The Crew of the Jealous Mistress: Part Two: Getting Down to Business

Gougham, who as you may remember was now lying in a heap just inside the door of the crew quarters, was not exactly in love with Fralt, though they had been secretly fulfilling each other's personal needs for some time now. Gougham was the only purebred Earther on board, and he kept this a secret from everyone but the very thorough and intimidating first officer. Since Kossprey had no interest in witnessing a lynching, his secret was reasonably safe, but as he did not know this, Gougham actually experienced moments of real panic on a regular basis when people made comments about Earthers and their ilk.

He could have been called handsome, with his mussed black hair and icy blue eyes, except that most of the crew viewed these as birth defects that made Gougham appear 'too human' and therefore somewhat pitiable. Vielt, by contrast, had dirty blonde hair and muddy brown eyes, a ruddy complexion with a rough growth of beard, and prominent nose and ears, yet if asked both Fralt and Kossprey would admit to being more attracted to Vielt. Of course, that could be attributed to his peculiar brand of luck.

Whatever it was that kept the ladies away, the result was that—aside from the vigorous playtime Fralt spent with him—Gougham poured all of his love into technology. Part ship's engineer, part science officer, Gougham usually made the call when it came to where they would be spending the next six months, and he did it through a combination of consulting with the ship's instruments and the careful application of a few gadgets of his own design. And although the ship itself was capable of doing some pretty sophisticated sniffing, when a likely rock was found the entire crew turned an unusually attentive eye and ear to the crew member they spent most of the voyage ignoring.

Gougham had fitted one of the ship's precious weapon port modules with a device that bombarded space debris with tetra-rad and then mapped the dispersion beyond the rocks. On a good day, this was a fool-proof way of finding turidium in asteroids, which was worth spending a month of drilling to recover. A bootlocker full of turidium would earn them a week in paradise at the end of a year-long stint mining.

On a great day, Gougham's tetra-rad mapper would find them a few grains or a few chunks—or a torso-sized slab if they were really lucky—of vellidium. One fist-sized nugget of vellidium, which was used to power deep-space vessels and which was so far unable to be replicated, would send them running to the intergalactic treaty banks. Anything larger than that might result in thievery on the part of one or more of the crew. Finding enough of it might mean outright mutiny and backstabbing.

So far, they'd been lucky insofar as they had been un-lucky. The most vellidium they'd ever recovered in a one-year stint was the size of a pea. The current crew had been together for six stints now, and Orliss Strohmer hoped that that meant two things: enough solidarity to avoid a melee if they got lucky, or poor enough luck with the vellidium to avoid it altogether.

Gougham was working secretly on an upgrade to the tetra-rad mapper that could more accurately map the size and location of deposits, but Strohmer had asked him not to share the details with the crew. Strohmer calculated—correctly, as it turns out—that such a request would ingratiate him to Gougham, who still felt like an outsider. The only other person who knew about the upgrade project was Valera Kossprey.

...

Valera Kossprey could not envision a scenario in which she would need to apply her considerable skills in seduction to Captain Orliss Strohmer. For one thing, she had a nigh unbreakable conviction regarding fraternization with superiors. For another, she believed that the fantasy Strohmer was constructing around her in his mind could never be equalled in reality. There was also the fact that she found him physically repulsive and anatomically ... challenging.

All this added up to a conclusion she had reached long ago: that in order to control this captain, she would have to appeal to Orliss Strohmer's principles. But she was not above stringing him along sexually in the meantime.

It was with all this in mind that Valera gave Psilos command of the bridge and returned to her quarters. There she discarded her jacket, opened the side vents in her 'utilities'--baggy shorts she usually wore underneath the mining rigs—and tied her hair back, away from a neck that she knew held a close second place to her legs in Strohmer's personal fantasies. Dressed just so, she crossed the crew quarters and thumbed the signal on the captain's cabin.

After a pause, Strohmer called her in.

...

First Mate Kossprey did not need an education in the economy of the Outer Rim. She had been brought up in the Inner Colonies, where the only thing anyone seemed to want to talk about was trade practices in the Outer Rim. Granted, most of what she heard was thick with accusations of illegality, epithets regarding the character of Outer Rim traders, and threats outlining what would someday happen to 'those people' and their economy, but somewhere in the spectrum of Valera's own studies, the darkly tinted school instruction on the subject, and her family's prejudicial rantings, Valera eventually pieced together an approximation similar to what follows.

