Glad you're enjoying the story, folks. HRogge, I've addressed the spacesuit issue in this chapter, and the formatting looks fine to me; in fact, I'm rather pleased to find some forum software that can handle indentation without clumsy workarounds.
Anyway, let us press on:
So, if you knew enough to come and talk to me, you're probably familiar with the name of Frank Berquart. Even at that stage I wouldn't have called us friends, but we did correspond a lot over the year I spent building my ship. He could be abrasive and condescending at times, and I really didn't like his attitude to non-Fen, but that wasn't uncommon; like many first-generation Fen, he had a rough go of it growing up as the only nerdy kid in one of the less salubrious bits of the rural United States. He had a good deal to be bitter about, and I tried to reach out to Frank and others like him because I thought they had it in them to be something better.
Either Frank didn't, or I didn't do a good enough job of looking for it. But at least I tried, right?
Anyway, all his attempts at getting hold of something waveable had been stymied and he was getting desperate enough to consider doing something foolhardy, so eventually we struck a deal: He'd buy me certain items that were more easily obtained in the US, and in return I'd pick him up from a nearby airfield and give him a ride as far as New Yavin. This was all before the December 30th deadline so it was entirely legal: I even filed a flight plan, describing my ship quite truthfully as an "experimental long range utility aircraft".
Yes, I do mean guns. I wasn't harbouring any illusions about a new era of peace and brotherly love coming to pass through the power of handwavium.
Many people tend to draw a slightly rose-tinted picture of those freewheeling early days. Don't get me wrong, it was an incredibly exciting time to be alive with all kinds of possibilities opening up, but... Well, it's not like the Boskonians popped into existence fully-formed in 2012. This was before the Sailor Armed Militia was more than a concept, before FTL comms equipment was readily available... Hell, it wasn't until WorldCon in '09 that we had a formally agreed distress frequency. Once you were out of radar range of a station or settled body you were pretty much on your own. And space may be big, but if you know roughly what time a particular ship left Point A, what speed and/or acceleration it's capable of and that it was headed for Point B then you can narrow the search area down considerably.
(One of the first really effective anti-piracy measures, incidentally? Port control services locking down manifest information on encrypted servers so that it was nigh-impossible to target specific ships. I once met an allegedly reformed ex-pirate who claims he jacked it in when he hit a freighter he thought was carrying flatscreen TV sets only to find it full of baby formula.
Of course nowadays they're organised and professional enough to get the information by data-mining instead, but c'est la vie.)
Anyway, the practical upshot of all that is that I wanted something more impressive than a .38 revolver older than I was in the hopefully unlikely event of the 114mm coilgun not being enough to prevent my ship from being boarded in the first place.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I hold the record for the biggest gun fitted to any prewar Fen craft. I don't advertise this fact because I don't consider it something to brag about, and in any case I prefer not to have pirates targeting me specifically because I'm so well-armed I must be carrying valuable loot, but it's all on the PEPPER database and everything so it's not like it's a secret.
Things have been tightened up considerably now that handwavium is de facto decriminalised, but at the time it wasn't strictly speaking illegal for a private citizen to own a multi-stage coilgun capable of launching projectiles with enough force to put a concrete blockhouse to some trouble; for better or worse, lawmakers in this country tend not to restrict or outright ban weird and exotic weapons -or potential weapons- until after someone goes out and commits a violent crime with one. Nevertheless, my test firing was conducted well out to sea.
The paintball guns turned out to be more trouble than they were worth, incidentally: I think Greg had intended to use them as secondary weapons but the rate of fire and muzzle velocity were marginal at best in atmosphere, and when I put the test-rig in a vacuum chamber (aided and abetted by a fellow aspiring Fen studying at the University of Manchester) it experienced what British aerospace enineers call "rapid unplanned disassembly", costing me £5,000 for the damage to the equipment and several bottles of good scotch as an apology to the lab assistants who had to repair it.
I did find a good use for the ball bearings though. Combined with an accelerometer, a small pyrotechnic charge and a hollow steel casing they made for good canister shot.
But anyway, the ship's armament won't really become relevant 'til some years later. Back to my first face-to-face encounter with Frank.
