Family Law 2: The Long Voyage of the Little Fleet (27 page)

Gordon and Lee silently looked at each other and nodded silent agreement.

"Then might I suggest we send the courier down one of these routes while we are here, double crewed and see if it matches the chart three or four populated planets into it?" Prosperity proposed.

"
Not
alone," Lee said quickly, looking concerned.

"You have reservations too?" Prosperity asked surprised.

"The sky is wide; it holds surprises. I've seen it turn around and bite us on the ass when we were sure everything was as sweet as could be," she said.

There was just a moment's pause, as everyone considered how expensive that lesson had been for her. It didn't leave much room to argue.

"Send the
Sharp Claws
," Lee argued. "It can come close to keeping up with the
Roadrunner
and she has teeth. If the Biters ship is any indication it is sufficient. And call Chance right now and tell him and Fat Ortega to pick their alternate crew."

"Agreed, we'll send the
Sharp Claws
, but designate the
Roadrunner
and Chance Ochocinco taskforce command. It removes the fellow with his finger on the trigger from making decisions for all of them. I know it slows the process a little, but it's worth the added safety to avoid any kind of a friendly fire accident."

"Thor, call Talker on com and ask if there is any problem with doing that. If they want to send a ship along as escort that's fine, but make sure it can keep up. Make it happen pretty quickly, so they can't send word ahead and have a fleet waiting for them."

"Aye, sir," Thor took 'make it happen' to mean
now
, starting things in motion from his seat.

"And have them translate that chart to one with English notation," Gordon added.

Thor just nodded, talking into his hand com low.

"We need to reciprocate. They have agreed to make no claims in a sixty degree cone with its apex here and axis pointed at our worlds. Outside that cone it's first come first served. We've agreed to respect each other's claims markers," Prosperity said.

"Do you agree with that?" Lee asked the third Mother.

"Yes, with caution. I agree we should test this chart before creating a similar one for them."

"So you didn't agree to any time line? They aren't waiting for our chart with a hard deadline to produce it?" Gordon asked.

"No and I would avoid the issue. Just tell them we want to verify their chart before we give them a similar document. I think it will take our navigators a few days to produce it in an unfamiliar format anyway," the third Mum said. "I have confidence it will check out."

"Why? What makes you so confidence?" Lee asked, frowning.

"With all honor to my associate, I can tell when the Badgers are lying and he can't."

"That's a pretty remarkable assertation. Is there some sort of rift that's happened between you two? Gordon wondered. "I need to know if there is."

"Not at all. I enjoy working with Prosperity. In fact I'd say his government made a good choice in sending him. It's just that after our official talks were done for the day we socialized with the Badgers a bit after hours. Prosperity taught them to play poker and he owes Talker eighty six and seventeen hundredths grams of gold. He can't tell when they are bluffing."

"And you can?"

"I won twenty seven and three hundredths grams," she explained.

Lee started giggling. She tried to say something and she couldn't. Finally she jumped up and ran in the head. Prosperity looked a little miffed.

"Before you take offense too deeply, it isn't just your story that amused Lee so much." Gordon said, looking almost as unhappy as Prosperity.

"Whatever else could it be?" Prosperity asked.

"We had some discussion..." Thor said, looking down into his coffee mug. "We were concerned the Fargoers, having such affection for games of chance, would take advantage of the natives and possibly create some resentment among them."

"
Take
advantage
of the natives?" Prosperity asked, dismayed. "Let me tell you something about the natives. After a game is done, they can recite the order in which every card was shown and quote off the top of their head the odds of filling a hand at that point based on the previously played cards. And this is playing a
new
game to them."

"Well then, I guess that isn't a concern for granting liberties," Gordon said.

