A free trader adventures.., p.1
A Free Trader: Adventures of a Jump Space Accountant Book 8, page 1
A Free Trader
Adventures of a Jump Space Accountant
Book 8
Andrew Moriarty
Copyright © 2025 Andrew Moriarty
All rights reserved.
Version 1.00
This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Special thanks to my dedicated team of beta readers – A J, Adam G, Aleeta, Alex, Barbara M, Bryan, Christopher G, Chuck B, Daniel C, Danny H, Dave M#1, Dave W, David H, Djuro D, Elizabeth S, Gary L, Greg D, Haydn H, J Anderson, Jim C, John E, John K, John S, Jolayne W, Justin H, Keith C, Kent P, Lorna, Mark H, Michael G, Michael R, Nathan T, Penny L, Peter B, Ralph J, Robin C, Ross C, Ryan P, Sally S, Scott, Scott M, Simon, Skip C, Susan G, Terry H, Tigui R, Vince P, VJL, Wolfgang R, and to my editor Beth Lynne.
Chapter 1
Accounting Error slid silently past Delta’s jump limit en route for Rim-37’s orbit. Jake had jumped them in beyond any of the orbital stations, even outside of the Dragon’s magnetosphere, counting on Accounting Error’s better shielding to protect them from the hard radiation beyond the jump limit. He’d minimized their comm traffic, sending only directed messages.
“Good thing we have our shields. The radiation out here is deadly,” Jake tapped his screen. “If we were on a Militia cutter or a regular freighter, we’d be in trouble. We’re getting bombarded with billions of energetic particles every second. The Flandre wouldn’t have lasted an hour this far out.”
The Flandre was their jump freighter, left behind with the rest of their crew in the last system. It was a hundred times more massive than Accounting Error, one quarter as fast, stuffed full of trading goods, and refueling it was like using a hand laser to melt an asteroid. They’d tethered it to an icy comet, but without a proper fuel processing system, it would be weeks slurping ice before it could jump again.
“Why is it so dark, Jake?” Nadine gestured at his console. “I can barely read that.”
“I was trying to figure out loading options for trading packages. I had all the screens running. The dark is quiet. It helps me think.” And I don’t understand the coded transmission I got from Dashi. Transfer of assets? An inheritance? Read Roi’s report closely? Why is he transferring assets to me? Why should I check out Roi’s reports? And why isn’t he answering my comms? Did something happen to him? “I forgot to turn them up when you came on watch.” He pushed the slider. “Better?”
Nadine nodded. “Thank you, temporary admiral and high muckety-muck Mr. Stewart, for lowering yourself to take into account your humble crew’s requests.” Jake had led a diplomatic mission to the planet Magyar and had been made a temporary admiral for the duration.
“That was temporary, Nadine. Once we get back, I’m just Jake. And you’re never humble.”
“Why should I be humble? I’m awesome!” Nadine grinned. “But I’m always more cheerful in the light. Darkness is depressing. The less time we spend out here, the better. Let’s get out of this radiation bath.”
“Not until we have more info on the current situation, Nadine. And it was your idea to get information first. Sneak in. Make sure nobody beats us back. To be safe.”
Nadine sighed. “Yes, but I forgot how boring safe is. Stewart, we haven’t seen any pirates since we left Magyar. That was a month ago.”
“There was that one reading—”
“It was a ghost. They would have caught up by now. They’re gone. We chased them away. And we’re not even sure the ship was a pirate.”
Accounting Error and her crew had bluffed a hostile ship away from the planet Magyar four jumps ago without identifying it.
“I don’t know that they weren’t.” Jake took another sip of basic. Could have been pirates. Could have been an armed Free Trader. Could have been part of what’s left of the Imperial Navy. We can’t gamble either way. If they followed us back here, things could get bad.
Nadine slurped up the last of her food tray’s contents, grimaced, and tossed the empty tray in the recycler. “That was awful. I think you Belters had your taste buds removed surgically at birth. Can we at least sneak in closer to somewhere we can get a decent meal?”
