Family Law 2: The Long Voyage of the Little Fleet (11 page)

"That's nice and good advice, thank you sir. Being appreciated is nice too, besides the money."

"Call me again if you get any more ideas," Gordon invited and broke the connection. If he kept coming up with stuff this good Gordon might have to pay him a fourth share. He was worth it.

* * *

They transited seven more systems with no alien artifacts, no significant planets and nothing really unusual except one star had a large planet so close it had baked off all the volatiles and the iron core with a thin crust was orbiting the star yellow hot and molten. It turned so fast the night side didn't have time to freeze. It simply had a bit of a graduated glow as the edge turning into the dark was hotter than the edge going back to the light. They were tired again and planned a rest if the next system was suitable. It was stressful going through a bunch of boring systems, while keeping alert.

* * *

"Do you realize? We've been taking the longest safe jumps on the same vector away from known space for long enough now that the distance has really added up. We are now almost as far from what was considered the near frontier closest to the Derfhome, Fargone, At Last group of stars, as it is back across all of explored Human space to the far surface of expansion," Gordon told them.

"And we haven't even been out six months yet. That just justifies my theory to me," Lee said. "It just shows how
slow
everybody has been expanding."

"We have enough right now to turn a profit against the cost of the expedition. We have a water world, a huge deposit of silver, a moon system with so many heavy metals I think it will take centuries to mine out and of course a living world," Gordon enumerated, lifting a claw for each.

"But we can't
claim
an occupied world," Lee complained. "We may be in the history books for finding it, but if the Bunnies don't get their act together and trade with us we won't make a Dollar off finding them. I suppose we could put a brag gem in our earrings, but I wouldn't feel right to even survey and mine their outer system. It would feel like plundering the kitchen in somebody's house to claim anything in an inhabited system. Did anybody try to mine in the outer systems of Hin or Derfhome?"

"Somebody
tried
to file a claim for Hin and the Claims Commission disallowed it in pretty strong language. The Commission made it clear enough that nobody tried it on the other occupied worlds," Gordon told her. "I would suppose you could get a license from the natives to mine, but with the Bunnies I suspect they'd want you to do it for free, since the Teen already owns it."

They were orbiting a beautiful gas giant with enormous rings to shame Saturn and a couple dozen moons. All the ships were fueling up on a slack schedule. There were minimum crews on duty and even those taking turns off. There were card games with IOUs changing hands, making wild assumptions about what their shares would be worth when all the claims proved out.

The Hinth holed up in their suite for this break and Thor explained as delicately as possible that three Hinth was a breeding group, the neuter third sex being the one who sat the nest and hatched the single egg. "They are a bit like Humans and consider it indelicate to discuss the details in public," he told Lee.

Nobody got so blind drunk they made a nuisance of themselves and the crew had hoarded enough materials and entertainment that nobody was short at the six month mark. There wasn't any shortage of food or spare parts. The hydroponic garden in
The Champion William
was a sour fuzzy mess however. They stripped all the trays and tanks out, sterilized the soil and reinnoculated it with bacteria and worms from the
Retribution
. They also sent one of their gardeners over to supervise and see if he could have similar success with the garden there.

There was concern there might be some source of fungus and mildew aboard that would recontaminate it. A few cabins that the Hinth, with their sensitive sense of smell, declared had a 'funny' odor about them were pumped down and opened to hard vacuum as a precaution. One crewman's cabin the Hinth wouldn't enter. He was forced to vacuum clean all his clothing while he did a personal supervised scrub down and decontamination procedure in the clinic while his cabin was cleaned. One pair of his soft shoes was double bagged and incinerated as beyond any known cleaning regimen. He was then assigned a supervisor to make daily checks of his cabin and person.

 Thor taught Lee how to play Go, but she found out chess was no fun to her. It seemed needlessly complicated and she grew bored and antsy after a dozen moves. Maybe she'd like it better when she was older, Thor predicted. For some reason she couldn't articulate, that irritated her.

The engineering department converted the jump drone to a Brown Dwarf explorer and put it back in the launch tube ready to deploy before they took a well deserved break. The cooks prepared a few special treats like actual cakes that were hard to do when there was variable acceleration and maneuver to contend with. They dug a few items out of stores that were not served every day like prawns and whole fish. It made their break seem different and special. The last day shift of the break they had a Mexican supper and a German breakfast, complete with Mariachi music and Polkas. After six days everybody had received a minimum of two days off and they were ready to move on.

* * *

The next jump the
new
clock in the old cabinet on
Sharp Claws,
that had varied a few nanoseconds from the others before was slightly off again. They tore out the entire chassis, examined it and the mounting studs on the bulkhead, checked for sharp points and cracks, ran new wiring from the clock to the computer and power source and added isolating shielding on the runs. When they reinstalled it they fabricated a new housing and put another clock in a fourth cabinet, positioned it on a different bulkhead and altered the software to run comparing four clocks instead of three. The Captain didn't like Gremlins and was just about ready to run all six clocks they owned instead of three, but his navigator dissuaded him, saying that whatever was wrong was likely beyond their current understanding and no number of clocks was likely to fix it. He promised to yank the clock in the refurbished cabinet out of play and trash the entire assembly of hardware if it was off again. They'd keep it in storage and have somebody study it when they got home.

The system was uninteresting. A single star. No worlds worth looking at closely. There were no unusual radar returns. The
Sharp Claws
did all their repairs under way and they jumped out together.

* * *

They transited six more systems, another uninteresting stretch that wore them down. Gordon had by this time gained trust in the off shift crews to the point they went ahead and recorded data and picked a target star and jumping out while the main shift crew slept. They racked up a lot of light years quickly, before they took another break. They could have done one more, but they were tending low on fuel and this system had a nice gas giant. There was no telling if the next one had such an easy fuel source and how deep the jump after was.

