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Maude was bored.
This was entirely normal, especially in deep space, especially especially if you were a penniless matter-panner sitting besides a black hole so old and worn it didn’t suck so much as slop, waiting for weeks and weeks on end for something worth taking home to drift through the sieve-and-pan of your un-reality net. Maybe some uranium, maybe some platinum, maybe diamonds, maybe a big ol’ chunk of iron the size of a city-state.
Maude had been here for three months. So far, she’d found a fragment of ice the size of her torso. She’d watched all her old sensetanks three times over and her new ones six, she was starting to run out of meals-u-eats that had organic matter in them, and although she’d brought no mirror on board, she had a strong suspicion her chin was starting to boast more hairs than Harold’s.
So Maude was bored. Very bored indeed. This was why it was such a large surprise when her grungy old un-reality tethers snagged something that that she wasn’t surprised at all. She looked at the instruments: anti-matter, ten thousand tonnes, blah blah blah, and was fully nine-tenths of the way through the procedure to lock the catch into place before exactly what she’d just done sunk in.
“Huh,” said Maude. She did the math. Assuming the demand in the market had – oh, let’s say been cut in half, then half again – she was now richer than all of the last ten governor-generals of her system.
Maude considered this. She could afford to pay off her and Harold’s mortgage. She could afford to pay off her grandchildren’s mortgages. She could afford to buy her planet and most of its neighbours and maybe a luxury palace on Earth for retirement, which she could afford to do right now.
“Well,” said Maude, because that’s all she could think of, and she locked the anti-matter into place, set coordinates for the long chug-a-chug homewards, and did a little hooting, yelping, skipping dance in the middle of the floor. She bruised her elbow on a cupboard and didn’t care in the slightest, and she stuck her head into the longest and most tedious of her sensetanks (Pride and Prejudice and Pirates and Penguins and Prosecutors in Paris, IIV) and paid not the slightest attention to anything that was happening.
This elated state of non-boredom lasted for approximately three days, which was when Maude was stirred from her newfound hobby of calculating the highest rank of politician she could bribe (three presidents at once and the vice-president, plus their lawyers) by the peevish beeping of her proximity alarms.
“Meteor belt,” she decided. Then she looked at the display, and changed her mind because meteors didn’t have that many spikes, or mass launchers.
“Hello, tiny scrap-panning vessel,” hailed the nearest and largest not-a-meteor. “This is High General and Executive Gunner Killowac Murgatroyd of the Scram III.”
“Hello,” said Maude. “Maude Hanover, on the Sally. Whatcha want?”
“Not want, sad to say,” said the heavily armed person on the enormous dreadnought, “but need. A trifling engagement with a patrol destroyer seems to have put a dent in my flagship’s fuel tanks, and I’m afraid my invasion of the sector here could be postponed. You wouldn’t, by chance, have five thousand tonnes of anti-matter to spare, would you?”
Maude considered this, along with the mass launchers, along with the matter disruptors, along with the hyperspace laser batteries.
“Sure,” she said.
“Wonderful,” said the galactic warlord. “A pleasure doing business with you. Goodbye.” And with that, he and his fleet of war machines seized half her anti-matter and dove briskly into hyperspace at ten times the speed she could ever hope for.
“Drat,” said Maude, compressing several times the normal swear-weight of emotion into it. And she went on her way, cussing once every hour like clockwork, doing some revised math. It wasn’t so bad, anyways. She could still afford to bribe the president to go on a manhunt for High General and Executive Gunner Murgatroyd and have enough left over for a nice comfortable planet for her and Harold to retire on. They could bring the rest of the family too, especially if it had some nice beaches. Kids love beaches.
A little more than a week later, she was jolted out of her latest sensetank rehash (The Sun Goes Round the Moon, starring Platt Manderson – she could probably hire him as a masseuse, but Harold would be put out) by the high-pitched wailing on the communicator of a man with nothing left to lose. Sure, the man was a Treeblik, and they don’t have genders, but it was close enough.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I am ruined!” lamented the Treeblik. “Here I am, an honest merchantman-” he caught himself, feeling the touch of skepticism (the only known force in the universe to exceed hyperspace in velocity) “-a reasonably forthright merchantman of limite – adequate means, caught up in ruin and bankruptcy by the plundering and voracious greed of one Killowac Murgatroyd!”
Maude winced a little at this.
“I am plundered and my hold emptied, my years-long pilgrimage of goods-gathering for naught. My assets will be seized, my name disgraced, my company stricken from the registers, and my wife won’t give me hugs anymore.”
