Worlds in Collision (43 page)

Krulmadden was more than just another Orion pirate. He was the worst kind: an outlaw whose hideous crime had been condemned on each world of the Federation and was believed to have been forced into extinction. But perhaps evil was more powerful than even the Federation had realized. Because Shipmaster Krulmadden was a slaver.

And now,
Chekov thought in horror.
So are we.

Kirk remembered the
Farragut,
the first real ship he had served on—a
Constitution
-class starship like the
Enterprise.
He had been a green lieutenant and the
Farragut
was to be his first deep-space mission. The endless week between receiving his orders and finally arriving aboard her had been filled with his dreams of the new life of exploration and excitement that awaited him: first contact with alien worlds, going eye-to-eye with the Klingons, saving colonies, securing the frontiers. Then Kirk had run straight into what his father disparagingly called the “new Starfleet” and had spent his first six months managing supply crates in the
Farragut'
s cargo bay. He found it somehow fitting that he had returned there now, in spirit, if not in fact.

Surprised that he had retained so much of an almost fifteen-year-old skill, Kirk deftly managed the controls of a Mark IV Tractor Web to receive, sort, and secure the rapid stream of cargo crates being loaded onto the freighter, SS
Ian Shelton.
It helped that the old Mark IV was virtually identical to the one he had operated on the
Farragut.
His familiarity with it was how he had managed to swing the job of stevedore in the first place, jockeying the transfer of cargo from Intrator II's commercial spacedock to the freighter which was stationkeeping 200 meters away.

As Kirk worked the controls, the voice of the Orbital Transfer Controller came over the communicator link on the Mark IV's console. “How are you doing in there,
Shelton?”

“All conditions are nom—uh, everything's okay so far.” Kirk still had to concentrate to keep from falling into the old patterns of speech. He wasn't looking forward to another unveiling as had happened with the rockriggers, despite his beard and longer hair, even though he knew it was inevitable. He had been surprised to find out how small a universe it was within the boundaries of Federation space.

“Sure you don't need a break in the flow to sort things out?”

“Keep 'em coming,” Kirk said.

He could hear the grin in the Controller's voice. “Okay, hotshot, let's see if we can go for a new record.”

The crates began floating through the open cargo-bay doors of the
Ian Shelton
at ten-second intervals, almost twice their previous rate. They were standard, interstellar modular crates whose polyhedron-angled sides were designed to prevent shifting during transport and which were just as easy to handle in microgee or with tractor webs as the less stable, cube-shaped crates still used for strictly planetside shipment.

“Hey,
Shelton,”
the Controller asked jovially, “sure you don't want us to slow it down to give the computer a chance to take over?”

“Slow it down?” Kirk asked, trying to sound puzzled. “I'm still waiting for you to speed it up.”

The Mark IV's main projectors were arranged around the cargo-bay opening and along one bulkhead to produce a three-dimensional grid of tractor beams through which the crates moved. An inertial feedback circuit told Kirk the mass of each crate as the web acquired it so he could spread the density of the cargo throughout the hold as the crates were stacked, to keep the freighter's lines of thrust balanced. If the cargo had been completely uniform, or each crate had been outfitted with a reliable transponder to identify its contents, or there had been enough time for a sensor system to evaluate the crates for a computer that could stack them a thousand different ways in memory as it searched for the most stable order, then Kirk's job could have been automated. But the real world of interstellar trade was not so orderly, so the almost infinite flexibility of a living mind was required. Along with absolutely no distractions.

Kirk involuntarily tensed when he heard the cargo-bay control room doors slide open behind him. Keeping a mental picture of the positions and masses of almost sixty crates in his mind at once as he tried to stack old ones at a rate exceeding the arrival of new ones, he didn't dare turn around to see who it was. A split second of hesitation on his part could lead to crate collision, cargo loss, and even hull damage.
Why do I get myself into these situations?
Kirk asked himself. It was one thing to go all out when the safety of his crew or his ship had depended on it. But for a ten-credit-an-hour job?

“Don't look up,” a voice behind Kirk said. It was Anne Gauvreau, the ship's captain and his employer of the day. From the corner of his eye, he saw her standing by the console to look through the cargo-bay viewport. Then he heard her whistle.

“When Control said we were taking on cargo at one per ten, I thought they were joking.”

Kirk made a noncommittal noise. His board showed the rate was already up to one crate every eight seconds. As far as he could see, in less than a minute there were going to be only two ways out. The first was to start stacking the crates without worrying about their mass. There was a possibility that the stacking density might balance out by chance, but if it didn't, then he'd be personally responsible for keeping the freighter in orbit for hours while he reshuffled the cargo.

The board showed a shipping rate of one per seven and Kirk knew he had reached his limit. No matter how uncomfortable he found the decision, he had to choose the second way out. The bottom line was that it wasn't his ship. He had to admit defeat.
It'
s
only a job,
he told himself. He wasn't convinced.

“Come in, Control,” Kirk called out to the communicator.

“Give us a break,
Shelton.
You don't have to rub it in.”

Kirk didn't answer. He hadn't expected that reply. And then he saw that no new crates were floating into the bay, though the manifest screen indicated there were still several hundred to load.

Kirk took the chance. “Orbital Transfer Control: What seems to be the trouble out there?”

The Controller took his time answering. “Uh, seems we got a burned-out impeller coil at the transfer bay,
Shelton.”

Because he wasn't on an image link, Kirk smiled. Now he remembered why he got himself into these situations.

Gauvreau leaned forward to the console's communicator. “Orbital Transfer Control, Captain Gauvreau here. Tell me, do you happen to know why the coil burned out…?”

