Archive-name: Fantasy/cather1.txt
Archive-author: Equus
Archive-title: Life and Adventures of Catherine the Great - Part 1 


"Talking Mining Colony Holovid Blues"

Angry red and orange of Ching Tai Optics image enhancer... "..Jojo left 
his home in Tuscon Arizona / For some California grass.."... Grey bullet 
wrapped around my legs, silver where the air-film clings...  "Ichi, ni, 
san, chi..."  The moon shining in cold blue pseudocolour of the SysCyber 
and she sings to it and it isn't even hers... "..I've got the brains / 
you've got the looks / let's make lots of money.."...  "Lover" sings the 
bullet... "..Now look at me like a Stormtrooper in Drag / I bet you feel 
exactly like I do.."...
   "Showtime!!"
   I groaned as a loud drum roll echoed through the air followed by a 
shrill major-chord fanfare of synthesizer horns and strings backed by a 
slippery fretless bass glide.  I rolled off the inflatible into the warm 
water of the Silvermoon's tank and with a couple of strokes I reached 
the edge and climbed out.  A nasal voice began to sing a lyric over the 
relentless urgency of the music;  as ever, I hadn't a clue what the 
words were, my half-sleep state making my incomprehension that much more 
acute.  Picking up a white bathrobe that lay at the poolside I put it
on, savouring it's seductive touch on my wet skin as I tied the cord 
around my waist.
   "Turn it down for God's sake, I moaned.  The volume diminished a 
trifle.  "How can I concentrate to kick the software into action with 
that unholy row." 
   "This is your culture Greenacre!" the voice of the captain came from 
above and beyond the pool wall, probably from the engineer's console; 
"late twentieth century, Gary Numan even!  Have you no soul you 
philistine!"
   I groaned in reply "Yes I know, 'We Take Mystery To Bed' 1982, 
Beggars Banquet Records.  I like it but I prefer to be awake to like 
it."  I closed my eyes and concentrated:

++ SysCom Cyber Corporation ++
++ Cyber 8 Cerebral Enhancer ++
++ Concurrent N.O.S  v5.3 ++
++    ++ Initialising..
++
++ System OK.
++ Biomonitor - Blood sugar  -20%   nominal
++              Blood press  70/115 nominal
++              Blood O2/CO2        nominal
++ OK

   The green characters flitted across my vision, appearing as though 
they were half a metre before my eyes;  they weren't, of course, they 
were being fed directly to my optic nerve from the biochip implant in my 
cerebral cortex, a SysCom 8, one of the third generation models that I'd 
had fitted at the same time as the vocal chord range extension and the 
Ching Tai Optics system fitted to my left eye.  Hell, wasn't that an 
operation to remember!  I thought of the word "chronograph" and the green
characters vanished to be replaced by a row of figures in the peripheral 
region of my vision which informed me that the time was 0822(shipboard) 
and the date was the fourteenth of July 2332.
   I opened my eyes and willed he green figures away and duly away they 
went.  "Well, where's the show this time?" I asked as I climbed the 
spiral stairs to the middle level of the bridge.  Sliandra looked up 
from the main drive console as I reached the top of the staircase, her 
green cat eyes shining from her pointed leopard face, framed by the 
golden yellow of her flowing mane.  I would never quite get used to 
seeing her.  She was a Leopard caste Amthren, a race decended from 
feline analogues on a world in the Rishthrane Sector, one of the races 
that had found we Terrans rather than the other way around.  According
to the history books, we'd called them "Were-Cats" at first;  indeed
they looked like some sort of a bipedal cross between a tall human and 
one of the Terran great cats, but that was before we'd learnt each 
other's language and before we'd learnt of the business acumen of the 
leopard-caste.  I'd first met her on Track's World towards the end of
the Dralasite Conflict in the summer of '29.  With my usual lack of 
discretion I'd taken a job as a mercenary pilot, flying an antique
mark 3 Stinger fighter for what turned out to be the losing side.  My 
stolen single-seater just about made it to Track's where I had run 
across Sliandra smuggling arms to the winning side and in need of a good 
pilot. 
   Sliandra stood up and put her spotted furry arm across my
shoulder.  "Party time is out in the Urgenic Deeps, a mining colony," 
she said in her lightly accented english.
