Hi, gang. After many delays, a spare evening here in lovely Atomic City,
Oak Ridge, Tennesee... (amusing story: I'm standing in line to get lunch,
the first day, and there's this young guy in front of me, about my age.
He turns to make polite conversation, and suddenly reads my name tag again,
getting this weird grin on his face. "Michael Metlay?" he asks me. "Where?"
I says, looking behind me. That widens the grin a bit, but then HE sez:
"Traveller Mailing List?" You could have knocked me over with a feather!
Turns out that TML Digest-reader Martin Jarrio from Georgia Tech is here
attending this workshop/conference in Oak Ridge too! You meet TMLers in
the WEIRDEST places, man....)
Anyway, here's a little something I've promised folx for a long while. Since
my alternatives to writing this stuff are watching TV or putting even MORE
hours in the day into my dissertation, I figured I'd get it out of the way.
Don't be surprised at the length of the intro-- it contains a lot of stuff
that was NOT in the first four stories. I'd like to give credit to W. Dow
Rieder (Grant) and Alex Wilce (Fell) on the TML, and David Turner (Jaeger),
Boris Bartlog (Kherkhoulloth), Paul Reilly (O'Connor) and Rob Packard
(Sanchez) off it, whose actual gaming sessions from 1989 to 1991 provided all
of what you're about to read. I redid the dialogue because my memory isn't
that good, but the rest is mostly as it happened. When my thesis is out of
the way, I plan to pick up the game again, and we'll see more from these
guys!
metlay
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SYNOPSIS AND CHARACTER INFORMATION
The Suleiman Cluster is a grouping of a dozen or so worlds within a mutual
Jump-1 of one another in the coreward section of the Solomani Rim. One of
the most recent arrivals onto the shipping scene in this bustling little
stellar village of industry and agriculture is the fledgling line of
Hortense, Luttner, and Grant; for the past ten years or so, this scrappy and
inventive shipping line has managed to accrue a good two dozen ships of
varying sizes and solidify its place in the Suleiman shipping business. Its
founders are William Hortense, Rachel Luttner, and Khagariilian Grant, three
Free Traders who pooled their resources (Hortense's administrative savvy,
Luttner's technical expertise, and Grant's brokerage/trading genius) to build
their struggling concerns into one strong company. This move took the
established fleets in the area by surprise, and the competition has been hot
and heavy ever since. They include, for future reference, Rekuta (the local
Tukera affiliate), Whitestar/Concord (the local branch of WhiteStar Lines,
the Solomani Rim's biggest non-megacorporate sector line) and Belvane
TransTech, a fiercely competitive interface line run by the inimitable
Myra Belvane (you need a description? Put Joan Collins in a vacc suit. A
TIGHT vacc suit.), whose fiery passion for Bill Hortense was often at odds
with their economic thrust and parry.
About 2 years ago (1117, the beginning of the Solomani push into the Rim),
Captain Grant sold his share of the company back to Hortense and Luttner and
went on the market to purchase a Far Trader. Grant was tired of the grind of
business management, and longed to hit the road again. On the war-torn and
mysterious planet Easter, Grant assembled as unlikely a crew as the Rim had
ever seen, as he followed a tip by a young StarPort authority secretary that
there was more to one of the ships in mothballs than met the eye....
For technical support, Grant chose Wu-Shun Sanchez, a fanatical tinkerer
whose soft-spoken optimism was often mistaken for an advanced coma. His
career had been rapid and unswerving in its progress--downward. From a
promising start as a corporate trainee in Tukera, Sanchez was busted down
to WhiteStar, the Solomani Rim's main sector-wide line, then to the
subsector subsidiary WhiteStar/Concord, then to an interface line, and
finally to HL&G, where his easygoing attitude finally found him a home.
Grant, not much of a yeller himself, found Sanchez a pleasant alternative
to the whiskey-swilling imbeciles who learned engineering etiquette from
James Doohan, and took the tech with him to aid in his selection of a ship.
