Polyvalent

By Steve Whitting

Freetrader Captain Pete Soñador and his loyal beer-loving crew from Orchid in the Void and Saving Mars are back for more wild adventures that take them from Mars to the distant Kuiper Belt aboard their trusty interplanetary transport, Polyvalent.  In stories that range from horrorific to humorous, they find themselves dealing with bizarre space monsters, a 'bathroom scale' teleporter, mysterious murders, space pirates, and a 'sexing booth' that turns women into zombies.  Hard science fiction meets pulp fiction in this fast-paced, occasionally rauncy romp across the Solar System.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Whitting
• Release date: May 31, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227138576

Steve Whitting

Geologist, cyclist, home brewer, and author all describe Steve Whitting. His formative years were spent in Fayetteville, Arkansas building model rockets, stargazing with his friends, and reading science fiction. Graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Arkansas in 1978, he had aspirations of becoming the first Geologist to visit the planet Mars. When that didn't pan out, he began writing short fiction in his spare time. Over the years those story concepts grew and eventually coalesced into his first novel, "Orchid in the Void". When he isn't busy pursuing his profession as an Environmental Geologist, he can be found aboard his beloved bicycle cruising along Alligator Bayou Road near Prarieville, Louisiana, concocting ales in his home brewery, or working on his next novel.

Book preview

Polyvalent

Published by Steve Whitting at Draft2Digital

Cover art by Steve Whitting

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Polyvalent is a work of fiction.  Names, places, characters, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Other Books in This Series

Orchid in the Void

Saving Mars

Terror in the Void

Tara Soñador

Contents

NO HARM NO FOUL

EXOTIC MATTERS

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

THE RETURN OF CHARITY CASE

THE INFINITY DOOR

OVER SEXED

BRIDES OF THE ETERNAL NIGHT

EDIE GO HOME!

No Harm No Foul

CHAPTER 1

Let’s try this again.  Where . . . or maybe I should say WHEN exactly are we? I asked Marvin.

If you must know, you haven’t purchased Eon Princess yet, Marvin explained patiently.  In this particular timeline things don’t quite go as planned and you stay in the Sol System.  A few other things are different, but you won’t notice them because you’ll believe that’s the way they always were.

What does happen? I asked.

You’ll see.  Telling you wouldn’t change the outcome anyway.  That’s for you to decide.  Oh, you won’t remember any of this after I’ve departed, he added, and then he abruptly vanished.

And just like that, Marvin the Martian was gone.

* * *

After first I blamed the dreams on the massive solar flare that hit us when we were approaching Mars.  Although we’d managed to avoid the worst effects by maneuvering Polyvalent so that our destination was between us and Sol, I’d apparently received a not-so-insignificant dose of radiation before I joined the rest of the crew in the storm shelter.  Lucky for me, I’d had the ‘treatment’ back when Em and I were in the outer planets, or I might not be writing this now.  Having a swam of nanobots running around inside you to repair your organs and prevent you from aging, and fix you when you’re sick or injured, has advantages.

Still, the dreams persisted.  They were extremely vivid and sequential, as if I was seeing glimpses of an alternate life.  They were both puzzling and disturbing, and Doc Ellie Tanner suggested that I undergo a passive mind scan while asleep so that she could record and analyze my dreams.

No drugs? I asked her, recalling when, after taking one of her ‘magic pills’, I’d mistakenly believed that my wife, Em, was dead.  Okay, so she really was dead in an alternate timeline, but that’s another story.

No Pete, Ellie reassured me.  You’ll just need to sleep in an automed for one night.  I’ll do the rest.

I hesitated.  You’re not going to do anything to my brain, are you? I asked her timidly.

No, she replied and laughed.  I’m just going to record your dreams so that you can play them back for yourself.  I won’t be watching what’s going on in your temporal lobe if you’re worried about that.

Okay, so I agreed.  That evening I took a rickshaw over to Ellie’s clinic in Sagan City where she’d perform the procedure.  As the time for my mind scan neared, I drank the amber ale that I’d brought with me to calm my nerves.  After the last drop had passed my lips, I stripped to my skimpies, crawled into the automed, and promptly fell asleep.

I dreamed.  Or is it dreamt?

I awoke the following morning to find Ellie puzzling over the desk ‘face.

I’ve got something, she informed me as she stood up and pulled her long blonde hair into a ponytail.  You’ll have to watch it to make sense of it.

Could I get some coffee first? I asked as I pulled on my pants and took a seat in front of the display.

