Starfist: Blood Contact (6 page)

"How would you like to work for me, George?" Scanlon eventually asked.

Cameron accepted the offer immediately.

In the following months, Cameron showed he could supervise the loading of a cargo hold, draw up an accurate shipping manifest, and carry his own weight on a raid.

The raid had been a small affair, just a brief touchdown on a nearly uninhabited world to heist construction robotics, but Cameron neutralized the tiny work force at the site quickly and effectively and established a defensive perimeter immediately afterward, from which he held off the security force until the snatch was completed. Everyone in the Red 35 Crew had gotten off safely, and no witnesses were left behind. Even Lowboy had been impressed, although the new man had demonstrated some reluctance when ordered to kill the survivors. But a man could learn to do that sort of thing.

About a month after he'd joined them, Minerva attached herself to Cameron. A clerk in one of Jenny's mining camps, she'd been recruited on Old Earth under false pretenses. The company actually wanted someone to service the men in its operation on Jenny, and not by keeping their pay records straight. She soon became very unpopular with her bosses, but she did keep the men's pay records straight. When her contract ran out, she decided to find other work. After pushing drinks in the dives around Sodus Bay for a while, she wound up a shipping clerk in Scanlon's business. She was pretty and, just coincidentally, had guts and brains.

The other men in Scanlon's crew respected her. Scanlon's inflexible rule on women in his organization was that no man could force himself on one who was a member of the crew. Minerva and Cameron met because he knew unarmed combat and had volunteered to teach his skills to the others. During a demonstration, while thinking of someone else whom he wanted to hurt, he'd applied too much pressure to Minerva's left arm, which had snapped. Cameron was genuinely sorry, and she liked the awkward way he tried to make up for it. After her experiences in the mining camps and the bars on Jenny, it was refreshing to have a man pay attention to her not because he wanted something from her, but just to be nice. And with Minerva, Cameron really tried to be nice; when he was with her, the burning hatred and disgrace that had driven him to the fringe world of New Genesee subsided.

The raid on Society 437 had been Cameron's idea.

"They have scads of stuff we can use," he pointed out during one of Scanlon's strategy sessions. "They have three stations operating down there. We take the one called Aquarius, in the tropics. There's forty or fifty technicians there, tops. We'll outnumber them two to one, and we can shut them down in no time flat, heist their hardware and be gone before the big station, Central, knows what's happened."

"Hell, George," Lowboy said, "that's a goddamn scientific survey team down there! The Confederation's invested trillions in that expedition. You don't think they'd sit by and let us strip the joint!"

"Who's to stop us? They have no—repeat, no—military security. If the survey team has followed the standard TO and E, the only weapons they have are to protect against unfriendly animals. Shit, they're all scientists and eggheads! I bet most of them don't even know how to use the few weapons they have.

Besides, they're so spread out, they couldn't possibly reinforce Aquarius."

"Why not, Cap'n?" Rhys Apbac chimed in enthusiastically. Rhys was always ready to go on a raid. He grinned fiercely at the others and recited the only piece of poetry he knew, an ancient highwayman's ditty he'd managed to memorize after years of practice:

"Come tighten your girth and slacken your

Buckle your holster and blanket again;

Try the click of your trigger and balance your blade,

For he must ride sure who goes riding a raid."

Scanlon ignored Rhys, who sat there grinning triumphantly at the others after finishing his recitation. He said to Cameron, "The Confederation might get pissed enough to send a really significant naval force out here if we mess with 437, George."

"Count on it," Cameron replied. "They'll send Marines, bet you money. But so what? Before that can be done, the Bureau of Human Habitability, or whatever they call it, will have to request a military force be dispatched there. That can take six months. By then the stuff we get will all be sold. There are a dozen wildcat mining and construction teams working throughout five or six systems who'll buy the sophisticated gear we can get on 437, no questions asked, cash on delivery. What's the Confederation going to do then? Investigate everybody in the whole damned quadrant?"

Indeed, Scanlon owned two starship freighters that could go anywhere in Human Space. There was no limit to where they could go to conduct a raid, or where they could go to sell whatever they got.

