Freelance On The Galactic Tunnel Network Read online

  “So you’re asking me to join you in a suicide pact?” Roland stole a few peanuts from the reporter before she could move the dish out of his reach. “All right. I’ll get you fifteen hundred, but I expect you to spend a full month on Earth so that you’ll be reachable by the people you contact. After that, we’ll talk.”

  “You’re a prince, boss. As long as I can leave in time for Rendezvous. Are you sure you don’t want a drink?”

  “How about I take you for something to eat instead? My wife is with the kids at a bowling party and they’re getting pizza.”

  “What’s the damage, Frode?” Ellen called to the Drazen.

  “Jordan was running a tab on his programmable cred—I took it out of that.”

  “That’s why you’re my favorite bartender on Union Station,” the reporter said, and slapped down a two-cred coin as a tip. “Where are we eating, boss?”

  “How about the food court at the Empire Convention Center?”

  “Sure, that’s close.” Ellen staggered against the editor when she slipped off her barstool and began thumping her right thigh with her fist. “Went to sleep on me. I must have been sitting here longer than I realized.”

  “So how’s life treating you outside of work?” Roland asked, staying close to her side in case she lost her balance again.

  “It’s been a tough year for independent traders and I’ve seen too many bankruptcy auctions. I’m really looking forward to Rendezvous this year because the new council we elect will decide whether or not the Traders Guild will join the Conference of Sovereign Human Communities.”

  “I caught a Rendezvous many years ago and you traders have a funny way of electioneering.”

  “But we do vote. And you’d think everybody would be in favor of joining, but some of the old-school traders are classic loners. Most of the young traders, well, you can wait to find out until I submit my story.”

  “This Earth assignment could turn into a full-time gig if it works out.”

  “You mean sell my ship and settle down on a big ball of rock? Not a chance. I may not have been born a trader like some of them, but it’s in my blood.”

  “Then your blood must be getting crowded because there’s a heck of an investigative journalist in there too, at least when she’s not swimming in alcohol.”

  Four

  “If you won’t go back, just kill me and get it over with,” Georgia groaned.

  “We can’t turn around in the tunnel, and we’re already halfway there,” Larry lied to soften the blow.

  “Really? You’re not just saying that?”

  “Do you realize you haven’t thrown up in almost three hours?” he asked in reply.

  “That’s because there’s nothing left in my stomach. Would you please stop moving?”

  “I’m not moving. Space sickness happens because the data from your inner ear doesn’t match what you see and your brain goes whacky trying to adjust.”

  “Are you saying there’s something wrong with my implant?”

  “No, it’s the old-school mammal stuff. Did you get a good night’s sleep?”

  “I was up most of last night tying up loose ends before we left. I guess I should have planned further ahead.”

  “Sleep deprivation makes Zero-G sickness worse. I should have warned you,” Larry said sympathetically.

  “You said you knew some tricks that would help me through it,” Georgia reminded him in an accusatory tone.

  “I’m saving those tricks for later because you’re not that bad. I had a passenger once who lost control of his bowels and—”

  “Not helping,” she interrupted. “How long is it going to last?”

  “I think you’re already coming out of it,” he lied again.

  “If there was just something to see out of the porthole instead of the tunnel void. I used to get motion sick traveling in floater buses back on Earth, but if I could sit in the front and look forward, it was better.”

  “Space sickness is the opposite of terrestrial motion sickness,” Larry explained. “That’s why I keep telling you to close your eyes, or at least focus on something small. You should try reading on your tab.”

  “Are you sure? That’s the last thing I would do on a bus.”

  “Trust me. Besides, if you were really that sick, you wouldn’t be able to ask so many questions.”

  “Comes with the profession.” Closing her eyes once again, Georgia found that this time it provided almost immediate relief. “Keep talking.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. Tell me about yourself. I still can’t believe I’m going to be living in one room with a complete stranger.”

  “Come on, I’m sure you checked me out with your paper. I’ll bet you reporters all have free access to the EarthCent Intelligence business database.”

  “I might have asked them to run a criminal background check, but how much does that really tell you about a person?” she asked rhetorically. “Only that he hasn’t been caught yet. The truth is, I was so desperate to get started on my new career that I would have come even if you were a notorious axe murderer. Oh, and the report from EarthCent Intelligence said that your credit is good.”

  “That’s the most important thing in my world. Anybody can get into a drunken bar brawl on some alien station and end up with a criminal record, but good credit has to be earned.”

  “Is that how you got your nose broken? In a bar brawl?”

  “No comment,” Larry said, self-consciously touching his imperfectly healed nose.

  “Are you married?”

  “Do I look married? No, don’t open your eyes.” He paused a moment, considering his answer. “I was married. It didn’t work out. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Okay,” Georgia said cautiously. “Family?”

  “I’m from a trader family. My parents still live on their ship, and I have a brother who was a trader until he married some grounder he met on a Verlock open world and went native. My uncle, dad’s brother, is a trader too, and I have a couple of cousins who work a two-man ship together. My grandparents settled on Void station when my grandmother had enough of living a quarter of her life in Zero-G, but my grandfather still owns a ship, and he takes consignment deliveries to keep a hand in. How about you?”

