by J. S. Fields
She shrugged again. “Maybe. I dunno.” She brightened. “Hey, want to come with me on the tramp? I mean, I’m eighteen, same as you. I haven’t seen anything worth seeing, but it’d still be nice to spend Journey with someone anatomically compatible. You know?”
Nicholas tugged at the collar of his coveralls. It was a lot hotter in this hallway than it had been a minute ago. “Not really.”
“No?” She stopped walking and put her hands on her hips. “That’s fine, but, like, what do you want? Not law, apparently, or your enthusiasm slider maxes at, like, two. Not sex, which is totally your prerogative, but there has to be something. What are your scores?”
“Scores?” Nicholas’s brow wrinkled. “On what?”
“Your exit scores. Come on.”
Nicholas giggled nervously. “Oh, right. I got honors on my bio-composites and history of cellulose exams. Standard one ranking on everything else.”
“Huh. I got honors on Common and interstellar mathematics. Couple of twos though on things like history, especially cellulose history. That stuff is dry. ‘Course, you’re going into law, so you probably love it.” Watchara winked at him.
“But I don’t, I mean, love it.” Nicholas scrambled for the right words. How did one respond to a wink? Another wink? A bow? He wasn’t any good at this flirting stuff. Still, she was being friendly, and Nicholas wasn’t about to be rude. “I just…want to be in space, you know? In, like, a cutter or a skiff, or one of those other zippy ships.” He mimed making a sharp turn with a round steering wheel. “Juking, dodging asteroids, and stuff. Learning about other cultures. We’ve had our whole lives regimented, and this is our first chance to break free. All within the bounds of the law though, of course.”
Watchara’s eyebrows arched halfway up her forehead. “You want tramp transport.”
“I do not!” Nicholas continued walking, not bothering to see if Watchara followed. “Those people are filthy, and if there was some crime clinging to the Systems, it’d be with them. My sister did six months with one. She came back with botflies. Botflies! Like, the actual Earth bug, but apparently it got off Earth and infested some other world—and found her! And the language the pilots use!”
“You could have mine, if you wanted.” A half smile played on Watchara’s face.
“Your interview? What’ll you do, then? You want to try for the law firm?”
She laughed. “No! But I, uh, was thinking—” She nodded to her left at a wide door marked EXIT in Common. She lowered her voice and whispered into his ear. “I was thinking I might run.”
The words didn’t compute. Run where? Run to what? She had a fine life. They all did. She had good scores, she’d get a good Journey placement, and she was free to spend the next two years doing as much or as little as she wanted. Running didn’t make any sense. Nicholas wrinkled his nose and turned to face her. “Run where?”
Watchara opened her arms out and raised them above her head in a clap. “Out there! Anywhere! You don’t have to go through the offices, you know.” She pointed to the YOUTH embroidery. “You got the coveralls, you got the pass.”
“Yeah, but you’ve got to be signed to someone. You can’t just be on your own. Right? Youths can’t just be unassigned?”
“We get a two-week grace period. We’re supposed to be learning ourselves and figuring out adulthood, and what better way than on my own?”
“You could get—”
“Killed? Maimed? Robbed? It’s the Charted Systems, Nicholas. When was the last time you even yelled at someone?”
“I’m about to.”
Watchara smirked. “I’m going. Plenty of offices in this district alone, and I’m sure someone wants cheap labor. Catch you later, trader. Have fun with your books.” She sidestepped to the exit door and, with a salute, slipped out into the acidic-smelling air of Corieus’s capital.
The door slammed shut behind her. Nicholas let the air curl up into his sinuses as he debated. Part of him wanted to chase after her, but she was right. She wasn’t in any danger, and she wasn’t really breaking any rules. He could go after her, he supposed, but why? Anything out there wasn’t going to be better than anything in here. The internship on Risal was a good opportunity. It would pay well. He’d be happy there, right?
“Right,” Nicholas said out loud. He’d walked without thinking farther down the hall and now stood at a T-junction. To his left, the door to room eighteen stood ajar, the backside of a Risalian in a yellow tunic sticking out from the frame. To the right was door seventeen. It was closed, and no light spread from the gap near the floor, but Nicholas could still hear the sounds of arguing.
