Freelance On The Galactic Tunnel Network by E. Foner (best beach reads of all time TXT) 📗

think I killed it,” the reporter called back. “I meant to just pick it up, but it felt so gross that I kind of squeezed too hard.”

“That’s even better,” Larry said. “Do you have room to turn around?”

“No problem. I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

“Okay. I’m going to start gathering the parts I need to make the repairs. I’ll bet it was able to hold onto the hose because of the curvature, but it got blown off when the leak started.”

By the time Georgia pulled herself out of the technical deck crawl-space, Larry had gathered everything he hoped he would need to do the repair in a work bag to keep it all from floating off.

“Good job,” he praised the reporter when she showed him the remains of the chewer. “Genie, is the power source dead?”

“The maintenance chewer’s fuel cell is in open circuit mode.”

“What does that mean?” Georgia asked.

“You crunched it good so that there’s no longer a complete circuit,” Larry said. “Maybe you should keep it to show your friends when you tell the story of how you saved a spaceship. I’ve got some Dollnick crystal glue somewhere so you could seal it into a clear pendant for a necklace.”

Georgia surprised both of them by blushing. “Thanks. I’m a regular big game hunter. I’ll hang around out here to fetch and carry for you while you’re fixing the cooler.”

“Dinner’s on me next time we’re somewhere with a restaurant,” Larry said, pulling himself back under the cargo deck and setting to work replacing the damaged hoses.

“Those people I was talking to in the bar might have guessed that I’m investigating Colony One from the questions I was asking,” Georgia mused out loud. “One of them may have slipped the chewer into my purse or even the bag of promotional brochures. It’s so small I might have missed it.”

“I don’t know,” Larry replied after a minute. “Why would any of them have been carrying a chewer with magnetized legs? They could hardly have been expecting you.”

“Well, you said you don’t have any enemies.”

“I said I don’t have enemies lined up around the galaxy, but that’s not the same thing as none. There’s a Traders Guild election coming up, and I’m standing for the council this year as a candidate for the CoSHC faction in place of my father, who’s the outgoing council head. Some traders are getting pretty worked up about the election, which sort of took us all by surprise.”

“You’re joining the Conference of Sovereign Human Communities? I’ve been to one of their conventions on Union Station and it’s all representatives from human communities on alien open worlds and orbitals. What does it have to do with the Traders Guild?”

“They invited us to join,” Larry explained, and then paused to examine his work. “If you add up all of the independent traders, there are more of us than the population of most CoSHC members, and it’s about time we had some representation. Hang on a sec while I refill this thing, I need to pay attention.”

Georgia waited patiently for a minute, and then she heard a hissing sound that started fairly loud, but quickly ran down until it was inaudible.

“What was that? Did it leak?”

“No, that was just the system refilling. It should be all set now. I’m coming out.”

“But what if it did leak? You said you only had enough for one recharge. Will we cook before we get out of the tunnel?”

“We might have had to back off exercise and sit around naked, but it wouldn’t have gotten that bad in just two days,” Larry told her. “There’s also an emergency tap on the primary cooling system I could have temporarily hooked up to, but that’s a lot of work.”

“Do all traders know as much about their ships as you do?”

Larry pulled himself out of the crawl space, gave his work bag a gentle push in the direction of the tool locker, and reached for the access panel. “Half and half, maybe? The majority of our traders fly second-hand Sharf ships, primarily the two-man version, because there happened to be hundreds of thousands of them available cheap when the Stryx opened Earth. Believe it or not, the Guild got its start when a bunch of first-generation traders got together to publish a sort of repair and maintenance manual for the systems that humans are capable of fixing. But not everybody is a mechanic.”

“Why didn’t the ship controller warn us when the leak started?”

“It’s not considered a critical system and I turned off the secondary alarms years ago,” Larry admitted as he locked down the access panel. “I got tired of the controller waking me up to tell me that the toilet receptacle was ready to be emptied or that it was time to lubricate the main hatch hinge. Now I just review the alert queue once a day on my tab.”

Georgia watched as Larry put away the tools. “So when is the Traders Guild election?”

“A little over three more weeks, at the end of Rendezvous. If you haven’t wrapped up your Colony One investigation before then, you’ll have to take a break or go it alone for a couple weeks.”

“Where is Rendezvous this year?” she asked, following him onto the ladder.

“At a Vergallian Fleet open world on a brand new tunnel exit the Stryx recently opened. There was a lot of arguing about that too.”

“What do traders have against it?”

“The gravity and the atmosphere. Some traders fly ships that are patched together junk with just enough thrust to travel the tunnel network between space stations and elevator hubs. They hate it when Rendezvous is on a planet. Do you want to try the rock climber?”

“I’ll stick with the bike,” Georgia said, launching herself towards the now-familiar exercise equipment. “So who chose the location?”

“The