  “My parents are crazy,” Georgia said bluntly. “My father insisted that everything that ever went wrong in his life was the fault of an alien conspiracy, and my mother won’t even accept that the Stryx exist. I grew up in a sort of a commune of squatters on an abandoned college campus, and nobody talked about the outside world because it would always end in an argument.”

  “So how does your mom explain the tunnel network?”

  “She doesn’t, and even though you could see the space elevator from our kitchen window on a clear day, she pretended it wasn’t there.”

  “How about the moon landing?”

  “Nope, but at least I can understand her on that one. It is kind of hard to believe that people made it to the moon all those years ago without alien help.”

  “Our scientists used to be pretty handy with rockets, probably because they made good weapons, but they’re next to useless for commercial space travel due to the fuel-to-weight ratio,” Larry said. “Do you mind if I hop on the stationary bike while we talk? I’m used to exercising at least six hours a day in Zero-G and I feel like I’m being lazy just floating here.”

  “You’re going to ride the bike upside-down?”

  “I told you, there is no such thing in space. Tell me when you feel ready to try one of the machines and I’ll help you get hooked up. And if you think you’re done with that sick-up bag, I’ll put it in the trash.”

  “Take it,” Georgia said, relinquishing her death grip on the sealable pouch that contained the barely-digested remnants of her lunch. “Why did you insist that we eat before leaving when you knew there was a good chance I’d be sick?”

  “Having something to throw up beats the dry heaves.” He double-ch
ecked that the bag was properly sealed, and then gently shoved off the back of her chair to propel himself to the locker set aside for the trash. There he placed the sick-bag into a larger garbage sack and used a short piece of elastic to tie it shut. After putting the garbage back in the locker, he pushed off for the exercise bike.

  “I thought spaceships all had disposal chutes,” Georgia commented.

  “You were watching? You must really be feeling better then. And bigger space ships do have disposal chutes but they don’t dump into space. On Stryx stations and alien orbitals, everything is either recycled or atomized, which is also a form of recycling because the atoms can be used for something. Traders don’t have a lot of waste, mainly food packaging, and we have to pay to get rid of it when we’re docked or parked.”

  “I always assumed the trash got dumped in space.”

  “Aliens have fought wars over littering, it’s nothing we can afford to fool around with,” Larry told her. He slipped his feet through the pedal straps and fastened the waist harness to keep his butt on the seat. “Besides, it wouldn’t work in the tunnel. The way it’s been explained to me, even if I cycled the trash out through the airlock it would travel right along with us. Then we’d get in trouble with traffic control at the other end.”

  “Traffic control? I thought the tunnels were just open.”

  “Seriously? It’s a toll system, though it all works through the Stryx-supplied ship controllers so it’s not like we have to stop and pay. Earth is just a probationary tunnel network member so we get the option to go shares rather than paying a flat rate. All of the traders I know work that way.”

  “So you’re in business with the Stryx?” Georgia asked, carefully tilting her head back until she could see where Larry was pedaling away like he was climbing a hill in first gear.

  “Nothing so grand. I use the mini-register to keep track of my business, cash is on the honor system, and the Stryx traffic controllers access that information and debit their percentage when I enter a tunnel.”

  “You really are upside-down, you know.”

  “If you’re well enough to watch me pedaling, you should try to drink some water. Once you’re rehydrated, a little exercise will make you feel even better.”

  “Can you help me get to my food locker?”

  “Try it yourself and I’ll come to the rescue if you get stranded. Moving around in weightlessness is easier than it looks, almost too easy. The trick is not to push off anything too hard because you have to be able to stop yourself without bouncing when you get there.”

  “Is that what all the ropes are for? I thought they were pull cords for some kind of emergency system.”

  “I went with safety lines running through rings welded to the bulkhead because that’s how I grew up. Some traders wear magnetic gloves so they can stick anywhere in a steel ship, and of course, everybody has magnetic cleats for their boots. I only use those on board when I work in the cargo hold.”

  “The chandler sold me a pair but I put them away with my food. You know what? I think I’m hungry.”

  “Start with the water,” Larry advised her. “Actually, start with removing your safety restraints or you aren’t going anywhere.”

  “Right.” Georgia unbuckled the four-point harness that kept her strapped into the padded acceleration chair and then took a deep breath. “Here I go.” A few seconds later, she slammed into the lockers but managed to grab one of the safety lines to keep from drifting off.

  “So what did you do wrong?” Larry asked in a calm voice.

  “Why did I hit so hard? I barely pushed off at all.”

  “You started with your knees bent and then you extended until your legs were straight. It doesn’t feel like a lot of work because you’re weightless, but your mass is the same as it would be on Earth or Union Station. Next time, try pushing off with just your toes. Good job taking the force on your arms, though. For a second there I was worried you were going to hit your head.”

  “I’m not uncoordinated, I was just surprised.” Georgia opened her food locker and got out a box of Union Station Springs water. “Do you want one?”

