Aces (3 page)

“Yeah!” Manny
answered enthusiastically. Specialist Second Class Jennifer Tanner had taken a
liking to the Sanchez children, and Manny openly had a crush on the pretty
young woman. Rick thought he could appeal to Jen to let them observe the cargo
loading from the windows overlooking the shuttle bay.

“Okay! Let
’
s get your mother and your sister, and see if we can contact
Jen.”

Jen was reluctant
at first, there were regulations against passengers being in the cargo sections
of the ship, although she had brought the children along before. That had been
during the uneventful cruise in hyperspace, when the Captain was unlikely to be
roaming the cavernous cargo holds. Now, as usual during a loading exercise,
Schroeder was supervising directly. Kaylee pouted, until Jen relented, and
agreed they could watch the cargo go by, in one of the wide access corridors
between the shuttle bay and the cargo hold, while Schroeder was busy elsewhere.
The deal Jen made with Rick was that the children needed to keep out of the way,
and out of sight if possible. Joy had elected not to join them, figuring this
would be quality father-children bonding time.

Kaylee and Manny
were very excited, and on their best behavior, without even being reminded. Jen
had enlisted a co-conspirator, a man who was normally the ship
’
s
navigator-pilot, Sethandra Putri. Everyone called him ‘Seth
’
.
He liked the children, mostly in small doses. Since Seth
’
s
duty station was on the bridge, they didn
’
t see him often,
and that appeared to be just fine with Seth.

The cargo came in
from the shuttle landing bay on robotic pallets, all Jen and Seth needed to do
was guide the pallets to their destination in the various cargo bays. There
were three pallets, two of them held one large cryostorage tank each, which
contained live animals in deep sleep storage. It was not unusual for alien
animals to be purchased for zoos on Earth, the crew had dealt with them many
times.

“Watch this,
kids.” Seth pulled a rag out of his back pocket and started wiping the thin
layer of condensation off the clear cover of the cryosleep tank.

“Seth, I don
’
t think this is a good-“ Jen started to say.

“Aw, it
’
s fine. What could it hurt? Besides, aren
’
t
you curious?” The pilot asked.

Jen, after a
moment
’
s hesitation, nodded. “Yeah, kinda.” She waved the
children forward, and they all crowded around the tank
’
s
cover.

Seth wiped away
the water vapor, and shone a light inside the tank. It was a frightening sight.
The animal was roughly the size of a tiger, clearly a predator, based on the
claws on the ends of its four paws, and the large, sharp teeth visible in its
half-open mouth. Unlike a tiger, it had no fur, instead it was covered in
plates of thick, tough, leathery armor. The plates were especially large and
thick on its chest, and around its front shoulders. The skin was a mottled
grey-green, with dark grey stripes. Rick shuddered, reminding himself that
field archeology sometimes meant facing animals like this, and worse. “What
’
s it called?”

Seth checked the
cargo manifest. “
I dunno. It
’
s got some
long darned Latin scientific name I can
’
t pronounce. This
thing looks like a cross between a rhino and a tiger to me.”

“A Tino. That
’
s what I would call it.” Kaylee suggested.

“Yeah. Tino. I
like it.” Seth made a notation on the manifest. “Tell you what, kiddo, you just
named the beast. When this container gets opened on Earth, the label
’
s gonna read ‘Tino
’
.”

“Really? Cool!”
Kaylee beamed with delight.

“Can I name one?”
Manny asked excitedly.

“Well, there
’
s other animals, but they
’
re already in
storage. Another day, OK?” Jen made a mental note to take the children down to
see the cryosleep compartment.

Kaylee put her
face up close to the clear cover. “Tino, huh? Sure is mean looking.”

Manny crowded in
with her to get a better look. A thin, clear tube ran into a patch on the tino
’
s neck, in between armor plates. Through the tube dripped drugs
and nutrients which kept the animal alive, asleep, and safely in suspended
hibernation. “Kaylee, that is really cool that you named it.”

Kaylee shot a
glance silence at her brother out of the corner of her eye. Was he teasing her?
No. The little creep was serious this time. He was OK sometimes. “Thanks,
Manny.” She whispered.

“Why are you
whispering?” Manny asked.

Kaylee looked at
the curving, yellowish teeth of the tino, and turned toward her brother. “
I don’
t want to wake it up, so you?”

Just then, Seth
jostled the tank and roared at the same time, making it look like the animal
was awake and moving. The two children, along with Jen and Rick, jumped back.

“Very funny,
Seth!” Jen said, annoyed. “Show
’
s over, let
’
s get this stowed away. What else we got?”