“We’ve got plenty of trays. And basic.” Jake gestured at the cloudy liquid filling their cups.
“This Basic is sooo vile.” Nadine slurped up some liquid from her cup, then spat it back. “You’d think space trader types as rich as us could afford a better quality of drink powder.” Basic was recycled water mixed with powder. The powder had sugars, salts, vitamins, minerals, half a day’s worth of calories, and a horrible taste. “Smells like a thruster control line popped and leaked propellant into the main cabin.” She scanned the repeater system display over the aft hatch. “No fuel leak, so what I’m smelling is what this is supposed to taste like.”
Jake didn’t respond. He brought another spreadsheet up on his screen and examined it.
Nadine gulped the last of the basic, grimaced, and tried another tack. “This is stupid, Jakey, we’re too far out to do any trading. We’re in the middle of nowhere. The butt end of the rings. Only things out this far are the dregs of humanity, thieves, degenerates, and people who marry their cousins.”
“This is my old neighborhood. We could rendezvous with my old station, Rim-37, and visit if you were bored.”
Nadine rolled her eyes. “That’s exactly what I mean. The one time I was on your station, whenever I shook hands, I checked for webbed feet.”
“How would you check for webbed feet if you were shaking hands?”
“Because for you Rim people, they’re probably the same appendage.”
Now it was Jake’s turn to roll his eyes. “We’re not all freaks, Nadine.” He turned back to his console. We’re poor, uneducated, unsophisticated, and some of us are lazy. But that’s no reason for the corps to take advantage of us like they did. Well, now it’s my turn. The mag-boot is on the other foot.
“Can’t prove it by you. Weird math-loving person. You spend more time looking at spreadsheets than you do looking at girls.”
Jake kept his mouth shut. There had been an embarrassing incident earlier, when Nadine said she ‘wanted to teach him a new trick’. Just because I wanted to pause to write down something doesn’t mean I wasn’t interested in what we were doing. I didn’t want to forget her instructions, that’s all.
“In fact, I even raided the cargo and get us an extra jar of soy sauce, since we used up the whole last one, but—”
“I had to write something down, that was all. Changing the subject, the news is bothering me,” Jake said. “Or the lack of news. There’s this new Senate elected while we were gone, there’s no news about Dashi, and there’re fewer Free Trader ships than before.”
“You counted the Free Trader ships?”
“I counted every ship in the system.” Jake played with his display. “And categorized them, plotted their courses, and tried to get an idea of their cargo.”
“Of course you did.”
“Dashi hasn’t answered my comm. I’ve got a private code for him, and he isn’t responding. What did the admiral say when you called him?”
“I never called the admiral.”
“Of course you did.”
“You told me not to.”
“When do you ever listen to me? Tell me what he said.”
Nadine frowned. “We don’t need the admiral. We’ve got the best trader in the galaxy right here, according to you. And all I need is to keep an eye on you to make sure nobody shoots you. Need to guard my investment.”
Jake locked his board. “He hasn’t answered you either?”
Nadine shook her head and pursed her lips. The admiral was the former head of the Delta Militia. Also, her grandfather. “We don’t need him.”
“We need somebody.”
“You’ve got your friend, Dinner?”
“Skimmer,” Jake said.
“He’s helping us. Rounded up a tug, you said.”
“He did that. Or he’ll do it.”
“Would he be able to do that during some sort of system problem? Some sort of political problem?”
Jake frowned. “He’s so out of it most of the time, he wouldn’t notice if the station was on fire. He can’t even spell political. And Rim-37 isn’t exactly in the mainstream of anything.”
“Well, he got us a tug, right?”
“He said he did,” Jake said. “One problem.”
“Which is?”
“It’s supposed to be here now.” Jake checked his board. “And there’s nothing nearby. He stood us up.”
Nadine stood and stretched, then shook the bottle of soy sauce. “Well, if it’s just the two of us, I know what we can do while we wait.”