The three confederations of planets—the Inner Colonies, the Union of Planets, and the Seviren—made their own laws regarding trade and travel between territories. As there was no larger federation governing them, these laws changed frequently to benefit or punish one confederacy or another, which unfortunately resulted in frequent trade embargoes, highly profitable smuggling, and a degree of graft in the government that made being elected or appointed to an office almost like a royal inheritance.

It is therefore no surprise that residents of all the several confederations projected their suspicions and greed on the traders who—for one reason or another—chose to do their business on the frontier of open space, that outer rim of backwater colonies and all-but-abandoned outposts now elevated from simply 'outer rim' to 'The Outer Rim' by virtue of their tacit solidarity against the confederacies.

Inhabitants of the Inner Colonies, for example, were so accustomed to paying off political officials for business considerations in legislation that their outrage over the idea of Outer Rim fiefdoms arising where outpost overlords insisted that residents of the outpost pay for the protections the outpost could provide—mostly outdated projectile defenses and pulse energy shields—did not seem ironic in the slightest.

In the Union of Planets, where business ran the government outright, the Outer Rim practice of appointing buyers who were in charge of the price of all goods bought or traded—whether within the Outer Rim itself or in the rare instance that trade with the confederacies was deemed profitable—sounded like something naïve and dangerous, not something that actually closely approximated their own system.

In the Seviren, a group of planets dedicated to a kind of socialist self-sufficiency, the isolationist tactics of the disparate populations of the Outer Rim—where one trade group often haggled with another and where the only agreed-upon law was maintaining a careful separation from the confederacies—looked to them like political suicide.

The colonists who fled from the confederacies and took up lives in the Outer Rim often found themselves targets as well: at one time or another, they were declared outlaws, illegals, or pirates by this confederacy or that. There had even been bounties placed on them by wealthy buyers in the Union of Planets who wanted not only the heads of Outer Rim buyers but also their full warehouses and well-stocked ships. There had been betrayals and political machinations, full-scale riots within the Union, and even some eventual pressure from the Seviren to abandon the bloody campaign against the Rim, as it affected them all to one degree or another.

In the end, neither the law nor public opinion could keep people from misunderstanding and hating 'rimmers'--or whatever name they applied to them—but eventually it became enough to keep all but the most unscrupulous from resorting to outright violence against them.

Business, the lifeblood of the galaxy, began to flow again, and life went on.

...

Imagine the disbelief giving way to terror that Valera Kossprey's parents experienced when she told them that after eight years of study in preparation for a lucrative post in the Ministry of Trade for the Inner Colonies, she would instead be taking a single-passenger skimmer to an outpost colony and joining the first mining crew that would take her.

Valera's mother hid it the best, but she never came to terms with her daughter's wishes, preferring instead to simply abandon any hope of understanding and make only perfunctory attempts at communicating with her in later years. Instead it was her father who came to her the next day and made a peace offering. After all the shouting and pleading he had done the previous day, it was her father that confessed to her that he was a tiny bit jealous of her decision to take such an enormous gamble when her own happiness was at stake. And it was her father who admitted also that he had taken a 'safe' route marrying her mother—not that he did not love his wife, but that he had had chances to seek his fortune in farflung places, but that she would not promise to wait for him.

Now he felt like he was undertaking that same risk by telling Valera that he supported her and would be waiting to hear from her on her travels. Valera cried and told her father that she loved him—two things she hadn't done since.

...

Orliss Strohmer's cabin was a mess.

The parrot-headed captain sat among the mess as though nesting in it, but as Valera made herself comfortable he occasionally tossed something from the rubble toward a glowing panel on the wall, where it passed through and was compacted. The piles of garbage were actually an accumulation of information and evidence from previous digs and excavations. Strohmer had been cataloguing the last three years of exploratory mining efforts, and as he muttered under his breath the computer beeped affirmations and responses overhead. There were probably pictures being taken and smells being recorded, spectrometer and techrometer readings being recorded.

