The Star Pirate's Folly (6 page)

That was over fifty years ago. No one in the Luxar System
really knew what became of Earth and its vast empire. Most people thought Earth
maintained the silence out of choice, fearing that they might lose control of
their colonies once again if their other systems were allowed to see the fruits
of revolution. Others say they simply expanded their conquest of the stars to
other planets, uninhabited planets which they could freely exploit, following
the path of least resistance to greater wealth and power.

Bee stood at the base of the
marble staircase in front of the gate station and looked up, following the
lines of the thick white columns. The building had been around since the old
days, before the revolution. The quiet was eerie. It had been a long time since
she was last there, but what she did remember was the buzz of human voices,
human footsteps. All she heard now was the occasional siren.

Find him
, came Mother’s whisper.

“Working on it,” she said under
her breath.

As if in response, Slack Dog’s pad
in her pocket pulsed twice. A text message. She tried to swipe it open and it
prompted for the four-digit code again. A preview of the text scrolled across
the top of the screen, but the message was short enough to be read in its
entirety.

Buffalo Bill:
Dock B46

Well, now she knew where she was
going. She snickered at the nickname Slack Dog had given to “Buffalo Bill,”
wondering what it even meant, and walked up the steps to the gate station. Once
she passed through the automatic sliding doors, she approached one of the dozen
or so ticket machines that lined the walls. Two guards stood
shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the hallway to the inner station.

Bee poked some commands into the
ticket machine’s screen, and it presented a list of destinations and prices.
She clicked on the icon for a ticket to Overlook Station’s docking bay and
back, and a box popped up on the screen with the amount: 250 CREDITS YES/NO.

YES, she selected, and the machine
flashed its red scanning light across her eyes.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR PURCHASE, the
screen said. YOUR TICKET CAN BE REDEEMED VIA RETINAL SCAN AT THE GATEWAY.

Bee approached the uniformed
guards. The two looked identical in their lightly armored navy nullsuits. They
always wore nullsuits when on duty at the station in case they were needed up
above. The guard on her right pulled something off his belt—one of the little
spherical scanners she had seen the police at the hotel use.

He stepped toward her, clicked the
scanner with his thumb, and tossed it toward Bee. She flinched as it whizzed
around her and snaked a wavering tongue of red light over her whole body.

“Going up?” the guard asked as he snatched
the scanner out of the air and put it away. His doppelganger remained silent,
staring straight forward.

“Yeah. Dock B46,” she said. “Can
you tell me where that is?”

“Just go down the hall and take a
right,” he said and jerked a thumb behind him. “You'll see a map of the station
when you get up there. You never been up before?”

Bee looked behind him. The hall
was split in two along its length by blue ropes that hung between metal poles
with round bases.

“Not since I was little,” she
said.

“Just keep going; you’ll be shown
to your gate, and they’ll shut the doors behind you. It’ll know where you’re
going. The gate opens, you walk through, and you’re there.”

“Thanks.”

“What made you pick today?” he
said.

“Huh?”

“You know, to go up today with all
this going on.”

“All what?” she said, feigning
ignorance. She didn't want to have to explain herself.

The guard just laughed.

“Don’t worry about it then,” he
said.

The second guard hadn’t moved for
the entire conversation. The one she was talking to took up his position again
opposite the other. Bee walked between them and down the hallway, trailing her
left hand along the velvety blue ropes that separated the hall into an entrance
and exit lane.

Both walls had huge projection
displays of what looked like live feeds from cameras in other gate stations
around the world. They were ordered by the time of day, with each time
displayed tastefully near eye level underneath the city’s name. She knew
roughly where most of the cities were, and tried to get a mental image in her
head of where each on would be on a globe.

Bee stopped when she got to the
feed of Overlook City’s gate station. It was a shot of cargo being auto-loaded
into massive transport rooms. Tiny pallet bots swarmed to and fro like bugs,
carrying gargantuan loads on their backs hundreds of times their own weight.

She kept moving and took a right
at the end of the hallway, following the signs. The other way was blocked and
seemed to be where passengers would normally be filtering out of the building,
walking the opposite way down the hallway she had just come from. There was no
one today. She continued left around another corner and found herself in a
long, wide room. The walls were lined with airlocks, maybe five on each side,
distanced at regular intervals. The room had the appearance of a bank vault.

