Encounters In The Trade
The strange vessel came in on the same side of the system as Verus III, the Jovian, braking with nine engines blazing. It was clearly something unusual. The engines fired steadily, without the normal pulsing. The spectrum was bizarre -- it had complex traces to it, as if the vessel had concentrated the interstellar wind for its burn.
The ships orbiting Verus III reacted like animals around a water hole in a Gaian tropical savannah, when they catch a strong but unfamiliar scent on a change of wind.
Exotic freighters were the migrating grazers. Combine freighters were the fat and slow ones. Of course, they stay away from situations that require speed. And plodding from one warehouse to another on contracted shipments neither pays for nor demands speed. The combine freighters started moving immediately, staying together in herds based on combine and Family alliances. The Free Traders were the gazelles, small and nimble. They also moved, scattering, every ship ... every Family ... for itself.
The Other skipships were the flocks of birds, and it was time to head off to the home roost. They rose from their own skimming operations inside the Jovian and made for the Inner Deep beyond cold Verus VI.
The local skimmers were the hippos, making for the deeper water in the middle of the water hole. They were stout, and had tremendous legs for a straight run. But with their crew in inertial stasis against the delta plus gravity, they were anything but nimble. Add to that the bulk of their tanks, which they would be reluctant to jettison. But the same bulk meant fuel to waste. So they descended to a tight driving orbit, beneath the top cloud deck.
The First Colonist picket ships were the local predators, and acted as warily as any pack of jackals with an unknown scent on the wind. It might be prey, it might be competition, it might be harmless. Their First Colony needed to know, so they formed into main body and advance guard, and made way to the incoming vessel.
And we Traders? Why, we were the chattering monkeys in the trees, staring toward the intruder, trying to see if it was a threat or opportunity. Much of the chatter was asking everyone else what they knew, when we each expected that nobody knew anything at all.
We were actually fairly well equipped to work out what was going on. Part of that "we" was Wavedancer. She is Gaian with an AI of Other design, with all that implies for sensors and analysis. And she started as a skimmer at Jove, before Gaia's main source of Heavy-H was exhausted, so she has the legs of a skimmer without the bulk.
The other part was the two University Traders there. One was a Biology department, insystem to study the collapsed ecology of the failed Second colony world. The other was a Survey department.
University ships are ungainly looking things, a cluster of cheap diamond-ply tanks for fuel surrounding more tanks for life support ponds surrounding ... well, still more tanks where the staff lives and works. But University Traders live on creating information as much as swapping information. They leak valuable odd-level information like sieves, but the good ones create enough even-level information to make it well worth your while working with them. And both of these were Echelon University departments, so they were very good indeed.
Our chattering quickly sorted out who would stick their snouts into the situation, and who would retreat to the other side of the Jovian and receive the feed. Wavedancer was one of the ones trading credit for increased risk, and the two University ships were among those trading debt for relative safety.
At a time like this, you think of more than accumulating credit. We put our sensor data and running analysis at 2 level five credits per hour, a very high price indeed. We'd make more at a lower price. But the high price guaranteed company from those who undercut us, or could not afford our feed.