I hadn't done a long-range flight test up until that point, and neither had I pushed the throttle much beyond 25% or tested the button conspicuously marked TURBO on the collective while in flight. (A ground test of the turbo button proved that it caused an 'afterburner' effect that appeared to function as an acceleration drive. Rather a powerful one, in fact; I found one of the barn doors a quarter of a mile away. This was before handwavium's innate safety features were widely known or documented, I might add, so the safety cover on the button was taped shut until further notice.) But I did have enough data to calculate that I'd just make my destination field on a full tank.
The main engines are a constant-speed type, powered by ordinary Jet-A and electrical energy from a couple of solid handwavium crystals. They're fairly standard reactionless thrusters capable of a respectable 7% of c in space, while the turbo button activates some kind of fusion torch that will get my ship up to a theoretical maximum of 21%, but I can't exceed 15% without draining my fuel tanks well below my preferred safety margin.
Performance in atmosphere turned out to be a bit less impressive by Fen standards. Cruising speed is around six hundred miles an hour, or just over the speed of sound, but when I really pushed the engines I got her up to about a thousand... at which point the vibration was so violent I couldn't read the instruments anymore, and when I made the mistake of lightly touching the rudder I got an unwanted refresher course on recovering from an asymmetric spin. I pencilled in eight hundred as the Never Exceed Speed and settled in for a long run.
On arrival, I had a brief and rather awkward discussion with US air traffic controllers that ended with no less than four F-15s escorting me as far as the small airstrip in Colorado where I was due to pick up my passenger. Their pilots were perfectly friendly though, and quite embarrassed about being ordered to hassle me like this when I was still within the letter of the law.
The airstrip was some tiny grass-strip place in the arse-end of nowhere, to the point where they had to borrow a sheriff's deputy to check my passport because this was the first international flight they'd had in years. He looked like he was expecting me to suddenly manifest a biomod or pull out a death ray or something, but he signed the necessary paperwork without demur. I had a brief argument with the refuelers about whether they were insured for possible handwavium contamination ("For what I was paying for my liability cover you'd bloody well better be!", I think my exact words were), ordered a pizza and settled in for my mandatory crew rest period.
I was just on the point of turning in for the night when someone started pounding on the hatch. Frank wasn't due until the morning, so I ended up grabbing my revolver and running aft in my dressing gown, torn between alarm and annoyance.
To my utter astonishment, I found myself face to face with a shivering and terrified catgirl in a soaking-wet hoodie clutching an overnight bag, who immediately begged me for a ride somewhere, anywhere in Fenspace.
Once I got her calmed down a little and into some dry clothes, she told me her name was Barbara, and that she'd treated her Gender Identity Disorder with handwavium after being refused insurance cover for it. The process was an overall success, but her roommate had taken it rather badly and called the police. Barbara'd managed to get away ahead of the hue and cry, and had been headed to the airfield hoping to 'borrow' a plane and make a run for the border when she saw my ship.
I made a quick phone call to Frank and got an ETA; the Greyhound he was on was due in around 2AM. I explained the situation and told him to cancel his motel room and come straight here in case we had to leave in a hurry. He agreed quite happily, apparently finding the whole idea rather exciting, and confirmed that he'd got the items I'd requested... more or less.
I'd specifically requested a couple of Browning High-Powers because they were the only pistol I'd had any range time with, unless you counted the few surreptitious rounds I'd fired into an old dartboard behind the barn to make sure the revolver actually worked. Beyond that, I wasn't very specific beyond "a couple of shotguns, preferably 12-gauge, and a rifle that's decently powerful but won't make me look like a militia nutbag".
Apparently Frank's local gun dealer had some sort of promotional deal going in anticipation of some cowboy action shooting event, which is how I ended up with a lever-action and a coach gun. They even came with a free ten-gallon hat! But they were modern replicas chambered to take modern ammunition, and I've always been quite fond of Westerns, so I was actually pretty pleased. I was almost disappointed that he'd managed to score a fully contemporary Ruger Mini-14 (albeit with wooden furniture) with a scope instead of a Henry rifle.
And yes, I did wear the hat, but I don't have the gravitas to pull off the look.