Maude drummed her fingers on her armrest and started doing math again. “How much was your cargo worth?”
“A million billion,” said the Treeblik. “Not a penny less!”
“How about I give you five hundred tonnes of anti-matter?” asked Maude.
The Treeblik performed an elaborate and ancestrally practiced double-take, which took up twenty seconds and two-thirds of his bridge. “Please,” he managed at last, in a strangled voice that suggested most of his vocal chords were absent.
“Done deal,” said Maude. She transferred it over and got out before the Treeblik could start to sing one of his maternal victory cadenzas. “Not so bad,” she said to herself. “Not so bad.” She’d just have to rent out a continent or two to make ends meet, and maybe bribe the vice-president instead. “Not so bad.” Then she decided she’d done enough math, and plunged her head into the sensetank for The Joy of Art History, coming up for air only two weeks later, when she almost ran straight into the leading ship of a million-strong fleet.
“What’s going on?” asked Maude.
“Refugees seeking refuge,” said the leader, a dour and muscular Murmosap with forearms that could consume sharks in three bite-and-shakes of their jaws. “A manic moron calling himself the High General and Executive Gunner shot out of hyperspace, ordered everyone off-planet, blasted it open down to the core, took all the mineral resources, and shot off again.”
“Mmpph,” said Maude, trying appear sympathetic while wincing so hard her jaw hurt.
“And to top it all off, we’re in whatever we could grab and fly,” said the Murmosap, the pessimism seeping in through his eyeballs more throughly still, “so half of us are having to push the other half around by now on account of idiots driving no-account pleasure craft with the fuel efficiency of a paralyzed jetliner. And we’re all running low again. Doom rides abroad and the end is nigh.”
“How nigh?” asked Maude.
“About a week. I did the math.”
Maude did more math herself. She was beginning to dislike it. “How many of your ships can take antimatter?”
“A lot, probably. We’ve got enough mechanics to jury-rig something in the bigger boats anyways.”
“Would a sliver each help matters?”
A sliver each in a million ships came up to a thousand or so tonnes, but by the time the refugee fleet was fading in Maude’s sensor range, it was already accelerating again. And it was okay. She could still rent out a continent on a nice, sensible, stable planet, bribe the governor general to lay it easy on the taxes, eat out at ridiculously fancy restaurants once every month, put the kids through nice stable schools. It’d be fine. It’d be fine.
“Hello?” asked a high-pitched voice over her communicator. “Help?”
“Problems?” asked Maude.
“Baby problems,” said the voice.
“Ah, been there,” said Maude.
“Oh good. I was hoping I’d get someone who understood. Tell me, can you spare a few thousand tonnes of anti-matter?”
Maude blinked. “Baby problems?”
“Yes, she’s starting to teeth in there, and if I don’t feed her soon, she’ll eat her way out through my left ventricle. I wouldn’t mind so much if it wouldn’t kill her too – she’s not ready for raw cosmic radiation yet, poor dear. Needs another few years.”
“Oh,” said Maude. “Sure. Take it.”
“You’re a kindly dear,” said the high-pitched voice. Something composed of what Maude’s sensors refused to consider as matter stirred centimetres off her port bow, and there it went, two and a half thousand tonnes of anti-matter, chewed away in a flash. “I wouldn’t impose like this, but some wicked man took a shot at me while I was feeding, and I had to flee all the way out here away from proper dining locations, and you’re the first person to come by with a proper meal.”
“It’s all good,” said Maude. She could probably bribe the planetary senator now. It was likely. Not that she’d need to; she could afford the taxes on a city-home without a blink for the next couple generations.
“Oh you modest little thing. Thank you so much; I’ll drop by when she’s due and let you meet her. Take care now!”
Maude cruised in idle for the next month, taking in everything, letting the sensetanks lie, keeping her mind lazy. And there went the sensors again. Bip. Bip. Bip. Something sitting still in space, idling there as she mosied closer. It was a few miles long and a few miles wide and most of it was built around and outside a big complicated prong that looked a lot like a cannon. Huge and beautiful (now half-obliterated) murals on its side marked it as a Steed-ship of the Non-Holy Siblingdom of Secularism, operated by a single knight.
It wasn’t moving, and large chunks of it were missing.
Maude sighed. “Good Samaritan,” she said, in a very uncomplimentary way, and then she punched the communicator until it worked.
