Planetary Transfer Station 1, in Clarke Orbit around Terranova Planet
Kerri Helfort could hardly wait until they were safely aboard the Mumtaz.
Not that she had any particular love of starships, commercial or Fleet. Her years in the Fleet had ground that out of her. No, it was Sam. The bloody girl had become truly impossible. Her excitement at the prospect of the trip to the Frontier Worlds had reached fever pitch; the prospect of seeing her cousin Jemma had brought on an alarming attack of severe verbal diarrhea.
As Sam chattered on and on, her verbal momentum seemingly unstoppable, Kerri gritted her teeth and prayed that she would shut up, if only for a moment.
Kerri did the only thing she could do: She picked up the pace. With Sam and the cargobot carrying the bags following in her wake, she accelerated down the passageway that led from the up-shuttle to the Mumtaz, the walls lined with holovids advertising all the exotic destinations served by Prince Interstellar. Moving at a near gallop, she rounded a corner, and there, 50 meters in front of her, much to her relief, was the welcoming committee from the Mumtaz. A short wait, and they were through the DNA and retina identity checks and the valetbot was leading them to their cabin, which was located, it seemed to Kerri, kilometers away.
Eventually they arrived at a small two-berth cabin. Thank God, it had beds and not bunks-bunks were another thing Kerri had had more than enough of in her Fleet time-together with “luxurious en-suite facilities” as the brochure so coyly put it: two small armchairs, a tiny desk, a coffee table, and the usual huge wall-mounted holovid.
Kerri peered into what looked like a cupboard. Aha, she thought acidly. She’d just found the luxurious en-suite facilities. Obviously it was passenger mership code for a very cramped bathroom with just enough space for a toilet, a hand basin, a shower, room to turn around, and nothing else. It would be a long trip, she thought resignedly, and Sam was likely to spend much of it in the luxurious en-suite facilities while she waited her turn. It was a great relief when Sam agreed to her suggestion that she go walkabout and check the place out and they would meet for dinner later. In deference to the passengers, Mumtaz would hold to Terranova time for one day before progressively adjusting the clocks to be in sync with Jackson Time-Frontier’s only settled planet-for their arrival. A 72.5-hour day would take some getting used to after Ashakiran’s 26.8, Kerri thought.
By ten to eight, Kerri had showered and changed and was feeling much better after nearly two hours without Sam’s constant rattling on. After a quick duty pinchgram to Andrew to say that they had arrived safely and with her neuronics leading the way, she set off.
The business class lounge and dining room were quite small, smaller than she had expected. Mumtaz, which was a mixed cargo-passenger mership, carried only 1,000 passengers, of whom, according to the ever-helpful ship information persona-its AI-generated avatar that of a cheerful-looking and very patient woman-94 were in premium class, 176 in business, and the rest in economy class. The ever-helpful persona told her that the Mumtaz was almost full this trip, with 945 passengers in all.
For a moment, Kerri felt guilty about the extra cost of business class, but Andrew had insisted. The trip of a lifetime, and he wanted Kerri to enjoy it. She had eventually given in, and now that she was here, she was glad they had spent the money. Economy class was a good value, but only if almost two weeks of four-berth cabins, shared bathrooms, and cafeteria-style eating was your bag. As she made her way into the plushly furnished lounge, Kerri spotted Sam talking some poor young man to death and, taking a deep breath, made her way over to join them.
Sam was bursting with excitement. “Mom, this is John Carmichael. He’s from Ashakiran, too, and guess what? He’s going to visit relatives just like we are!”
“John, how are you? Kerri Helfort. I see you’ve met my daughter.” Nice-looking boy and just a bit older, she thought, but old enough to be dangerous. Poor old Arkady had better watch out. She reached out to shake hands.
“Mrs. Helfort.” The grip was firm, and the hand warm. “Nice to meet you. Shall we go through and eat?”