  “I’m set with recycled supply, and just so you know, it’s considered rude to offer water from your own stock in trader circles. It means you think that the person you’re with is too incompetent to plan for their own survival.”

  “Sounds like you have a lot of rules. How does this work?”

  “Pull the straw off the side, jab it through the seal, and then you can suck the water out. We only had squeeze tubes when I was a kid, but the boxes are better because you’d really have to work at it to cause an accident.”

  “Nothing is coming out,” she reported after some fruitless sucking.

  “Make sure your hand isn’t covering the vent holes on the bottom. If the air can’t get in to fill the space between the box and the bladder, it’s like trying to create a vacuum.” He pedaled on in silence for almost a minute before asking, “Is it alright now?”

  “Finished,” Georgia declared, and crushed the empty box for emphasis. “I’ll put it in the garbage.”

  “That goes into recycling, the yellow bag. I keep it in the same locker as the garbage bag because we don’t generate much of either.”

  “How can you tell what’s recycling and what’s garbage?”

  “Okay, I called it garbage because I don’t know how squeamish you are, but the real deal is that the blue bag is biological waste and the yellow bag is everything else.”

  “You have a whole bag dedicated to vomit?”

  “Maybe we should save this discussion for after you’ve eaten,” Larry suggested.

  “I’m all better now, really, and I’m the least squeamish person I know. Just tell me.”

  “If you’re sure,” he said, clicking the tension setting on the exercise bike up a notch and dropping his pedaling speed. “Have you ever used a Zero-G toilet?”

  “No, but what does that have to do with it?”

  “Like I said, we can’t dump anything in space. On a small ship like this, the waste reprocessing system is limited to recovering the water, which is relatively easy. The stuff that’s left over, the solids, get baked into briquettes by the toilet and vacuum-sealed in disposable pouches. I empty them into the biological waste bag every few days to keep the receptacle from overfilling.”

  “So when you said you’re set with recycled water, you mean that you drink…”

  “We’re in space, Georgia. Everybody drinks recycled wastewater, the only question is whether it’s distilled with minerals added, like what I get back from the toilet, or whether it’s gone through some kind of natural filtration process, like the water you bought on Union Station. I’m sure the only reason the chandler sold you so many water boxes was because you told him it was your first time on a small ship. We’ve all heard stories about Earthers getting dehydrated because they refuse to drink recycled water. That and it doesn’t hurt to have a backup supply in case something goes wrong.”

  “I thought you said we’d drink the shower water if something went wrong.”

  “I said some traders have resorted to that, but only if the toilet recycling system fails and they don’t have any other supply.” He increased the tension setting again and his breath began to come harder. “Not sleepy yet?”

  “Should I be? I’m really kind of hungry. Do you want to eat?”

  “You go ahead. I’m going to get in at least two more hours of exercise first. I showed you the small microwave if you need to heat something up, but that’s the only kitchen equipment we can use in Zero-G.”

  “Hey, I’m stuck!”

  Larry craned his neck around to look at his passenger and chuckled. “You’re not stuck, you’re unstuck. You must have let go of the rope while you were drinking and accidentally pushed off just enough to drift out of reach of the safety line.”

  “What should I do? I read somewhere if you’re adrift in space you can move by throwing something. I could throw my empty wa
ter box.”

  “It doesn’t have enough mass and I’d rather you didn’t start throwing things on the bridge. I’ll get the bot to rescue you,” he concluded, and called, “Genie?”

  “Who? What bot?”

  “Genie, my cargo bot. She’s in her charging bay in the hold so it will take a minute for her to get here. I paid for an upgrade to my ship controller so Genie responds to voice instructions.”

  “And the controller is artificial intelligence?”

  “Controllers aren’t sentient, but in addition to doing all of the navigation and providing limited Stryxnet access, they’re programmed to handle most of the situations that come up in space. Which reminds me, I have to add you as a guest.”

  “What will that do?”

  “If I had a heart attack right now or got knocked unconscious, the controller won’t respond to your voice since I haven’t added you yet. If I didn’t recover, we’d eventually end up returning to my home port, which is registered as Union Station.”

  “How eventually?”

  “The default no-response timeout is seventy-two hours,” Larry said. “Once you’re added as a guest, if I’m disabled, you could tell it to return us home immediately. I didn’t pay for the medbay option so the controller has limited ability to scan our health status, but if it determined I was in really bad condition, it would let you specify any Stryx station. That and answer your questions rather than ignoring you.”

  “So how do we do this?”

  “Controller. Recognize Georgia Hunt as an official guest.”

  “Georgia Hunt added to manifest,” a female voice responded. “Please repeat the following sentence for voice registration—My name is Georgia Hunt.”

  “My name is Georgia Hunt,” the reporter repeated dutifully.

  “Recognition complete.”

  “Is that it? Are there any instructions?”

  “It’s a natural language interface and it’s always listening. You can address the controller directly, or like with Genie, it can usually figure out that you’re talking to it through context. Where is that bot?”

  “Genie was in deep charge mode and has just completed self-test,” the controller replied.