COMPANY OF ADVENTURERS

“Mr. Dieudonne’s got a contract for us, captain.”

Rand Hudsons was leaning on the pasture fence, looking at the young steers browsing in his father in law’s green meadow. Two smaller cows nuzzled their calves and an elderly horse leaned against a tree covered in pink blossoms, scratching. It was early enough in the day that Clawthorn, the largest of Pentangle’s three moons, had not yet set.

“Peaceful, ain’t it, Dita? Like it’s been here forever.”

Dita Aglukak waited silently.

“What kinda contract?”

“There’s a biological station bout thirty klicks up the road. Mamie’s sister-in-law’s sister works there. They got a cargo to take to Greenleaf.”

“What kind of biological?”

“I didn”t ask.”

Rand looked back at the farmhouse and at their ship, Bluebell, parked in a field that had been plowed but not yet planted. The transport was small, barely able to carry enough air and fuel for a few weeks without stopping, but loomed over the stone and bamboo house. He sighed. Visiting the Dieudonne farm had been a pleasant bonus after dropping cargo at Pentangle’s smallest spaceport. But the job barely covered expenses. Time to get back to work. The captain and the pilot took the ship’s shuttle to the biological centre before another interplanetary transport could grab the job.

Dr. Linda Mobuto was tall and slender, with a warm golden skin and black curls. She shrugged the hood of her clean suit off as she entered the reception area of Purple Emperor Biologicals. “Have you been offered tea?” she asked.

“Yes, thank you,” replied Dita.” The receptionist asked. I believe it will arrive momentarily.”

“Let’s go into my office then. Cherie, send in the tea when it arrives.”

She buzzed them into the inner offices through a different door. “We’re a small enterprise. Very hands on with a highly specialized workforce.”

“What do you do?” asked Rand.

“Bugs. We breed bugs. Insects, spiders, moths and butterflies, mosquitoes.”

“Skeeters?” asked Dita, twitching as if she heard the high buzz of the little biters.

“We breed sterile males, so when yet another outbreak of malaria comes along, we are ready to break the life cycle.”

Rand nodded. malaria, fought to a standstill thousands of times over the centuries, continued to

Monarchs/1

turn up. Unlike diseases with a short period between infection and death, it simmered quietly in unvaccinated populations, waiting to mutate and spread.

“Are mosquitoes the cargo?” he asked.

“Something much prettier. You’d be carrying Monarch butterflies to Greenleaf. And they would be carried as pupae, so there should be no difficulty.”

“Sounds almost too easy.”

“Well, yes. And not too bulky either. We expect that you will be able to deliver with a 97% success rate. That is that 97% of the pupae will be viable on landing. That’s our success rate here at the butterfly farm. We expect nothing less. ”

“What might cause the success rate to be lower?”

“Not keeping the pupae in the proper conditions of warmth and humidity. But those are basically well within the comfort zone for human beings too. And if the butterflies emerge too soon, they could damage themselves trying to fly in a contained space, or starve if there is no food available. Timing is everything.”

“How long do they stay as pupae?”

“About nine to fourteen days. That’s not too predictable, and we would be loading third day pupae - so you’d want to deliver within a week, to be safe.”

The receptionist knocked and brought in a tray with tea and cups.

“This is from the tea plantations on Greenleaf . The Monarchs spend their winters in those mountains.”

“Perhaps we can take on a cargo of tea there when we’ve dropped off the butterflies,” Dita suggested to Rand.

“You have family here, I understand?” Dr. Mobutu asked.

“We travel with our families.” explained Rand.“My wife Mamie is a Dieudonne from here on Pentangle. We got three kids on board. My two and Dita has a daughter.”

“Perhaps the children would like a tour of our facility?”

The Dieudonnes had a laissez-faire attitude to the children. On the whole, if they showed up at meals and didn’t cause too much destruction, they were not watched too closely. Derry joined the younger group of four to ten year olds happily. His arm, broken this time in a low gravity fall aboard the spaceship, gave him some bragging rights.

Hope’s relationship with the pre-teen Dieudonne girls was tighter. They were a quiet well-mannered gang of hellions. On this visit, Hope had quickly emerged as their leader. When the girls came up with some fantastically nefarious plan, it was Hope who filled in the details.

”Ay, there”s the wonder of the thing! Macavity’s not there!” she would quote.

They returned the next day, and while Rand negotiated fees and Dita discussed the specialized care that might be needed, Mamie supervised a visit for her son Derry, three of the Dieudonne cousins and Hope Aglukak.

The kids were enthralled by the tour, and En-lai Dieudonne was particularly proud of being allowed to test a new mosquito repellant, a test that entailed sticking her coated arm into a sealed tube filled with dozens of the pests. That the repellant turned out to be inadequate didn’t seem to bother her, and the lab workers were happy to give her antihistamine cream to soothe the itch.

For the next few days, while they waited for word that the pupae were ready for transport to Greenleaf, Mamie spent much of her time with her father, helping him with the few engine repair jobs he had been able to find and updating him on developments in their field that she had learned and in

Monarchs /2

some cases invented. She was particularly proud of how she had increased the efficiency of Bluebell’s ancient HVAC system by using the spaceship’s grey water as a coolant.

Dita spent a lot of time sunbathing, not realizing that her chosen private spot had been noticed by some of Mamie’s older brothers and cousins.

