The captain’s couch was deceptively comfortable, its cool embrace trying to lure me into sleep. I rejected it by force of will, tempered by a tad of pure panic. The seat countered by molding itself to me. It hadn’t done that before. Hao had been in here with her toolbox.
Out of habit, I cast a quick glance through the Bucket’s high-tempered quartz viewports. Space was still space, a big empty blackness with a few million tiny pinpricks of light, some of them moving slowly as we sped past at just shy of 300c.
The status lights shone green, with a few yellows, which for the Bucket was pure luxury. Even the ventilation system whooshing quietly, bathing me with dry, cold, joyously dust-free air. Having a mechanic on board had its advantages.
The pilot’s readout showed the local star cluster, which meant lots and lots of nothing, interspersed with the occasional star and its numerical designation. Plenty of planets, according to the ‘pedia, no habitation. Most stars were uninhabited. And in the middle of the readout, behind us, right at the edge of sensor range, was a big, green, blinking dot that was our tail.
We’d picked it up some days and light years from Jackson, when it’d turned in behind us on a shadowing course. That maneuver alone was enough to make my skin itch. You don’t follow random ships. Whoever it was, they knew who we were, and what we were carrying.
The sensor suite really shouldn’t have picked them up. But I’d warded it myself, spending weeks on balancing the wards, and spreading them out over the entire hull. Lots of extra-vehicular activity, until my sprayed-on shielding layer had burnt out and my radiation meter had told me in no uncertain beeps that I would end up with cancer if I didn’t get inside immediately.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
I shouldn’t have listened. Maybe another twenty ward chains would have given me enough resolution to tell what that ship was.
Right now, all I knew was that it was big. If it was transmitting a transponder code, that would be lost in the light-wake. Being in front, you couldn’t receive radio signals, and the Bucket was too small to carry its own warded transmission tower.
We were broadcasting a standard freight code. The Bucket of Dice, a low-mass hauler registered at Numenor Prime. The code was legal, and had all the proper crypto-keys. Wouldn’t do me a crud of good if we let anyone get too close in the darkness of the interstellar void, though. Even honest captains could be tempted by no law and an easy catch. What skippers living on the fringes of impolite society would do, I didn’t want to imagine. Breathing cold void was never high on my to-do list.
“Anything?” Hao asked, climbing into the co-pilot’s couch. She folded her legs beneath the dashboard, carefully cramming her head into the space between the couch and the ceiling. There was already a spot of dried blood there. She hadn’t been so careful the first time.
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s big and it’s fast. As long as they stay back, we can keep going as we do now. If they increase speed, we push the engines and run. With luck, we outrun them.”
“Can’t you magic the ward or something?” Hao asked. Most of her knowledge of magical theory came from adventure and fantasy vids. It was about as true as the ‘pedia’s knowledge of the hatchling.
“I could,” I said. “If we had six months of uninterrupted time on a pleasant planet, a large supply of spare sensor plates, and maybe ten kilograms of platinum.”
“We could get that,” Hao said.
“And the six months?”
“You’re the captain, sir,” she said with a smirk. “Logistics is your responsibility.”
“Remind me to dock your pay,” I said.
“Remind me to remind you to pay me,” she countered.
The sensor ward beeped. I froze.
“Is it supposed to do that?” Hao said. “I thought you had everything on silent.”
“I do,” I said, pulling up the controls. “Something touched the wards at extreme range.”
“What?”
“We’ll see,” I said. “Maybe it was a glitch.”
Turned out, it wasn’t.
