Closed System Read online

  Closed System

  Zach Hughes

  CLOSEDSYSTEM

  by Zach Hughes

  A SIGNET BOOK

  NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

  Copyright © 1986 by Hugh ZacharyAll rights reserved

  ONE

  The computer was being cranky again. The oldermodels of the Century Series were subject to ion­izationof the Verboldt Cloud memory chambers, and decontamination of the chambers in a well-equipped shop on a civilized planet was the onlycure. In the Ophiuchus sector planets were few, even if one counted Van Biesbroeck's brown dwarf,a gas giant circling VB-8, twenty-one light-yearsout from Old Earth and almost thirteen light-yearsbehind. As for the degree of civilization in Ophiu­chus, that remained to be seen.

  Pat Howe had the ship's optics on scan. He wassure that he recognized the obverse patterns ofstars in both Scorpius and Sagittarius, but whendealing with distances measured in parsecs on the far end of a little-used blink route, one did not relyon optical readings as interpreted by the always fallible human mind.

  The computer had begun to develop a crustypersonality after theSkimmer's last overhaul. Itreminded Pat of a creaking, proud, overly meticu­lous old man more intent on thoroughness thanefficiency. The computer had gone to H-alpha lightand was laboriously building a composite 360-degree photo map, following a procedure designed for use in the event a ship became hopelessly lost, with not one known point recognizable. However,sooner or later the computer would accomplishthe purpose of checking the ship's position. To haltthe process would have required giving the com­puter detailed instructions, and that would haveinterrupted Pat's dinner.

  The nutrition servos were working well, as were,indeed, all of the ship's systems except the com­puter. Skimmer was a smoothly functioning com­plex of hardware, electronics, and subatomic tech­nology that muttered, purred, clicked around Patwith familiar, reassuring sounds. She was in excel­lent condition for her age, squat and squarish,solidly built. She was moderately luxurious insideand all space dog outside, a refitted deep-spacetug, Mule Class. She had become surplus, and thus affordable, when the deep-space tug companies be­gan racing each other to replace the dependableold Mules with the sleek, ultrapowerful Greyhounds.

  For five decades, the Mules had been the most reliable ships in space.Skimmer had power to sparein her drive system, because she'd been built to be able to haul in the largest liner, and to be able tomake multiple blinks without recharging the over­sized blink generator which, with the chambers ofthe flux atmospace drive, occupied a large portionof her interior space.

  As the computer built its maps on the screen, the nearer stars appeared as haloed, sparklingpoints of light. Pat slid his plate back into thenutrition servo, put his feet up on the console, andmused idly as the Carina Nebula formed on thescreen, its emission nebulosity only slightly altered in shape from the familiar pattern on UnitedPlanets-oriented maps. He was a man at homewith himself and his world, a world which con­sisted of theSkimmer, his library, his own thoughts.

  Pat Howe was a sandy blond man, not only inhair coloration but in skin pigmentation. He was abit thin for his six feet, but hard-muscled, staying fit through religiously observed exercise periods both in null-gravity and in the ship's easily acti­vated artificial gravity. Some took him to be in his late twenties. Others would guess that he was nearing forty. Actually, he was thirty-five and, becauseof his emotional stability and his relatively newfreedom, expected to live past that biblically prom­ised age of six score years.

  The computer whirred, an electronic chuckle."You're gonna make it yet," Pat said, as the Jewel Box, the galactic cluster Kappa Crucis, formed onthe screen. From theSkimmer's point of reference,the Jewel Box had been glaringly evident to aquick scan.

  The computer, almost chortling, leaped with itsold swiftness to placeSkimmer just under two light-years out from the single star wing of the Ophiuchusgroup, just where they were supposed to be.

  "Congratulations," Pat said, as the computer de­livered coordinates for orbital approach to Taratwo. Now that he had the coordinates, he was in nohurry to use them. His mind was not quite pre­pared for action.

  There were times when it seemed best to post­pone action in favor of some thinking, and Pat wasa man who believed in following his hunches.

  The computer flashed a green light at him, brag­ging about a job finished and well done.

