Shadow Run

by Michael Miller

  The comms crackled to life with Qole’s voice. It resonated with the timbre of someone who was steady, alert, and completely in her element. “Do your thing, Arjan.”

  The sharp triangle of the skiff gleamed in the gaslight of the clouds as it juked and twisted around space debris to keep up and, miraculously, keep the net out of the worst of the asteroid interference. He created a huge arc, predicting where the Shadow specks would flow next.

  “Ready?” His voice came in, calm as could be, as though he hadn’t just threaded the needle of death.

  “Count to two, then bring it in.” Qole’s tone carried with it all the same emotions.

  While Arjan’s job was difficult, he had the more maneuverable vessel by far. What he was doing was amazing, but not unbelievable. Qole, however, was using the Kaitan in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible. She employed every thruster on the ship to send us corkscrewing around obstacles and darting for Shadow as nimbly as a starfighter a quarter our size. In other subsystems, she would have been a celebrity, the hero of racing circuits and reality daredevil shows. Here, she was just a Shadow fishing captain. The best and from one of the oldest families Alaxak had to offer, but still.

  There weren’t many members of the old Shadow fishing families left alive, I’d discovered after arriving on the planet a few weeks ago. At least, not with their wits intact. I’d come to Alaxak chasing rumors of extra senses and preternatural reflexes in humans, and instead found mostly death and madness. But Qole was another matter. She was living proof that I hadn’t come in vain.

  For a few moments, both skiff and ship raced in parallel, nose to nose, and then Arjan veered sharply, bringing in the far edge of the net to close the circuit. Straight for the Kaitan, and straight into the path of a lump of space rock that had appeared between him and the ship in the blink of an eye.

  A split second later, the grating roar of a mass driver echoed through the ship and the asteroid was harmless debris.

  “Clear,” rumbled Eton unnecessarily from his perch in the turret.

  Excitement, wonder, elation, terror, wetting one’s pants in abject fear—all these things are what a human might normally go through after being exposed to that experience for the first time. But this was where my job came in, and after more than a few hours on the ship, I was thoroughly numb to it all, in mind and body. The hold, though insulated to allow for human survival in deep space, was not heated for comfort. The near-freezing temperatures would have turned me into a meat icicle, if I weren’t forced to hustle with all the remaining speed I had left.

  “Get it processed, Nev. This flare is slowing down, so make it count!” Captain Qole yelled at me over the comm. I stumbled in semihaste, groaning inwardly at both my exhaustion and the continued delay this Shadow run was to my mission.

  As Arjan funneled the Shadow into the net, artfully tucking it in, the circuit closed. It formed a containment field that kept most of the substance from escaping, but it couldn’t hold such a volatile and unstable energy source for any prolonged length of time. So that was when I activated the suction scoop on the side of the hull, whisking the Shadow right into the containment hold, which was sealed off from the cargo hold I was in. But of course that couldn’t hold it for long either, as Arjan had told me, because of the damned poor lining.

  The containers, of which there were hundreds, happened to weigh approximately half of what I did, even empty. I would heft one, jam it into the slot where it seated with the maglock, and yank the lever that would let the Shadow come blasting inside. The second it was full, I had to close the maglock and replace the canister with another. The faster I moved, the more Shadow we captured, and the less time it had to eat its way through the containment hold and blow us all to smithereens. But even that had stopped providing me with impetus for speed. Only two things kept me going: an overriding desire to be done with the job, followed by the nagging thought that I had to get out of this cargo hold before I ran out of time to convince Qole of anything.

  Unless working myself to death was the only way to gain Qole’s trust, in which case I was nearly there.

  “Um, Telu?” Arjan’s voice, slightly concerned, crackled into my awareness through the comm.

  I glanced up at the display feed, and my blood turned to ice.

  “Telu, there’s a drone, bearing zero, zero, two. What’s your status?” Qole chimed in.

  Sure enough, hanging out and minding its own aggravating business directly in front of us was a mining drone thrice the size of the Kaitan, busy latching itself on to smaller asteroids. Five or six metal tentacles whipped out and grasped the rocks, and a beam of energy projected from the front of the dome. The asteroid split, and piece by piece the fragments were sucked into the drone’s circular maw. We were headed directly for it.

  That managed to wake me up a bit. I hit the comm button. “Uh, excuse me, but drones don’t take very kindly to anyone getting close to their fields.”

  “Thank you, newbie.” The captain drop-kicked me back into place. “Please focus on your job. Everyone, we’re completing the run.”

  I stared, somewhat slack-jawed, as we closed the distance to the drone much faster than I could fully appreciate. What I had said was an understatement—the drones were from a bygone era, but their programming was still running even though no one had tended to them in hundreds of years, and their security protocols remained as active as their mindless tasks. They would decimate anyone who drew close enough to interfere with their mining. Younger captains, and many complacent older ones, had lost their ships or their lives from drawing too near to them. Say, about as near as we were drawing now.

  “Telu?” Qole’s voice wasn’t concerned, but it was inquiring.

  “No worries, Cap,” Telu’s voice responded, sounding for all the world as though she were promising to sweep the floors later in the day.

