Authors: Dave Duncan
On the brighter side, he was assigned to share with dark-eyed Planetologist Maria Chang, a classic see-what-I-got-guys trophy: thick black hair, sultry black eyes, and a slinky walk that made his glands tingle. At first sight of all the females aboard, a man would instinctively choose her.
That first night, he retired early, which was understandable when he had to go to work at 02:00. He was awake when she entered. He sat up, bare-chested.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you.”
“I’m not sorry. Come here.” He patted the edge of the bed.
“Oh, no! You think just because I have big boobs I’m a pushover, don’t you?”
“I don’t think any woman’s a pushover; but we have months or years ahead of us here, ma’am, and I do hope that some time in the future we’ll be lovers. Is that impossible?”
She tossed her head. “Perhaps not some time, but this is now.”
He patted the bed again. “Come here, then.”
“Why?”
“Because I want a goodnight kiss. Just one little kiss, I swear.”
“Sure! And then one little caress on my breast. And you remove my top. And so it goes. And then,
bingo!
”
“Maria, I absolutely swear I just want one tiny little sisterly kiss.”
She said, “Huh!” disbelievingly. But she did come and sit beside him, and he put a hand behind her head to guide her lips to his. He played fair, kept the other hand clenched. After the first minute she let his tongue in. After several more, she stroked his chest. So then he caressed her breast, she checked the state of his erection under the sheet—which was at warp nine, raring to go—so he removed her top. And so it went.
He must have acquitted himself well, because when he came off duty he found the two beds pushed together and her ready to go again. This was space travel as the legends had it.
* * *
Time melted away. The critical end of the month was approaching, when ISLA would announce the next slate of candidate worlds discovered, if any. If they were ready, it would be up to JC and Mighty Mite’s board of directors to decide if any of them was promising enough to be chosen as Cacafuego,
Hind
’s destination. If none looked good enough, they would set the clock back to
Day -30
and wait until the next month, or the next, or as long as it took. Still no other ships seemed ready to enter the race, but
Hind
’s good fortune could not last forever.
* * *
Day -9
was memorable. The last cargo boat taxied Seth to the Oryo station so he could take delivery of the shuttle that would carry him down to the as yet unidentified world of Cacafuego. After signing for it, he flew it back and docked it in
Hind
’s only docking port, in the center of the disk. Granted that computers did all the work, that little jaunt made him feel like a real spaceman. After that there could be no further cargo deliveries, but the shuttle added to Seth’s workload, because he had to check it out, inch by inch.
On
Day -6
, JC put them into overdrive, wanting to be ready to launch at a moment’s notice. Seth, for one, worked until he was ready to drop. He couldn’t see the urgency when no other ship on ISLA’s list was spaceworthy yet, but he was willing to accept that JC had more information than he did.
On the evening of
Day -4
JC’s voice summoned them all to the control room. He was beaming like a newly-fed tiger, clutching a piece of paper, but he said nothing until they were all seated. Then he waved the paper like a flag.
“This is it,” he boomed. “The world of our dreams—Cacafuego itself. It scores slightly over nine on the Mew-Watson scale.”
Pause for wild cheering. Niner worlds were rarer than snake feet these days.
“Only 1,500 light years away! In case you’ve forgotten, AKG’s big strike is at more than three times that distance. The poor sods lost thirty-two years.”
“Virgin?” Jordan asked skeptically.
“Absolutely. Its star didn’t even have a catalogue number until last week.”
“Why?” asked Maria, who was going to give Seth hell when she discovered the hickey on her neck. “Why should a world so Earth-like and so close—close by today’s standards—go unvisited so long?”
“Weird sisters,” JC boomed. “Other planets screwing up the Doppler trace. Also, it’s in Orion. Dust clouds masking critical wavelengths.”
“But not a new star?” Maria again. There was a lot of star formation in that area.
The commodore scowled at their skepticism and consulted his notes. “Right on the main sequence, type G. Metals date it a little older than Sol, but not by much. Why so glum?” He peered around and fixed on Seth as the safest target. “What’s worrying you, sonny?”
“It’s not the end of the month, sir.”
“So?” JC demanded belligerently. “You look after the bug-eyed monsters and let me handle the politics.”
“So you greased palms to get that information, but how do we know how reliable it is? Galactic has a fleet almost ready to launch. They might pay more than you just to have us sent off chasing wild geese.”
The big man showed his teeth in a sneer of triumph. “You think I didn’t think of that? I have backups. I put a lot of important suits on Mite’s board, and two of them have checked out the coordinates for me, and they both confirm oxygen and chlorophyll lines in the spectrum.”
This time even Seth joined in the roar of approval.
“There’s also a bonus, of a sort,” JC said, still riding his wave of triumph. “A backup I’m renaming Armada. It should be only two or three havens from Cacafuego. Not so promising, still in the slime stage. It’s been staked before, but the claim will lapse soon, so I picked up an option pretty cheap. If we miss out at Cacafuego for any reason, we can go on to Armada and see if we can salvage something the finders missed.”
Better still!
“Course locked in, sir,” Hanna said quietly, and the babble died into shocked silence.
“Already?” Jordan exclaimed. “How did you manage that?”
The navigator looked smug. “The road to Orion is well mapped. There’s a good haven at 213 light years, confirmed only four months ago.”
“Then this is
Day 1
! Any idea how many days to target?”
