Home: Interstellar: Merchant Princess (11 page)

“I’m confused,” Meriel said to John. “I get the laws of nav and relative position and the uncertainty in jump and all, but I get confused trying to visualize relative motion.” John had volunteered to help Meriel with her nav exam and invited her to the bridge.

“You should be confused. It’s not human,” John said. “To think of the way things really move makes you dizzy. Really, you get dizzy. Here—imagine you are on a moon watching the motions of the planets and a sun.” He turned the lights in the bridge off and displayed a hologram of Jupiter and nearby space. “Here’s a view of Sol system from Europa.” Lines like ribbons appeared to show the relative paths of Sol and Saturn and inner planets through space. The ribbons twisted and spun, and soon the bridge was filled with epicycles and helixes. “OK?” he asked, and Meriel squinted and nodded. “Oops, I cheated. Here’s what it really looks like with Europa rotating.” Now the display became chaotic, like teams of rhythmic gymnasts twirling ribbons.

She tried to follow the twisting patterns but could not. “Whoa,” she said and closed her eyes. She got dizzy, as John had predicted. John froze the display and added soft lighting to the bridge. Meriel noticed that he had moved a bit closer with the lights off, and she liked it.

“That’s how people saw things before Copernicus and other geniuses made calculations that predicted those paths.”

Meriel blinked. “Why did they even bother?”

“Navigation and agriculture. They started with Earth as the point of reference to make sense of it all. But you saw what they ended up with. So a genius changed the point of view to make it simpler.” John brought up another series of projections. “When you look at the orbit of a moon, you stand on the planet it orbits; when you look at the orbit of a planet, you stand on the star it orbits.”

“Because otherwise, we get dizzy,” she said.

“Right. And when you look at the movement of stars, you put yourself in the middle of the galaxy. Here’s what Sol and its planets look like from the Galactic Ecliptic.”

Meriel watched John’s big hands move over the console controls.
Rough hands,
she thought
, not like a spacer pilot who’d spent his life on the boards
.

The disk of the galaxy appeared, and John zoomed into a bright star that seemed to dive below and surface above the plane of the ecliptic, like a dolphin following a ship. Around the bright star, eight smaller objects spiraled.

“Everything is moving,” she said softly, hypnotized by the motion.
The first law of nav.

“It’s tranquilizing to think that the computers can do this automatically and with complete accuracy, but that’s the kind of thinking that drives you into a star. A computer that could do that exactly would not fit on a ship and would take too long to calculate positions. And before it finished, some mass would perturb your location or your destination, and your uncertainty would increase again.”

On the display, he opened a hologram of the Milky Way with callouts for the Sol, Lalande 21185, and Procyon A star systems.

“Here’s our current course,” he said, and a sequence of arcs appeared between Lander and Enterprise. The view changed to follow the arc of their current course with suns moving all around them. “To think that you really cannot know where you are exactly, ever, is scary. It’s better to focus on your destination,” he said, but his words drifted away into the stars.

“It’s like riding a light wave,” Meriel said as the stars and nebula moved past, and Procyon A in front of her seemed to move forward as expected. However, when she looked behind to Lalande 21185, it seemed to move backward.
Oh, right, we’re FTL
, she remembered.

“Don’t forget that this is not a trajectory,” John said. “We’re like quanta now, just a probability with a series of possible destinations if we jump back into real space early.”

“Sure,” Meriel said, but knowing that did not change the exhilaration she felt. She wanted to extend her arms like wings and fly the path of light without a ship’s hull around her. “How do I do this?”

“That’s what nav-3 is about.”

“This is profound, isn’t it?”

“Yup. Earthers don’t see it like that, because they’re born to see their position as fixed, first on Earth, and then on Sol, or some galactic center. Spacers don’t do that. They orient themselves within an ever-changing starscape of moving objects. Earth still publishes all our star maps relative to the Earth ecliptic, but all the nav computers translate to the Galactic ecliptic. And that’s where we live.”

John moved again to rest his arm on the back of her chair and she warmed to his attention. She wondered if Molly would approve of them using the bridge for a date but then relaxed and enjoyed the ride on the flight path. She stuck her hands out to touch the stars they passed, but then she stopped and sat up.