"I don't know if the Badgers or the rest of them have anything like a casino," Prosperity said. "But I'd suggest you make clear to them that the ship will
not
bail them out if they gamble on credit. I know some of them have gone a little nuts assuming they'll be rich when we go home and decided to take IOUs from each other. We have no idea what the local laws are and if they can't pay up their debts they might end up sitting in jail for all we know right now. Just because we have certain laws doesn't mean theirs will be anything similar. In their law the ship might
be
responsible for the crew's debts on station. You better find out for sure."

"Tell the translating team to do that," Gordon instructed. "Find out the basic rules and laws of ship and crew responsibility,
before
we grant any leave. Also, they gave us a free dock this time. That's nice, but we need to know the rates for later."

Lee came back from the head, under control.

"I got the story," Prosperity told her.

"Oh good. You don't hate me I hope?"

"No and I won't hold it against Talker and Trader, but I'm never going to play poker with the Badgers again. I predict if they visit our worlds all the casinos will ban them. They're all natural card counters."

"Eighty six grams was a cheap lesson," the third Mother told Prosperity. "I'd count it a friendly game. They could have set the stakes
much
higher."

"Again, I think we can get along with these people," Lee said. "Well, maybe not the Biters. But the rest seem to have thought processes similar to our races. It wouldn't be hospitable to play your guest's game and take him for everything you can get. They do seem to have a sense of what is polite."

Chapter 13

"The
Roadrunner
and
Sharp Claws
can be ready to depart in thirty minutes if that is acceptable," Thor informed Gordon. "They can do it faster, but it gives the
Sharp Claws
time to safely double check things like loose items in the galley and give crew time to secure personal items. The
Roadrunner
is pretty much always stowed and ready to go. They picked Persevere Wilson and Timely Rodriguez to be their beta crew."

"Can the Badgers have an escort ready to go in the same time frame?"

"They say yes. They have a Badger messenger class ship, with a crew of six, that looks to be similar to our courier class. They agreed to send them along to introduce our people on system entry. Talker says such a ship always stands ready to quickly carry a message or light delivery."

"I'd suggest to our captains they make sure the Badgers can synchronize well enough before inviting them to jump in close formation."

"Any other instructions?" Thor asked.

Gordon considered it silently just a moment.

"We don't have time to make and install another docking collar. It's a lot of weight to add to a courier anyway. Have them start making another though, in case we want one another time. Try to make it light too. See if the Badgers can sell us replacement feed stock for the fabricators."

"I suggest you charge them with protecting the Badger ship since they are kind enough to provide an escort," Lee proposed.

"Indeed, an excellent suggestion, if the Badger Captain is agreeable. Also, tell them to withdraw if the owners of any system tells them they are unwelcome. Loop back another way even if necessary. Double check before they go, to make sure that the Biters aren't the owners of any of the systems they will transverse."

"The Badger messenger ship is undocked already. They accept protection. The Captain informs us the Biters worlds are to the far edge of the map we were given, so that isn't a problem. He will privately transmit us an update showing extensions as they aren't listed as part of that group. The Biters he says, object to any of their three systems being listed on other's charts. They see that as an invitation to enter and don't welcome visitors. So they leave them off public charts, rather than argue."

"Why doesn't that surprise me?" Gordon muttered.

After the ships formed up and departed on an agreed vector and acceleration, they got a message back from the
Roadrunner
. " Fat Ortega sitting second board to Captain Chance Ochocinco wishes you to know that the commander of the Badger ship informs him they can jump in sync if need arises, but he doesn't wish to add the small risk without necessity. He would prefer to jump from a fifty kilometer separation. Since we are going to be announced by him and have no operational need to cloak our numbers on entry, we have agreed to that."

"I can't fault that," Thor said. "I wonder what our boys plan to do? I'm not going to influence them and see what they choose."

"We should have sent Ha-bob-bob-brie," Lee said. "Too late... "

When the ships blinked out of existence they did so simultaneously. But the ships of The Little Fleet were about five hundred meters apart.

"Ah, they decided to show some style arriving, Thor said. He seemed to approve.

