by Tom Jordan
Tommy and Jade approached.
“Hey! Tommy, mate!” the big man said. Still sitting, he executed some kind of elaborate high-five-and-handshake sequence with Tommy. Tommy was a little taller than average, and Jade was taller than him, yet the other man was even taller.
“Glad you came,” Marco said, suddenly beside her, breaking her out of her scrutiny.
“Thanks.” She folded her hands in front of her, then put one on her hip, suddenly unsure what else to do. She noted how self-conscious she became in Marco’s presence. She hoped she’d been able to contain her awkward attraction and not give it away through her body language.
Tommy gestured with a flourish to the tough-looking guy. “Jade, it’s my pleasure to introduce the great Henning Freeborn! Henning, this is my friend Jade Saito.”
“Hey,” Henning said. “Heard good things about you, mate.” He smiled and extended his hand. He didn’t stand, which left Jade to lean awkwardly over the table to shake his hand. He pumped her hand once, his grip strong and firm, his hand engulfing hers.
“It’s great to meet you, Henning. Marco had good things to say about you. Tommy too.”
“They better have!” Henning and Tommy shared contagious laughter. Marco didn’t seem amused. Henning’s voice had a strong colony accent Jade couldn’t place, but she was reminded of an Earth Australian accent.
“Jade, what can I get for you?” Tommy said. “My treat.”
“Cool, thanks. Uh, hook me up with a mocha latte, double shot.” Screw it. May as well call this a vacation. “Actually, if they have real beans I’ll take a pour-over, black, and I’ll reimburse you.”
“All right!” Henning said. He clapped his hands together, then pointed at Jade. “Someone else with taste. No wonder you talk about her so much, Tommy, mate!”
Tommy tightened his lips, looking uncomfortable. She smirked. It was nice to know how much he must have been looking forward to seeing her again. She’d missed her closest friend, too.
“Coming right up, Jade,” Tommy said, and he snuck away.
Marco and Henning chatted while Jade perched on a free stool and took everything in. She watched Tommy wait in line and tap his foot until he got to the counter and ordered a drink from the robot barista, which, to Jade’s amusement, had been given an apron to wear.
“Good to see another coffee snob,” Henning said behind her.
She turned around. “Pardon?”
He nodded toward Tommy. “Tommy’ll drink anything with caffeine in it. I’ve been trying to educate him.” He pointed a thumb behind him at Marco. “But Marco only drinks green tea. What’s up with that?” Marco shot back a perplexed frown.
Jade snorted a laugh and held up her hands. “Hey, I drink more than my share of both. I’m not taking sides here.”
Jade was interrupted by her wrist computer vibrating with an incoming message. She didn’t get many messages, so it piqued her interest. “Sorry, hang on.”
She raised the small cuff and watched the text scroll by. It was a message from Feinglass Research, the company she was delivering her cargo to.
“What’s up?” Tommy asked. He set down a cup in front of her.
“I need to deliver my haul. The client is paying extra if I can get it to them in the next few hours.” Her heart lifted. “That doesn’t happen much!” She looked up to Marco and Henning. “Sorry, guys. I have to do some work. It was nice meeting with you. Maybe we can talk later?”
“Sure,” Marco said with a smile. Henning nodded his agreement.
Jade turned to Tommy. “Want to give me a hand?”
“Absolutely,” Tommy said.
Jade sipped her drink and looked over the rim at Tommy. It was the mocha.
“No real beans?” she asked.
“No such luck.”
“It’s still great.” She smiled and cupped her hands around the drink. “I can’t really make coffee and tea in low-g.”
Tommy dropped a sealed industrial container out of the cargo-access hatch on Ghost of Jupiter’s underside. The dock’s lighter gravity meant the box weighed a fraction of what it would in a typical environment, and the container sailed down to Jade, who caught it and loaded it onto an autonomous shipping pallet.
“What’s in these things, anyway?” Tommy said. Due to the lack of atmosphere in the dock, the pair wore their formfitting flight suits and helmets and had synced their comm systems so they could communicate.
