Chapter 7
A rutter is a listing of real space locations of jump points. Like the rutters of pre-chart seafaring days on Old Earth, the modern rutter is more a description of the route than a map. That is because the jumps turn space into something that simply cannot be adequately described in even three dimensional holo maps, much less two dimensional flat maps. To represent jump space in a map without inviting false assumptions about proximity of other routes, would take a number of dimensions greater than the number of jumps on the map.
The Use of Rutters, Captain Vernon Netteburg of the Pamplona Merchant Academy
Location: Drake Space, Big Dark,
Standard Date: 03 27 630
“What are we doing, John?” Jenny asked, looking up from her study screen at the main screen of the lounge. They were two days out from Bonks and John was watching a repeat of the bridge graphic.
“We’re looking for jump points,” John told her. “Plug in and see.”
Jenny made a face. Her implants were installed when she was seven, a few months before the station disaster, but there was very little chance to use them in the refugee camp on Bonks. So Jenny was out of practice and found the interface data kind of overwhelming. Instead of plugging in, she said, “I thought that took special ships.”
“Not really,” John said, then called up a study guide on how wings worked and how they were developed from solar sails back in the Sol System before the first jump. “Most of it’s guessing right about where the jump point is. About the only way to tell for sure is to make a guess, then go there and see if there really is a jump point. You get a feel for space after a while. With practice.” He pointed to the headset and continued as Jenny put it on.
Location: Drake Space Big Dark
Standard Date: 03 27 630
Two more jumps and four hours later, Danny spotted a good possibility for an undiscovered jump that wasn’t too far from their course. The Pan shifted course so they would pass through the jump point if it was there. Jenny, again in her headset, felt the difference in the feel of space when they reached the jump point. It was a section of space about a tenth of a light second or about thirty thousand kilometers across. The Pan was doing about three thousand kilometers a second, so they were in it for about ten seconds.
Jenny had time to feel Pan’s wings adjust to two sets of space. To feel the difference in the patterns of the space dust in the two places that were almost, but not exactly, congruent. Feel the dust in both chunks of space swept aside by the massively powerful magnetic fields.
What she couldn’t feel, couldn’t tell at all even with the augmentation, was Pan slipping from one chunk of congruent space to the other. There was no bump to it, no nothing. They were in one place with one set of stars, then in another with a slightly different set of stars.
Location: Drake Space Jorgan System
Standard Date: 04 02 630
Checkgok started checking the net as soon as they emerged from the last jump and not finding a lot of potential trade. There were some robotics, but they were mostly specialized for mining and the orbital farms were growing precisely the same things that orbital farms grew all over the Pamplona Sector.
Jorgan system had no habitable planets, but it had millions of planetoids, ranging from a few microns to a few miles across. Which made it perfect for mining everything from gold to water.
“Captain Gold, there seems little point in continuing in-system here. There is little to buy and less to sell.”
“Fine with me,” Danny said. “It’ll save us time to head back out-system now. What about processed ores, though? A bit of titanium, some gadolinium, perhaps? We might be able to pick them up in the out-system.”
Checkgok looked at Danny for a moment and said it would look into it.
Location: Drake Space, Jorgan Oort Cloud
Standard Date: 04 04 630
Checkgok got a jump route to a planetoid about five hundred kilometers across. It was near the inner edge of the Jorgan systems oort cloud, about three light months out from the primary. The jump route was five well-aligned short jumps, so there wasn’t much maneuvering involved and it only took a couple of days to make the trip.
The planetoid was owned by a family of deep space rock miners who got lucky. A good ten percent of the planetoid was titanium and it had decent deposits of scandium, yttrium, promethium and half a dozen more. The family consisted of three wives and four husbands with eight children and, in a sense, they lived in luxury. They had plenty of room and plants to produce breathable air. They had computers and games and equipment. Food and drink from the same gardens that gave them air. And atomic batteries, using the promethium to power lights and equipment. But they got a visit from a system freighter about once a year and were well behind on the news, because even the laser commo link took three months each way.
They didn’t have a jump capable ship, so no one could leave, save when the annual freight hauler showed up, or the rare unscheduled stopover by a ship like the Pan.
Pan, just out of Bonks, was well-stocked with things like Bonks chicken thighs and five thousand gallons of Bonks homemade strawberry ice cream with real strawberries. Most of which ended up staying on the planetoid.
While Checkgok was being taken to the cleaners by Agness Sunderland, Danny and Pan played Rutter Tag with Elijah Sunderland.
“Have you got anything near locus—” Elijah used his implants to send a location to the others.