And with that the evening slipped into a comfortable haze of small talk interrupted only by a low-key announcement that Mumtaz was getting under way and by the obligatory safety briefing. After a while, Kerri just sat back. Sam could be very good company when she put her mind to it, and Kerri enjoyed watching the half-flirting, half-serious way Sam interacted with John. A nice boy. If she was to go off the rails, let it be with someone who would treat her with respect, Kerri thought.
As the meal came to a close, Kerri stood up to leave Sam to John’s company, reminding herself as she did not to give Sam any advice on how to manage interpersonal relationships. Previous experience had shown it to be a complete waste of time, and Kerri hated wasting her time. But just as quickly as she had reminded herself, she forgot her own advice.
“I’m off. Not too late, Sam.”
“Mom!” Sam was indignant.
“Sorry. John, nice to meet you. I’ll see you in the morning, Sam.” And with that she was off, leaving them to it. A good night’s sleep was what she wanted, even if it was going to be interrupted-she checked her neuronics-in a bit under five hours by the pinchspace jump and the usual dramas that went with it. Prince Interstellar’s policy was to have every passenger wide awake when it happened, a policy so strictly enforced that mership captains had been known to delay a jump into pinchspace until the last recalcitrant sleepers were fully awake. Given the alternative, she wasn’t complaining.
At 09:00 UT Mumtaz sent her pinchspace jump report, and twelve minutes later she vanished into pinchspace.
Kerri Helfort woke with a start, confused for a moment in the half darkness. What warship is this? she wondered. No, she thought, no Space Fleet bunk was ever this comfortable. And then it all came flooding back. She stretched luxuriously. The realization that finally she and Sam were on their way after the frantic buildup she’d had to endure almost made her drop back to sleep.
No, she chided herself. Up and at ’em. Slipping quietly out of bed and taking care not to disturb the lumpy mass that was Sam, she was quickly into her training kit, out of the cabin, and on her way to the Mumtaz’s gym, an installation so impressive that it had to be seen, if Prince Interstellar’s publicity materials were to be believed.
Kerri Helfort was not disappointed. The gym was impressively large and comprehensively equipped and, even better, didn’t smell like someone had been using it to stable horses.
It was also completely empty.
Fine by me, she thought as she stood in the lobby, more an access corridor than a lobby in fact, as the ship’s gym’s AI ran her through the options. She really was spoiled by the choices. The place had pretty much every form of physical exercise capable of being stuffed into a commercial spaceship, and for those that couldn’t, it had the latest in sims. Swimming, running, bikes, horse riding, surfing, walking, resistance work, weights, white water, rock work, zero g, every brand of unarmed combat and ball game known to humankind and more. Much more. If she wanted to, she could climb almost any mountain in humanspace in the middle of a howling blizzard wearing a bikini, sandals, and a beanie. The options were as endless as the imaginations of sim engineers were boundless. No, she decided after a moment. Something simple, something that didn’t need a full-function envirosim. A long, hard walk and spectacular scenery-something from Old Earth would be nice-and she’d be well set up for whatever else the Mumtaz might have to offer.
Even as she made her decision, the gym began to fill up in a hurry. One by one, a group of men filed past her. For a moment Kerri thought nothing of it, but then she looked closer. It wasn’t just any old group of men, she realized. They were all young; they all looked to be in great physical shape and had a disciplined, controlled way of moving. And they said very little, just a few words now and again, but so quietly that she couldn’t make out their accents. She watched them as they split up and with no time wasted started on the weight machines, working with a focused intensity that was almost robotic. Military, perhaps? Professional futbol team, maybe? No, military. Had to be. They just had the look.
It was odd, though, she thought. She’d skimmed the manifest looking for any Space Fleet or Marine Corps people she might know and hadn’t seen any mention of a group like this. Well, she thought, they have a right to travel, too, whoever they might be. “Come on, Kerri, time to get moving,” she said quietly to herself, promptly walking right into another young man as he tried to get past her and into the gym.
“Oh, sorry about that,” she said, embarrassed by her carelessness.
“No problem,” said the man.
