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.”