Valera made a mental note that Strohmer had probably catalogued her when she walked in as well—it was actually standard practice for captains to begin recording everything once they had a visitor in their cabin, but Strohmer would not stop at simple visible light recordings or soundwave files, instead opting to have her measured and sniffed, perhaps to be holographically reproduced after she left.

Now she sat in a corner, prim and proper, waiting for her captain to come to a stopping point so that she could interrogate him.

Strohmer continued dictating and cataloguing for a while, one eye on the samples and printout flimsies, the other eye on anything except the legs. Eventually he drew to a stop and cued the program off.

“Miss Kossprey, to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”

Valera arched one eyebrow. “This is how you address your senior officers?”

“It is how I would address even my superior officers if they were as lovely as you.”

They both knew that this was not actual flirting, but ironic flirting—two people governed by Zeno's Dichotomy, destined to draw closer without ever actually meeting.

“I have a proposition for you—and spare me the proposition jokes, please.”

Strohmer clicked in what passed for a chuckle. “You sound like someone trying to hire me.”

“I am,” Valera nodded. “Unusual for a first officer to hire her own ship, but there it is.”

“A first officer with designs on her own ship usually goes the route of mutiny or assassination,” Strohmer pointed out, “so in this case, I'll gladly overlook the unusual nature of the request. What is it you have in mind?”

“I propose that we turn pirate.”

They both laughed as though she'd told an all-too-common joke.

The pause that followed, however, was uncomfortable—and uncomfortably long.

“Miss Kossprey, I understand that after ten years the ship feels a little small.”

“Captain, it has nothing to do with the size of the ship.”

“And I understand that some of our previous crew members have regaled you with tales of outrageous exploits.”

“I am not swayed by the boastful exaggerations of idiots.”

“Perhaps you are not satisfied with our productivity, then?”

“You hit the nail on the head there, but that's still not what is motivating me.”

“Then by all means, enlighten me: what has driven you insane, and is it contagious?”

“The opportunity for a little justice, a little retribution, and a whole lot of free capital.”

The Crew of the Jealous Mistress: Part One: Meet the Crew

Orliss Strohmer, the squat parrot-headed captain of the mining ship Jealous Mistress, slouched moodily at the conn, empty darkness filling the viewscreen, hardly a sound disturbing what might soon become a fitful slumber for everyone on the bridge.

Several of his crew had taken up their positions on the bridge out of habit at this early hour of the day, but there was nothing to do—would be nothing to do for days, in fact—until the Mistress decelerated to a speed where visual wavelengths allowed them to at least assess their position relative to the distant star that was their destination.

Orliss watched them go about trivial duties with a mixture of respect and pity. Finally, he turned and let one of his eyes settle on his second-in-command, Valera Kossprey, and began ogling her legs. This was something that could potentially entertain him for hours, or until she got up and left. For a Zavinthian his size, those legs might as well be a mile long, and he had said as much to her more than once.

Valera shifted in her seat and threw him a warning glance. Orliss turned his attention back to his consoles for a moment, and when she was engaged in her work once more, he rolled his eye toward her again.

“Captain,” a voice at his shoulder intoned softly.

“Rrawwk!” Orliss squawked. He hated being caught by surprise, hated it even more when it caused him to make a sound reminiscent of a parrot—as he supposed it was fuel for species jokes among the crew—and hated it most of all when it interrupted a relaxing perusal of Miss Kossprey.

The voice was disembodied, or so it would have seemed to the untrained eye. There was a bare shimmer in the air and a distinct shadow on the floor. Psilos, the shade, expended a great deal of energy in this mode, and it only confirmed to Strohmer that he had been watching the captain watching Valera. Orliss shuddered, shaking the feathers of his head and shoulders back into place. One eye remained on Valera; the other turned slowly, deliberately to the heat-shimmer that was even now dissolving into the corporeal form of Psilos.

In his visible form, Psilos looked more like the classic xenophobic Earther's conception of an alien being: tall, slender, gray or green depending on the light, and large opaque eyes occupying most of a bulbous head. Orliss knew that Psilos allowed people to persist in the assumption that such a large cranium indicated a large brain and possibly advanced thought patterns. While the latter may have been true, Psilos' brain actually resided in his chest, close to where the human heart lay; as a result, Psilos had gotten up and walked away after several gunfights “ended” with an ignorant off-worlder trying to blow his brains out and then celebrating a little too soon.

