Free Running With Argentine by William Lee Gordon Page B

spot of tea really
would be blinding.”
     
    Most everyone around the table looked confused but Sami
smiled and said, “No problem, I’ll get it.”
     
     
    ΔΔΔ
     
     
    “I found myself
stranded on a planet my star chart said was Eridi III. The locals called it
Haven.
     
    “Now I’m an industrious sort, mind you. So I didn’t let any
grass grow before I started looking for employment.”
     
    “Employment as what?” interjected the chief.
     
    “As a pilot, of course,” he responded. “That’s what I do;
that’s what I am. You won’t find a better pilot on this end of the spiral arm.
     
    “Anyway, I was having trouble finding anyone to seek
employment with. It turns out that Haven was a very insular society. They don’t
have a tremendous amount of contact with other worlds and then it always comes
through the theocracy. Religion controls everything there.”
     
    Argentine understood the type of society Barry was
describing.
     
    As an officer in the Chezden fleet he had been required to
study the spacefaring capabilities, militarization, and technical abilities of
other civilizations they might clash with.
     
    Theocracies were the worst.
     
    The reputations of most societies in the Galactic spiral arm
were seldom representative of their populations as a whole. That is because the
only interaction outside worlds would usually have with any given civilization
would be through its space presence.
     
    For example, the worlds of the Barbary Alliance were known
as being crude, vulgar, and merciless. 99% of the population on those few
planets were no such thing, but since most of their space presence was made up
of opportunists and pirates, such was their reputation.
     
    Conversely many planets, like Shannon’s Home and Serenity,
formed very professional space fleets that were unfailingly polite and fair in
their dealings with the outside world. Argentine knew from personal experience
that wasn’t representative of their cultures. It still made him mad to think
about how he had been swindled there, but that was a story for another day.
     
    The spiral arm was teaming with civilizations. Some were
militaristic while others were almost totally based upon a trading economy. Of
them all, however, the theocracies were the worst.
     
    In the true theocracies the priests of the one religion
ruled everything. So when you met the High Priest Captain of a trading vessel
and endured his disdain for all infidels you can safely bet it was a true
representation of his society.
     
    What kept everything from boiling over was that as common as
populated planets were, no one culture dominated the space lanes.
     
    Most of the space holovids children grow up watching give a
very inaccurate depiction of stellar empires.
     
    First of all, most ‘empires’ are made up of one or two
planets located within the same star system. There were exceptions and the
People’s Republic of Chezden had been one of them. But compared to the largest
empires that claimed over 1,500 stars they were still puny. And of course,
nobody knew if there might not be larger empires; the spiral arm was made up of
billions of stars.
     
    Even a massive fleet like the one that had been built by the
People’s Republic, however, was still outnumbered 1000 to 1 when compared to
all the combined starships of the other empires, republics, trade associations,
and independent planets of the spiral arm.
     
    The other reality that kept things confusing was that there
are no real borders in space.
     
    The stars claimed by the People’s Republic were spread out
and diffused among 100 other political sovereignties. Many of them were single
system empires, but not all.
     
    This made for an incredibly intricate political dynamic.
     
    Add to this the fact that spaceflight was expensive.
     
    Most ships were owned by planetary governments. Often, but
not always, that meant military. Usually it simply meant that the line between
military and trading vessels