  "Just hold your horses," Pat said. He punchedup a cup of steaming coffee, with cream and sugar,from the servo and sat easily, feet up, the mugheating both hands as he clasped it. There was nourgent reason for his hesitation, no clang-clang of warning in his skull, just a reluctance to push thebutton and send the Skimmer on to her destina­tion. No harm, he decided, in going over it onemore time.

  The ship's papers, and his own, were in order.He was Audrey Patricia Howe, an accredited freetrader, bonded to carry cargo of all classes up toClass AAA pharmaceuticals, of which his currentcargo consisted. To carry the potent drugs inSkim­mer'sstorage areas required a half-dozen permitsand licenses, for in the wrong hands the drugscould produce happy times and headaches. Prop­erly handled, his cargo was as legal as a church.

  Was that the problem?

  He'd had to express his concern in a polite wayto the businessmen on Zede II who had commis­sioned him. At first he'd gotten the idea that theyhad something other than legal Class AAA in mind.There'd been nothing concrete or overt, just hints that very profitable items could be carried by anaccredited trader to an independent out-planet.

  Needless to say, he was having nothing to dowith illegal drugs. UP law might not be present asfar out as Taratwo, but Pat had no intention ofspending his life in the cosmic outback, no inten­tion of risking a negative entry on his record onany planet, no matter how far removed from UP Central.

  So the cargo was legal, and he had the rightpapers to carry it. He had done what a traderalways strives to do. He had bought cheap and hewould sell dear, and the profit from the cargowould be a welcome bonus to the fee he'd set onthe commission from the businessmen on Zede II.

  Thinking of the size of that fee gave him twoemotions, joy and happiness. Half of it was al­ready on deposit in his account in the UP Bank and Trust Company on Xanthos. The other halfwas on demand deposit on Zede II, requiring onlya coded affirmative from the men who had char­teredSkimmer to be transferred to his account.That coded affirmative would be sent before hedelivered a certain item of cargo to an isolated,private landing pad on Zede II.

  The computer blinked its green light again. "Takea break," Pat said, but he let his feet slide off the console, and leaned forward to punch the stand-bybutton on the computer.

  On the surface, it was to be a simple operation.All he had to do was blink out to a distant planetin the Ophiuchus sector. He would be contactedon landing by a friend of his employers on Zede II.He would trade his cargo, pick up a passenger,whose legality had been sworn to by the Zede IIbusinessmen, and take that passenger back. Sucha simple mission could have been performed moreeconomically and more comfortably for the passen­ger by any charter yacht in the UP system.

  And that, he decided, was why he was hesitating.

  The Zedeians, two of them, neatly dressed in thestandard tailored suits of businessmen, had soughthim in his small office on Xanthos, having made atrip of twenty parsecs from the Zede suns. Whenhe realized that they'd deliberately chosen him, a man with a cannon, to do a job which could have been done by an unarmed yacht, he had begun to wonder.

  "Why do you need an armed mercenary?" hehad asked.

  "The passenger is important," the spokesmanfor the businessmen had said. "We want the pas­senger to have every possible degree of safety."

  "From what?" Pat had asked.

  "It is a lonely and desolate part of the galaxy.There have
been pirate attacks there."

  But there hadn't been a recorded act of piracysince X&A had sent fifty ships of the line to reducethe pirate strongholds on the Hogg Moons.

  When Pat didn't like a proposition, he set the fee impossibly high. He had named a figure, knowingthat it would be refused, and without blinking aneye the Zedeians had accepted. Obviously, therewas more to the proposition than appeared on thesurface. But it was a lot of money. Pat liked hisfreedom, and without financial freedom there isno personal freedom. And, after all, he was paid totake risks.

  "Just what business are you in?" Pat had asked.

  "We are involved in several areas," the spokes­man had said. "Import-export, for example. Re­cently we've become interested in producing enter­tainment films."

  Just plain, ordinary businessmen. Businessmenwho were willing to spend a small fortune withouteven bargaining over the price to send a legally armed mercenary on a simple passenger-carryingmission. The problem was that there was nothingsimple about anything Zedeian. It had been a thou­sand years since the prosperous, populous Zede worlds had engaged in their last war of conquest,but historians, to whom Pat had been often ex­posed, talked about "the War" as if it had hap­pened yesterday. For a while, during that last ofman's big wars, the first all-out war in space, ithad been anyone's victory, touch and go. In desperation, the free worlds of the United PlanetsConfederation had used a terrible new weapon,the planet reducer, for the first and last time inrecorded history. Seven Zede planets were rup­ tured, blown apart, sent flying into space in chunksand pieces, all life destroyed, before the Zede war­lords capitulated.

