📘The Star Pirate's Folly | 6: Expedition
Fabricants built most of the foundational infrastructure required for colonization on Surface before the first settlers arrived.
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Chapter 6: Expedition
Governor Reginald Glunt sat behind his desk in his home office aboard Overlook Station, idly sipping lotus wine as he watched the news on his display lenses. The windows that normally gave him a view of Surface were blacked out, the door shut and locked, and all calls were blocked for the moment. It was just him, his wine, and the steady stream of current events unfolding in front of him. He at least deserved a few moments of peace with all the chaos going on.
Then a call came through.
Glunt groaned but answered. “What is it? Quickly, please.”
An error message appeared where there should have been a face, and the voice that came through was distorted. “Hello again, Governor.”
Glunt nearly dropped his wine. “It’s you,” he said with quiet terror.
“You were very rude to me last time we spoke.”
Glunt pulled at the neck of his suit. “Y-yes, I remember. I still can’t just—”
“That’s on the list of words I didn’t want to hear from you, Glunt.”
“I—I’m sorry—”
“That’s on the list too. Why don’t you try yes?”
“They’ll kill me—they’ll know it was me. Jensen Lee got himself seen. The whole police force is after him, I can’t just let him through the gates,” the Governor said, and put some strength back in his voice. “No, I won’t do it. I won’t do that for you. I’ll preserve what dignity I have left. These people voted for me. They believe in me. I won’t help you.”
“Oh, come on, Glunt. You're only Governor thanks to me. You know that.”
“I refuse,” Glunt declared with an air of finality, and ended the call.
The display lenses didn’t respond to his input.
“You know, Reginald, I’ve been helping you out here. Working with you. Tell me with a straight face you would’ve gotten re-elected without my help. Those people were at your throat a few months ago, and now they worship you. I’ve given you this much, and I can take it away just as easily. Open your gates to let my man Lee out and I won’t touch your city. Or you can continue being difficult and I’ll smash it to dust.”
“I won’t do it—”
“YOU WILL!”
Glunt trembled at the shout.
“I have been lenient with you, dirtwalker. The streak of paltry victories that kept you your title, Governor, were not earned by you, they were given to you. By me. I have allowed your fleet to believe it’s dealt with the pirate threat for the moment, but I will not wait any longer. Give me the map. Let Jensen Lee out of your city, or I’ll take your head first, Glunt.”
Governor Glunt’s only reply was a mewling sob.
The scrambled voice heaved an exasperated sigh. “Look, I want to make this deal work. But my boys are getting very restless, Glunt. They don’t want this to work. They want you to let your pride get the better of you. They want to be in your cities, eating your fine food and ravishing your fine women. And they know all I’ve got to do is let them loose. Just a bunch of snarling dogs. Animal urges, you know. But I only want the map. And if you give it to me I can lead this pack of howling dogs away. Without that map….”
“I won’t,” whispered Glunt.
“It’s your head, Glunt. We’re coming.”
The display window vanished from his lenses and Governor Glunt, once again alone, took a trembling gulp from his glass of lotus wine as he considered his options. With one finger, Glunt held his right eye open while he gently pinched the display lens off, repeating the process on his left eye. He’d get the fabricant to destroy them later.
Gim stared out at the stars through the thick window in the living room of the Governor’s quarters. He had spent the past three and a half hours standing in the same spot, mentally reviewing what he had been instructed to cook for Governor Glunt’s post-meeting breakfast.
The local ingredients shifted seasonally: today it would be three grilled venison spice sausages, two fried warbler eggs, one thinly sliced chilled lotus fruit, and of course the accompanying lotus tea. Yesterday Glunt confirmed his menu for the day ahead, and he said he would be “looking forward to each meal.”
Gim considered this unusually high praise. As a fabricant, most humans didn’t bother to show him the same social niceties they might give another human. People normally spoke to him as one would any other machine: they either gave orders or asked for information. The Governor was oddly polite to him. Gim gazed out the tall window that stretched across the living room as the sun’s first rays peeked out from behind the planet. Surface, they called it. Not much of a name, really. About as inventive as Earth. But it was the name chosen by its discoverer decades before.
Gim turned on his heel, making his way to the private kitchen. He’d been leased by Governor Glunt forty-seven hours ago as a personal assistant. Before that he had served on a mining vessel in the Styx belt for roughly sixteen hundred hours, on reserve for some high risk zero gravity repair work.
