It didn't take long to figure out how the Rift Drive worked, much to my relief. Turns out the flight plan was already in the ship’s systems, and all I had to do was literally point the ship in the correct direction, go the correct speed, and push the correct button.
"What about the Flying Brick?" I asked, slowly turning in my chair to look at the demon splicer medic girl sitting at a console behind me, still holding a gun in my direction.
"The what?"
"My ship," I clarified.
"Does your ship have a Rift Drive?"
"No."
"Then forget about it for now. You can come back for it later depending on what happens when we arrive."
I turned my gaze out the port window. With a heavy sigh, I located and activated the EMF Drive and slowly backed away from the Flying Brick. At a safe distance, I spun the ship 180 and activated the Grav Drive at 0.1 Grav. Part of my heart seemed to break as my home, workplace, and ship fell away from the port windows. I wondered if I'd ever actually see my little ship again. Correcting course and slowly increasing the Gravs on the forward momentum, I watched our velocity tick up as the number for the needed momentum on the Rift Drive ticked down. It was a long two or three minute wait as we gained enough forward velocity, all while I considered the woman behind me, and more specifically, the pistol in her hand. My only saving grace was that she apparently had no idea how to fly this thing, and until we were docked at a station, she needed me.
On the correct course and at the correct velocity, I pushed the button to activate the Rift Drive. The numbers cycle on the screen, displaying a massive surge in power which I couldn’t feel or sense in any meaningful way. Out the front ports, a small pinpoint of green light blossomed into an uneven hole into the secondary side space that they traveled through. It was so weird. The gateways that various systems controlled for shipping traffic, like my Flying Brick, had a nice solid structure around where the rift was placed, making the whole thing look rather natural. This was literally a rift in space, and how the hell this ship managed to tear a hole way out there was far beyond me. Regardless of whether I liked it or not, the ship I was currently on slid into the green pulsating embrace and closed behind us.
"Okay. We're on course," I said to the girl behind me without looking back.
"Good, get up now."
Originally, I thought the girl was letting me use the bathroom. It took some odd sounds and about three minutes of thinking about it before I realized I had been locked in it. I supposed this is the best she could do for a prison cell. There was always the captain's quarters, but that had terminals that I might be able to get into. Being locked in the head wasn't exactly pleasant, but it was fairly clean, and I had a place to sit.
***
The station was in control of the ship via the docking computer. I felt the familiar thud of the lock latching on, connecting ship to station, and my eyes moved from the screen that held the locking information which went green, down to the station information screen which wanted to know who was paying the docking fees.
I turned my head to look over my shoulder at the red-skinned woman behind me, still with her pistol pointed at my head. "Who's paying for this?"
Her hard expression changed slightly, muting just a bit and flowing into one of subtle surprise, like it had never occurred to her that docking fees were a thing. Her lips parted ever so slightly, and the gun drooped a bit as she very intelligently said, "Uhhh?”
I shook my head and shrugged before entering my own information. By my guess, she was either going to kill me or, more likely, turn me over to the station authorities. What was a small drop in my account balance to the stars only knew how many years in prison. Once finished, I continued staring at the computer while saying, "OK. How are we gonna do this?" I waited for a good solid while, hearing no reply, before I turned to look at the girl. The splicer's expression was stuck showing some form of indecision, mild panic, and utter bewilderment. I noticed that the gun was shaking slightly, which certainly didn't comfort me. "Do you want me to call the authorities and turn myself in?" I asked as deadpan as I could. I really didn't want to provoke the girl into shooting me, and I didn't really see any other way I was gonna get out of this.
Her sudden and immediate response made him jump slightly. "No!"
Well, that pretty much just confirmed what I had already thought. "This is a pirate ship, isn't it?"
The splicer gave me a look that said she thought I was stupid and more calmly replied, "No."
"So you guys knock a ship incapable of opening a Rift out of one of the shipping lanes, cut open into its cargo bay, and you're claiming to not be pirates. Also, you suddenly seem very hesitant to have port authorities on board."
"That's not it. It's not like that," she said defensively, still with the gun pointed at me though she actually sounded a bit unsure.
"Uh huh," I shifted in my seat. "So how are we doing this?"
She looked away, I lunged for the gun when she looked away.
I had played a lot of video games using the Neuro helmet. Combat in video games was very similar to real life depending on the settings. While I certainly didn't have the built-up muscle memory required to correctly disarm someone, I was reasonably sure of what I was doing. My left hand went for the gun while my right hand went for her wrist, a pushing and pulling motion causing her to scream out as her finger was overextended in the trigger guard. Unfortunately, as I had never done this in actual real life, I was pretty sure I had failed to break her finger, and she retaliated with a swipe of her fingernails towards my face, using her other hand to go after the gun. Said gun flopped around in between our fingers for a few moments before tumbling off to the side, hitting the floor, and bouncing underneath the console. Both I and the splicer woman looked from the console to each other. I dove for the gun and the splicer girl dove for the door. By the time I had managed to snatch the weapon and bring it up, the door of the bridge had been shut, and I could hear the splicer's pounding feet hauling ass down the passage.