A bored-looking doorman
straightened his back when she entered. He was younger than herself, and much
shorter. He waved her inside the airlock he was holding open for her. She
entered the pod-shaped room and smiled her thanks at him, noting the name on
his badge—Juanito. He sealed the door behind them and excused himself as he
slid by her to open the inner airlock.

“Lucky you,” he said, turning the
wheel. “You get the whole thing to yourself. Sometimes we really gotta cram you
in there.”

“Yeah, it’s so empty in here.”

“Well, you know Cap City folks,”
Juanito said. “Obedience is a virtue. The Governor asked everyone to stay
indoors and keep gate traffic down while they search the city. They even
cancelled the festival. Oh, but since you’re going up there you should be able
to see Orpheus. Down here he won't be visible again until tonight.”

“Okay, cool. I'll take a look.”

Juanito swung the door open and
stepped to the side. He gestured for her to proceed with one arm and Bee
entered the transport room.

Governor Reginald Strump sat
behind his desk in his home office aboard Overlook Station, idly sipping lotus wine
as he watched the news on his display lenses. The windows that normally gave
him a view of Surface were blacked out, the door shut and locked, and all calls
were blocked for the moment. It was just him, his wine, and the steady stream
of current events unfolding in front of him. He at least deserved a few moments
of peace with all the chaos going on.

Then a call came through.

Strump groaned but answered. “What
is it? Quickly, please.”

An error message came up where
there should have been a face, and the voice that came through was distorted.
“Hello again, Governor.”

Strump nearly dropped his wine. “It’s
you,” he said with quiet terror.

“You were very rude to me last
time we spoke.”

Strump pulled at the neck of his
suit. “Y-yes, I remember. I still can’t just—”

“That’s on the list of words I
didn’t want to hear from you, Strump.”

“I—I’m sorry—”

“Yeah, that’s on the list too. Why
don’t you try
yes?
”

“They’ll kill me—they’ll know it
was me. Jensen Lee got himself seen. The whole police force is after him, I
can’t just let him through the gates,” the Governor said, and put some strength
back in his voice. “No, I
won’t
do it. I won’t do that for you. I’ll
preserve what dignity I have left. These people voted for me. They believe in
me. I won’t help you.”

“Oh, come on, Strump. You're only
Governor thanks to me.”

“I refuse,” Strump declared with
an air of finality, and ended the call.

The display lenses didn’t respond
to his input.

“You know,
Reginald,
I’ve
been helping you out here. Working with you. Tell me with a straight face you
would’ve gotten re-elected without my help. Those people were at your throat a
few months ago, and now they worship you. I’ve given you this much, and I can
take it away just as easily. Open your gates to let my man Lee out and I won’t
touch your city. Or you can continue being difficult and I’ll smash it to
dust.”

“I won’t do it—”

“
YOU WILL!
”

Strump trembled at the shout and
nearly dropped the datapad.

“I have been
lenient
with
you, dirtwalker. The streak of paltry victories that kept you your title,
Governor
,
were not earned by you, they were
given
to you. By me. I have allowed
your military to believe it’s dealt with the pirate threat for the moment, but
I will not wait any longer. Give me the map. Let Jensen Lee out of your city,
or I’ll take your head first, Strump.”

Governor Strump’s only reply was a
mewling sob. The scrambled voice on the other end heaved an exasperated sigh.

“Look, I want to make this deal
work but my boys are getting very restless, Strump. They don’t want this to
work. They want you to let your pride get the better of you. They want to be in
your cities, eating your fine food and ravishing your fine women. And they know
all I’ve got to do is let them loose. Just a bunch of snarling dogs. Animal
urges, you know. But I just want the map. And if you give it to me I can lead
this pack of howling dogs away. Without that map….”

“I won’t,” whispered Strump.

“It’s your head, Strump. We’re
coming.”

The display window vanished and Governor
Strump, once again alone, collapsed into a dejected heap, sobbing with his head
on his desk.