* * *

"We are finding none of these races here have the depth of plastics technology we have," Prosperity informed them. "The situation is almost the same with paint, which is closely related of course. But some of the things they have done with ceramics we
have
to buy. They showed me ceramics you can dent with a hammer and they don't break. They make ceramic
springs
."

"They haven't said anything about the gravity on the station?" Lee asked.

"No and I'm reluctant to let them know we don't have a clue how they do it."

"Don't ask straight out
how
," Lee counseled. "Ask how high a gradient they can generate, or what sort of power efficiencies they get. Something round-about like that."

"The danger is with that I could be asking a really stupid question, which might tell them we have no idea of the underlying mechanism and are trying to fake it."

"Then they'll know," Lee said with a shrug, "but we won't be any worse off than if we didn't give it a try," she said. After a little thought she added, "Have the third Mother work it into the conversation. Ask if they can turn it up a little to Derf standard. They apparently can't read her and if they try to blow her off with a lie she'll probably know. She isn't a technical person either and if her question seems silly to them she can honestly say she'd an executive and a cook, but not an engineer or a techie."

"There's still no hint that they have nuclear explosives?" Gordon asked.

"We touched on power generation. They found it interesting we use a helium 3 – deuterium reaction because they use deuterium – deuterium. They were aware of the higher energy reaction but decided not to build the infrastructure for helium 3. When we mentioned that we used fission reactions for power while still planet bound, they said they too experimented with that early on and dropped it because of the difficulties with waste and because of the short life of mechanical components under high radiation and decommissioning expenses. Nobody has ever hinted they conceived how to assemble an all consuming prompt neutron super-critical mass," Prosperity said.

"Isn't a simple fission bomb pretty obvious?" Lee asked. "I thought it was 1940s technology."

"Everything is easy in hind-sight. There was nothing simple or easy about the circumstances of humans inventing it in the 1940s," Prosperity told her. "They didn't produce nuclear reactors and then accumulate experience about nuclear engineering until eventually they knew enough to produce a nuclear explosive. They were in a global war of survival and the explosives came
first
with little thought to other applications until after. Some of the first reactors to make plutonium were set on a river for coolant and they just discarded the power as waste heat dumped in the river. The production of the weapons took a great deal of the national economy in a country already paying for a worldwide war. They literally built entire new towns to hold all the workers and vast machinery. Look up 'Oak Ridge' on the portion of the web we haven't released to them. It wasn't something that would have happened in peacetime."

"And the Badgers and Bills are more peaceable than us?" Lee asked. She didn't seem convinced.

"I can't swear to
that
, but their wars and technology advanced at different rates than Humans. That resulted in quite a different history. Badgers had a world government before they had a war like Humans had in 1914, the First World War. Their last war that created a world government had a few submarines but no armored tanks or heavier that air war planes. The submarines were horrible death traps really. They just barely developed repeating firearms before it was over. They never had a mechanized war like WWI, which a lot of historians would tell you was just a precursor to World War Two, or what they call the First Atomic War now," Prosperity said.

"I could argue Derf are more peaceable because we never had worldwide wars," Thor objected.

"So by the time they could have built them... " Lee prompted Prosperity to finish up before Thor side tracked him..

"They had no need. Especially no incentive to spend that huge of a fortune to do so. And the limited fission tech they did develop never had a need to produce the highly enriched uranium or huge quantities of plutonium that you need for a nuclear kernel. Even if some Badger ever visualized the theoretical possibility of assembling a supercritical mass so quickly that the prompt neutron cascade consumed all the nuclear fuel before the device could disassemble itself – the stuff wasn't laying around to try it. And if you didn't have somebody at hand you were keen to drop the thing on why would you go to the expense? At that tech level it isn't a trivial exercise to assemble uranium, and plutonium requires much faster assembly not to be a dud. Why would they spend that kind of money and risk the hazards of what they already saw as a dangerous and dirty technology to go blow a crater in a desert somewhere with no enemy to use it on?"