“Left is security,” Nicholas murmured. “Left is security and good wages and probably a good job when I get back to Earth. Right is bugs and hard floors and probably…bars.” He bit his lower lip. “Bars and greasy food. Music. Sleeping in till noon and lazy days of reading while you wait to exit a wormhole. Ah, screw it.” It was just an interview, right? He could always turn it down.
Nicholas took several short, tentative steps towards the loud voices. The arguing was still going on, but it wasn’t angry arguing, like when you accidentally stepped on someone’s foot and they yelled at you for being careless. It was more like when his parents argued about some trivial matter, like his father’s inability to see the crumbs he’d left on the countertop. It was mostly indistinct, however, so Nicholas edged to the door and tried to listen in. Best to know what he was walking into before he actually walked into it, surely.
“Well, fuck, Captain. If we can’t make the delivery by the ninth, then why take it at all?”
There was a huff and the sound of a chair scooting over a plastic floor. “Because the money is good.”
“We won’t get paid if we’re late!” That voice, the first one, sounded exasperated.
“Maybe we won’t be late this time.”
Someone sat down heavily on a chair. Nicholas heard the cushion exhale. “When, since I started working for you, have we ever made a delivery on time?”
Well, it certainly sounded like what Nicholas expected. Tramp transport meant hauling jobs for whomever was paying, old broken-down ships, and crusty space captains. Nicholas wasn’t sheltered. He’d watched movies growing up and knew exactly what kind of people, and what kind of smells, in theory, he’d be in for.
“Stupid to be nervous. I need to practice my interview skills anyway,” Nicholas murmured before he pushed the door open and stepped in. “I can do this.”
“Ah, see? Here is someone now.”
Nicholas edged back into the hall as a…well, a biped of some form grabbed his hand with sticky fingers and pulled him to a chair. She was taller than him and had weird little stress lines at the junction where her nose met her forehead. Her hair was strawberry blonde, her skin coppery, and she had way too many fingers. She had to be a Neek, but that didn’t make any sense. What was she doing off-world?
“Uhh…” Nicholas began. “Shouldn’t you be, I mean, why are you—”
“Sit,” the Neek instructed. “I’m asking questions first. How’s your sense of time?”
“Uh…” Nicholas looked at the other person in the room. The man was Terran—Nicholas was sure—with a wide, heavyset frame, a little too much paunch than what was considered healthy, and a scruffy, brown beard that was threatening to eat his face and neck. Where it started and where the man’s curly, dark-brown hair ended, Nicholas couldn’t even begin to discern. He was wearing the same beige flight suit—wrinkled and stained—as the Neek, and they both smelled exactly as Nicholas had expected. As an added bonus, the Neek’s fingers appeared to be dripping some sort of snot. No, wait. Not snot. Mucus. The Neek secreted empathic mucus from their fingers. It was the plot of at least four B movies back on Earth.
“Um. Ah.” Nicholas tore his eyes from the Neek’s dripping fingers and managed to look at her face. “How might I address you? Captain? Pilot? Madam, sir, or something else?”
The man barked a laugh as the o
ther biped looked startled. Nicholas hunched in his chair. This definitely wasn’t the correct way to start an interview. Should he apologize? Laugh along?
“I’m the pilot, and I’m…I’m Neek. A Neek. I don’t use modifiers because they’re stupid. I’m female, and I… Anyway, my species doesn’t do individual names past childhood, so just ‘Neek’ is fine. This—” She pointed to the Terran. “—is Captain Yorden Kuebrich of the tramp transport Mercy’s Pledge, which is an old-as-dirt space shuttle from your own planet. Captain Kuebrich can tell you about its history better than me.”
“You don’t use a modifier, so you’re just going to use the name of your species and your planet?” Nicholas asked, stupidly, like he was repeating a lesson. “How is that not confusing? You can’t just use ‘pilot’ or something?”
“You don’t get an opinion on this,” Neek responded acerbically.
“Oh.” Nicholas shut his mouth and tried to think before speaking again, but his brain just wasn’t connecting with his lips. “You know that ‘The Neek Brigade of Jollies’ has a worldwide broadcast every Saturday morning around nine AM, right?”
