Star Wanderers: Tales of the Far Outworlds (Omnibus V-VIII) Read online

  Before he reached his chair, Salome intercepted him. “Hi, dear,” she said, stopping him with a hug. There was little tenderness in her embrace, however, and her eyes were cold.

  “Hello,” said Jakob, stiffening a little as he gave her a quick kiss. “Enjoying yourself?”

  “Of course, of course.” She gently but firmly pulled him aside, toward the hall. A few clusters of guests lingered near the bathroom door, but for the most part the place was empty. Jakob obediently followed, his heart sinking. He knew all too well what she wanted to talk about.

  “How is the money situation?” she asked, keeping her voice low. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure no one was listening, then looked him square in the eye.

  Jakob took a deep breath. “I’m not going to lie,” he whispered. “This event has set us back at least a month, probably more.”

  She winced. “Anything you can do to make up for it?”

  “I can clock in a couple hours early to help out with the paperwork. Chief knows our situation—I’m sure he’d let me do that.”

  “What about asking for that raise?”

  This again?

  “Honey, I don’t know what to tell you. If I lose this job—”

  “Yes, yes, I know. But we can’t go on like this, dear—we can’t.”

  You think I don’t know that? Jakob wanted to say. Instead, he held his tongue. No sense getting into another argument with all these guests around.

  “What are we going to do?” she muttered, as much to herself as to him.

  “I’ll do what I can,” he said. “I’ll do everything I can. I love you, dear.”

  Before she could respond, he slipped past her back into the family room. Surrounded by the guests, there was nothing she could do except scowl at him—which she did, quite fiercely.

  I’ll do what I can, dammit, he thought to himself as he took his seat. The dancing was still in full swing, and a couple of other boys had joined in to replace the others. They swung out their arms and dropped to their knees, the reckless abandon of youth driving them almost as much as the admiring eyes of the young women. Mariya was no longer in the center of the circle, but half a dozen boys had gathered nearby, doting on her in ways that made her smile.

  At least my daughter is enjoying herself, Jakob thought. Mariya glanced over at him, and she beckoned him to come join the dance, but his knees were still trembling from the confrontation with his wife. “I love you”—had he meant that as a term of endearment or a barb? It was so hard to tell these days.

  * * * * *

  “Starship on final approach,” came an automated female voice over the dockyard loudspeakers. “All personnel stand by.”

  Jakob rechecked the vacuum seal on his jumpsuit and latched his utility belt to a safety pole. All around him, the other workers did the same. A couple of newbies fitted their breathing masks and made ready to put up their helmets, but all the old hands waited with half-bored expressions on their faces. About twenty yards overhead, the portholes were blocked by the mass of the approaching starship. Though the details were hard to pick out through the tiny windows, everyone knew what to expect.

  The last few weeks had been more eventful than usual. That wasn’t saying much, but the recent events had been earthshaking by anyone’s standard. The talks with the Imperials had been peaceful so far, but that was only because they held all the big guns. Whatever they wanted, they could get—and there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that they wanted everything.

  The artificial gravity shut off for a moment, and Jakob’s feet lifted slowly from the floor. From years of experience, he knew to keep his movements to a minimum, not to try and resist the disorienting effects of microgravity.

  “Another battleship, eh?” said Arai, one of Jakob’s work buddies. “That makes the second one in as many weeks.”

  “That’s right,” said Jakob. “They’ve come to relieve the Augustine. Stars of Earth, was that a ship.”

  A mutter of assent rumbled through the crowd. Arai folded his thick, muscular arms while his dreadlocks drifted up like a pack of rearing snakes.

  “You think they’re going to take us over?” asked one of the newbies.

  “Hell’s bells, kid—they already have.”

  The heavy clang of the docking gears reverberated through the dockyard, sending a tremor through the bulkheads. Jakob gripped the safety pole and watched the hangar bay doors overhead. The station-side tanks and pallets had all been secured magnetically to the floor, with a wide space in the center of the bay to receive whatever the docking starship sent through.

