Island Worlds (12 page)

"About two months. Our acceleration is about one-hundredth-gee, not even enough to feel."

"Sounds slow," Thor said doubtfully, "but my specialty is environment engineering, not flight dynamics."

"It is slow," Shaw said, "but in about three days, we'll be doing around thirty kilometers per second, which is about the speed at which the Earth orbits the Sun. In a month, when we start deceleration phase, we'll have hit a heliocentric velocity well in excess of what's needed to escape the solar system. If we were to just keep on going, we'd clear Neptune and Pluto eventually and disappear into interstellar space, just like all the probes." There was a wistful note in his voice. Thor figured Shaw would really like to try it. The hatch opened and Shaw went through, closely followed by Thor.

A shaven-headed woman whose scalp was painted with a spiral galaxy looked up from a bank of readout screens. "Everything's in order, Boss. Good reaction mass this trip."

"Ought to be," Shaw said. "I told Mboya I'd have his skin made into a coverall if he sent up a batch of gravel like last time."

"This ship is a duster?" Thor said.

"That's right. Old-fashioned, but it works." He pointed to a humped form covered by a molded metal housing. "That's the vaporizer. It turns angstrom-sized dust into ionized atoms. That's where that crook Mboya screwed me last time. Some of that dust he sent up was so coarse you could see individual grains with a microscope. Gave us hell on the trip out to the Belt."

"Wouldn't a hydrogen ion drive engine be more efficient?" Thor asked. "The charge-to-mass ratio of hydrogen ions is much higher than rock dust ions."

"Sure it'd be better," Shaw said, "if you can pay for it. Our cargoes aren't in that big a rush. You don't see hydrogen drive ships much except for military craft or luxury passenger liners. They carry along a tank of liquid hydrogen." He chuckled ruefully. "Hell of a thing, isn't it?"

"How so?" Thor asked.

"Hydrogen is the most abundant element in interplanetary space, but it's pretty diffuse. The only concentrated source is water, which is too precious to use for fuel. There's plenty of rock, though. We pick up dust at each end of a voyage."

"When do we leave lunar orbit?" Thor asked. There was still a slight chance of being picked up by Emigration agents. He was anxious to get away.

The woman with the tattooed head looked at him in pitying disgust. "We started fifteen minutes ago."

"A continuous-boost ship doesn't work quite like the skyrockets that take off from Earth," Shaw said. "When we left the station, we moved out at a slow walk. We're up to a steady run, and accelerating all the time. We'll get there."

Thor reddened slightly. He knew all this, but it was another thing to be actually experiencing it. In spite of himself, he still expected violent acceleration, noise, flashing lights and broadcast warnings to strap in.

The ship had several "holds," actually just enormous, detachable cylinders adapted to carry cargo or passengers. Some of these were sealed and Shaw was reluctant to reveal what was in them. For an unabashed smuggler, that suggested to Thor that some things were unacceptable, even in the freewheeling society of the space settlers. Drive, holds and control were all in separate modules, connected by struts and passage tunnels. It was a common system for ships never intended to make planetfall, allowing great flexibility of size and function. "Also," Shaw told Thor with a sharklike grin, "it makes it very difficult to keep up with how many and what type of ships are out here. If the authorities were looking for Spartacus, I'd break her up and rearrange her modules with other ships. You can have as many ships as you have command and drive modules."

"It must be a nightmare for customs authorities," Thor observed.

"We do our humble best. Hijacked ships are never found again because they're broken up and utilized or sold off as modules. You'll have to go to a ship sale some time. There's no pirate hangout like in the holos. Word just gets passed that there's going to be ship hardware for sale and everybody just sort of congregates at a certain set of coordinates that all the bartenders seem to know about. I've seen whole government military vessels broken up and sold, weaponry and all."

"Military!" Thor said, aghast. "I thought that was supposed to be impossible. Are there hijackers powerful enough to attack a Space Service ship?"

"Who attacks?" Shaw said. "Usually, it's just a matter of paying someone to look the other way. The degree of corruption in the higher echelons of the military is immense and has increased tremendously in the last fifteen years. It was historically inevitable. I'll let you read my monograph on the subject. There are other ways that service vessels make it onto the black market. Sometimes, a whole crew will decide to take early retirement from the service and bring their ship along with them."

