by Troy Osgood
“None of your business,” Valeri replied. Apparently she was the leader. I tried to place her accent. From earth or a colony world? Hard to tell. “One of us will be in the hold at all times to keep you from snooping.”
Interesting. I figured Romer had something stashed in the crates. The Yortusk wouldn’t do business with him and he hadn’t been able to penetrate their organization. Whatever was in the crates was probably to help him do that. Her response pretty much confirmed it.
I entered a code on the keypad mounted next to the rear ramp and it started to descend. I watched, ignoring my new “crew”, and waited until it had lowered. I walked up the ramp and headed towards the far end of the hold and the rest of the ship. I heard footsteps, Valeri and not the Curdo, following me.
I paused at the door into the ship’s lounge, watching the Kern and the other human pushing the maglifters into the bay. They moved over to one side where the locking plates were. The Curdo just stood by the ramp looking out into the city. I wished I had my blaster, I could take him out easily from here. They hadn’t given it back to me. Valeri had it in the bag she carried over her shoulder.
That’s okay, I had some other weapons hidden on the ship. Just needed to find some time to get to them.
I stepped through the door and into the ship’s lounge. From there into the galley and the spiral stair in the corner that led to the upper level. A short corridor led to a longer one off of which were the quarters, three to each side and at the far end the door to engineering. The near end was the hatch into the bridge, with two storage rooms on either side. I hit the pad to open the bridge door and Valeri followed me in.
The bridge consisted of two levels with four stations facing a clear polycarbonite view window. Each station was a bunch of readouts, buttons and controls along with a chair. More readouts and controls lined the walls. Pilot was on the upper level to the right, co-pilot on the left. Navigator was on the left on the lower level and weapons on the right. The pilots station, my station, had additional controls that allowed access to the other functions.
Like I said, crew of six, but rigged for one.
Valeri sat down in the co-pilot's chair and swiveled it to face me as I took my seat. I started punching in the navorders for the hop to Orso. Flying through space is nicknamed starhopping, or just hopping. To get from A to E, you need to go to B and D and sometimes G depending on the current conditions of the various systems. Ion storms, novas, you name it. They all messed with navigation. You basically hopped from one system to another. Each hop would bring you closer to your final destination. When you went from A to B, you’d get an updated navorder in B for the trip to C or you’d get an alert that you now had to go to D.
Hops generally lasted anywhere from three to six hours, the longest single hop that I’d been on was ten hours. One reason why ships ran crews with multiple people, so there was always someone on duty in case something came up. It was a risk running with just one person, but that’s the way I wanted it.
And now I had four unwanted passengers.
I mentally ran through the list of supplies. Not enough for five people.
The navcom beeped and I glanced at the readout. Five jumps, six days. Not bad. I hit a couple buttons and got it programmed in with a slight addition so it would need to be recalculated after each hop. I cleared the memory and set the navcom so that only I could access it. Just a little insurance.
“We’re good to go,” I said.
“How many hops?” Valeri asked.
I shrugged.
“Are your boys loaded?” I asked instead of answering, ignoring the glare she gave me. “I’ll contact Buhin Dock Control and we can head out.”
“Not yet,” she replied and started looking around the bridge. “We’re waiting on supplies. Where’s the camera for the hold?”
I pointed it out to her and she switched it on. We could see the Curdo still standing at the ramp, the other two somewhere else in the hold.
“Supplies huh,” I said leaning back in my chair, studying her. “Good, I didn’t want to feed you lot anyways.”
My initial observation had been accurate. She was good looking but had that cold and hard look to her. It made her uglier than she really was. Not that I really wanted to, but I figured I’d try to break down her walls. I had absolutely no interest in striking up conversations with the other three, so might as well with her or it’d be a long four days. I know I’m not the most charming guy around, but I do alright.
“So,” I started to say but she was ignoring me.
In the camera feed I could see another figure walking up the ramp with a small crate on the maglifter. Another human, this one talked with the Curdo and both walked off screen for a couple seconds. They came back, the human pushing an empty maglifter. The supplies were loaded.
There went the idea of stopping somewhere and having an attempt to end this. Now we were all on board for the duration.
I felt a vibration through the ship and knew the ramp was raising.
“Now we’re ready,” Valeri said turning back to me.
Shrugging I grabbed my headset and prepared the ship for launch.
*****
The galaxy is made up of thousands, millions and maybe more, solar systems. Each system is a star in the sky. Each star is a sun with anywhere from three to a dozen planets orbiting. Out of those planets in a system, most are gas or uninhabitable. There’s usually only one or two planets in a system that can sustain life. But each planet and its moons have their own gravity. Not to mention asteroids and other objects in space. This makes jumping to warpspace difficult within a system, so everyone travels to the edge of the system to jump.
Some ships, like the Wind, can travel in-system and larger ones have to wait at the edge and take small shuttles in deeper. Lots of heavily traveled systems have space stations at the edges where all the trading comes in. Buhin was not one of those, but we still had to travel an hour or two to the edge of the system to engage the stardrive. Thankfully it’s a small system.