Sure, I could use some too, Ellie replied as she padded on bare feet toward the clinic’s small kitchen.  She returned a short time later carrying two sippy cups.

The first parts of the recording are just normal dreams, she explained to me as she handed me the cup.  It’s the last twenty-five minutes you’ll want to watch.

Did you watch it?

No, I just fast-forwarded to where the images appeared to be coherent.  You’ll see, Ellie explained as she started the playback and then left me to view my dreams in solitude.

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CHAPTER 2

The Martians, the Belters, and those on the outer moons never fully trusted artificial intelligence.  They had observed how sapient A.I.s gradually molded the Earthers into ‘sheeple’ who’d blindly obey their ‘anointed perfect leaders’, and the Martians rejected them.  The Earthers perceived this mistrust as a weakness during the First Interplanetary War, and that ultimately proved to be a fatal mistake.  Their A.I.’s purportedly vast superiority unfortunately ‘corrected’ a perceived flaw in ‘fuzzy logic’ that resulted in human’s ‘irrational’ decisions.  As a result, the highly improbable destruction of the Earth by the Fat Lady asteroid was ignored until it was too late to prevent.

Ironically, the lowliest of sapient A.I.s, the pseudosapient android ‘sexbots’ with their capacity for empathy, could have anticipated the Martian’s desperate strategy.

•  From Lessons of the First Interplanetary War by Mustapha Huxtable

* * *

I knew that our sapient bioroid, Cherry Poppers, was assisting my best friend and long-time spacing partner, John Tanner, with routine maintenance on Polyvalent, so I took the bus out to Olympus Spaceport and then hiked out to Pad 73 where our second-hand knock-off of a basic late-model Triplanetary-class transport stood resting on her landing gear with her nose proudly pointed skyward and her sleek silvery hull gleaming in the late afternoon sun.  As John once told me long ago, the newer, fancier candles[1] had too many doodads and nano-whatevers to fix way out in the outer Sol System when all you had to work with was duratape and some parts scrounged from a washing machine.  That was still true today out in the distant Kuiper Belt.  Just as when I’d purchased Orchid and No Free Rides at auctions many years[2] ago, I’d wanted a dependable no-frills transport that was easy to maintain and repair.  I’d chosen the model that I was familiar with, albeit a much upgraded (but still somewhat less than state-of-the-art) version of the famous long-lived class for which spare parts were widely abundant.  The basic design was simple (as far as candle’s go), rugged, and enduring, and hadn’t changed much externally since it was introduced well over a century ago during the First Interplanetary War.  Although she lacked the private (and rather claustrophobic in my opinion) ‘staterooms’ available on some variants, Polyvalent’s accommodations included comfy acceleration/sleeping bunks for ten with privacy screens that filtered out both light and sound, a galley/autochef, shower/lavatory, automed, and storm shelter.  Like No Free Rides, she had retractable, self-leveling tripod landing gear for dusting on rough terrain, and her long spearhead-shaped landing gear housings gave her a sleek, rather rakish appearance.  She had a Deltastar-7 rocket motor which gave her a higher delta-v[3] than her predecessors and made trips to the outer Sol System faster, and a factory installed ‘afterburner’ that threw water in on the backside of the power plant to produce extra thrust when needed.  The afterburner was a horrendous water gobbler, but it provided Polyvalent with ‘fat-guy-sitting-on-your-chest’ acceleration for those occasions when it was needed.

Yes, I referred to Polyvalent as ‘her’.  Referring to candles in the feminine was once again politically correct (at least for the time being).

Polyvalent was a nice score that hadn’t ‘broken the bank’ considering that my finances, like those of everybody else, had suffered significantly after the ‘Great Readjustment’ that occurred when bitcreds were scrapped in favor of credits and devalued to a fraction of their value.  The problem with bitcreds was that virtual currency transactions were limited by the speed of light, and as a result could take hours or even days to complete in the outer Sol System.  The solution was reverting to ‘hard currency’ that you carried with you which had its own drawbacks but made point of sale transactions instantaneous once again.  However, the devaluation resulted in us fixing anything that our ‘bots couldn’t by doing our own maintenance and repairs to save money.  Em volunteered to sell some of her controlling interest in Aratek to help, but I figured it might come in handy someday and besides that the stock price was presently down.