"I think that society out there will be quite different from what I anticipated," Thor mused.

"I can guarantee it," Shaw said.

"In the meantime, what's there to do to pass the next two months?" Thor glanced through the small viewport set in a wall of the control module. Earth and the Moon were there, but soon they would be gone and there would be nothing to look at but a starscape that would soon become monotonous.

"You're looking at the best of the sightseeing now," Shaw said. "Otherwise, you can read. This ship has an extensive library, which is true of few of them. There are holos if that's to your taste. There are limited exercise facilities, which I suggest you use daily or your muscles will start deteriorating soon. And you're going to need them if you go into any of the mining trades. People make the mistake of thinking that zero-g means that no effort is required for anything. Otherwise, there's always the spacer's religion."

"What's that?" Thor asked.

"Poker."

The poker table was riveted to the "floor" of the small recreation room. No stools were required, but the players could stay in place by means of the snap hooks on short cords set at intervals around the circumference of the table. These could be fastened to metal rings on the travelers' coveralls. Thor had already had several such rings sewn to his own outfit.

Around them, a few passengers were boredly working out with spring-loaded exercise apparatus. There were five around the table. Besides Thor and Shaw, there was a baldheaded, muscular man named Jake, a fat man called Slim, and a nondescript man named, appropriately, Joe. All three were heavy construction workers, or claimed to be.

The cards were slightly magnetized, as were the chips, which were bought with uranium-backed Avalonian currency. Thor recognized the other three from the dining facility. They seemed to hang around together much of the time. Thor had acquired the reputation of being a shrewd poker player at college, but he realized that these men played the game far more seriously than any bunch of students. From habit, Thor played a cautious game, keeping close track of the mathematical odds, remembering every card shown. After four hours of play, he noticed that the odds stayed with Jake with unmathematical consistency, especially as the pots got larger.

They had begun with petty stakes, and there had been other players at first, and they had played five-card stud. When the number dropped to six, they had switched to five-card draw. The sixth player had dropped out when the stakes had risen above her limit.

Thor began to feel distinctly uneasy about Jake's game.

He was winning consistently when Thor's hand was a good one. From the way Shaw had been betting, his hands had been good ones, too. Slim and Joe had kept in, raising the bets, then folding or losing to Jake. They seemed oddly unperturbed about the substantial sums they were losing. Thor was sure of the collusion but he didn't know how to prove it, or what to do about it if he could prove it.

Jake was dealing. Shaw, at Jake's right, cut the cards and the big man picked up the deck, his thick, working-man's hands flicking out the cards with incongruous delicacy. Thor had three kings in his first hand, discarded a six and a ten and drew a pair of jacks. Jake had discarded one and drawn another, but left his hand on the table, not bothering to look at it. Joe and Slim made heavy bets and Jake looked at Thor. "You in, friend?"

Ordinarily, he would have bet heavily on a full house, but pat hands seemed jinxed in this game. Still, there was something different in this hand. It was like ozone in the air and he decided it had something to do with Shaw's attitude. He pushed two hundred dollars worth of chips forward. The uranium-backed Avalonian currency was worth more than fifty times the equivalent in degraded U.S. currency. "I'm in."

Shaw was already shoving his chips forward. "So am I." Jake picked up his cards. "And I'll raise you—" He fanned the cards and his perpetual grin faltered as he looked at them. "No, guess I'll fold." He had made a quick recovery, but Thor had caught the surprise. As Jake tried to toss his hand among the discards, Shaw's hand clamped around his wrist.

"The reason you didn't fill your hand," Shaw said conversationally, "is that I slipped a card on the bottom of the deck when I cut."

Jake looked at him levelly. "You calling me a bottom dealer?"

"If there's a nine of diamonds in that hand, you sure as hell are." He twisted the imprisoned wrist and the offending cards lay face-up on the table: a four, five, six and seven of spades, and a nine of diamonds. Shaw turned the remainder of the deck bottom-up. The bottom card was an eight of spades. "That sure would have beaten my king-high straight. Would've beaten Thor's no doubt high hand, too. What is it, Thor? Flush?"