Scanlon thought a bit. Lowboy watched. He was beginning to dislike Cameron, who had just come into the Red 35 Crew, and was already worming his way into Scanlon's confidence. And he had that bitch Minerva too, Lowboy thought. Goddamn whore. Lowboy had tried to score on her once himself, and she'd rejected him. He detested her after that, and he'd grown to resent Cameron's relationship with her.

"George, can you plan this raid and pull it off?" Scanlon asked.

"You bet, Captain! Right down to the microns. Leave it to me."

"Okay," Scanlon said with finality. Lowboy mentally kicked himself for not having thought of the raid first. Well, he reflected, maybe Pretty Boy Georgie would have an accident on Society 437.

And the raid would have worked perfectly, just as Cameron had planned it, except for one horribly unforeseen circumstance.

Back at the fire, Cameron nudged Minerva with the toe of his boot. She sat up sleepily. "What's for breakfast, Georgie?"

"Raw beef, Minnie," Cameron answered. He grabbed a glowing brand from the fire to light his way. It seemed they were back in the Stone Age. That's another thing we need, he reflected: energy packs.

Grinning, Minerva got up and followed him far back into the cave, away from where the others were just beginning to stir. "Georgie," she whispered, her breath hot in his ear, "are we going to make it?"

meaning, Would they survive this ordeal?

"You bet, honey," Cameron answered, by which he meant what they were about to do in the near darkness of the cave's recesses. What the hell, he thought, the future would still be there when they were done.

CHAPTER 5

Ulf Thorsfinni's Saga

Ulf Thorsfinni was the last of his breed. Tall, muscular, athletic, blond, and cursed with an irresistible urge to see what lay beyond the horizon, plunder whatever was there, and bring the booty home.

Tall, muscular, athletic, and blond were just as desirable physical characteristics in the mid-23rd century as they had been throughout all the history—and prehistory—of Northern Europe. But the irresistible urge to see what lay beyond the horizon was a curse, as all the horizons of Earth had long since been gone past and nothing new was left to see. Even if there had been, society in general frowned on plundering whatever was there. And the civilized people at home didn't even want the booty brought back.

Had he lived in an earlier age, Ulf Thorsfinni's exploratory exploits might still be commemorated in sagas to rival those of Eric the Red, Lief Ericsson, or Ragnar Hairy-Breeks. Or he might have been a king, cast in the mold of Harold, Olaf, Haakon, or Magnus. Instead, it was his fate to be the scion of a family of commerce—and not merely a family of commerce, but the Family of Commerce.

The Thorsfinnis had started small, back in the early 22nd century, when Great-Grandpapa Thorsfinni sold the family fishing trawler and used the proceeds to purchase a pine tree strand, which he clear-cut and then replanted with hickory, oak, and other hardwoods. For some years Thorsfinniwold, as Great-Grandpapa Thorsfinni named his wood strand, served as a nursery, providing saplings to architects and landscapers. When the trees that weren't sold as saplings grew large enough, some of them were culled and sold to wood-carvers and cabinetmakers at what would have been exorbitant prices had hardwoods not been so rare and difficult to come by. That provided the kroners (an archaic term even then) for Great-Grandpapa Thorsfinni's grand plan.

The profits of the nursery and hardwoods, and they were substantial, were used to buy a partnership in a fledgling venture capital bank. Unlike his partners, who used their income from the bank to live very rich lives, Great-Grandpapa Thorsfinni used his share of the profits to quietly buy up portions of the shares of his partners, each of whom thought he was merely selling a few shares to the junior most partner so he could increase his earnings and begin to live as richly as they were. Needless to say, the partners were quite surprised when one day Great-Grandpapa Thorsfinni announced that, as majority partner, he was taking full control of the bank and they could either sell the remainder of their shares to him or accept whatever dividends he deigned to declare. Few of them took him seriously enough to sell immediately. They all took him seriously when they discovered how small were the dividends that the majority owner doled out. Thorsfinnibank, as the business was quickly renamed, thereafter became the richest and most prestigious venture-capital bank in Scandinavia.

Great-Grandpapa Thorsfinni didn't merely lend to entrepreneurs who came to him for the financial backing they needed to make their—and Thorsfinnibank's—fortunes. He invested money in his many childrens' projects as well.

Great-Uncle Leif went into mining in a big way with Thorsfinnimineral. Great-Aunt Emily built an amazingly successful tropical jungle theme park on the Arctic Circle, which she called Thorsfinniworld.