  UP historians justified the use of the planet de­stroyer by saying that freedom had been preserved,that millions of lives had been spared by endingthe war. Some historians and moralists went allthe way back to the mid-twentieth century to findhistorical precedents.

  The peace treaty had been generous. The surviv­ing Zede worlds had become a semiautonomous part of the Confederation, a status which contin­ued into modern times. UP laws governed all the Zede planets, but the Zedeians were notoriouslyindependent, and sometimes rather frustratinglyinventive. Zede led the Confederation in innova­tive industrial development, in subatomic technol­ogy. The Vervoldt Cloud memory chambers whichhad given a relatively small shipboard computerthe storage capacity and reasoning ability of asomewhat backward human brain had been devel­oped on Zede's Valhalla. The advanced weaponswhich were mounted on the latest ships of the UPFleet and the ship of the Department of Explora­ tion and Alien Search, were largely Zedeian. Thearms trade, indeed, was at the core of Zede's pros­perity, big business within the UP, a profitable sideline when dealing with non-aligned, indepen­dent planets of which there were very few, andthose mostly on the far fringes of the explored andcharted portion of the galaxy.

  Had the Zede "businessmen" had a small ship­ment of arms in mind when they hinted at a more profitable cargo for theSkimmer? Pat didn't thinkso. Armaments were often bulky. The store of Class AAA drugs inSkimmer's storage areas was, Patfelt, just about the most profitable cargo he couldcarry, for you could pack a lot of high-class medi­cine into a small space.

  Pat had taken theSkimmer to Zede II to buy hiscargo, having been assured of the lowest prices inthe Confederation. He'd done some talking aroundthe port, and the word was that a man with theright connections could buy just about anything he wanted to buy somewhere on Zede II. It wasthere that he had heard repeated a persistent ru­ mor, unproven as yet, that someone was dealing inthe filth of the old nuclear weapons, and perhapseven the long-since-outlawed planet reducers.

  The rumor had leaked originally from the crewof an X&A ship back from charting a new blink route in search of always scarce habitable planets.A long way from home, in a previously unchartedarea, the ship had picked up suspicious readingsfrom a barren, small, Mercury-like planet. Theplanet, if the X&A ship's analyzers were workingproperly, had recently, in the past two decades at the most, been the site of hydrogen fusion tests.Since the need for power from either fusion orfission had been eliminated soon after the first starship went out from Old Earth, there was onlyone possible use for the nasty power of the atom,nuclear power was good only for destruction,and not even efficient destruction. An X&A destroyer had more firepower than a thousand hydrogenbombs. If someone had been playing around withthe antique nuclear weapons their intent couldonly be blackmail. Livable planets were rare, widelyscattered. The constantly multiplying populationsof the UP worlds made X&A's search for new livingspace the most important function of government.A madman with nuclear bombs, threatening tomake a life-zone planet unlivable with slowlydecaying radioactivity would be in a powerfulposition.

  All of these old thoughts replayed through Pat'smind as he sat, scratching himself. That was asmall but important luxury, to be able to scratchwhere he itched when he itched and not worryabout couth. He liked living alone.

  He grinned at the computer. "Give me the dis­play file on Taratwo," he said.

  The computer disliked oral orders. It fancieditself an old man, hearing becoming impaired. He had to repeat the order, loudly. The computer mut­tered to itself for a few seconds, punished him bytaking extra seconds to check and crosscheck allreferences to the planet Taratwo, then deliveredthe file to the screen.

  Pat had examined the file a dozen times on the trip out. He had in his data banks all the informa­tion available on Taratwo, fourth planet of thestar Upsilon Ophiuchus. He had data not availablein the public banks, thanks to Jeanny Thompson.

