by J. N. Chaney
“You know what?” he began again. “Screw Sammy, and screw those other assholes who cheated me out of my pay. While we’re at it, to hell with the entire galaxy.” Dash was nothing if not thorough in his wrath.
He spun and walked out of the cockpit.
For its part, the nav just did what it always did—waited for navigational inputs so it could steer the Slipwing to wherever Dash wanted it to go. Which, right now, was nowhere.
Dash frowned at the bottle sitting beside the nav.
“Is it half-empty,” he asked the air, “or half-full?”
The background hum of the Slipwing was his only answer.
He gave a slow nod. “Yeah, I agree. Half-empty.”
He turned his attention back to the vid. It displayed the Needs Slate, a listing of jobs throughout the known galaxy. They were mostly short-term—one-shot contract jobs. But that was what couriers did. Retainerships, positions that were paid across multiple jobs, were as rare as black holes, and they sure didn’t go to small-time couriers like Dash. No, they went to the big courier ships, the ones with full crews and cargo holds, the ones that were corporations unto themselves.
“Bunch of assholes, in other words,” Dash muttered.
He cut himself off with another swig, then turned his attention to the vid. Or he tried to, at least. But the world had gone soft around the edges, the data on the vid rippling like he was seeing it under water. He had to concentrate on each word, one after another, to get them to make sense.
A soft chime from the Slipwing’s master computer plucked Dash’s attention away from the vid, making him lose his train of thought. “What?”
“Fuel level is nearing critical,” the master said. “In six hours shipboard time, there will not be enough to both maintain full system power and travel to the nearest habitable—”
“I know, I know. What do you think I’m doing?” Dash paused to burp; it filled his mouth with the sour taste of warm brandy. “Not the best choice, I see.”
The master said nothing else. It had said all it needed to say. He couldn’t really afford a better system, the kind that had a personality. The Slipwing had enough anti-deuterium in its tanks to power the ship for a long time yet. But add in the amount needed to translate her through unSpace to the nearest port, and Dash had…
He looked at the engineering panel, took a moment to focus, then another to puzzle out what it was telling him. Enough fuel for a short ride, and then the Slipwing would be unable to go anywhere useful. Sure, she could keep him alive, but he’d be a world of one man, stuck in a remote place among the cold stars of the galaxy. And even that wouldn’t last, and then she’d be his tomb. But if he translated now, he’d likely end up somewhere with no work. He might even have to sell the Slipwing just to keep a roof over his head and food in his belly, and that would leave him stuck planetside somewhere he wouldn’t want to be.
He checked the nav. Tilly’s Planet. That was the only habitable world he could reach from this desolate patch of space. So, he’d be a permanent resident of Tilly’s Planet. But there were people on Tilly’s Planet he owed credits to. So not just a resident, but a desperate-resident-in-hiding.
“I’ll pass, I think,” he said, then turned back to the vid. There must be something on the Needs Slate he could do, some job he could pick up with the fuel he had left, that would pay enough to—
“Ah, there we go.”
The vid highlighted a one-shot, a contract to carry a data module from Penumbra to Traver’s Landing. Pay was pretty good, and the contractor would pay toward up-front expenses, including fuel. And it was a sealed data module, so the courier’s sole responsibility was on-time delivery.
“Hmm. Beggars aren’t choosers and all that.” Dash leaned closer, thinking hard. The decision was simple; the command, even simpler.
He tapped at the vid, submitting his bid for the job. This would be perfect. Just a brief stop on Penumbra—he didn’t even have to go down to the surface, just rendezvous with a ship in orbit—fuel up, translate to Traver’s Landing, and get paid. Then he could get some of the Slipwing’s problems fixed and knock some of those error messages off the diagnostics.
Dash leaned back and closed his eyes. This would probably take a while, but he had nothing he needed to do for the moment except rest.
A chime sounded, causing him to sit up blink in surprise.
“Okay,” he said, rubbing his eyes to try to clear away some of the blur. “Quick answer like that must be good.”
