The Star Venturers

by Kenneth Bulmer

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

"Heard of you?" The princess spoke with a great weariness. "We hear about all the adventurers of the galaxy. So far all have failed. You will fail too. I know it - but I must go on trying to find the prince. When you are dead and scattered into the atoms we shall find another strong man and try again. One day, perhaps, we shall succeed. Maybe you will, but I doubt it. You too will be destroyed like all the others." With these words of confidence ringing in his ears, Big Bill Jarrett was sent out on an impossible journey - one he knew could kill him if he went, and would kill him if he didn't.

Release date: August 29, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 114

Sample

FOR ONCE Bill Jarrett was minding his own business.

He had just sold a quantity of diamonds he had picked up on a Pluto-cold world to a jowly Terran atom-master and he felt in good spirits. He felt great. He was actually whistling as he strolled down the sidewalks of a New York that hummed and bustled in many levels about him.

The sun shone, throwing patterned shadows, warm. That sun up there was Old Sol, the real honest-to-goodness Number One Sun.

Jarrett, whistling, feeling the thick roll of notes in his pocket, felt legitimately on top of the galaxy.

He turned into a pedway fifty stories above the ground where bright murals beckoned. He strode along eagerly. What should it be? A frosted flagon of red wine—Dragon’s Blood? Or a hot cup of java?

The opportunity to make a choice pleased him.

The café appeared nice and pleasant, quiet and respectable. These were qualities long unfamiliar to him, near-forgotten and strange, lost, he had thought, in a dozen years of rollicking on the toughest spots in the galaxy. He had seen a lot of space and a lot of stars since he had last been on Earth.

Jarrett’s wide shoulders brushed a pot plant on a shelf as he sat down and his long legs kicked into the chair opposite. The girl laughed at him.

“Do you always,” Jarrett said, making it soft and genteel for the moment, “do you, young lady, always giggle at perfect strangers?”

“How do you know you’re perfect?” she countered.

Big Bill Jarrett had to chuckle at that one, especially in the mood he was in. He didn’t stop to think. He just rushed in, all big beaming smile and dancing eyes and wide-open teddy-bear lovableness.

“Could be I’d be amenable to some polishing.”

Her eyes flirted at him. She was a tall, statuesque girl, with smooth blonde hair plaited and swung low over her breasts. Her features, full and florid, promised a coarse emotive understanding. She wore a short emerald green dress that glittered as she moved and her thighs showed firm and strong. Lacking other female company, Bill Jarrett found her attractive, as he found some orchids attractive.

She said now, her eyes measuring him, “You might be amenable to anything; I wouldn’t know.”

Along about now Jarrett, in normal circumstances, would have registered the exact pitch on his internal social radar mind-screens. He’d handled enough Harpies on enough strange planets. But here he was on Earth—on Earth—the hearthstone of the galaxy. Crudities did not exist on good old Solterra, did they?

The robot waiter chirruped for attention and, making up his mind with reckless abandon, Jarrett ordered champagne. The girl smirked. The robot brought the bottle and popped the cork and poured. Jarrett lifted his glass, not bothering over formality, anxious only to be seen as a bon vivant.

The champagne was reasonable. He drank two glasses and as he was reaching for the bottle to pour the third for the girl he felt an amazingly acute pain in the back of his head, a stabbing agony over his eyes and a sick queasiness in his stomach.

He rolled over and sat up.

The metal floor quivered.

The metal walls shook.

A single glow-light in the overhead showed him the familiar outlines of a spaceship’s brig.

“What the—!” he said thickly.

No answer.

He put a hand to his wallet—gone. The thick roll of notes—gone.

He groaned. His head threatened to come off.

“Not at my age,” he said. “I’m a grown boy. Say it isn’t so.”

But it was so—indubitably.

It mattered not if the atom-master had instigated the rolling of him to regain his money, or if he had fallen into the hands of free-lancers. His cash was gone. His wallet and thus his proof of who he was was gone.

And he was aboard a rustbucket en route for God knew where.

He lay on the metal floor and pondered. His thoughts made his face take on the semblance of a gargoyle’s, all hooked nose and thinned lips and jutting jaw. He didn’t waste energy railing against fate—rather, he knew with a savage, morose lack of self-pity that the mug had been him; it was all his fault, and he and he alone had dropped himself in it this time around.

Bill Jarrett had stature enough to recognize that life itself is good; but he was not a sentimental fool who thought that the goodness of life could be had free, without some pain. Hitherto, for all his adventures, he had fought cleanly; now he wondered how he would react if confronted with that blonde-haired temptress in the little mural café perched on a pedway fifty stories up in Earth’s New York.

When some of the headache had gone he propped himself against the metal wall and shoved himself fully upright. He was a tall man. His head brushed the overhead. He straightened up his rumpled jacket and trousers and then took off one of his real leather spaceboots with the plastic reinforced sole.

He thumped the door with it. He banged that door with all his frustration and anger.

The small polarized window set halfway up flushed pink and cleared and a face peered through.

“Shaddap!”

“Come in here and say that!” blasted back Jarrett. “Don’t give me any trouble, sonny. I’m bigger and rougher than you are.”

The door swung open silently. The speaker stepped through the opening.