“Jesus,” Captain Kuebrich muttered.
Neek’s eyebrows rose and remained that way. Earth videos were probably not something she cared about. He needed to get them back on track. “So, what was your modifier, then? Before the, well, before?”
Neek’s mouth turned down, and she looked away from Nicholas to the wall and stared at it as if she might melt it with her mind.
“Maybe just a little modifier? I could call you, uh, Away Neek, or Ms. Neek, or maybe—”
“Would you shut up?”
Nicholas felt warmth in his cheeks. “I’m sorry!” He stood from his chair. The interview was definitely over. There was no coming back from whatever he’d just stepped in. Maybe the Risalians were still waiting for him and he could just slide on over. Hopefully, he didn’t already smell like the room he was in.
Captain Kuebrich held out a hand and motioned for him to sit back down. “Call her anything other than ‘Neek’ and you’ll end up with an earful. What do you know about Terran shuttles, kid? Or transport, for that matter?”
Nicholas tried to catch Neek’s eyes so he could apologize, but she steadfastly refused to look at him. Frustrated and feeling more than a little guilty, Nicholas sat back in his chair and tried to focus on the captain’s questions. “I, um, know a bit about early Earth shuttles, like how some have been modded with cellulose biometals so they can travel outside our solar system. We had a whole unit on it in school. The Earth shuttles have decent cargo space if you didn’t mod out the living quarters too much, so I assume you haul small to medium jobs, just…” Nicholas tried to pick his words carefully. “Just, you probably don’t haul them very fast.”
“Ha. Well, you’re not wrong. We need another pair of hands. Neek is my pilot, but the Pledge has a combination manual and interface control panel, so Neek’s at that ninety percent of the time we’re in flight. Thank god for her big hands, because no one else can fly both systems simultaneously. I do most of the repairs—well, the small repairs—but, as you noted, the ship is old, and if something breaks or blows while we’re docking or whatever, there’s no one to actually make the delivery.” Captain Kuebrich shoved his hands into two very large pockets and stood. “You’d be manual labor, mostly. Loading and unloading. We have lots of dead time when we’re in wormholes though, so I can walk you through ship maintenance or Neek can teach you some piloting to help meet the mentorship component of Youth Journey.”
“I don’t have the patience to teach children to fly antiques.” Neek still wasn’t looking at him, but she was glaring at the captain now. Nicholas had to suppress a laugh because, while Neek’s face looked like she meant to physically harm someone, the captain’s merely looked amused. Maybe she was just mad a lot. Not having a name might do that to a being.
“We can work out the details later. Do you have any questions for us, Mister St. John?”
The hair rose on Nicholas’s arm. Thank heavens his skin was too dark to show a blush. Mister. He’d never been called that before, and it seemed really out of place, especially coming from the mouth of a tramp captain. It…it sounded like they were going to offer him this job. Even scarier, Nicholas was almost certain that if they did offer, he would accept.
“You—you’re aboveboard, right?” Nicholas asked. His voice wavered, so he balled his fists and ground his knuckles into the plastic of his chair. Professional, he thought to himself. Have to be professional, no matter how weird they are, ‘cause this is maybe sort of a cool job. It’s better than law. Mom’ll freak, but that’s okay.
Captain Kuebrich raised an eyebrow, and Neek finally turned to look at him, an unreadable expression on her face.
“I’ve never been arrested,” Yorden said, looking Nicholas right in the eyes.
“That’s not really an answer.”
“I have,” Neek said. “It’s not something I wish to repeat.”
“Still not answering my question.”
“We’re not illegal,” Yorden managed to choke out. Nicholas was certain there was a smile pulling at the captain’s mouth. “We, uh, well, we do a lot of jobs for the Markin Council on Risal.”
Nicholas blinked. They hauled for the Charted Systems sheriffs? That had to be okay then. The Risalians were the ones who upheld peace across the systems. They ran Cell-Tal, and the ruling council just before the current one had been the ones to mandate Journey in the first place. Thinking about Cell-Tal made Nicholas’s heart race. He’d love to get his hands on some of the new biometals being manufactured by the Risalian company. Rumors in the tech sphere said they were maybe a decade away from faster-than-light travel! The cellulose content of metal like that though, or even bioplastic… Nicholas could feel the slight warmth under his fingers. Getting a chance to see Cell-Tal goods before they hit market was definitely worth the time on a tramp transport, even with someone as sticky as a Neek.
