Wildcatter Read online

  * * *

  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 1023 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 fail
ed 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.

  Seth called for animation, and was shown a few hours’ rotation: a slow twist, then flip back, slow twist, flip back. Clearly the ship was approaching more or less along the ecliptic plane, aimed for about halfway between the planet’s equator and the sunlit pole. Yes, there was ice at the equator. Some of that white might even be sea ice, which would make seasonal migration difficult for marine life.

  “Latest estimate of the atmosphere?”

  —Oxygen between sixteen and eighteen percent, balance nitrogen, neon, and water vapor. Sea level pressure estimated 1.7 atmospheres.

  “Carbon dioxide?”

  —Too small to measure at this range. Temperatures indicate it cannot be much higher than terrestrial, but there will be some, because there is chlorophyll.

  His body could handle that air as long as he was allowed enough time to depressurize afterward. The oxygen content was lower than Earth standard, but that would actually be a blessing, because the partial pressure would be higher than terrestrial. If he had to, he could dispense with the EVA suit and just breathe through a filter mask to eliminate toxic dust and airborne biohazards.

  Tiring of the endlessly repeated twist-flip, he called for a current view of the terminator at highest practical magnification. Like a view of the moon at the half, this gave him a sense of three dimensions, the mountains’ relief being exposed by their shadows. The topography was Earth-like, suggesting plate tectonics, and that boded well for mineral distribution, soil fertility, and the development of life.

  “Anything else unusual?”

  The disk became an irregular, grainy detail. There was a coast, and an obvious river, and…

  —We caught this by chance with our high-magnification scanner, and have not yet established a paradigm for the unusual texture. On Earth it would satisfy our parameters for provisional identification as a city seen in low-angle lighting, but there is too much vegetation to be sure at this distance and in this context.

  Seth slumped back on his chair. A city? He was hallucinating, surely.

  The rules for first contact overrode everything else, although they had never been applied in practice. Prospecting must cease at once. There must be no communication of any kind, only immediate withdrawal, leaving a beacon where the natives could not detect it. Events must be reported to ISLA, which would compensate the expedition for any financial sacrifice incurred, with a bonus. Plus historical fame to match Columbus’s, of course.

  “What color beacon for a sentient species?”

  —Purple.

  Made no sense! “And Galactic’s is…?”

  —Yellow, Prospector, still yellow.

  “Holograph dismissed. Down on the floor, monster!” Seth rose and headed for the galley to flip some pseudo-eggs. The cat ran hopefully before him. He must be patient. In a couple of days everything would be clear. It couldn’t be a city, just a trick rock formation. Evidence for intelligent aliens would certainly have sent the Galactic team high-tailing home to Earth with the news, but they would have posted purple, not yellow. He wasn’t going to mention the shadows to the others. Let them find out for themselves.

  But all that oxygen and blue water? Damn the little green men! Cacafuego was just too hot to pass up. The odds were very high now that in just a few days, Prospector Seth and Astrobiologist Reese would climb into the shuttle and go downside to that strange sideways world.

  * * *

  After his usual solitary breakfast, he went back to the showers. He had just found his shaver when Jordan wandered in behind him, and for a moment their eyes met in the mirror. She had cleaned off the smudged makeup and brushed out the short golden hair, but she was topless. That was not unusual aboard Golden Hind and he was quite accustomed to seeing her naked in a cabin, a sight that never palled, but even semi-nudity seemed wrong under their present circumstances. She started at the sight of him and stepped quickly into a toilet cubicle. He went to the clothes bins, rummaged for top and shorts in her color, blue, and tossed them over the door to her. Then he went back to shaving.

  When he was rich he would have his mess of a face tidied up. His nose had once been straight, his cheek had fallen in where he had lost four teeth to a lucky punch, and the too-recent scar on his forehead had come from a broken bottle. The wonder was not that he had only scored two out of four on the ship, but that such an ugly thug ever scored at all.

  He had just reached the sandpaper on his chin when Jordan emerged, decently clad. No doubt she had started the change pills already, but no results would be showing yet. She was still a boyish woman with small breasts and narrow hips, but she excited him more than the voluptuous Maria ever did. He knew every pore in Jordan’s skin intimately, the pink nipples and aureoles, faint pubic hair almost invisible against her pale skin. He hated the thought of those breasts shrinking even more, the slightly enlarged herm clitoris swelling into a workable penis.

  He turned to face her as she came closer. Not too close, though.

  “I screwed up tonight,” she said.

  Of course she had. The captain’s job was to inspire the crew, which Jordan did with good humor and fine people management skills. Unlike Reese or JC, they phrased every order as a request and never pulled rank on the lowly gofer. The whole crew liked them, but no one doubted that JC had chosen Jordan Spears because they avoided confrontation. Unfortunately a face-off was sometimes necessary, and tonight the herm had blinked.

  “No, you didn’t,” he said.

  “Yes, I did. I should not be changing over.”

  He shrugged. “You made the right decision, love … ma’am, I mean. No one knows more about fighting than me, and you never go into a fight with a monkey on your back. If you
feel happier tackling Old Ugly as male, then you are quite right to change over.”

  “But it’s a retreat, and he’ll know it. Damn it, he can’t overrule me! He can’t even overrule you, if you have good cause to refuse to go downside. I can handle that big ape without having to grow a cock. It’s not fair to the others: you, Reese, Maria.”

  “Is he sane?”

  Sidetracked, Jordan stared at him for a moment. “Be more specific.”

  “A trillionaire, sixty-two years old. What’s he doing out here in the Big Nothing? Escaping from too many ex-wives?”

  “Looking for the Great One, the world-shaking triumph to crown his career.”

  “And if he fails, he’s busted. Loses everything. I worry a little about that.” Was that true? Was JC sane?

  “You could handle him if he turned violent,” she said. “You’re a fighter, an ex-bouncer. He’s big but he’s three times your age.”

  “The first time we met you told me I was the best applicant and yet you’d been frightened he wouldn’t accept me. That why? You thought he would red-pencil me because I could take him down?”

  Jordan shrugged and put on her professional calming smile. “JC’s not the type to go berserk, Seth. ISLA tests everyone for that.”

  “You’re not the type to buckle under when a fat old bully shouts at you. Galactic’s not the type to run away from danger. I sure as hell aren’t, either. But I like to cover the bases. Let’s talk about firearms.”

  Jordan nodded quickly, as if she’d expected the question. “All according to GenRegs. I have a stun gun coded for captain’s use only. In the shuttle you have one plus a blazer, neither of which will work inside the ship.”