Misjump Read online

  Chapter 15

  The Sarafina dropped into normal space on the edge of the system, still with significant velocity. The stars were unmoving but the navigation software picked out small points of light that were showing motion relative to the ship and the background stars. They would be mining ships and plant. Fumi rapidly scanned through the standard comms frequencies, looking for a carrier wave. She was taking as much processor as they could spare to maximise the chance of catching a signal but still missed the start of the transmission.

  “—emy ship just jumped in, small so maybe a scout or an old trader or something. Getting you a vector but load ‘er up. We have some shootin’ to do.” The voice was distorted by static, but it sounded excited and scared, the words rushed despite their drawling accent. Fumi switched on the transmitter, punching a virtual button on her virtual screen.

  “This is the Sarafina, a Camel II trader. We are not armed. We are not hostile. We have trade goods and cash. Please do not shoot. We are friendly, repeat we are friendly. Do not shoot!” radioed Fumi.

  There was a brief pause. “Ooooh-kay. Zac, vector is 254.392 by 121.212 with a v of 11,010 meters per second give or take. That thing sure is moving. Hold fire for now. Moving to intercept. This has to be a trick but not shooting folks out of the sky without a reason.”

  Fumi patched the comms through to the ship’s PA.

  “Sarafina, you say? You a greenie, girl? First time one of you has talked back to us. Apply braking. I am going to come up and give you a look-see and I don’t want you getting out of flinger range, you copy?” The voice was still clouded by noise and blurred by an odd accent.

  “Yes, this is the Sarafina. Gregor, can you start to kill our velocity please like the nice gentleman with the mass accelerator asked please? We are not hostile, please do not fire. What should we call you, please?” asked Fumi. She saw from another display floating over the wall near her desk that the in-system drive was applying thrust and the velocity relative to the local frame of reference was dropping.

  “Well, ain’t you a polite one? Where you from, little miss? We ain’t had visitors in a long, long while. Well, not ones that we were pleased to see, anyroad. Guess you can call me Ezekiel since that is my name. Where did you come from? Ironstone is all greenie now and I still ain’t convinced that this isn’t a greenie trick. They got you hostage or some’ut in there?” asked Ezekiel.

  “Pleased to meet you, Ezekiel, No, we are not being held hostage. We are looking to buy fuel, and we could use some information like what the hell a greenie is,” said Fumi.

  The comms whistled back and it took Fumi a second to realise that it was not an equipment fault. “Well, how the hell can you not know what a greenie is? Where you been, girl?”

  Fumi did not like being addressed as “girl,” but she was very aware of how vulnerable they were. “You can call me Fumi, Zeek, You okay with being called Zeek? You might have a hard time believing this but we are a long, long way from home. We had a misjump, headed over to Ironstone and found they weren’t very welcoming to strangers. We were hoping that you good folks would be more amenable to a bit of trade. We have goods and a doctor if you need one.”

  “Yeah, guess’n Zeek is fine. You out from the rim then? We haven’t had news in a long time. Fumi, y’ say? How many folks you all got up in that ship, girl?” asked Zeek.

  Fumi set her teeth and took a deep breath. It had been worth a try. “Six-man crew, no passengers. We were hauling cargo when we misjumped. What are you guys short of? We may be able to help.”

  “First things first, Sarafina. How about you open up a video link so that I can see that you really are what you claim to be?” said Zeek. It was clear from his tone that this wasn’t a question.

  Fumi looked around her virtual environment. She had got used to it, but she knew it would not pass for a real place. She felt real and knew that she looked it too, but the surroundings were a problem. She adjusted the camera to show just her face and shoulders and then added video. An image from Zeek’s ship appeared on the monitor a few seconds later. He was a thin man with an angular face and a moustache that he had curled up at the ends. He was perhaps thirty standard old, but it was hard to tell with the image quality. The overall impression was one of neatness and careful grooming, quite at odds with the rough look that she had expected from a miner. He grinned, the expression cheesy. “Well now, ain’t you a doll? Would you be so kind as to touch your nose for old Zeek now?” Confused, Fumi complied, tapping the tip of her small nose with an index finger. “Yep, you look real enough and not a greenie. Welcome to Yellow Sun mining corporation, better known as Klondike. I am going to want to check you out careful like, but I think maybe we can help each other out here.” Fumi realised that she had winced when he had called her real.