With his Thorsfinniherring, Great-Uncle Haakon became one of the greatest fishing farmers in the North Atlantic. Great-Aunt Gertrude bought a failing spaceshipyard and converted it to Thorsfinniship, the world's first shipyard devoted entirely to starship construction. Great-Uncle Olaf and his Thorsfinni entrepreneurship went through a series of endeavors, each of which he sold at a humongous profit.

Great-Aunt Mildred borrowed money from Thorsfinnibank to buy her way into the tiny remnant of European royalty and became Empress Mildred 1. Not that she had an empire to be empress of, but the entire world quickly came to know her as Empress Mildred, and wherever she went, which was just about everywhere, even the powerful bowed and scraped.

Grandpapa Magnus Thorsfinni was the only failure of the lot. Everything he tried his hand at crumbled, went under, failed. As much out of pity as out of a feeling of family equity, Great-Grandpapa Thorsfinni left two shares of his holdings to each of Grandpapa Thorsfinni's children for each single share he left to his other grandchildren. There were no business failures among Great-Grandpapa Thorsfinni's grandchildren. By the time Ulf reached his majority, it seemed to the great-grandchildren of Great-Grandpapa Thorsfinni that the Thorsfinnis owned all of Norway, most of the rest of Scandinavia, half of the rest of Europe, and significant chunks of Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Australia, not to mention substantial holdings on other worlds. They didn't own quite that much, but it certainly felt to the great-grandchildren that they did.

Young Ulf looked around and felt despair. He saw no horizons left to go beyond. There was no major endeavor, other than the arts, in which the Thorsfinnis were not already a power—and Ulf was unable to draw a straight line even with a ruler and could not write a coherent sentence. He was tone deaf too.

Moreover, he couldn't stand artists of any sort, so being an impresario was out of the question.

What Young Ulf really wanted to do was build a dragonship and go a-Viking. But, as noted above, that was impractical. So he did the next best thing. He went to Uncle Herrman, who now owned and ran Thorsfinniship, Great-Aunt Gertrude's starshipyard, and bought a starship—at a family discount, of course.

The
Glittertenden
was a magnificent ship, a Ragnarok-class cruiser, a civilian design based on the Confederation Navy's Crowe-class amphibious assault battle cruiser. In its appropriate military configuration, it carried a navy warship crew of three thousand plus an assault force of two full Marine FISTs, each two thousand men strong, and was powerful enough that, with a handful of destroyers in escort, it could single-handedly defeat any of the secondary worlds in the Confederation, or nearly any of the nonconfederated worlds in all of Human Space. In its civilian configuration, the Ragnarok-class cruiser could carry a crew of four hundred along with some ten thousand colonists, or an eight hundred member crew and six thousand vacationers.

To please Young Ulf, Uncle Herrman had a dragon-head prow constructed on the part of the ship arbitrarily designated the bow. The dragon-head was totally nonfunctional, of course, but it made Young Ulf's chest swell with pride.

Ulf then set about finding like-minded spirits who wanted to go a-Viking, and to find a suitable world on which they could do it.

Finding a world was easy. About the time Great-Grandpapa Thorsfinni had bought into what became Thorsfinnibank, a deep-space probe discovered a planetary system 150 light-years from Sol. One planet of the system was within the liquid-water range of its primary. It had gravity within five percent of Earth and a breathable, though aromatic, atmosphere.

There were, quite naturally, life-forms native to the planet. Some of the fauna was rather large and voraciously carnivorous. None were venomous to humans, however. Some of the flora was edible after a fashion. Which is to say a human being could eat it without being poisoned, and it would take months of a purely native diet before any nutrition-deficiency symptoms became apparent. The animals could be eaten as well, and with the same considerations.

The planet in question had no name, just some meaningless, bureaucratic alphanumeric designation. It had no landmass of continental size. It did, however, have a proliferation of islands. The most desirable, in Ulf's eyes, was an oblong running roughly north to south, about the size of Scandinavia, and closer to one of the poles than to the equator. More, this large island was mountainous, craggy, rocky, and rent with coastal fissures that could accurately be called fjords. The island was cold in the winter and balmy in the summer, and surrounded by a gray, crashing ocean reminiscent of the North Atlantic.