At least Polyvalent was paid for.  There were plenty of independent farhaulers who’d financed their candles with bank loans and still owed thirty years of payments.  By design I wasn’t our candle’s sole owner because I’d made Em, John, Ellie, and Cherry all shareholders in Polyvalent, LLC.  I was the majority shareholder, but if something bad ever happened to me then Em got all my shares.

Why did we name our candle Polyvalent?  Cherry came up with the name after we’d struggled to find something that hadn’t already been used at least a thousand times.  Polyvalent means, "having many different functions, forms, or facets".  In essence, a jack-of-all-trades.  Yeah, I suppose that describes us nowadays.  Our candle’s original name was Gypsy Star, and the name is still visible in faded, peeling letters below the cargo bay doors because we haven’t gotten around to removing and replacing it.  You need atmosphere to apply the vacuum and radiation resistant paint used for airlock and cargo bay door outlines, and candle names.  That’s one reason why we never renamed Orchid.  Well, that and the fact that we’d have to re-register the new name with the Space Guard and pay a fee (which being bitcred strapped at the time we skipped) to have our transponder signal switched.  We could pay to have our candle moved to a pressurized hanger and have the work done, or simply wait until we dusted on Io again and do it ourselves.  The latter option was cheaper, so that’s what we decided upon.  Now we just needed to visit Io, but that hadn’t happened yet. 

You’d think that, after centuries of shooting rockets into the void, someone would have invented a paint by now that you could apply in a thin atmosphere without it bubbling.  Maybe that would be a good project for John to tackle.

Oh, while we’re at it, notice that I used the term, ‘independent farhaulers’.  They used to call us ‘free traders’, but that term has apparently become associated with ‘capitalist exploitation’, so now we’re referred to as ‘independent spacers’, or simply ‘freehaulers’ or ‘farhaulers’.

I suppose that, when everybody is vastly wealthy and can live almost indefinitely, then nobody is wealthy by comparison.  For me, that meant that when the economic bubble burst my ambitious plan to acquire a used passenger liner and transform it into an interstellar colony transport had to be placed indefinitely on hold.  That reason, and the fact that anti-matter for rocket motors was still scarce after the war and was going to stay that way since all production was reserved for the Space Guard and a few entities with special licenses, meant that I’d be staying in the Sol System for the foreseeable future.

Sounds like a lot of gobbledygook, doesn’t it?  In some alternate timeline I’d evidently not been so financially or otherwise constrained and successfully implemented my grandiose plan.  I only had my recorded dream sequence of our ‘other life’ on a distant terraformed moon named after me as evidence.  The detail and the mundanity of my recorded dream sequence suggested that it had really happened.  I had already shared my dream with Ellie and Em, who’d viewed my suggestion that the cosmic ray induced hallucinations we’d all briefly experienced as we were approaching Mars were actual memories of our ‘other life’ on a distant moon with skepticism.  Now I wanted to share my experience with John and Cherry and get their opinions.

It took almost ten minutes for John to finally answer my ‘permission to come aboard’ request and lower the cargo basket for me.  I suppose he didn’t have his wearable and was busy wrenching.  My pressure suit was one of the newer ones with superefficient CO2 scrubbers that allowed for virtually indefinite rebreathing, so I wasn’t worried about the length of my wait, just a little annoyed.

I weren’t expectin’ you to show up this afternoon, he said apologetically as I exited the air lock and removed my helmet.  You shoulda let me know you was comin’ and I’d made sure the beer was cold before you done arrived.

I wasn’t planning on coming here either, but I wanted to tell you about the results of my mind scan, I explained as I finished shucking my pressure suit.

Ain’t that kinda personal? John asked me, frowning.

It’s nothing that I’d be embarrassed to share with close friends, I replied.

I’m curious Pete, said Cherry.  You may tell me all about it.

In that case go ahead and tell us what Mr. Sandman done sprinkled in your noggin, John said jokingly, obviously not taking this too seriously.

I started to tell them, but I hadn’t gotten very far when Cherry interrupted me.

Pete, she began slowly.  That wasn’t a dream.  It really happened.

I suppose the look of relief on my face must have matched the look of astonishment on John’s.

That’s crazy talk! he exclaimed.

No, it was real, the metallic red-haired bioroid[4] replied and then proceeded to explain how it had been John’s experiments with exotic matter that had resulted in Marvin the ancient Martian ‘jumping’ them to the timeline that they all currently inhabited.

Hold, you knew this all along? I asked her.  Why didn’t you say anything?

I believed that your memories of our lives on that moon were lost, and it wouldn’t have made any difference, she answered.