“John, can you overlay our sphere as we travel? And show that it gets larger as we move forward?”

“Sure, but it’s pretty small on an interstellar scale.” He flipped a key, and a gauzy sphere showed around their position. Then he moved their point of view out a few light years perpendicular to their path. As they traveled along their path, the sphere became exponentially larger.

“Can you overlay a ship along the same path but leaving ten seconds later?”

John complied, and now a new cone followed the first in a different color and on a slightly different axis.

“Now try a third ship leaving from a different station,” she said.

“Are all the clocks ET?”

“Yeah, and they are trying to meet at the midpoint.”

John did as she requested, and they watched the three flight paths approach the midpoint. As they approached each other, a new sphere appeared this one larger than the others and in a different color.

“The new sphere includes the uncertainty in ET from different stations that are light years apart,” he said.

“OK, stop them when the paths intersect. How big is the sphere, now?”

“A hundred AU,” he said. “Let’s ignore this third one. The uncertainty in station time makes the sphere much too large.”

“The closest is the trailing ship, right?” Meriel said, and John nodded. “Then how long would it take for them to actually come into contact if they broadcast their positions? You know, short jumps with inertial glide.”

John waved his fingers above the console.

“They need to touch, John.”

“Uh-huh, but not collide,” he said, and Meriel nodded. “Exponential approach.”

“About three hours twenty, minimum, if they synch speeds and do not collide. That’s four sigma. That’s the soonest. And that assumes they can locate the target as soon as they get EM, which is very unlikely.”

Meriel sat back in the chair and smiled broadly. “There’s not enough time,” she said softly.

“What?”

“There’s not enough time. The
Princess
jumped less than three hours after the hull breach. Even if they agreed to meet, pirates could not have reached us before we actually jumped away. It could not have been a deep-space rendezvous. It was either a short jump that Papa would never do, or there was not enough time.”

John nodded. The whole scenario that damned the
Princess
and Meriel’s family as drug dealers could not have occurred.

“John, can we save this? Package it up to send it to the court on Enterprise?”

“I can try, M, but it will take a nav-four to understand it. Courts go nuts with technical information like this.”

“Then we need to get them an expert witness,” she said.
And Teddy will be perfect
.

“John, thank you,” she said. “This could save my ship.” She put her arms around him and kissed him. And when the kiss was over, she kept her arms around him and smiled.

John pulled her closer and leaned over to return the kiss, but Meriel’s link chimed, and she turned her head to answer a call from Cookie.

“Hey, guys,” Cookie said. “Come on down to the forward mess. I’ve got something special for ya.”

“I’m kinda busy, Cookie,” Meriel said and gave John a quick kiss. “What kinda special?” Meriel asked.

“A party,” Cookie said. “It was supposed to be a surprise. And bring your date.”

“Who?”

“John, of course,” Cookie said. “I’ve sent Alf to relieve you.”

“Let’s stay a bit longer,” John said. But just as he moved in for a kiss, a surly Alf Martin entered the bridge and logged in.

“I’m feeling happy, John,” she said. “Let’s go have some fun.” She rose and pulled John from his chair, and they left the bridge together.

When they reached the corridor, John pulled Meriel toward his cabin, and Meriel pulled John toward the mess and the party.

John frowned. “I was thinking of a different kind of fun,” John said.

“Slow down, sailor,” she said with a smile and tugged him to the mess.

Rounding the corner to the mess hall, John turned to Meriel. “Nav-three may be easier for you than you think, M.”

Meriel and John found the mess hall crowded with most of the passengers and off-duty crew. Everyone seemed happy, and a few of the passengers’ kids ran between the legs of the adults. Cookie wore a strange hat that looked like a colorful octopus with bells on the end of each tentacle. Meriel and John walked over to him.

“What’s the occasion?” she asked over the clamor.

Cookie handed noisemakers to them and smiled. “Really nothing. They call it Carnival, some old annual Earth excuse for a party. I’ll get you drinks.” He gave them each a party mask and went back to the bar.

Meriel followed John to the window and a breathtaking view: a wash of blue and red with an orange halo and clusters of stars floating within it.
This must be what it looks like near the Orion nebula
, she thought, but she knew they were in a different sector of space.

