Dumarest, Low Passage, and the universality of things....

"You really seem to know your way around this thing!  Just what kind of tour did the 'skip give you anyway?"

"Nah-- just the run of the mill "these are the main corridors; there are probably access lines behind the bulkheads; engineering is over there; stay off the upper decks" kind of thing.  I didn't even pay attention."

"Well you've been dead-on so far; we've hit every access panel on the schematics."

"Kid, this ship was old before I was born, and they were crazy popular during the big trade boom when they opened the Pinault route and found that other link to Besteron.  We've got four gas giants in system here, one downport and no upport worth mentioning.  We sure as _Hell_ ain't got a shipyard or even a drydock.  If I have been on one of these Cerce-class freighters, I've been on a thousand.  Let me find a port on the push end, and I can get to every compartment in this old cow without ever setting foot in a main passage."

The younger man contemplated a bit.  "How old are you, Grandpa?"
"I'm a hundred and ninety-eight, the way you count, Thaniel.  Almost sixty  the way I do."
"That's a lot of High Passage, isn't it?"
"Low Passage, Thaniel.  Low Passage.  I got drafted into a war zone.  Before they let me loose, they took me to seven more.  Officers and nobles-- they'll spring High Passage and Fast Drug on them, but grunts?  Straight in the freezers with the cattle."
"The cattle?  Grandpa, that doesn't make sense. Cows don't buy passage; they're freight!"
"So are marine grunts, Kid.  So's any sap wants the stars and wasn't born with a spoon up his butt."

The younger man finished his task at the access point, shut down the soldering tool, and threw three switches inside the panel.  The lighting flickered on and, satisfied, he withdrew his hands and resealed the access hatch.  The older man grunted.  "Nice job.  Let's keep moving.  Lotta ground to check if we're going to take this mothballs out of this thing."

"Well, at least the power plant's still up.  Why'd they mothball it with the life support on?"

"Kid, don't knock it!  Have you got any idea how long it takes to heat a ship this size from A-Zero?  We'd be in vac suits, freezin' our tails off for the next three weeks!  Besides," he said after a pause to check the schematics, "it happens sometimes.  Sometimes the thing gets parked for a few days, and that turns into a few weeks, and the next thing you know, it's a forgotten asset that's been in orbit around a remote moon for seventy or eighty years.  Then some other company notices you haven't used it in a while, and offers you a lowball price, and maybe you think "you know, we haven't used that old rust bucket freighter since my father's time, and boom-- You've sold your antique freighter to some young buck start up that thinks they're going to build a luxury liner for pocket change and strike it rich."

"They don't know much about engineering, do they?"

"And don't you dare tell 'em!  Fools like that are our bread and butter in an under-developed system like this one-- hey, what's that you're playin' with?"

"I don't know."  The younger man handed it over for inspection.  "It's a bit of fluff that was stuck in the seal of the access port.  It's... well, it's fluffy."

The old man examined it briefly.  A bit of white fluff.  Tiny, with an almost non-existent streak of black throughout the fibers.  "Hunh.  Weird."

"Who knows?  This thing was a freighter since before you were born, right?"

"Yeah.  Ship's records says she was one of the heavy haulers back when this system was opened up, mothballed, sold, and pressed into an ag run when the Pinault system was being colonized."

"Oh yeah?  Building materials?  Computers?  Equipment?"

"Ag run, Kid.  Agriculture.   Probably some building materials and heavy equipment early on, but mostly seeds and livestock after that."

"You mean Low Passage Travellers, don't you?"  Thaniel chuckled.

"You think it's a joke, Kiddo, but I'm serious.  That's how low passage worked.  It was originally for transporting livestock-- mammals-- from one planet to another."

"People are mammals, Old Man."

"Yeah; no kiddin'?" he replied, irritated.  "How the Hell do you think the idea came about?"

"Wait-- you're serious?"

"Yeah, I'm serious.  The first coolers, they were a way to transport mammals to distant planets--"

"Why just mammals?  You'd need fish and birds and--"

"Because everything else lays eggs, Genius.  If I want an ocean of fish, do I want to build a million-gallon aquarium, pay the fuel expense to push that kind of mass out of orbit, then show up with ten thousand fish?  Or do I want to secure a billion fish eggs in the cargo hold, packed only with the necessities to keep them viable, and deliver _that_?  If I want a forest full of game birds, same question: take on all those birds, and their feed, and clean up after them, or just take a few thousand eggs and incubators?  Need some pollinators? Grab ten thousand racks of comb from a hive or whatever it is they do for keeping larvae....  Mammals are tougher, though: no eggs, and maintaining embryos takes equipment, power, space, and effort.  But cryo tech provided the solution, see?  Freeze 'em.  They don't eat; they don't crap all over the place.  All you have to deal with is waking them up and replacing whatever they lost to dehydration and slow starvation.  In a few days, you've got the same healthy herd you left with.  Super easy, with no messy cleanup."