Seth grinned,
pulled the next pallet forward and scanned the label. “Hey, professor, you
’
ll be interested in this one,“ Seth said as he read the label,
“some kind of alien artifacts. Funny, though, they weren
’
t
originally labeled that way at first. Must have caught it at the space station
Customs office.”

Rick frowned.
“Probably somebody trying to get around the export restrictions. Where
’
s it going to?”

“Earth. Some
company called Concordia Planetary. Looks like they
’
re
acting as a forwarding agent for somebody else.”

“Never heard of
Concordia.” Which was odd, there weren
’
t many
non-governmental organizations that were allowed to handle alien artifacts.
Officially, at least. Rick knew there was a substantial black market; the paper
he wrote for his doctoral thesis had been helped, in part, by a private
collector letting him examine an artifact, with the agreement that Rick keep
his mouth shut about where he saw the items. What really didn
’
t
make sense was shipping such valuable items on a slow freighter like
Atlas
Challenger.
The ship had several stops to make on the way back to Earth...
unless cargo aboard a faster ship would attract more attention? Or the buyer didn
’
t think the items were important? That was the problem with
most alien artifacts, other than the fact that they were alien and ancient,
they were worthless junk, of no practical value. Rick mentally shrugged.
Oceania
’
s few, small sites of alien ruins had been studied
pretty thoroughly, the current theory was that Oceania never had more than a
short-term alien science station, never a permanent settlement. The aliens hadn
’
t liked sitting on a beautiful beach, sipping pina coladas, he
guessed? Whatever was in the boxes, it couldn
’
t be very
important.

Rick realized
Seth was looking at him and waiting for him to say something. “There
’
s one, two, three, uh, seven boxes here, you want to report
this as contraband? The space station has a government Customs officer aboard.”
Seth suggested.       

“Nah, it can
’
t be anything important. I don
’
t want to
hold up our departure time, make the Captain mad at me.”

“I wouldn
’
t worry about that, Captain don
’
t like
contraband. Universal Transport don
’
t like problems,
Captain keeps them out of trouble.” Seth concluded.

“Seth, seriously,
I
’
m sure it
’
s junk destined for some
collector
’
s library back home. If it was anything
significant, it would have been impounded at the station.”

“Dad, it
’
s real alien stuff, though? Can
’
t we look
at it?” Kaylee asked.

“Yeah, Dad, you
’
re the expert,” Manny added, “you should look at it.”

“Kids, those
boxes are sealed for transport, we can
’
t open them.
Sorry.” Rick concluded. “
Trust me, we
’
ll
see much cooler alien stuff on Valhalla, stuff that
no
human has ever
seen before.” He added hopefully, and waved a hand at the pallet dismissively.
“Not this leftover junk.”

After
Oceania, all the pleasant distractions were gone. No other passengers. The
Beach was empty. Star travel was endless  and dull and boring. Schoolwork
sucked. There was nothing to do aboard the ship. Mother and father tried to
find something, anything, to occupy Kaylee and Manny.

After
a particularly trying morning, when Kaylee had been grumpy at breakfast, and
then stomped off to mope in her room, Joy brought her husband a cup of coffee,
and announced "Our daughter is going to drive me crazy. She's bored out of
her mind, and she hates everything."

"Honey,
it's not just this boring trip." Rick said gently. "Manny is just as
bored, but he's dealing with it, because he's excited that we're going to a new
planet. Kaylee hates the idea of going to Valhalla even more now than she did
when we left Earth. Valhalla is still a primitive place. The aliens modified
the climate when they occupied it, then the planet partially reverted to its
natural state, now we're terraforming it and that process isn't complete."
After the aliens mysteriously disappeared and stopped maintaining the biosphere
they had artificially created on Valhalla, the planet's climate had radically
swung from one extreme to another over thousands of years, with the current
state being widespread deserts. The human terraforming project had raised
oxygen levels to eighteen percent, which was lower than Earth normal but
breathable. Dropping ice-filled comets into the atmosphere had helped refill
the ocean basins and bring much-needed rains to the continents, and the project
was on time and on target to eventually make the planet into the paradise the
development company promised. Until the project was complete, people living
there had to endure unpredictable weather, occasional supersonic shockwave
winds from strings of comets slamming into the atmosphere, and isolation from
most of the human community. Valhalla held a population of only three thousand
people, scattered across an entire planet. The settlement where the Sanchez
family would be living had three hundred fifty people, with only thirty of them
being children. Rick would be away working on excavating alien ruins part of
the time, and while Joy's job allowed her to be near home most of the time, she
would have to travel several times a year. The parents planned to coordinate
their schedules so at least one of then was always with the children, rather than
rely on the company-provided child care. And both parents hoped to take the
children with them on field trips on school breaks. Manny was dying to explore
alien ruins, and Rick was sure Kaylee would also be interested, when she
actually saw the ruins of an ancient alien city. "Valhalla is great for
us, for our professional passions. I get to investigate alien ruins that no one
has seen before instead of stuff sent to Earth in a box. You get to do
exobiology where all the biology is 'exo', even the modified organisms we
planted there. For Manny, it will all be a grand adventure, playing pioneer in
a frontier settlement. For Kaylee, it will mean living in a prefabricated box
instead of a nice house, going to a new school, not knowing whether she'll make
any friends."