Orliss clicked his beak—a sign of impatience—and Psilos stared back in fiegned ignorance until Orliss felt forced to ask, “Is there something you need?”

“I require a private sleeping accomodations and a recreational leave of absence,” Psilos hissed in a voice barely above a whisper. “These requests have gone unanswered for some time now.”

Orliss tried giving Psilos the full attention of his left eye, hoping to divide his attention between the whining of his head of security and the aforementioned legs, but Psilos repositioned himself strategicallly. Orliss clicked his beak again. “Your requests have not gone unanswered—they've simply been denied. There are no 'private sleeping accomodations' on this ship, and I do not grant anyone a 'recreational leave of absence' for any reason. See the doc about a dream vacation.”

The doctor in question was Moah, a cephalopod-like creature who—in everyone's opinion—was far too touchy-feely in his examinations. On their last trip through the Tier Siehni system, Moah had acquired a batch of dream vacations: pills that rendered the patient (or victim, really) unconscious for days on end while intense and vivid dream sequences played out. The batch had turned out to be somewhat ... sour. The result was that most of the dream vacations turned into haunting nightmares, usually derived from emotional images in the patient's past. Although the 'vacation' itself was a bust, it still had its intended effect: the patient returned to work with a vigor and a sense of relief.

Psilos did not feel the need to point any of this out to the captain, as it had clearly been an ironic suggestion, but the silence with which he replied was cold and dry.

“I do have another request, captain,” he said instead.

“Yes?”

“We are hauling this load to the Outer Rim, are we not?”

Orliss nodded, anticipating the conversation that followed.

“Let me scout the buyer for this load, captain.”

“We've been over this--” Orliss began.

“Yes, sir, but I can employ my skills to discover how much the other haulers are being paid.”

“Psilos, it's illegal.”

“Only if I'm caught.”

“Some haulers get paid more, and the quality of the ore is different from load to load.”

“They say it is different; I say ore is ore.”

“Psilos ... I already know what other haulers get paid.”

Psilos was incapable of showing emotion in his eyes or his face, but the surprise came across in the way he paused before plunging ahead again.

“Then we ought to demand a better price. We could refuse to sell.”

“And do what with the ore? We can't sell it ourselves, and if we did, we'd get an even worse price than the buyers will give us. We're not buyers, and we don't have an opening to sell to a plant. Those get bought out as soon as they become available. We'd have to knock somebody off to get an opening, and even if we did, there are always a hundred buyers right there, ready to outbid us.”

Psilos fell silent again, but this time under the onslaught of sentiments he'd already heard expressed a thousand times. Orliss poked absently at his shoulder with the tip of his beak, a nervous grooming habit from his youth. His mind was elsewhere, having had this same conversation with his former captain, the tables now turned.

“How do you know what the other haulers are paid?” Psilos asked finally.

Orliss stopped grooming and shifted in his seat. After a long pause he replied, “My mother's family were buyers. It's why they say she left my father: he was a long hauler, never got a good price for his loads, and she got tired of seeing him ripped off.”

In the corner of one eye, he could now see Valera listening. She had barely adjusted her posture, but her eyes were unfocused, her head turned just so, and her hands had stopped flitting over the controls at her station. For some reason, Orliss did not want her to hear about his father, did not want her to like him or dislike him for his family problems, and certainly did not want her pity.

“Captain,” Psilos began, “could we not take advantage of your family connections--”

“No!” Orliss held his voice down—no more squawking, he willed himself—and bit off the word sharply to keep the anger and humiliation out of his voice. “No, we're not going to do that.”

And that was the end of it, as far as Orliss was concerned.

Psilos excused himself, and Orliss managed to get some work done on the wave of anger that had surfaced over these painful memories. Eventually, he tried to go back to ogling Valera, but she was stretching her legs out just so, and something in the twisted mind of Orliss Strohmer suggested that she had heard it all, that she was putting herself out there for him because she felt bad for him. He clicked his beak and turned the conn over to his navigator, and a moment later he disappeared from the bridge.

...