  “Zeek, how about I transfer you to our pilot, Gregor? He is the captain, and I think that you probably want to talk with him," Fumi suggested.

  “Well now,” said Zeek, “I am sure that he is not as pretty as you all are.”

  Fumi forced a smile that she didn’t feel. “Well, there you have a point. Here he is.” She transferred the comms to the bridge and slumped in her chair. That had not been fun. She pulled up the app and created a beer. The nanites would filter the alcohol out of her virtual bloodstream too quickly for her to get more than a light buzz, but she could use the comfort. Maybe they could scan something stronger next time.

  It took several hours to kill the velocity that the Sarafina had carried into the system, but Zeek’s ship, the Gopher, matched speed before the trader was at rest relative to the local frame of reference. They hung in space, nose to nose. The miner’s vessel was ugly compared to the Camel class since it never had to operate in an atmosphere. It was all engines and a modest living space, designed to attach to a load and pull it in for processing. That had the side effect of making it an effective interceptor. The nose carried a small laser cluster, low power for mass spectrometry and high power for breaking up metallic or rocky asteroids. It would also be effective against a civilian hull. The capsule around Zeek was clear and bulbous, designed to allow maximum visibility from the cockpit. While the miner was fragile, it was the only ship with weapons.

  “Okay,” said Gregor. “How you want to do this? We do not have umbilicus for your lock type, but you are welcome to vac across.”

  “Nah, ain’t going to go down that way. Here is what we will do. One of you comes out in a suit and we meet in the middle. If everything checks out, then sure, we can trade. If not, well, my ship has a set of programmed operations, if you follow me. I don’t mean to be rude, but you folks are strangers here and we didn’t invite you. We have the right to be a mite suspicious,” said Zeek.

  Gregor shrugged. He didn’t think that he had many options. “Okay, yes, no problem. Will be me or Ivo as we are best in a suit.”

  “And here was me hoping it was that pretty little Fumi. Are you sure that she can’t make it out here? It gets real lonesome on watch duty,” said Zeek.

  “Fumi cannot leave the ship,” said Gregor, his sincerity clear in his voice. “I will come out to meet, okay? Will need a few minutes to suit up.”

  “Yeah but no. How about you send Ivo and you and I can talk on the radio,” said Zeek.

  Gregor shrugged. “Whatever, no problem. He will need a few minutes also.”

  It took twenty minutes for the two spacesuited figures to meet in free space between the two ships. Ivo was not especially skilled at zero-G operations and moved slowly. Zeek reached out a hand and stopped the slow drift of the larger man.

  “Nice and easy, no sudden movements there, buddy,” said Zeek. He pulled a handheld device that resembled some sort of improved energy weapon from a magnetic patch on his leg and waved it over Ivo’s body. Beads of sweat broke out across Ivo's forehead, and he looked Zeek in the face, trying to guess what the miner was going to do. Zeek was also sweating freely but relaxed after checking the display on the cobbled together device. He put it back on
the magnetic patch and pulled a retractable cord from his suit, clearly an audio lead. Ivo hung there motionless while Zeek plugged into his suit. Zeek motioned at the neck of his suit, repeating the gesture until Ivo got the idea. Copying the mimed action, Ivo shut off his radio.

  “Okay now, it is just you and me now. No nosy neighbours. You a hostage, boy? They got someone that you care about on that ship?” asked Zeek.

  Ivo’s brow creased. “No, we are shareholders in the ship. We are all there because that is where we work. What are you worried about? We are all human. We don’t even know what greenies are.”

  Zeek tilted his head inside his helmet. “Well damn and if I don’t believe it. Shit, wouldn’t have expected that, no way. Guess that I will take you up on your offer of hospitality then if you would be so kind. Just one thing though, if you don’t mind, son.”

