George Martin - Tuf Voyaging

“Of course,” Tuf said. “Pardon me, but now I fear I must run away from the dinosaur.” The tyrannosaur was ten meters behind Rica. It paused. Its lashing tail struck the wall, and Tuf’s cart shook to the impact. Slaver was dripping from its fangs, and its stunted forelegs clawed the air with unseemly eagerness.

“That would be very rude,” Rica said. “You see, Tuf, that’s the answer. These bio-weapons, these monsters—they were held in stasis for a thousand years, likely for longer than that. But they weren’t ordinary monsters. They were cloned for a special purpose, to defend the ship against intruders, and they had been genetically manipulated to just that end.” The tyrannosaur took one step, two, three, and now it was directly behind her, its shadow casting her in darkness.

“How manipulated?” asked Haviland Tuf.

“I thought you’d never ask,” said Rica Dawnstar. The tyrannosaur leaned forward, roared, opened its massive jaws, engulfed her head. “Psionics,” she said from between its teeth.

“Indeed,” said Haviland Tuf.

“A simple psionic capacity,” Rica announced from inside the tyrannosaur’s jaws. She reached up and picked something from between its teeth, with a tsking sound. “Some of the monsters were close to mindless, all instinct. They got a basic instinctual aversion. The more complex monsters were made psionically submissive. The instruments of control were psi-boosters. Pretty little things, like crowns. I’m wearing one now. It doesn’t confer psi powers or anything dramatic like that. It just makes some of the monsters avoid me, and other ones obey me.” She ducked out of the dinosaur’s mouth, and slapped the side of his jaw soundly. “Down, boy,” she said.

The tyrannosaur roared, and lowered its head. Rica Dawnstar untangled her harness and saddle and began to strap it into place. “I’ve been controlling him all the time we’ve been talking,” she said conversationally. “I called him here. He’s hungry. He ate Lion, but Lion was small, and dead, too, and he hasn’t had anything else for a thousand years.”

Haviland Tuf looked at the needler in his hand. It seemed worse than useless. He was a poor shot in any case. “I would be most glad to clone him a stegosaurus.”

“No thanks,” Rica said as she tightened the harness, “you can’t get out of the game now. You wanted to play, Tuffy, and I’m afraid you lose all around. You should have gone away when I offered you the chance. Let’s review your claim, shall we? Lion and Nevis and the others offered you a full share, yes, but of what? I’m afraid now you get a full share, whether you want one or not—a share of everything they got. So much for your legal argument. As for your moral claim on the basis of superior utility,” she slapped the dinosaur again, and grinned, “I think I’ve demonstrated that I can put the Ark to more effective use than you can. Down a little more.” The beast leaned over still further, and Rica Dawnstar vaulted into the saddle on its neck. “Up!” she barked. It stood.

“Therefore we put legality and morality aside, and again return to violence,” Tuf said.

“I’m afraid so,” Rica said from on top of her tyrant lizard. It came forward slowly, as if she were feeling her way. “Don’t say I didn’t play fair, Tuf. I’ve got the dinosaur, but you’ve got my needler. Maybe you’ll get a lucky hit. So we’re both armed.” She laughed. “Only I’m armed to the teeth.”

Haviland Tuf stood and tossed back her needler, overhand. It was a good throw. Rica leaned out to one side, caught it. “What’s this?” she said. “Giving up?”

“Your scruples about fairness have impressed me,” said Tuf. “I would take no advantage. You have a claim, I have a claim. You have an animal.” He stroked his kitten. “I have an animal, too. Now you have a gun.” He activated his cart and backed away from the intersection, rolling quickly down the corridor behind him, or at least as quickly as he could go in reverse.

“Have it your way,” Rica Dawnstar said. She was done playing. She felt a little sad. Tuf was turning his cart about to flee headlong instead of backwards. The tyrannosaur opened its mouth wide, and slaver ran from half-meter-long teeth. It screamed a scream that was pure red primal hunger a million years old, and came roaring down on him.

It roared down the corridor and into the intersection.

Twenty meters away along the cross-corridor, the minimind of the plasma cannon took cognizance of the fact that something exceeding the programmed target dimensions had entered the fire zone. There was the faintest of clicks.

Haviland Tuf was turned away from the glare; he put his body between Chaos and the heat and awful noise. It lasted only an instant, fortunately, although the smell of burnt reptile would linger in that spot for years, and sections of the deck and walls would need to be replaced.

“I had a gun, too,” said Haviland Tuf to his kitten.

Later, much later, when the Ark was clean and he and Havoc and Chaos were settled comfortably into the captain’s suite, and he had moved all his personal effects and taken care of all the bodies and done what repairs he could and figured out how to placate the incredibly noisy creature that lived down on deck six, Haviland Tuf began to search the ship methodically. On the second day, he found a store of clothing, but the men and women of the EEC had been shorter than he, and more slender, so none of the uniforms fit.

He did, however, find a hat he took rather a liking to. It was a green duckbilled cap, and it fit snugly atop his bald, milk-white head. On the front of it, in gold, was the theta that had been the sigil of the corps.

“Haviland Tuf,” he said to himself in the mirror, “ecological engineer.”

It had a certain ring to it, he thought.

Her name was Tolly Mune, but they called her all sorts of things.

Those entering her domain for the first time used her title with a certain amount of deference. She had been Portmaster for more than forty standard years, and Deputy Portmaster before that, a colorful fixture in the great orbital community that was officially known as the Port of S’uthlam. Downstairs, planetside, the office was only another box on the bureaucratic flowcharts, but up in orbit the Portmaster was foreman, chief executive, judge, mayor, arbiter, legislator, mastermech, and head cop all in one. So they called her the P.M.

The Port had started small and grown over the centuries, as S’uthlam’s swelling population made the world an increasingly important market and a key link in the network of interstellar trade for the sector. At port center was the station itself, a hollow asteroid some sixteen kilometers in diameter, with its parks and shops and dormitories and warehouses and labs. Six predecessor stations, each larger than the last and each now outdated, the oldest built three centuries back and no bigger than a good-sized starship, clung to the Spiderhome like fat metal buds on a stone potato.

Spiderhome was what they called it now, because it sat at the center of the web, an intricate silver-metal net cast across the dark of space. Radiating from the station in all directions were sixteen great spurs. The newest was four kilometers long, and building; seven of the originals (the eighth had been destroyed in an explosion) stabbed twelve kays out into space. Inside the great tubes were the port’s industrial zones—warehouses, factories, shipyards, customs gates, and embarkation centers, plus docking facilities and repair bays for every class of starship known in the sector. Long pneumatic tubetrains ran through the center of the spurs, moving cargo and passengers from gate to gate and to the crowded, noisy, bustling nexus in Spiderhome, and the elevator downstairs.