Bid rejected. Only bonded couriers eligible.
Dash stared at the vid for a moment.
“I am bonded, you stupid—"
No. Wait. He was bonded. But then he’d carried those stims and other chems and run afoul of a magistrate patrol. The one time he’d carried something illicit—or, at least, the one time he’d been caught doing it—and it cost him his bonded status until he could get cleared again. Which should be soon, maybe even now, but he’d forgotten about it.
“Well, this is a fun development.”
Dash swung the bottle up, a heartbeat away from slamming it back down into the comms. Only a last-second sliver of sanity stopped him. Knocking out the comms would be it, wouldn’t it? Basically ensuring he’d stay right here, in the middle of nowhere, until the fuel ran out and he spent the rest of eternity a freeze-dried corpse in this chair.
He lowered the bottle and plunked it back on the console.
Again, he swore, but softer and with more feeling, if such a thing was possible.
“No job, so no fuel, so I’m good and screwed.” He smirked as he grabbed the bottle again, lifted it, and announced, “Here’s to an early retirement. Whatever that looks like.”
He took a long, acrid pull from the bottle. As he did, another one-shot popped up on the Needs Slate, a new job that fit the filters he’d set.
Urgent…origin pending…destination pending…pay negotiable.
It had every hallmark of a shitty job that was probably illegal, almost certainly immoral, and would probably end badly.
Dash tapped at the comms. He entered a bid so low he might as well offer to pay for the privilege of working. Didn’t matter, though. He probably didn’t have enough fuel to get to the origin anyway. But what did it matter?
“When you’re screwed,” he murmured, transmitting his bid, “you might as well be good and screwed.”
That made Dash giggle, although he wasn’t really sure why. He was still giggling as he slumped back in the seat, and still giggling as he floated off into a sodden slumber.
2
Ping.
Ping.
Ping…ping…ping…
Dash raised his head. It took a long time. And then it didn’t stay where he wanted it. It wobbled. And…that taste. If he’d thought burping that brandy was bad, it paled in comparison to letting it stew in your mouth for…how long had he been asleep, anyway?
Ping…ping…
Dash blinked until the haze of sleep cleared. His eyes found the chronometer, narrowed, and worked at reading the display through the throb behind them. Almost three hours.
Ping…ping…
He turned to the comms. It still showed the Needs Slate. It also showed the last job he’d bid on, the one he’d practically offered to do for free, which was blinking, pinging, announcing that his bid had been accepted.
“Huh.”
This was good. Really good. Of course, he’d be more enthusiastic if his head wouldn’t keep wobbling and pounding, his mouth still tasting of something vaguely dead. Or horribly alive. He grimaced, unsure which was worse.
His gaze had brushed across the nav data for the job and kept going. His brain hadn’t, though. It did an intuitive calculation and concluded…
Dash blinked again.
“Three minutes.”
Slowly, he stood, the reality of it pushing the wobble, throb, and vile taste aside. He had three minutes to initiate a translation into unSpace if he was going to make it at the prescribed time. Three
minutes to change his life. To salvage his life.
Dash exploded into action, residual drunkenness and burgeoning hangover forgotten. He rattled off commands to the computer and hammered inputs into the nav and the flight control system. The Slipwing’s engines rumbled to life, accompanied by the rising whine of the unSpace translation drive. Dash furrowed his brow at the nav, making sure the coordinates matched the ones sent with the job.
“Wait, what? These coordinates are out in the middle of freaking nowhere!”
He glanced at the engineering chronometer. Twenty seconds to translation.
A destination in deep space. It would literally take years—a lot of them—to reach a habitable world from there, at the Slipwing’s best real-space speed. He’d run out of fuel and die gasping on cold, dead air years before he’d ever make it—again, a lot of them. With some jobs, he could drop only partly back into real space to do whatever needed to be done, but this one specified a full drop out of unSpace. That meant it was a hand-off job, transferring something from one ship to another. Dash hated hand-off jobs, because the pay usually sucked—and that was when he didn’t have to hope he could scrounge some fuel from the client, which wouldn’t be free, which meant he’d probably end up down in credits for all his trouble.
