Sliding Void (2 page)

Lana flicked off the translation stick for a second and leant across to Skrat. ‘I don’t know what they’re saying, I don’t know the name of this world, I don’t know what was inside the sealed containers we’ve offloaded, and I don’t know what the fuck we’re still doing docked to their shitty so-called trading station.’

‘Patience,’ whispered Skrat. ‘There is a deal to be done here, old girl, I can feel it.’

Lana sighed. Given how screwed Skrat’s life had been before she had pulled him out of that scummy televised corporate gladiator pit, he sure was an optimist. She gazed across at the two delivery agents, one of them whirling about maniacally on the end of a rope, making dolphin-like clicking noises by pulsing its top sphere in and out, rapping like a drum. The thing’s friend was leaping up and down on one arm/leg (take your pick), and scratching the other’s underside.
Is that grooming? Screwing? Indicating their thanks for the ship’s delivery; on time and on schedule?

Lana flicked the translation stick back on, a couple of seconds for the wireless connection to the linguistic computer on board the
Gravity Rose
to pick up speed, and then the speaker at the top of the stick started stuttering: ‘Joy comes from chance. Chance is all. Trade is chance. I am horny. I am dying. I am exclusive and taking a minute.’

‘Fuck this,’ muttered Lana. She stood up and bowed ironically towards the two swinging collections of balls. ‘And I am so out of here. Take your minute and add a couple of decades before my ship comes back to your world.’

The full effect of Lana’s outburst was slightly ruined by the bulky environment suit she was wearing to protect herself from the green gas that the balls had swirling around the visitor’s chamber as atmosphere. But what the hell, there had to be some privileges to being skipper of your own vessel.

Skrat was fast behind her, swishing his powerful tail in annoyance, the visor of his suit’s helmet misting up as he spat out his words. ‘That went well. Another hour, Lana, and we could have negotiated an exceptional cargo to ship out of here. I can almost guarantee it.’

Lana was glad the environment suit was covering Skrat. Out of the suit-skin, he looked like a bipedal dragon – all shining green scales, solid muscles, sharp white teeth, a pair of eyes like burning coals floating on a chlorophyll-choked millpond – and nobody in their right mind wanted a humanoid dragon pissed off with them. In fact,
dragon
was one of the politer nicknames for Skrat’s race among humanity. Much like dragons, their kind were up for a fight if push came to shove, but they loved trading far more. His species would much rather get one over you in a negotiation than stick a dagger in your back.

‘What, with Mister I Am Dying and I Am Horny? Shit, Skrat. You were going to end up selling us into their local brothel is what you were going to do.’

‘System crash,’ squawked the translation stick, still working in her hand after she had snatched it off the table. ‘Core rebooting. Fatal agglutinative group error.’

‘Ha,’ said Skrat, his magnetised boots cracking down the tunnel of the airlock linking the orbital station to their ship. The station corridors were low for Lana’s six-foot frame. Skrat was three inches taller and he had to stoop even more than she did as he strolled quickly after her. ‘I knew it. Language errors. We definitely should have given the dashed computer longer to adjust to their dialect.’

Lana tapped the side of her helmet. ‘It’s not their language, it’s what’s up here that counts. You’re aiming to service a planet’s demand-side needs, you got to understand how the little fuckers think. What they got that anybody wants? Ass-scratching sticks? I told you when we took on the cargo, this would be a one-way job. Sealed containers always are.’

‘And to prove you’re right, we’re shipping out of here with an empty hold,’ sighed Skrat.

‘Empty hold on my ship,’ Lana reminded him.

They had reached the ship’s airlock, and she leaned forward to let the little camera take her retina print. Scoring a match, the outer door hissed up into the hull. Polter was just visible on the other side of the airlock, eyestalks peering up through the inner door’s armoured glass. Next to their navigator was Zeno, the ship’s android first mate. Polter’s fussy voice echoed through the little chamber as they stepped inside and closed off the lock. ‘Are we blessed with a return cargo?’