Anyway, Frank launched into another one of his rants about 'mundanes' and how we Fen could be running the planet in ten years if we dropped a few big enough rocks, then tried a couple of hilariously ill-advised Pick-Up Artist tactics on Barbara until she up-ended her coffee in his lap. He retreated to his cabin to sulk when I laughed at him, and I didn't see him again until takeoff the following morning.
The police did eventually turn up looking for Barbara, but I refused to give them access without a warrant and to my mild surprise they didn't make an issue of it; I guess they figured she'd be somebody else's problem soon enough.
Then I realised I only had two pressure suits. (Made from a pair of old RAF flight suits complete with helmets and an emergency O2 bottle, which under the influence of my homebrew 'wavium became mechanical counter-pressure suits with full-face helmets and enough air for about six hours.) We solved this problem by shutting Frank in his cabin with a fully hardtech "oxygen candle" and a CO2 scrubber and sealing the door with duct-tape.
Funnily enough, yes, this was Barbara's idea. Frank had made a very tactless remark about her pre-biomod medical condition after overhearing me talking to the cops and she wasn't in the best of moods with him. Neither was I, for that matter, seeing as he laughed off my attempt to give him a little word of advice about what is and isn't okay to call people. (My mum's Indian, born to first-generation immigrants, so I dare say you can imagine my views on the subject.)
Oh well, in about six hours we need never see each other again.
The transition to space was smoother than I expected, though I had to throttle up abruptly at the tropopause. After that, it was a simple case of identifying the radio beacon for New Yavin and putting it into the autopilot.
Frank was in another one of his moods after I cut the tape on the door, which didn't bother me in the least, so Barbara and I got to know each other a bit better over a mug of tea. I learned she'd been a pilot for a small commuter airline until the economy took a shit, that her parents were divorced and her father had taken her diagnosis rather worse than her mother. She was also down to about fifty dollars until and unless she could get in touch with her bank manager.
Well, I was starting to ponder the issue of long-distance runs and fatigue; I couldn't exactly set the autopilot and go to bed, could I? But there was the thorny issue of British law to deal with: Getting her a visa was going to be all kinds of inconvenient when her passport was in the name of Robert White, assuming the US didn't outright revoke it. And I really couldn't afford to bend the rules if I wanted to keep my relatively unfettered access to European airspace...
Well, that could wait. I was in space, I was flying my very own homebuilt spaceship and I was going to have some fun!
We dropped Frank off at New Yavin, by which time he was in a much better mood. He bade us farewell and dashed off to cash in the two kilos of high-quality weed he'd brought with him. I wasn't sure if I should laugh or feel a bit sorry for him, because I doubt he made a profit. Me, on the other hand...
Now, basic hydroponics are pretty easy even with pure hardtech: Some troughs full of potting compost, some sun-lamps, a drip-feed system that can be as simple as a low-powered water pump and a couple of dozen metres of plastic tubing with tiny holes drilled in it every few centimetres and a dilute solution of ordinary chemical fertiliser (or household sewage) in fresh water will do the trick. But it doesn't scale past plants you can grow in an ordinary Earthside greenhouse without a much more elaborate setup that requires a lot of money, expertise and above all space. And root crops or fruit trees need really deep soil; they didn't become really practical to cultivate until someone got a crater on the Moon glazed over and pressurised, and they stayed quite pricey until prefabricated buckydomes hit the market.
The practical upshot of which is that I just about quadrupled my money selling four tons of King Edward potatoes and one ton of coffee beans, and made a decent profit from the hazmat suits to boot.
I remember the conversation Barbara and I had in vivid detail. I was carrying a good-sized duffel bag stuffed full of small bills, and I saw Barbara looking at the Situations Vacant board by the exit to the hangar with a rather mournful expression; there were plenty of jobs posted, but I guess not many of them called for a couple of hundred hours in a Bombardier CRJ.
"So," I said, "is there anywhere in particular you want to go?"
"I dunno," she replied sadly.
"Well, how about we start at the Moon and work our way out? You can show me how good a pilot you are too."
She was quite taken aback. "You really wanna hire me?"
"That's going to depend on a lot of things," I replied. "Not least how good you are at your job. But I'm sure as hell not leaving you stood here in the clothes you stand up in. You're Fen now, Barbara. And I guess I am too, even if I'm not a wanted felon in my home country. And this far from home, all we Fen have is each other. Now let's go find somewhere you can call your mother and I can call my friends in high places."