Once at the edge of the system, the stardrives are engaged and the ship enters warpspace, or wildspace as it’s also known. This is the weird area between systems, the stuff that surrounds it. Dark matter I guess. Whatever it’s called, you have to travel through that to get to the next system. The stardrives take trips that would be decades or centuries and makes them hours.
Star travel, the short version.
We got to the edge of the Buhin system and I engaged the Wind’s stardrives.
Most ships no longer have view windows, but I love them for just this reason.
Before us was black with thousands of white dots that were the stars. As the engines started up, the dots elongated. They stretched in continuous lines as far as the eye could see, ahead and behind. They got closer and closer together, the black disappearing, until all was white. It took on a foggy appearance, like flying through a cloud, as we entered wildspace.
I loved this view.
I caught Valeri looking out the window.
“I’ve never seen the transition before,” she said, awe in her voice. It lost some of the harshness.
“It never gets old,” I said and leaned back in my chair, arms crossed behind my head, watching the clouds of wildspace drift by.
The silence grew and there was a bit of tension to it. A ‘what now’ kind of thing. I was content to just wait it out. I was the kidnapped party, forced to do this, after all. No need for me to make it easy on them.
I heard the door slide open behind me and the other human walked in. About six foot, hundred and fifty, with brown hair and eyes. Clean shaven, hair cut short. Nothing remarkable about him. No idea what his name was, didn’t care. He was armed with a blaster like Valeri’s, in a holster hanging from a belt. Young looking, he must have been pretty inexperienced. The way he was standing, with the holster angled towards me, I could have grabbed it pretty quickly.
Lunge forward, grab and pull the gun, push him into Valeri so she can�
��t react. Two shots and I’d have them out of the fight.
I was tempted.
Valeri must have seen me looking because she pushed the kid aside, glaring at me. I returned my attention to the console.
“Set up a rotation with Yer,” she was telling the kid. “I want one of you in the hold at all times. Awake,” she finished, putting emphasis on the last word.
So much for sneaking down to the hold and seeing what was in the crates.
“And one of us with him at all times,” she said pointing at me as the kid walked out of the bridge. The door closed before him.
“Even when I need to use the lav?” I asked, an innocent smile on my face.
I got the glare.
It was starting to look good on her. How soon could someone get that condition where they started sympathizing with their captors?
“What about when I sleep?” I asked as I watched the Wind’s security camera feeds through the small monitors at my station. I could see the kid walking down the stairs and into the hold where the Curdo and Kern were. They were all pretty animated in their discussion.
“Someone will be outside the door,” she answered.
“You’re more than welcome to be inside the door,” I said and meant it as a joke, figured I’d get some kind of angry remark.
There was a pause before she answered.
“Sure,” Valeri said.
I looked over to see if she was serious. No glare and she was standing up.
What the hell.
*****
If you can, I’d recommend getting kidnapped by a good looking blond that’s wild in the bunk.
That made the trip much more interesting.
And fun.
I had no illusions about what was going on. It was just fun, a way to pass the time. I had no problems with that.
The other goons weren’t fans, but I didn’t care and apparently neither did Valeri. She was the boss. The rotation they worked out was that one person was with me at all times, one was in the hold at all times and the other two were sleeping. It went hold, sleep, me, sleep. They went on a twenty-four hour rotation. Six on, six off. There wasn’t that much time to get a true pattern and routine going but I tried to establish one with my movements. Yer, the Curdo, was a mean one. He would have killed me the first time he saw me. I avoided him as much as possible and never felt comfortable when it was his turn to watch me. Those beady little eyes just bored holes into me and I could tell he wanted to not just kill but to hurt me. The Kern was named Hors Buyt. Decent enough and might have even been friends if he wasn’t one of my captors. The other human was named Darm Hunir and he was an ass. Young and cocky with a touch of squirrely. He wasn’t long for life. Someone would put him down soon enough.
Midway through the third day was when I decided to have some fun.
Valeri’s shift at watching me was almost up and we were walking towards the galley afterwards. I wanted a beer. A good earth made beer. They were hard to come by out here and I kept a few on hand.
I walked over to the pantry, cabinets aligned against one wall, and pulled a bottle of beer out of the cooling unit. They keep telling us that replication tech is coming someday and we’ll no longer need to carry food. I don’t believe it. Leaning against the counter I surveyed the room.
Yer was sitting at the table, facing me, eating something from a bowl. I didn’t know what it was, some special food that only the Curdo would eat. It looked gross. Valeri was digging through the supplies her team had brought aboard. They were still in a box sitting on the floor.
In the way.
Which is where I kept moving it to.
And there was my target.
Darm came into the room having just switched places with Hors down below in the hold. Probably to grab a bite before his sleep rotation.
He looked tired, irritable. Perfect.
He eyed my beer and I took a drink from it.
“Damn this is good stuff,” I said to no one in particular. “Pretty rare to get a good earth beer out this far.”
Grumbling something he moved to dig around in their box of crap. Valeri had taken a seat at the head of the table where she could keep an eye on me. And she was doing that without looking directly at me. I could see her wondering what I was doing. I know she had been warned by Romer that I was smart, which I was, and crafty. She had to assume that I was always up to something.