“This is a bit off course for Enterprise,” he said. “Jerri must have brought us here just for the view. It kind of looks like a sunrise with a blue sky.”

Meriel had no idea what that would look like, except for some of the vids of Earth she had seen.
Why would John make that connection? Maybe he had seen the same vids
.

Cookie came back with their drinks. “Why is everyone so happy?” John asked him.

Cookie smiled. “Clear space and lots of fireworks,” he said, pointing a thumb at the nebula outside. “Nothing in the way and nothing coming at us. Just nature. Just life. Relaxing. I think it’s biological, but I don’t care. Enjoy the mood.”

Someone produced an instrument and began singing bawdies, which forced the passengers to remove their children.

“This ‘speculative destination’ you L5ers ended up in was Haven?” Meriel asked.

John smiled. “Ah, you’ve been reading. Yup, Haven. We made LeHavre from the transport ships.”

“Habitable?”

John nodded. “Close enough to make a go of it and enough resources to be self-sustaining. It surprised us. I think it surprised BioLuna, even though they did the initial survey.”

Haven
, she thought.
Habitable
. She fiddled with the sim-chip on her necklace.
Maybe Mom put something about Haven on the chip in one of the corrupted files, if I could ever read them.
“What’s the gravity?”

“About fifteen percent more than Earth.”

“Artificial?”

“No. Natural.”

Meriel nodded slowly.
That’s a big mass. Maybe Mom’s Home is a dead end, and our home base is Haven
.
I’ve got some research to do
.

“Did you ever hear of a planet called Home?”

“Only the myth,” John said. “Don’t need it, really. We’re pretty happy on Haven.”

Especially after L5
,
she thought. “So Corp just sold Haven to you clear?”

John nodded again. “A trade for the L5 libration point. I think they hoped we’d just die there, and they’d reclaim it. We didn’t die, and they tried to take it back.”

“I didn’t read about that,” Meriel said.

“Cookie might know,” John said and waved to invite him over to their table. “BioLuna tried twice to get it back using hired mercenaries. They kept it real quiet.”

“You didn’t complain?”

“Sure did,” he said. “Lawsuit filed in court of Lander, and we won a cease-and-desist order and preliminary injunction, but there’s no one out here to enforce a judgment. Too far from Earth for the
UNE
Navy, and BioLuna is too rich and too well connected.”

Cookie joined them, and Meriel turned to him. “So you know about mercs and Haven?”

“Maybe,” Cookie said. “Mercs offered me a command for a big deployment, but they never mentioned where. I declined ’cause I was on my honeymoon.”

“Want to tell me about it?” she asked.

“Hell no.” Cookie said. “Say, why aren’t you kids dancing?”

“Well, I…,” Meriel stammered.

Cookie took both of them by the arm and led them to a clear spot between tables as a slow song began to play. John put a hand on her waist and started to slow dance.

Meriel was nervous, afraid of falling for a crew member, but she liked this man.
Just relax, girl
, she thought.
A dance isn’t a commitment
. She closed her eyes, laid her head on his chest, and listened to his heartbeat.

When the song finished, Cookie put on another slow song to keep them dancing. The crowd in the mess hall slowly melted away to prepare for jump, but the pair stayed. At the end of the song, Meriel looked up at John and closed her eyes, inviting a kiss. She relaxed in his arms and drifted away with the moment.
It’s OK; I’ll just keep the lights off.
But what if the nightlight cycles on?
She stiffened.
What if he sees my scars and pushes me away like those boys did when I was a teenager? I can’t go through that again
. She opened her eyes quickly and pushed him away.

“I’m sorry, John,” she said and ran to her cabin.

She’d had her fill of men who could never love her, anonymous spacers on station layovers who didn’t care about the scars and only wanted sex. After the first time, her heart hurt too much. And with those who could love her, the scars were like a wall that she could not shatter. The scars would still be with her, with them, even if she were in love.

If I take the meds, I’ll forget or at least not care
.
Meriel shook her head.
God, it’s always the damn meds
. She took her boost instead, put her head on her arms, and cried until the
Tiger
jumped.