   "Terrific, three weeks sub-light from any half-way safe jump zone and 
then we have to find a way through the mag-storms," I grumbled.
   There was a whistle from the pool below, and a squark, followed by a 
strange cross between the two.  It was a curse in Delphine which roughly 
translated into "Your mother fucks sharks,"  which is a pretty heavy 
expletive in anyone's language, in Delphine it was very heavy indeed.  
Sliandra and I looked over the rail to the pool below;  Silvermoon was 
swimming in lazy circles.  She whistled again:
   "The last time I was there we nearly got wiped by a freak storm, I 
don't want to go back!  Come back to bed Peter!"  the last was added in 
a falling cadence, a heartfelt entreaty.  Sliandra shot me a look of 
stifled humour and I grinned back.
   "I'd love to Silver, but The Chief has a job for us," I warbled back 
in Delphine, invoking the SysCom to pull my modified vocal chords to 
make the necessary sounds.  Silvermoon turned a slow somersault in the 
pool before protesting about the earliness of the hour and that she 
wanted something to eat before calculating the jump vectors.
   I smiled as she swam for the exit tunnel.  She had been serious in 
her offer of a return to her bed.  We had been lovers for almost as long 
as I had served under Sliandra's command.  I remember reading that the
first trans-species bonding contract had been ratified back in 2098,
seven years after the communications breakthrough between our two races
that followed the Honshu Incident.  Dolphins were a common sight around
the spacelanes, their natural psi abilities making the mind warping
task of translight navigation relatively trivial. Slightly less common
was pair-bonding between our two species, but we shared an unstoppable
curiosity and so it was not unknown for certain individuals to,
shall we say, experiment.
   "You haven't asked who we're flying for yet," said Sliandra.
   "I almost hate to," I replied, "but you're going to tell me anyway, 
right?" "Fat Charlie," she said with a broad smile which exposed her 
wicked looking teeth.
   "Oh Hell's Donkeys!  Not The Archangel."
   "The very same.  And there's more;  we're shipping mucky books."
   "Pardon?"
   "Erotica, Pornography, Holovids and Simstim's of reproductive 
behaviour."
   "You're kidding!"
   "No, it's on the beam!  Apparently out on the mining colonies there 
are nowhere near enough Stepfords or real females to go round and a 
chronic shortage of reading literature;  first out there with some good 
clean fun is going to make a killing!"
   "Let me guess:  chronic imbalance between the sexes out there"
   "Eight hundred to one at the last count; one hour with a Stepford 
sets you back five hundred Galcreds."
   "Szjat!"
   "So you see, plenty big Galcreds for Mr Archangel if he gets there
first, and plenty big rakeoff for pretty leopard, pretty dolphin and 
not-so-pretty human into the bargain."
   I shook my head, smiling at Sliandra's favourite way of referring to 
her crew.  "Why aren't we shipping Stepfords instead."
   "Two reasons I can think of," said Sliandra, licking her left forepaw 
and starting to wash behind her ears:  "First up, a good quality 
cybernetic streetwalker is going to command a purchase price of 10k 
Creds at least, and all Stepfords are custom built remember so the lead-
time is horrendous.  Second, they have no room for them up there and so 
our kind sponsor is getting us to haul some top quality porn for him.  
Ahh, that's better."  She added the latter as she scratched under her 
chin with her forepaw.
   "Knowing Fat Charlie the Archangel, it won't be top quality;  nothing 
of his ever is."  I gave a rueful grin, the fast-cred and shady deals of 
our irregular client were well known.
   "We shall see;  we load Charlie's crates and some top-flight laser 
mining kit which he's also selling to MagCorp at nine hundred hours, 
dock Lima Nine, out by ten thirty and if pretty dolphin gets her fishy 
act together we go translight by midday.  So take your places gentlemen 
please and let's get this show on the road!"
   She indicated the pilot's chair, raised on a dais on the middle deck 
behind the helm.  As I took my place and began to invoke the docking 
release procedures the old Paul Simon song "Crazy Love" came over the 
JBL's installed in the roof of the flight deck - the song which had 
caused Charlie DaPalma to be known as "Fat Charlie the Archangel" to the 
crew of the SpaceFreighter CSF367/66 Catherine The Great ever after.