Skimmer arrived four hours late, parked his tug next to Accounting Error, and free-jumped over. He gave Jake a bear hug when he cleared the airlock. “Sorry I’m late. I had to stop to take a smoke break, Jake.”
“Skimmer…” Skimmer was a childhood friend of Jake’s. He was short, stout, and often forgot to wash. He didn’t like math, and his reading skills didn’t extend beyond the label of a whiskey bottle. But he was tough, loyal, and he and Jake had been piloting tugs and barges together since grad
“Cargo ship came running into port. Free Trader, from one of the drop stations. Needed fuel badly. They traded hard for it. I got me three cartons of the good stuff.”
Jake and Nadine had drifted on an un-powered orbit, waiting, pretending to be a hole in space. A silent hole. One orbit later than expected, Skimmer had shown up with his tug. “Knew I’d missed you, so didn’t bother to chase,” Skimmer said. “I knew the orbit would circle back.”
“Glad you didn’t broadcast your delay to the whole system.”
“No problem, Jake,” Skimmer shrugged. “Silence is Goldman, right? And my long-range comm is broken, so I couldn’t do that.”
“Silence is golden, you mean,” Nadine said.
Skimmer shook his head. “Golden? No, Goldman. Dave Goldman. Works at the caf at the station. Never talks, quiet guy. When you want to be quiet, you don’t talk, like Goldman.”
“Show me your hands. Spread your fingers. I want to see—”
“Not now, Nadine,” Jake said. “Glad you made it, Skimmer.”
“What you want to do with these containers?”
Jake split his cargo across four containers. His plan was to offer one each to the two largest corporations, one to a Free Trader’s ship, and one to a crooked Militia officer—it wouldn’t be hard to find one. Skimmer would take care of the delivery. Rim-37 wasn’t much of a station, but they’d been spiraling cargo into the inner belt for fifty years. They knew how to launch a container into orbit to intersect somebody. Jake explained his plan.
“And I’m getting my money?” Skimmer asked.
“Half now, half when all the containers are popped,” Jake said. “As agreed.”
“Always knew I could count on you, Jake,” Skimmer said. “You’re pretty cheerful, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“Considering what happened to your friend.”
“Which friend?”
“Your friend Dashi,” Skimmer said. “Didn’t you know? He’s dead.”
“We’ll be at the dock soon, Jake,” Nadine said. Jake had been so shaken, she’d had to pilot them to Skimmer’s rendezvous. He’d questioned Skimmer over and over, but the story hadn’t wavered. Dashi was dead. He’d heard it on the news. No other details.
“It can’t be true.” Jake slumped in his chair. “He should still be alive.” He tapped his screen. Then again.
He kept banging it until Nadine grabbed his hand. “Let me.” She shut down his screen. He’d started a dozen new spreadsheets since the news, but abandoned them all. “Skimmer says he’s dead. And now that we know what to look for, we found the news.”
“He was like a father to me.” Jake blinked back tears. “Like a father.” Better than a father. He gave me a chance when nobody else would.
“Better than some real fathers,” Nadine said. “And I guess you didn’t get the rest of the news.”
“What rest?”
“Dashi wasn’t the only one who died in the fighting. Lots of Free Traders, including our friend Marianne, Jose’s girlfriend.”
“Marianne?” Jake tilted his head. “The Free Trader? No loss, not compared to Dashi.”
“And one other person died.”
“Who?”
“The admiral.”
“Admiral Edmunds? your….” Jake knew Nadine didn’t like to talk about him. “Your grandfather? How?”
Nadine slapped the controls, but her voice was level. “I’m still trying to find out more. He was poisoned, same time as Dashi.”
“The news said Dashi died. Didn’t say anything about poison.”
“Well, I’ve read some other news. I have other friends who kept an eye out for me. It could have been Jose who killed him. He was in the room with Dashi and the admiral when they died.”
“He was? Who else was there?”