  “Think they’ll put us out of work?” asked another of the newbies.

  Arai threw back his head and laughed. “Fire us? As if the union don’t matter? No—who else would they find to unload their battleships and bulk freighters? I don’t think we have much to worry about.”

  Not all of us are union, Jakob wanted to say. The Oriana Station unions wouldn’t admit immigrants as members—they only cared about protecting their fellow Alphans, and the immigrant community wasn’t large enough to form any sort of competing organization. The dockyards still hired immigrants, but at a much reduced wage, with hardly any of the rights that union workers enjoyed. Not that the other men on the shift looked down on Jakob in any way—but then again, they probably assumed he was union just like them.

  “Hey, Chief,” said Jakob, pulling himself over to the foreman as they waited for the battleship to complete its docking routine. “Got a second?”

  “Sure, Jake,” said the foreman. He was tall and beefy, with a thick neck and a well-trimmed goatee. In the null-gee, his face had reddened slightly, but the rest of him was built solidly enough that it hardly had any effect.

  “I was wondering if you could do me a small favor,” said Jakob, low enough that the other men couldn’t hear him. “I’ve got a friend from the Outworlds who needs work, and I was wondering if you could help him out.”

  Chief frowned. “Jake, you know with the Imperial takeover my hands are tied.”

  “Nothing permanent—just something to help him get by. He’s a star wanderer who just needs something to tide him over for a few months.”

  It made Jakob wince a bit to ask Chief for help directly, even if the favor wasn’t technically for himself. With all the mandatory overtime, though, he might not get another chance like this for a while, so there was no sense in taking the long orbit around.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” said Chief, but he shook his head as if the outcome was doubtful.

  “You want me to send him in to talk with you?”

  “Yeah, that should be fine. Bring him to my office first thing tomorrow, and I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thanks, Chief.”

  “No problem, Jake.”

  The hangar doors over their heads groaned and began to separate. A strong draft of recycled air rushed down, blasting them as the pressure between the station and the starship stabilized. Jakob used his grip on the safety pole to keep his feet firmly planted against the floor. In less than a minute, the draft died down, leaving a slightly metallic taste to the air.

  “Huh,” said Arai. “Would you look at that.”

  As the doors parted, the gap offered an impressive view into the cargo hold of the Imperial battleship. The cavernous space extended almost fifty yards past the freight airlock. A crane even larger than the one in the dockyards hung like a giant claw from the ceiling of the starship, though in null-gee, it might as well have been a wall or even the floor.

  “All right, guys,” Chief called out. “There’s a big load coming through, so we’re going to need everyone. Fahid and Jesson, take the mag-wheelers. Everyone else, let’s head up the shaft and get those tanks on the lift.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” came a voice from the direction of the hangar. Jakob looked up and saw a Gaian Imperial officer in a dark blue uniform coming through with two soldiers, both carrying assault rifles. They caught themselves on the safety poles
and expertly flipped themselves around, facing the Chief.

  “I can’t allow any unauthorized entry onto the Starhelm,” said the officer. “Our own men will unload the bay on our end. Just be ready to receive our cargo as it comes down.”

  “Right,” said Chief, his red face reddening a little more. “Well, in that case, we’ll just sit tight and let you do your thing.”

  The officer nodded and scanned the workers before shooting back up through the freight shaft. Jakob frowned—it wasn’t normal to restrict entry into a ship’s cargo hold like this. Even the larger starships didn’t have the crew or equipment to unload everything themselves—that was what dockyard workers were for. Then again, no system in the Outworlds was large enough to boast a professional military. Defense forces, certainly, but those were normally small flotillas of local volunteers.

  Which was why the Imperials had caught them so thoroughly by surprise.

  “Anyone got the specs on the cargo they’re sending us?”

  “I think it’s mostly waste solids,” said Chief. “Tank dimensions are Coreward standard.”

  “Which means it’s gonna be a bitch finding a place to hold them.”

  “Yeah.”

  In the hold of the Starhelm, the loading claw groaned and came to life. A dozen Imperial crewhands came into view, swarming around the cargo to be offloaded.