Security went to Daryavayush O'Connor, a downpowered cyborg warrior
from FSO, the little-publicized and much-feared Free Space Operations
branch of the Imperial Navy. The FSO specializes in operations similar to
those performed by the Marine Commandos, but are renowned for taking on
missions the Commandos consider too dangerous with equipment they consider
substandard. Everyone, but EVERYONE, in the Imperial military machine
considers the FSO to be dangerously loose cannons, and with good reason--
they are actively recruited into IRIS upon retirement, if they live that
long. (Interestingly enough, I predicted IRIS by about six years when I
created the FSO and their parent organization, the Shadow Fleet, in 1979--
but GDW informed me that a secret organization of this nature wouldn't
fly. Harrumph.) O'Connor was a native of Iddamakur, the primitive and vicious
archipelago once used by the Solomani as a prison camp world. His eye, arms,
throat, and part of his brain were replaced by artificial implants as he
recovered from various war traumas. He was, in a sense, the perfect security
system.
No one knows where Grant found Kherkhoulloth, the Vargr navigator. Kherk was
a deassigned Imperial Scout, stranded far from the Antares Sector where he
was born. He'd travelled the xboat routes for decades, and had been just
about everywhere coreward of Capital. Now, he was the ultimate Vargr specimen
- - --scrawny, unwashed, cowardly to a fault, and a recreational drug-user whose
exploits were legendary in their monumental stupidity. But he had one fetish
that outwieghed all others: he was stonecold sober when he plotted courses,
and could do a Jump-5 from inside an asteroid belt in under three minutes and
miss his target by less than a kilometer every time. Grant hired him.
During the search for a suitable used ship in the Easter shipyards, Grant and
his team became embroiled in a battle to set up a new xboat route from
Estigaribbia to Suleiman via Easter, in case the encroaching Solomani broke
the existing routes to the Vegan district. HL&G, attempting to expand its
influence by tying in an Imperial subcontract for xboat service to the new
route, was struggling with WhiteStar/Concord and with Myra Belvane's, erm,
PROMISING young niece Tiffany, who were attempting to secure the contract for
themselves. HL&G supported the claims put forth by the nation of Alepfa that
occupied one half of Easter, and the other firms were doing the same for
Zuma, the other half of the planet. The two nations existed on opposite sides
of the thick atmosphere barrier at the planet's equator, and each had its own
starport at its own pole, above the atmosphere in vacuum. There had been
peace for uneasy centuries, but the situation over the lucrative Imperial
contract and the commercial openings it would encourage was raising tensions
to the boiling point.
Grant solved the problem in spectacular fashion, exposing a plot by
WhiteStar/Concord to bribe the Zuman government to start a war over the port.
He was aided in this by a mysterious stranger named M. Iscin Delano Jaeger,
a man who seemed part George Lucas, part Donald Trump. Jaeger, it turned
out, was the first human in history to be officially admitted to the Hiver
Manipulators' Club. His Manipulation, fully documented and on file on Guaran,
was the war currently in progress on Okefenokee, which he'd started several
years earlier for the filming opportunities it would lend him. Jaeger was
an ex-supervisor at Makhidkarun, a topnotch diplomat, and an expert at
propaganda films and popular culture control, who viewed the chaos in the
Rim as the ultimate laboratory for sheer mayhem. He chose Grant's new ship
as his favored means of getting away from his projects as they exploded.
The team purchased a bizarre ship impounded from a group of pirates who'd
been captured or killed while shoreside. The Serendipity, as they named her,
had any number of bad associations with various people around the Rim, and
Grant's company was hounded across the sector by them, until the Serendipity
was impounded by the authorities as stolen goods on the feudal-technocratic
world of Upirzanu, where it had originally been built by Langmuir, personal
shipwright of Lord Cendryk, the strongest ArcoLord of the world. Along the way,
the Serendipity's crew discovered a floating hulk in space with more than
its share of secrets, stopped a religious war on Vega, and bounced their
ship off a mountain on Ymir (as documented in the first couple of stories).
Their new ship contract was for the Torch, a ship designed as a prototype
for the spoiled oldest son of Lord Corris, Cendryk's greatest rival. The
Torch was an innocent-looking merchant ship with INCREDIBLE Jump legs; it
could jump the Great Rift unaided, with minimal preparation. (Can you say
"three Jump-5s without refueling"? Knew you could.) While the Torch gave
Grant a big edge in the small-package trade, it brought a serious new problem
with it: its payment schedule was backbreaking. Between that and the few
loose ends left from the Serendipity's record, Grant was desperate for the
spare cash he'd need for overhauls.