Anyway, let us press on:
So, if you knew enough to come and talk to me, you're probably familiar with the name of Frank Berquart. Even at that stage I wouldn't have called us friends, but we did correspond a lot over the year I spent building my ship. He could be abrasive and condescending at times, and I really didn't like his attitude to non-Fen, but that wasn't uncommon; like many first-generation Fen, he had a rough go of it growing up as the only nerdy kid in one of the less salubrious bits of the rural United States. He had a good deal to be bitter about, and I tried to reach out to Frank and others like him because I thought they had it in them to be something better.
Either Frank didn't, or I didn't do a good enough job of looking for it. But at least I tried, right?
Anyway, all his attempts at getting hold of something waveable had been stymied and he was getting desperate enough to consider doing something foolhardy, so eventually we struck a deal: He'd buy me certain items that were more easily obtained in the US, and in return I'd pick him up from a nearby airfield and give him a ride as far as New Yavin. This was all before the December 30th deadline so it was entirely legal: I even filed a flight plan, describing my ship quite truthfully as an "experimental long range utility aircraft".
Yes, I do mean guns. I wasn't harbouring any illusions about a new era of peace and brotherly love coming to pass through the power of handwavium.
Many people tend to draw a slightly rose-tinted picture of those freewheeling early days. Don't get me wrong, it was an incredibly exciting time to be alive with all kinds of possibilities opening up, but... Well, it's not like the Boskonians popped into existence fully-formed in 2012. This was before the Sailor Armed Militia was more than a concept, before FTL comms equipment was readily available... Hell, it wasn't until WorldCon in '09 that we had a formally agreed distress frequency. Once you were out of radar range of a station or settled body you were pretty much on your own. And space may be big, but if you know roughly what time a particular ship left Point A, what speed and/or acceleration it's capable of and that it was headed for Point B then you can narrow the search area down considerably.
(One of the first really effective anti-piracy measures, incidentally? Port control services locking down manifest information on encrypted servers so that it was nigh-impossible to target specific ships. I once met an allegedly reformed ex-pirate who claims he jacked it in when he hit a freighter he thought was carrying flatscreen TV sets only to find it full of baby formula.
Of course nowadays they're organised and professional enough to get the information by data-mining instead, but c'est la vie.)
Anyway, the practical upshot of all that is that I wanted something more impressive than a .38 revolver older than I was in the hopefully unlikely event of the 114mm coilgun not being enough to prevent my ship from being boarded in the first place.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I hold the record for the biggest gun fitted to any prewar Fen craft. I don't advertise this fact because I don't consider it something to brag about, and in any case I prefer not to have pirates targeting me specifically because I'm so well-armed I must be carrying valuable loot, but it's all on the PEPPER database and everything so it's not like it's a secret.
Things have been tightened up considerably now that handwavium is de facto decriminalised, but at the time it wasn't strictly speaking illegal for a private citizen to own a multi-stage coilgun capable of launching projectiles with enough force to put a concrete blockhouse to some trouble; for better or worse, lawmakers in this country tend not to restrict or outright ban weird and exotic weapons -or potential weapons- until after someone goes out and commits a violent crime with one. Nevertheless, my test firing was conducted well out to sea.
The paintball guns turned out to be more trouble than they were worth, incidentally: I think Greg had intended to use them as secondary weapons but the rate of fire and muzzle velocity were marginal at best in atmosphere, and when I put the test-rig in a vacuum chamber (aided and abetted by a fellow aspiring Fen studying at the University of Manchester) it experienced what British aerospace enineers call "rapid unplanned disassembly", costing me £5,000 for the damage to the equipment and several bottles of good scotch as an apology to the lab assistants who had to repair it.
I did find a good use for the ball bearings though. Combined with an accelerometer, a small pyrotechnic charge and a hollow steel casing they made for good canister shot.
But anyway, the ship's armament won't really become relevant 'til some years later. Back to my first face-to-face encounter with Frank.