He reached for the Abort toggle, which would kill the spool-up of the translation drive and leave him right here, so he could find another, better-paying job, one that didn’t have him dropping into the void on fusion exhaust and a prayer.
Ten seconds.
Dash got his finger within a centimeter of the Abort toggle…and did something he didn’t really understand, then or later. It was intuition, a hunch, a feeling in his gut, something he couldn’t quite describe. Anyway, whatever it was, it made him turn and plunk himself down into the pilot’s seat and buckled in.
Dash had time to mutter, “I am such a moron.”
And then existence itself came to a dead stop as the ship moved into unSpace and time stretched. Since he wasn’t all that far from his target, the process didn’t take long, a few minutes on the outside. When he entered real space again, he was in an entirely different place.
The translation through unSpace was a bizarre combination of a long, tedious passage, and the passing of no time at all. Dash had done it many times and still didn’t quite get it. It meant he would arrive at the destination on time, while still having a leisurely spell to both shed his hangover and deeply regret making the journey at all.
He glanced at the nav, watching its display confirm his approach to the forsaken volume of empty space where the handoff would happen. Then he looked at another panel, the one that controlled the Fade, an illegal modification to the unSpace engine—called the translation drive—that Dash had gotten when he’d been a little more flush with money. Normally, the translation drive would allow the user to “translate” from normal space to a sub-dimension known as unSpace, but with the Fade modification installed, the process was altered. The Fade allowed the ship to essentially stop at the halfway mark, creating a kind of cloaking effect. This gave Dash a means of avoiding conflict altogether. It was his ticket out of a tight spot, the one thing that stopped him from slumping completely into despair at what was no doubt a fool’s errand.
“Okay,” he said to the Slipwing, “we’re going to do this, sweetheart. You just keep yourself together.” The downside of the Fade was the stress it put on the ship, as well as the sheer piloting skill required to use it. A minor miscalculation, a tiny maneuver, and he and the Slipwing would be a cloud of molecular debris.
The nav put them close now. Dash engaged the Fade, then braced himself for the weirdness of being in two realities at once as the so-called cloak fully engaged.
His perspective shifted, then split. Pain throbbed behind his eyes as everything went, not really double, but that was the only way to describe it. It was like being hungover, but with none of the upsides.
When things went back to normal, Dash checked the nav. Nothing. The coordinates in dead space were just that—dead space.
So, a bust. Well, to hell with whoever posted that job. He’d report them to the agency that ran the Needs Slate, make sure they never managed to leave some other bastard on his way to becoming a corpsicle.
The computer squawked out a message, startling him. “Any ship! Any ship! ...attack! We…”
Dash couldn’t make out much of what the message said, garbled as it was. It had been audio only, most of it lost in the spatial distortion around the reality-straddling Slipwing. That didn’t mean it came from nearby, of course. It could have come from light-days, light-weeks, even light-months away.
But the sudden flare of energy discharges on the scanner immediately said no, the message came from close by. The discharges were weapons fire. Just like the frantic message had said, someone was under attack.
Which meant a battle was raging across this empty piece of space, and if Dash dropped entirely out of unSpace, he’d be smack in the middle of it.
“Any sh… attack! Please…”
“Sorry,” Dash said to the comm, “but I don’t think so.” He reached for the controls to get its unSpace course redirected to Penumbra. “Best of luck, whoever you—”
“Pay…anything you want, just…”
Dash’s hand froze over the nav at the word pay but drew back at anything you want.
He looked at the scanner. While he was using Fade, the Slipwing’s sensors had only a very coarse resolution when it came to seeing into real space. All he could tell was that two ships were exchanging energy-weapons fire.