  “What is that?” asked Ivo.

  “I have seen how you move out in the black and, no offence, but you let me steer this time, okay?” said Zeek.

  Chapter 16

  Zeek sat at the table in the mess room, his chair pushed back and a mug of coffee in his hands. He cradled it as if it were a rare liquor. “We don’t have enough space for many luxury crops and coffee is crazy hard to get. Don’t think that I have ever seen that much in one cup before. Gotta say, that is mighty kind of you.”

  Lori smiled and said, “De nada,” and then repeated the sentiment in standard English when he looked confused. “I need to ask, Zeek, what is a greenie and what made think that we might be some of them?”

  “Hell, how can you not know that? Ain’t you rim folks heard what happened to the core systems? Greenies are them, the ones that took over all the core world. Where in the hell did you jump from that you ain’t no idea about that?”

  Lori looked him in the eye, holding contact uncomfortably long. “Zeek, I promise that we will level with you but we need to know. What are the greenies? What do they look like? Are they the ones that took over Ironstone and emptied Neuholme?”

  “Well, yeah, of course they are. They look like people, of course. They used to be people. Maybe they still are, inside. Don’t rightly know. We used to warn them off, but it never made no difference and they kept on coming whatever we said, so now we just hit ’em with a mass driver. Safer that way,” said Zeek.

  “So, what was that business with the scanner outside the ship?” asked Ivo.

  “Well, to check you weren’t infected, of course. If they ain’t been infected long then they look like regular folk. I was checking you for radiation. They give off soft X-rays all the time, sometimes more than others we think,” replied Zeek.

  “Doesn’t the radiation harm them though?” asked Lori.

  “Well, yeah, ’course it does. That is why we call ’em greenies, ’cause they always look sick. Never seen an old one, so I guess that they die off pretty young.” Zeek drained off his cup and looked hopefully at the coffee pot. Lori refilled his mug for him.

  Zak snorted. “So, you are saying that they are space zombies? Really? Space zombies nuked a spaceport?”

  Zeek looked at Jax with his mouth half open. “Son, ain’t no such thing as zombies. Greenies ain’t dead. They are just sick and ain’t in control of their own minds. Dead folks don’t wander around and fly starships now, do they?”

  Jax looked down. “Yeah, point taken. So, greenies are infected folk. Why would they bomb the Neuholme spaceport?”

  “Hell if I know,” said Zeek. “We don’t exactly talk, you understand. Only things that I ever heard of them doing with uninfected was to try to infect them, so maybe it has to do with that.”

  “Zeek, do you know how long someone lives after infection?” asked Lori.

  “Can’t say I do,” he replied. “Like I said. never heard of an old one, but what we know is mostly from old newscasts. If they come in-system, we hit them with the mass driver. They don’t respond to hails which is why we didn’t radio you when you came in-system. It has been a damn long time since we had any visitors.”

  Gregor was the next to ask a question. “So, Ironstone did not have SDB by your jump point. Why would this be? Would seem to me that they would be concerned about your colony.”

  Zeek finished off his coffee and put the mug back on the table. “Ain’t no surprise there. They must have figured out that we don’t have anything jump capable here. Last of those went more than forty years back. No hope of making any more either. Ain’t got the manufacturing for it.”

  Gregor nodded. He understood what was needed to make even a basic jump drive. “Other jump point from here is to Jindo. Any idea what is there? Going back to Ironstone is not attractive option.”

  “Weren’t nothing there last time we heard back. Greenies emptied the place. We don’t know ’cept what we heard in grandpa’s time, but they only colonise some of their planets and just harvest the rest like they was crops or something,” said Zeek.

  Lori nodded. “They would need to keep replenishing the population if the radiation killed them off. They probably couldn’t breed because it would sterilise them. The only way for the disease to survive would be for it to keep expanding. It would burn itself out if it stayed in one place.”

  “That makes it sound like they are still thinking and planning,” said Jax.

