After my nice big stretch, I left the hold behind and walked my way to the front of the ship, passing my quarters and the room I retrofitted into a lounge. The boat was not a gargantuan thing, it was more of a one to two-person shuttle to move things from one place to another.

Only the center was used to hold things, the pods only held fuel.

A third of it was designed to hold cargo; the bit at one end and the others were entirely for moving the boat or keeping the person inside alive, and the little bit in the middle for sleep when necessary.

The quarters were not quite cramped, but not spacious by any means, both modules tucked back into the curve of the ship nose below the cockpit. I could cook, only a little, though. Food wasn’t supposed to come in cans, but canned food was very easy to prep.

I made my way to the front but stopped at the lockers just below the chair, and changed out of my clothes and into my void suit.

My hand cannons, Righty and Lefty, got placed down, their holsters pulled off my belt and placed into their place in my locker. I pulled off my poncho and coat pulled off and left it hanging on a hook, and my chest plate was taken off. It was heavy, even as small as it was, and I placed it at the bottom with my hat resting on top of the angular plate.

A bit of armour was never amiss; if nobody knew it was there, it was even better.

My Shirt, pants, and everything else got shoved into the second locker along with the cloth over my head, and I got to put on my suit after whisking a little red dust out of my hair.

The void suit was skintight, the exterior was hardened to help hold the insides in. It wasn’t designed for walking around outside a ship for any significant amount of time, just to keep someone alive in the case of a loss of atmosphere. There was a helmet amongst the things, which was theoretically useful, but I had never had to use it.

I pulled the skin suit over my feet and up my legs. Up past my narrowed hips and small chest, sliding my arms in before sealing the suit over my pale, hairless form. My collarbone was a bit of a pain to get past, the added bone was like a gorget that, in theory, would help keep things from reaching my throat, a little bit of natural armour.

I had inherited a lot of my bone structure and brain from my dad, and everything else from my mom, including her black hair, the little I had, only on my head and eyebrows, and the two brown eyes in my head.

However, I hadn’t inherited their height or muscle and felt scrawny growing up. Even after I had finished growing, I was only 5’ 8”, dwarfed by everyone around me both literally, and in every other proportion most people measured themselves by.

Chest size? Nope. Beauty? No way. Length of my sword? It’s not about length, it’s about how you use it.

I did have a few things going for me; obviously, I had sturdier bones, which seemed dumb until you got hit for the first time, the low gravity of most stellar bodies had left our bones brittle, but not mine. I had a mind for a few machines and tools along with how to make and use them. I had the ability to cope with isolation and knew my way around the stars. I was just born with those, the knowledge and traits were a part of my brain, passed down from my ancestors so they could more effectively perform tasks for our Terran overlords.

You know, right up until they died.

Anyway, I moved my flat ass up the stairway after grabbing my coat and the helmet I never needed and made my way into the front of the boat.

The bridge, if you could even call it that, was small, fit for one person and designed to be flown solo. It had more in common with the latrine than a proper bridge, but it wasn’t a proper voidship; it was a voidboat.

There was a nice chair on a sliding rail, that I could adjust back and forward, with a harness I could pull out for takeoff, orbital entry and exit. It was situated in front of a relatively small quartz window to let me fly the ship.

There was a desk of sorts below the window, holding consoles and dials and buttons, each one an important piece of equipment. It read the compasses, both magnetic north, and objective north. Using the heading, velocity, and location generated the heading shown on a map, which was nice. There was an objective location relative to the planet, with setting dials and a button to confirm it, which I had to do every time I entered a planet, which was less nice.

Gabriel had some twenty nations, clustered mostly around the equator and the largest around the terraformed sections or the northern pole across the shallow northern sea, and not getting shot out of the sky meant checking who’s airspace you were in, so setting all the things I needed to was mandatory.

There were dials for altitude, and consoles for radar, infrared and passive detection, which generally stop people from smashing into one another, which is always important. And the ever-present radio console, with multiple channels leading and a port for my headset.

All of that centred around the center control setup meant to be accessible by one person.

There were no weapons systems on the Junker, nor were there the fancy gadgets for finding my way through the void. That was for a ship or a fighter, though I could upgrade if I felt like I needed to show off how big my junk was. Luckily for my wallet, I had one head, not two.

A void ship was too big and heavy to land on a planet most of the time, it was a ship made to move in low gravity, like outer space. That’s why voidboats like mine existed, if a ship needs to send stuff between a planet, it can use a boat to get stuff on and off. But a boat generally wasn’t so good at going incredible distances in the dark, even if they could go short range, skipping around, it was far more costly than doing what they were meant to do, that and the big relays gave us way too much velocity, if we hit a random space rock it would turn us to debris.

The Junker was just a bigger fighter without weapons systems. The Gull was what got me around the void, and it was parked in orbit at a station, which meant I needed to go up.

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

I activated my ship’s radio and dialled into the right frequency, and pinged the Gull to check in while starting up the Junker.

I primed the low altitude and vertical takeoff thrusters and set them up in a way that wouldn’t make the Junker act up. I could punch it, turn it all on and take off in almost no time, but the old ship would start getting really pissy about it and need more maintenance.

I had only needed to do that once, and the scratches from the gunfire still marked the Junker, where bits of hot metal had chipped its paint a little. The more costly part of that encounter? The parts I needed to buy.

Never again.

Anyways I waited for about ten minutes without a reply from MC, so I decided to get on with it, turning on my thrusters. The storm had started rolling through, buffeting the ship, it would have been hell if I had been outside, but compared to normal conditions, it didn’t hit the boat particularly hard.

A vibration ran through the ship and up through my seat. Picking up as the thrusters got ready for takeoff. I went and double-checked my radar, but the storm left me blind.

I got myself situated for takeoff, securing my helmet down so it wouldn’t fly around and took my place in the chair.