‘I believe you need to address that question to the captain,’ sighed Skrat.

‘Sorry to say, but God has taken the day off,’ said Lana. ‘We’ll be running light until we hit the next system.’

‘Perhaps not,’ came Polter’s reply. ‘There have been developments, oh yes.’

Developments.
That didn’t sound good to Lana. She was in charge of developments. Anyone else started
developing
shit and you just knew that trouble was going to be bouncing close behind. Lana’s helmet came off with a hiss of escaping air under pressure, and she flicked her mane of long blonde hair back as she reached for an Alice band to secure it, pushing her fingers through the curls at the edges. People said the hair made her look cherubic. Unfortunately, the illusion only lasted as long as it took Lana to open her mouth. ‘I didn’t even want to leave the ship to talk to the locals on the station. You heard me say that. I’m sure you did.’

‘You’re far too over-cautious.’ Skrat racked the large pistol that had been strapped to his leg, and Lana followed suit. Her rail pistol had been dialled up to sixteen, maximum power, where one of the ball bearings sitting in its magazine could be accelerated to the kind of air-cracking speeds capable of causing grenade level explosions. Perhaps that was caution, too. Nothing won a fight like going kinetic on someone’s ass first.

‘One of us has got to be thinking about limiting our losses,’ said Lana.
Sure as hell ain’t gonna be you, Skrat.

The glass of the airlock’s inner door automatically mirrored as the lock’s bacterial decontamination routine kicked in. Lana sucked in her cheeks. She hated her own reflection. Had she got that classically beautiful Slavic-Nordic look from her parents? Hell if she knew
. If I ever get to meet them, I might ask.
She looked tired, her green eyes weary. She was only in her late forties, and with anti-ageing treatments she looked more like twenty-five. How could she look so tired? When she smiled the grin filled her face, one of her few endearing features, but she hadn’t felt like smiling for a while now. The inner lock cycled open and Polter danced excitedly on his six legs, the tips of his crab-like navigator’s eyestalks wide and excited. She glanced towards her android crewmember, and Zeno just shrugged. For all his artificial golden skin and wire-headed Afro, he could do innocent just fine. The look was one she recognized.
Don’t blame me
.

Lana raised a hand and adjusted her green ship overalls. ‘I’ve only left you two jokers in charge for three hours. Polter, please tell me you haven’t donated the ship as spare parts to the local orphans’ fund?’

‘Sarcasm is not among your better virtues, revered skipper,’ observed Polter.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Lana. ‘I can see that you’re busting to tell me how the will of the Lord has landed something shiny-new in our laps.’

‘A ship,’ said Polter. ‘Oh yes, not local traffic. A courier vessel, I should say.’

Lana groaned. ‘Looking out for us?’

‘And asking for permission to dock ship-to-ship. I told them that only the blessed Captain Lana Fiveworlds can give permission for that, and she is presently engaged.’

Lana weighed the options. It was hideously expensive to send a single ship out with a message for a trader, even when you had a flight plan logged and a fair idea where the recipient might be. Not when the alternative was tossing a free e-mail into the data sphere and waiting for it to propagate into the path of its recipient. The
Gravity Rose
would dock and sync her computer core next time they hit somewhere civilised. A courier vessel meant the message was important and covert enough it’s sender didn’t want to risk it being hacked rolling about out in the wild. Messages like that, you might be better off ignoring.

‘It is a contract offer,’ said Polter. ‘I can feel it in my soul. Our holds are empty and the holy of holies wills the space filled.’

‘Yeah, and maybe it’s contract law enforcement,’ said Zeno. ‘How many bills did we leave unpaid at the last planet?’

Lana rubbed her pale freckled nose. ‘Hell, if it’s a reminder for the docking fees we skipped jumping to this shit-hole, I’ll pay that guy sitting out there solely for persistence.’