  “All right, guys, let’s secure the cargo containers in front of the freight elevator for the fourth quadrant. That’s where they’re going to end up anyway, and no one else is gonna dock here with the Starhelm taking up the space. Jakob, Isa, and Abe, you go with Fahid and the second mag-wheeler. The rest of you, stand by to receive.”

  “They always give us the heavy work,” Arai muttered as they floated over toward the heavy equipment. “But hey, a job’s a job, right?”

  Not when it barely makes enough to pay the bills.

  “You think we’ll still have jobs after the Imperials take over?” asked Abe. He was a newer kid, a star wanderer who had settled down just recently with an Alphan girl. Even though he’d only just started a couple of months ago, he was already in the union, making a higher hourly wage than Jakob.

  “Naw,” said Isa. “The unions’ll protect us. If anything, we’ll have even more work than before.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Jakob. He grabbed a handhold near the storage containers and swung himself around to wait for Fahid to bring up the mag-wheeler.

  “Why do you say that?” asked Abe.

  “Well, for one thing, Alpha Oriana isn’t really on a major trade route that the Gaians would want to consolidate. To us, it’s a major hub, but to them, it’s just a frontier backwater.”

  “That doesn’t mean we won’t see any new investment,” Isa countered.

  Or a mass exodus Coreward.

  A harsh warning beep sounded through the dockyards as the cargo lift descended from the Starhelm to the receiving area on the floor. Without the gravity, the equipment didn’t have to work as hard, but the high mass made the going slow. The others leaned in a little closer so they didn’t have to compete as hard against the noise.

  “That’s a very optimistic view,” said Jakob. “More likely, they’ll do all they can to dismantle our manufacturing centers and make us dependent on the Gaians for goods and supplies.”

  “Come on,” said Arai, his lips curling downward. “What makes you think they’d pull a move like that?”

  “Because they’ve got an empire to manage.”

  “Look, they don’t really care what happens out here at Alpha Oriana. There’s only fifty thousand people in the whole system—how many billions are living on Gaia Nova alone?”

  “I don’t want to know,” Jakob muttered. The Coreward stars were so utterly packed with humanity, it made his stomach sick just to think about it.

  “Right. So what makes you think they’d want to overhaul us so badly?”

  “The fact that they’d send a battle group out to take us over.”

  Arai shook his head. “No way, man. I’ll tell you what this is about. The Gaian emperor thinks his dick would look bigger if he ruled a hundred and fifty-two systems instead of a hundred and fifty-one, so he draws a line on a starmap and sends out the navy.”

  “Well,” said Abe, “if that’s all it takes, the emperor must have the largest dick in the galaxy.”

  “Not until he rules over a hundred and fifty-three.”

  The others chuckled, but Jakob wasn’t in the mood for crude jokes. Once the Imperials fully took over, there was no telling how things would change. They might keep everything in place the way it was, or they might make drastic changes. Only one thing was for sure—Alpha Oriana would never again be a part of the Outworlds.

  * * * * *

  “Is that the last of it?” the young pilot asked as the loading claw returned from the hold of his starship. He watched the remote operating screen over Jakob’s shoulder, unable to do much except supervise.

  “Yep,” said Jakob, easing back on the controls. The old, sun-blasted loading claw—dubbed “Jonah II” by the dock workers at Megiddo Station as something of a religious joke—retracted slowly into the open freight airlock with its load. The secondary and tertiary displays cycled through the various video feeds, showing the equipment against the stunning backdrop of the planetscape below. Cloud decks swirled like the glassy blue surface of a marble, deceptively peaceful this high up the gravity well.

  “All right,” said the pilot. “I’ll be happy to help your men with the offloading.”

  He was scrawny even for a starfarer, probably no older than nineteen. Delta Oriana must be one of his first stops since leaving his birth star, Jakob realized.

  “Shift’s almost over,” Jakob observed, cracking his knuckles as the automated systems took over and finished the operation. “Once the outer freight airlock is shut, we’ll wait until next upshift to finish offloading it.”