The brief disturbance of the captain barging through the drop bay on his way aft did not throw Agram Vielt off his game—a game still called poker but so different after six thousand years that the name was little more than a symbolic nod to its predecessor. Agram held a stack of cards loosely in his left hand, which was still more or less the original appendage, although the skin had been grafted poorly. His right arm was robotic from the shoulder, and gleaming precision-tooled parts showed through the rubber flesh in places. The arm ended in what could be called a hand, though it was more like a conglomeration of tools that could be folded into something resembling a fist. Agram was accustomed to it by now, but fidgeted the thing constantly: folding it, unfolding it, switching tools, and so forth. All he really cared about was being able to handle his weapon and his mining equipment, but occasionally he would find an unexpected situation to use one of the other tools, and that really irked him.

Agram had lost his arm in a common mining accident: a cave-in. With no significant savings, no membership in the galactic guilds, and nothing paid toward medical emergencies, the doctors were supposed to simply seal the wound and make other repairs to the missing joint and nerve endings—Agram would have gone through life a one-armed methropod. Unfortunately for one of the other patients in the facility, a long-timer with a lot of paid-in medical and a current guild membership, he got put in the same pre-op ward with Agram. Agram sold several patients on the story that he was unlikely to survive the surgery, tempting them with the chance to win a little inheritance from a dying man.

Two days later, a whole lot richer—and a whole lot drunk—he sank his winnings into a gaudy replacement for his missing appendage. His twice-wounded roommates plotted their revenge.

Accustomed to thinking on his feet while drunk, Agram then skipped post-op recovery and bartered passage on a medical cargo looper before the anesthesia had even worn off completely. By the time anyone could catch up with him, Agram had already had plenty of time to practice drawing and reloading his sidearm with the mechanical limb.

Now Agram did his best to scan the faces of the other players without looking like he was scanning their faces. Agram didn't have a tell—that he knew of—but he frequently manufactured one for the other crew members when he thought they were looking.

Zuvie Matusek was looking.

Zuvie had come a long way to join the crew of the Jealous Mistress—not as far as Dr. Moah, but close. She was a Meratonan, childlike in appearance, at least until she got very upset or exerted herself physically, at which point she would undergo a disturbing physical transformation and more than quadruple in size. It's not really necessary to describe it at this point, since it does not usually take long for Agram to upset her.

Zuvie sat directly across from Agram, smiling contentedly—or at least, trying to appear contented. She had stopped looking at her cards, hoping to project an air of overconfidence, but Agram kept pace with her, raise for raise. She was desperately trying to keep a tic from appearing in her forehead.

Just as she looked back at Agram—trying not to look like she was looking, but failing—she saw the briefest line appear on his forehead: the faintest vertical crease of consternation, a sign she'd never seen from him before. Zuvie suppressed a smirk and decided that the time had come to call Agram's bluff.

When the cards hit the table, Zuvie's face went on a little journey, starting at smug celebration and then progressing through confusion, shock, self-disgust, and eventually misery. But it didn't move on to rage until Agram began laughing, and then Zuvie had to watch him scooping up his winnings—her winnings.

And then Agram winked at her.

One meaty hand slammed down on the table, and the two other crewmen bolted out of the drop bay as the transformation began to progress up Zuvie's arm, like a series of explosions in her muscles: one moment, Zuvie sat in the little chair, one arm impossibly huge and pressing on the table with its claw-like hands, and then less than a minute later, the snaggle-tooth grimace of Zuvie's alter-ego, Matusek, leered down at Agram with blood in his eye.

“I'll tear your arms off!” Matusek roared.

Agram stacked cards and credit vouchers lazily, keeping one eye on Matusek but not moving from his seat—deliberately so, in fact.

Matusek raked the table and two of the chairs out of the way—the table ricocheted off the ceiling and two instrument panels before clattering to the floor behind Matusek—and wrapped two crab-like hands around Agram, pinning him to his chair. “Did you hear me?!” the beast roared.

There was the faintest clack and hum then, and Matusek lowered its gaze to the Kreyk projectile weapon centered on its chest. Zuvie's voice came from somewhere inside Matusek: “Did you have that under your chair the whole time?”

Agram nodded.

Matusek's eyes squinted, and Zuvie's voice came out again: “Am I that bad?”

Agram looked down at the claws pinning him to his seat, the monstrous arms, the hackles standing up on Matusek's shoulders, the slavering jaws, and the remnants of the pink party dress impossibly still clinging to the creature in places.