  “Oh, greenies can think, but they don’t seem to think like people. They will sacrifice themselves if they need to. Don’t seem to care about it, near as we can tell. Ain’t the people doin’ the thinkin’ is what I am saying,” said Zeek.

  “Sure sound like zombies,” said Jax.

  “No,” said Lori. “Zombies don’t run starships or raid planets for resources. Also, zombies don’t exist. Look at Neuholme. They stripped that of what they wanted and took it off world. We can’t assume that they are stupid.”

  “So, wouldn’t that make the infected territory most likely an empty bubble with greenies only on the edge?” Meilin asked.

  “Figure so,” said Zeek at the same time as Lori started to speak. She paused and then continued.

  “That would depend on how intelligently they use the territory they have. If they pass some worlds by and harvest them for replacement hosts, they could keep a stable population. Maybe these greenies harvest aggressively during expansion but settle into a steady state as the available population in the region drops,” said Lori.

  There was a pause as this sunk in.

  “The old reports, did they say where the first affected system was?” Lori asked, looking at Zeek.

  Zeek shook his head. “Not really. Coreward and towards Terra, we think, but the reports were never real specific. Ships came through running, but they didn’t say much. They wanted fuel and to get out. A few came from Jindo way at first and more from Ironstone. They was both looking for a better place and not finding it.”

  Gregor swore. “That would be hundreds of systems, maybe even thousands.”

  Fumi jacked her runtime up and wrote a simple program to go through the navigation database. If it had spread from the core and spread uniformly until it ran out of planets then that would be a shade over 200,000 inhabited worlds and trillions in casualties. Fumi looked at the numbers again, trying to find the error, but the data seemed right, even conservative. She couldn’t burden the rest of the crew with the figures. She would erase them from her own mind if she could. Instead, she took another pull at her beer, went back to normal speed, and paid attention to the mess room again.

  “—pends what you want to know,” said Zeek.

  “Anything that you could tell us about the nature of the disease could be valuable. It is not much of an edge, but we have about a century’s more medical research than you all had when this … well, plague broke out,” said Lori.

  “’bout all I can tell you is that they die when you destroy their ships and I don’t know that the thing that makes a greenie into a greenie isn’t still there, but they stop moving and freeze up. We don’t take samples or anything.”

  Lori looked at
him directly. “You have to have doctors, yes? We need to talk with them as soon as possible. Can you arrange that?”

  Zeek shrugged. “Sure, we have a couple of doctors. I can arrange that.”

  Gregor added, “We need fuel too. We have things that we can trade.”

  Zeek looked at the coffee pot again. “Speaking of trade, I might be willing to do a little trade right now.”

  “Go on,” said Ivo.

  “Kilo of coffee for information that is worth more than that to you,” said Zeek.

  Ivo nodded and went to the cupboard. There were several vacuum-packed cubes of coffee grounds in there. It would be hard to get more, but given that they were not likely to live long enough to drink what they had, it seemed like a reasonable price. He tossed the pack to Zeek.

  Zeek stowed the cube in a suit pouch making it bulge. “Okay, so you are going to end up talking to Nathan Nitrauw, our first officer. He will talk big and point out that you ain’t got nowhere else to go, but the truth is that we have pretty much no use for fuel beyond our own fusion reactors and we can get more any time. You are the first ship in better’n eighty years that had something to trade and y’all have the only way out of the system. You can push way harder than you think you can. We are really short of a lot of stuff and plumb out of others.”

  “I can’t imagine that he would be pleased that we know that. What are you out of?” asked Ivo.

  “I can’t imagine that he would give me a kilo of coffee either. Medicines, replacement parts for tech stuff that we can’t make, information. He might stall a bit, but he can’t afford to pass up a deal and he won’t take nothing by force. A lot of us run ships and the fundamental rule is that you don’t touch someone else’s cargo. He’d have a revolt on his hands if he tried it. A lot of us miners have real strong feelings about that kinda thing. You seem like right decent folks, and I would hate to see you get a bad deal,” said Zeek.