Wildcatter Read online

  “I never heard of quarantine, or proscription,” he said.

  “Quarantine’s from ancient marine law,” JC said. “When a sailing ship had plague or yellow fever aboard, it had to fly a yellow flag. In the early days of space travel, everyone feared that life-bearing worlds would harbor bugs or viruses that would be brought back to infect the Earth. So far as I know… Reese, has any wildcatter ever been infected by a local disease on an exoplanet?”

  “Very rarely,” the biologist said. “It has happened, but exoplanet bacteria and viruses are usually so alien that you would be more likely to catch Dutch elm disease from a lobster. You are in less danger from the infection than from your own immune system over-reacting, but we can control that.”

  JC grunted agreement. “Control, confirm that Cacafuego is virgin territory.”

  —ISLA had no record of any previous exploration, Commodore.

  Which meant only that the ship’s files had not been updated since first jump, and so were fourteen months out of date. The evidence showed that someone had beaten them to it.

  Seth would kill for a cup of coffee and a long glass of orange juice. Sitting with his back to the mess doorway, he was in the path of all the stale scents of last night’s party treats wafting by: wine, chili, ripe cheese, onions, and a few recreational materials not listed on the official manifests. It was his job to tidy up. He should fetch and serve refreshments for the others. To hell with duty, this meeting was too critical to miss.

  Jordan was drumming fingernails on the table. “Is there a posting date on the beacon?” she asked.

  —Beacon is still too distant for us to query, Captain.

  “Any ships in orbit there now?” asked JC.

  —No transmissions being detected, Commodore. Target is too distant for visual detection.

  Jordan said, “If they’re still there, they must have seen our jump flash when we arrived.”

  “Not necessarily,” JC said. “Control, there must be a text message included.”

  —Still too distant even for that. We are presently receiving only the wideband alarm signal, barely distinguishable from galactic background noise.

  “If we left ahead of De Soto,” asked Reese, the biologist, “how far ahead of us could they have gotten here? I mean, how long, in time? Without allowing for any time slip?” Somehow his questions always sounded like sneers.

  “A physicist would say that there was no answer to that question,” Hanna snapped, her temper glinting again. She must be blaming herself for this catastrophe; she had lost the race. “When you jump, you twist both space and time, so the uncertainty principle cuts in. We took fifteen jumps. If De Soto has better maps of the safe havens, as JC says, they may have relied on those without confirming the jumps were still safe. In theory you could travel the whole distance in no time at all.”

  “And get your gonads fried by radiation somewhere,” JC said. “Or ram a brown dwarf star. Better safe than sorry.”

  The Big Nothing was not truly empty. It hid radiation belts, dust clouds, gas clouds, solitary comets or planets, and even black holes. They all shifted unpredictably in space-time. Running into any of them at supra-light-speed was normally fatal.

  Reese made a snorting noise, an annoying habit of his when male. “Never mind theory. How long in practice?”

  “As much as two or three months, maybe,” Hanna admitted.

  The mood of gloom deepened. Four hundred days ago they had greeted the data on Cacafuego with wild rejoicing. Remote sensing by the trans-Neptunian observatories had indicated a highly promising candidate for a life-bearing world, a mere 1,500 light years away, but there were limits to what remote sensing could detect and many things that could make a planet hostile to humans. Now De Soto had made a close appraisal and been scared off by what it saw, or what had happened to its prospectors.

  Reese curled his lip. “Finders keepers; first come, first served. Even if we discovered something they missed, could they just take it from us?”

  Seth thought not. The rules for staking were very specific. There were no Wild West shootouts in the Big Nothing. Battles were fought back home in the courts, where Galactic could outgun Mighty Mite by a million lawyers to one. Returning explorers had to hand over their ships’ memory banks to ISLA, and Golden Hind’s now recorded the detection of Galactic’s beacon. There must be penalties for ignoring a quarantine.

  “Not so,” JC murmured, speaking unusually softly for him. “It’s who plants a flag first that matters. De Soto didn’t want it. If we stake it now, it would still be ours.”

  It would not be his job to plant the flag.

