Sullen Stars: Free Merchant

Naturally, the two books Rachel bought didn't last her for anything close to the full week it would take to make it to the Damián system.  Even if she had the mental fortitude, focus and determination to do nothing but read both books continuously, that would have only eaten up the majority of a single day, and she really needed to ration them to break up the monotony later.  She tried just laying around some, but being unable to lose consciousness for six to ten hours at a time like an organic made that an insufferable way to waste time, and so she found herself back in the lounge at some indeterminate point during the trip.  When it proved to be empty, she began a slow and random stroll around the ship's corridors, not looking for anyone or anything in particular.

She expected whoever wasn't on bridge watch to be asleep, but her meanderings brought her to a source of noise in the engine room.  Positioned in the center of the floor and surrounded by the guts of electronics, Daphne sat and turned over a circuit board of some kind.  She glanced up.  “Hey.  Something wrong?”

“No, just bored,” Rachel admitted.  She stepped inside and lowered herself to the floor across from the deer.  “You?”

“Just bored,” Daphne reflected.  She blew on the circuitry and set it aside before plucking the next piece up.  “Figured I'd take some time to really catalog what we got from your ship and figure out what it's worth.  I hate to do it, but we might be able to get some money for the parts when we get to Radeyah.  If we need to.  Might get lucky with the delivery before then.”

“Radeyah?  Do you mean Rawiyah?”

Daphen chuckled silently.  “No.  Sorry, but I think we're going to be delayed getting you there.  Francis found some passengers on Hessa that needed transportation to Radeyah.  A bunch of meteorology graduate students or something.  Studying the crazy weather on Hessa.  And from there we had someone lined up to go back to Alcmene, and it's all time sensitive...”

So, she was getting booted down the priority list because she ate up all of their money getting fixed?  That wasn't exactly fair, since she didn't do it on purpose or maliciously, but what was she going to do?  If she argued they might just leave her on Hessa and she wouldn't have a whole lot of recourse.  It wasn't like the locals, who certainly had no spaceflight technology of their own, were going to ground Borealis and force them to take her anywhere.  This sounded like it was going to add a month or more to the wait, given that many spike drills...

“I get it,” she lied.  “So, how does the counting go so far?”

“Huh?”  Daphne glanced down at the glittery board in her hands, then to her compad.  “Oh.  Right.  Uh, well, ideally these parts are worth about fifteen-hundred so far.  I'm guessing the lot is worth about five or six times that in total, but if we have to ditch them in a hurry to buy fuel in a backwater system, we'd be lucky to get half of that.  Less than ideal.”

Rachel nodded and glanced over the piles of junk laying around.  If she was running Theseus on her own for four years, she really should have known a lot more about what all of it was in case something broke down, but the only part she recognized for sure was the spare processor board that she watched Daphne pull out of the computer closet.  None of that was anything she could talk about.

Instead, she shifted gears to get to the more salient point.  “Yeah, I guess so.  Anyway, I'm guessing you talked to Frank.”

Daphne nodded.  “Yeeep.”

“I'm sorry.  I wouldn't have brought it up if I'd known you hadn't yet either.”

The doe turned the board over in her hands a few more times, probably looking for an identifying mark or model number.  “It's fine.  I should have told you.  Or, better yet, probably shouldn't have brought it up with you before I'd talked to him anyway.  Kind of got ahead of myself there.”  She muttered, “As I always do.”

Oh boy, let's not start down that road.  Rachel took a deep, artificial breath and said, “I really did appreciate what you did for me.  If you hadn't, nobody else was going to.”

Daphne looked up and eyed her bare feet and hooves.  “That's something at least.  You look a lot better.  How do you feel?”

“Much better.  Really.  I was in constant pain before.”  She wiggled her toes as if that somehow proved what she meant.  She'd never be top of the line again.  Never be perfect.  But it was like an organic who dislocated a joint or broke a bone.  They'd get almost better, but never quite the same.  “I'm sure I'd have lasted long enough to find a bottom of the barrel job on Rawiyah to get the money I needed, but it would have been really... trying.”

“Yeah, I can imagine.”  Daphne flicked her eyes between Rachel and the part in her hands.  “I am sorry though.  I really did want to hire you.  I think it would have worked out better for everyone in the end.  Maybe I can still talk Frank into it...”

Rachel shrugged a little.  “Don't worry about it.  It sounded like there's no easy way to do it.  I'm sure I can find something when I get to Rawiyah.”

“Or Frank just doesn't want to be bothered,” Daphne mumbled.  She set the board down in her lap and bit her lip.  “You know... there... never mind.”