"So
what do we do?"

"You're
asking me?" Rick shrugged. "I have cabin fever too, being cooped up
on this ship. The crew spends most of their year in this tin can, I'll ask them
for suggestions on how to cope with it."

The
starship crew, after pleading from Joy and Rick, helped rescue the children
from their hopeless boredom. It started with Jen offering to let first Kaylee,
then both children, accompany her on her maintenance inspection rounds, into
areas of the ship that were officially off-limits to passengers. Jen told them
that the crew didn
’
t refer to their ship as
Atlas
Challenger
, but by its nickname “
A.C.
”, pronounced “
Ace
”.
Also, Jen told them that all cargo ships owned by Universal Transport were
named Atlas C-something, like
Atlas
Champion
,
Atlas
Charger
,
Atlas
Capital
and fifteen other names. The crews referred to
themselves as ‘Aces
’
, that was why the crew uniforms had
logos in the form of a playing card: an Ace of diamonds. It made Manny feel
cool to call the ship
Ace
in front of his parents, one night at dinner.
Initially, the excursions around the ship with Jen were no big deal, staying
within the aft part of the oval-shaped command section that was attached to the
front of the ship, forward of the four long, boxy cargo pods. Just getting out
of the passenger section, which took up the front of one cargo pod, and into
the command section, was exciting enough. Jen could not actually take them onto
the ship
’
s bridge, of course. The best she could do was to
allow them to peek their heads in the doorway, late one afternoon, when she was
sure only Seth was on duty.

Seeing
the ship
’
s bridge was a big build-up to a huge
disappointment. The starship
’
s control center was nothing
special, lots of computer display screens, although everything seemed to be
well-worn, and about a generation behind current technology. Seth had been
sitting in a chair, sipping tea, looking thoroughly bored. All in all,
Atlas
Challenger
’
s bridge was nothing like the fictional
starship control centers shown on popular video programs. The children realized
the command section
’
s crew quarters were no different, and
generally more cramped, than the cabin their family had been assigned.

Things
got more interesting when Jen took Kaylee and Manny along on trips into the
cavernous cargo sections, each of which was over a kilometer long. Walking the
considerable length of the ship did impress the two young people, and every
time they went, they saw something different, so large was the ship. They saw
the compartment where the cryosleep boxes held the tinos, that became a
favorite place to visit. After the first two days, Jen let the sister and
brother navigate their way through the cargo compartments, she would tell them
where she needed to go, and either Kaylee or Manny would go first, figuring out
which lefts and rights to take, when to climb up or down. The process was not
fast, as Jen had to use her access card to open many airtight doors along the
way. Unlike during cargo loading operations, when all the doors in a cargo section
would be open to facilitate movement of the robotic cargo-handling pallets, the
doors remained closed while the ship was in flight. Jen explained that using
doors to separate the cargo sections into airtight compartments was a
precaution against loss of air during an accident. There was no repeat of what
the Sanchezes had briefly seen during cargo loading at Oceania: the entire
length of a cargo section, with all the doors open, stretching over a kilometer
back toward the fusion engines and hyperdrive.

The
days crawl
ed
along slowly, with schoolwork, family
dinners, reading, watching videos, going to the Beach, playing games, and
spending time with Jen. Only another two weeks, and the ship would finally
arrive at Valhalla, where the bulk of its cargo would be unloaded, the Sanchez
family would say goodbye to the crew, and begin their new life. And everyone
aboard could not wait for those two weeks to be gone.

Captain Schroeder
was in his office adjacent to the bridge, playing chess against the ship
’
s Artificial Intellgence computer. There was, of course, no
possibility that he could win, what Hans wanted was to see at what dumbed-down
setting of the AI he had a chance. He was contemplating his next move, trying
to determine not only what to do, but how the AI would respond. A mug of tea
sat next to the chessboard, he picked it up and sipped it. Tea was a habit he
had picked up while serving under a British captain, early in his career. Such
a civilized habit, Hans thought. In the midafternoon, a hot cup of tea, a light
snack. Same time every afternoon. It was orderly, predictable. Hans liked
predictable, it made his job so much easier. Then the intercom beeped.
“Captain, we
’
re picking up a distress call.”

