N
AVIGATOR AND pilot-apprentice Trav Esmet had made over a dozen runs with Captain Amaro on the
Dust Devil,
three of them by way of an unlisted port call on Sapne. This was the first time he had set up the course and made the jump for Sapne himself, but he had confidence in his work. Amaro was a cautious man when it came to matters of piloting and navigation. He wouldn’t have turned over the jump to his apprentice in the first place if he hadn’t thought that Trav was ready.
The transit itself proved an uneventful one. Most of them were, Trav had learned by now, unless the ship or the crew had brought some kind of trouble into hyper along with them. In general, however, hyperspace was a good place to be if you were a spacer—you had plenty of time to work on internal repairs to the ship, or to catch up on your sleep, or to wait out whatever enemies you’d left behind.
The run-to-jump, now, was always dangerous. A pilot had to balance the ship’s power between realspace engines running at extreme speed for a jump-point—falter even once, or deviate from your straight-line course, and you lost the point and had to make your run-up all over again—and hyperspace engines that had to be warmed up and ready to cut in at the moment of translation. If something mechanical was going to fail, it would fail then, and the result would be ugly.
Dropouts could be bad as well. If your navicomps had gone sick on you, or if you’d made a mess out of setting the course, you could find yourself drifting someplace off the charts, or burning up in the heart of a star. And not even good piloting and good comps would save you from piracy and ambush.
Trav knew that his piloting was good. And Captain Amaro kept the
Dusty
’s navicomps repaired and up-to-date—he’d put out good money for a data-file upgrade a couple of Standard months back, and that made the second time since Trav had apprenticed to him. If there was going to be any danger at the Sapne dropout, it would come from outside.
“What’s the inspace situation like for Sapne?” Gentlelady Bindweed asked. She and Captain Amaro were playing kingnote in the
Dusty
’s common room while they talked over the possible hazards of transit. Her partner, Gentlelady Blossom, sat watching the card game from a chair nearby.
The ship’s two owners confused Trav a great deal. It wasn’t unheard of in the freetrading community for respectable dirtsiders to be silent partners in a ship’s business, or even to own the vessel outright; but such people didn’t invite themselves to come along on a less-than-legal run, and they didn’t answer to names that even a still-green apprentice could recognize as aliases from half a room away. The fact that either one of the two women could have been Trav Esmet’s grandmother only made the situation odder.
Captain Amaro played a card. “Sapne’s been enough every time I’ve gone by there. No system fleet to worry about, and the Space Force doesn’t patrol that sector very heavily most of the time either.”
“I’m not worried about the Space Force.” Gentlelady Bindweed considered her hand, then pulled out the three of trefoils and laid it down on the table. “I’m worried about the sort of people the Space Force would scare away.”
Gentlelady Blossom nodded agreement. “
Dust Devil
has guns; we required them when we made the purchase. Does she have gunners ready to use them?”
“The purser and the supercargo are cross-trained.”
The gentleladies glanced at each other. “Not cross-rated?” Bindweed asked.
Amaro played a four on top of the three. “I wouldn’t put either of them up on the hiring board as a gunnery specialist, if that’s what you mean. But they’ve both scored above qualifying in the sims.”
“‘Above qualifying.’” Bindweed’s voice was rich with scorn. “That’s what comes of having your minimum standard fixed by law … pretty soon the minimum’s all you’re going to get.”
Amaro looked skeptical. “If the minimum wasn’t good enough it wouldn’t be the minimum. I suppose things were better in the good old days.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Blossom thoughtfully. “Nobody dirtside gave me a qualifying exam before the first time I hit the guns live. I’d been taking lessons from the ship’s main gunner in my spare time—playing at it, mostly—and when she got killed and the number two got wounded, there wasn’t anyone left to shoot back at the Mages but me. Our ship was still in one piece when the fighting stopped, and the other guy wasn’t, so the captain said I was qualified and gave me my papers herself. But it was months and months after that before I was anything I’d call good at the job.”
Bindweed smiled at her partner. “You were
always
good at the job,” she said. “After a few months, though—by then, you weren’t just good, you were excellent.”
Blossom laughed. “Flatterer.” She turned to Amaro. “What happened in the old days doesn’t change the situation here. We’ve got two gunners with paper qualifications—how about your navigator, have you trained him?”
Esmet had been studying the Pilot III and II manual at the flatscreen in the corner, and trying to stay invisible; now he blushed as the others all turned to look in his direction.
“Trav’s working on getting his pilot papers,” said Amaro. “That’s a heavy load already on top of his regular job.”
“This is hyperspace,” Bindweed said. “The boy can take his turn at gunnery practice along with everybody else; it’ll keep him from getting bored. But
Dust Devil
is going to have fully-trained gunners on duty when she drops out of hyper, even if it means that Gentlelady Blossom and I have to run make-up classes from now until the end of the transit.”
Chakallakak
ngha
-Chakallakak had spoken the truth when she said that she had never been in a starship’s engine room before in her life. She did, however, possess a thorough grounding in the general principles, thanks to diligent work back on Maraghai in the basic instructional sims.
“You could probably qualify for an apprentice’s papers, no problem,” said Bindweed. She and her partner were drinking hot
uffa
in the
Dusty
’s common room, and Chaka had encountered them when she came there on a similar mission. “You’re doing an apprentice’s work, that’s for sure.”
*I don’t think so,* Chaka said. *There’s no glory in running somebody else’s engines for them.*
Blossom looked thoughtful. “Ferrdacorr
ngha-
Rillikkikk got all the fame he needed that way, and then some.”