Bluebell’s stevedore, Marco Majumdar, found little to do on the farm. He spent some time in the little town nearby, where there was a brothel, but mostly he helped Mrs. Dieudonne with household tasks. “He was well-trained by his own Ma,” she remarked to Mamie. “He does a nice job with dishwashing and with weeding.”

“We don”t need much weeding on Bluebell, but he is very thorough about dishes.” Mamie mused. “Doesn’t stop him from complaining.”

“He tells me he does more laundry and dishwashing that anyone else.”

“No, we all have the same … well, we do bet chore tickets when we play cards, and Marco is not real good at cards.”

Rand went riding alone, breathing the moist green air.

The live-bio containers for the butterfly pupae were as tall as Marco and easily two meters square.

“Twenty cans of butterflies. How many bugs are we carryin?” he asked.

“Nearly a million , give or take,” Purple Emperor’s shipper replied. “We sell ’em by weight.”

“Let’s get’m safe to their new home,” said Rand. “Dita, take us out of this world.”

The trip to Greenleaf would be a milk run, and Rand was already on the ansible, hammering out a contract with the tea planters in the cool equatorial hills. Bluebell was purring, running smoothly after the extra pampering she had from Daddy Dieudonne, Mamie had little to do, so she spent her time reading celebrity zines which she had been given by her mother. Bored, she looked for tasks.

“The bunkie needs work, but we ain’t had nobody looking for a cheap ride in yonks. We kin charge more if the cabins look fancy.”

She painted the walls a warm blue and laid down new flooring from the bamboo grove on her father’s homestead. The beds had almost new soy latex foam mattresses, but Mamie pulled out her serger and made new covers from some of a cargo of linen fabric they had been trying to sell for over six months.

“I’ll be looking for some fancy cloth for duvet covers too when we land. The linen is good for sheets but too plain.”

The trip may have been a milk run but landing on Greenleaf was difficult. Dita had no problem with the actual setdown, but the bureaucracy made Rand testy.

“They’re after drug smugglers,” explained Dita patiently. “Greenleaf grows plants that are used to produce important drugs. Or very rare drugs. Ones that can’t be synthesized yet. But because too many workers were taking clippings home and growing them on, the producers engineered plants genetically crafted with traceable tags and patented. So now they inspect every ship for contraband.”

“But we’re landing!”

“Put the fear of God into the potential smugglers, Rand.” said Dita. “Get us antsy when they don”t need to work too hard at the search. Also they now have a record of what we bring in. And a

record of what we sell here.”

“So it gets easy to tell if we are flying with more cargo than we declare. Cute.”

“I’ll deal with the red tape, sir. You do better with getting an export cargo.”

Rand knew he was being managed but also knew from experience that Dita would be more

Monarchs /3

efficient with the customs inspectors than he would be. They left the bridge where he had taken the inspector’s call, Dita for the cargo bay, and Rand for his own cabin.

But there he found Mamie and the children. Since she had her machine out anyway, she was measuring Derry and Hope for new clothes. “We got so much cloth it makes sense to make instead of buy, sweetie. I could make you a couple shirts too.”

They heard a commotion in the cargo bay.

As they looked down from the catwalk a flurry of orange wings rose up and fluttered around them.

A customs inspector lay flat on his back on the grilled floor, stunned, possibly unconscious. Falling, he had knocked some of the biocontainers from their securing ties. One had broken open, scattering bright green pupae like peridots across the floor and through the grates.

And some of the pupae had already hatched and the butterflies emerged. The bay seemed full of silk scraps struggling on new wings.

Marco was less impressed with the sight. He moved swiftly to the open door and slammed it shut, keeping the butterfly cargo from escaping.

The noise broke the spell. Rand checked the customs man for concussion. His colleagues gathered nearby, clipboards clamped to their bosoms.

“Told them not to climb on the cargo.” Dita said calmly to Rand. “Told them they could check from the catwalk.”

Derry had joined the captain and his patient. “Will he need a cast too, daddy?”

“I don’t think so,” Rand replied.“But he’s very lucky that he doesn”t.”

The groggy inspector looked into two pairs of blue eyes. The captain’s eyes snapped with annoyance, while the child cheerfully waved his own fibreglas cast at him.

“Hey, sign my cast, mister? I fell off the cargo, too.” The inspector groaned and closed his eyes.

Rand shooed the boy away while he gave instruction to the rest of the inspection team. “Keep him awake for the next 12 hours. Any nausea or dizziness, take him to ER for a scan. And get a prescription for painkillers, he’s going to be very bruised and sore. He got told and I ain’t takin responsibility for his foolishness. ”

The inspectors hurried their fellow out to their van and disappeared.

“So he fell?” Rand asked Dita.

“Yep.”

“Tripped on the ropes?”

“Looks like.”

“He was pert close to a hidey-hole.”

“Was he?”

“Good work, Dita. Okay anybody know how to capture butterflies?”

As it developed no one on the crew knew how to capture the escapees. When the customers came to collect their cargo, they just laughed.

“Don’t worry about it. They get released as soon as we’re sure we got full weight. And Dr. Mobutu is reliable as sunrise and sunset. A few hundred more or less won’t make any difference.”

When they opened the large cargo doors to unload the Purple Emperor cargo, there was a rush of

orange wings into the sunshine. All over the dusty industrial waste of the dockyard , spacers and navvies stopped to gaze at the cloud of beauty as it swirled up and away to freedom.