That was fine with me. I walked up to the door and locked it. With the splicer girl no longer on the bridge with me and the door locked, I returned to the console and started searching around to see if the ship had any interior cameras. It didn't take too long before I found them. And there were a lot of them. Even the bathrooms had cameras, leaving literally no privacy. The girl holed herself back up in her little medical lab, hiding behind the desk with what looked like a shotgun pointed towards the door. I honestly couldn't blame the woman. I had come in, murdered everybody, and then she had to keep me alive because she had no idea how to fly this thing. Furthermore, there was something clearly wrong as she seemed to be extraordinarily hesitant to phone up the authorities and hand me over to the station security for murder, and yet she claimed that this was not a pirate vessel. The ship and crew had certainly been acting like pirates.
With some solid time on my hands, I looked over the ship's systems and wondered what I was supposed to do now. The part of me that said I should do the right thing wanted to phone up the authorities, turn myself in, and quite probably turn the girl in. The part that didn't want to go to prison for the rest of my life was scrambling to find some way out of it. Actually, there might be something to that. I pulled up the crew roster, which despite the eight people that had been on board when they had attacked my ship, there were only three listings. I cross-referenced them with the station systems only to find that the captain and first mate were in reasonably decent standing. They both had a warrant for their arrest in the same system for assault. There was a reasonably large amount of other systems that they had warrants, more specifically in various stations, mostly drunk and disorderly, battery, aggravated assault, and a couple accounts of theft. The captain and first mate seemed like they were probably good friends and got into a lot of bar fights.
The engineer, on the other hand, was a slightly different story. The guy had a 2000 credit bounty in three different systems with crimes including manslaughter, sexual assault, grand theft, and embezzlement. Too bad the guy needed to be alive to collect, but that certainly made me wonder what was up with the other four crew members that weren't listed in the ship's roster. Well, five crew members; the splicer girl wasn't listed either. While I had no idea what her name was, sticking her physical description through the filters on the station net, pretty quickly narrowed it down. Though I was rather surprised to find that there were a whole seven people who were wanted and who were female with horns and red skin. Their wanted posters ranged from literally all over the human diaspora, and it was pretty easy to pick out my specific splicer girl.
Samantha Draken, had a 25,000 credit bounty on her head if brought in alive and 10,000 brought in dead. There was a palpable feeling of unease as I looked through the list of her alleged crimes: torture, human experimentation, assault, theft, corporate espionage, more accounts of torture and human experimentation, and the last one being breach of an indentured contract. Story of the medic chick holed up in the medical closet of the ship, if read in chronological order, was that she was some type of indentured servant who ran away and then started experimenting on people with the stars only knew what. The image of the woman told by the screen in front of me didn't exactly match what I had come to think of her as. While she was a bit odd, I had mostly seen her as a scared girl just trying to keep her shit together and survive long enough to reach something other than the cold, hard, certain death of the void. Now, I sat with an uneasy feeling as my eyes returned to the camera to verify that she was still posted in that little medical room with a shotgun pointed at the door. She seemed to be waiting for me to walk in and murder her.
I let out a long sigh as I wondered what the hell was up with this shit. With everything gathered so far, I might get away with only a year or two in prison, especially if the other dead members of the crew had bounties on their heads. I sat back in my seat and rubbed my temples, my frustration and indecision interrupted by an audio-only comm.
"This is Grant of the Res-a-tesseract" I didn't really actually know how to pronounce the unpronounceable name, but I figured as long as I said it the same time every time and I acted like that's how it was pronounced, then I could pretty well fake it until I made it. I initially wasn't going to take the audio call, but the fact that it came up as encrypted had piqued my interest and made me wonder if whoever was on the other side of the line was the person that had hired the crew of this ship to go hijack my ship or, more specifically, disable it, leave it floating in the dark, and pull something out of cargo.
"Please get the captain for me," came the voice from the other end of the call. It was male and professional sounding. I considered my options for response.
“I'm afraid there was an issue with our last trip. The captain's dead. You're pretty much stuck with me. Would I be correct in assuming you're expecting delivery of something?”
I was trying to keep the same professional tone. I was already in pretty deep shit and I figured the guy on the other end couldn't make things any worse.
“Yes. Did your vessel complete its mission before you lost your captain?”
“Afraid not. Unfortunately, I wasn’t privy to the details of the mission and therefore could not carry it out.”
“Be advised. I'm going to send you new docking coordinates so we can remove our equipment from your hold. I also require your flight records.”