  I opened my mouth to yell at them all for their insanity, when the drone wobbled, rotated ninety degrees, and fired itself with savage speed at a giant asteroid in the distance.

  “Suck it, Dracortes,” Telu said.

  Normally I would have laughed, since suck it and Dracortes weren’t things one often heard in the same sentence. Instead, I gasped. Drones never left their allotted task before they were done, and that could only mean that Telu had managed to temporarily redirect the programming. Not unheard of, but usually accomplished only by carefully chosen people who had studied for years in restricted academies. To her, it was a common chore.

  My thought was eclipsed by Shadow flaring inches from my face.

  I blinked and shook my head. The world had altered around me; I was looking at the ceiling instead of the wall. It took me a moment to realize I was now on my back on the floor, ringed by several people in various stages of emotion: Telu looked relieved, Basra unmoved, and the new arrival distinctly displeased.

  Captain Qole Uvgamut, my brain informed me, even as I tried to reconcile that with who I was seeing. I knew her rank, her reputation, and her voice, and yet she still wasn’t what I had expected.

  She was young. Much younger than I’d imagined. I’d heard she was only seventeen, but the command in her tone had made that hard to believe. A glance, from upside down and on my back, was proof enough. Her long black hair was held in a braid down her back, and she was dressed in an odd combination of warm clothing. Unlike workers in other subsystems who used synthetics, they wore local leather and furs on the Kaitan, because of the remoteness of Alaxak and the cost of shipping from offworld. Affordability aside, hers must have been tailored for her, because while they looked comfortable, they also hugged her figure in ways that made my eyes want to linger. Otherwise she looked about as warm and inviting as a knife. High cheekbones sharpened the curves of her oval, medium-toned face, and her dark eyes were quick to narrow.

  “How in the systems did that happen? Did you let a canister overflow?” Qole didn’t raise her voice, but I shrank back anyway as I sat up.

  I reached out for balance as I t
ried to stand, but Qole evidently thought I needed help and clasped my wrist. Her hand was warm, and her grip left no doubt that it would hold until I was on my feet. In fact, she hoisted me up with enough speed to stagger me forward. I could have caught myself, but instead I stumbled against her arm. Her slight frame was unmoving, braced with excellent balance, as my fingertips pressed into her and managed to stick the nearly invisible biometric sensor onto the inside of her wrist. In spite of making myself look like a drunk, I had finally accomplished one useful thing today.

  “Um…maybe?” I responded, stepping back. “There was a drone, and tentacles of death, and…”

  “Yep, that’s what went down,” Telu supplied helpfully. “The canister overpressurized and leaked Shadow into the hold. The safety system closed the maglock when the blowback happened, but it must have been strong enough to give him a knock.”

  “Oh, Great Collapse.” Qole grabbed her hair and scrunched it up, pulling strands out of her braid. “That’s the same problem we had with the other blasted idiot. I should have known this wouldn’t work out.” She bent over and began to savagely stack some of the scattered containers. “Basra, comm Arjan and Eton, would you? We need to get into position for the next flare, see if there will be another run.”

  An idiot. That was all I was after all this—eighteen hours of backbreaking, repetitive labor. She’d dismissed me, just like that. All that to earn her respect and trust, and instead I get her contempt.

  I felt myself flush with anger. I couldn’t hold it in; I was too exhausted, and the pain in my skull only added more of an edge to my words. “Have you considered you wouldn’t have these problems with blasted idiots if you directed even a fraction of the energy you spend on risking everyone’s lives toward designing a better system to store Shadow more safely and efficiently?”

  Qole went still. “Excuse me?”

  Warning klaxons jangled in my head, all of which were firmly ignored. “You’re excused. But just so we’re clear, your incredibly fancy flying to gather up everyone’s next paycheck won’t do us any good when we’re are all dead, from either exhaustion or a Shadow explosion.” I gestured at the canister that had nearly knocked my brains out.

  She fixed me with a steady gaze that shrank a portion of my anger. Well, a lot of my anger. Telu backed away a little, and Basra had magically relocated to the far side of the hold. But in for a reentry, in for a free fall, as the saying went. Besides, I wasn’t about to back down when I knew I was right. The rough-edged captain, intriguing and impressive though she might be, wasn’t about to intimidate me when I’d dealt with powers so far beyond her station it was laughable.

  “I don’t see anyone dead.” Qole started to let heat into her words. “And since it’s your ignorance of your job that led to the accident, I’m dying to know how you think we could do better.”

  “My profound and unending apologies for being momentarily concerned for the intact status of my hide, your hide, and everyone else’s on this ship,” I said with as much sarcasm as I could muster—which was significant, given the circumstances. “Next time, consider saving up for a proper containment hold instead of having people run ragged trying to manage a cargo that this ship was never designed to carry in the first place.”

  “Proper?” Qole spat out the word like something disgusting, and looked as if she would stuff it back down my throat if she could. “What the hell would you know about any of that?”

  While I didn’t have any working knowledge of how to Shadow fish, I had certainly studied the industry. “Only that containment holds exist that can, I don’t know, actually contain Shadow safely—no leaking, no degrading, no need for your crew to siphon it into different blasted containers”— I ticked off the qualities on my fingers—“and with one, your ship could carry your catch until you get to a processing station that could simply suck it out of the hold. I know that’s how Shadow is shipped off-planet.”