   It had soon become apparent that translight by midday was off the 
cards when Sliandra had appeared in the docking bay at nine fifteen 
carrying her black attache case.  I was supervising the loading of Fat 
Charlie's dubious crates and the rest of the cargo when she wandered 
across to me.
   "I'm just off stationside;  I have a little business to attend to."
   "There aren't, perchance, any manifest disks in there are there?"
I said with a smile.  She rattled the case.  From within came the chink 
of bright steel chains and who knows what else.
   "Are there ever?" she said back and, with a jaunty stride, she walked 
down the loading ramp towards the travel tubes.  That's my captain,
never let business get in the way of pleasure.
   True enough it was fifteen hundred hours before I nosed the bulk of 
our Spacewhale from the cargo bays of Rigel 2's transit station and out 
on impulse power for the jump zone.  Silvermoon and I were both wired up 
to Catherine's computers and we idled the time away by playing a game of 
speed-chess between course alterations and vector recalculations.  I had 
just gained the upper hand in the fifth game when we were interrupted by 
Rigel control.
   "Sliandra." whistled Silvermoon, "warm up the charms;  Rigel have 
given us the next path out."
   "Got it.  Charm drives leaving pre-ignition state for hot standby." 
came the Captain's reply, the ship shuddering briefly as the magnetic 
plasma bottles fired into life in a flip of electronic switch-states, 
holding within their annular swirls the myriad swarms of the monsters of 
quantum physics.
   Flipping my computer into synch with that of the drive' I was treated
to a brief subliminal flash of the triple-starred and skeletonned "Psi 
Hazard Warning" logo and the message that prolonged use of inertial 
simulators can lead to distortions of mental acuity, followed by a shorm
message from the Hawkins Corporation telling me to have a nice day.
Then came the solid green characters:

   ++ CHARM DRIVE STATUS -  HOT STANDBY  ++
   ++                    -  HELM CONTROL ++

My vision flipped to an external view of the the ship, a view supplied 
by her computers directly to my visual cortex.  The gravity lines of 
local space superimposed themselves in white upon the blackness of 
space, a distant ship a red pyramid with the words "CPV890/75 Aleister 
Crowley" floating beside it,  Rigel 2 a purple distant sphere, red lines 
marking incoming and outgoing flight vectors.  A green dot flashed 
before me indicating that drives were now under my mental command and I 
started to invoke the ignition sequences for the neutrino pulse that 
would flip Catherine The Great across two hundred parsecs of space on a 
wave of tachyons.     

   ++  INCOMING TRANSMISSION - JUMP WILL BE SUCCESSFUL  ++

Silvermoon received the same message, whistled her readiness and,
with a flicker of concentration I put the charm drives online.
   Twenty seconds before we left Rigel we arrived at Urgenic Deeps Jump 
Zone T4.  The Charm Drives entered their wind-down sequences and
Sliandra transmitted the message we received before we began our journey 
across the vastness of space.  Tachyon travel was incredibly safe;  you 
knew if your jump was successful before you made it;  if you didn't 
receive a clear jump message it meant that you made the jump wrongly, 
transmitted a "No Jump" message and flatlined the charm ignition 
sequence and so you never made the jump in the first place and, 
therefore, never transmitted a "No Jump" in the first place.  Yeah, I 
don't understand it either and I've flown charm drive ships for fifteen
years.  The trick to FTL travel was getting to the right place first 
time as "Clear to jump" signals had to be transmitted as soon as you 
came off the wave.  Silvermoon soon let us know that we had got
where we wanted to be by leaping from her pool with a squeal.
   "Right on the button!  Am I beautiful or am I beautiful!"
   I put Catherine The Great into a 50 kiloclick elliptical intercept of 
the last calculated position of the mining colony we sought, angling the 
ship to spiral up and out from the gravitational whirlpool we had 
created by our arrival, flying along the distorted white lines of the 
tortured gravity field, the turns and climbs and impulse-drive 
acceleration seeming to push me back into my seat as the inertia 
simulator fed my brain with the fantasy that I was experiencing G-
Stress.  I admit to being one of the old-school of pilots;  I found 
flying a lot easier on hallucinations.
