Family Law 2: The Long Voyage of the Little Fleet Read online

  The Long Voyage of the Little Fleet

  Mackey Chandler

  Second Book of the Family Law Series

  Cover design by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Background built using Space Construction Kit © Tony Hayes AKA Bogwoppet www.my-art-gallery.co.uk (2007)

  Spaceships from renders by http://www.most-digital-creations.com/ © Adam Thwaites

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  The Last Part – My other books and links

  Chapter 1

  It wasn't like Fargoers to be bureaucratic. They prided themselves on independence. So it seemed unlikely the United States of North America nor any other Earth power could pressure them not to sell military supplies to Derf. The Derf had won the recent war, so it wasn't a matter of whether to re-arm the defeated underdog and stirring up new hostilities.

  Neither did the missiles Gordon wanted to buy hold any secrets for him. He'd originally been the one to sell Fargone the copies they reverse engineered to make them. Indeed he still had magazines over half full of the X head ship to ship missiles they'd copied, although it was true the Fargoers improved on the original missiles. Gordon's forces had been very frugal with the expensive missiles during the war. He simply wanted to replace the ones he'd used and alter the standard load out on the captured USNA ships. He really had no use for ground attack nukes. He hoped never to use one, much less need the half and half load out of ground attack and space weapons the North Americans favored.

  Their fleet was going exploring for profit, not looking for trouble. Weapons were expensive and he'd have been happy not to waste money on them. But they were going deep. Deep as in potentially years away from Human or Derf society. So deep they had no idea what they would find and more to the point who. There wouldn't be any help out there and they best be able to take care of themselves. Man had already found two aboriginal races and two marginally technological societies close to home, The Derf and the Hinth had both been far enough along to take up space flight easily in a generation. It seemed likely sooner or later they'd find some advanced space-going species. How friendly or territorial they might be was impossible to guess. But he wanted to be prepared should they be so unfriendly they'd try to blow his dainty little butt off on sight.

  In honesty he was irritated. Being over a half ton of irritated carnivore with four inch gut rippers on his middle arms, he could have been radiating intimidation. Instead his personality was such that he got quieter and less visibly agitated the more upset he got. When he got to the stage of statue-like immobility it would be a very good time to try to defuse the situation. He wasn't anywhere near that state, yet. To all appearances he might have been a tourist, relaxed and looking out the window with interest at the cluster of towers and skyscrapers that was the biggest city on Fargone. The planet was still mostly empty and this was the only city on it with tall buildings. The Fargoers seemed determined not to turn it into another Earth, rejecting almost ninety eight percent of the applicants for immigration.

  His daughter Lee was even angrier. She was a loose cannon liable to say anything to the Fargone military commander they were preparing to meet. She was precocious, utterly fearless, an easy thing to be at her age, but it was a cunning, calculating fearlessness instead of the usual teen inability to imagine her own death. At fourteen she was scarily capable of imagining six different paths to your sudden death, all the while smiling pleasantly at you, as you were busily occupied making nice-nice and patting the sweet little Earth girl on the head.

  Indeed, Gordon had seen her track a young Derf intruder through the woods back on Gordon's clan territory. She had followed him through a falling dusk in dense forest and prepared to defend Gordon from the interloper. Half a metric ton of young six limbed aggressive carnivore, equipped with a 20mm carbine, the pushy young cub had given Gordon a hard time, challenging his clan's territory, until matters had almost come to a head. Lee had changed the balance of that angry confrontation by the simple expedient of loudly clicking the safety off her pistol from slightly behind the fellow in the quiet woods. Derf have excellent hearing. The 'Oh shit' look on the kid's face was a precious memory Gordon held close.

  Gordon was Derf too after all, in fact he had fifty years experience and a couple hundred kilograms on the kid. It never seemed to have occurred to Lee he might not need her help. He hadn't. He was holding a handgun hidden from the insolent cub. In fact he'd love to remind her – that although the entire Red Tree/Human war was precipitated by her treatment on Earth, almost all of it was fought without her direct help... thank you very much.

  His own clan hadn't accepted his adoption of Lee without some controversy. But they did do the right thing in the end, even if it required a change of First Mother. At least it hadn't required removal by assassination to make new law that respected Lee's adaption, though it was a close thing.

  The United States of North America had then very stupidly broken their treaty over disapproving of his adoption of Lee. One cranky old prejudiced judge had taken her into protective custody when they were visiting Earth. The Nation of Red Tree did not take kindly to having their children kidnapped. The three Mothers took Red Tree to war without hesitation, though it had been over a thousand years since they'd made war on anyone. The clan would have declared war on every nation and world of all three races for one of their own. It was a matter of principle.

  Gordon looked down at his daughter with a smile. The snarling grin he got back was no less threatening for being on a fifty kilogram or so Human girl of fourteen years, who needed a few more years growth to push two meters, versus his own seven hundred kilos and four meter length.