***

Gim stared out at the stars through the thick window in the
living room of the Governor’s quarters. He had spent the past three and a half
hours standing in the same spot mentally reviewing what he was instructed to
cook for Governor Strump’s post-meeting breakfast. The local ingredients
shifted seasonally: today it would be three grilled venison spice sausages, two
fried warbler eggs, one thinly sliced chilled lotus fruit, and of course the
accompanying lotus tea. Yesterday Strump confirmed his menu for the day ahead,
and he said he would be “looking forward to each meal.”

Gim considered this unusually high praise. As a fabricant,
most humans didn’t bother to show him the same social niceties they might give
another human. People normally spoke to him as one would any other machine:
they either gave orders or asked for information. The Governor was oddly polite
to him. Gim gazed out the tall window that stretched across the living room as
the sun’s first rays peeked out from behind the planet. Surface, they called
it. Not much of a name, really. About as inventive as Earth. But it was the
name chosen by its discoverer decades before.

Gim turned on his heel, making his way to the private
kitchen. He’d been leased by Governor Strump forty-seven hours ago as a
personal assistant. Before that he had served on a mining vessel for roughly
sixteen hundred hours, on reserve for some high risk zero gravity repair work.

He hadn’t actually done anything but sit in storage; the
miners finished their contract early and returned him to Overlook Station for a
partial refund, where he was repackaged and kept in cold storage. After a few
days on the shelf he was requested for service by the Governor for a period of
no more than seven hundred hours. Once the lease was up he would have
approximately 62,436 lifetime hours of operational capacity left—a little over
seven years.

The stovetop began heating itself as Gim walked into the
kitchen. He had set out two pans and a kettle for tea earlier in the morning.
On a shelf in the refrigerator were three venison spice sausages, two
yellow-speckled warbler eggs, and a crimson-skinned lotus fruit—all fresh
ingredients brought up from farms on Surface. He set the eggs on the counter,
dropped the sausages in their pan, and began to prepare the fragrant lotus
fruit while the sausages sizzled.

The lotus looked similar to Earth’s avocado, except that its
skin was a dark mottled red and its stem sprouted aquamarine leaves. Gim
plucked the stem and dropped it in the food processor, which whirred to life
for a few seconds. He took a knife and deftly bisected the fruit vertically
along the large central seed, then peeled away both halves.

The fleshy interior of the fruit matched the bright aqua
color of the leaves and glistened with moisture. It released a strong, sweet, melon-like
scent. The fat teardrop seed was nestled inside the fruit, shiny and dark red.
Gim popped it out and tossed it into the food processor, which eagerly obliged
him again with a momentary buzz.

After setting the two halves face down on the counter, Gim
peeled off the skin, cut the fruit into wafer-thin slices, arranged them
artfully on a small plate, and put the dish inside a drawer in the refrigerator.
If he left the fruit out it would begin to brown before the rest of the meal
was ready. As he shut the fridge, the kettle started to boil. Time for tea.

The heat died underneath the boiling kettle when he turned
the heating element off. Gim opened a drawer recessed beneath the counter and
plucked an empty teabag from it. The bags were made from the lotus plant’s
fibrous stalk and stems back on Surface. The fruit’s seed, leaves, and stem had
been reduced to grounds inside the food processor, and Gim carefully spooned
the fragrant mixture into the teabag. He cinched the string on top and tied it.
A purposeful product. Efficient.

The leaves required only rudimentary preparation to make the
tea—no drying, no curing, no processing—making it an extremely profitable
export from Surface. Meanwhile its psychoactive primary ingredient ensured high
demand: the tea brewed from the seed, stem, and leaf of the lotus fruit induced
a warm, full-body, buzzing sensation, heightened mood, increased appetite, and
general contentment.

Gim lifted the lid on the tiny teapot and poured in half the
water from the kettle before he dropped the bag in. The water swirled from
clear to a reddish-purple color, steaming as it filled the pot. Gim replaced
the lid and set the kettle down.

Although he performed the process with mechanical precision,
Gim had never made the tea by himself before. It was one of the lessons he’d
been given by the Governor, who had taken the time to teach Gim between his
many video conferences.

Strump claimed that the shoddy instructional files Gim could
have downloaded were entirely wrong, and that he in fact knew the only proper
method. Until he had the chance to teach Gim himself, the Governor refused to
allow him to brew the tea. Now, having been shown once, Gim would never forget
the Governor’s instructions. He would repeat the process exactly any time he
was asked. Fabricants never forget, barring brain trauma or deletion of data.