   "Yes my darling,"  I transmitted to my lover over the intercom, "But 
let's get out of this gravity well before we celebrate."
   Five minutes later, just as I DSed the Upcom, Sliandra brought the 
McKinley Outboards up to power and we accelerated to a smooth one tenth 
the speed of light, Silvermoon retracting the shields from the front of 
the ship and guiding us on visual towards the flickering blue star where 
lay MagCorp's selenium operation and twelve thousand lonely ore-jockeys.
   The lights had dimmed for the night-cycle on Catherine The Great's 
flight deck as I slipped into Silvermoon's pool, the water that 
enveloped me seeming to flow forever into the deep blue-blackness of the 
endless night of space.  The ship flew onward to our destination on 
autopilot, the sleeping SysCom set to interrupt me should the 
Spacewhale's systems detect anything untoward.  I swam to the spaceward 
rim of the pool and looked out to the myriad stars and galaxies.  
Something brushed across my dangling legs and moments later a grey shape 
broke the surface of the water beside me.  Reaching over I caressed the
pointed snout that angled itself towards me, her skin smooth and soft to 
the touch.  She opened her mouth, making a clicking sound in her throat.  
Delphine sweet nothings, simple sounds that bonded us together as 
tightly as any contract.  She pushed past me, my hand slipping across 
her back and to the side of her dorsal fin.  She dived, spiralling 
around my legs, her teeth nibbling playfully at my legs as I seized hold 
of her tail, allowing myself to be pulled underwater, using my purchase 
to pull myself up her back to seize hold of her dorsal as we glided 
through the dark water, slowly surfacing to breathe together in a shared 
gasp.  I loosed my hold of her and she turned around with a languid flip 
of her powerful tail to slip like a shadow towards me.
   "Love?" she asked, the sound a tiny, delicate thing in the Delphine 
language.
   "Love," I replied as she nosed into me and I took her head in my 
hands and let her push me backwards so that her lithe, warm body covered 
mine, the word no less tiny and sweet in my tongue.  As I went under I 
wrapped my legs around the back of her strong tail and we pressed our 
bodies close to each other.  Deep below her skin I could feel her heart 
beating slow and mighty within her graceful frame.  I felt a wave of 
comfort breaking over me, my eyes closed and my breath held but my mind 
afire with love and wonder at the flowing beauty that I embraced in our 
subaquatic ballet.
   Like quicksilver we flowed through the dark waters of the pool;  our 
light was the glow of the stars and our bed was of warm, still water.  
We surfaced together, again breathing a single gasp, and again we dived 
into the spectral roaring silence of the pool, an underwater silence of 
low sounds and heartbeats, spiralling by degrees down into the depths as 
though we could have swum together among the shoals of stars, the gas-
cloud shallows and the deep emptiness of space that surrounded us.  My 
lover lay on her back when we next surfaced, deliberate movements of her 
tail keeping us afloat in her microcosmic ocean. 
   "Lover..." she trilled, the sound splashing through the surface of 
the water. 
   "My Beauty," I whispered in return.
   No more words were necessary in her language or mine;  indeed, in 
those times before our peoples had spoken, each to each, no words could 
have expressed the unity of our hearts and souls.  And no words could do 
so now.  With a twist of her sinuous frame she brought us to the
brink of intimacy and, for our shared love and with endless gratitude, I 
slipped inside her.  We both gave a cry as I gained possession of her 
and she of me, sliding deep into the liquid cave of her passion.  Her 
sleek grey body pushed hard against me and I held her as tightly as I 
could to my chest, my head pressed against the underside of her beak, my 
legs entwining around her tail, weaving a tapestry of human and dolphin 
threads.  I lay deep within her, drinking the sensation of her hot, damp 
cleft wrapped tight around me.  We dived again, turning a somersault in 
the silent waters.  I clung as firmly as I could, keeping hard and fast 
within her, her puissant muscles that propelled us causing her molten 
warmth to tighten and relax endearingly around me.  We both gave a cry 
of ecstasy as we broke the surface, gulping air as again we dove below 
the surface, her grey-blue delphine shape sparkling with the starlight 
that seemed to shine in constellations from her night black eye.
