He retrieves his can opener and canteen from kitchen storage and chugs till the canteen is empty and refills it. Feeling somewhat human again, he heads for the bridge.
Hunter and Stetson are already there, leaning over a holo map, a grid of stars with a few glowing bulbs. They don’t look happy.
“How we doing?” Jack says.
“Well,” Stetson says, “we missed our mark by about a million clicks.”
“Oh goody.”
“Yeah.”
When Stetson concentrates, his eyes get narrow and those gray irises seem to glow. He’s the best engineer Jack ever met and has no patience for mincing words. Jack appreciates that. They don’t talk much unless it’s work-related, but over the years bits of information have trickled out. Stets was in the military, too, and operates with the same protective emotional shell so common among servicemen. He had it before he joined up, though. An albino black man, he’d fought off bullies from a young age, and this stigma led him away from social games and toward a lifelong fascination with machines—computers, hypertrams, antique automobiles, propulsion systems of all kinds. He wanted to crack open the world and examine its moving parts. He’ll talk for days about the mysterious physics of grav drives and the software that regulates them. People say it’s mostly guesswork, based on half-formed theories about the underlying nature of time and space, but Stetson disagrees. It just takes finesse. And he’s got that, he’ll say with a wink. After the war, he worked for a resource collection agency. Asteroid mining and comet capture and the like. He was caught stealing some of the more valuable hardware and went on the run with a price on his head. The funny part is, he only stole the hardware to experiment with more effective surveying equipment, but it violated some contract or another with a manufacturer. He started selling modified super-computers on the black market, paid off his own bounty, and lingered around various spaceports looking for work as an engineer at a time when Jack needed one.
“A software glitch, or hardware?” Jack says.
The last thing they need right now is a malfunctioning ship.
“Neither,” Stets says. “I’ve been combing it over and nothing pops out. Hunter’s with me, yeah?”
“Yep,” Hunter says. “For once.”
“So? What happened?”
Stetson’s eyes sparkle. “Someone knocked us out of the jump.”
“Is that possible?”
“Apparently. It’s kinda like we hit an electric fence. Some kind of security system. I’ve never heard of such a thing. Highly advanced.”
“What are you saying?”
“Buddy boy,” Hunter says, “Dandy has his hands anywhere there’s money, right?”
“That’s a good way of putting it.”
“What if those rumors about the alien ship or whatever are true?”
“You’re kidding.”
She is not kidding.
Stetson has the same look of nervous excitement.
Jack says, “Even for the Dandy, stealing an alien spaceship seems ambitious.”
“Come on,” Hunter says. “It’s the wild west out here.”
“This could be big. Like, really big.”
“Let’s focus,” Jack says. “Technology to cut a jump can’t be that complex. Are we talking military?”
“Military or something other,” Stetson says.
“How long before we reach our destination?”
“Three hours. But Jack. There’s nothing on the map out here.”
“And that surprises you? Nothing’s mapped this far out.”
“No, I mean something’s jamming our systems. But check this out.” He points up at the transparent roof.
At first, Jack sees nothing out of the ordinary, just the same old faint field of stars, but one hangs brighter than the rest, and Stetson assures him it should not be there and it is no star.
It’s like approaching a city on a desert plane at night. As the hours draw down and they draw near, the object reveals itself to be not a single point of light, but a network of thousands. It is roughly cube-shaped and does not appear to rotate, probably anchored by grav drives, a trend among newer stations to make docking easier. Physically, there’s nothing unusual about it.
“That look alien to anybody?” Jack says.
They say nothing. They may be disappointed, but he’s relieved.
“Is it military?” Lana says from behind him. She stares upward, too, trying to make sense of the bright grid. He didn’t realize she’d entered the room.
“Hard to say.”
Dino and Justin came in at some point, too, and have since taken seats. Dino appears on edge, leaning forward and rubbing his chin. Justin slouches, sucking on a vaporizer and playing a game on his portable. Jack recalls the unsecured shover in the airlock and a ripple of anger runs along his scalp.
“Justin,” Jack says.
“Yeah.”
“I thought I told you to complete a full inspection.”
“I did. I double-checked everything an hour ago.”
“So triple-check.”
Justin turns halfway in his chair. He shoots a pleading look to Dino, who shrugs.
“Now,” Jack says.
“Going.” He shoves out of his seat and plugs the vaporizer in his mouth.
When he’s at the door, Jack calls to him, “Hey.”
He half turns.
“If I ever find that you’ve failed to secure another shover, I’ll dump you at the nearest outpost. You either pull your weight or get off my ship.”
Justin starts to say something, thinks better of it, and continues through the doors.
Awkward tension settles over the room.
He hates playing disciplinarian, but better to be a living asshole than a dead saint.
Soon the station grows in size to fill the window, and they can make out the shadowed structures between the points of light. The station hails them. A low male voice in their portables: “Attention crew of B-class freighter Belinda, you are entering restricted space. You have thirty seconds to clear the area or be subject to deadly force.” Stetson runs a diagnostic and confirms that they are being targeted by two very large plasma cannons. Military, then.
“What do we do?” Hunter says.
“Are we linked for two-way communication?”
“I don’t know. Our comms are still down.”
Dandy sent them here for a reason, and that reason was probably not to be blown up before anything interesting happens. Jack clicks his portable and holds it to his mouth. He takes a deep breath. Counting down, they’ve already lost fifteen seconds. It’s this or it’s nothing.
“The barber needs a haircut,” he says.
Nobody moves.
“They’re still targeting us,” Stetson says.
“I repeat. The barber needs a haircut. Do you copy?”
Nothing. Not so much as a confused reply.
“The barber needs a—”
“Copy,” The voice says. “Standby for docking procedures.”
“Holy shit,” Hunter says.
Stetson says, “They’ve lowered their defenses.”
Jack feels like a leaky balloon. Despite not knowing what this place is or why it’s out here, this is otherwise familiar territory. They’re here to pick up a package.
Chapter 15
The station appears to be a giant storage unit, a warehouse, each area color-coded. They follow a strobing green light to their dock on the opposite side of the cube. All around, ships flit from one area to the next, some nearly invisible but for the occasional glint of light across their hulls. Most are combat vessels decked out with plasma cannons. Jack keeps expecting one to swing around and blast them into dust.
They find their assigned dock and attach the cargo ramp. Forty minutes later, Jack and Dino pull themselves along the railings of the tunnel. Bel sensed a pressurized atmosphere and the linkup confirmed clean air, so they go without suits. The outer door slides open with a hiss and a thump, popping Jack’s ears. The station’s airlock is about the size of a two-car garage. It seals them in. A female voice tells them to prepare for gravity. Red arrows marked “floor” point at what Jack mistook for the ceiling. They resituate and grip handles while the gravity amps up. He feels it in his chest first. Then the floor pushes against his feet. A green light flashes, warning that the inner door is about to open. Jack attempts to erase all thoughts from his mind. It is easier to face the unknown with no presumptions. Yet he can’t help imagining a line of soldiers on the other side. Zip-zap. He will fall limbless to the floor.