The rules of Rutter Tag were simple, though they depended at least some on trust. Each person at his turn was allowed to ask about any real space coordinate he chose, and the other players were required to answer honestly. There was no way of enforcing the honest answers, but there wasn’t much point in asking about random points in space. You wanted jump points near one you knew about, so each question gave the other player information. And tradition among spacers was that you didn’t lie when playing Rutter Tag.
“Just the one that led us here,” Pan said. “And I assume you know that one.”
“So, for our question, I’ll ask the same,” Danny added. “You know any others?”
“Yep. A cul de sac chain with three jumps.” He gave the jump points and their exits. Pan entered them in her rutter. Then Elijah asked another question. There was very little overlap between Elijah Sunderland’s rutter and Pan and Danny’s. Elijah’s was mostly local. He had a couple of side routes to nearby systems, and Danny gave him the cul de sac jump that they found on the way here. That seemed to please him.
Mostly it was a pleasant way to spend an evening. Elijah wasn’t a spacer. He’d been a miner all his life and never been out of the Jorgan system, but collecting rutters was his hobby. So it was natural that most of what he had picked up was from local or semilocal transports.
Aside from the three jump cul de sac they got from Elijah, they also got the known orbits of a great deal of space junk in the vicinity.
∞ ∞ ∞
Trading done and everyone back on board, Danny went to the bridge and lay down in his acceleration couch. “Pandora, plot the course back out.”
“There may be an unmarked jump about three light minutes to the solar north, spinward,” Pan said, sending him its coordinates, and showing the markers on the main screen.
Danny looked over the data she sent. “You figured this out from the data we got from Elijah, didn’t you?” He added his own markers to the main screen.
“In part, Captain, but mostly from the data we collected coming in.” She fed him another data set.
Danny nodded. “Two parts of the key. It’s probably there, all right. Any guess where it will take us?”
“I am unsure, Captain.”
“What about it, Checkgok? Shall we see if there is at least a useful jump?”
Checkgok hissed its equivalent of a sigh and said, “Very well, Captain, if we must,” but its heart wasn’t in the complaint. After Danny drank a Banger the day before, the Parthian was pretty mellow.
Location: Free space Gold Route, Big Dark,
Standard Date: 04 04 630
“Well that’s interesting,” Danny said, looking at the bridge screen. “What’s the nearest known point, Pan? And put this up in the galley for Checkgok, John, and Jenny.”
“Searching, Captain.” Then a few moments later she threw a schematic of a jump route up on both screens. It was a series of connected lines in various colors. Each line represented a vector in real space from the exit of one jump to the entrance of the next. The main route was in Drake blue, then in Cordoba purple, but faded. The alternates were in green, the cul de sacs in red. As they watched, a new point was added in blinking white. From that point, a line in gold extended to one end of a line on a cul de sac route that connected to the main route on the Cordoba side.
Danny looked at the screen and grinned. “Isn’t that the Old Granny?”
“Yes, Captain,” said Pan.
“What are we looking at?” John asked from the galley.
“It seems the jump Pan found out of Jorgan got us close to an old cul de sac that was in Pan’s rutters. The cul de sac was off a gray route from Drake space to Cordoba space. It’s called the Old Granny. It hits Cordoba space on the route between Hudson and Morland.”
“You said a gray route. The Cordobas and the Drakes don’t know about it?”
“Actually, they do,” Danny said, smiling. “Someone blabbed to the Cordobas about thirty years ago. The Cordobas declared it off limits and when they have them free, they station a couple of customs cutters at F397 and seize any ship that comes through. F397 is on the Cordoba side of the longest jump in the Old Granny route, three and a half light years. But the cul de sac we’re heading for is three jumps on the Cordoba side of F397. Unless they have a cutter on its way to F397, they won’t see us. And even if they do have a cutter there, they probably won’t see us. The cul de sac jump into the main route is two light minutes from the Morland jump and eighty light seconds from the F397 jump.”
In a way finding a jump point was like buying a lottery ticket. The odds were way against drawing a winning number or a useful route. But there was a difference. The more jump routes you already knew in an area of space, the better your chances of catching a winner. The Jorgan jump would have been a useless cul de sac if Pan hadn’t already known about the cul de sac off the gray route.
∞ ∞ ∞
Some hours later, Pan started vectoring for the cul de sac off the Old Granny.
“We’ll head for Morland where we can get spices and parts to bring Pan up to snuff,” Danny said.
“What about Hudson?” John asked. “Their lambfish is a real delicacy and they’re a major wheat exporter.”
“Not this trip. Checkgok wants to get the spices at Morland because one of them is supposed to be like the habaneros. It thinks they might be a very popular spice on Parthia. Besides, we’re short of funds. We have the room for the lambfish but not the money to buy it, not without selling goods we can get better prices on elsewhere.”