Darm found something prepackaged and took it to the table. He sat next to Yer, glancing at Valeri and noting what she was wearing. Pants and a tank top, nothing special, but it wasn’t what she had on earlier. He knew what we had been up to.
I think little Darm was jealous.
“Better than that stuff,” I continued pointing with the plasbottle of beer at what was on his plate. I was just speaking the truth. I didn’t even know what it was supposed to be.
Setting my drink on the table, in clear view of Darm, I turned around and started pulling stuff out of the pantry. Early in the trip I had caught him in my stuff and had quickly put the locks on so only I could open the cabinets. I had to share my ship with them, not my food. It was bad enough they were all sleeping in the bunks next to mine. I’d have to pay to get their stench and germs cleaned out of my beautiful Wind.
What I pulled out was nothing fancy but it was much better than what Darm or the others had.
“Now this is what food should look like,” I said sitting down. “So kid, you from Earth or a colony?”
“Don’t call me kid,” Darm grumbled.
“How’d you know I was talking to you?” I asked innocently. “I could have been talking to Yer there,” I continued, pointing at the Curdo with my now almost empty beer bottle. “I have no idea how Curdo age, he could be a kid.” Yer, for his part, just gave me the look that said he wanted to eat me and then kill me. “But since you responded, you must get called kid a lot.”
I took another bite of my meal and another drink. I could tell he was glancing at my stuff.
“I’d offer you a beer but I don’t have that many and it’ll be awhile before I can get more. Besides kid, are you even old enough to drink?”
“You don’t need to worry about getting more,” Darm snarled.
“Is that a threat kid,” I replied taking the last swig of my beer and putting the empty plasbottle down, closer to him.
“Darm,” Valeri said calmly.
He ignored her, staring hatefully at me.
“Don’t worry Val. I’m not worried about the kid.” I could see using a familiar form of her name bothered him. He was almost twitching. This was the first time I had used that shortened form. Up until that point I hadn’t even called her, or any of them but Hors, by name the whole trip.
Darm tried to calm down, I could see him taking deep breaths. Yer just stared at me, the same look. Valeri shook her head, not wanting anything to do with it, or thinking Darm was calming down. He wasn’t. I could tell.
Back in my Special Operations days I’d been taught how to read people and how to push buttons. It was a great skill to have. Beings of all races were easier to deal with when they were off balance. Just a matter of finding the right screw to twist.
He finished eating and stood up, walking towards the head of the table. All eyes followed him, at least mine and Vals, Yer continued to glare at me. I smiled at the Curdo and felt the urge to stick my tongue out.
“You didn’t answer me kid,” I said to Darm as he passed by Val. “You from Earth or a colony?”
I could feel Darm’s eyes boring into my skull as he walked towards the sink mounted in the cabinets. I heard the dish fall into the metal bowl. He was now directly behind me.
“It’s not a big deal kid,” I continued and got myself ready, not showing it in my body language. “Just making conversation. I think most people your age that are in space come from colonies. Read a stat on that or something years back. Not that many kids come out of the homeworld nowadays.”
Yer glanced up quickly over my shoulder so I
knew that Darm was standing there looking down at me. Now to just push him over the edge.
“I don’t know Val, Romer must be hard up for thugs,” I said looking across at Yer. “The Curdo here, that species is tough, so that’s a plus. A Kern like Hors is the same. And I understand you. But Darm here,” and I motioned behind me. “That one I don’t get. He’s so green, a fresh faced kid. Couldn’t Romer have done better? Back in the day this kid would just be a mule.”
I had to give him credit, he didn’t make a sound and moved pretty quick but I was expecting it.
He lunged for me, probably wanting to grab me in a headlock or push my head against the table. I darted to the side, pushing the chair back so it slammed into him. His hand just missed my right shoulder and I grabbed his reaching arm with my left. I stepped backwards and pulled him forward, his body pushing the chair against the table and into his stomach. With my right arm, while holding his left pulled out, I reached over his shoulder and cupped his chin. I pulled his head back, kept his left arm out and stepped behind him. I kicked his legs out and he fell forward but was pinned by my headlock. He struggled, trying to move his left hand and reach at me with his right but the angle was wrong and my knee in his back drove him against the chair.
Darm was coughing and sputtering.
“Dumb move kid,” I said calmly.
“Let him go Lancer,” Valeri said and I looked to see her and Yer standing up, both with weapons pointed at me.
I leaned forward, close to Darm’s ear, well keeping my eyes on Valeri. As much as Yer might want to shoot me, he was going to follow her lead.
“They’re not going to shoot me,” I said to Darm. “Without me they can’t land on Orso or even fly the ship. You’re expendable. That’s probably why you were sent along. Just a body to give them a break on watch.”
“Lancer.”
I released his arm and his head, pushing it down with my hand as I stood up. Darm jerked back and turned towards me, holding his chest where the chair had been against it. There was a lot of hate in that stare but I could see fear too. Kids like this, put the fear in them and they fold. I smiled.
