by Joseph Lallo
“You are the, ah, the courier?” she asked anxiously.
She had a plain face and mousy brown hair pulled back. Up close he could see that she was perhaps an inch taller than him and rail thin. There was something about her that made it seem like she ought to be wearing glasses but wasn’t. Her voice was shaky but precise, wringing every ounce of pronunciation out of the word ‘courier.’ Everything about her screamed ‘academic,’ as though she were a professor or librarian at a masquerade party. This clearly wasn’t something that she was comfortable doing, but she was trying her very best to play the role. She cast a wary glance up and down his wardrobe.
Lex straightened his tie. “I had a prior engagement. This is the package, I presume?”
“Yes, yes. I need this delivered, but before I agree to give it to you I need your assurances on a number of points.”
“I’ll endeavor to oblige.”
“It is beyond important that this be delivered with the utmost of discretion. No one should know that you have it or where it is going. You should not look at the package’s contents, and above all else no aspect of this delivery should be made known to VectorCorp. I cannot stress this point enough.”
“That’s not an uncommon request. It is something of a specialty, in fact.”
“Yes, I know. I did a lot of research before settling on your services. You were the only freelancer on the planet with no formal citations. I wasn’t even sure if you were legitimate at first.”
“Oh, I’m the real thing.”
That Lex most certainly was. Once his indiscretions had closed off racing as an outlet for his talents, there were precious few jobs to feed his need for a challenge. The military was always looking for a few good pilots, but once they had them they didn’t do anything but show off at the airshows. The space-based combat was fought almost entirely with automated drones these days. Conflicts could rage for years without a single loss of human life. Usually the victory went to whoever had the best production line and the best AI. Transport Captains spent most of their time babysitting autopilot, too. That really only left him with the choice of freelance courier, the sort of person who carries things that for one reason or another the client doesn’t want to put into the hands of one of the big three transport companies.
“I can do the job for you, Miss...”
“No names.”
“Alright, Miss No Name. I can do the job, but I should warn you that I’m not a fan of transporting illegal stuff. Drugs, corporate espionage. I need to know that’s not what’s in this package.”
While it was true that he preferred not to deal in such things, he’d made the statement primarily out of liability concerns. On the off chance this was a sting, or he was in some way being monitored, it would be handy to have it made clear that he at least had been told that it was on the up and up.
“No, no, nothing like that. Just something... private. I need the package delivered to a locker in the Lon Djinn region of Makou, Tessera V.”
“That’s a fair distance away. Any time table?”
“As soon as possible, but don’t sacrifice secrecy for speed. When can you have it there?”
Lex ran a few calculations in his head, plotting out the route, figuring the maximum time and adding a reasonable buffer.
“To keep myself out of VectorCorp’s patrol space the whole way? Eight days.”
She chewed her lip for a moment. The time worried her. And not just the time. She was practically trembling, the case and purse clutched tightly in her hands. This was something serious, something that had her on edge. It was clear that the cloak and dagger stuff wasn’t just for show to her. She really thought it was necessary.
“I might be able to squeeze a bit more speed out of the old ship if I tune it a bit first. I could do it in six,” Lex offered.
There goes that buffer. Clearly he’d made an impression, though. A whisper of tension was relieved, and she allowed herself a shaky sigh.
“As long as you are sure you can make it there.”
“I assure you,” he said, placing a hand on her shoulder, “Your package will be delivered safely and secretly. You don’t have to worry about it. I don’t fail at this sort of thing. Now, as for the fee.”
This was always the trickiest part. Some people wanted a private courier because they could not afford VectorCorp. Clearly this woman was interested in the privacy angle. That meant he could charge a premium. He had to select a price that would cover his expenses with enough headroom to at least get him back into his apartment and cover the bills until his next legitimate paycheck, but not so much that it would scare her away. A number formed in his head.
“I can give you 1.5 million credits. The first half million right now and the remainder will be provided by the recipient upon delivery,” she said quickly.
“That will do.”
Her offer was at least triple what he normally charged for a high security job like this, and more than double what he’d been thinking of asking. It was all he could do to keep the smile off of his face.
“Excellent. Here is the package,” she said, handing him the case and fishing out a large envelope bulging at the bottom, “This is your first payment. The full delivery details are inside. Please, hurry.”
She lingered for a moment, looking for the life of her like she’d just handed over her first born. Lex marched away, leaving his bike where it was. His client seemed skittish enough as it was. The visual of him taking off on the same sort of vehicle a pizza boy might use would probably make her think twice about her decision to trust him. When she decided to move, she moved quickly, looking furtively in either direction before disappearing out of a different door than she’d entered. After a long enough delay to be sure she wasn’t watching, he pulled down his bike and piloted out over the city.
If he was going to make it to Tessera V in six days without drawing too much attention he was going to have to leave pretty much immediately, but that was fine with him. May as well let the landlady stew a few days. Paying her off right when she asked might make her think he’d been holding out on her. Besides, a few days plotting out routes and listening to engines purr would be a chance to settle his nerves and get away from his troubles for a while. A trip like this was long overdue.
Chapter 4
The most costly part of space travel, in the old days, had been the takeoff. Escaping a planet’s gravity well took a huge amount of energy, and it all had to be done under conventional propulsion. Ways had been found to do an end run around the laws of physics in terms of exceeding light speed without needing the energy of an exploding star to pull it off, but those methods were dangerous to do inside a star system, and more or less impossible in an atmosphere. An early and still popular method to ease the energy cost of this first step in space-faring was the invention of the space elevator. It wasn’t anything special, just a very long tether hooked up to a space station in low orbit, but it let you load-lift and haul material into space without pesky concerns about thrust and escape velocity.