To look at, he was obviously another member of the group now working out in front of her with silent, almost manic determination. Without being too obvious, Kerri moved so that he couldn’t easily get past her.
“So,” she said casually, waving a hand at the men working out in the gym, “you’re part of the team? What do you guys do? Professional futbol, maybe?”
“Please excuse me. I need to get on,” the man said quietly, his gray-blue eyes fixed on some distant point over her shoulder.
“Oh, sorry,” Kerri said, standing unmoving in the center of the narrow gym lobby, her face sporting her best “I’m a clueless old bat so please indulge me” look. “I don’t mean to hold you up, but what do you do? Come on. You’re professional futbollers, aren’t you? But which team?”
“Madam, please, I…”
“Oh, come on,” Kerri pleaded, watching with interest as the man struggled to keep control in the face of what he must have thought was a dangerously obsessive woman. “You can tell me. I can keep a secret. Which team?”
The man shrugged his shoulders in defeat. “Not futbol, ma’am,” he said resignedly, smiling a thin, forced smile, “We’re just a bunch of guys off to Frontier. We’re hard-rock miners, and there’s an asteroid waiting for us out there. Now really, please may I pass? I must get on.” His tone was polite but firm, his accent thick with the flat, stretched vowels of a Damnation’s Gate native. Well, that was what her neuronics had decided, anyway.
Kerri had had enough of the young man with the untidy yellow-gold hair and hard gray-blue eyes. Why the man made her so uncomfortable, and he did, she’d probably never know. But if he was a hard-rock miner, she was a cabbage, a very big one. She’d sneaked a look at his hands, and they looked to her like the hands of a man who’d spent a great deal of time practicing unarmed combat. The closest they’d been to rock would have been climbing a cliff.
“Oh, yes, silly me. I do so like to talk,” she said gushingly as she stood aside and waved him past. “Please.”
“Thank you,” he said more curtly than was polite.
Kerri watched him for a moment as he went through. Something wasn’t right here. A group of military men, possibly special forces, some of them, pretending to be hard-rock miners? Didn’t stack up. But, but, but. All of that might be the case, but it really wasn’t any of her business. After all, whatever mischief they might be up to, it would have to wait until they got dirtside on Frontier. There sure as hell wasn’t much they could do millions of light-years from anywhere, stuck in the vast nothingness of pinchspace.
Exercise over, aching muscles more than compensated for by a definite sense of virtue at having completed a good, solid workout, Kerri dropped into what was to become her routine for the trip: a brief word with an uncommunicative and sleepy Sam followed by a shower and breakfast and then on to the forward business class lounge. There the holovids presented a truly spectacular three-dimensional simulation of local normalspace as it rushed past them at over 4.3 billion kilometers per second. Even though it was something created by the ship’s AI-the actual view outside being only the murky gray-white nothingness of pinchspace-Kerri never tired of it. For a while as Mumtaz passed through (around, under, over?) deep interstellar space, there was little to see except the blazing glory of distant stars. But then, in a rush, a star system complete with planets, moons, asteroid belts, and comets would appear before flashing past and disappearing. But what got Kerri was the sense of wonder that the incredible show produced in her, almost a deep oneness with the enormousness of the universe.
It was an effort to get up and go for a walk around the ship before lunch in time for her other passion: contract bridge with a group organized by the ship’s entertainment officer. That was followed by a people-watching walk through the small piazza, coffee with Sam at one of the small cafes before happy hour in the business class lounge, followed by dinner, idle conversation, and then bed.
If it hadn’t been for the persistent unease she felt about the group of men she had met in the gym that morning, it would have been a perfect day. Stop fussing, she told herself as she drifted off to sleep. They might well be, as she now suspected, a group of mercenaries bound for one of the endless wars that sputtered and flared on some godforsaken world out on the rim of humanspace, but that was somebody else’s problem. She’d do what little she could. She would make sure that she had full neuronics recordings of each group member, and once back home, she’d pass them on to one of her contacts in Space Fleet intelligence. They’d follow up if necessary.