The End of All Things (2 page)

I took the hand. “Thank you, sir. Glad to be aboard.”

*   *   *

I found Hart a half hour later, on the other side of Phoenix Station, in a reception for his boss, Ambassador Abumwe.

“She got the Meritorious Service Award,” Hart said. He was on his second glass of spiked punch and he was never one who held his alcohol very well, so he was on his way to being a little tipsy. He was also dressed in a formal diplomatic uniform. I thought it made him look like a doorman. But then I had just spent the better part of the year in sweatpants, so who the hell was I to say.

“What did she do that was meritorious?” I asked.

“She kept her entire staff alive while Earth Station was being attacked, for starters,” Hart said. “You heard about Earth Station?”

I nodded. The Colonial Union was pretty good at keeping bad news from reaching the civilians of the colonies, but some pieces of news are harder to hide than others. For example, the news that the Earth’s sole space station was destroyed by unknown terrorists, killing thousands including the cream of the Earth’s diplomatic corps, and that the Earth blamed the Colonial Union for the attack and severed all diplomatic and economic ties.

Yeah, that one was a little hard to hide.

The Colonial Union’s official story about it, said only that it had been a terrorist attack; the rest of it I had filled in from former shipmates and friends like Hart. When you live at the bottom of a gravity well, you only tend to hear the official story. The people who actually move between the stars, on the other hand, hear a lot more. It’s hard to sell the official story to people who can see things for themselves.

“Some people saved themselves,” said Harry Wilson, a friend of Hart’s who he’d just introduced to me. Wilson was a member of the Colonial Defense Forces; his green skin gave him away. That and the fact that he looked the same age as my kid brother, but was probably something like 120 years old. Having a genetically modified, not-quite-human body had certain advantages, as long as you didn’t mind being the same color as guacamole. “Your friend Hart here, for example. He got himself to an escape pod and ditched from Earth Station as it was literally blowing up around him.”

“A slight exaggeration,” Hart said.

“No, it actually was literally blowing up around you,” Wilson said.

Hart waved him off and looked back over to me. “Harry’s making it sound more dramatic than it was.”

“It sounds pretty dramatic,” I admitted.

“Space station
blowing up around him,
” Wilson said again, emphasizing the last part.

“I was unconscious for most of the trip down to Earth,” Hart said. “I think that’s probably a good thing.”

I nodded toward Ambassador Abumwe, who I recognized from pictures, and who was on the other side of the reception hall, shaking hands with well-wishers in a receiving line. “How was the ceremony?”

“Painful,” Wilson said.

“It was all right,” Hart said.

“
Painful,
” Wilson repeated. “The guy who gave out the medal—”

“Assistant Secretary of State Tyson Ocampo,” Hart said.

“—was a fatuous gasbag,” Wilson continued. “I’ve met a lot of people in the diplomatic corps who were in love with the sound of their own voice, but this guy. He and his voice should just get a room.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Hart said to me.

“You saw Abumwe’s face while that dude was going on,” Wilson said, to Hart.

“Ocampo,” Hart said, clearly pained that the assistant secretary of state was being referred to as “that dude.” “The number two man in the department. And there was nothing going on with her face,” Hart said.

“She was definitely wearing her ‘please shut the hell up,’ face,” Wilson said, to me. “Trust me, I have seen it many times.”

I looked over to Hart. “It’s true,” he said. “Harry has seen the ambassador’s ‘shut up’ face more than most.”

“Speak of the devil,” Wilson said, and motioned slightly with his head. “Look who’s coming this way.” I glanced over and saw a middle-aged man in a resplendent Colonial Union diplomatic uniform, followed by a young woman, heading our direction.

“The fatuous gasbag?” I asked.

“Secretary
Ocampo,
” Hart said, emphatically.

“Same thing,” Wilson said.

“Gentlemen,” Ocampo said, coming up to us.

“Hello, Secretary Ocampo,” Wilson said, very smoothly, and I thought I saw Hart relax maybe a tiny bit. “What may we do for you, sir?”

“Well, since you’re standing between me and the punch, perhaps you would be so kind as to get me a cup,” he said.

“Let me get that for you,” Hart said, and nearly dropped his own glass in the process.