  “Danger I do not understand,” said Maria, the planetologist. “What danger? Poisonous atmospheres, yes. Lots of worlds have that and are still profitable. Monsters, rarely, and nothing worse than tigers.”

  She noticed Seth’s eyebrows rising and smiled an apology. “Nothing you can’t shoot or keep out with an EVA suit, I mean. No little green men or long blue women. Diseases, yes; bacteria, viruses, fungi, all sorts of nasty things have tried to infect us, but none of them could penetrate an EVA suit or withstand our medicines. In a hundred years! So what can be more dangerous about Cacafuego than risks already met and dealt with on explored worlds?”

  No one offered a suggestion.

  Jordan said, “We have two choices. We can go on in the hope of finding something that Galactic missed. They may have done us a favor, saved us from blundering into disaster. Or we can set course for the backup target.” She looked to JC.

  Who growled. “Not so fast, Captain! Control, how many planets have ever been proscribed?”

  —Either six or seven, Commodore, all in the very early days, when records were not so well kept. None in the last seventy years.

  “Seven! How many planets have been explored, even briefly?”

  —Recorded 7,364, but numerous others never registered.

  JC leaned back and wrapped his ugly face in his fearsome but unconvincing grin. He looked triumphantly around the table. “They’re bluffing! The odds are only one in a thousand that Galactic really has found a killer world. What better way to chase others away than to post a yellow flag? They can change it to green as soon as they decide the rewards are worth the staking fee. They’re probably down there now, working away like busy beavers. Maybe they do this all the time, but nobody has chanced along to catch them at it.”

  Now he wasn’t talking of braving a killer world, he was talking of challenging Galactic as well, and perhaps even ISLA.

  Jordan opened her mouth and then closed it without speaking. She seemed absurdly outmatched in a shouting match with JC. He was almost forty years older and at least fifty kilos heavier. Seth suspected he had chosen her for the job precisely because she was unassertive and avoided confrontations. That did not mean she would let herself be bullied into a wrong decision, though.

  Jason Christopher Lecanard had first gone into the Big Nothing at twenty-four, the same age Seth was now, on a Bonanza expedition—Bonanza being a major company, one of Galactic’s rivals—but he’d signed on as an IT engineer, nothing risky like prospector. Back then even large companies had rewarded crews with royalty interests, and that expedition had struck it rich by staking Nirvana, in the Aquila Sector. Nirvana biology had poured out a torrent of novel antivirals and antibiotics over the next ten years. While JC’s share had no doubt been a minute percentage, the payoff had been huge. He’d invested his wealth in other ventures, eventually buying into a middle-sized exploration company, and there his luck had held again, with the discovery of the algal textile that had later been synthesized and sold as starsilk.

  Two years ago he had founded Mighty Mite Ltd. and started rounding up investors to help him go wildcatting for himself. Those tightwad money-men would have insisted he put both his own life and fortune on the line too. A billion dollars barely showed in the cost of a starship, and the belief among the crew was that JC was betting the farm, risking every cent he had, on Golden Hind and
Cacafuego. If it failed, he would be as penniless as Seth.

  “Does a yellow flag have legal status as a prohibition?” he growled. He was asking Control, while looking thoughtfully at Seth.

  —No, Commodore. But it is a serious caution.

  Hanna said, “Control, what will ISLA say if we ignore the beacon?” There spoke red hair and Irish ancestry. Hanna stood up to JC better than the captain did.

  Computers would not speculate. —It would largely depend on the results, First. If the Authority judges that you put lives at risk, then you and the captain might lose your licenses, and face other penalties.

  JC didn’t like that. He regarded laws as war games for lawyers. “We don’t know if they’re still there. Even if they are, they don’t need to know about us.” He laid a hairy hand on the table. “Control, turn off all external transmissions, acknowledge no signals until further notice.”

  —Orders in violation of ISLA regulations require confirmation by a licensed officer.

  “Flaming shit!” JC muttered, almost but not quite under his breath.

  “I’m not convinced we need to go that far,” Jordan said.

  “Me neither,” said Hanna, more forcefully.