He hadn’t actually done anything but sit in storage; the miners finished their contract early and returned him to Overlook Station for a partial refund, where he was repackaged and kept in cold storage. After a few days on the shelf, he was requested for service by the Governor for a period of no more than seven hundred hours. Once the lease was up he would have approximately 62,436 lifetime hours of operational capacity left—a little over seven years.
The stovetop began heating itself as Gim walked into the kitchen. He had set out two pans and a kettle for tea earlier in the morning. On a shelf in the refrigerator were three venison spice sausages, two yellow-speckled warbler eggs, and a crimson-skinned lotus fruit—all fresh ingredients brought up from the finest organic farms on Surface. Gim set the eggs on the counter, dropped the sausages in their pan, and began to prepare the fragrant lotus fruit while the sausages sizzled.
The lotus looked similar to Earth’s avocado, except that its skin was a dark mottled red and its stem sprouted aquamarine leaves. Gim plucked the stem and dropped it in the food processor, which whirred to life for a few seconds. He then took a knife and deftly bisected the fruit vertically along the large central seed, peeling away both halves.
The fleshy interior of the fruit matched the bright aqua color of the leaves and glistened with moisture. It released a strong, sweet, melon-like scent. The fat teardrop seed was nestled inside the fruit, shiny and dark red. Gim popped it out and tossed it into the food processor, which eagerly obliged him again with a momentary buzz.
After setting the two halves face down on the counter, Gim peeled off the skin, cut the fruit into wafer-thin slices, arranged them artfully on a small plate, and put the dish inside a drawer in the refrigerator. If he left the fruit out it would begin to brown before the rest of the meal was ready. As he shut the fridge, the kettle started to boil. Time for tea.
The heat died underneath the boiling kettle when he turned the heating element off. Gim opened a drawer recessed beneath the counter and plucked an empty teabag from it. The bags were made from the lotus plant’s fibrous stalk and stems back on Surface. The fruit’s seed, leaves, and stem had been reduced to grounds inside the food processor, and Gim carefully spooned the fragrant mixture into the teabag. He cinched the string on top and tied it.
The leaves required only rudimentary preparation to make the tea—no drying, no curing, no processing—making it an extremely profitable export from Surface. Meanwhile its psychoactive primary ingredient ensured high demand: the tea brewed from the seed, stem, and leaf of the lotus fruit induced a warm, full-body, buzzing sensation, heightened mood, increased appetite, and general contentment.
Gim lifted the lid on the tiny teapot and poured in half the water from the kettle before he dropped the bag in. The water swirled from clear to a reddish-purple color, steaming as it filled the pot. Gim replaced the lid and set the kettle down.
Although he performed the process with mechanical precision, Gim had never made the tea by himself before. It was one of the lessons he’d been given by the Governor, who had taken the time to teach Gim between his many video conferences.
Glunt claimed that the shoddy instructional files Gim could have downloaded were entirely wrong, and that he in fact knew the only proper method. Until he had the chance to teach Gim himself, the Governor refused to allow him to brew the tea. Now, having been shown once, Gim would never forget the Governor’s instructions. He would repeat the process exactly any time he was asked. Fabricants never forget, barring brain trauma or deletion of data.
Gim turned the sausages and oiled the other pan for the Governor’s eggs.
“Amazing what fabricants can do these days,” Glunt said around a mouthful of fried egg. “You’re just so damned smart now. I remember I had one of the first organic models back in ’32. Back when they still had memory problems. Back up your backup’s backups, that’s what they used to say.”
They sat at the marble countertop in the kitchen, which doubled as a table for two. The counter was empty underneath, and two chairs tucked in neatly to fill the space when it was not in use.
“Yes, the early models were unreliable,” Gim said. “We’ve come a long way since then.”
Gim had set the table for just the Governor, but Glunt insisted that Gim at least keep him company so Gim sat patiently with his hands in his lap as the Governor ate. Glunt stabbed the juicy slices of aquamarine lotus fruit two, three at a time onto his fork and finished them first. As he chewed, he nodded his head in satisfaction.
“A long way, yes,” the Governor said. “A long, long way.”
He grew quiet then, and took on a distant stare, half-chewed fruit resting in his hanging jaw. He looked pale and distraught. Gim, in an effort to make himself good company, took it upon himself to liven up the conversation.
“How are your wife and children?” Gim asked, confident that speaking of his much-loved family would brighten the Governor’s mood. His conversational guidelines indicated that, rather than asking a simple yes-or-no question, it was much more beneficial to ask open-ended questions which provoked a better response.