I hadn't done a long-range flight test up until that point, and neither had I pushed the throttle much beyond 25% or tested the button conspicuously marked TURBO on the collective while in flight. (A ground test of the turbo button proved that it caused an 'afterburner' effect that appeared to function as an acceleration drive. Rather a powerful one, in fact; I found one of the barn doors a quarter of a mile away. This was before handwavium's innate safety features were widely known or documented, I might add, so the safety cover on the button was taped shut until further notice.) But I did have enough data to calculate that I'd just make my destination field on a full tank.
The main engines are a constant-speed type, powered by ordinary Jet-A and electrical energy from a couple of solid handwavium crystals. They're fairly standard reactionless thrusters capable of a respectable 7% of c in space, while the turbo button activates some kind of fusion torch that will get my ship up to a theoretical maximum of 21%, but I can't exceed 15% without draining my fuel tanks well below my preferred safety margin.
Performance in atmosphere turned out to be a bit less impressive by Fen standards. Cruising speed is around six hundred miles an hour, or just over the speed of sound, but when I really pushed the engines I got her up to about a thousand... at which point the vibration was so violent I couldn't read the instruments anymore, and when I made the mistake of lightly touching the rudder I got an unwanted refresher course on recovering from an asymmetric spin. I pencilled in eight hundred as the Never Exceed Speed and settled in for a long run.
On arrival, I had a brief and rather awkward discussion with US air traffic controllers that ended with no less than four F-15s escorting me as far as the small airstrip in Colorado where I was due to pick up my passenger. Their pilots were perfectly friendly though, and quite embarrassed about being ordered to hassle me like this when I was still within the letter of the law.
The airstrip was some tiny grass-strip place in the arse-end of nowhere, to the point where they had to borrow a sheriff's deputy to check my passport because this was the first international flight they'd had in years. He looked like he was expecting me to suddenly manifest a biomod or pull out a death ray or something, but he signed the necessary paperwork without demur. I had a brief argument with the refuelers about whether they were insured for possible handwavium contamination ("For what I was paying for my liability cover you'd bloody well better be!", I think my exact words were), ordered a pizza and settled in for my mandatory crew rest period.
I was just on the point of turning in for the night when someone started pounding on the hatch. Frank wasn't due until the morning, so I ended up grabbing my revolver and running aft in my dressing gown, torn between alarm and annoyance.
To my utter astonishment, I found myself face to face with a shivering and terrified catgirl in a soaking-wet hoodie clutching an overnight bag, who immediately begged me for a ride somewhere, anywhere in Fenspace.
Once I got her calmed down a little and into some dry clothes, she told me her name was Barbara, and that she'd treated her Gender Identity Disorder with handwavium after being refused insurance cover for it. The process was an overall success, but her roommate had taken it rather badly and called the police. Barbara'd managed to get away ahead of the hue and cry, and had been headed to the airfield hoping to 'borrow' a plane and make a run for the border when she saw my ship.
I made a quick phone call to Frank and got an ETA; the Greyhound he was on was due in around 2AM. I explained the situation and told him to cancel his motel room and come straight here in case we had to leave in a hurry. He agreed quite happily, apparently finding the whole idea rather exciting, and confirmed that he'd got the items I'd requested... more or less.
I'd specifically requested a couple of Browning High-Powers because they were the only pistol I'd had any range time with, unless you counted the few surreptitious rounds I'd fired into an old dartboard behind the barn to make sure the revolver actually worked. Beyond that, I wasn't very specific beyond "a couple of shotguns, preferably 12-gauge, and a rifle that's decently powerful but won't make me look like a militia nutbag".
Apparently Frank's local gun dealer had some sort of promotional deal going in anticipation of some cowboy action shooting event, which is how I ended up with a lever-action and a coach gun. They even came with a free ten-gallon hat! But they were modern replicas chambered to take modern ammunition, and I've always been quite fond of Westerns, so I was actually pretty pleased. I was almost disappointed that he'd managed to score a fully contemporary Ruger Mini-14 (albeit with wooden furniture) with a scope instead of a Henry rifle.
And yes, I did wear the hat, but I don't have the gravitas to pull off the look.
Anyway, Frank launched into another one of his rants about 'mundanes' and how we Fen could be running the planet in ten years if we dropped a few big enough rocks, then tried a couple of hilariously ill-advised Pick-Up Artist tactics on Barbara until she up-ended her coffee in his lap. He retreated to his cabin to sulk when I laughed at him, and I didn't see him again until takeoff the following morning.