“Electronics for a manufacturing company, mostly,” Jade said. “Let’s see. What are you, little guy?” She waved her wrist computer, now strapped to her flight suit, over the crate’s embedded electronics. “This one is superconductors.”
“That’s high-end stuff,” Tommy said. “So why did you say you were having money trouble?”
Jade tapped the crate to ensure it was loaded tight against its neighbors on the robotic pallet. “Cargo rates are the same whether you’re carrying electronics, clothing, whatever. I’m just one person. One ship. I get a standard rate. Then there’s taxes, fees, licensing, currency exchange…and now I need to get the hull repaired thanks to that pirate. It’s financial death by a thousand cuts.”
“Coming down,” Tommy said as he released another crate. It sailed deckward into Jade’s waiting hands.
“I mean,” she continued, “I have my freedom. I value it. I’m making my own way. I just hate cutting it so close sometimes. I have such a small profit margin.” She placed the crate on the pallet. “It really sucks.”
“Simple solution,” Tommy said. “Join our team. Marco already extended you the invitation.” Jade looked up and saw his enthusiastic smile through his helmet’s faceplate. He waved a small cargo container around while he spoke. Jade winced, fearing Tommy would whack it against the hull and damage some kind of fragile electronic components. “Come on, we’re getting rich out here!” He dropped the container toward her. “I’ll take you to check out our ships after this. You’ll see what I mean.”
“I’d like that,” Jade said. “You seem to get along well with Marco and Henning.”
“Henning’s like my big brother, I guess. It sounds lame, but it’s true. We spend a lot of time together. We work out, even. He comes across like some kind of bad dude but he’s the nicest guy. A family man, too. He supports his wife and two daughters back on Aleare.”
Jade had no idea where Aleare was. “As long as he’s not taking my place,” she said with cheerful emphasis.
“You know you’ll always be my main bro,” Tommy said. They laughed over their comm system into one another’s helmets. “Henning bankrolled a lot of our early work and ship upgrades. He’s got investments and stuff. He got our team off the ground. Businesswise, I mean. And once you bring a big ship loaded with tons of guns, nobody really wants to stand up to you. So he’s been as much a part of this as Marco and I.”
“Now, Marco…” Tommy said. “I’m not sure how to explain it. I mean, he’s a good guy for sure. But he has a way of telling you what you want to hear. And if it’s not what you want to hear, he convinces you that it is. He can be stubborn, even bossy, I guess. But he just has this way with people.” He dropped another container into Jade’s hands. “He’s made contacts on every station we visit, so he gets inside info about bounties. He charms everyone and runs the operation, and he does it well. He’s making us all rich.”
Jade found herself smiling at the memory of her dinner with Marco. Tommy was right. Marco oozed charm and appeal. She hadn’t seen him be bossy, however. Just driven. He was like a magnet for her thoughts.
“Last crate,” Tommy said. “Here it comes.” He tossed it down. “Henning and Marco butt heads all the time, though. They both have strong personalities. They’re always having it out over comms, but when it comes down to it we get things done as a team.”
Tommy floated down from the access hatch, rather than using the cargo elevator or folding stairs, and landed on the deck posing like a superhero.
“Tour?” Tommy asked.
&nbs
p; Jade poked at the pallet’s control panel and spoke her name to add her voice signature, signing off on her delivery. The pallet would use the station’s secure transport system to bring the cargo from here to its destination.
“Rebel Star,” Tommy said.
“Wow.” Jade breathed out the word as a stretched syllable.
“I know!”
Jade stared in awe at Rebel Star—Marco’s ship—a sleek Mako fighter from Thorsen Space Technologies, a shipyard servicing military clients. She recognized the ship from a VR combat sim she and Tommy had played in flight school during their downtime. The Mako was one of the licensed real-world ships available in the game.
“I remember it from Supremacy at VRCADE. Wasn’t this a high-end unlock?” Jade said.
“Yeah, man. We played a lot and I was close to unlocking it at the end, but never made it.”
“Can’t believe I’m standing in front of a Mako,” Jade said. “In real life.”
