A Working of Stars Read Online Free PDF

family had left a hundred years ago.
    With the chart finally stabilized, he went to work setting up the Fire for emergence from the Void. The marker he’d asked for was a deep one, out at the farther limits of Eraasi’s normal-space travel lanes. He’d have a long crawl past the outer planets, doing it that way, but he wasn’t hauling perishable cargo and safety was better than speed.
    For a good enough contract, sure, he’d pop out of the Void close in over Eraasi, and risk having one of the big fleet-families take him for an unlawful intruder and respond with force. He’d gotten his latest contract through the sus-Dariv, and Fire-on-the-Hilltops was listed with their fleet for the duration of the current voyage, but that wouldn’t help much if a trigger-happy guardship captain decided not to bother with asking for his papers.
    All the Fire had aboard this time was mixed-lot bulk cargo: transport, not trade, most of it, and not big enough to warrant a fleet-family’s direct attention. Independents like Len handled the small jobs, and the urgent ones that couldn’t wait for a convoy or a fleet courier, but the star-lords would come down hard on any pilot they suspected of working without a contract—“in the grey,” as the slang term had it.
    “Hard times, old girl,” Len said to the Fire , as the ship-mind chewed its laborious way through the calculations for normal-space emergence. “Hard times. You and I, we were born too late.”
    There had been a time, not more than a generation or so ago, when a family working in the grey could gather enough ships (by trade or purchase or outright capture) to put a syn - or even a sus - in front of their name and have it stick. Len had daydreamed of it himself in his boyhood, back when he was the space-happy one among all the cousins. He’d pictured himself taking the family out of the groundside shipping and transportation business and into the stars, making them syn-Irao and star-lords and a fleet-family in Hanilat. Then he grew up, of course, and understood that those days were gone.
    He took the figures the ship-mind ground out for him and entered the series of commands that would pass them to the Fire’s navigational console. “Emergence in five,” he said, and keyed in the final sequence. There was only the ship-mind to hear him, but he’d learned to observe the formalities during his training days, when he’d served as hired crew aboard fleet-family ships.
    A little while later he felt the disquieting inner sensation of Void-emergence pass through him like an oily wave. The distinctive hum and vibration of the Fire’s passage changed in response. Even if he’d somehow managed to sleep through the emergence, he would have known, by the sound and by the feel of the ship around him, that Fire-on-the-Hilltops was moving through normal space.
    It was eight hours before he heard the distress signal. He had the Fire’s search-and-scan routines set to a tripwire sensitivity these days—a lowly contract-captain couldn’t be too careful. They repaid him this time with a clamoring alarm and, when he put the signal onto ship’s audio, a voice:
    “This is sus-Dariv’s Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms, ” it said, and the synthesized clarity of its pitch and elocution raised up all the fine hairs on the back of Len’s neck. The only thing in space with a voice like that was a ship-mind, and if the ship-mind alone remained able to put out a signal, something very bad had happened aboard Garden - of-Fair-Blossoms “If you are receiving this transmission, know that we are in distress and call for aid. We beg of you, make all speed to our location at—” There followed a warbling noise that Len recognized as the Garden’s ship-mind transmitting its reference coordinates directly to the ship-mind of whatever vessel might be listening. Then there was a pause, and the message started all over again.
    Len hit the Transmit button on the Fire’s communications board.