Schroeder
didn
’
t look up from the chess board. “Yes,
Ms. Olivetti. From where?” There were no registered starships in the area, he
had checked the navigation logs only an hour ago. Military vessels, of course,
didn
’
t show on the registry. Could it be a warship in
trouble? That would be interesting.

“Mining colony,
Sir. On Ares.”

“I
’
ll
be right there.” Schroeder paused the chess game, and walked through the door
to the bridge. Seth was at the navigation station, with Gina Olivetti
monitoring communications. “Ares?”

Gina nodded.
“Beta Leonis III, it
’
s about the size of Earth, but the
atmosphere is thin like Mars, and it
’
s covered with red
oxide dust. No indigenous life.”

“I
’
m
familiar with that world, Ms. Olivetti, I didn
’
t realize
there was a colony there.” Schroeder vaguely remembered swinging by that world,
years ago when he had been a mere ensign in the Navy. “What are they mining?”

Gina checked the
data screen. “It doesn
’
t say, Captain. Should I ask them?”

Schroeder shook
his head curtly. “No. I don
’
t actually care what they
’
re digging out of the ground. Play the message.”

“The signal is
weak, Sir, here it is.” It came across the hyperwave faint and distorted, with
bursts of static. “This is the mining concession on Ares, calling all ships in
the area. We have suffered an accident, we
’
ve lost primary
life support. The remaining oxygen will last us only another two days, uh,
fifty hours maximum. Please help us. Repeat, this is-“ Gina cut off the
speaker.

“Fifty hours is
their entire oxygen supply, including reserves? That is inexcusably bad
planning.” Schroeder scratched his beard. “Have any ships responded yet?”
Diverting a big, lumbering freighter like the
Ace
was impractical.
Surely the military had ships somewhere close by. Or not? This area of the
Orion Arm of the galaxy was the boondocks.

“Not yet, Sir.”

“
Mister
Putri?
” He asked the ship
’
s navigator.

“They
’
re in luck, because we
’
re close, Captain,
our present course takes us within a lightyear.” Seth consulted his navigation
computer. “If we diverted, we could be there in, let
’
s
see… add time to swing into a low orbit, say another four hours for the shuttle
to line up an approach and drop to the surface… uh, we could have a rescue team
on the surface in thirty two hours. That
’
s cutting it
close.”

“
We
don’
t have a rescue team, Mister Putri.” Schroeder chided gently. “This
is a freighter. And someone will have to pay for the fuel the shuttle uses, and
the discounts the company will have to pay to our customers if our deliveries
are delayed. Diverting this ship is no small matter.” Despite his bluster,
Schroeder knew that interstellar law, and his moral responsibility as a ship
captain, would require him to respond to the miners
’
need,
if the
Ace
was the only ship that could get there in time.

“Ms. Olivetti,
open a channel to Ares, I want to speak to-“

But Gina held up
her right hand, and pressed the earpiece to her left ear with her other hand.
“One moment, Captain, priority message coming in for us.” After a few seconds,
she explained. “It
’
s military.”

Schroeder
straightened his uniform jacket and stood to face the communications station.
“Let
’
s see it.”

The screen in
front of Gina displayed first the symbol of the Colonial Protective Forces,
otherwise known as the Navy, gold on a blue background, then the symbol was
replaced by a woman wearing the white uniform of the Navy, with four gold
stripes, and a silver eagle designating her rank as a Captain in the service.
She had short, dark hair and piercing dark eyes, and spoke with a lilting
accent from the Indian subcontinent. “This is Captain Gante of the Colonial
frigate
Tigershark
, calling the Universal Transport vessel
Atlas
Challenger
. Respond, please.”

“What
’
s the time lag for the transmission?”
Schroeder
asked.

Gina checked the
time code embedded in the message. “Seven minutes, Sir. They
’
re
nowhere near Ares.”

Schroeder
nodded curtly. He had been hoping
Tigershark
’
s
message would be that the frigate was responding to the distress call, and
Atlas
Challenger
could continue on its way. Now it seemed possible the
Ace
would have to rescue the miners. He pressed the transmit button. “
Tigershark
,
this is Captain Schroeder of the
Atlas Challenger
, we are standing by to
render assistance as needed.”
He sighed.
“
Mister
Putri,
there's no sense waiting for official word from the Navy; plot a
course to put us in a parking orbit around Ares with all possible speed, and
engage when you are ready.”