Wildcatter

Day Minus 46 to Day Minus 4

Everything after that seemed like anticlimax. Yet time, which had crawled like a snail for months, suddenly went into hyperdrive.

The following day the crew flew to Space City to begin final training, and JC joined them there two days later. The mockup of the ship’s living quarters was depressingly small, a claustrophobic line of windowless rooms no larger than a three-bedroom apartment. Seth had always been a solitary person, and the lack of privacy bothered him more than he had expected. He found himself due to share a room with First Officer Hanna Finn, a cuddly-looking redhead with a sharp sense of humor and an even sharper temper. She was the one that Jordan had called a prude, and she proved it the first night. There was nowhere to have a private chat with her ahead of time, a quiet sounding out of intentions. They would not be alone together until bedtime.

So he sprayed his teeth very carefully, shaved, washed, prettied up, and went to tackle the problem. The two single beds stood parallel, half a meter apart, leaving little space in the room for anything else. He closed the door on the world and the galaxy. She was sitting on the edge of a bed, reading—reading a real paper book, too! Seth had never seen one outside a museum. It must have used up a fair part of her baggage allowance.

He sat down on the other bed and leaned back against the wall.

After a few moments she turned and frowned at him.

“What are you staring at?”

“I wasn’t staring. I was admiring.”

“And hoping, I presume?”

“Of course. But we can leave that until we know each other a lot better.”

She snapped at him like a terrier. “No, it’s something we can settle right now. I never engage in promiscuous sex. Carnal relations should be restricted to traditional marriage. Forget your lecherous ideas. The beds will stay apart.”

“That’s fine by me, ma’am,” he lied. It had been a long time. She was a striking woman and he had been hoping. “Let me know if you change your mind.”

“I will never change my mind. And I always read my Bible before retiring.”

“What’s your favorite bit?”

The big green eyes registered cynical disbelief. “Matthew, Chapter 5. You know it?”

“Oh, yes. Great stuff. I’m not sure I want to inherit the Earth though. I’m planning to earn it.”

“Holy Scripture is not a fit subject for humor. Your ability to quote it isn’t by any chance related to the fact that I left this book here earlier and it happens to open to that page?”

“Certainly not. My favorite is the bit in Paul’s e-pistle to the Carthaginians about faith, hope, and love. Love’s the greatest, he says.”

“He didn’t mean that sort of love, and he was writing to the Corinthians, not the Carthaginians.”

Seth sighed and sat up to remove his tee-shirt. “As long as you don’t do it aloud, I shan’t complain.” He preferred to sleep naked, but decided to leave his shorts on. Jordan had promised him four tickets to the lottery, but the first one he had drawn was not a winning number.

For the next five weeks the crew were kept frantically busy, spending hours every day in final training. Some of that had to be done elsewhere, so they were not entirely confined to the mockup, and could adjust to the cramped quarters gradually.

Seth earned his license on the hydroponic and synthesizer systems, and trained on a simulator until he was qualified to pilot an Oryo 9 shuttle. He was taught how to use the cooking machines, the cleaning system, and the laundry. He had to attend a general course on emergency procedures, et cetera, et cetera.

The end of the month came and ISLA’s report included no new life-bearing planets discovered, which was a relief, in that Golden Hind hadn’t missed anything. It was also a real concern. Accessible space was being mined out. Good prospects were becoming rare. The latest staking had been Munda Kmer, at 5,450 light years and almost thirty years’ round-trip time, although that had included time slip, which might or might not repeat on a later visit. Many wildcatters were revisiting closer worlds that had been explored several times before.

Yet it was a real relief when news came that Golden Hind was ready for final trials. Next day they were hustled aboard a shuttle and blasted into orbit. For the three hours they needed to coast to docking point, they took turns at the port, watching Golden Hind grow and grow. Seth had seen plans, knew it would be shaped like a stubby carpet tack, with the discoid head being the ship itself and the shaft below containing the tachyon converter and the eight tokamaks that powered it. He had never guessed that it would be so big. Even Reese, who had done all this before and put on know-it-all airs, was too impressed to sneer much.

The reality of Golden Hind itself gave him mixed feelings. JC’s need for dominance, officially termed respect, was most obviously displayed in the sleeping arrangements. The commodore himself had a stateroom larger than the two other cabins put together. Three cabins, six beds. Hanna slyly referred to them as “our golden hindquarters.”

Let the monkey business begin!

Seth, lowest on the totem pole, was appointed to the despised 02:00 watch and informed that the duty roster would not be changed during the voyage. Every spare square centimeter aboard was piled high with equipment and supplies that must be moved to permanent storage, largely by hand, and much of the storage was down on the high-gravity levels. Guess who? The two space tugs made fast to the rim had just begun the long process of “winding up”, so for the first week or so he had only partial gravity to deal with. That helped, but a fifty-kilo crate still had fifty kilos of inertia, even in microgravity. It took real muscle to start it moving and just as much to stop it again.

On the brighter side, he was assigned to share with dark-eyed Planetologist Maria Chang, a classic see-what-I-got-guys trophy: thick black hair, sultry black eyes, and a slinky walk that made his glands tingle. At first sight of all the females aboard, a man would instinctively choose her.

That first night, he retired early, which was understandable when he had to go to work at 02:00. He was awake when she entered. He sat up, bare-chested.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“I’m not sorry. Come here.” He patted the edge of the bed.

“Oh, no! You think just because I have big boobs I’m a pushover, don’t you?”

“I don’t think any woman’s a pushover; but we have months or years ahead of us here, ma’am, and I do hope that some time in the future we’ll be lovers. Is that impossible?”

She tossed her head. “Perhaps not some time, but this is now.”

He patted the bed again. “Come here, then.”

“Why?”

“Because I want a goodnight kiss. Just one little kiss, I swear.”

“Sure! And then one little caress on my breast. And you remove my top. And so it goes. And then, bingo!”

“Maria, I absolutely swear I just want one tiny little sisterly kiss.”

She said, “Huh!” disbelievingly. But she did come and sit beside him, and he put a hand behind her head to guide her lips to his. He played fair, kept the other hand clenched. After the first minute she let his tongue in. After several more, she stroked his chest. So then he caressed her breast, she checked the state of his erection under the sheet—which was at warp nine, raring to go—so he removed her top. And so it went.

He must have acquitted himself well, because when he came off duty he found the two beds pushed together and her ready to go again. This was space travel as the legends had it.

Time melted away. The critical end of the month was approaching, when ISLA would announce the next slate of candidate worlds discovered, if any. If they were ready, it would be up to JC and Mighty Mite’s board of directors to decide if any of them was promising enough to be chosen as Cacafuego, Hind’s destination. If none looked good enough, they would set the clock back to Day -30 and wait until the next month, or the next, or as long as it took. Still no other ships seemed ready to enter the race, but Hind’s good fortune could not last forever.

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.”