“Greetings,” said the ship’s occupant. She was a spectacularly large and fit Heronius Zach, at least sixteen inches tall, possessed of a prize-fighter’s physique and sensitive, soulful ears that stared firmly at Maude with a perfect openness that would’ve obliterated a politician’s soul.
“Hey,” said Maude. “Problems?”
“A little,” admitted the Heronius Zach. “I am Knight-Questor Iz. Is the madman known as Killowac Murgatroyd still afoot?”
“Probably,” admitted Maude. “He’s pretty mobile. Which is my fault.”
“I’m sorry?” said Iz.
“It’s a – well, not a long story. Listen,” and Maude told her.
“You didn’t have much of a choice,” said Iz. “What is done is done, and would’ve been done whether you allowed it or not. ‘Where there is no choice, there is neither shame nor pride.’ That is a quote and also a fact.”
“Mmm,” said Maude.
“Don’t mmm me, please. Ambiguous denials are purposeless and cause premature mental fatigue. Now, which way would you say Murgatroyd was traveling? My drives are online again.”
Maude told her.
“Straight towards the system capital,” said Iz, and gave a little wiff that was the sigh of the Heronius Zach. “Of course. Plunder the most there. I can catch him before he makes it, I expect.”
“That going to be enough gun to stop him?” asked Maude.
“Ordinarily?” said Iz. “Yes. He punched a hole through my magazine, though, and I had to eject about a third of the ship to save the rest. I have enough fire for one fairly solid shot, and ambiguously defined concept of hope be willing, that should be enough to take out his flagship if placed correctly.”
Maude thought that was the longest possible way of saying ‘no,’ she’d ever heard, and she lived with Harold, a man so shy that he swept up after the rats and politely suggested that maybe they should look into moving along soon and getting their own place.
“What kind of ammunition does that thing take?” she asked.
“Just about anything that can explode – I make due with what I have. It consumes so much in each volley, though, it has to have a good deal of it.
“How about one thousand tonnes of anti-matter?”
Iz scratched her left nose. “Yes, that would work very nicely. Close to perfect, actually. Is it refined?”
“No.”
“Treated?”
“No.”
“Inspected for potentially lethal impurities?”
“Not even a little.”
“Yes, that should be absolutely perfect. Thank you.”
It wasn’t more than mere minutes after the transfer took place that the Steed-ship’s cannon began to warm up again, and it was seconds after that that the Knight-Questor took off at a lot over the speed of light, with a fare-thee-well and thanks-again.
And after that, Maude went home, home, home, just her, the Sally, and a piece of ice the size of her torso. It took a few more weeks, but she was in no hurry now, and when she got there the first thing she did was put her feet up as high as she could and then have a shower and also sleep somewhere that didn’t smell like meals-u-eat.
When she woke up, Harold was waiting with a large drink that was about fifty-percent ice cubes.
“You brought it home, you get a slice,” he said.
“About all I got this time.”
“Not true, not true,” said Harold, “not true at all.”
Maude was too tired to dispute it, so they watched the news instead. It was dull as dishwater; nothing much had happened since the firefight just over the atmosphere last week, where twenty rogue dreadnoughts had been blown into little pieces and sold off for scrap.
“Huh,” said Maude, and kept watching. At some point this smoothly transitioned into snoring.
Harold carefully draped a blanket over her feet, then got up to silence the shrill beeping of the communicator, jumping quite violently as he came face-to-teeth with the forearms of a Murmosap.
“Sorry,” said the Murmosap. “Is she home yet?”
“Oh! Oh yes. But she’s put her feet up for now. Could you call back tomorrow?”
“Right, right. But these scrap options aren’t going to hold themselves together forever. Sure, we hauled it – and did a damned fine job in a hurry too, for civilians, if you ask me or anyone else – but there’s enough lawyers around that I don’t trust that particular fact to stay relevant forever.”
“Well, why don’t you get that nice Treeblik gentleman to talk to them? He’s your agent, he’s meant to do this sort of thing.”
The Murmosap wearily moistened his eyes against his forearm’s tongues. “Christ in a crater, he’s done enough of that for two lifetimes. He practically THRIVES on it. Much more of this, and they’re going to sue him out of spite. Nobody likes to see a happy face in a legal procedure, you know?”
“Oh, you worry too much,” said Harold. “It’ll be fine, fine, fine. At least until tomorrow. You’ll see, she’ll know just what to do. And she can probably help you lot decide what planet to buy. She’s always liked that sort of thing.”
“Not an easy choice to make, help or no,” mused the Murmosap.
“It’ll be fine,” said Harold. “She’s good at choices. She should be proud of that.”