"So when did they decide it was safe for people?"

"Safe?  Thaniel, this thing was designed as like a broad-spectrum freezer for _mammals_.  Not a particular mammal; not even 'these kinds of mammals.'  Just 'mammals.'  That's why there's a fifteen-percent mortality rate.  You'd lose a hundred and fifty out of every thousand, roughly, but _you could transport a thousand_!  If you took them live, you'd have to lay in food and up the life support to a level you can't possibly afford just for the clean-up alone!"

"So why would they decide to use it on people?"

"I don't know that they did.  Hey, what's that?!"  There was a flash of movement at the edge of his vision, down one of the raceways for the various pipes and conduits branching and feeding other parts of the ship.

"What's what?" Thaniel jerked to attention.

"Down there, by that raceway at the floor level.  I thought I saw movement."

"ooh-- scary!  Ghooooost shiiiiip" Thaniel teased."

"Knock it off, Kid.  You know as well as I do that vermin are real.  They get into the cargo sometimes, and then get into the access corridors.. Damned hard to get rid of, and they can do a lot of damage."

Thaniel took his flashlight off his belt and played it around the area of wall near the upcoming raceway.  "I don't know.  I guess a rat could squeeze through there easy enough."  He walked ahead, kneeling and playing his flashlight into the raceway, shadowed as it was by the various main lines and cables bolted to the length of the corridor walls.  "No; wait!  I got it."  He reached forward just above the ground and plucked something out of the air.  He handed it to the other man.  "Here you go, Grandpa."

"Thanks."  He examined it.  Another bit of fluff, this one a bit larger  Soft white feathers with a faint but definite black checkering.  "Must have gotten stirred up by the recirculators.  They'll want to give this thing a top-to-bottom clean before they try to haul sixty passengers.  Crap like this can clog the life support.  It'd be some kinda bad in jump."

"So when did they make coolers for people?"

"They never really did.  They just made the mammal coolers smaller and more comfortable."

"So who came up with the idea?"

"How the Hell would I know?"

"Well I figured your old ass was there when it happened.  Was it before the jump drive?"

"It kills me that your mother thinks you're funny.  One day, I'm going to have to tell her the truth."

"have it your way."

"I don't know when it happened, Kid, but I'd bet my last coin that it was some smooth-talking Traveller."

"What?  That doesn't even make sense.  If your whole reason for living is to move through the stars, why would you risk that big a chance?"

"You ever been to Halthea?  Or Kerun?  Or Tannic IV?  Or Prime?"  

Thaniel shook his head.  "You know I haven't.  Why?"

"Absolute hellholes, Than.  Absolute nightmare places-- slavery on some worlds.  Insidious atmospheres and poisonous everything on others.  Hell, on Prime, you are pressed into labor just for landing there without enough money to meet some arbitrary standard.  You work until they decided you've paid your clearance fee, and only _then_ can you take a paying job, and let me tell you something: on a feudal planet with near-total automation, there ain't a lot of work to be had, and none of it pays.  You land on Prime and you don't meet the clearance fee that day, you're never going to make enough money for a Standard Passage, let alone High.  And Halthea...  Damn, don't get me started on Halthea...."

"What about Halthea?"  He made a 'pfft' sound as if blowing away an errant strand of hair, then decided it had to be removed by hand.  They arrived at a corridor junction, with the corridor behind them being the only one with light.

"Okay, Than; find the junction and let's do it again."  The older man said, shining he flashlight at the most likely areas of the opposite walls.

"So what about Halthea?"

"Well, when I was there, the big dome had broken-- the one over the first city.  A bunch of over-wealthy and over-connected First Families just assumed they were going to move into the outlying domes.  The folks in the new towns understood domes a bunch better than a bunch of wannabe aristocrats did, and understood that even between all the other smaller domes, they could only save about a third of the folks from First City.  They took up the welcome mats and put out some brand-new 'HELL NO!' mats, and the wealthy and over-connected weren't having that."