  “If you actually knew what you were talking about, other than about what’s off-planet, then you’d know how few operations can afford that type of setup here. There are maybe two ships like that on all of Alaxak.”

  Arjan had tried to tell me the same thing, but that didn’t change the fact that this was still a stupidly dangerous, inefficient way to do things. “Well, those two are the only ships whose captains value their lives over their catch, apparently. Working like a maniac doesn’t make anyone noble, it just makes them a maniac.”

  Qole stepped closer to me, and for a second we were face to face as she stared up at me and yet stared me down. For the first time, I noticed something other than anger in her brown eyes—something dark that flickered at the corners.

  Shadow. Literally, Shadow, flickering at the edges of her whites. Great Collapse, I’d heard the stories, but I hadn’t really believed it. This wasn’t Shadow poisoning—this was her affinity, active in her system.

  I braced myself. For what, I didn’t know.

  Then her eyes narrowed into normal anger, and she turned on her heel and disappeared from the hold.

  I’m pretty sure we all blinked. Except for maybe Basra—I didn’t get a chance to catch him in the act.

  Fantastic. I’d just thoroughly alienated the one person I’d needed to befriend. In fact, I might have just gotten myself fired by the one person I’d needed to befriend.

  I resisted the urge to rub my forehead and give away how unnerved I was. Facing an infuriated Qole had been bad enough, but the new realization trickling into my stomach was worse: As we were running for Shadow, the best I could hope for was to hear her commands over the comm as I canistered my way to a stupid death.

  I ignored Basra and Telu, who were both watching me, and began hefting the fallen canisters for something to do, knowing I’d be expected to restack them anyway. If I had a different position on the ship, if we had a moment to breathe, if we had more time planet-side…

  Planet-side. At first, I hadn’t been able to wait to get aboard the Kaitan. But that was when I’d been thinking it would afford me the opportunity to get close to the captain. Other captains took time to repair, refuel, and recharge their crew in the villages. The situation would be different there, and surely, if nothing else, I’d be able to buy Qole a drink.

  However, in spite of my brush with death, Qole showed no signs of quitting. She was probably even less inclined to stop now.

  I eyed the canisters, feeling less bitter toward them. We might not need refueling at the moment, but we could easily need to address some other pressing issue.

  I wouldn’t dare mess with something as dangerous as Shadow, but its volatility could serve me in another way. There were panels on each canister that displayed how full it was and how intact the lining was. Very simple electronics—but it would be a serious business indeed if they suddenly displayed imminent failure.

  Serious enough to head back to Alaxak.

  Next time, consider saving up for a proper containment hold….

  The sentence echoed in my mind, getting louder along with sparking surges of rage, as I made my way back up to the bridge. Nearly every word brought on a new flare that made my vision blacken at the edges.

  Next time…“Next times” were a luxury not all of us got in the Shadow fishing business. And Telu, Arjan, and I were facing other dangers, every day, that arrogant, self-assured piece of scat didn’t have a clue about.

  …consider saving up…As if living day-to-day, keeping my crew well paid and well fed, and covering overhead costs that sometimes felt so huge as to crush me left me much room to just save up. Not to mention I might not live long enough to save much of anything. Such a naïve offworlder.

  …for a proper…What did that word even mean out here? It wasn’t as if I could go to the blasted Containment Hold Market. He knew absolutely nothing.

  No, I thought as I stopped to brace myself in the doorway of the bridge, no, Nev—if that was even his name—knew much more than nothing. He had a familiarity with ships, even this type of ship, which was
so customized beyond its standard, outdated model as to be nearly unique. I’d hired him in a hurry without the interview that Eton had wanted to subject him to, but then, most new arrivals on Alaxak weren’t eager to talk about their pasts. We’d needed a new loader after our old one left abruptly—the fifth to quit this year—and it was a position that didn’t require much know-how. No one with much brainpower wanted it, anyway. And yet he was far better educated than most, especially at his age—eighteen? Twenty?

  And he didn’t look right. He wasn’t the usual rough and ragged type that usually tried to be a loader. He was too…nice-looking. His teeth were very straight and white, and his light brown hair was wind-tangled but clean. His gray clothes were the right color, but also clean and mostly synthetic. He had a lump on the bridge of his nose as if he had broken it in a fight, but his pale cheeks and jaw were too defined and smooth, and his brown eyes were too rich and sparkling to have been on Alaxak for a single winter.

  The guy was proud. Wealthy too, judging by his clothes, and from one of the royal planets, judging by his accent. Eton had sounded a lot like him when he’d shown up a few years ago, and Eton had served as a bodyguard on one of the royal planets, though that was about all I could get out of him on the topic of his past.

  So what the blasted hell was Nev actually doing out here? He was probably a tourist wanting a thrill, or worse, a runaway rich boy. In either case, something stank.

  I took a deep breath and let my arms slide down the door frame with my exhale. I focused on the stars through the sweeping viewport half circling my captain’s chair, on the river of light made by the clouds.