* * *

"I'm not sure I'm comfortable with this new arrangement of having the alter-shift crew make transitions while we are sleeping," Thor told Gordon the second day of their break.

"Tell me why. Is there any particular person in the off-shift that worries you? Did somebody say something or do something that made you lose confidence?"

"No, I never
got
confident. You saved the transitions for the first crew until just recently. Why did you change that arrangement?"

"They seemed to be doing a good job and it seemed peevish to make them wait to start a jump run, or accelerate slower to time it so we'd take the bridge before jump. And it slows us down. It adds an extra day every fifteen days or so."

"They aren't as good a crew as ours. I mean, they'd be fine,
more
than good enough, for say taking a freighter into a known system. But would you have wanted them sitting the conn when we were at war exiting the Fargone system and ran head on into the USNA destroyer
Phoenix?
Would they have made a split second judgment to fire blind at the emergent point the fleet waiting in ambush for you would use? Would they even have
understood
there was a trap waiting for them behind the destroyer?

"I admit, I have my doubts. We did luck out on that one."

"No, that's my point, we didn't
luck out
. You read the situation perfectly and the entire crew all responded flawlessly in seconds, under fire and damaged, to take us to safety and defeat their fleet. The Fargoers on
Murphy's Law
told us they've all had the record of that battle played for them, synched with the real time system scan, so they would know just what they were dealing with to serve under us. They are universally
awed
to hear you ordering complicated spreads of fire and a low probability escape jump with a hole burned through our middecks, calm and unhesitating and then politely inform system control of changed jump plans, like you decided to take a ship load of socks to Bountiful instead of New Japan on a sudden whim.
That's
why the Fargone captains were nervous having you in close orbit. It wasn't the weapons load out on the ships.
You
scare the crap out of them!"

"I've always had a hard time accepting a compliment. But thanks for spelling it out again."

"I don't
know
that we'll meet anybody out here. And I certainly hope we don't cross runs with somebody who starts shooting at us immediately, like the
Phoenix
did.
But if we do, I'd sure rather have you in that chair than anybody else, including myself. I don't think we should allow jumping into a virgin system to become
routine
. It's easy to do when we do one after another and nothing bad happens. But there is nothing routine about it. We may run into something none of us can deal with," he said with a shrug, "But let's not fail because we had the 'B' team up."

"You've convinced me. Now, can you tell me how to change back and not make the whole shift feel slighted and resentful, killing morale?"

"Blame it on me."

"OK," Gordon agreed grinning, "I will."

* * *

The rest period over, the new scheduling chief, Thor, posted the new rotation, switching a few people around and returning to reserving late run to jump and transition to the prime crew. There was a little bitching, just a few - "Oh gods no. Not him." muttered when Thor's name was on the header over the duty roster posting, surprising Gordon. "Why so few complaints?" He asked Thor.

"They
like
you," Thor explained. "Even knowing you are the absolute law between the stars and a master to be feared, they still think you will listen to a bunch of nonsense and try to keep everybody happy. Me, well, they
don't
like me, indeed they expect the worst. Yet I have not found that an impedance to command. At best they know I'll mock them if they complain, at worst I'm likely to put them on slop well and filter cleaning duty if they waste my time complaining."

"I wish I'd known this months ago," Gordon marveled. "I'd have sent all the pestering fools to you and saved untold hours. It doesn't faze you either, does it?"

"It's like throwing mud on a pig," Thor answered. "He doesn't
know
it's supposed to bother him."

Chapter 6

The star they visited next was huge. It had an odd spectra with lots of green. Filtered down to a level the eye could tolerate it wasn't a particularly pleasant color. Gordon wondered if it was just him. On inquiring the Hinth said it was a rotten egg and the Humans pronounced it ugly as sin.

There were outer planets, a couple gas planets if not real giants. The bonus was that there was another Brown Dwarf orbiting the big star and if there was such a thing as a good match for the bilious star it had to be this. One human likened it to the color of his mother-in-law's face when she started on a good rant. It was a sort of pinkish magenta, maybe.

If there had ever been any inner planets they were now moons of the dwarf, because it had some big ones. Big enough to show some serious surface gravity. Three of them holding some atmosphere. Ernie was both elated to find another Brown Dwarf system like the other they had staked a claim to and upset with himself that he couldn't think of any model for its formation. He seemed to be a bit depressed and chiding himself for thinking that as an Astrophysicist he was anything but an incompetent  dilettante, a hobbyist and a delusional dabbler.

"Don't be too upset with yourself," Thor counseled him. "I've noticed that when something really new comes up like this, even the professionals usually advance three or four theories that aren't even close to right, before somebody comes along and actually figures it out."

"As compensation for your angst, you may name it if you wish," Gordon offered. He figured that was a safe gift, before Ernie figured out some way to ask a fourth share over it.

"I'm tempted to say 'Ugly', because of the colors, but even a mining system, which I'm convinced we'll find this is, should have a name that attracts business."

"Bountiful is taken," Thor pointed out. "Hideous has the same objection."

"Cornucopia!" Ernie said with sudden inspiration. Thor had to look it up on his hand com, trying not to be too obvious. He gave up however and just said, "Does one ever finish learning English?"

They checked a couple of the smaller moons before sending a lander down to one slightly bigger than Luna back in the Earth system. That was an unusually large moon in most stellar systems. There was more heavy metal to be had here than Gordon could imagine their civilization using for centuries. It was good it was so far away, the transport costs would keep the price of metals from crashing. He said as much to his bridge crew.

"You have a point there," Ha-bob-bob-brie mused. "However, I can see the population and production centers of our cultures shifting to around these sources of metal in a few centuries, assuming meanwhile we don't find an economical way to synthesize what we want anywhere."