  "We really don't want to jump right in with an adversarial conversation," Gordon pleaded. "Let's stay calm, ask some questions and find out what the real problem is."

  "Does this mean I shouldn't remind him that removal of obstructive officials by assassination is a perfectly normal procedure in Derf politics?"

  "It might be well not to mention it first. And if you didn't jam your thumb under your holster flap while saying it, as you did just now, it would add an air of genteel sincerity."

  "Why are we seeing someone from the Ministry of War?" Lee demanded. "This is just a commercial transaction and we're not asking credit. I saw the ridiculously huge ingots of silver in the hold. That's the basis of their currency and an absolute necessity for them to import since it is scarce in the Fargone system. So it's not like our kind of money isn't favored here."

  Gordon broke into song..."And I don't care if the money's no good. Just take what you need and leave the rest. But they should never, have taken, the very best..."

  "What's that?"

  "A song about an old war in North America. Money offered in war time is often worthless."

  "How can money be – entirely worthless?" Lee asked, scrunching her nose up.

  "When it's paper certificates and they won't, or can't, redeem it in metal," Gordon explained.

  "Oh, yo
u'd be a fool to take them then. That's a bad contract and fraud, not bad money."

  "Yes, but in the song he told the soldiers to take what they wanted, probably his food, because otherwise they'd probably just shoot him dead and steal it anyway."

  "Why didn't you buy smaller bars that would be easier to handle?" Lee wondered. "You could count out smaller bars to pay the exact price of whatever deal we work out. I never imagined they made ingots so big they came with a big eye for the crane to hook into cast right on top."

  "That's the cheapest way to buy silver. Those are ten thousand troy ounce ingots. Besides, I didn't want easy to handle. How would you go about stealing one of those?"

  Lee tipped her head to acknowledge the truth of that. They'd hardly fit in your pocket. A new suspicion occurred to her. "Do you think they'll try to run up the price because they know we're rich?"

  "No, if that was it, we'd still be meeting with the munitions manufacturer, or him and a Finance Minister. No, I'm afraid whatever the problem is, it is political in nature," he said, distastefully.

  "You think they may regret selling you the three radiation enhanced weapons back in the war?"

  "I doubt it, they haven't made any noises about buying back the two we haven't used."

  "I'm stumped what they want then," she said, frustrated. "I'm just going to sit back, listen for awhile and try to hear how he sounds, as much as what he says."

  "You are getting smarter about dealing with other Humans," he allowed, relieved somewhat. "Where is Clare?" he asked. The girl had been rescued at the same time Lee left Earth, and was the first Human near Lee's age that she had gotten to know well. They had been near inseparable while they tried to get everything ready for their voyage. He hadn't noticed her absence with everything else on his mind. Lee counted Clare a friend, although she seemed dominant over the older girl. Clare might be older but she'd been raised in a North American negative tax family in a rural area of northern Michigan, so she was much less experienced at everything than Lee, especially anything considered important off Earth.

  "She's with your recruiting people, trying to find some department she'll fit in. You see what you can pry out of this fellow. You're more intimidating than me."

  He wasn't so sure of that. The official meeting them would know Lee was here because she owned two thirds of the deep space explorer High Hopes, which was the lead vessel in their exploration fleet. She also owned the other DSE, The Champion William, their escort the heavy cruiser Retribution and a mixed bag of shuttles and fuel scoopers outright. All her's by inheritance or purchase. She had control of them despite being young, because she had assumed the semi-adulthood provided for in Derf law, which included property rights and the ability to form contracts, even if it wasn't the full mantle of adulthood that Earth law saw as all or nothing.

  Lee seemed content to allow Gordon to continue raising her in her intermediate state, with partial rights and responsibilities. She might own the ships and speak to their broad use to explore, but nobody was going to accept her in command on the flight deck with her meager experience. Neither could she sit as a clan Mother yet and Lee didn't find either lack particularly confining. Gordon owned a third of the High Hopes and was in undisputed command of their little fleet.

  The Mothers of Red Tree had decided to send the clan owned destroyer Sharp Claws along in exchange for shares in potential discoveries. It would carry six clan citizens who would be getting their first space experience, bringing their own shares home, as well as earning an equal share for each of the six paid to the clan, for the service of the ship.

  The High Hopes was the only ship not a war capture. It was the original North American flagged ship, in which Gordon and Lee had gone exploring with Lee's parents. That search had ended in both triumph and tragedy. They'd discovered a class A world, which left them beyond simply rich, but her parents had died while surveying the new world, Providence.

  The finder's fees and shares on a class A world where men could stand bare-faced meant they never had to worry about money for even extravagant living, but Lee being born to ship life, had tired of planets and planet bound people quickly. Rather than retire at ease on a planet she wished to continue the life of an explorer and felt there was even more need for bold exploration now. In her opinion the slowing spherical expansion of human space risked running up against another star faring race, more aggressively exploring deep, leaving Humans and their associated species with a foreshortened frontier and the loss of a lot of prime real estate. She wanted to put her new wealth to work pushing back the frontier. Her recruits shared that vision and hoped to all come back filthy rich on their ship shares.