Tommy sputtered, “And Marco won’t even let me touch the hull, let alone fly it!” He looked around the docking bay, fingers twitching. “I want to touch it so bad. But he always knows.”
Jade scrutinized the vessel. Its red hull gleamed. She couldn’t find a single blemish. Rebel Star’s sleek shape spoke of speed. It reminded her of historical twenty-second-century fighter craft from Earth history, but engineered and evolved to a wild extreme. Its thrusters and stabilizers looked oversized for a small fighter. It had a complement of weapons tucked away beneath fins stabbing out at crazy angles from the fuselage and both pairs of forward-swept wings. Its bubble cockpit was angled forward—a Mako pilot wasn’t hidden inside a recessed bridge staring at monitors.
“Isn’t it inconvenient for your purposes, though? Your team’s purposes, I mean. It’s a short-range ship launched from a carrier. There’s just a cockpit that opens to the outside. No airlock, no room to move on board.”
“Yeah,” Tommy said. “It’s a knife fighter. It’s not really meant for long-range stuff and extended time aboard ship, like Marco uses it for, but he loves it. He can run down anything, outmaneuver anyone. He customized it—it’s jump capable. He says the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. But I’ve seen him spend a week in that cockpit. The guy is like some kind of warrior monk.”
“How’d he even buy it?” The Mako was a strike fighter for SOL-SEC and other militaries, and not a civilian ship.
“Bought it used from a private seller in a system where there weren’t any laws about that sort of thing.”
Seeing the ship helped Jade understand the kind of profit the team was making. Paying for a ship like this…what would it even cost? Three million SCU? Four million? It would take decades to afford at the rate Jade had been earning.
She smiled. The ship’s substance and style were a perfect reflection of Marco. He was focused on excellence. On success. He obviously wanted the best and he didn’t compromise. But she didn’t know how he could spend so much time in Rebel Star’s cockpit. It would drive her completely insane. There was barely room to stretch out. She intended to ask Marco about it, but she came away from viewing the ship with a new respect for his intelligence. Anyone successful enough to buy a ship like this was a more adept entrepreneur than her.
Tommy led Jade to Henning’s ship, a Sakharov Model One he’d named Audacity. It was docked in the same bay as Rebel Star. Henning cycled the airlock and let Jade and Tommy aboard.
The hull sloped forward to its bridge, which had an open layout with large canopy panels, giving each of the three flight seats an impressive view of their surroundings. From the cockpit Jade was able to see the pair of enormous thrusters that dominated each side of the hull. Despite Audacity’s sturdy bulk, it was sleek and rounded. It looked both imposing and futuristic.
Jade wasn’t familiar with Sakharov, but Henning explained that, to date, Sakharov had only produced this single design, the Model One. The company’s approach was to iterate over successive versions of their product, edging continually closer to what they felt was perfection. This approach led to an outstanding product with a dedicated following. On the downside, the Model One was expensive to purchase and maintain due to numerous Sakharov-specific components.
The Sakharov, Jade learned, was small enough for consumers and entrepreneurs yet large enough for many commercial applications. It could carry cargo, support a small crew, or, in Henning’s case, be fitted with a full complement of armaments, defensive modules, and hull upgrades. It was a multipurpose ship that excelled at whatever it was customized to do, and surpassed Jade’s Mark IV in every category.
She was impressed by the lighted archways leading to other decks above and below the one on which they stood. The ship had been engineered to feel spacious and pleasant. The Sakharov even had a GEM—a gravitomagnetic emitter—for creating artificial gravity. In her career as a pilot, Jade had found that the novelty of weightlessness wore off quickly and that, while it helped her load and unload cargo more easily, micro-g was more of a nuisance than a benefit to life in space. She was eminently jealous of Audacity’s GEM.