  A few years back, when Pat was enduring tenure in the Roget Seat of Philology at Xanthos Univer­sity, both he and Jeanny had thought that an alli­ance between learning and practical science, be­tween the learned professor and the upwardly mo­bile X&A technician, might work. Neither of themcould remember the moment of mutual decision,nor place blame, for the realization that a perma­nent marriage would be undesirable.

  Jeanny just bent the rules a little bit when sheallowed Pat access to X&A's file on Taratwo.

  "That's a long way from home," Jeanny hadsaid, when he made his needs known.

  "That makes it interesting," Pat had said.

  They had read the file together as it slid silentlyfrom the printer.

  "If I were you, boy, I'd walk easy out there,"Jeanny said. "That planet is an anachronism. Anabsolute ruler in this enlightened, unquote, age?"

  Taratwo had been discovered by accident and peopled by political dissidents who had carefully nursed on their journey through space an old, oldgrudge from the Old Earth, a grudge so ancientthat the reason for it was a long-forgotten mys­tery. When a race can lose its home planet forthousands of years the reasons behind a simplelittle family fight among tribes of men can also belost.

  "This is interesting," Jeanny had said. "The nameof the planet is taken from the site of the palace ofa legendary race of kings, back on Old Earth."

  Pat had been more interested in solid informa­tion. Taratwo's political status was Independent.There were no organized trade routes to any UP planet, but there were records of trips to the planetby free traders. The autocratic ruler of Taratwodidn't call himself a king, but according to allinformation he was the boss, the absolute ruler.

  "He fancies himself to be a great leader," Jeannyhad said. "He's a bad dude, Audrey—"

  "Don't call me Audrey," Pat had said.

  "—standing tall and alone on the frontier of theinhabited galaxy. And look at this. He's been buying warships from the Zede munitions plants."

  The figures were impressive. Taratwo, a small,insignificant planet, had the most powerful fleetarm of any independent planet or group of inde­pendent planets.

  Pat whistled through his teeth in surprise. Itwould take a full UP battle fleet to reduce Taratwo'spower, and not without loss, because Taratwo had been buying the latest, most powerful ships andweapons, every modern weapon except, of course, reducers.

  "Let's run down all recorded trips by free trad­ers," Pat had said, not too concerned about Tara­two's powerful f
leet. TheSkimmer was armed, true,but no one in his right mind would use an entirefleet to chase—if the need arose—one small deep-space tug converted into an armed mercenary.

  Taratwo seemed to welcome free traders. Iso­lated as they were, no established trade routeswithin a dozen parsecs, free traders would keepthem up to date and bring in the latest in, forexample, medicines.

  There in Jeanny's office at X&A Headquarterson Xanthos, they had stared, together, at a holo­graphic chart of the Taratwo sector. Jeanny shud­dered. "It's lonely out there," she'd said.

  Pat had nodded, musing. Taratwo was alone, theonly populated planet in a twelve-parsec radius of space. She was a relatively new planet, as plane­ tary age goes, and she was, in theory, too small to hold a viable atmosphere. Mountain formation wasstill going on, and that made for considerable vol­ canic activity along with the resultant earthquakes. Population was under half a billion. Chief exportswere heavy metals and gemstones.

  "Well, Audrey," Jeanny had said, "you havepicked an odd profession. You can expect odd placesand odd people."

  "Don't call me Audrey," Pat had said.

  "You're a mercenary, a gun for hire," Jeannyhad said. "Nice citizens and nice planets don'toften need a man with a gun."

  "I think of myself as a knight in shining armor."he'd said, "soaring into the nebulous distances of the universe on missions of true and pure good."

  "Batshit," Jeanny had said. "It's just a way ofrunning from responsibility."

  He had made the statement with a mock look ofarrogance on his face, eyes idealistically wide, eye­brows raised, for he would never admit to anyonethat he'd been naive enough, in the beginning, tosee it just that way when lucky coincidence ofbirth had made it possible for him to purchase hisfreedom from the halls of learning and from eagerfreshmen with an unexpected legacy from an un­cle who had been forgotten since he boarded acolony ship aimed for a star near the Coal Sack.

  "Knight, hell," Jeanny had said. "You're a bum in an antique space tug which carries enough ar­mament to take on a destroyer."