   Countless were our turns that night, countless the spirals and 
volutions of our lovemaking.  For an age our essences mingled in 
glorious synergy in the limpid salt waters of the pool, our skins wet 
and shining, clinging hard and furious to each other, my hands roaming 
over her glistening body as we turned and rolled before I spilled my 
soul deep within her body.  The endless, immortal night spun on towards 
eternity as we drifted apart for a moment, the pearls of our lust 
scattering throughout the waters.  
   Then together we lay.
   We wept as we lay together on the hydrostatic bed, my head supported 
above the water, the bed on which we lay submerged some twenty 
centimetres below the surface of the pool, her head across my chest 
shiny silver and weighty.  For our love and for each other we wept:  
weeping tears of thankful, poignant joy for our sharing of the gift of 
life, weeping gentle tears of devotion to the salt water for the gift of 
each other.  There are those that will tell you that a dolphin cannot 
weep.  But they are wrong.  As we lay still and I held her, tracing the 
line of her permanent smile until she opened her beak and she nibbled my 
hand with a gentle, caressing pressure, we wept for the pleasure and the 
beauty of our company and our love.
   And then together we slept.
   The rest of the journey to the mining colony was, from a pilot's 
point of view, uneventful.  Two days into the journey Sliandra with the 
assistance of Catherine's computers finally cracked the entry codes for 
fat Charlie's cargo pods.  Inside the first one we opened was a note 
from the Archangel himself which congratulated us on breaking the codes;  
he may have been a shady customer but he had a sense of humour.  
Contrary to expectations his wares were of quite a high quality but, as 
is ever the case, the product was of mixed artistic merit.  We watched a 
few of the holovids whilst sunning ourselves around grecian splendour of 
the flight deck pool, awarding them points as we watched the bump and 
grind and dubious dialogue.  Sliandra performed as Master of Ceremonies 
for our entertainment.
   "Ladies and gentlemen," she began, "for your further viewing pleasure 
this evening, Archangel Productions are proud to present.." there was a 
pause as she checked the label on the HV disc:  "Satraganarius Sex 
Party."
   Silvermoon and I fell about laughing.  Silvermoon, squeaking her 
chortles, backflipped across the pool, drenching Sliandra in the 
process.   
   "Careful, you'll damage the merchandise!" roared Sliandra as she 
started the recording.
   We counted thirty two seconds between the two actors meeting to the 
moment he climbed on top of her.  The dialogue consisted of stilted, 
badly rehearsed phrases and groans, the actors kindly informing us when 
they were coming, Silvermoon informing us that she had never fully 
understood the phrase "I'm coming" as it always sounded like the speaker 
was trying to catch up with their partner.  I reached over the edge of 
the pool, laughing as she rubbed against my arm that dangled in the 
water.  The Delphine phrase for the moment of bliss that the actors so 
cruelly were massacaring in three dimensions above our heads 
approximately translated into human speech as the word "together".  
Sliandra consulted the manifest printout that we had found alongside Fat 
Charlie's note.  "Hey you two, there's one here called 'Dolphin Lust'"
   "Seen it!" we chorused from across the pool.
   "Any good?"
   "Sharkbait!" whistled Silvermoon.  "We saw it at the pleasure complex 
on Kapella last year, based on a scene from a late twentieth century 
celluloid format movie."
   "Easy Travel to Other Planets?" asked Sliandra.
   "Yes, sort of a graphic rendition of the love scene;  totally ruined 
the atmosphere of the original."  I replied.
   "Caused a hell of a fuss when it came out in nineteen ninety seven 
you know. Music was by a band called Riding The Nightmare,  got the 
soundtrack about somewhere," volunteered Sliandra, yet again astonishing
us with her knowledge of late twentieth century Terran trivia.
   "Oh, here's a good one," said Sliandra, consulting the manifest 
further, "It's called 'Kiss My Whip'"
   Again, the flight deck was rocked by laughter.
   The holovid flickered to show the image of tall terran woman, dressed 
in nothing but a maid's white serving apron and carrying a tray of 
drinks, her ankles were manacled together.
   "Rrawor, pretty," murmured Sliandra.