One of the most interesting loose ends of the Serendipity's run was Hector,
the ship's computer. Technically he was just a Model/7 (just?!), but in fact
he was much, MUCH more than that-- he was a living being. Not a sentient
computer or a synaptic robot-- a living being. As the crew discovered, the
initial discovery of sentient silicon life on the planet Cymbeline was being
exploited in secret by a private firm developing a new generation of
computers for the Navy. The firm, CymBiotica, was now desperately trying to
hide all evidence of its research from the occupying Solomani-- including the
third generation of CymBiots, the "grandchildren" of the now-famous sentient
chip 10987 (see Adventure 13, "Signal GK") that resembled their grnadfather
about as much as a Cray resembled an abacus. Needless to say, Hector was a
big boon to anyone who had him as an employee-- and EVERYONE wanted him.
The only other chip of that type on the loose, nicknamed Marilyn, was being
transported by a courier who didn't know what he was carrying and who hitched
a ride on the Torch to evade his pursuers. Although Marilyn went insane and
had to be destroyed, the courier ended up joining the crew. He had several
different identities, and switched from one to the next effortlessly; most of
the time, he preferred to be known as Dr. Christoph Fell, architectural
expert and ex-IISS bureaucrat. His other alter egos included the slimy
tabloid reporter Clovis Cruikshank and Terran private detective Tibor Trench,
not to mention a dozen others....
Driven by encroaching Solomani fleets to seek shelter in the Vegan Autonomous
District, Grant and his tired, careworn crew were approached by a man calling
himself J.J.Cameron, an executive for Ling-Standard Products. Cameron had a
fascinating proposition for Grant: he had learned of a new formulation of
Dag, a material used in electronics design, that had been developed on Terra
and was now being hidden from the Solomani there. Grant and his team would be
surgically altered and personality-overlaid into a completely new group of
people, and sent to Terra to recover the formula, or better yet, a sample of
the new Dag. If they succeeded, Cameron promised, he would pay off the lien
on the Torch.
Grant agreed. The process of transformation took months, but when it was
done, the Torch was hidden in deep space, and a battered old Far Trader,
the IMSS Inexplicable, was doing the smuggler's route along the Rim. Its
captain, James Hudson, had no memory of his previous life, only a personal
secretary-bot that seemed awfully smart for just junk. Accompanied by his
ragtag crew of smugglers, Hudson headed for Terra and a quick buck. Behind
him in the Suleiman cluster, a company he didn't know or care about was
dying in the throes of a tradewar, its CEO nearly killed in a terrorist
bombing and its VP scrambling for her life....
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PART 5
Terra, in the Solomani Rim: 1119
"There it is again."
Tsogukh stopped and looked at the poster, now beginning to peel
off the wall. He frowned and scratched his head, squinting at the faces
before him, reading the caption for the dozenth time.
HAVE YOU SEEN THESE MEN?
Hortense, Luttner and Grant, LIC, will pay a reward of ten
thousand Imperial Credits to the locator of the crew of the
IMSS Torch, lost 102-1119 in the Vegan Autonomous District....
Hudson looked past the huge Vargr's shoulder at the picture
of the man called Khagariilian Grant. Edison just stood there and blinked.
Tchorgin picked at a tooth delicately, trying to hide his boredom. Nyborg
scowled and began scratching the back of his hand again; he claimed it
still itched after the accident on Muan Gwi, oh, months ago. Newton stroked
his beard thoughtfully, his eyes troubled.
After a long pause, Hudson turned to the others, anger fighting with
fear on his face. "What IS it about this damn thing...?"
"Have a seat, Mister Hudson."
Hudson staggered across the room, propelled roughly by a shove from
the guard, and flopped into the chair. He summoned up the strength for a
scowl at the pudgy, moon-faced man across the desk from him, and rasped, "What
the hell gives you the right to do this to us? We're clean! We aren't...."