“Thank you,” Ocampo said. “Schmidt, yes? One of Abumwe’s people.” He then turned to Wilson. “And you are?”

“Lieutenant Harry Wilson.”

“Really,” Ocampo said, and sounded impressed. “You’re the one who saved the daughter of the secretary of state of the United States when Earth Station was destroyed.”

“Danielle Lowen,” Wilson said. “And yes. She’s a diplomat in her own right, of course.”

“Of course,” Ocampo said. “But the fact that she’s Secretary Lowen’s daughter didn’t hurt. It’s one reason why the U.S. is one of the few countries on Earth that will speak to the Colonial Union in any capacity.”

“I’m happy to be useful, sir,” Wilson said. Hart handed him his punch.

“Thank you,” Ocampo said, to Hart, and then turned his attention back to Wilson. “I understand you also skydived from Earth Station all the way down to Earth with Miss Lowen.”

“That’s correct, sir,” Wilson said.

“That must have been some experience.”

“I mostly remember trying not to go ‘splat’ at the end of it.”

“Of course,” Ocampo said. He turned to me next, registering my lack of dress uniform and the crew bag at my feet, and waited for me to identify myself.

“Rafe Daquin,” I said, taking the hint. “I’m crashing the party, sir.”

“He’s a friend of mine who happened to be on station,” Hart said. “He’s a pilot on a trade ship.”

“Oh,” Ocampo said. “Which one?”

“The
Chandler,
” I said.

“Isn’t that interesting,” Ocampo said. “I’ve booked passage on the
Chandler
.”

“You have?” I asked.

“Yes. It’s been a few years since I’ve taken a vacation and I decided to take a month to hike the Connecticut mountains on Huckleberry. That’s the
Chandler
’s next destination, unless I’m mistaken,” Ocampo said.

“You could just take a department ship, I would think,” I said.

Ocampo smiled. “It would look bad to commandeer a State Department ship as a personal taxi, I’m afraid. As I understand it the
Chandler
lets out a couple of staterooms for passengers. I and Vera here,” he nodded toward his assistant, “have taken them. How are they?”

“The staterooms?” I asked. Ocampo nodded. “I’m not sure.”

“Rafe has just been hired as of about an hour ago,” Hart said. “He hasn’t even been on the ship yet. He’s taking a shuttle over in about an hour.”

“That’s the same shuttle you’ll be on, sir,” Vera said to Ocampo.

“So we’ll experience it for the first time together,” the secretary said, to me.

“I suppose that’s true,” I said. “If you would like I would be happy to escort you and your assistant to the shuttle gate, when you’re ready to depart.”

“Thank you, I’d appreciate that,” Ocampo said. “I’ll have Vera tell you when we’re ready. Until then, gentlemen.” He nodded and wandered off with his punch, Vera following behind.

“Very diplomatic,” Wilson said to me, once he was gone.

“You jumped out of an exploding space station?” I said to him, changing the subject.

“It wasn’t exploding that much when I jumped,” Wilson said.

“And you got out in an escape pod just in time,” I said to Hart. “I’m clearly in the wrong line of space travel for excitement.”

“Trust me,” Wilson said. “You don’t want that much excitement.”

*   *   *

The
Chandler,
as advertised, was not exciting.

But it’s not supposed to be. I said before that the
Chandler
had blocked out a triangle run. That means that you have three destinations, all of which want something that’s made and exported on the previous planet. So, for example, Huckleberry is a colony that’s largely agrarian—a large percentage of the land mass there is in a temperate zone that’s great for human crops. We take things like wheat, corn, and gaalfruit and a few other crops and take them to Erie. Erie colonists pay a premium for Huckleberry agricultural products, because, I don’t know, I think they think they’re healthier or something. Whatever reason, they want ’em so we take them there. In return we load up on all sorts of rare earth metals, which Erie has lots of.

We take those to Phoenix, which is the center of high-technology manufacturing for the Colonial Union. And from there, we get things like medical scanners and PDAs and everything else it’s cheaper to mass produce and ship than try to put together yourselves in a home printer, and take those to Huckleberry, whose technology manufacturing base is pretty small. Wash, rinse, repeat. As long as you’re working the triangle in the right direction, you’ll get rich.

