Jack Chalker - Kaspar's Box

The sergeant came back in and nodded. “Well, you were right. They can’t even wash their long hair in three hours. Each! ”

“Aye. Told you so. Of course, it would help if they had some hair dryers. Guess that wouldn’t be likely in a ship built for a bunch of baldies, though. Well, they’ll make do. This is, after all, where they, or them what’s behind them, want ’em to be, so there’s not likely to be a lot of patience with the folks on the ground if they decide to take a few hours before clearin’ the authorities.”

“You’re probably right there,” the sergeant agreed. “I wonder who the hell is picking them up?”

“Well, they was to be dropped off to members of the Knights of Saint Phineas on Barnum’s World. That’s all I was told. The others I delivered now and then, they was all a bit different, or at least seemed a wee bit more normal, so they just went off while I did me paperwork and that was that.”

“You trusted them?”

Murphy shrugged. “What could I do? Besides, I didn’t do much except transport ’em, and all but these girls I had to bring in kinda on the quiet, if you know what I mean, so there wasn’t much I could do but trust the others. The money was always there, though, in the accounts, ready to spend, and the notation of credit equivalent to the amount was posted with the bank down there. Why not? If they stiffed me, I didn’t exactly have to come back the next time, you know. It’s not like there’s a hundred ships dock regular at Tara Hibernius.”

“I see what you mean. Well, there’s no sneaking these young women in, I don’t think. Not now. And that means either somebody meets them or they have to use their voodoo on the authorities down there. Either way, I figure they aren’t going back on this shuttle!”

“No papers. Be interestin’ to see if they are expected, won’t it? Uh, that is, interestin’ for you .”

Maslovic smiled. “Yes, for us, I guess.” Like Murphy wasn’t dying to know who or what was behind this, particularly now that he’d seen the power in back of it and the possible real money and valuables they had at their beck and call. “The Knights of Saint Phineas, you said. Know anything more about them?”

“Nope. It’s been eons since I been anywhere near a church, let alone catechism school, and I’ll be blamed if I ever heard of a Saint Phineas, although, I admit, that blamed church’s got ten saints for every day that is, was, or ever will be.”

“Fascinating. Not one of the major ones, then.”

“Definitely not. I dunno. Maybe they ain’t so well known down there, if you know what I mean. I don’t know if I should ask about ’em, strictly out of concern for the lasses, you understand, or keep me trap shut. Sounds like some old crusader stuff, or order of soldiers for God, like the Knights of Malta back in ancient times, but I don’t think these folks would be them kinda soldiers, and not for God, neither.”

“Well, not your old god, anyway,” the sergeant said. Maybe for some dark gods lurking in the shadows of a cave upon some bleak and distant world, though, he added to himself.

The full ship’s intercom came alive, and Lieutenant Chung’s voice announced, “Five minutes to gate emergence. Depending on traffic control, no more than twenty or thirty minutes insystem until at least orbit.”

“Put the traffic control low on the speaker when you emerge, Lieutenant,” Maslovic requested. “And if we can get a visual of the planet and resolution to ground as applicable, I’d appreciate it.”

“I will do it if I can, Sergeant,” the pilot told him.

Murphy shrugged. “It’s generally an easy in and out. Mostly freight modules in orbit, a few tugs but mostly storage containers, and service bays for two freighters. Port Bainbridge is the single ground spaceport, but it’s pretty decent size for the fairly low traffic it does. When they export, though, it’s usually very large and often fragile consignments, so they need the equivalent of a much larger planet. There’s towns with specialists all over the world, including a large number of underwater domes, but the only one that can be called a ‘city’ is Port Bainbridge, population under half a million, and that’s where we’ll come down. Almost entirely import-export and inland supply. That’s all they do. A lot of the world is self-sufficient, or so they say. I never been more than a few kilometers beyond the spaceport meself. Why bother? Go out into the bush and wind up gettin’ eaten or worse, or spend time in a station feelin’ like you’re infested with creepy crawlies. Nope. Not me cup of tea.”

“It doesn’t sound like a particularly good place to send three girls, even these girls, pregnant and without much knowledge of the outside.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s a problem for ’em here. They’re from a far more rural place than even this, ’cause it’s not so high tech and managed as Barnum’s World. They’ll have good facilities for birthin’, and, let’s face it, somebody is expectin’ ’em. Be hell tryin’ to track ’em if they go off into the bush, though. Never thought of it before, either, but Barnum’s World’s actually a pretty fair place if you want to keep secrets and be out of the public view. Wilderness, mostly, lots of ways to hide and lots of places where even if you were found you couldn’t be snuck up on, high tech as you need it, low population for less questions, and yet a fair amount of in and out interstellar traffic. If it wasn’t for them creepy crawlies, I’d say it’d be a good place to run anything not legal, come to think of it. Me, though, I got this thing about them creepy crawlies.”

“What do you mean by that?” Maslovic asked the old captain.

“You’ll see. Think of the whole world as a zoo, an animal preserve, and a botanical gardens to boot. Just about everything that was still livin’ when the place was set up, a century or more before the Great Silence, goin’ back to Old Earth species and through any of the stuff we found out here. Animals, plants, you name it. So if some nasty booger comes along and all Tara Hibernius’s sheep get sick and die, here’s where they come to get more, genetically perfect and maybe immune as well. New Siam short on their kind of elephants? Got some. And if you’re terraforming a place to specific design, here’s the plants and bugs and bacteria and crap you’ll need, and they can be specially produced to adapt perfect to what you can’t terraform. Hell of a business, even now on some worlds. And now that nobody can go back and pick up any species not already extinct, and there’s tons of those, the folks down there think they got a kind of sacred trust. Me, I just think most of ’em prefer animals to people.”

“I scanned the database on it. Fascinating sounding. But I’ve never been on a world with a full ecosystem including everything down to the microbe level. This could be quite interesting.”

“The first time you get stung by a bloodsucker insect and then you come face-to-face with a jumpin’ spider bigger’n your head, you’ll think different, Sergeant. I promise that.”

The intercom came on again. “Out of jump. All nominal,” Chung reported. “I’m now in the system control region of Barnum’s World. Too far out for a really good picture but I’ll give you what I got.”

The wall area between the two food service ports flickered and came to life, and there was a realistic three-dimensional view of the new solar system they’d just entered, looking inward. The sun was a bright yellow-white but too far to require any optical filters or adjustments, and towards it they could see several planets, mostly gas types. It looked quite normal, just the kind of solar system that produced terraformable worlds which were used for colonies.