[Should Daphne admit she has a crush on Rachel here instead?  Does she?  Maybe Rachel could find Daphne's compad unlocked at some point and discover the Tsoukalos VI Synthetic Builder App on it with a replica of herself, where Daphne's been practicing talking to her.  No, that would be supremely creepy.]

“What?”

Daphne fiddled with a ribbon cable on the board.  “It's nothing.”

Rachel scooted a little closer.  “You can tell me.”  She waved a hand around the room.  “We've got time to kill, and nobody else is around.”

The deer bit her lip again.  “Well, I was just going to say that I had more than one reason for wanting you to join the crew.  Yeah, I wanted to help you out, but, uh... well, it gets pretty boring out in deep space like this.  Frank's here, but one of us is always busy and there's only so much two people can talk about anyway, you know?  You're nice and easy to get along with.  I was looking forward to a chance to have someone else to talk with occasionally.”

Rachel's mouth hung open a little.  A warm feeling welled up within her that she couldn't explain.  Daphne just wanted her to be around?  And not just because she could cook?

“I-I'm flattered,” she finally managed to respond.  “I'd be lying if I didn't say I was kind of looking forward to it too.  At first, well, I've still got some pretty bitter memories of running Theseus, so I wasn't really sure, but... yeah, I like traveling with you two.  Maybe being delayed by a month or however long these extra transportation jobs takes won't be the worst thing in the world.”

Daphne's ears rose and she sat up a little straighter.  “Really?”  She suddenly became very interested in whatever it was she was holding.  “Well, uh, maybe I could talk to Frank again.  Maybe by now he's had some time to calm down.  If we find some buyers on Hessa, that would definitely put him in a better mood.”

“Yeah, I'm sure.  Did you not have any yet?”

She shrugged.  “I hope he had some leads before he bought ten-thousand credits' worth of biofoam, but I never really pressed him for details...”

“And probably not a great time now, yeah, I get it.”  Rachel twiddled her thumbs.  “Anyway, is there anything I can do to help with all of this?”

Daphne grinned and said, “Just sitting there's already helping.”  She finally moved on to a different part, which bristled with connectors.  “I, uh, did have a few things to talk about if you wanted.  Maybe kind of personal though...”

You'd hardly be the first to ask, Rachel thought.  “Sure.  What's on your mind?”

“I... uh... I'm not sure how to even ask exactly.  I guess the gist of what I wanted to talk about was what it's like to be a robot.  Not that you have any experience being organic to compare it to, but well, you've got to have picked up what it's like by now.”

Rachel chuckled.  “Yeah, I think so.  Short answer is that everyone thinks I've got it easy, and I guess I do.  Not having to sleep, never getting hungry and never having to pee at a bad time is pretty nice I imagine.  It gets pretty lonely when everyone's asleep, so I started to take up reading a long time ago to pass the time at night.”

“Oh, yeah?  I did see you come back with a few books.  And you got one on Asa too, right?  What do you like to read?”

Sappy, trope-filled stereotypical fantasy.  Sometimes with trashy love scenes sprinkled throughout them.  “Oh.. different things.  Whatever I can get my hands on.  I really like paper books for some reason, but nobody makes them anymore since it's so expensive and they take up space.  But I used to have a huge shelf of them back on Anvari.  It was kind of a dumb point of pride for me for a while.  I might have bought a few books I never read just to pad it...”

“Hey, nothing wrong with that.  I've got like thirty movies on my pad that I've never watched, and I don't even have anything to show for it.”  Daphne cocked her head to the side a little.  “You didn't bring them with you?  Did you leave them all on your ship?  We had space...”

Oh boy... probably shouldn't go there.  Rachel coughed to fake clearing her throat.  “Ah, no, I left all of that back home before I even started running cargo in the Autolye system.”  She paused, considering if she should say more.  She settled on adding, “With everything else.”

Daphne frowned.  “Doesn't sound like you had a lot of choice... I know there was space on your ship too.”

If she was going to turn the knob on the door, Rachel could let her peek inside a little.  “Not really.  It's a long story, and not a very nice one.  There probably aren't too many ways that a VI can end up on their own that are nice.”

“I was kind of curious, but it seemed like a really private topic so I wasn't going to ask...”

Hey, you just did.  Implicitly.  That was good enough.  “I'll spare you the gory details, unless you're really curious, but the short version is that my previous 'owner' died about five years ago.  My-err-his family didn't like me very much, so they challenged everything in his will and basically repossessed all of my belongings since I'm not considered a person on Anvari.  The planet is so suspicious of any kind of synthetic intelligence that everyone probably mistrusts calculators...”