I started my final checks, then hit the ignition.

The engines lighting up was a thing of nature inside the confines of the ship. The impulse from the gases igniting kicked the Junker and me up and forward a little.

The ship rapidly accelerated, and I got pushed back and down into the seat as I lifted off the ground.

I quickly elevated the gear, pulling it in before they tore off and start forward, hovering over the ground and picking up speed.

Once I started going, I turned off my vertical thrust, I was held aloft by the force of compressed air under me, increasing altitude once I got up to speed. I climbed onwards and upwards until I came out of the storm.

I immediately took in the sky and found nothing I needed to be aware of, so I levelled out and lowered my thrust before making my way northwest.

I locked myself level so I could free up my hands and started going through the radio, first with MC, who was still not picking up, then with another channel, I reached out for a ground station. I had to double-check the map for the closest, so I knew who I was about to talk to.

Some of them were picky, others not so much. There were 20 nations on Gabriel, assuming you didn’t count Gabriel themself, who sat in the middle of a river delta and was a nation in and of themself.

Golems were a strange sort, but I often found them preferable to some of the flesh and blood people I had met. I had never met a Golem that I disliked, and some of them, like Doc, I even counted as a friend.

The ground control I ended up getting in touch with wasn’t picky, I identified myself and was cleared to continue, and I switched off of the channel, letting the indicator stay on in case I got pinged.

I still hadn’t gotten pinged back by MC, so I got on my hour-long journey to the closest tether. I could go straight to the void, but the fuel cost was higher than waiting for the tether. The tether was a space-bound hook leading up to the station where the Gull was docked.

I took my time climbing up to a good altitude and turned on a third radio channel. The radio beeped into my headset, rhythmically.

It was a slow heartbeat, slowly increasing as I got closer to my destination; along with my radar, I could use it to catch the hook.

I got to the destination and started circling, checking the radar for when I would need to jump aboard.

Three minutes to the hour, and it blipped onto my radar, blipping forward.

I started to speed up, four hundred knots, five hundred, eight hundred, ten thousand knots. I stopped there, that was the average velocity of the hook. The cracking sound was immense, and I enjoyed it, there was something about going fast that interested my primitive brain.

Now for the hard part, I checked the blinking radar as the blip closed in. It kept getting closer and closer, but the beeping was still a bit too distant vertically.

I started to go up and up, slow and steady. The sky was vast and clear in front of me through the quartz window.

The blip was close, the beeping closer as I waited for the hook to pass.

A huge metal thing passed into my vision above me, and I immediately started adjusting.

It was the tense moment between two joy rides, the most attention-grabbing time, the short window where I needed every brain cell to be focused.

MC’s voice followed the ping from the radio channel I had left on.

“So, Bandit, I have some good news and some bad new-” he started, only to be cut off when I swapped my microphone over and screeched at him.

“NotNowSkyhookBadTimeCallBackSoon.” was all I said, and I flicked the channel off. While flipping the fourth channel on, it was already dialled in.

“Approaching the hook, landing position,” I asked over the channel.

A terse, though not angry, voice coughed over the radio, and told me I was cleared to go to Bay A5.

I grabbed the wheel and brought my eyes back to the hook, which had begun to swerve out of my line of sight, forcing me to increase my thrust and slamming me back into the seat again as I struggled to angle up to meet the hook.

The hook was less a hook and more of a hangar. The angle up was harsh, harsher than lift-off, the change in momentum felt like my body was pancaked against the chair. It rushed out from above me and started speeding away as I climbed.

I started to climb sharply as it raced out away from me, moving around to get behind it where I could see the doorway, increasing my velocity to chase after the massive hammer shape in the sky.

I started gaining on it, I had all of 40-70 seconds to reach it before it would start to speed away. I chased the cylinder, closing in on it and increasing my velocity.

It was growing in my vision, coming up faster and faster, and I started to slow the Junker until I was just gaining on it at around 10400 knots.

I crept up in, slowing further as I entered the back. Relative to the hook, I was moving at running speed.

I cut the speed, a little more, opened up my landing gear and landed to slow myself down, bleeding velocity using the friction of my wheels along with an extension of air brakes, which were, while less useful in the lower atmosphere, still able to slow me down slightly, and that was the thing I needed.

I needed to slow down, or I would slam into the back of the hangar, and while I could have used my forward thrusters, that would start pushing me back out and was counterproductive.

Once I started to inherit velocity from the hook, I lowered my thrust to maintain my slower speed.

Now at the speed of a light jog, I started to taxi my way over, further cutting my engines until I was no longer shooting expensive fuel out the bay door; and parked noise first is the cube of bay A5.

It was sized for a military corvette or newer freight craft that were more frequently used.

I flicked on the Junker's metallic landing gear, the twelve metal limbs that would stick to the standard magnetic plate below me that would help stop the Junker from rolling away on its wheeled landing gear, and I cut the engine entirely.

I reached over and flicked on the channel for MC, flicking off the hangar and shutting off the channel, and I only had to wait a few seconds for him to pick up after I pinged him.

“Bandit, can I assume you’re parked now? That was quite the shout before.” He stated more than he asked.

I nodded habitually before speaking, “Yes, MC, I have parked. What was that about good and bad news?” I asked.

“What should I say… Ah, that’s it. So good news first, the pay is for a small chip, not a ring, you get to keep it, and the client has paid already, I will have the amount transferred to your account automatically, and pay is fine, you’re looking at a payout in the five digits before your bonus. I also have a second job lined up for you, should you choose to accept it, which will pay you even better.” He told me.

“That sounds like a lot of good news, MC, why am I sensing a really bad but here,” I asked, eyebrows scrunching.

“Well…” he hedged, “How do you feel about going to The Sundered Throne?”