Nadine slapped another control. “Marianne. And Shutt.”
“All three? Do they…?”
“News says officially they don’t know. Unofficially, Jose blamed Marianne. She’s dead. Justice served.”
“Do you believe him?”
“Nope.” Nadine shook her head. “This is too convenient for Jose. His boss, dead. His biggest rival, dead. The head of the Militia, who hated him, dead.”
“Well, who...”
“We’ll find out.” Nadine snarled. “We’ll find out. But one more thing, Stewart.”
“What’s that?”
Nadine slid a knife from its forearm sheath, spun it across her fingers and rammed it back in. “Until we find out exactly what happened, we’re keeping to ourselves, and we’re not going anywhere near the inner system. We don’t want to make it any easier for Jose. With Dashi gone, there’re two people who could run TGI- his assistant, Jose, or his number one troubleshooter, Jake Stewart. And I don’t want to get too close to Jose, cause he may decide he wants to up his chances.”
Chapter 2
“Jake, this course sucks.” Nadine hammered her board. “Stupid universe.”
“Yes,” Jake said, “it does. It’s the wrong course.”
Nadine glared over her shoulder. “No, I mean seriously, it sucks. We’re going to the wrong spot.” They sat side-by-side at Accounting Error’s control station. Skimmer and Jake had loaded up four containers of mixed goods and hid them in Rim-37’s floating junk farm. Jake kept small quantities of samples, but dumped all the other containers in an orbit known only to Skimmer and him. Now they were creeping in-system for their first clandestine sales meeting.
“Remember, our database is out of date by 50 years?”
“But you updated that at Magyar.”
“I did. Which only brought it up to the last time they got something from the Empire—which was 50 years ago, when Imperial ships moved through. We’re up to date for the rest of the galaxy, at least the Imperial Galaxy, but we don’t have the latest mappings from here.”
“You made me drive this course. This out-of-date course? Anything could have happened. We could have run into a comet.”
“You said you’re an amazing pilot, so I’m counting on your amazing piloting skills to amazingly pilot us where we need to go. And comets are easy to avoid.”
“Fine.” Nadine slapped the board. She’d done a lot of slapping since she'd heard the admiral had died. “As simple as changing the jewelry on an outfit. A slight adjustment, but a big effect.”
“Why were you complaining?”
“Because I wanted to yell at somebody. I’m angry.”
Nadine and Jake exchanged looks. Their reactions to the deaths—of Dashi and the admiral—had been varied. Nadine exhibited screaming anger, followed by a smoldering fury. Jake had initially been disbelieving, and then had quieted to an icy calm.
“I don’t want to be out here,” Nadine said. “I’m going to go in and stab whoever killed my grandfather.” Her hand strayed to a sheath, then drifted back.
“Fine with me,” Jake said. He brought up another spreadsheet, his seventh in the last hour, and turned the cabin lights down. “Who did it?”
She closed her mouth. “I don’t know. Probably Jose.”
“Prove it.”
“I don’t need to.” Nadine reached for her board and pulsed the cabin lights to max. “I just know.”
Jake shaded his eyes from the glare. “What if it wasn’t Jose? Don’t you want to stab the right person?”
“Don’t you want to do something about Dashi?”
“Yes,” Jake said. “I want whoever killed him to die.”
“See? So we should go to Landing.”
“And do what?” Jake spread his hands wide. “You don’t know who killed your grandfather. I don’t know who’s responsible for Dashi’s death. We need to find out what’s going on first, and do some trading.”
“Trading. Don’t you have any emotions? Don’t you have any feelings? Aren’t you angry?”
“I’m angry, Nadine,” Jake said. “But I don’t run and scream and yell and shoot people. That’s not my way. As soon as I have enough information, I’ll let you know who to shoot. Or stab, whatever you want.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.” Dashi would want me to ignore who killed him and get on with saving the empire. I’ll do that. But that doesn’t mean I can’t let Nadine have some fun first… “Have I ever let you down before?”