  If their fleet did run into somebody out there, it seemed likely anyone they encountered would be more polite to a small fleet than a single ship. One ship you might arrest or destroy, four of them presented a much reduced chance of doing that successfully.

  Besides wanting his magazines full of the higher performance ship to ship weapons, Gordon wanted the DSEs fitted with an entire extra reactor and a Greaser – a gamma ray laser weapon that had much higher performance than mundane petawatt optical lasers. Greasers were so far unknown in civilian ships. Fortunately Fargone was not at all picky about weapons sales, and the DSEs had a lot of open holds and storage, being designed for long voyages with small crews.

  Both DSEs already had an externally mounted fuel mining systems and an extremely high velocity 'peashooters' a weapon that very accurately threw a rice grain sized projectile at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. The name was far easier in everyday usage than saying – "Give me a status report on the Asymmetric Pseudo Polarity Hypervelocity Traveling Wave Accelerator." There simply wasn't an acronym that fell off the tongue easily. Just one pellet from the device had converted an Earth orbital fort into expanding cloud of plasma during the war.

  The cab Lee and Gordon were riding in left the fast lanes and drifted down an exit ramp into the heart of the Fargone government campus. A cluster of tall building rose around them like you'd expect in smaller Earth cities with just a couple million people. Landing was the biggest city on Fargone. Fargone had a policy which limited the growth of cities as much as possible. Nobody stopped them to check identities or inspect the vehicle. It was one of the Fargoer's own automated limos and it would have never been allowed down the ramp if the passengers didn't have business here.

  The open cart the father and daughter transferred to just inside the building entry however, had a driver. He gave them a gracious bow and indicated it was his pleasure to take them to Admiral Hawking, the head of Fargone Space Forces. The driver's name tag indicated he was Propensity Jones, the Fargoers being given to a different custom in names than Earth Humans.

  At least they'd be dealing with a spacer who understood what they were doing. Nobody suggested Lee hand over her pistol. As for Gordon, he was much harder to disarm. Even without the ritual ax or modern pistol on his belt, a Derf could make his way through the interior of most human buildings by creating expedient doorways bare handed.

  The cart delivered Lee and Gordon right to the Admiral's door and they were not trifled with by any silly Earth games such as making them wait to show status. The Admiral stood to greet them, letting them see he wore canvas cargo shorts under what Gordon would have called a golf shirt. Fargoers were not much given to showy symbols of authority. He only wore a medallion of rank around his neck on a stout chain and would have expected quick obedience and respect if he were otherwise buck naked.

  "Miss Anderson, Mr. Gordon," he bowed as deeply as their driver had. He addressed and looked at Lee first, so he knew what the deal was here. That was one less thing where they could bullshit him. His name plate on his desk said Admiral Serendipity Duvochek Hawking. Serendipity was a very favored given name for both sexes on Fargone.

  Laying on his desk was a hammer, the square head of which was about three kilo of unpolished steel. The thick handle was carved of a dark native wood to be grippy and there was a
braided rawhide lanyard a half meter long hanging from the handle. It was Fargone's second highest military award. Gordon had told Lee a few things he's researched about the Admiral when they were asked to this meeting, and explained they would never meet a recipient of the highest award, because it was only given posthumously.

  "It is my custom to have a break for coffee and snacks about this hour of the morning," Serendipity explained. "Would you join me in a cup and help me regulate my blood sugar and retain my good humor this morning?"

  Gordon allowed he'd take a cup with a little honey or brandy. Lee suggested a mug with a shot of bourbon would be welcome. If serving alcohol to a fourteen year old at ten in the morning bothered him at all, the admiral never let a twitch or hesitation cross his face. Maybe that was normal here for all she knew. On Earth most people would have been horrified as it was increasingly Puritanical. The age to buy alcohol in North America had been twenty-four for some time now.

  "I can see written on your faces that you are unhappy. Fargone put a roadblock in your supply plans. We are not inflexible about it, or we wouldn't be meeting here to discuss it."

  "Not a roadblock," Gordon assured him with a dismissive little gesture. "A speed bump at most. We have plenty of copies of the ship to ship weapons. We can simply go to New Japan to have them copied. If anything New Japan is ahead of Fargone on rapid prototyping and fabrication. We had major battle damage during the war, a hole burned straight through our ship, repaired there in only four days. Fargone may have the edge at present in actually improving on a design, but we are willing to forego that slight advantage to get what we need. Also, in the future we won't be sharing such captured designs with Fargone if you don't show reciprocity, so I expect the edge on improvements will shift over to New Japan if they are the opener, more accommodating society. Which is an ironic shift, given their long held reputation for xenophobia."

  "But a supply switch would be an unnecessary delay. You'd have to keep your crews on hold drawing salary for another six weeks or so plus transit time to deal with New Japan."