"Save it, Captain. I'm not interested." The man's smile flickered for
a moment, and he cocked an eyebrow at the door. The guard quietly withdrew,
taking the hint. The door shut with a click.
Hudson surveyed the room. It was obviously bugproofed and
soundproofed; the man facing him was obese, his chins bulging out over the
collar of the expensive business suit, grey and black except for a spot of
color at the lapel. Hudson tried to focus on it, but his eyes weren't
cooperating....
"Cigarette?" A neatly-slit packet was waved before Hudson. He frowned
at it, suddenly unsure. I don't smoke, he thought. Do I?
"I...don't smoke."
"You used to smoke like a chimney, old friend," was the startling
reply. "Sure you won't change your mind?"
Hudson shrugged and took a cigarette from the pack. The man across
the desk lit it for him; he took a deep lungful of the smoke, held it,
exhaled. Suddenly he saw the cold pig-black eyes regarding him carefully,
and forced himself to cough, gasp for breath. "Foul habit," he managed.
"Give it up, John. You're not fooling anyone."
Hudson tried to poke a hole in the dark stare with his own eyes.
John?
"John?"
"John." The oily voice held satisfaction. "Shall I spell it out for
you, or would you like to do that yourself and save me the trouble?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Hudson managed, the
cigarette forgotten between his fingers and scorching the arm of the chair.
"My name's Jim, not John. James Hudson. I'm a chartered merchant on a run
from Ys to--"
"To Hell, John. Straight to Hell." Meaty hands slapped the desktop
as the mountain of flesh scrambled upright. "'Down, down to Hell; and say
I sent thee thither.' Shakespeare." A horrible smile creased the fat face.
"I don't know why you picked here and now to show up again, and how you chose
that gang of freaks you call an ops team, but I am NOT going to let an
opportunity like this pass me by."
"What opportunity? What are you talking about---Sonderberg?" Hudson's
mouth closed with a snap. Who?
"Ah, so you DO remember me," the fat man nodded. "Excellent. It'll
make killing you so much more pleasurable. It's ALREADY practical beyond
belief, but now at least I can enjoy it."
"Look, I DON'T remember you! I have NO IDEA who you are! That name
just, well, I don't know, just kind of popped into my head!" Hudson felt the
sweat trickle down his temple and across the stubble on his cheek. Something
was very, VERY wrong....
"Of course it did," Sonderberg soothed. "Of COURSE it did. Your
overlay was a pretty shoddy one, John-- just like the others'. You must have
really scraped the bottom of the barrel when you did your recruiting! It's
sort of a pity you're all going to have to vanish together-- it would be
interesting to see what sorts of songs Chandra and Shevek could sing. But
where, where, WHERE did you dig up RICE, for God's sake? Or that Corris
brat? And the VARGR-- you couldn't even get one with his BRAIN INTACT?!"
Hudson's mind was whirling. Shevek? Rice? Who was-- what was--
what was that about the brain? Intact? But he was OFF drugs, Tsogukh never
DID drugs-- WHO was off drugs? And Corris--where'd he hear THAT before--
Corris, the Lord, the Keeper of the Flame--of the Flame--of the....
Torch?
Hudson's mouth worked like a fish's, but no sound came out. His eyes
began to glaze over.
Sonderberg scowled. "Hmm, the overlay must be stubborn. Normally when
they crack, they peel right up. Okay, fine," he sighed, walking around the
desk and facing Hudson, who shrank back in his chair at the big man's
approach. "Let me help you along, then." He poked a surprisingly strong
finger into Hudson's chest. "Your real name is John Becker. JOHN BECKER!"
That last was a cry of triumph. "And you are about to suffer a fatal
accident, trying to escape from me-- and my job, YOUR JOB, will be as
permanent as anything ever gets in this floating world we live in...."
Hudson wasn't hearing him any more. His terrified gaze was locked
on the huge man's lapel pin, a blood-red circle-and-cross-
JOHN BECKER. SOLOMANI SECURITY. IDENT CODE ASB8-93OJ-HGN4...4....
My God, Grant thought in a panic. HOW MANY OF ME *ARE* THERE?!
He fainted dead away.
TO BE CONTINUED