"You were there?  When it happened?"

"No.  I was there about a year later.  It became a military action, and armies need equipment, and equipment needs guys like me.  So when they settled in for the long occupation and evac, they thawed out my crew and me--"

"Thawed out?  Where were you coming from?"

"The damned storage freezer, Kid!  The damned storage freezer!  When you get drafted, maybe you'll get lucky; maybe they'll tell you 'you are going to serve until this war is over,' or 'until this stupid-assed goal is met.'  Sometimes they tell you 'you are to serve for twelve years.'  What they will never tell you is that if you're some background enlisted man, those years are _subjective_."

Thaniel's eyes widened.  "What?!"

"Get's them the most bang for their training buck, I reckon.  The military's got near-unlimited budget.  They got coolers like you will never see anywhere in the universe in civilian life.  Thousands of us frozen and stored for months at a time.. years, even-- Hell, my record showed one single stretch of cold storage running eleven-and-a-half years!"

Thaniel looked at his grandfather.  In spite of the teasing, there were _maybe_ twenty physical years of age between them.  It wasn't the only case he had heard of; he just accepted it as a part of living in a thriving universe.  "I thought--"

"You thought _what_?  That I was off in some war that lasted the lasted the first ten years of your life?  Not hardly.  Anyway, Thaniel was pretty awful.  I don't like to think about it, but when I got there, there were only six domes left, and the military had them packed so full I swear there was a permanent layer of condensation on them.  You couldn't buy a vac suit or an oxy tank for less than five souls, and most people were pretty much willing to pay that.  They'd have to kill four other people, but that suddenly didn't seem to be unacceptable terms.  Madness ran through the over-crowded domes, and no matter how many ships brought food, people were always starving.  There's always an 'entrepreneur' somewhere who can figure out how to put a limit on the unlimited, and make a coyne or two selling what other people are trying to give away.  Somehow, it's always the same people.  First Families and minor nobles grew absolutely fat while there were daily  dumps of emaciated bodies from the domes-- people who starved to death because they couldn't make some rich bastard just a little bit richer.

The bodies where everywhere.  The atmosphere is so thin-- not much gravity there to begin with, and there's enough sunshine to burn off what little bit of air seeped out of the crust and the local lichen-- that's all there was for native life-- lichen.  That slimy shit was _everywhere_, too.  With no atmosphere and no weather, and no native bacteria or such..  the bodies just dried up.  They'd mummify right where they were dumped...."  his voice trailed off.  Finally he spoke again.  "I... saw-- it was just outside the motorpool I was assigned to-- there were hoarders and vagrants always walking the surface, or raiding the busted domes, looking for anything that might keep them alive another day.  Vac suits so patched up the idea of stepping into even a slightly noxious atmosphere made me shiver.  I saw a woman collapse out on the rock plain, maybe half a klick from where I was standing.  She had a kid.  she had been stumbling, trying not to lean on the little kid for fear of damaging his suit.  I guess they were going to beg to get into our plastic bubble; I don't know.  They didn't make it.  She fell to her knees and swayed there for a while.  The last thing she did was uncouple her oxy tank and strap it to the kid.  Then she fell over onto the rock.   The kid knelt beside her and shook her-- I can only imagine what was going on, the fear he felt.  The guards on the gate had been getting clearance to send a raft to pick them up when another suit-- pretty big guy from the look of the suit-- darted over the crest and shoved some sort of homemade spear straight through the kid, blowing his suit, killing him.   He snatched the tank the woman had given the kid, then ripped off the kid's tank and high-tailed it out of view.  Wasn't hard to hide, I guess, on a rocky crag like Halthea.  The guards got their raft, but they never foudn the guy."

Thaniel said nothing; he just sat, uncomfortable, and listened.

"Let me tell you, if I had been stuck out there, and some ag ship had shown up, and I would give every damned coyne I had to buy a chance to stowaway in the cattle car.  That was Halthea.  There are worlds out there so much worse than that.....  Yeah; I expect it was desperate Travellers and greedy stock handlers that figured out the coolers worked for humans."  His eyes fell on a cable with insulation that had been nicked repeatedly.  "What the Hell is that?"  He asked as he bent closure, stepping up to the wall upon which the cable was mounted.  "Jesus!" he yelled in shock and pain.  

