“Oh, sure,” Accrington assured her. “The hull is as sound as it was when we bought it” — Hannelore snorted; that hadn’t been very sound — “and there’s nothing wrong with the life support. It’s just the flicker drive.”
“Very well,” Hannelore said, straightening up. “Put the ship on internal system duties until it finally gives up the ghost or we can scrape up the funds to have the flicker drive repaired.”
“It would probably be cheaper in the long run to buy a whole new ship,” her chief engineer said, as he wiped his hands on a grubby towel. “The older ship isn’t going to last forever.”
Hannelore contemplated the loss of the Misfit as she strode through the freighter’s cramped passageways and out into the asteroid habitat she’d converted into a base of operations. Calling it a habitat was a bit of a stretch, but she didn’t care about rocky walls, dodgy life support and unidentified smells in the atmosphere. It was her home and would remain her home until she returned to Earth in triumph, or finally gave up and joined the Moochers, the army of disinherited heirs who lurked at the edge of the Thousand Families, more than commoners but less than aristocrats. She couldn’t imagine a worse fate and her natural optimism kept her going, yet it seemed as if the universe itself was conspiring against her. All her hopes and dreams seemed to be on the verge of failure.
Tyler’s Star had been judged worthless when the Imperial Navy’s survey service had passed through the red dwarf system, pausing long enough to catalogue the small handful of asteroids and the single small gas giant before moving on to more prosperous systems. Hannelore — searching for a place to try to build a fortune — had other ideas. The system had two great advantages; it had no local population and a suitable source of power, the star itself. And, if the economic predictions for Sector 117 bore out, a person who just happened to control a cloudscoop and an asteroid mining facility would be in a position to carve out a niche for herself. Hannelore wanted that very much.
She’d been the product of an arranged marriage between two families, both small families who had dreams of merging and becoming a greater one. They’d ordered two of their youngsters to marry and produce a heir, but their dreams had shattered long before Hannelore had reached her majority. Powerful factions within both families, fearing that they would be disinherited in favour of the newcomer, had torn the alliance apart, leaving Hannelore adrift. Her parents might have been divorced, yet they’d always been kind to her, but that kindness had limits. Hannelore was that unfortunate person who could not be denied a place in the family, but was also an embarrassment, a reminder of plans that had simply never come to fruition. She had grown up among the Thousand Families and rapidly learned to hate most of the younger members, both the ones who pretended sympathy for her isolation and the ones who acted as if she was tainted, as if what had happened to her was a deadly disease that could rub off on them. Hannelore had sought an escape and found one, more or less by accident. It had required almost all of her trust fund from her family, but she’d gone ahead with it anyway. A successful mining project would give her the leverage to rejoin her family on her terms, or allow her the independence she had always craved.
The thought made her smile bitterly, for both her parents had been adamantly opposed to their daughter taking her inheritance — such as it was — and heading nearly six months from Earth, in the company of common-born miners and engineers. The miners were hardly suitable companions for a young girl, her mother had twittered, while her father had warned of the dangers of a pirate raid taking her alive. If she was lucky, the family would have to pay a hefty ransom; if she were unlucky, she would suffer a fate worse than death. And, so far, the worst that had happened was a steady decline in her assets and financial trouble on the galactic market.
Her concept had seemed brilliant, at first. The asteroid miners worked for the Thousand Families, often paid low wages that allowed their superiors to fix the prices of asteroid ore. Hannelore had calculated that if she established a completely independent mining colony, she could charge whatever prices she liked, including undercutting all of her competitors. The Roosevelt Family would not be amused — she had been careful not to allow them any stake in her enterprise — yet what could they do about it? They couldn’t crush her through their network of patronage, for that would bring the wrath of every other family down on their heads. The Thousand Families couldn’t afford to turn on one another, or the commoners would see the infighting and start getting ideas.
She smiled again, a more relaxed smile, wondering what her mother would say if she saw her daughter now. Hannelore wore a grimy shipsuit, her blonde hair cut back into a short mop surrounding her head… and she looked as if she hadn’t had a bath in weeks. She hadn’t, come to think of it, water was rationed on the platform until they finished melting down asteroid ice and inserting it into the system. Hannelore had no intention of abusing her position; she could never have explained it to her mother, but she liked the engineers and miners she worked with more than she liked her friends back home. At least the miners weren’t plotting her social death every time they looked at her.
The asteroid’s control centre barely rated the name. Her engineers had rigged up a fusion reactor, a handful of consoles and a display they’d pulled out of a freighter that they’d actually had to scrap, after using it as living quarters for the first few weeks. The thought was galling; if she’d had full access to the family funds, she could have provided much better equipment and they wouldn’t be risking their lives every time they used some of the older gear. Once she got the whole complex up and running, once she started funnelling supplies to various worlds… then she would be in a position to claim her rightful place.
“We’re going to have to cut back in 445-67,” Jackson said. He was a burly miner, exactly the sort of person her mother had warned her about. He would have been handsome, at least o her eye, if he hadn’t used an illegal genetic re-profiling system at some point and wound up looking like a biological experiment gone horrendously wrong. Hannelore had wondered — she had never dared ask — just what he’d had in mind. It looked as if he’d gone three rounds with an angry crocodile-analogue and the creature had won. “The mining team have filled all their baskets.”
Hannelore nodded, sourly. “At least we can send the Misfit to pick up their load,” she said, studying the display and calculating times in her head. She hadn’t even thought about distances in normal space until she had come to Tyler’s Star. The flicker drive normally made every location in the system only a few seconds away, but only her freighters carried FTL drives. The mining ships were confined to normal space. “And then transfer it over to another ship or even one of the storage asteroids.”
She scowled as she looked at the storage asteroid. They’d attempted to turn a rocky-iron asteroid into a genuine habitat, but the survey had missed impurities in the metal and the asteroid had burst when they’d tried to expand it. It made a source of raw materials and a storage point, yet it was a dark reminder of her failure. Her first of many failures.
“Of course, My Lady,” Jackson said. Unlike most of the other miners, Hannelore had never been able to get him to abandon formality. “We can…”
He broke off as an alarm sounded on one of the displays. “My Lady,” he said, as he twisted the console around so she could see the icons, “there is an unidentified ship within the system.”