*There was a war going on,* Chaka said. *Ferrdacorr ran engines for Jos Metadi—and
he
had fame and to spare for anybody who ever met him.* “She has a point,” said Bindweed. “There aren’t many like our Jos. So, Gentlelady Chakallakak … how were you planning to chase down your own fair share of fame?”
*Before I started chasing down my thin-skin buddies instead? * Chaka’s mug was empty; she filled it with more
uffa
from the hotpot. *I was going to head for Eraasi and look for something there. Word on Maraghai is that things in the Mageworlds are still fairly loose and exciting, if you know where to look. Fame grows wild in places like that.*
The
Dusty
’s two owners glanced at each other. “You want to be careful, if you try Eraasi,” Bindweed said. “The Mageworlders aren’t just another bunch of thin-skins who happen to talk funny. Things are different out there.”
*What do you mean … “different”?*
“For one thing,” said Bindweed, “you can get called out for a duel by a respectable citizen in the middle of downtown Port Eraasi, which is something you don’t often see these days on our side of the Gap.”
Chaka bared her teeth in a grin. *The Mageworlders sound like sensible people to me. Tell me what sort of thing starts a duel on Eraasi.*
“So you can make sure to get into a couple?” Blossom asked. She turned to her partner. “Tell me truly, Bindweed, was I ever that young and hotheaded?”
“You’d calmed down some by the time I ran into you,” Bindweed said. “But considering what I heard about you from the friends of your childhood—you were probably worse.”
“It was lies, all of it. But if that’s the way that Chaka, here, wants to chase fame, it can be done.” Blossom gazed thoughtfully at the bottom of her mug. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea, though. Another thing they believe in the Mageworlds is that fighting duels for no good reason dooms maybe the loser and certainly the winner to punishment after death.”
Bindweed looked surprised. “You really believe in stuff like that?”
“I don’t believe in betting against myself,” Blossom replied. She circled the rim of her mug with her forefinger. “And I gave up fighting pointless duels a long time before I met you.”
*What form does this punishment take?* Chaka asked. *Is there any fame in standing up to it?*
“You’d have to ask a Magelord about that aspect of the situation,” Blossom told her. “But my feeling has always been that making yourself deliberately miserable was a rotten way of going about gaining anything.”
Not much to Faral’s surprise, the hyperspace transit from Ophel to Sapne turned out to be profoundly dull. The door to the passenger cabin stayed locked except when the gong rang and Captain Amaro came to escort them to their next meal. Faral supposed that dining with the captain gave them a status somewhat higher than that of ordinary cargo—“but I’d say we were prisoners,” he said to Jens and Miza, “if we hadn’t paid good money for all of this.”
“At least we’ve got access to the entertainment library and the unlocked data files,” Jens said. “If we were prisoners in here, they’d be making us pass the time by counting rivets in the deckplates.”
“Fifty-four on a side,” said Miza. “Twelve plates in the main cabin, two in the ’fresher. Since you asked.”
The whooping sound of an alarm broke into their conversation, and the red Strap Down light started blinking over the cabin door.
“Time to quit worrying about how low we rank on the shipboard social roster,” Jens said. “It sounds like we’re about to drop out and make orbit.”
Faral strapped himself back into the padded bunk. “The captain could have given us a bit more warning.”
“The captain isn’t going to give you anything that you haven’t paid for,” Miza said. “You bought a passage. Information costs extra.”
“Next time I buy a ticket from the gentlesir,” Jens commented from the top bunk, “I’ll make sure to purchase the ‘jolly camaraderie’ upgrade. In the meanwhile, let’s hope his piloting holds good.”
“Worried, foster-brother?” Faral asked. The alarm was still whooping, and the Strap Down light had stopped blinking and gone to a steady glow. The illumination from the cabin’s overhead panels grew slowly dimmer, until the red light over the cabin door glared out into the room like a bright red eye. “You never even broke a sweat when we left hyper on
Bright-Wind-Rising
.”
“At the risk of stating the obvious, coz, this ship isn’t the
Wind
, and Sapne most definitely isn’t Ophel.”
Before Faral could answer, he felt the faint shiver of dislocation that meant the
Dust Devil
had emerged from hyperspace. The overhead light panels came back up to full intensity, and the steady vibration of the ship changed in pitch and timbre as the realspace engines cut in and began to work. The alarm kept on sounding, though, and the Strap Down light didn’t go out.
Faral experienced a moment of alarm, then forced himself to relax. The odds were that the continued Strap Down mean nothing more than that the
Dust Devil’s
captain had made his dropout close to atmosphere, and wasn’t bothering to wait around in orbit before making a landing.
“This is no way to gain fame, either,” he grumbled. “Paying people money and then sitting around in the dark while they do the work for you.”
“So learn how to do your own piloting,” Miza said. “That way, if there’s a problem, you know exactly who to blame.”
“That’s easy for you to say. Do
you
know how to do your own piloting?”
“Pleasure craft, limited.” Miza sounded smug. “Class B and up.”
Faral heard Jens give a deep sigh from the upper bunk. “Had I but known … this, coz, is what comes of underestimating one’s travel companions.”
Captain Amaro brought
Dust Devil
out of hyperspace himself, and Trav Esmet was glad to let him. After listening to the gentleladies tell their tales of privateers waiting at known drop points to pick off unsuspecting cargo ships, Trav didn’t want to take the responsibility. The
Dusty
made the translation to Sapnean space with her guns fully crewed and ready for action, and Trav had enough to do monitoring the sensor boards for contracts. They’d never had any trouble making planetfall on Sapne before, but as Gentlelady Bindweed had said to the
Dusty
’s purser, it only needed to happen once.