Someone was desperate—probably, but not necessarily, the smaller vessel. If he dropped out of Fade and fully back into real space, and was able to help them, the pay-off might be pretty good. If he was able to help them. If the other ship wasn’t vastly more powerful and, together, they were able to drive it off or destroy it. If they weren’t actually criminals, running from the magistrates, so aiding them would slap a warrant on Dash, too. If they weren’t stretched for resources themselves, had some fuel to spare…and they weren’t just lying, and this was all some sort of set up.
Dash had a hundred reasons to just punch back into unSpace and fly away. That was the smart thing to do. He had almost no reasons to get involved in…whatever this was. But, beyond the potential for monetary gain, something tugged at him, now that the alcohol had run its course. Someone needed help, and they were desperate.
Again, leaning on nothing but hunch and instinct, Dash disengaged the Fade and plunged the Slipwing back into real space.
The battle abruptly resolved in the scanner, in all its horrifying detail.
A small, Raven-class scout ship raced ahead of…something. Something big. A massive ship, of a design Dash didn’t recognize. Neither did the scanner.
Whatever it was, it was bad.
Faint, bluish tendrils of Cherenkov radiation flickered where particle cannons blasted through wisps of interstellar gas and dust, reaching for the smaller ship like grasping fingers. Only some spectacular maneuvering kept them at bay, corkscrewing gyrations and rapid accelerations that flung the smaller ship through a mesh of ghostly beams. Even so, it trailed an ionized wake of vaporized metal, the result of some hits. The scanners couldn’t resolve much detail about the unfortunate vessel, like how much damage it had actually taken.
“Well,” Dash muttered, “this was probably a mistake.”
The comms erupted with a clipped woman’s voice. “You, Slipwing! We need your help!”
Dash cocked his brow at the comms. “Hey, sorry, I’m just passing through.”
“You must have stopped because of the distress call. You have to help us!”
It clicked then. This was the mysterious employer whose job he had taken. Technically, the voice was right, then—he was under a contractual obligation to fulfill the terms. But no adjudicator would ever suggest that meant committing suicide, because that was what this would be. The big ship had ignored the Slipwing—so far—but that woul
d change fast, Dash suspected, if he stuck his nose into this. And the Slipwing’s two particle cannons wouldn’t be much of a response. He did have some missiles with miniature Fades, which could let them avoid detection from real space, but not many—and they were bloody expensive.
Sue me, he thought, assuming you aren’t just a cloud of expanding vapor sometime in the next few minutes.
What he said, though, was, “Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t see what I—"
“Listen, we’re carrying something…let’s just say, it’s extremely valuable. That’s why they’re chasing us. Our drive is out. Please, help us!”
Dash narrowed his eyes at the comms. “How valuable is extremely valuable?”
“More valuable than you can imagine.”
“I have a big imagination.”
“Believe me, you won’t be disappointed.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that before.” Dash curled his lip. In the end, his reluctance didn’t really matter, did it? The Slipwing didn’t have enough fuel to translate, so there really wasn’t much choice here. “Look, I need fuel. Bring your valuable whatever-it-is and a tank of anti-deuterium, and—wait, how many of you are there?”
“Two.”
Two. Okay, that was something, at least. Given what he had in mind, trying to take aboard more than two or so was pretty much a non-starter.
“Alright,” Dash said, “just keep yourselves in one piece until I’m in position. This is going to happen fast, and we’re only going to get one shot at it.”
And we probably won’t survive it anyway, but there was no need to actually say that.
“We’ll do our best. Hurry!”
“Believe me,” Dash muttered, fingers dancing over the Slipwing’s controls, “hurrying is the only way this is gonna work.”
With a flare of fusion exhaust, the Slipwing spiraled toward the battle. As soon as she did, several particle beams lanced out from the massive ship chasing the Raven-class, aimed at Dash. He winced at the power levels displayed for those beams—big weapons, at full power, too—then punched commands, slinging the Slipwing sideways to keep her shield pointed at the looming mass of the attacking ship. He put her through a series of accelerations that the inertia offsets had a hard time keeping up. A low groan rattled her hull as his stomach alternately dropped into his gut, then shoved up against his lungs.