The four of them headed for the bridge, taking the ship’s internal Capsule and Transportation System. The CATS capsule jolted and shuddered, sections of Lana’s four thousand foot-long ship squealing in and out of view as they rode a clear bullet down her transparent lateral tube. At times the capsule was shooting over the ship’s grey dust-pitted hull, then it spiralled down, blasting through the vessel’s interior chambers – passing along the jungle of hydroponics vaults that gave the ship her atmosphere and food, furnishing crew and passengers with the space they needed to stop going stir-crazy on extended flights. By law, all starships needed those. If her hyperspace engines ever failed, they would need to slide to the nearest inhabitable world generation-ship style on her anti-matter thrusters. Although, given Lana’s current motley crew, she’d hate to think what her descendants would end up looking like. As pitted as her hull was, as worn by all dust of the universe that had never quite made it into a planet, Lana loved her ship with all the ferociousness of a tigress protecting her cub. Not because the
Gravity Rose
was beautiful: she could never be accused of that – the profile of an aircraft carrier taken to space. An eclectic collection of cargo units, hyperspace vanes, passenger cabins, life support modules, in-system antimatter drive, solar panels, self-healing armour, artificial gravity systems, and freight holds from a dozen ship yards and manufacturers welded together with hope, optimism and whatever spare currency Lana and her predecessors had to throw at her. No, not because the
Gravity Rose
was beautiful, but because the ship was Lana’s home. And because what passed for the vessel’s dysfunctional crew also passed for her family. Lana stretched out her legs and pushed the toes of her long leather boots out towards the opposite side of the capsule, hearing the bone crack of every one of her years
. It’s not age, honey; it’s the intermittent low gravity. Yeah, you keep on telling yourself that.
The ship looked her age, too. The
Gravity Rose
would need an overhaul soon to pass authority checks and keep her flightworthy status. Without that, no planet worth a damn was going to allow Fiveworlds Shipping in to trade. Lana could hear the dead voice of bureaucracy whining inside her skull.
‘What if your jump engines lock and you collide with our world? You want us to shoot you down, you want that?’

When Lana got to the bridge she punched up comms and made the offer to take the message point-to-point on a tight laser line, but the courier refused, which kind of made sense. If you were paranoid enough not to risk your precious message getting hacked in the wild, you weren’t going to chance the danger of someone having a pebble-sized probe hanging tight off your hull and trying to intercept your laser communications.

The courier ship was a pert matt-black needle, not much more than a pilot cabin and  life support system forward of a jump drive and the pion reaction thrusters she used to kick some tidy little propulsion out. With a hull-to-engine ratio tricked out like that she could tear a strip through this lonely corner of space. Faster than the
Gravity Rose
, that was for sure, even with the Rose running empty. Speed being of the essence, and all, Lana opened the doors to the
Gravity Rose
’s starboard-side hold and the courier couldn’t have set her down more sweetly if Lana’s vessel had been a navy carrier, three little landing skids folding out of the dart. She noted from the hold’s cameras that the pilot was another kaggen, like Polter. A five foot-high sentient crab-shaped mass of religious worry. Female kaggens were twice the size, so this one was a male, just like their navigator.

Lana instructed the courier to come to the bridge, skipper’s privilege, rather than doing a meet-and-greet in their massive empty hold. There were traditions to be observed, and it never hurt to underline the fact that the courier’s sense of urgency wasn’t her problem. Not yet, anyway. Not until it started putting bacon on
her
table, as well as the courier’s. A few minutes later the messenger scuttled into the bridge, his two large vestigial claws folded backward along his top-shell to indicate he came in peace and with God.
Like the little pacifists come in any other flavour.
He signed a private greeting to Polter, and kept on with the blessing even as he began talking to Lana, a parrot-like beak on the soft fleshy face underneath his carapace warbling in satisfaction at having tracked down his quarry. His accent was a lot thicker than Polter’s. ‘I have the honour of addressing Captain Lana Fiveworlds, proprietor of Fiveworlds Shipping, registered out of the Protocol world of Nueva Valencia, The Edge?’