Cherry, I left a son behind.  I’d think that was important.

Your daughter, Liv, has a stable full of husbands and you have Elvis knows how many grandchildren, great grandchildren, great-great grandchildren . . .

Hold! I shouted.  I know I do.  What’s your point?

You’re not exactly close to your offspring.  When was the last time that you visited Liv?  You send her and her family a video greeting during Elvisfest.  You seem to be less concerned about them than you are about a son in an alternate reality that you cannot return to, anyway.  What happened to us was real, but that’s in the past, or rather an alternate distant future.

I think I see what you mean, I said to Cherry.

Oh, you left a granddaughter back there, too, Cherry added.  Her name is Tara, she’s a warrior princess, and she runs the place.

Anything else I should know? I asked Cherry wearily.

Uh no, not really.

Good, cause all this ‘effin crazy talk has made me powerfully thirsty! John exclaimed.  It’s passed quittin’ time now anyway, so I think we all ought to set course for the Black Hole and refuel.

No argument from me, I responded.

I’ll advise Em and Ellie know so that they can meet us there, added Cherry.

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[1] Spacer’s slang for space vessels that lift off and land vertically on their tails (i.e., rocket ships).

[2] A standard ‘year’ in the Sol System is still based on one Earth-year since nobody has been able to agree on an alternative.

[3] Meaning velocity change (∆V).  In spacecraft flight dynamics, it is a measure of the impulse per unit of spacecraft mass that is needed to perform a maneuver such as launching from or landing on a planet or moon, or an in-space orbital maneuver.  Spacers often refer to a candle with a higher delta-v as having more legs.

[4] A cybernetic or biological organism created by artificial means. A genetically engineered or synthetic humanoid-like organism.

Notes: Decks are perpendicular to direction of travel so that acceleration creates artificial gravity.

Some versions have grid fins instead of deflector flaps.  Landing gear configuration varies (some versions have self-leveling tripod landing gear.)  Radiators retract for landing and lift-off.

CHAPTER 3

Em and Ellie made their appearance at the Black Hole almost an hour after John, Cherry, and I arrived.  I was in fact getting ready to ‘face Em and find what was taking them so long when they strolled into the bar accompanied by a stranger.  His appearance was somewhat disheveled, yet he carried himself with an air of self-importance.

I was beginning to think you were lost, I said to Em as I rose from our table to greet her and her mystery companion.  I kissed Em and then extended my elbow and introduced myself to the stranger, who stared blankly at me for a long moment before finally extending his elbow to touch mine as if he’d forgotten how.

Excuse my lack of manners, he replied.  I’m Professor Engelbert Orotund.  Your charming wife has informed me that you’re the owner and captain of an interplanetary transport that is available for charter.  I should like to engage your services.

Uh, available for charter?  That sure was news to me.  Then I noticed wide-eyed Em frantically nodding her head yes.

"Ah yes, Polyvalent is available for charter," I replied cautiously.

Excellent! Professor Orotund exclaimed.  How soon can you be ready to depart?

Hold on the count, professor, I replied.  Before I agree to your charter, I’ll need to know your destination."

Oh yes, of course, he replied.  It’s the asteroid Urgog.

Urgog? I thought and hesitated.  From what I knew, Urgog was an asteroid way out in the Kuiper Belt.  It was an icy cigar-shaped hunk of rock in an orbit that was sufficiently inclined to the ecliptic plane that it wasn’t easy to get to and wasn’t worth the ridiculous propellant expenditure to visit unless it was in a favorable position.

"Professor, Polyvalent isn’t a torch[5].  It will take us months to reach Urgog, and that’s assuming it’s in the right spot in its orbit, I explained.  I’m afraid that your ride won’t be cheap."

Oh my.  Well, I suspected as much, he said frowning.  It is what it is, I suppose.  Regardless, my presence there is critical to my research.  When can we lift?

Uh, no offense Professor, but I’ll need to confirm that you have the funds . . .

Oh, you needn’t be concerned about your compensation, he interjected impatiently.  I have the full backing and resources of Carl Sagan University at my disposal which you are more than welcome to verify.

I glanced at Cherry, who had apparently already up linked to Solnet to check the professor’s credit and, wide eyed, nodded affirmatively.

In that case, we’ll depart tomorrow afternoon, I replied.

We can’t leave tonight? he asked.  It won’t take long for my graduate assistant to load my equipment.

We have to top-off our propellant tank and get ready to lift, I informed him.  There are system checks that we’re required to run, and that takes time.