  So here it came, seconds out of the ring, the sponsor versus the executive officers. Seth was careful to keep a poker face as he waited to see what happened next. Reese and Maria were doing the same, and the room was silent as vacuum.

  Without question, Jordan commanded the ship. If she refused to knuckle under to JC’s bullying, he would be powerless to overrule her. Control and the rest of the crew would back her up. On the other hand, JC represented the owners, and was expedition leader. When they got home he could destroy Jordan’s career, probably ruin her with a civil suit. But now he leaned back and smiled with feline confidence, veteran of a million boardroom battles.

  He wheedled. “What have we got to lose? They may be long gone. Even if they aren’t, provided we go in under radio silence, there isn’t a chance in a million they’ll notice us, and even if they do, how can they identify us? Even visually—you know interstellar gas will have stripped all the paint off our hull. We’ll take a closer look at this planet they want to steal, and if it seems like a winner, we’ll send the shuttle down, and young Seth there can plant the flag and claim a world for honor and justice. How does that sound, Prospector?” He peered at Seth around the Cacafuego icon.

  Only Control ever addressed Seth by his rank. Usually the crew called him gofer, which was supposed to be funny, or cabin boy, which wasn’t.

  “I’ll obey orders, Commodore.” The bottom beaver on any totem pole must always kept his head down and never talk back, but he meant orders from the captain and JC knew that.

  “There you are, Captain,” JC said, all reasonable-like. “Even our hunky hero is in favor.”

  Jordan said, “Reese, once we go into orbit, how long will it take you to come up with a preliminary appraisal of Cacafuego’s potential?”

  Reese closed his eyes to activate eyelid implants. His lips and throat moved as he sub-vocalized. “Need to know our trajectory.”

  While Jordan was telling Control to plot an approach that would minimize the chances of being detected by the Galactic fleet, Seth went back to studying the display. That small moon that JC had named Turd… Most natural satellites orbited above their primaries’ equators. There were exceptions; some even moved in retrograde orbits, and Luna was offset as much as twenty-eight degrees. Yesterday Turd had been almost lined up with Cacafuego, and now it was well above, so it must move in a polar orbit, or else… The only satellites that wandered so far from the ecliptic, so far as he knew, were those of the solar planet Uranus, and Uranus itself was tipped over about ninety degrees. Cacafuego might be a very odd world. As planetologist, Maria ought to have noticed that. It wasn’t his job to point it out to her.

  Even if Cacafuego was severely tilted, why should that make it any more dangerous? Humans needed a twenty-four hour day to satisfy their circadian rhythm, but darkness could be supplied, just as air and temperature could be supplied.

  “Very well,” Jordan said, offering a compromise. “We can certainly spare four days to enter orbit and four or five days to assess the planet. On Day 409 or so we’ll decide whether to stay or set course for Armada. Control, observe radio silence. All plans subject to change due to circumstance. Acceptable, Commodore?”

  “Acceptable, Captain.” JC rose up on his hind legs. If a grizzly bear could grin, it might look like that. “Hanna, love, it certainly wasn’t your fault that those rascals got here first. Come along, you deserve some sleep.” Without waiting for her, he headed out the door.

  For a moment Hanna’s lips and fists clenched. She was currently JC’s roommate, so he had been dropping the sort of hint she detested. Seth’s early efforts to woo her had met with no success at all, and he doubted very much that the commodore’s had. When the party had started to turn kinky last night, Hanna had been the first to leave, just before Seth had draped the captain over his shoulder and carried her off to the cabin to pursue their fun in private. Whatever the other three had indulged in after that was their business.

  She rose and started to walk out, then hesitated. She was still on watch and ISLA rules required that one human be awake at all times. Visibly blushing now, she glanced uneasily at Jordan and then Seth, who nodded agreement and laid a hand on the table.

  “Prospector taking the con,” he said. That expression always amused him, because it meant steering a ship and no human could steer a starship.

  Hanna said, “First Officer going off duty.”

  —Confirming Prospector Broderick on watch.

  Hanna left. Even the backs of her ears were red. Reese held out a hand to Maria.