Slowly, ever so carefully, Matusek—Zuvie, really, Agram considered—set the chair down and Agram with it. Zuvie's voice sounded one more time, as though she were deep down now inside Matusek, perhaps hiding and feeling humiliated: “I think I'd better go to my room.”

Agram kept his eye on the retreating beast, but he disarmed the Kreyk and holstered it. Eventually, he set about folding and stowing the table and chairs, and he was just starting to collect his winnings again when Strohmer reappeared from the hatch leading aft.

“Vielt!” the captain squawked. “Didn't I order you not to play poker with Matusek?!”

“I was not playing poker with Matusek,” Agram replied calmly, folding a stack of vouchers into his pocket. “Fralt, Gougham, and I started a game, and Zuvie joined us for a while. I have not seen Matusek for some time now.”

Strohmer clicked his beak impatiently. “You know what I mean, Vielt!”

Agram held up a hand placatingly. “Yes sir, I know what you mean, and I assure you that the moment Matusek showed up, the game ended by unanimous accord.”

Strohmer turned one eye on Agram Vielt, then the other, and finally made his way to the forward hatch, rawking to himself. “Ought to have Psilos sit in on these games,” he was saying as he disappeared through the hatch.

...

Fralt and Gougham didn't begrudge Vielt his winnings. When they had bolted from the game, Fralt had stuffed half her poker hand, two credit vouchers, a polarized mirror film disguised as a poker card, and a lucky charm—which was actually a small signal repeater—into her jacket before swinging through an upper hatch into the auxiliary cannon nest.

Gougham had stashed a similar grab-bag of items in his pants and launched himself through the first door he could find. In typical Gougham fashion, however, he'd managed to throw himself into a cargo hold, which he filled quite neatly, and which he only later realized he would be unable to open from the inside.

Gougham followed the ensuing 'conversation' between Vielt and Matusek—and jumped when a smashing sound caused the door to pucker inches from his face—and then waited at least ten minutes before tapping out a timid SOS.

Vielt was the first to hear it. He cracked open the cargo hold and shoved the Kreyk in—only to withdraw it and slam the hold shut again a moment later.

Eventually Fralt came looking for Gougham and managed to unfold him from the uncomfortable position he'd had to assume. She supported him carefully as they limped toward the crew quarters, but when Gougham suggested hopefully that he could use a massage, Fralt slipped out from under his arm and headed in the opposite direction.

...

Terza Fralt was no delicate flower, though she managed to pass for feminine when she wan't standing next to Valera Kossprey. The two despised each other for no other reason than that they were both women and they were both struggling for credibility in a crew full of chauvinists and womanizers. Any closeness between Fralt and Gougham was ammunition for Kossprey, and any perceived camaraderie between Strohmer and Kossprey was fodder for the entire crew. Typically, the two women avoided each other, and words between them were as icily civil as they could be made while still completely avoiding sounding polite.

Fralt was muscular, athletic, graceful when no one was looking—but she maintained a careful gorilla-like posture and demeanor whenever the crew found themselves planetside or on the outpost stations. Nothing made her more angry than to be mistaken for a sexual surrogate—or worse: for a crew mother.

Some ships had them: matronly women who shipped out with miner crews and served as nurse, psychiatrist, cook, maid, and—an unfortunate fact of deep space travel—eventually a kind of madame. Fralt found the entire concept disgusting, but she'd learned not to take up the topic—or have the conversation steered toward it—unless she wanted someone characterizing her as their crew mother. This sort of comment, in her opinion, had to be met with brutal violence, as in Vielt's case: she had casually tossed her drink on him.

Then she had set him on fire. They had been in deep space, and Moah had done his best to graft skin for his left arm, but the artificial skin cultures they had on hand were of the cheapest variety. Now Vielt's arm was like one of the many warning signs posted around the ship:

DANGER: AIR SEAL – IMPROPER USE WILL CAUSE BREACH
DANGER: ELECTRICAL SHOCK – WEAR INSULATOR GLOVES
DANGER: FEMINIST – SHE WILL SET YOU ON FIRE

Fralt had even assaulted Matusek once, but since Matusek deserved it—and since Fralt had bounced off like a rubber ball—that story is less interesting than Vielt's, so there you go.