Hanna took a few minutes, made more calculations. “There are listed havens all the way, but some haven’t been visited for years and may not exist in our time slice. Allow a month or so to sound each one properly. There’s lots of shoals around Orion, so we’ll be zigzagging… Say
Day 425
as a best guess.”
Jordan gave her a victory sign and turned to Seth. “Is the shuttle ready?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’re sure? It’s your lifeline.”
“I’m sure.”
“Anyone know anything that needs to be redone, rechecked, tied down? Nail clippers; bed socks; beads and mirrors for the natives? No? Very well.” The captain laid both hands on the table. “Control, reset clocks to midnight,
Day Zero
. Launch Jump One.”
Day 401, Continued
001.001 definitions. The following terms shall apply in these regulations and any subsequent amendments thereto.
001.095 master means the person in charge of a landing vehicle engaged in exploratory operations.
035.08 Notwithstanding anything else in these regulations, from the moment a landing vehicle disengages from its mother ship until it docks:
[a] the master is endowed with the autonomous authority of a starship captain,
[b] to be more specific, the master is not subject to the overriding authority of the mother ship captain, a ship commodore, or a flotilla commodore, as set forth in Sections 04 and 06, above.
General Regulations
2375 edition
Busboy-janitor-gofer Seth tidied away the vacuum cleaner hose, wondering as always if the system vented directly to space. Galley and mess were sparkling clean now, but he wasn’t. He went along to the showers to wash his hands and scowl at his stubbled face and tousled hair.
Normally about this time he laid out dishes for breakfast and loaded the chefs with the correct materials, but he expected everyone to be late appearing today. He also had some questions to put to Control, which never slept, constantly gathering and collating data.
The camel caravan had advanced into the control room under a cloudless blue sky. Going to be fine day—that had been his personal joke for the last year.
“Whittington, I know you own the ship, but this is my seat.” He scooped up the furry squatter and put himself between cat and chair. “Control, show me the hologram of the system again.”
Camel steppe vanished and the planets appeared above the table as before. As sponsor, JC had naming honors, so the gas giant had become Hades, the two ice worlds Niflheimr and Jötunheimr, and Cacafuego’s little satellite was Turd.
“Orbital parameters for the Cacafuego satellite, Turd?”
—Preliminary estimates only, Prospector.
“They’ll do.”
—Mass 1.8 times 10
23
kilograms… Semi-major axis unknown, current distance from planet…
Smaller than Luna but at about the same distance. It would appear as only a very bright star and could not raise significant tides. Then came the data point he had been waiting for:
—Inclination to the ecliptic, between 84º and 85º.
“Stop. Have you estimated Cacafuego’s axial tilt?”
—Observations so far are too brief for an accurate estimate, Prospector.
“Set limits.”
—Between 87º and 92º.
So Cacafuego was a sideways world, tilted over, with its axis in the ecliptic plane. Worlds like that could grow ice caps around the equator, while the poles would have perpetual sunlight for half the year and perpetual darkness for the other half. Life might survive on such a world by hibernation or migration, but conventional theory held that advanced, multi-cellular life forms could not evolve there, meaning that the crew’s dreams of untold wealth were doomed to disappointment. Even primitive slime worlds could provide interesting new compounds, but they rarely repaid their finders’ costs or tempted people to go back for more.
Conventional theory often turned out to be wrong.
Any virgin planet that held life, as Cacafuego obviously did, was worth a visit when you’d invested trillions of dollars in getting to it. So why was Galactic planting warning beacons instead of staking it? Staking fees were nothing to Galactic, and if the initial samples failed to turn up anything interesting, the license could be sold to recoup some or all of the costs to date.
Permanent settlement of Cacafuego was not feasible, and never would be, and no one would ever want to colonize a sideways world anyway. Only the chance of finding exotic organic chemicals unknown on Earth could ever justify the cost of interstellar exploration. Curiosities like starsilk or the Florenian orchids that were the current fad in body decoration could be very profitable, but
Golden Hind
’s real hope was to take home a few liters of alien muck swarming with strange bacteria, spores, viruses, or whatever might be enough to make it a huge success. The yellow beacon meant danger, but an extreme axial tilt in itself brought no special danger, not in the short term of a wildcatter’s visit. The climate might be a killer, but only over a course of months.
“Show me a blowup of Cacafuego.”
The blue dot swelled, becoming gibbous, until it was about a meter wide, floating above the table like a grotesquely deformed balloon.
Golden Hind
was still three days out; Seth had not expected so much detail yet. He saw blue, with streaks and swirls of white cloud, shattered fragments of continent in brown and green. There was life there, much life!
The weather looked vicious.
“Climate?”
—Terrestrial categories do not apply. The poles go from super-tropical to total darkness and back again. Islands near the equator appear to carry permanent ice caps
.
“Estimated gravity?”
—Turd’s orbit will soon allow a better estimate of the mass, Prospector, but we have already determined that the radius is smaller than first believed and the density abnormally high. Surface gravity is provisionally judged to be about 1.6 gees.
Oh, balls! That was serious. He had been counting on 1.2 gees. He had worked for a year to add muscle and bone and succeeded so well that he had gone from middleweight to heavyweight, but on Cacafuego he was going to weigh almost 150 kilos, about twice what he had weighed back on Earth. How long could he function under those conditions?
“Why? I mean why didn’t the trans-Neptunian observatories figure that better?”
—The overall mass falls on their error bar, Prospector, but the planet’s density is anomalous, meaning a shorter radius, and therefore the surface gravity is higher. Inverse square law,
Control added helpfully.