The Controller was surprisingly contrite. “Because we couldn't keep up with the rate at which you were receiving cargo.”

Gauvreau tapped her fingers on the console. “If I'm not out of here in two and a half hours, the business office is going to owe me some hefty penalties.”

“We'll get back to you when the repairs are finished,” the Controller said glumly.

Kirk heard the channel click off. He forced the smile from his face and looked up at Gauvreau with earnest concern. For a moment the freighter's captain had an expression of stern concentration. “Offhand, Leonard, I'd say you were one lucky bastard.” Then she laughed and Kirk joined her.

“So what do you figure?” Gauvreau asked once the tension of the near-disaster in the cargo bay had been dissipated. “I'd say you were about two more seconds away from a chain-reaction pile-up that would have sent crates through the wall of the ship.”

“Well, not exactly two seconds,” Kirk began.

“Let me rephrase that,” Gauvreau interrupted. “Through the wall of
my
ship.”

Kirk tried to keep the smile from his face but had little success. “When I called Control, that's when I was going to…admit defeat and have them shut down the stream.”

“One per eight on a Mark IV,” Gauvreau said, shaking her head. She looked back out through the viewport. “You know, with the penalties they're liable for if I don't break orbit on schedule, they're going to be rushing that impeller repair. So I'd take care of that holding pattern you've got in there while you've got the chance.”

Kirk turned back to the console and without the confusion of new crates arriving every few seconds, the stacking procedure was simple. He kept a few unusually massive and unusually light crates floating in temporary stacks and assigned the rest to a final storage configuration.

When he had finished, Kirk kept his hands on the controls, fully expecting the Controller to inform him that the coil had been replaced about one second before the first crate came blasting through the bay doors. At least with the extra time Kirk had had to straighten out the hold, even at one crate every five seconds he could handle the rest of the flow simply by keeping everything in temporary stacks. There would be room enough according to the manifest.

Gauvreau read the mass display of the final stacked crates appreciatively. “Good arrangement,” she told Kirk. “Don't know how you built that pattern so quickly.”

“That's my job,” Kirk said.

Gauvreau seemed about to say something, then thought better of it. “So how does a young guy like you know how to run a Mark IV, but still keep up with new loading strategies?”

Kirk smiled at being called young. He estimated Gauvreau was only a few years older than he was, with just a few telltale strands of white in otherwise sandy and curly short hair. She was young for a commercial freighter captain—the way he had been young for a starship captain.

“Actually, I'm not that young. I trained on the Mark IV a long time ago. And I don't know anything about new loading strategies.” Kirk had not been inclined to keep up with the literature since the day Captain Garrovick had rotated him out of the
Farragut'
s cargo bay.

Gauvreau tapped the mass display. “I've never seen that distribution pattern before. And I do know all about new loading strategies. That's
my
job.”

There was something to her tone that put Kirk on the defensive, almost as if she were testing him.

“Do you play three-dimensional chess?” Kirk asked.

“Love it.”

“Look at the mass display again. Think about middle games.”

Gauvreau peered down at the screen, studying the density map of the cargo crates stored in the hold. “The Siryk Variations…?”

Kirk nodded. It was a conservative approach to 3-D chess favored by players who preferred to wait until their opponents made exploitable errors. The variations of defensive placement developed by the Vulcan Grand Master Siryk emphasized arranging pieces in an interwoven pattern of strong and weak that did not permit much leeway for sudden offense, but created a near impenetrable defense.

Gauvreau laughed now that the seemingly new stacking pattern had been revealed as a game strategy more than four hundred years old. “The low-mass crates are pawns, the heavy-mass crates the more powerful pieces.”

“That's it,” Kirk said. “And I kept track of each crate's position by picturing the hold as an expanded 3-D chess grid.”

“Very inventive.” Gauvreau sat on the edge of the console and folded her arms. Kirk could see she had territory patches from dozens of star systems on the sleeves of her flight jacket. The back of the jacket held even more. Quite an accomplishment for someone who served in the merchant fleet, where freighters rarely had the capability for exceeding warp 2 and most stars were long months apart.

“You must be quite a player,” she said. “Any grand master points?”

“I've never been in any tournaments.”

“But you know enough about the Siryk Variations to fill a hold with them.” She was obviously skeptical.

“I have…had a good opponent. A full grand master.” He knew he shouldn't be surprised at the sudden ache he felt. But it was one of the few things he seemed to have no control over. Almost as if he expected never to see his friends again. “He was very dedicated to the Vulcan modes of play.”

“Ever beat him?”

Those memories brought a smile back to Kirk's face. “Enough to bother him. The, uh, relentlessly logical approach to the game doesn't hold up all that well to completely…unexpected changes in tactics.”

Gauvreau stuck her tongue in her cheek for a moment, reading between the lines. “ ‘Unexpected changes in tactics,' hmm? As in ‘acts of complete desperation'?”

Kirk hated to give away his secrets but the freighter captain was sharp. “Not complete desperation, exactly.” But desperate enough to totally disrupt Spock's carefully planned, long-range attacks and keep him in awe of his captain's skills, never quite realizing that Kirk's ability not to show his panic accounted for much of his perceived mastery of the game.

The mass acquisition alarm sounded and the first crate floated into the hold beyond the viewport. Gauvreau glanced at the rate display. “Ha! One per twenty. You broke their spirits today, Leonard. You might as well put the bay on automatic.”

Damn,
Kirk thought. It wasn't much but he needed that ten credits an hour. He had been stunned at the cost of transportation on the frontier. The things he had taken for granted.