The price - Part 1
29 Oct 2018Da5id Weatherwax
"You did it! It's over! I love you guys! Thank you!"That was Monica, staring at the galnet wall-crawl confirming what the station rumor-mill had been saying for the last three hours but which the admin offices had yet to make official. The outbreak of Hydran encephalitis that had been raging through this system, just the other side of the station's quarantine zone, was over. Monica, Phil, Jerry, Deb, Andy and I were the only Pilot's Federation commanders on the station so when they converted a storage module into a bunkhouse for all the pilots ferrying in medical supplies they gave us our own space. Kind of them, really. Currently I was losing badly at cards to Andy, Phil and Deb were sacked out and Monica, well, Monica was bouncing off the walls hoping they'd lift the quarantine soon so she could get downworld and check in with her family. Happy faces and cheers were breaking out all through the module, so it struck a bit of a jarring note when Jerry walked in with an expression on his face like a trumble had crapped in his remlok.
*** Two weeks previously... ***
The bars were packed, the sleepovers favored by the Pilot's Federation were so overbooked that on any night you'd find a few dozen commanders technically breaking regs and sleeping on their ships in the hangar. Deals of varying kinds were being done around tables in those bars and in every quiet corridor where station security's monitors might have unaccountably glitched. This was where we lived, the ocean we swam in and we were the sharks. This was what happened when a relatively prosperous Alliance-affiliated corporate (and therefore profoundly corrupt) state decided that the local pirates had gotten entirely too big for their britches and sent a courier to Shinrata "inviting" the fine public-spirited members of the Pilot's Federation to drop by and make the hurting stop. The quantity of credits they slapped on the metaphorical table didn't exactly discourage folks from enjoying their hospitality either. Even though most of us had managed to be on the wrong side of the law more than once, just about everything happening here was legal. But then just about anything would be "legal" here, for the right price. So long as what you were doing didn't hurt the bottom line or you paid enough "compensation" if it did, anyway. I'd been fairly close when the word went out so I'd arrived early enough to book a suite before the managers worked out what was in the wind and jacked the prices. This meant that by subletting my spare bed and couch space to three other pilots I trusted I was actually making a profit on station time, almost unheard-of in our business. I'd got my share of shit about it from my buddies too, which is how Deb knew to tap me on the shoulder in the bar.
"Dave, can I borrow your room to take care of something for a bit?'
"Sure. Let's head up there - the guys were on this morning's raid so they are probably still asleep but I'll run whatever interference you need."
"Thanks. I think Monica has a problem and I need a place to talk to her."
This surprised me. The words "Monica" and "problem" generally only went together in the same sentence when she was somebody else's "problem." Monica was one of the most unflappable and hard-as-painite pilots so anything bugging her badly enough to send Deb into mother-hen mode was likely pretty severe.
By the time Deb and Monica had devastated the mini-bar (twice - they called room service to restock it after the first half hour) all four of the rest of us were sitting around nursing our own drinks and completely understanding why Monica's reserve had cracked. It was the kind of news we all kept an ear out for and made a note to stay well away from. A particularly nasty strain of Hydran encephalitis was devastating a system off on the hubward borders of the Empire. Every planet, every station was infected to a greater or lesser degree and the Imperial Bureau of Health had slapped an iron-fisted set of quarantine regs on shipping. Ships could still come and go so long as they stayed strictly "space-side" of customs and only loaded cargo from the warehouses where everything had been sterilized, irradiated and otherwise treated to render anything organic, let alone biological, down into a soup of its component molecules. Load one can from a warehouse not certified clean or have any crew set a single toe over the "clean line" and your ship was staying put until the outbreak was over. Communications in and out of the system were disrupted and they were having a hard time shipping in enough medical supplies to treat the aristocracy, let alone the common folk.
We'd seen all this before, countless times. The difficulty was that this was Monica's home system, where her parents and two younger siblings still lived and where those siblings had been happily generating enough nieces and nephews for Monica to largely escape any nagging from her mom about grandkids. And she hadn't heard from any of them.
"You know, guys.... " This was Andy, looking up from his glass. "That system government must have its head so far up its collective ass it's mind-blowing. I can think of at least three high-tech or industrial economies within thirty light years of there. All they'd need is half a dozen big haulers and pilots who could run a hot schedule. Call it a week, tops, before there's enough tonnage of medical supplies stockpiled to either knock it back or ride it out."
"It's a poor-as-dirt mining system, Andy. Most of the pilots there are in-systemers and the bulk ore-haulers aren't even set up for canisters. It's not that they won't take general cargo, they can't." Monica looked about drunk enough to start crying again but Deb had a thoughtful look on her face.
"There's half a dozen of us sitting right here and it's not like we'll have a reason to stick around much longer. That pirate band is pretty much dead already - all we're doing now is picking over the bones and in a few days you know as well as I do that the corporate slime are going to start thinking about ways they can weasel on the bounties."
There was silence in the room for a moment.
"I dunno, Deb..."
"I do. Monica's had my wing often enough I'm going to have hers on this one. The Bolide is docked between here and there, they can have her reconfigured for cans by the time I drop in to pick her up."
I thought about it for only a few seconds longer.
"I'm not warehousing modules from the Radius here. They'd find some way to impound them as a means to claw back some of the bounty credits they've already paid me. Introduce me to your wrench where the Bolide is docked and make sure they've got racks to fit me on hand too, Deb?"
"I'll have the Widow ferried out, she's got almost no jump on her anyway. I flew the Eddie in here anyway and she's got loads of can space and long legs."
The mood was almost as infectious as the plague. In less time than it takes to log it we were all making plans to roll into the system in big ships rigged to carry lots of cargo and armed well enough to make sure it got to its destination and Monica was starting to look hopeful.
"Guys... If you're going to do this any hangar or warehouse charges are on me." Deb gave her a dirty look but that was Monica all over. Even though she knew we'd likely come out ahead on the deal anyway, she wouldn't have it any other way.
*** Present ***
So, we worked our arses off. Back to back jumps take their toll on a body and a solid two weeks of fast turnarounds and strung jumps had made us all, at one time or another, curse the principles that required us to jump in on this one. But we'd done it. We'd even managed to hand a few nasty surprises to the kind of bottom-feeding lowlives who had gathered on the peripheries looking to pirate any ship loaded down with medical supplies. New disease cases were trending down and nobody had died due to a medicine shortage since we started making our supply runs. So why was Jerry so sour-faced?
"Guys, we've got a poison Ark."
Oh shit.
(to be continued)