  Now Seth could head into the mess to clean up the, um, mess.

  Jordan said, “Wait, please, all of you.”

  The captain came around the table. Seth deposited Whittington on the carpet and rose to accept her outstretched hands. She had trouble meeting his eye.

  “He’s a lout,” she said. “And a bully. But in his way he’s also a great man. Nobody knows the Big Nothing better than JC, from the boardroom, all the way down to years of utter boredom. He’s made more money in his career than any of us can dream of; he’s risking every cent of it. He put this thing together, Seth. Without him none of us would be here. We certainly can’t deny him a look at his world. But I am not going to let him send you downside to fry in some sort of planetary hell, no matter what he says. Understand?”

  Yes, Seth understood, perhaps better than she did, because he knew exactly how JC could make the prospector dance to his tune.

  “I don’t go down there unless I want to,” he said. “GenRegs 003.01, remember? I can refuse any order I consider too dangerous unless you and First agree that my refusal will imperil the ship, and if JC Lecanard tries to get nasty, I’ll knock his face off.”

  Jordan smiled wistfully. “I’d almost like to see that, but it’s my problem, not yours. I’m the one who has to put him in his place, and I can’t do it as well like this. I’ll have to shift, love. You do understand?”

  He understood that it felt like a kick in the crotch. Millions of years of evolution said his mate was deserting him. That was his stupid lower brain speaking. They’d only been paired two weeks this time. He had no claim on her, and a herm could never be a mate in the way a real woman could. Jordan was great recreation, nothing more.

  “You’re being sexist,” he said. “Stereotypical. There’s no reason why a woman can’t put him in his place. Verbally, I mean. If you’re planning to punch him on the nose, then I advise against it, no matter which gender you happen to be. Let me do it for you.”

  She barely smiled. “Not sexist, love. It’s just, well I know me, both me’s, and I know I can handle JC a lot better when I have visible balls. This is too important to risk a screw-up.”

  “I understand,” he said, struggling to hide his bitterness. “The mission must come f
irst.”

  “I’ll make it up to you later, I promise, on the way home.”

  “It can’t be better than it has been, but I’ll take the rain check.”

  He turned to the others, who were watching. Ever since the ship left Earth, the herms had tried to maintain the balance among the crew, never being the same gender at the same time. “Maria, take her over and make her over.”

  “You’re a brute, Seth Broderick.” Maria shot him a wink as she came to rescue Jordan. Any other time a wink from Maria would raise his heartbeat twenty points.

  Maria and Jordan left together. Two blue pills a day and a high protein diet would make Jordan male again in about three days. But the change would be much easier for them if they shared a cabin with a woman during that time—inhaling female pheromones, although it was indelicate to mention that. The captain might be right in thinking she would resist JC’s bullying better as a man, but it would be because JC wouldn’t push a man as hard. Bullying women was an ancient custom, much safer than bullying other men.

  Reese came wandering along the room, wearing their usual sardonic half-smile. They were tall for a herm, taller than Seth, although they had a dancer’s athletic slimness, nothing like his fighter bulk. Also like him, they had thick hair, wavy and jet black; Seth fought a constant battle against beard shadow, but herms rarely grew facial hair. Reese’s only razor was a sense of humor that sounded aggressive when they were male and snide when female.

  “So you’ve been kicked out of the captain’s cabin,” he said, standing closer to Seth than felt comfortable for two men. “You’ll have to slum with me. What a disaster! Now we’ll have four males and only two females. You expect me to make a change, too? You expect me to satisfy your brute sexual drive?”

  His sarcasm wasn’t truly joking. Reese Platte was older, around forty, with a worldwide reputation and an alphabet of letters after their name. They had won prestigious awards in astrobiology. They were rich—not in the same class as JC had been before he founded Mighty Mite, but they were not gambling their fortune on this expedition, as he was. Win or lose, Reese could go home to a life of unworried comfort. They considered Seth Broderick an uneducated young lout, kitchen help, the hand hired to do the heavy lifting. Reese, when female, was not the girl of Seth’s dreams.