The police did eventually turn up looking for Barbara, but I refused to give them access without a warrant and to my mild surprise they didn't make an issue of it; I guess they figured she'd be somebody else's problem soon enough.
Then I realised I only had two pressure suits. (Made from a pair of old RAF flight suits complete with helmets and an emergency O2 bottle, which under the influence of my homebrew 'wavium became mechanical counter-pressure suits with full-face helmets and enough air for about six hours.) We solved this problem by shutting Frank in his cabin with a fully hardtech "oxygen candle" and a CO2 scrubber and sealing the door with duct-tape.
Funnily enough, yes, this was Barbara's idea. Frank had made a very tactless remark about her pre-biomod medical condition after overhearing me talking to the cops and she wasn't in the best of moods with him. Neither was I, for that matter, seeing as he laughed off my attempt to give him a little word of advice about what is and isn't okay to call people. (My mum's Indian, born to first-generation immigrants, so I dare say you can imagine my views on the subject.)
Oh well, in about six hours we need never see each other again.
The transition to space was smoother than I expected, though I had to throttle up abruptly at the tropopause. After that, it was a simple case of identifying the radio beacon for New Yavin and putting it into the autopilot.
Frank was in another one of his moods after I cut the tape on the door, which didn't bother me in the least, so Barbara and I got to know each other a bit better over a mug of tea. I learned she'd been a pilot for a small commuter airline until the economy took a shit, that her parents were divorced and her father had taken her diagnosis rather worse than her mother. She was also down to about fifty dollars until and unless she could get in touch with her bank manager.
Well, I was starting to ponder the issue of long-distance runs and fatigue; I couldn't exactly set the autopilot and go to bed, could I? But there was the thorny issue of British law to deal with: Getting her a visa was going to be all kinds of inconvenient when her passport was in the name of Robert White, assuming the US didn't outright revoke it. And I really couldn't afford to bend the rules if I wanted to keep my relatively unfettered access to European airspace...
Well, that could wait. I was in space, I was flying my very own homebuilt spaceship and I was going to have some fun!
We dropped Frank off at New Yavin, by which time he was in a much better mood. He bade us farewell and dashed off to cash in the two kilos of high-quality weed he'd brought with him. I wasn't sure if I should laugh or feel a bit sorry for him, because I doubt he made a profit. Me, on the other hand...
Now, basic hydroponics are pretty easy even with pure hardtech: Some troughs full of potting compost, some sun-lamps, a drip-feed system that can be as simple as a low-powered water pump and a couple of dozen metres of plastic tubing with tiny holes drilled in it every few centimetres and a dilute solution of ordinary chemical fertiliser (or household sewage) in fresh water will do the trick. But it doesn't scale past plants you can grow in an ordinary Earthside greenhouse without a much more elaborate setup that requires a lot of money, expertise and above all space. And root crops or fruit trees need really deep soil; they didn't become really practical to cultivate until someone got a crater on the Moon glazed over and pressurised, and they stayed quite pricey until prefabricated buckydomes hit the market.
The practical upshot of which is that I just about quadrupled my money selling four tons of King Edward potatoes and one ton of coffee beans, and made a decent profit from the hazmat suits to boot.
I remember the conversation Barbara and I had in vivid detail. I was carrying a good-sized duffel bag stuffed full of small bills, and I saw Barbara looking at the Situations Vacant board by the exit to the hangar with a rather mournful expression; there were plenty of jobs posted, but I guess not many of them called for a couple of hundred hours in a Bombardier CRJ.
"So," I said, "is there anywhere in particular you want to go?"
"I dunno," she replied sadly.
"Well, how about we start at the Moon and work our way out? You can show me how good a pilot you are too."
She was quite taken aback. "You really wanna hire me?"
"That's going to depend on a lot of things," I replied. "Not least how good you are at your job. But I'm sure as hell not leaving you stood here in the clothes you stand up in. You're Fen now, Barbara. And I guess I am too, even if I'm not a wanted felon in my home country. And this far from home, all we Fen have is each other. Now let's go find somewhere you can call your mother and I can call my friends in high places."