Authors: Joseph Lallo
Another few corridors of weightless coasting brought him to the airlock that led to his delivery ship, ‘Betsy.’ The name didn’t have any deep meaning behind it. The ship needed a name, and it seemed like a good one. He swiped his pad over the door’s mechanism and fetched his package. It would be a minute or two before the access way was pressurized, so he drifted over to the view window to admire the vessel. One of his lingering fans wandered over and glanced out.
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THAT’S your ship?”
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Yep!” Lex said proudly, “Why so surprised?”
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I don’t know, I was expecting something... sexier.”
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Hey, hey, hey. It isn’t a pleasure cruiser. This baby is built for speed.”
Betsy wasn’t much to look at. It had at one point been a Cantrell Aerospace Intrasystem Interceptor. One step above police, one step below military, the CAII (or CA2I, or CA double I, or Kai, depending on who you were) was once the ship of choice for chasing down smugglers, but that was many years ago. Ironically, or perhaps inevitably, they’d become the ship of choice for smuggling just as soon as they’d started to show up on the used market. It wasn’t well favored for either, these days. There were faster alternatives. He’d found this one in a salvage yard and picked it up for next to nothing. Then he’d gone to work on it. A pair of engines from a second scrapped CA2I were grafted onto the rear along with a pair from something he hadn’t been able to identify. Stuck between the two massive banks of engines was the power plant from a full sized freighter. The result was a ship that was about 85% propulsion system. It was a stack of engines with a place to sit. Not pretty, not graceful, but FAST.
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She might have a little junk in the trunk,” he said, pointing to the preposterous cluster of engines, “But that’s the way daddy likes it.”
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It looks like crap.”
The access door hissed open. Lex drifted inside, looking back.
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You don’t bet on the best looking horse, you bet on the fastest one,” he said.
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Who bets on horses?”
He climbed into the cramped cockpit, stowed the client’s package and his own, and pulled the backup flight suit from the storage compartment.
“
You’re clear for departure, Lex. Take the long way around,” squawked Blake’s voice over the com, “And if you’re going to get changed, please don’t do it until you’re out of the damn hanger this time.”
Lex looked out of the view window to see Blake in the control tower halfway across the dock, microphone in hand and looking irritated.
“
The tint isn’t on?”
His jacket and shirt were already off.
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The tint is broken, remember?”
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Clearly I don’t.”
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Just get out of here.”
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Fine. I’ll be back in two, two and a half weeks. That cool?”
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Yeah, sure. We’ll be cleared out by then.”
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Righto, buddy. See you then.”
The engines purred to life at a touch of the control panel and he maneuvered the ship out of the dock and into an exit pattern while he worked out the path he’d be taking. It wasn’t an easy task.
You see, space is extremely big and mostly empty. Those two little adverbs, extremely and mostly, are the key words. The ‘extremely’ comes in when you realize that even light, which for most of history was the fastest thing in existence, takes years to get from star to star. Since then science had one-upped mother nature, as it tends to do, but finding the shortest and quickest path is still a big concern in space travel. No problem, though, right? Just draw a straight line between where you are and where you want to be, scoot around any stars or planets that get in your way and you are set, right?
Well, unfortunately, that’s where ‘mostly’ comes in. Space is mostly empty, but then, a shotgun blast is mostly empty, too. That doesn’t make it any less dangerous. There are all sorts of things drifting in the vast interstellar wastes. Micro meteoroids, variable density gas and dust clouds, and for the last few hundred years, human beings sealed in glorified tin cans called space ships. Sure, you probably won’t hit anything, but when it involves the life and livelihood of untold thousands of passengers, not to mention the freight workers and the planets they supply, ‘probably’ doesn’t cut it. The only remotely safe way to keep people from smacking into each other is regulation. Air traffic control on a galactic scale. Flights are scheduled, routes are designated.
These designated routes aren’t just lines on a map. They have to be monitored and scanned. If an asteroid wanders into a trade route filled with ships moving at ten times the speed of light, it would be catastrophic. By the time physics allows anyone to see it, it will already be several hundred thousand miles behind them, having passed through the hull along the way. Monitoring a thread of space of any reasonable length takes a phenomenal amount of resources. Expecting every separate transportation firm to do so individually is ridiculous, so most routes are the result of a government sanctioned monopoly.
The biggest of the companies that regulated space travel was VectorCorp, a gargantuan telecommunications and transit corporation that had exclusive rights to most of known space. They ran communication and shipping, and manufactured half of the devices that made use of the communications and shipping. In order to keep the inevitable trespassing and piracy under control, they’d managed to become a substantial paramilitary presence as well, along with a producer of the arms and vehicles that went along with that status. The only thing that kept them from being the only game in town was a swath of space that neatly sliced the colonized portion of the galaxy in two. This hunk of the cosmos had sold its rights to either Rehnquist Intercom or JPW. Neither company was even half the size of VC, but they’d banded together to make sure that not a speck of usable space wasn’t owned by at least one of them. The fact that you had to pass through their space to get to the other side of the galaxy meant that VectorCorp had to buy time and pay fees if they wanted end to end service. It was pretty clear that the income from VectorCorp’s licensing was the only thing that was keeping these companies afloat.
As is the case with all local monopolies, there is no competition, so they are free to charge whatever they want. Sure, the government makes enough of a stink to keep the price within reach of the middle class, but you are still at the whims of the corporation. If you disagree with their policies, or you can’t afford the price, or you require a degree of discretion that doesn’t fall in line with their terms of service then, officially, you are out of luck. Unofficially, there are alternatives for those not too choosy about speed or legality.
