for a hundred credits. Hell, some would do it for free.”

  “What are you saying?”

  He was like a loop of computer coding that repeated the same things over and over. She paused to allow him to think and wonder where the conversation was going. When he’d completely confused himself and the wine arrived and was being poured, she continued, “Bill, of all things in life, I value trust. Just that. Call it trust, loyalty, faith, allegiance, or fidelity, it’s all the same. I’ve searched a hundred planets and found six people that fit that mold. People I can believe in, no matter what.”

  “Six?”

  “Well, my father found three of them, I’ll take credit for the others. Until I met the three of you, that was it. Seven of us do all the work on my ship. They are loyal to me in the way you are to Kat and Bert. I value that above all else. The same with you. You’re willing to walk away and sacrifice your future for the sake of your friends. I can only hope to earn that sort of relationship with each of the three of you.”