Gim turned the sausages and oiled the other pan for the
eggs.

***

“Amazing what fabricants can do these days,” Strump said
around a mouthful of fried egg. “You’re just so damned smart now. I remember I
had one of the first organic models back in ’32. Back when they still had
memory problems. Back up your backup’s backups, that’s what they used to say.”

They sat at the marble countertop in the kitchen, which
doubled as a table for two. The counter was empty underneath, and two chairs
tucked in neatly to fill the space when it was not in use.

“Yes, the early models were unreliable,” Gim said. “We’ve
come a long way since then.”

Gim had set the table for just the Governor, but Strump
insisted that Gim at least keep him company so Gim sat patiently with his hands
in his lap as the Governor ate. Strump stabbed the juicy slices of aquamarine
lotus fruit two, three at a time onto his fork and finished them first. As he
chewed, he nodded his head in satisfaction.

“A long way, yes,” the Governor said. “A long, long way.”

He grew quiet then, and took on a distant stare, half-chewed
fruit resting in his hanging jaw. He looked pale and distraught. Gim, in an
effort to make himself good company, took it upon himself to liven up the
conversation.

“How are your wife and children?” Gim asked, confident that
speaking of his much-loved family would brighten the Governor’s mood. His
conversational guidelines indicated that, rather than asking a simple yes-or-no
question, it was much more beneficial to ask open-ended questions which
provoked a better response.

“My family is away at the moment,” he said. “I’ve sent them
far from the planet. It's unsafe.”

An unexpected answer—it did, however, explain his mood.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Governor.”

“Yes. It’s a regrettable set of circumstances we’re in, my
biofabricated friend.”

Gim frowned. “There must be something I am unaware of.”

“Yes,” the Governor said. “There’s a great deal of things
you are unaware of. Tell me something. If I instruct you to keep our
conversations secret, can you?”

“Of course. My social protocol allows for confidentiality.
In fact, if you told me to I could encrypt anything we’ve spoken about.
Absolutely no record of it would remain in my memory. Fabricants are very good
at keeping secrets.”

“How wonderful. You were designed with such consideration.”

Gim smiled. “We’re here to be helpful in any way we can.”

“And say some nefarious agent were to set his mind on
gaining access to some of this sensitive information? What sort of
countermeasures do you have?”

“A successful intrusion attempt would require extremely
advanced knowledge of fabricant security infrastructure. The cryptographers at
BioLock, my manufacturer, consider our defenses essentially hack-proof. If you
require I can go into further technical detail.”

The Governor skewered a sausage and dabbed his egg’s yolk
with one end, releasing a wave of yellow-gold that crept slowly toward his last
sausage. He shook his head unhappily as he took a bite.

“Well, I suppose if the good folks at BioLock say so it must
be true. In that case, I request that all of our private conversations be kept
private, full security measures and whatnot.”

“Of course, Governor Strump.”

Strump prodded quietly at the yolk with the other end of the
sausage, then dropped his fork on the plate with a huff. “I’ve sent my family
away because they’re in danger. We all are. I’m sure you’ve heard about our
recent sweep through the pirate sector of the asteroid belt.”

“News sources indicate the campaign ended with a complete
rout of the pirate fleet.”

The Governor nodded, sipping at his tea. “It very nearly
was.”

“So what is the great threat?”

He started to put the cup down, then brought it back to his
lips for another sip, seeming to use the moment to collect his thoughts.

“The battle was a farce. Our ships barely engaged. It was
mostly infighting between the pirates, a power struggle between the old
leadership and an upstart calling himself ‘the Starhawk.’” Strump couldn’t help
but make mocking air quotes with his fingers. “The old guard was content to
stick to the belt and raid the shipping lanes, skimming a fat comfortable
profit from interplanetary trade; Starhawk gained power by calling for strikes
at the cities themselves, expanding their territory. His forces baited ours
into engaging the main pirate fleet, but he cut and run once the battle
started. He’s got a fleet about a fifth the size of the previous pirate
coalition, and he claims they’re headed this way ahead of our returning fleet.”