That’s where Lex and other freelancers came in. They were willing to carry packages to and from just about anywhere you might want them to for the right price. Depending on the individual and the start and end points, they might even get it there faster than the official methods. This was because they, as a rule, couldn’t use the main routes. The main routes belonged to the big corporations, and you couldn’t fly them without their blessing and paying their licensing fees. Freight was one of their biggest sources of income, so you better believe they weren’t letting anyone else deliver using their routes without coughing up. This forced freelancers to use more direct courses. It also forced them to risk getting blasted to pieces by nearly invisible debris and the speeding ships of other freelancers, since the space was barely mapped and completely unmonitored. Well, not completely unmonitored. Regular patrols of corporate ships swept the more useful chunks of space to try to weed out the riffraff, but the sheer size of the area involved made it rather hit or miss.
The better freelancers took a hybrid approach to their deliveries. Standard operating procedure called for a dead sprint toward a star system or asteroid cluster. Then drop down to conventional speeds to weave through it. Anyone tracking you on sensors would more often than not lose you among the other ships and space rocks. Anyone following you directly would have to slow down and take the same route. At that point it was just a test of who was the better pilot, the very fact that attracted Lex to the business to start with. While they are tied up in whatever mess you picked to hide in, you gun it to the next thicket. The popular parlance had dubbed it “Sprints and Jukes.” It was like a needle hopping from haystack to haystack.
Right now he had to find the right haystacks and the paths between that didn’t intersect corporate space, wouldn’t get him killed, and WOULD get him to Tessera V in six days. It didn’t leave much room for error. He tapped and swiped his way through the various stellar maps, downloaded some fresh data, and pushed the whole mess into his flight computer. Before long he’d found a crooked, zigzag path that seemed mostly survivable, and set a course for the first sprint. All that remained was to make it out of the cluttered star system before shifting to FTL speed. He took the opportunity to finish getting out of the monkey suit and into the flight suit. It was just a reinforced and airtight jumpsuit with sealed boots and gloves, but aside from being marginally more comfortable, it could couple with a helmet and keep him from popping like a ripe tick in the event of a sudden change in cabin pressure. That sort of thing was a bit more intense in deep space.
He managed to finish the uniquely awkward dressing maneuver just in time for the autopilot to kick into FTL. One would think that such a thing would be spectacular. Not as such. The inertial inhibitor wiped out any semblance of the sensation of speed. No lurch backward, no pressing into the seat. It had to, or the pilot would be a thin film of organic matter long before the ship even made it to half the speed of light. And as for the sights? Well, everything in the view field took an abrupt shift toward blue, then violet, and then on up into ultraviolet, then into the various levels of high energy radiation, which was summarily blocked by the ship to prevent, among other things, death. Some pilots used view screens that would drop the radiation frequency down to viewable levels, probably the same sort of people who get a kick out of listening to bat sonar. They would get a groovy stretched out light show that, in reality, was a long way behind them. Lex preferred to nap or poke at a casual game on the slidepad until he reached the first stop.
Back in the skies over Golana, an aging but well kept ship, military in design, was maneuvering to dock with a communications pylon. In an earlier age it might have been called a satellite, and in truth that’s all it was, but when things become commonplace, people find the need to come up with more specific names. Just as cars would come to be called coupes and convertibles and roadsters and hatchbacks depending on their shape, satellites earned descriptions like pylon or wheel or hub. Com-pylons had taken the place of cell towers once humanity had developed the need to stay connected on a globe-to-globe scale. Hand held or vehicle mounted devices would communicate to a pylon. From there, small bundles of quantum entangled particles would, with a little super-scientific prodding, transmit data via their matched pairs over virtually any distance instantaneously. Pylons scattered along all mapped transit routes meant that any slidepad in mapped space could communicate with any other one, given enough hops.
The quantum communication, aside from thumbing its nose at relativistic physics by transmitting information faster than the speed of light, was subject to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Physicists liked to define this with fancy equations that featured letters from three different alphabets, but to the layman it meant that it was impossible to observe the data without altering it, thus making the communication absolutely secure as long as the connection was direct. Any wireless steps or repeater relays spoiled the effect by at least briefly requiring it to be decoded to a less secure form. Thus, if you were the sort who required utter secrecy, you needed to dock directly, and very few had access. This man was among them.
Fingers tapped out a long sequence of digits on an access screen, then swiped their prints for authentication. A screen read off a list of connection steps. A moment later, a voice crackled across the com speaker in the ship.
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William Trent,” said the voice, a terse introduction that managed to communicate with remarkable clarity how much of a waste of time he considered the call to be.
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Agent Fisk reporting. I found the leak,” said the mysterious ship’s pilot.
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About time,” Trent barked.
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There’s a problem,” warned Fisk.
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What is it?” fumed Trent, murder in his tone.
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It may not have been contained. I did a trace on network activity. She did some research. Freelancers.”
Fisk spoke in short, precise bursts, like machine gun fire. He delivered exactly what information needed to be delivered with the sort of efficiency you only get in soldiers and butlers.
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Damn it!” Trent replied.
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Narrowed it down to one. Found surveillance of a hand-off. Package contents unknown. It looks like he is off planet already.”
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Find him. Get it back. This doesn’t get any farther. Not now.”
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What about her?”
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If she sprung one leak, she can spring another. We can’t have that. Take care of it.”
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What level of authorization do I have in this matter?”
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Take. Care. Of. It.”
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Acknowledged.”
The communication was severed. Fisk pulled away from the pylon and pulled up his surveillance notes. His primary target had a short trip to a neighboring star system planned that day on a commuter shuttle. That would be simple enough. Some collateral damage, but no trail to follow. As for his new secondary target, the freelancer... That might require a more personal approach.