Galactic Thunder by Cameron Cooper (best book club books txt) 📗

map and asked the computer to point to the location, the map still had the old boundaries of the Tanique Dynasty’s extended empire showing. The wildcatters were well beyond the nearest boundary.

Humans had spilled out in all directions since the array and the empire had collapsed. Now they didn’t have to wait for gates to be built to get somewhere, they were tumbling, rolling and skipping out in all directions, finding new territories every week.

Old, pre-crescent converted ships were scooped up cheap by the adventurers, who would find a likely spot for a Terran class world and go look. It was as simple as that.

If the world had breathable atmosphere—or even if it didn’t, but the spectrographs looked promising—the wildcatters would head to the surface, prospect, get samples, then dash back to civilization to announce either a mining claim, or a colonization claim.

There were a lot of very wealthy wildcatters who had given up the high-risk business a dozen years after one of their worlds had been settled, to live an easy life among the colonists.

There were also a lot of wildcatters who never came home. Space has always been dangerous. Unknown, unsurveyed worlds were even more so. Still, the lure of immense wealth drew more gamblers to try their luck with each passing year.

I didn’t have a lot of known facts about Mace’s situation, but the many scary rumors and tall stories about wildcatting shadowed it. I had not had an easy night’s sleep. From Dalton’s and Fiori’s faces, I judged they had not had much rest, either.

I nodded at both of them and shifted my pack onto the other shoulder. “Lyssa has docked and is waiting for us.”

“She really is captain of the ship…which is her?” Fiori’s voice rose.

“Danny says wait until you meet her,” Dalton said, although he didn’t sound any happier than Fiori.

Fiori was a long way from being one of the Humanist extremists, but every human who hadn’t met a digital person carried some degree of trepidation about sentient AIs. Nothing got them past that ancient prejudice as fast as meeting one, so I pushed open the man-sized door inserted into the massive commercial bay doors and stepped through.

“Come on,” I told them, as Vara and Darb trotted through with their tails up.

After a ship touched down, a commercial landing bay became a noisy, bustling cavern, with freight being unloaded and new freight loaded, while station-based engineers and laborers crawled over the rest of the ship, analyzed it, fixed it, fueled it and performed all sorts of support services in between.

Captains of freight vessels kept a careful eye on their ship while the station people marched through her. Usually a station stevedore or mercantile agent stood at the captain’s side to watch out for the station’s interests.

This time was a little different. The Supreme Lythion rarely carried freight, unless the freight came along with its paying passengers. What Lyssa did was offer luxury accommodations and private passage. Whatever the client wanted in accommodations, Lyssa could create with her construction nanobots. A single passenger could hire the ship all for himself…if he could afford it.

Today there was no freight being banged around and bounced off walls or laborers sweating and cursing over the big containers. There were, however, a good two dozen station people working on the exterior of the ship, checking couplings and umbilicals, topping off water and energy, checking fuel cells.

The Supreme Lythion was a blocky, ugly ship on the outside. It had been designed by a mad genius, Girish Wedekind, and had been so far advanced for its time that the empire had laughed him into shame and suicide. The exterior of the ship was a deep, matt black, with few distinguishing details, except for the twin rail guns on the upper surface.

The Lythion had been converted to a crescent ship shortly after the Shutdown, and the twin crescent arms emerged from her belly in the front half of the ship and ran back and up at an angle. They were meters thick but looked spindly against the size of the ship itself. At the end of each arm, the two crescents appeared to be resting against the roof of the ship. During a jump, the arms activated and swung the crescents up and over the front of the ship, then down beneath it. The crescents formed a worm hole, which was flipped over the nose of the moving ship. Impetus drove the ship into the hole, to transition across interstellar space to where the hole ended.

Once, we’d needed stationary gates beside every inhabited star system to form the holes between them. But now, the crescents were partial gates which we took with us.

Sometime since I had last seen the ship, Lyssa had coated the arms and crescents with the same non-reflecting black covering that made the Lythion almost impossible to see in the black of space.

The crescents and arms didn’t enhance the Lythion’s appearance yet seeing her still gave me a warm swell of homecoming happiness.

Lyssa stood where a captain usually stood—at the top of the freight ramp, where she could see as much as possible of both the inside and outside of her ship. She wore spacer boots and the heavy, waterproof, rip resistant shirt, pants and multipocketed jacket which space-bound workers preferred.

Since I had seen her last, Lyssa had changed the color of her hair. It was a fiery, coppery orange now, and bound up at the back of her head to keep it out of the way. Tendrils escaped around her face. She wore a speaker headset, a theatre prop to convince the station personnel she was in direct contact with the shipmind.

Melenia’s harbor master himself stood at her side, overseeing his people, for the Supreme Lythion was a celebrity these days—one of the few ships to escape the melt-down of Nijeliya’s atmosphere, after being converted to a crescent ship in the temporary workshops that had sprung up on the plain outside Eventide, racing against the clock to avoid