  The pilot frowned. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? I mean, there’s only two loading claws on the whole—”

  “Trust me, it’ll be fine.”

  Jakob rose from the controls and stretched out his weary arms and legs. He must have been sitting there for hours—strange, how quickly they flew by. Well, his work was over for the day, and Salome was bound to have a hot, delicious meal waiting for him. Isaac would come running on his clumsy toddler legs to welcome him the moment he stepped in that door, and his sisters- and mother-in-law would all be waiting cheerfully around the table.

  “You’ve got a place to stay?” he asked the pilot.

  “Well, I thought I’d just stay on my ship—”

  “Nah, that’ll never do. Come with me.”

  The young starfarer seemed a little nervous as he followed Jakob up the long, narrow staircase from the tiny control room to the rimside corridor. The station had about a dozen docking nodes for light freight starships along the outer edge of each of its dual wheels. Four of them were designed as shipyards specifically for maintenance and repair, while the rest were dockyards for loading and offloading cargo. Jakob technically worked for his father-in-law in the shipyards, but when work was slow or the staff on other parts of the station needed him, he was more or less on call. Being a former pilot and star wanderer himself, he knew more than enough to cover for any of the dockyard workers.

  “You don’t have to put me up, sir,” said the pilot. “I’m fine with staying on my ship.”

  Jakob chuckled, remembering that first meeting with his future father-in-law and how stressed he’d been to find himself in a similar situation. “Don’t worry about it,” he told the pilot as they stepped out into the glass-ceilinged corridor. “You’re welcome to stay with me and my family—it isn’t any trouble at all. By the way, what did you say your name was?”

  “Tom, sir,” said the pilot. He extended his hand.

  “Very well, Tom. And no need to call me ‘sir’—the name’s Jakob.”

  “Jakob. Right.”

  “So where
are you from?”

  They made small talk all the way to the apartment courtyard, almost on the other side of the station wheel. Even though Tom was still somewhat nervous, Jakob could see that it put him a bit at ease to have a friend at this foreign place so far from his birth star. Just his luck, to come across one of the few people on Megiddo Station who could speak fluent Gaian. Well, as one outworlder to another, Jakob would see to it that he felt welcome and at home for as long as he chose to stay.

  “Daddy!” little Isaac screamed as Jakob walked in through the door. He picked up the young toddler and tossed him high in the air, making him screech with delight.

  “There you are,” said Salome. She wore the cross-stitched apron her mother had made as a wedding gift, the bright floral design complementing her rosy cheeks. The slight bulge in her belly showed that she was expecting their second child. Jakob set down his son and gave her a hug and a kiss.

  “Who is that?” she asked, glancing over at Tom. Of course he couldn’t understand her, though, since she only spoke Deltan.

  “Just a star wanderer I brought home from work,” he said with a wink in his eye. “His name’s Tom. Think any of your sisters would want to keep him?”

  She gave him another glance, this one a bit longer than the first. Jakob took advantage of the moment to turn to Tom.

  “Allow me to introduce my wife,” he said in Gaian. “This is Salome. Salome, Tom.”

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  The young pilot extended his hand, but Salome only looked at it curiously. When he drew it back a little awkwardly, she leaned over on her tiptoes and kissed him once on each cheek. This unusual greeting custom so flustered him that Jakob couldn’t help but let out a laugh.

  “We do things a bit differently here at Delta Oriana, as you can see,” he explained. Then, turning to his wife, “Is dinner ready, dear?”

  “Of course! We were just waiting for you.”

  They went into the main family room, where Opa and Oma Jirgis, Leah, Sara, and Giuli with her husband and three children were already seated on mats around the table. Tom hesitated in the doorway, his awkwardness no doubt multiplied from having spent so many long months in deep space alone. Jakob knew the feeling all too well. When he introduced his guest to them, though, the others were warm and welcoming, so that even though the young pilot didn’t understand what most of them were saying, he took a bowl and joined them on the floor.