   The music was dreadful, a sort of pastiche of the Western Spiral Arm 
pop music known as "Speed House" from the last five years;  loud, brash 
and in two-four time.  Eventually Sliandra killed the music track while
leaving the dialogue track online and superimposed the music of a 
gentler era over the images;  quite nasty ones too but the use of camera 
angles and the somewhat unconvincing screams of the victim making it 
obvious to all but the most committed and uncritical sadomasochism fan 
that this was not for real.  By the time I nosed Catherine into the 
shuttle bays we had awarded the prize for worst HV to a truly horrendous 
piece of work which rejoiced in the title of "Mud Wrestlers of Lesbos."  
Mind you, we had taken copies of a few of the choicer HV's.  "Just in 
case we get bored on those long crossings," Sliandra claimed.
   It didn't take Sliandra long to get bored.  We shipped out of docking 
bays of colony Manta Seven a mere four hours after docking.  Their 
facilities were primitive to say the least and I was not sorry to be 
heading back to civilisation.  We were hauling a cargo of ultra-refined 
alpha grade selenium.  It had cost us the entire proceedings of the 
inward run to buy the purified metal but Sliandra assured us we could 
double our profits with the right buyer.  We also carried a new piece of 
software in Catherine's databanks;  Sliandra had hacked into the 
colony's computer and had appropriated a copy of a shiny new Unisis CAD 
program.  Whereas Silvermoon and I spent the return journey to the jump 
zone watching the stars and playing chess, Sliandra occupied herself 
with a copy of a HV whose subject matter paralleled her own special 
interests and attempted to improve on the device depicted therein, the 
CAD package producing a three dimensional holographic projections of 
curious devices formed from steel wire, plastalloy girders and chrome 
plated chain.  As to myself, well I do confess that I snuck a look at 
the dolphin video again...
   By the time we reached the jump zone we had a buyer for our metal on 
Kapella and a tidy profit from the whole operation.  Sliandra had also 
decided that she wanted a change of decor on the flight deck from 
Classical Greek to Gothic which meant a dry dock break of at last three 
weeks on the planet famous for its pleasure domes.  This was a cause for 
celebration for all of us but I shuddered at the thought of what sort of 
ship I would be returning to.
   It was a thirteen hour flight to the spaceport.  Kapellan sector
regulations insisted on a thousand-click separation between ships and a 
vector speed of no more than 0.03c for incoming vessels.  We let the 
computers fly us in during the night-cycle and, at twenty one hundred 
hours I left Sliandra on the bridge haggling over the Dirac for a refit 
at a reasonable price.
   During Catherine's last refit (from 1920's Terran Art Deco to Terran 
Classical Greek) Sivermoon and I had combined our two cabins into one so 
that our cabin looked like the front of a temple to Poseidon with a 
large pool stretching out before it.  The walls were curved and HV 
systems built into them were capable of projecting the illusion that the 
pool was merely an inlet of the crystal blue Agaean sea.  The projectors 
were running as I walked in, giving the appearance that I had entered 
the room from an antechamber of the pillared hall of the temple of the 
Sea God.  A white-sailed ship cruised far out to sea as the sun set as 
if behind the temple, the waters of the wine-dark sea reflecting back 
the warm golden rays.  Silvermoon floated on the surface of the pool, 
her eyes half closed, her flukes sill and relaxed.  Quickly throwing off 
my clothes I slipped into the pool beside her, floating on by back in 
the warm salty water. 
   "You're pining again."  I said softly.
   "Yes"  she replied in English; "I miss the pull of the tides, the 
feel of the old sun upon my back, the... the..."  She trilled a delphine 
word which had no translation in human languages.  The word expressed 
the peculiar sensation a wave breaking had upon the skin of a dolphin.
   "I know,"  I replied;  I miss Earth too:  the crisp air across the 
ice fields, the pure white of the floes;  yes, My Beauty, I miss all 
that too."  We were quiet for a moment, both remembering our homeworld, 
she the wild and stormy South Atlantic and the delphine city of New 
Atlantis, I the merciless beauty of my childhood home in the Byrd 
glacial basin in Antartica.
   When we made love that night it was with the slow languid tenderness 
that is born of shared memories.  The sea had turned black and the 
constellations of Earth glittered overhead.  The soft, repetitious 
splash of waves upon the shore found an echo in our movements until, at 
last, we let them lull us into sleep.

End of Part 1