Yesterday's Spacemage

by Timothy Ellis

  "Do you like living?"

  "I think so. Why?"

  "Because if you joke like that again, you'll find out what not living is all about. Got it?"

  "Note to self. Jenna doesn't have a sense of humour."

  "Of course I bloody do! Just not about my ship and crew. Are we invisible yet?"

  I concentrated, drawing power from my ship. I threw my sight outside the ship, and looked back at us.

  "Nothing to see here."

  "Good. We need to keep it that way until after the jump, and maybe longer, depending on what's on the other side."

  "Roger that."

  I slumped down in my chair, and waited for something to happen.

  Sixteen

  Being invisible wasn’t enough apparently. We'd sailed straight passed the six ships, threaded the needle as Jenna said, and something odd happened.

  The stars shifted. Not all of them, but enough to cause me to blink in confusion. The system information on the main screen vanished for a moment, and something quite different came up to replace it.

  "What was that?" I asked.

  "We jumped."

  "Jumped?"

  "Think of a solar system as being a big bubble. Where two bubbles rub against each other, we can jump from one to the other instantaneously. We just did that. Heads up, two more pirates here."

  She'd showed me the dots which indicated ships, and as I looked at it, a third one appeared.

  "Damnit! One of them followed us through."

  Missiles launched from the new one, and seconds later, from the others.

  "Do your thing!"

  I did my thing. I gathered all the energy I could, reached out for the nearest missile, and turned it back. I quickly did the same for each of them, with the exception of the last one, which impacted our shields before I had time to deal with it. One by one, in fast order, they impacted the ship which fired them, and suddenly there was nothing but debris.

  "You need to speed that up."

  I sighed. Maybe so, but she could have said thanks first.

  For something to do as we sped away, I cast my sight around the debris field.

  "There are pallets of stuff intact in the debris field. Want any of it?"

  "Sure, but I'm not stopping. Put anything you can grab in the main secondary hold for now, and I’ll sort it when I get a chance."

  "Will do."

  I reached out, and began moving whatever looked intact. It kept me occupied for an hour, before I suddenly found myself out of range. At which time Jenna told me to put the ship ID chip back in, which I did. She double checked it was working, and showing the correct ID.

  Feeling hungry, I went off to my kitchen. The pirates who'd crewed this ship had lived very nicely. Comfortable beds, good food, and even a nice wine cellar. Jenna had everything moveable from the other ships, moved into mine. I was well stocked for living here indefinitely.

  For some reason, it was a thought which left me cold.

  I chose something to eat, ate it, and trashed the remains. I was barely at the door before a cleaner bot appeared to remove any mess I'd made.

  I found Jenna in the cargo hold, scanning labels on pallets. She passed the pad over to me, which showed a list of what I'd salvaged from space. It was a long list.

  She pointed to one item.

  "That one is money for the ship, and all we need to do is return it to the nearest post office."

  "Post office?"

  "It’s a shipment of small parcels, assigned to some ship the pirates must have hit. There is a post office on every station, and they see to it everything is sent to where it needs to go. Most of it is insured against loss or destruction, so when we hand it in, the insurance value will be paid to the ship. The codes on some of the items show them to be high value."

  "So why not sell it all ourselves?"

  "I'm not a pirate!"

  She was very forceful about it.

  "Fine."

  I held up both hands palm towards her in a sign of submission.

  "Privateer laws apply to salvage. We can pick up anything floating in space. If the packaging is intact, along with the destination, it needs to be sent on its way again. Sometimes there will be a bounty placed on its recovery, often not. The post office is good for those bounties."

  "And if there's no label?"

  "If it's open, or the label is gone, so no ownership can be ascertained, we get to keep it, or sell it."

  "Hmmm."

  "No!"

  "No?"

  "No. You will not remove labels, or open anything which isn’t."

  I looked her in the eyes, and she was deadly serious. Spoilsport. Still, I could see the benefits of seeming to be a legit and honest trader. The problem was, I couldn’t see any attraction to being one myself.

  So far, I'd seen no reason why anyone should be honest out here. I guessed there must be honest people around somewhere. Jenna appeared to be one of them.

  "Is this your normal stance? Or do you just need brownie points where we next dock?"

  "Both. I need to be able to explain why this ship doesn’t conform to specs anymore for one thing."

  "I’d have thought that was easy."

  "How so?"

  "Tell the truth. You were captured by pirates, and after escaping, you found they'd modified your ship. On the way out of their system, you found a debris field, and stopped to collect as much as you could."

  "I guess that works. I sure as hell can't tell anyone you're a magician. No-one would believe it anyway."

  "And anyone who did, would immediately be a threat to me."

  "As far as I can see, you’re the threat. You represent a wild card in a poker deck. If you keep on the way you are, word is going to get around, and people are going to become interested in you."

  "All the more reason to get me home as soon as possible."

  "All in good time."

  We spent the next few hours moving pallets around, dividing them up into what needed to be offloaded to continue to their destinations, what was worth keeping for the ship, and what would be sold.