"Full house," Thor answered, wondering where this was going to lead. He didn't have to wonder long.

"If you and these two flunkies are going to cheat," Shaw said, "you'd better stick to amateurs. I caught your system by the third hand."

Jake lashed out with a powerful punch that caught Shaw high on the cheekbone, but Shaw had released Jake's left wrist and the punch had little effect in zero-g, merely pushing both men apart. In a well-practiced move, Shaw released the hook that tethered him to the table, grabbed Jake's still outstretched right forearm with his left hand, and delivered a vicious blow to Jake's left temple, using only the first two knuckles of his right fist. With the two men thus firmly anchored together, the blow was as effective as in a one-g environment. Jake's body went limp, then the minuscule acceleration caused it to begin settling almost imperceptibly toward the floor. The brief, brutal fight had lasted perhaps two seconds.

Joe and Slim released their tethers as Shaw pushed himself back from the table. He hit the wall feet-first, with knees bent, and launched himself at Joe, aiming for his face. In midair, Shaw dexterously somersaulted and kicked Joe in the solar plexus. Shaw had no weight, but mass remains constant and the kick landed with something near the force it would have had at one-g. Joe, braced for a high attack, folded double around Shaw's foot and slammed against the padded wall to his rear.

Thor had no time to admire Shaw's virtuosity. With no warning, Slim wrapped his hands around Thor's throat and commenced to squeeze. Thor couldn't figure out why the fat man was attacking him, but decided to speculate later. He applied a flat-palmed
shomen-ate
against Slim's chin while sweeping Slim's left leg with his own right. Slim's throat-grip broke, but instead of falling back on his head, as he would have on Earth, he merely floated away. Neither of their ensuing punches and kicks had any effect, either. Thor tried a few throws with no effect besides tossing himself in confusing directions. He had never appreciated how important gravity was to classical grappling and striking.

Slim threw a punch and Thor grabbed the wrist and tried to apply a joint-locking technique. Leverage, at least, should work in zero-g. Not so. As he floated across the room to bump into an exercising passenger, Thor had leisure to reflect upon the words of Archimedes upon discovering the mechanical advantage of the lever: "Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth!" Thor had the leverage, but he had no place to stand. All those years in the
dojo
, he thought. Wasted.

Anchorage was the key, he thought as he went back in. Shaw's first punch had been effective because he had locked his body and his opponent's together while delivering the blow. This time, when he caught Slim's wrist, he pulled himself in, behind Slim's back. Like a wrestler, he wrapped his legs around the fat midsection and applied a
hadaka-jime
, or "naked choke" with his arms. After a few seconds of futile struggling, Slim was unconscious, the blood supply to his brain cut off. Thor released him before any permanent damage could be done.

"Not bad, for a beginner," Shaw said. He was idly chatting with a crewman, pointing out the subtleties of the combat.

"Where were you?" Thor said indignantly. "You started this."

"Me?" Shaw's eyes went wide with hurt innocence. "They were cheating. I couldn't let them get away with it."

"Then why didn't you give me a hand?" Thor said.

"There was only one after you," Shaw pointed out reasonably. "You have to learn to take care of yourself. Count your blessings, it could have been somebody far more dangerous than that clown."

The three men were coming around. "I'm fining you three for cheating at cards and losing a fight despite a three-to-two advantage. The usual penalty for gross incompetence out here is death, but I'll let you off easy and fine you—" he counted all the chips on the table "—thirty-two hundred Avdollars. Now get out of here."

Sullenly the three made their way out. As Slim was leaving, Thor said, "Hey, wait a minute. Why did you attack me? I wasn't doing anything."

"Hell," Slim said with an upside-down shrug, "you was there, wasn't you?"

"Good enough reason," Shaw observed.

"Some of those chips are mine," Thor protested.

"That's your fee for the freefall combat lesson. I'll work out with you daily from now on, no charge."

"Thanks," Thor said, "it looks like I'll need to know how it's done. But, why are you taking me under your wing? I'm just another paying passenger."