24

Baile Fantasma was sadly lacking in gold-plated butler robots or any other outright magical tricks that legend might have expected from a ship built in the Solar Federation.

Of course, the general rule was that for every ten light-years a world was from Earth, tech was a year and a half behind on average. Economic development often lagged even further, but the general rule said that a ship built today in Guadaloop was the equivalent of a ship built two hundred–plus years ago in Tau Ceti.

And Fantasma was almost three hundred years old. The ship had probably been heavily updated in hidden sections, but Kira and her people were genteelly restricted to the passenger sections and the cargo compartment she was parking their shuttle in.

“You down and locked, Basketball?” Martinez’s voice asked in her head the exact moment she’d shut down the engines.

“I am,” Kira confirmed. “Is there a safe path out?”

“Highlighted on the deck in lights,” the freighter officer told her. “Keep to the path, Basketball. I’ve got a couple standard TMUs floating into that cargo compartment.”

“Got it, Baile Fantasma,” she said. “Watching the lights.”

A Ten Meter Unit—or Ten Meter Equivalent Unit sometimes—was the heir to the standardized cargo containers of old Earth. Five meters high, five meters wide, and ten meters long, every cargo ship in the universe was built to handle them.

Baile Fantasma had four cargo holds, cavernous spaces attached to the “bottom” of the ship, that were ten meters high, ten meters wide, and twenty long—officially, though any hold always had a few extra centimeters for maneuvering. Hold One now had Kira’s runabout parked at the far end, but that still left enough space for Martinez to slide multiple stacks of cargo containers into the hold.

There was nothing so luxurious as air or even gravity in the container hold, but Kira’s shipsuit was capable of handling the lack of both of those. The designated path was lit up in bright yellow on the floor, leading from her shuttle’s exit ramp to an airlock that presumably provided access to the habitable portion of the ship.

Still, Kira paused on the path to watch the containers come in. Each had its own small set of Harrington coils, controlled by remote from the cargo handler’s office, and they came in one at a time.

The first TMU was visible in the light from the planet behind it at the open entrance to the hold. Kira watched as it slowly rotated in place to align with the opening and then slid forward. There were literally centimeters to spare on three sides of the container as it slid broadside toward Kira.

It rapidly came to a complete halt, five meters from the back wall and barely a meter from Kira’s shuttle, and then silently locked down into its slot. The bottom half of Kira’s view of the hold was now blocked by it, but she could see another container aligning itself with the entrance.

Her shuttle was taking the space of two of the containers—more for safety than anything else—but Hold One would still take six two-hundred-and-fifty-cubic-meter cargo containers, stacked in three rows, each two TMUs deep. The other three holds would take eight, presuming Zamorano had acquired enough cargo to fill them.

The ship would have a fifth hold somewhere that was designed for less-standardized cargo. That one would be pressurized and gravitized by default and would often be used as a gymnasium if it was only half-full.

Still, Kira’s math said that Baile Fantasma only had nine to ten kilocubics of cargo space in an eighteen-kilocubic hull. Most freighter designers aimed for a seventy-five percent ratio of cargo space to overall hull space, which suggested the IIS ship had probably been designed around four-to-five kilocubics of machinery and living space.

Which left another four kilocubics, give or take, of volume that she couldn’t account for. Zamorano almost certainly had schematics saying they were taken up by absolutely innocuous things.

Kira, on the other hand, knew damn well who she was flying with.

* * *

“So, anything about this ship screaming 'love me, love me’ to the engineer?” Kira asked Konrad as she dropped onto the bed in their guest quarters.

“The fact it’s still flying after two hundred and eighty-six years, without a single system even suggesting that it’s overdue for maintenance or otherwise rusty?” her boyfriend asked. “Also, the mattress is already scanning your back and calculating the optimal level of elasticity for you.”

Kira glanced down at the normal-looking bed.

“You’re kidding, right?” she asked. Self-adjusting beds were common enough, but they usually took a few minutes after you lay down to find the right balance.

“Nope.” Konrad pointed to a small dot above the bed. “Scanner is right there. It’s scanning us both whenever we’re on the bed, sitting or lying down, and constantly adjusting.”

“That’s not three hundred years old,” Kira said.

“Forty or so, I’d guess, at most,” he agreed. “Probably self-maintaining to a large degree, like most of the ship. There’s a reason there’s only three people aboard—and space for us.”

She paused thoughtfully.

“I…honestly thought we just hadn’t met the rest of the crew,” she admitted. “Zamorano has been sufficiently closed with us, in some ways I could buy him hiding us away.”

Maybe,” Konrad said. “But I’d also buy this ship being mostly self-maintaining. There’s a lot of small stuff that has artificial stupids in it that you wouldn’t expect. I suspect there’s a fleet of self-repair drones that are being kept out of our line of sight, because no tramp merchant ship out here would have them.

“But let’s be honest: most sub-twenty-kilocubic ships can be flown by three. Or one. It’s the maintenance that becomes a problem, if you don’t have repair drones or something similar.”

“You think the ship is smarter than we expect?” Kira asked.

“I think this ship is more anything than you expect,” he replied. “I’m not going to go poking and see if I can chat with the computers; let’s put it that way. I’m not sure I’d like what I found.”

The implications of that were…scary. Rumor had it that SolFed had small-scale true AI, but that rumor had been present for a long time and Kira had never heard of anyone having proof. Complex artificial stupids that could fake sapience for extended time periods? There were even a few of those in the Rim.

Not many, though. Not least because faking sapience beyond what was needed for customer service wasn’t actually useful in most contexts. True AI would, in theory, be enough more flexible to add value on its own—but the few experiments she’d heard of in the Fringe had been closer to asteroid-fortress-sized than ship-computer-sized.

“Step carefully, my love,” Konrad said after a moment. “Today, Captain Zamorano is a useful ally, but his sole job is information-gathering for the Solar Federation. I imagine he has strict limits on what he is allowed to do—and those limits could easily end up with us getting cut adrift at a very awkward moment.”

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