  After, she taught me something new about computers, and had me practicing a new skill.

  I was pretty sure getting caught doing this, was going to be bad for the both of us.

  Seventeen

  By the time we arrived at the next station, I'd been staving off boredom by reading a selection of novels Jenna had on board. Most of them did nothing for me, being romances of one description or another, but a few kept me occupied. I made a note to find my own reading material.

  The station orbited a planet this time, and I had my first view of what a planet looked like from space. It was pretty mesmerizing, at least until the novelty wore off.

  Before docking was granted, Jenna was bombarded with questions. Her ship was listed as missing, and she had to explain what happened. As with me, it turned out she'd done something stupid, by taking a route too close to known pirate space, and been boarded, and captured. She introduced me as someone also escaping slavers, who'd helped her escape, and retake her ship. The modification explanation was accepted without question.

  They turned their attention to me. All I could tell them was space travel wasn’t known on my world, and I’d been stunned on the ground, and woke up in space. I had no idea where my planet was, or how it was referenced, or even if it was known here.

  Not having identification proved to be an issue. Jenna had none as well, but her identifiers were known, and she just had to supply them for checking. I was going to have to supply them all before being allowed on the station.

  Jenna provided the location of the pirate station, and this was promised to be passed on to authorities. But the person saying this didn’t look as if it was likely to be actioned. I wondered why. If ever a hole in the ground needed filling in, it was that station. Presumably someone was tasked with rooting out slavery and piracy, but maybe that someone wasn’t here. Hence as far as anyone here was concerned, it was somebody else's
problem.

  My problem became worse as soon as we docked. Jenna was quickly checked against her records, in spite of having already sent all this already. It didn’t take long, and she had a new identity card. And then all the attention turned to me.

  Standing there on the dock, ringed by security officers who all but had their hands on their guns, some bean counter began interrogating me.

  No, I had no idea what my home planet was called. We hadn't really called it anything interesting, and our word for it was translatable as 'dirt'. Not very useful as a galactic name.

  No, I didn’t know where my home planet was. The best I could do was something over two weeks away from here. Or two weeks from the pirate slaver station. No, I didn’t know the direction. No, I had no idea how to determine it from a ship computer. And in any case, even if I did now, I didn’t then.

  No, I hadn't the foggiest idea where I was now. Eyebrows went up alarmingly at this one. No, I haven’t even asked Jenna where we were headed. Why not? It meant nothing to me, since I had no reference to fit anything together.

  And hey, I really don’t give a shit anyway! This is a ride for me, until Jenna gets me home.

  I offered to stay on the ship if they would stop asking me stupid questions. Fingers twitched over gun butts. It didn’t really matter, I had a shield around me, but they didn’t know that.

  The questions continued, this time about local stuff, apparently I should have known about simply from the news feed coming in. I looked at Jenna, as if to say, 'did we get a news feed?', and she nodded. I shook my head in a 'now you tell me' motion. I repeated not knowing about it, or caring if I had. The end of Jenna's mouth twitched. Maybe she did have a sense of humour after all.

  The bean counter finally gave up. They covered my hands in black shit, and took prints of both of them. I peered into a scanner, and they took images of both eyes. And lastly, I was stuck with a needle, they drew blood, and told me it was a dna sample. I opened my mouth to ask what the hell that was when it was home, and was preempted with the information it was for a unique genetic code, and if I didn’t know what a genetic code was, I should look it up.

  A gizmo on top of a portable podium, spat out an identity card for me, I was told to present my pad, and it dinged as a file transferred to it, which turned out to be both local laws, and those for the local area of space this system belonged to. I read the first page, and my eyes glazed over. The other side of Jenna's mouth twitched.

  I was formally welcomed to the station, advised to obey all local laws, and hoped I would enjoy my stay here. The whole lot of them left.

  My hands were still black.

  Eighteen

  "So you want to open a bank account with us, young sir?"

  "I'm told I should."

  "Excellent. Do you have funds to deposit?"

  I dumped a large wad of notes in front of her. Her mouth went serious.

  "Where did you obtain these notes?"

  I noticed there was no mention of how I obtained them, just where.

  "I escaped from a slaver on a pirate station. I managed to liberate some compensation for my captivity as I left. Is there a problem?"

  "I guess not. We don’t see this stuff very often, but we are allowed to take it. You realize of course, the exchange rate won't be in your favour at all."

  I'd been warned this would be the case. All the same, it was still a healthy amount to open an account with.

  "Give me the best you can. It's all I have for now, and all I'm likely to have for some time, since my captain isn’t going to pay me until we reach our next station."

  I was lying, but it felt like a good sob story was needed here. I would be getting a share of what I’d salvaged, but no-one needed to know it.

  "And it's not going to be much either," I added, "since I'm just basic crew with no qualifications at all."