“Oh my God...” Daphne muttered.  “I had no idea!  That's awful.  Uh, well, I mean, I knew that Anvari was pretty weird about bleeding edge technology, but the rest of that... wow.”  She glanced down to the junk strewn about her.  “But wait.  If they took everything you owned, how did you get that ship?”

Rachel snorted.  “Heh, well, I'm not certain but I'm pretty sure it was a joke on their part.  Anthony, my 'brother', and I use that term very loosely, gave it to me.  My father originally gave me his personal shuttle in his will, but Tony had that rescinded too.  He gave me Theseus instead.  It was the oldest ship in the fleet and, as you saw, coming apart at the seams.  If I didn't know better I'd say he hoped it would fall apart somewhere out in deep space with me in it, but I do know better.  I'm sure he got a tax write off for it or something ridiculous like that.”

Daphne's mouth hung open a little.  “Damn.  Just... wow.”  She took a deep breath and asked, “So, um, why exactly do you even call him your brother then?”

“My previous 'owner' was Phillip Freeman, of the Freeman Express.  Ever heard of the company?”

“Wait... wait, yeah.  So, Rachel Freeman?  You're related to the owners of the company?  I mean, I've never worked for them or anything, but they're the biggest interplanetary shipping company in Autolye, so you see the name tossed around a lot.”

Rachel nodded.  “Yeah, he was the founder and owner.  Anyway, long story short, he was a pretty lonely man.  He split up with his wife like twenty years ago, and his son and daughter, Anthony and Andrea were kind of crappy people.  Surprise, surprise.  They never even talked to him unless it was about the business, and how they were going to inherit it and be so rich when he died, yadda yadda yadda.”  She rolled her eyes.  “Anyway, he decided a few years after his divorce that he wanted someone to be around, so he contacted Tsoukalos and had a new daughter made for him.”  She tapped a finger to her chest.

Daphne's eyes widened more.  “Whoa.  I-I can't really imagine what it must have been like to be handed over to someone and told, 'Hey, here's your new dad!  Hope you like him!'”

“I didn't really know any different at the time, I guess.  Honestly, looking back on it, I'm still trying to piece together just how much control I had over my opinions.  I'm a 'personal companion synthetic', and I can only imagine that means I'm designed to be complacent and willing to do whatever anyone else wants.”  Rachel shrugged.  “But, really, it's kind of a side issue now.  Phillip was always very nice to me.  He really did treat me like I really was his daughter, and I can't complain a bit about it.  He never treated me like he owned me in any way.  In his will, he wanted me to go free and do whatever I wanted.”

“I guess that didn't really work out,” Daphne said.  “Or not like he meant, anyway.  But it could have been worse, right?  Sounds like by Anvari law you could have ended up belonging to someone else.”

No need to think too much about that possibility again.  “One small upside to the rest of the family hating me, I guess.  They just wanted me to go.”  Rachel smirked.  “That's what happens when you're the best daughter, I imagine.”

Daphne gave a little nervous smirk in return.  “Yeah, I guess so.  Um, anyway, maybe we should talk about something else...”

Probably for the best.  She just hoped Daphne had something else to talk about, since she'd accidentally already said about all there was to say about her prior life instead of the little peek she intended to give.

[hr]

Everything was pretty quiet for the rest of the trip to Hessa.  The palpable tension dissipated within a day or so, but even so Rachel found she didn't have a whole lot to say.  Especially to Frank, even if he didn't look like a wandering thunderstorm anymore.  Neither deer ever brought up her prospective employment either, so she kept her trap shut.

Instead, she busied herself by finishing reading her books, including the now largely useless cookbook.  Afterward, she wanted to spend some time researching their destination, but Hessa had no real network connections so all she could find were maps twenty years out of date and encyclopedia articles that hadn't been updated in months.  All-in-all, she managed to kill another day of travel, but didn't learn much of value about the planet, except that it very definitely wouldn't have the ability to manufacture anything like biofoam.

Apparently, despite its low tech level, the planet wasn't so much searing hot as so hot nobody went outside, because it was all once a modern colony that kind of fell apart when it lost funding and support from whoever launched it.  Without the tools needed to repair and replace things as they broke down, the colonists had to work with what they had, and under the conditions even mining more materials was arduous enough.  By luck or plan, the planet's surface was covered in iron rich oxides, so they could just scoop up buckets of dirt and smelt iron out of it, but getting materials for making things like circuit boards or even plastic was just impractical.  Why they didn't just disband the colony was a bit of a mystery, but maybe by the time there were so many problems there were just too many people to evacuate.