Lex puttered to a stop at one of the four service tethers at Golana Interstellar. They were skinny things compared to the mighty commuter and cargo tethers, but they let the maintenance crew ferry parts and personnel to the station without interrupting scheduled trams. He shouldered his bike and pressed a thumb to the scanner. It gave a satisfying bleep and the security door swished open. Back in his racing days, Lex had done a fair amount of performance tuning on his ships, cars, and sleds. He wasn’t the best mechanic around, but he knew his way around an engine, so Blake registered him as a part timer at his garage for those times when things were getting a little backed up and he needed the extra help. One of the added benefits was free, ‘round the clock access to ‘The Upstairs,’ Golana Interstellar’s orbital section.
“Hey, Denny. Mention the tux and I’ll slap you,” Lex said with a nod to the teenager working the security desk.
“Hi, Mr. Alexander. Reason for tram usage?” he squeaked.
&
nbsp; “I need to shuttle some ships around for Blake. I’ll be taking one off planet, so it’s going to be a multi-day thing.”
“Sure thing.”
A few minutes later a tram the size of a shipping container came zipping up from below the loading deck. Maintenance tethers were in pairs, one up and one down. It helped keep the traffic flowing when a schedule wasn’t possible. The gate released a pressurized hiss as it disengaged and he stepped inside. It was a no frills vehicle, little more than a super-sized elevator with a row of seats along one wall, and a matching one upside-down above them. A few more minutes passed while they waited to see if anyone else was going to be burning the midnight oil, then the doors closed and sealed. A control panel on the door worked its way through a sequence of safety checks. Air pressure: Nominal. Tether Integrity: Nominal. Power Integrity: Nominal. Inertial Inhibitor: Active. A pair of heavy duty electric motors whined with effort and the tram began to accelerate upwards.
If he was a first-timer, he would have been awed by the speed of it. The various floors of the maintenance building shot by in a blur of stone and metal, and then the ground was dropping away as though gravity had decided to reverse and he was now falling upward. The acceleration should have been enough to pin him painfully to the floor, but the very same thing that made the limo stunt survivable was at work here as well, doing the job it was actually invented to do. Through the sort of complex quantum physics that a science geek would spend three hours gushing over and the average person would write off as magic, a field generator inside the tram canceled out the excess acceleration, keeping the ride at a rock steady 1g. Without it, the whole ride would either be much slower, much less comfortable, or likely a combination of the two.
About a third of the way through the trip the motors approached their top speed and the acceleration started to drop, the gravity going along with it. Lex grabbed one of the hand rails scattered liberally along the walls and pivoted himself upside-down with a yawn. Artificial gravity was possible, but it was a much larger and more expensive process, so the elevator and most small ships did without. A warning light began to blink on a panel, and the readout listing motor status switched from ‘Powered’ to ‘Regenerative Breaking.’ The gravity came back, though this time on the ceiling, and he took a seat on one of the chairs that seemed so out of place at the beginning of the trip. Barely three minutes after he’d left the surface, the gravity drifted away again and the tram clicked into the docking section of The Upstairs.
“Hey! T-Lex!” said the orbiting counterpart of the squeaky teen.
“Just Lex, thanks. Heading to Blake’s. Ignore the tux.”
“You said it, T-Man!”
Lex grumbled. There were a lot of people up here that he’d had semi-professional ties with back when he was a C-List celebrity, so it still came as a thrill to them when he showed up. They were having an even harder time adjusting to his fall from grace than he’d had. For the first few dozen visits it had been like having salt in an open wound to hear them ask what starlets he’d been partying with, but now it was just background noise. If zero-g and working in orbit could become humdrum, what chance did a few behind the times security guards have?
A few quick lift rides and a few minutes drifting down zero-g hallways led Lex to the employee entrance at Blake’s. The civilian sections of The Upstairs were situated at the outer rim of long, rotating rings that provided the sensation of gravity. The service tunnels and other nuts and bolts sections were stuck wherever they were needed, and thus ranged from almost normal gravity to microgravity. Blake’s was one of the places with no gravity at all, and it served his purposes just fine. Between moving heavy equipment around and having to interact with naked space so often, zero-g was more of a convenience than an annoyance.
“Hey, Lex!” Blake said, tapping at a pad tethered to his wrist as various jump-suited employees drifted about their daily tasks around him, “Fresh from the chauffeur job?”
“Not exactly fresh, but yeah. You said you needed me to get Betsy out of here for a few days, right?”
“Yeah, just for a few days. The ships are already coming in. I guarantee I’ll need the dock.”
“No problem. I have to take a trip around the corner anyway. You had that delivery for me?”
“It is in the storage locker outside your airlock.”
“Thanks loads, man. I just got a decent payoff. You sure you don’t want any money for this?”
“Just make sure you get your ass up here if I get someone looking for race tuning. No one I’ve got does it half as good as you.”
“That’s because you’re too busy taking instrument readings to actually listen to the engines, Blake. Listen to what she says, she’ll tell you what she wants.”
“Whatever, Lex.”
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.
“THAT’S your ship?”
“Yep!” Lex said proudly, “Why so surprised?”
“I don’t know, I was expecting something... sexier.”
“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.
“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.”
“It looks like crap.”
The access door hissed open. Lex drifted inside, looking back.
“You don’t bet on the best looking horse, you bet on the fastest one,” he said.
“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.
“The tint is broken, remember?”
“Clearly I don’t.”
“Just get out of here.”
“Fine. I’ll be back in two, two and a half weeks. That cool?”
“Yeah, sure. We’ll be cleared out by then.”
“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 a
nd 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.
