World Builders book 6 Snippet 2

 Sitrep:

So, Rea just sent me the manuscript back.

Here is a snippet from the second story, Customs:

 

Customs

 

Nuevo B

 

Commander Jorge Rushbar eyed the star system map with misgivings. The place to be was inward to the Lagrange points around the Nuevo Alpha planet.

Unfortunately, he was on a space station around Nuevo Baker.

He scratched his head with a hand, running his fingernails through his stubble.

The star system was a G0 class system with six planets. The inner two were Mercury class rocks. The third planet was named Alpha because it was the first habitable world with its own trio of moons. Outward from there but still in the goldilocks zone was Nuevo Baker, a super Earth class with 1.4 gravity and a single moon.

Outward from there was Gamma, a Mars class with two moons and finally a Neptune class gas giant with its own subsystem of moons.

The natives had colonized the star system in the cluster after a light terraforming effort had made the planets habitable. Nuevo Alpha had been settled initially by retired military personnel and their families. Nuevo Baker or B as it was also called had been primarily settled by a colony of Centaurians as well as a scattering of heavy worlders.

Nuevo and a couple of other star systems like Bek were in an isolated cluster in a pocket of space within the Rho sector. There were two ways in and out of the cluster but only one was safe to transit, the rapids.

The two Nuevo worlds had been agro worlds, happy with being mostly forgotten by the Federation until the Xenos had come around. Admiral Irons had visited briefly to set them up as a redoubt in case civilization fell. Bek had traded with them using their small number of starships until the ships had one by one broken down and had been mothballed or recycled.

For centuries the Nuevans had been cut off from Bek and the rest of the galaxy. That was, until the light cruiser Caroline had managed to successfully navigate the rapids and bring them back into the Federation.

The commander wasn’t quite certain he should be happy about that or not. Bek’s industry and shipyards were damn good but they came with strings. As did the army units that were stood up on Nuevo Alpha.

Nuevo Alpha had developed an army to protect itself from swarms of worms called Tremor worms. Why they were called that he wasn’t certain. What he was certain of was that the colonists had been struggling with the swarms for centuries. Their technology had failed, and they had been reduced to buggies and animal drawn carriages until the Federation had re-established contact.

Now they were returning to modern technology. There were two space stations in orbit of that planet. And here he was on the partially constructed space station orbiting Baker.

The space station was to ship cargo and people to and from the planet. A fourth station was on the books; it was supposed to be built at the single jump point in the star system, eventually.

He wasn’t tasked with that project thankfully.

He scratched his scalp again and then tugged on his right ear lobe.

He was a Spacebee; he had come from Senka. His star system lacked a habitable world; the world had been destroyed during the Xeno war. The survivors had build colonies in the asteroids. He was at home in space even though he knew it was dangerous and could kill him in an eye blink if he got too careless.

He ran his eyes around the station. The current design had been set up for the basic species. Most sentient species were less than three meters tall. The Centaurians, however, were not.

Their body forms were too large for the spaces and modules. The station had needed to be redesigned after a lawsuit made its way through the courts. The State Department had intervened and arbitrated a deal to redesign the station.

That allowed everyone to get what they wanted and the administration would avoid accusations of racism. The administration had accepted that compromise and sent the Spacebees in to build the new space station. They were using the small modular one attached to the new one until the new one was complete.

To say that the Centaurians were prickly was putting it mildly. And that wasn’t just because of the poisonous spines on their backs.

Nuevo A exported army personnel, some military goods, and food products to the Sargasso star system and from there to Bek or the outer Federation. They were steadily improving the quantity and quality of their exports and even expanding to other export goods.

The army had a handle on the worms to the point that tourism was starting to pick up a little. There were even star liners that came in from Bek every quarter. The tourists enjoyed the visits to the “quaint” world and welcomed a respite from their time on the ships and casinos.

The natives on Nuevo B had only one export, information. Their work was important to science, math, genetic research, industry, physics, and navigation. Which explained why they wanted their own dedicated ansible at three times the capacity of a normal link he thought wryly.

That was a part of his mission, build the station, build a computer center on the planet, build a larger ansible platform, and possibly build bridges and other structures on the planet if there was anything left in the budget.

A second ansible link was on its way. Getting it through the rapids was tricky though; they had to account for losses in transit. The ansible cores were super sensitive to even the slightest shock to them.

The Centaurians wanted to hog the current ansible bandwidth while they waited. That was not acceptable. State became involved again, and a decree was announced that the two worlds split the data bandwidth down the middle with exceptions for military and government communications of course.

Conversations through the ansible was expensive. He was limited to a dozen characters a month. He had begun to save them up so he could send an entire sentence to his family and not just an emoji.

He shook his head and glanced at the image of Reuben Sullivan. The Neodog mutt was the undersecretary assigned to the star system. He predated Jorge’s arrival and was the bane of his existence. The dog was constantly on him to find ways to speed the process up.

He would if he could. He’d love to get out from under the mutt and the prickly natives. Love, love, love that idea. But, it wasn’t going to happen. At least, not any time soon. He couldn’t magically pull the parts out of the void. Even though he’d love to do just that.

Or send a certain pain-in-the-ass mutt in that direction he thought darkly.

He kept tabs on the dog’s whereabouts so he could be elsewhere. Usually being on the shitter was enough to keep the dog at bay so he wouldn’t have to listen to another lecture and whiny demand to hurry things along—oh, and keep it all under budget of course.

He shook his head and decided it was time for him to go walkabout for a bit. In the other direction from the mutt of course.

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