But it’s not exciting, for whatever definition of “exciting” you want to have. These three colonies are well established and protected; Huckleberry’s the youngest and it’s nearly a century old at this point, and Phoenix is the oldest and best defended of any of the Colonial Union planets. So you’re not exploring new worlds by trading there. You’re unlikely to run into pirates or other bad people. You’re not meeting strange new aliens, or really any aliens at all. You’re shipping food, ore, and gadgets. This isn’t the romance of space. This is you and space in a nice, comfortable rut.

But again, I didn’t give a crap about any of that. I’d seen enough of space and had the occasional bit of excitement; when I was on the
Baikal,
we were pursued for four days by pirates and eventually had to ditch our cargo. They don’t chase you anymore when you do that because then you have nothing they want. Usually. Sometimes when you ditch your cargo they get pissed off and then try to send a missile into your engines to register their displeasure.

So, yeah. As Harry Wilson suggested, excitement can be overrated.

Anyway, right now I didn’t want exciting. What I wanted was to work. If that meant babysitting the
Chandler
’s navigational system while it crunched data for a run that it had done a thousand times before, that was fine by me. At the end of the stint I’d have the blackball off my career. That was also fine by me.

The
Chandler
itself was your basic cargo hauler, which is to say a former Colonial Defense Forces frigate, repurposed for cargo and trade. There were purpose-built cargo haulers, of course, but they were expensive and tended to be built and used by large shipping lines. The
Chandler
was the sole ship owned by its small consortium of owners. They got the obsolete frigate that became the
Chandler
at an auction.

When I did my research of the
Chandler
before the interview (always do your research; I didn’t with the
Lastan Falls
and it cost me), I saw pictures of the frigate at the auction, where it was sold “as-is.” Somewhere along the way it had gotten the living crap beat out of it. But refurbished, it had been doing its run for almost two decades. I figured it wouldn’t accidentally spill me into space.

I took the shuttle ride with Secretary Ocampo and his aide (whose last name I finally learned was Briggs; that came from the crew and passenger manifest, not from the secretary), and said good-bye to them at the ship. Then I reported to Han and my immediate boss, First Pilot Clarine Bolduc, and then to Quartermaster Seidel, who assigned me quarters. “You’re in luck,” she said. “You get private quarters. At least until we hit Erie, when we take on some new crew. Then you’ll get two roommates. Enjoy your privacy while you can.”

I went to my quarters and they were the size of a broom closet. Technically you could fit three people in it. But you wouldn’t want to close the door or you’d run out of oxygen. I got to pick my bunk, though, so I had that going for me.

At evening mess Bolduc introduced me around to the other officers and department heads.

“You’re not going to be running any scams in your spare time?” asked Chieko Tellez, who was assistant cargo chief, as I sat down with my tray.

“I did a thorough background check,” Han said, to her. “He’s clean.”

“I’m joking,” Tellez said, to Han. She turned back to me. “You know about the guy you’re replacing, right?”

“I heard a little about it,” I said.

“A shame,” Tellez said. “He was a nice guy.”

“As long as you’re willing to overlook corruption, graft, and bigamy,” Bolduc said.

“He never did any of that to me, and that’s what really counts,” Tellez said, and then glanced over at me, smiling.

“I can’t tell whether you’re joking or not,” I admitted.

“Chieko is never not joking,” Bolduc said. “And now you know.”

“Some of us like a little humor,” Tellez said, to Bolduc.

“Joking is not the same thing as humor,” Bolduc said.

“Hmph,” Tellez said. It didn’t look like she was particularly put out by the comment. I figured she and Bolduc ribbed each other on a frequent basis, which was not a bad thing. Officers who got on okay were a sign of a happy ship.

Tellez turned her attention back to me. “You came over on the shuttle with those State Department mucky-mucks, right?”

“I did,” I said.

“Did they say why they were on the ship?”

“Secretary Ocampo is going on vacation on Huckleberry,” I said. “We’re headed that way so he and his aide rented a couple of spare staterooms.”

“If I were him I would have just taken a department ship,” Bolduc said.

“He said it wouldn’t look very good if he did,” I said.

“I’m sure he’s actually worried about that,” Bolduc said.

“Seidel said that Ocampo told her that he wanted to travel inconspicuously and without having to feel like he was dragging his title around,” Han said.