“How many hauls do you do for the Markin in a given cycle?” he asked.
Captain Kuebrich blinked rapidly. He turned to Neek, who merely inclined her head towards Nicholas. “Five or six maybe, depending on need,” the captain replied, “Rest of the time, we fill in with other, smaller runs. We’ve got a hold full of andal saplings right now, if you want to see. They’re transplants from Neek—that we had to get via courier because someone can’t keep her mouth shut—destined for one of Risal’s moons. And yeah, I see your face. Andal growth struggles as much as you think it might off Neek, but hey, they keep paying us, so we keep moving them.”
“Somewhat slower than the Markin would like,” Neek added. “And all I did was send a short encrypted message. Could have been from anyone. Not my fault the Neek are paranoid.” Her posture relaxed. This time, when Nicholas tried to catch her eye, she held his gaze and then flicked a finger towards him. A droplet of her finger-mucus landed on his hand.
“Oh god, why?” Nicholas scrubbed the back of his hand on the leg of his coveralls. A funny tickle ran down his spine, and he scrunched up his shoulders.
Neek snorted. She brushed her hands across her pants, and little white flakes fell onto the floor.
Yorden gave Neek a tired look. “After we deliver these, we’ll get loaded with a bunch of the new biofilms for Baltec, in the Minoran System. Stuff is so fresh you can still smell the andal sap. What do you say? Want to sign on?”
Did he? Nicholas sat silently for a moment. Two years was a long time on a no-name ship with two no-name people. Still, the thought of the Cell-Tal products pulled at him. He was a tech geek, after all. He had half a dozen pocket communicators in his duffle, and those were just the ones he’d thought might be fun to toy with once he got settled down. Some were old enough to still be called “phones.” A few he’d built himself. Getting to look at the brand-new Cell-Tal tech, maybe getting to even meet some of those engineers…it was too good to pass up.
He could take an internship at Cell-Tal
and spend two years doing grunt work on the off chance he might be picked to work on one of the new projects, but on a tramp…on a tramp, he’d get to go right to the heart of the manufacturing. They’d be in and out of warehouses all the time. Engineers would have to check the products after they were loaded to make sure no damage had occurred. Nicholas would be alone—well, alone with Captain Kuebrich and Neek—with a cargo hold of Cell-Tal products and a Cell-Tal engineer or two. And if there happened to be a holdup for departure, or some issue with export permits, Nicholas might find the time to wander off the ship and into the labs…
“I’ll do it.”
Wow, he sounded confident. This was what it was like to be an adult, maybe. Making choices. Turning down one avenue that was definitely what your parents wanted to pursue your dreams. His mother would have a fit. If Hayley had come back from Journey swearing like a sailor from the far reaches of the Systems, then Nicholas couldn’t imagine what type of education was in store for him with these two.
“Great.” Yorden slapped his thigh as he stood. “I’ll go sign the paperwork. Neek will take you to the Pledge and get you settled in.”
A big grin settled across Neek’s face. As Nicholas followed Yorden out the door, Neek slapped Nicholas on the back. She let her hand linger there, and Nicholas felt the wetness from her fingers soak through his coveralls and start to gel on his skin.
“Gaahhh!” He ducked away from her and moved farther down the hall. “Why?”
Neek shrugged and put her hands in her pockets. “Because it’s fun—and Terrans seem to uniformly hate stuk. Not my problem, but it’s definitely going to be yours.”
“Do you have to ooze so much?” Nicholas growled as he and Neek took a left while Yorden headed to the main offices.
“Are you really this delicate?” she shot back. They rounded another corner and went out an exit door. There, on a small landing pad, sat a Terran shuttle—a Soviet Terran shuttle. It was white, mainly, and most of its external plating had been replaced with basic cellulose weave. There were dents and missing pieces across most of the structure, and near the viewscreen, he saw…a laser turret? Really? Weapons were banned across the Systems. This one looked old enough to have maybe gotten grandfathered in, but still. What kind of Markin haul jobs required weapons?