  She nodded, as if she could see I was, and started sorting the notes. Each type went into a machine which checked them for whatever they checked them for, and spat them out counted. When they were all done, she fed the amounts into her computer, and it spat out a piece of paper. She handed it over to me, pointing at the bottom figure.

  "That’s what you get in local currency, which is usable through this whole sector of space without needing to be converted. Is this acceptable?"

  "It'll have to be."

  "ID card please."

  I handed it over, she pushed it into a slot, pushed some buttons, and gave it back to me. She pushed a small box towards me.

  "Thumb print please."

  I looked at it, and looked up at her.

  "No black shit?"

  She laughed.

  "Heavens no. Banks pride themselves in using the latest tech, which means no black shit, as you call it. Just stick your right thumb anywhere on the reader."

  I did.

  "Thank you," she said, pulling it away from me. "Everything seems to be in order. Pad please."

  I put my pad down in front of me. It dinged as a file transferred to it.

  "Your banking interface is now on your pad. You can pay for anything on the station using a thumb print, and the bill will be transferred into the banking system, and come to us for processing. Faster than you can get to another station, or down planet, your thumb print will be distributed through the banking network. As a spacer though, you have options for taking your funds with you."

  "I assumed I'd need to withdraw cash."

  "It's one option. Lots do, but not an efficient way, especially with the amount you have in your account. You can simply leave it in your account, and draw on it anywhere you go, but if for some reason coms between systems are interrupted for any time, where you go next may not have an accurate total for you."

  "Does that happen a lot?"

  "Enough for us to provide another option. We can issue you another card, which you can transfer your funds to before you leave the station. At your next port, you simply transfer some or all of these funds back into your account. Hence the interface on your pad. It's quick and easy. Would you like the card now?"

  "Yes please."

  She busied herself for a few moments, and a card popped out of a slot I hadn't noticed. She passed it over.

  "A warning. This is like cash. While it's tied directly to your account, if you lose it, it's gone. Anyone can tie it to their account, and transfer the funds off it, and no-one is going to question it. A lot of large transactions get paid this way. We issue these cards all the time, and in fact, you can get as many as you want, loaded with specific amounts. Once you hand them to someone else, or you lose it, or it's taken from you, there is no way of getting the funds back. Do you understand this?"

  "I do."

  I'd never had one before, but I'd been taught all about bank card systems. This was different, but not too different. The loss part I’d found out from Jenna, who'd lost a great deal when she was captured.

  I placed the card next to my pad, and it beeped.

  "Your pad just synced with the card, which currently has nothing on it. Once you have some privacy, try the transfer options. There is some security for while you walk around with a card, as long as you set it on your pad. It stops anyone else syncing with your card, as long as your card and pad are within the distance of a small room of each other. If you have any questions, come back and ask me."

  As a security measure, it was a bit half-arsed in my opinion. It meant anyone could steal the card, but they couldn’t access it until you were a short distance away. But it did stop the syncing of cards as people walked by. On the other hand, for those like me, it meant cards used less space than cash did. I'd need to check all the fine print about them though. If the pad sync being lost sounded an alarm, stealing cards was going to be problematical.

  "I will. Thanks."

  "One last thing. It’s a good idea to leave some funds in your account all the time. As a general rule, arriving at a station or planet with an empty account, especially with a pending update flag on it,
is frowned upon."

  "More so than arriving without any form of ID?"

  She laughed again. It was a nice sound.

  "Probably not. But zero balances throw up all sorts of blocks, and the first thing you have to do is prove you can pay for things, before they let you on the station. The process is tedious. When you show your ID as you come off your ship the first time, a status of your account is presented to the immigration officer. They won't know how much is in it, but they will be told if it's enough to pay usual bills while on-station, or on-planet. If your account is healthy enough for any sort of expenditure, they get a different status code, and this one makes them happy. The suggested amounts are in the interface, and the first time you do a transfer to the card, it will prompt you to consider leaving an appropriate amount. Or alternately, transfer to your account before you leave the ship."

  "I'll take your advice. The last thing I need is a repeat of today's inquisition."

  She laughed again.

  Nineteen

  "You want me to do what?"

  "Get me access to the security database."

  "And how would I do that? Remember, I know very little about computers."

  "You could use that magical sight of yours to observe a username and password I could then use."

  "If I don’t die of boredom first, waiting for it to happen."

  "Well I need to find where certain ships are at the moment. I know the ships my crew are on now, but I don’t know where they are. But station security's trade information about who is where, and heading in what direction. The sector military get it all as well. So what I need is in the database here."

  "How do you know your crew are still on the ships?"

  "I don’t. And wont until we catch up with them. But as soon as the last of the sales is made, I want to be out of here, and heading after my engineer."

  "Let me look."

  She nodded.

  I cast my sight into the security office, which I’d walked past earlier. There was plenty of activity going on, but no-one was needing to type in passwords. I concentrated on the computer itself, but other than its own workings, there was no data stored there. Nor was there in the entire office. I followed the cables leading down into the bowels of the station, where I found a small room. Inside it was a computer, and a set of storage devices.