Well then, I suppose that you’d better make haste and get with it, he said.

[5] A candle with an anti-matter rocket motor that makes it capable of extremely high delta-v.

CHAPTER 4

There are destinations in the Sol System that I wouldn’t be disappointed at all if I never visited them, and Urgog was high on my list.  The asteroid was named for a planet in one of N. Zane Dost’s novels, and if you’ve ever read any of Dost’s stuff then the name alone would give you reason enough to avoid it.  Dost wrote horrific, often lurid stories that made Lovecraft and Poe look like authors of children’s books.  He died under mysterious circumstances.

There was something about Urgog’s appearance that was very unsettling.  Its surface features reminded most who viewed images of it, yours truly included, of ancient, leathery skin with distended veins visible beneath.  As distant as it was from Sol, it was forever dark and hellishly cold.  Specially insulated pressure suits with auxiliary heaters and night vision visors were required to visit its foreboding surface, and with an average surface temperature of -247 degrees Celsius, excursions were limited to a few hours at most.

The other thing that made me not want to go there was because two previous expeditions to Urgog had never returned.  That fact alone would have caused me to back out if our compensation for making the trip wasn’t so ludicrous to have made refusal unthinkable given our present less-than-favorable financial situation.

But why?  Other than being a big ugly rock of apparently extra-solar origin, multispectral analysis hadn’t revealed anything special about Urgog that would warrant attention.  Since humans had first began exploring and then gradually settling the void, numerous comets, asteroids, and even moons of extra-Solar origin had been discovered.  In my mind, Urgog was nothing special other than being an inconvenient – and quite possibly hazardous - destination. 

My attempts to coax more information about the reason for our expedition from the professor had thus far proven ineffectual and he’d remained tight-lipped.  I suppose the windfall payday that awaited my crew and me was sufficient reason for us to trust him and accept that whatever he told us was strictly on a need-to-know basis.  One fact that I did manage glean on my own had to do with Urgog’s current orbital position, which was about as optimal as it was going to get for an intercept – and a safe return – if we lifted by tomorrow afternoon as I’d told the professor.  Each additional day delay would make both arrival and return increasingly difficult.

The night before our departure I had a dream.  It wasn’t about my ‘other life’ on the distant moon that bore my name - I’d inexplicably stopped having those dreams after my passive mind scan.  In this dream I was inside the hollow asteroid Market, the formerly clandestine establishment where you could buy almost anything - including human slaves - for the right price.  Market had gone ‘legit’ and closed their infamous slave markets while Em and I were out on Pete’s Rock.  Anyone with enough credits could visit it now, but back-in-the-day you had to be a member of the ‘club’ or know the right people to get in.

In my dream, Market was dark and deserted.  Its once gleaming hotels and casinos had a dilapidated appearance, as if they’d been abandoned long ago.  Trash and other debris littered the empty streets, and blackened windows stared out at me like the empty eye sockets of skulls.

It was quiet.  Deathly quiet.  The kind of quiet you get when you’re out in the void suited up and the only thing you hear is your own breathing.  Here it was just my breathing and my footsteps.  Those were the only sounds.

I wasn’t alone, though.  I sensed the presence of something that I knew was huge, alien, and malevolent, and it was pursuing me.  I couldn’t see it, yet I knew it was getting closer.

I ran, but I could not run fast enough.  I felt as though Market’s gravitational pull had suddenly increased fivefold, and I could hardly lift my feet.  I could sense the nightmarish thing that was pursuing me steadily closing in, ready to envelop me with its slimy tentacles and draw me into its gaping tooth-lined maw. 

I felt the tentacles encircling me, trapping me, and I screamed.

Pete, wake up! I heard Em shout as she shook me.  You’re having a nightmare!

I blinked.  I was in our bedroom in our apartment in Sagan City.  I was sitting upright in our bed and Em was beside me with her arms around me giving me a worried look.  I was covered in cold sweat.

Are you alright? Em asked me frantically.

Yeah, I had hesitantly, as if I wasn’t sure.  I was just having a bad dream.  Must be the stress of our upcoming run out to Urgog.

It’s early, said Em.  Let’s go back to sleep.

I glanced at the clock.  It was 4:57 LMT[6].

Nah, I don’t think I can, I replied.  I might as well get up and get an early start.  There will be plenty of time to rest after we’ve lifted.

In that case I’ll join you, Em said as she slid out of bed and pulled on her robe