Thaniel jerked his attention away from the access panel in time to see something claw-like jerk back into another raceway with a flurry of movement and angry burbling sounds.  It had been incredibly fast.  His grandfather was swearing and standing on one leg.  The other poured blood from a gash low on the calf; the leg of his rugged work trousers and been cleanly sliced, exposing the wound.  There were three or four bits of fluff playing in the air near the raceway.  "Let me see it; let me see it!" he barked in an attempt to calm his grandfather.  The older man reached upward to a low-hanging conduit running along the ceiling to balance himself.

Thaniel sat on the deck in the narrow corridor and opened his first aid kit.  "Jesus that's deep.  Can you wiggle your foot?"

"I'll kick it straight up your ass if you don't narc it in the next two seconds!  Damn that hurts!"

Thaniel already had the anesthetic spray in his hand and was saturating the surrounding tissue.  It was the best he could do; the blood flow would wash out any attempt to apply it to the actual wound.  It would take a few minutes, but the pain killer would skin-absorb and go numb in the next couple of minutes.  "I'm on it; I'm on it!" He complained.  "Now stop dancing!  I've got to tend to this."

"Well it hurts like Hell!"

"It ought to!  It's deep, and it's kind of jagged.  Part slice and part tear."

"I don't need an analysis; do something about the damned pain!" but even as he complained, the sensations of the wound started to ease away.  Thaniel assumed as much when the older man relaxed slightly.  "Look, the blood stop is going to sting like Hell, but I don't dare not to use it.  It's a serious wound."

"Just do it!" The older man winced.  "This is killin'!"

Thaniel had finished with the blood stop and was spraying a general antiseptic in preparation to spray the bandage that would keep the wound shut and stabilized.  "There." he announced a few minutes later.  "Can you stand?"  He watched and assessed while the older man gingerly put weight back onto the foot.  Satisfied with his results, he eventually steadied himself fully on his feet and released the conduit he had been balancing with.  Thaniel leaned over near the raceway and picked something up.  He held it up in the corridor lighting and examined it.

The older man  made sure he could stand on his injured leg, then cautiously let go of the conduit above his head and reached forward to examine the thing himself. "What the--?" he pulled his hand back, examining the palm of his glove.  It was smeared with a white paste, flecked with dark spots, and bits where the paste had begun to crust. 

Thaniel took notice and joined his grandfather in studying the glove.  "Dielectric compound?"  He asked, not certain what it was.

"Don't think so.  Dielectric doesn't crust, even when it dries out."  Carefully, the older man reached up to the conduit again, rubbing his glove along the top surface until the resistance changed.  He felt something smear beneath his gloved palm.  He withdrew his hand and studied the fresh smear on his glove, very similar to the first.  Thoughts and ideas played across his face, and he seemed to slowly be reaching a conclusion.  Then he glanced down at the forgotten find in Thaniel's hand.

Thaniel, too, remembered he had found something near the raceway, and raised it for closer inspection.  A feather. A little larger than most, but a feather.  There was down fluff at the base, where the shaft of the feather would have attached to flesh.  The shaft was hollow-- a bird feather.  The down was white with slight black smudges, and as it gave way to the formed feather, the white coloration continued for a bit, and the smudges became a distinct angular checkering until it faded away as the color ran to a color like baked clay with a slight streak of iridescent green.

The older man blanched and drew his halon canister.  "Get your fire fog, Thaniel, and head back up to the lock.  eyes sharp; don't turn your back on the raceways, and watch the overhead spaces.  Get back to the boat.  We're doing a full decompress.  We're done.  Either they can get someone else, or they can call us back after the exterminators do their thing--"

"What the Hell, Grandpa?  It's a bird--"

"Boy, you listen to me, and you listen good!  It's not a bird; you understand that?  It's not just a bird.  I should'a thought about it from the git.  An ag ship that spent it's last fifty years sloggin' grain."

"And a pirate with a parrot."

The older man grabbed Thaniel by the shoulders and shook him, grabbing his full focus.  "You don't get it, Kid!  It's not just some lost pet!  The life support has been left on in this tug for generations!  Generations!  There could be thousands of the damned things by now!"  He spun Thaniel around roughly and gave him a shove.  "Now _move_!  Stay in the light, look up, and watch the raceways and open vents!  Mind where you put your feet especially."

"What's got into you, Old Man?"

"Dammit, Boy, listen to me!  This ship has _chickens_!"

Thaniel grabbed his halon canister and started to trot back the way they had come.  "Oh dear Gods...."