“My family is away at the moment,” he said. “I’ve sent them far from Surface. It's unsafe.”
An unexpected answer—it did, however, explain his mood. “I’m sorry to hear that, Governor.”
“Yes. It’s a regrettable set of circumstances we find ourselves in, my biofabricated friend.”
Gim frowned. “There must be something I am unaware of.”
“Yes,” the Governor said. “There’s a great deal of things you are unaware of. Tell me something. If I instruct you to keep our conversations secret, can you?”
“Of course. My social protocol allows for confidentiality. In fact, if you told me to I could encrypt anything we’ve spoken about. Absolutely no record of it would remain in my memory. Fabricants are very good at keeping secrets.”
“How wonderful. You were designed with such consideration.”
Gim smiled. “We’re here to be helpful in any way we can.”
“And say some nefarious agent were to set his mind on gaining access to some of this sensitive information? What sort of countermeasures do you have?”
“A successful intrusion attempt would require extremely advanced knowledge of fabricant security infrastructure. The cryptographers at BioLock, my manufacturer, consider our defenses essentially hack-proof. If you require I can go into further technical detail.”
The Governor skewered a sausage and dabbed his egg’s yolk with one end, releasing a wave of yellow-gold that crept slowly toward his last sausage. He shook his head unhappily as he took a bite.
“Well, I suppose if the good folks at BioLock say so it must be true. In that case, I request that all of our private conversations be kept private, full security measures and whatnot.”
“Of course, Governor Glunt.”
Glunt prodded quietly at the yolk with the other end of the sausage, then dropped his fork on the plate with a huff. “I’ve sent my family away because they’re in danger. We all are. I’m sure you’ve heard about our recent sweep through the pirate sector of the asteroid belt.”
“News sources indicate the campaign ended with a complete rout of the pirate fleet.”
The Governor nodded, sipping at his tea. “It very nearly was.”
“So what is the great threat?”
He started to put the cup down, then brought it back to his lips for another sip, seeming to use the moment to collect his thoughts.
“The battle was a farce. Our ships barely engaged. It was mostly infighting between the pirates, a power struggle between the old leadership and an upstart calling himself ‘the Starhawk.’” Glunt couldn’t help but make mocking air quotes with his fingers. “The old guard was content to stick to the belt and raid the shipping lanes, skimming a fat comfortable profit from interplanetary trade; Starhawk gained power by calling for strikes at the cities themselves, expanding their territory. His forces baited ours into engaging the main pirate fleet, but he cut and run once the battle started. He’s got a fleet about a fifth the size of the previous pirate coalition, and he claims they’re headed this way ahead of our returning fleet.”
“Can anything be done?”
“A brain aneurysm could strike Starhawk at this very moment and bring all of this to a sudden and peaceful halt.”
“There is a very small chance of that happening.”
“Yes, I understand that, Gim. Terrible time to joke, but I was only kidding. Mostly. Anyway, Starhawk has told me he never wanted to actually strike at the Core—he only convinced the pirates to follow him out here because he’s told them we have the coordinates to the vast buried treasure hoard of a dead pirate named Dreadstar—a map of sorts. He’s told me if we give up the map he’ll leave our city alone.”
“You've spoken to him?”
“He's called me. Hacked through my lenses somehow, I couldn't even turn them off. He threatened to raid the planet if we don't give up the map, but he says they'll leave us alone if we give it up.”
“And this map—is there any truth to it?”
“It’s authentic.”
“Historically speaking, I must advise you that such promises are rarely kept,” Gim said.
“Yes, Gim. I’m afraid you’re right.”
“How will you proceed?”
Glunt chomped at a sausage link. “I’m going to run away. And you’re coming with me.”
Gim allowed surprise to register on his face, but did not comment, studying the Governor as the man nonchalantly finished his meal, probing his face for answers. His manner and expression indicated that he was most likely withholding some piece of information which he planned to reveal for dramatic effect. It was actions such as these that puzzled Gim about the Governor—surely he must know that a fabricant would feel no sense of apprehension, no buildup of emotional tension. Was it purely for his own amusement?
“We’re going to save the planet,” Glunt said, breaking the silence. “I have the map under my control. I’ve already arranged an expedition and we’re going to go after the treasure before Starhawk does. By the time he gets to Surface, we’ll be long gone with the map, and he’ll be forced to chase after us—away from the planet. Back to the belt. Back to our fleet.”
“Where is the map?”
“Waiting on our ship,” Glunt said as he downed the dregs of his tea.
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