Jarrett—Big Bill Jarrett—stepped back a pace.

The man was big. He wasn’t just tall, he was big all over. After his first quick shock, Jarrett studied him more critically and noticed the swell of stomach and mentally filed that away as a possible weak spot. The man’s huge hands enfolded a large-size solid-projectile weapon, the type of gun normally operated from a mounting.

“You may be bigger,” Jarrett said coolly—he had at once reverted to his usual professional poise—“but rougher … you can’t prove that with a gun in your fist.”

He began to work his boot back on.

The giant laughed, gap-toothed, his lips folded in thick creases. He wore a drab uniform with a brilliant red cummerbund. His face and his body repelled Jarrett.

“I’m proving I’m tougher than you, sonny, because I don’t care if I use this squirter on you or not.”

At that, the cretin had a point, Jarrett conceded.

They went along the corridor to a comfortable wardroom.

Sitting at the table were two men, men of a certain stamp, hard-bitten spacemen who plied the lonely reaches between the stars for just one motive—profit.

“Here he is, Cap’n,” grunted the giant. “He just woke up.”

The older of the two officers, the one with rather more gold braid and wrinkles and a stronger leer of evil in his eyes, said, “He don’t look like much to me.”

The other one, the straight man, said, “Give him a chance. He might be quite—ah—adequate.”

“All right, Noggin,” said the captain briskly. “Put him to work. And I don’t want any trouble.”

“You won’t get any, sir, not from this bum.” And Noggin prodded Jarrett with the gun so that he stumbled out of the wardroom.

He heard the two officers laughing.

Jarrett liked a good laugh, himself.

He was put to work on routine cleaning and maintenance tasks aboard the ship, which proved to be a sizable freighter with a central open compartment for space-refrigerated cargoes. No novice aboard spaceships, Jarrett quickly contrived a simple routine that satisfied Noggin, the bosun, and left him plenty of time for himself. After a couple of ship-days of that he went back to making the work last full-time. He had never been one for sitting and brooding.

He figured out that he had not been shanghaied merely to work aboard the ship—automatics took care of almost everything. Noggin had to find work for him to do in double and triple cleaning and polishing. He must have been rolled by that tricky atom-master and, when the rich pig had stolen his money back, been shipped out to avoid the unpleasant consequences such a rough and tough specimen from the outer marches of the galaxy would inevitably arouse.

Even so—even so, there was the destination and the complaint he would make then.

Didn’t the officers of the ship (she was the Crepuscid Federation’s Dnipro Line’s Jacqueline—an unsavory shipping line at best) didn’t they realize he’d report at once to the authorities on planetfall?

They might try to prevent him from landing although he doubted that, for common sense told him he was costing them more in food and necessities than he could possibly earn cleaning ship. If they did try to stop him he would, regrettably, have to get rough.

So there was another reason.

As Jacqueline plunged on through space to a destination not revealed to him, Bill Jarrett tried to figure it out.

He saw little of the other members of the crew for they kept to themselves. At watch-changing he glimpsed them striding purposefully to their work and understood they were all of a pattern with the captain and Noggin. A hard ship, the Jacqueline.

He’d traveled and worked aboard hard ships before, in his time, had Big Bill Jarrett.

As the tally of ship-days mounted up and the ship still plunged through space at her light-year consuming gallop, Jarrett understood also that their destination lay at a considerable distance from Solterra. As the galaxy had been explored and colonized and opened up, many pockets of stellar clusters and conglomerations had been settled and abandoned, for a variety of reasons. Homo sapiens spread erratically throughout the outer portions of the home spiral arm. Inevitably much communication suffered. Stars and planets became cut off and isolated from other solarian settlements.

Local groupings sprang up, petty empires and commonwealths and federations of suns. Old Earth looked on and maintained a watchful motherhood. If any grouping looked too powerful, then she would arrange a balancing group or federation, so that nothing unpleasantly violent should break out among the stars.

As you looked out into space and saw the chips of light eternally burning, saw the long swirls of darkness and the whorls of more distant galaxies, you knew that around many of those tiny specks of light orbited planets whereon men—men like yourself—lived and loved and died.

Also, you knew, around other chips of light orbited planets whereon lived other beings, who may have loved, and who probably died; but so far Homo sapiens knew so little about them that only guesses could suffice for answers.

When the orders came through from Noggin that planet-fall was coming up Jarrett was polishing for the hundredth time the bright metal stanchions leading into the open area. He put down the rag and gaped back at the big bosun, as though the journey had grown to be a natural portion of life and any cessation of it was out of the normal, strange.

“Planetfall?”

“That’s right, sonny. Place called Merton. Heard of it?”

“No.”

Noggin guffawed.

“Oh, you will, sonny, you will.”

He was obviously enjoying a huge joke at Jarrett’s expense.

Jarrett glared furiously at him, feeling the impotence of the ignorant.

When the ship at last touched down and the locks opened Noggin and two other crewmen appeared before Jarrett, who was now dressed in a plain gray coverall, patched and stained, and jerked impatient guns at him.

“Move along, sonny. If you try to run—powee!”

Jarrett’s fists gripped into knots.

There was no hope of running. Preceding the guards, he marched down the ramp.

He took in this planet called Merton. . . .