Given its state, there was no surprise that the system also had exactly zero orbital or space infrastructure.  Deliveries had to be made to the surface, and based on the mumblings she overheard from the Buscemis, the descent was probably going to be quite an experience.  Such a thick atmosphere meant extreme reentry effects, and they may even have to use the engines to brake on the way down.

Rachel planned to stay in her room and try not to hunker up in a corner, imagining all of the ways the ship could shake apart under the stresses.  If there was ever a time she wished she could voluntarily lose consciousness, that would be it.

In any case, once they were down, they could land at New Lexington, which was the largest colony shelter and still possessed a landing pad.  If the maps were right.  And if the landing pad's facilities were still any good.  And if they had a way to get inside of the shelter from outside since apparently even brief exposure to the atmosphere was “capable of causing first degree burns within minutes.”

Before they even tried to set down, she sure hoped they could get in touch with the colony by radio and figure out if it was worth the trouble.  Surely they still had one that could reach orbit that worked...

...if not, maybe they should be going to find one to sell to them.

[hr]


Once they were in orbit, it took about three hours of searching radio frequencies across two full orbits of the planet to finally get in contact with New Lexington.  A lack of orbital comms satellites meant that they could only stay in touch while there was line of sight to the shelter, and given the significant atmospheric distortion it was hard to really communicate even then.

Fortunately, the ten or so minutes they had to talk before the radio went silent indicated that, yes, the inhabitants were willing to buy the biofoam, yes, they had Exchange credits to pay with, and yes, they had a functional landing pad.

So much for leaving to find a more accessible client elsewhere.

As she decided beforehand, Rachel spent the descent in her room, laying on her bed and trying to ignore the rattling and groans of the ship's hull as it descended through the ultra thick atmosphere.  Frank's plan to perform a retro burn to slow down during their descent wasn't going to work, since the rear of the ship didn't have enough heat shielding and in all likelihood they'd end up stranded with ruined engines if they didn't die, so they just had to come in at the most shallow angle possible to bleed off energy where the air was thin enough that the ship wouldn't be torn apart.

In all, it took a grueling eleven minutes for them to make it down through the upper cloud layers and reach a speed where the ship didn't jostle perceptibly from every gust of wind going by, and from there it took another ten minutes to begin their final approach to the shelter.

Rachel decided to stay in her room until the ship stopped moving, but finally, after the harrowing landing, the sound of immense machinery grinding overhead was followed by a final jolt as the ship touched down and the whipping of the wind around the ship ended.

Rachel met Frank and Daphne in the main corridor on their way to the cargo hold.  “So, we're down.  Is it safe to walk outside?”

“Yeah, the landing pad was an enclosed landing bay.  I'm sure it's hot outside, but it should keep the worst of it out,” Frank said.

Daphne frowned.  “I'm more worried about all of the dust.  I'm definitely going to have to look over the ship before we leave.  That crud could have gotten in any of the mechanisms, and it's going to blow if we can't get the landing gear to retract.  At least we're not using ramrockets or I'd have to be digging through intakes too.  I bet the atmosphere scoops are going to need a thorough cleaning though.”

That didn't sound like much fun at all, but then neither did unloading the barrels that took so long to get onto the ship in the first place.  “Yeah, better to look all of that over before we leave.  Anyway, other than unloading, is there anything else I can help with?”

“Probably not really,” Frank said.  “And this is going to take long enough anyway.”

Annoyingly, the cargo lift didn't have space to unload the barrels in addition to holding them on the way down, so after rolling a few onto it and setting it to descend, they had to trot all the way around to the access ramp, head down and loop back to unload it.

After the first batch of three, Frank stopped and said, “You know, before we waste our time, we should probably make sure they're buying all of it.  Let me see if I can get in touch with whoever we were talking to on the radio.  Could hardly hear what he was saying so I've got no idea what his name was.”

[What should happen at this point?  And what species even live on Hessa?  New Lexington is a decidedly English / British name, so that's probably what the culture should be like.  Britain has a wide variety of mammalian species, so deer, foxes, dogs, and so on are all possibilities.  Maybe more bears.

Should Frank be able to sell all of the biofoam here?  Probably not.  Even with a few hundred thousand(!) people, they probably can't really afford it, especially not without asking for it up front.  Where does that leave the Buscemis in their financials?  Still at a serious negative income, probably.

Are they able to refuel here?  Maybe they could scoop fuel from the nearest gas giant instead on their way out of the system.

Reminder: no serious electronics, so the inhabitants are probably paying with physical credit chips.]