Henning led Jade and Tommy on a tour of each deck. She was amused to find weight plates, bars, and benches in the corner of Henning’s ample cargo bay. Henning had even welded a basketball hoop to one of the bay doors. Jade asked if Marco worked out with Tommy and Henning. Henning smirked and said Marco didn’t. He did, however, regularly beat both Henning and Tommy at one-on-one games of basketball. Tommy said he often asked Henning to turn down the GEM to a lower gravity setting so that he could “stuff some sweet dunks,” but Marco played by the book and always insisted on a standard 1.0 gees.
Henning was the heavy hitter of their squad. His ship could intimidate with its size and weapon loadout and was effective in convincing their prey to stand down.
“Where did you get all these weapons? And so much tech?” Jade asked.
“We got the hookup!” Tommy said.
Henning gave him a sideways glance. “Specifically, the Beta Tallus system. Same place Marco picked up his Mako. Lots of stuff there is gray market. And I worked with the ISF for thirteen years. I’ve got friends.”
“ISF?” Jade said.
“Interspace Security Forces,” Tommy said. “It’s a pseudo-governmental security firm.”
“Privately run with government retirement funds,” Henning said. “Good deal. I worked ISF private security. Anyway, my contacts there helped us start this little party. Tommy knows the catalogs.” He counted on his fingers. “We skipped over to Beta Tallus after each big job and picked up hull modifications, weapons, d-fields, restricted munitions. All the goodies. Puts us a step above your average criminal.”
Jade blinked. The team was purchasing a shocking amount of hard-to-get equipment, and starship upgrades weren’t cheap. This fact—and her tours of Audacity and Rebel Star—made it clear that Tommy, Marco, and Henning were earning outrageous amounts of money.
Tommy’s ship, Gliese Voyager, was a stark contrast to Henning’s and Marco’s. Rather than trade up to a larger or more expensive ship when his funds allowed, Tommy preferred to continually upgrade his MST Mark II.
The ship was smaller than Jade’s, but with the same general configuration. The hull was gray instead of patterned black, white, and gray like Ghost of Jupiter’s, and Gliese Voyager had a single-seat cockpit rather than a double seat. Tommy had outfitted his ship with things Jade had never known existed. He demonstrated a top-of-the-line virtual interface—a wraparound visor using high-end displays linked to exterior cameras on the ship’s hull to give the pilot a spherical view of her surroundings. Jade put on the helmet and was blown away when she saw the docking bay load in all around her. It felt like she was the ship. All Gliese Voyager’s main systems appeared within the view as heads-up displays, and she could look in any direction she wished.
Gliese Voyager was also outfitted with advanced sensor equipment. Tommy had installed arrays of instruments that could detect ships at extreme ranges by reading heat signatu
res and power-plant outputs, allowing the group to locate and intercept their prey before it even realized it was being watched.
Jade was impressed after touring the ships and meeting with each team member. The vessels and equipment were outstanding, and the three pilots seemed to share an enthusiastic camaraderie. Tommy and Henning were closer than most colleagues, and Marco had a crisp professionalism that showed he took the team’s work seriously.
They were also making ridiculous amounts of money.
Jade found herself wanting what the team could offer her: Belonging. Friendship. Warmth out here in space where there usually was none. And the opportunity to push herself and improve her life, rather than travel the same paths until they became mind-numbing ruts. She was exhausted from staring at charts and trade routes, and wishing her profits were higher than insufficient scraps.
“Hang on a sec,” Cassie said. Jade’s friend looked different than she had when the pair had last been together, before Cassie dropped out of school. The young woman at the other end of the video connection had her blonde hair tied out of the way, having grown it long, and wore smudged coveralls with HOLLEN—her last name—embroidered on the breast.
“Hang on, sorry!” Cassie dropped out of frame, and the camera image whipped around as whatever device was capturing the video fell to the ground. Jade watched, through the upside-down video, as Cassie set up some kind of plastic container. The video righted itself, and Cassie sat down atop the makeshift chair.
Jade raised an eyebrow. “Are you settled?”
“Yep! I’m good! Just wanted to get out of the way. We’re in the middle of overhauling a VY-22.” That was a small-crew, long-range ship, if Jade remembered right. Cassie leaned forward, forearms on her thighs. “Nice to see your face again. Glad you called, JJ.”