I hesitated, quickly moving to another screen. I acknowledged the station's offer to top up the tankage of needed gasses and water. It was gonna cost me more money for a ship I didn't own, but it would give me time.
“The ship is currently refilling tankage. ETA is 23 minutes.” I replied, hoping that would indeed buy me time to think. How was I gonna get this guy to at the very least not kill me? Assuming I was working with some type of crime boss or mafia or who the hell knew who they were.
“Understood, sending information for our docks now.”
I saw the information pop up on my screen and after a moment of hesitation, relaxed myself so I didn't sound nervous and asked a question. “I do know where the ship is. Could you forward me the mission objectives? Perhaps I can complete them for you.”
There was a rather long pause where I had to stare at the screen for well over a minute before a new data file hit. I quickly opened it and started reading. My eyes widened as I noticed the 100,000 credit reward for completing this reasonably simple mission. The crew of this ship was essentially supposed to fly out to the middle of the deep dark along one of the shipping lanes. I didn't really understand the technicalities of how the Rift Interdiction System worked, which was the giant thing in the cargo bay, and I didn't really need to know how it worked as my ship had already been pulled out of the Rift. Point was the crew of the ship had enough clout to borrow an Interdiction System to pull my ship out, which had been noted as a drone ship. This, so far, was the largest error in the whole plot. They were then supposed to pull out a specific package buried in the cubes of lead and return it to the station at a specific docking arm. I was very clearly at the wrong docking arm, which was fine by me, but the fact that the guy had shared this information without knowing anything about who he was sharing it with gave me a horrible sinking feeling. I’d watched enough vids and played enough games to know that there was no way that the guy on the other end of this line was gonna keep me alive. I was now in possession of illegal evidence which I could hold or share with station authorities in an attempt to improve my position.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Then again, the guy on the other end of the line clearly wanted his Interdiction System back because that was probably a several hundred thousand credit piece of technology and he was also gonna want the information logged into the computers. Point being, when I docked at the correct docking station, they were going to invade the ship, kill me, likely the girl, Samantha, and commandeer the ship. Once they cleaned up, they could likely hand the ship and the bodies that were probably stored somewhere on the ship unless Samantha had just spaced them and claimed that the vessel they were working with had been hijacked. Win-win for everybody except me. The shit I was in had indeed gotten deeper.
"So I'm to understand that it is 100,000 credits to retrieve a box for you?"
It took an exceedingly long time for the response to come. "That is correct."
"And I must very much not look in the box. Correct?"
"That is also correct."
"Well, then I am very much interested in undocking from the station and going to get that specific box," I told the guy on the other end of the comms, trying to weasel my way out of docking at the other arm and being murdered.
"While I applaud your enthusiasm, you can certainly understand why we would want our Interdiction System returned."
"Yes, that does make sense. Can I ask who I'm speaking to?"
"Unfortunately, I am merely a broker for various clients, and there is a certain amount of relationship that has to be built up in these things before we start talking about names."
I took a quick glance to make sure that Samantha was still holed up in her little medical room and that the tank had not yet been close enough to full for me to actually have to worry about leaving. My best option for life was probably to disengage from the station and leave. I could either head off in some random direction while squirting the information for where to find the Flying Brick out just before I left, along with the insurance claim I still had to make, or I could just straight up not tell them, though I’d likely be hunted for the rest of my life by various governments and whatever criminal organization I would piss off. Somehow getting them back their Interdiction System would theoretically increase my chances of living, but how to do that without opening myself up to being murdered? I sat back and considered my options and decided to just level with the guy.
“All right. I'm gonna be honest here. I'm kind of in some deep shit. I don't know you, and I don't trust you. The reason the captain is dead is because that ship you sent them after wasn't a drone. It was my ship and I'm a little pissed about it. Most specifically, the part where they were gonna leave me sitting out in the middle of the deep dark to slowly suffocate and or starve. It sounds like my best option for survival is to simply break away from the station and make a run for it. That really just leaves me in some deeper shit though. So I guess my question is if there is a way I can get you back your Interdiction System and get this box for you? Is there some way I can end up leaving with my name free and clear from piracy caused by defending myself?
I waited for quite a while for the reply. While I was about 100% certain that this broker person was somewhere on the station, I felt like I was having a conversation that easily over an AU. I practically jumped when the reply did come.
"Do I understand this correctly? The ship known as the Flying Brick was not a drone, but a single person crewed vessel? Yours? And you managed to eliminate the crew of the vessel that pulled you out of Rift space? You wish to complete the job that the crew of the Res-a-tesseract had taken in exchange for the ship and having your name cleared of any forms of piracy? Is that correct?"
I hadn't actually thought about taking the ship, but why not? "Yeah, that's about it."
"That does sound reasonable. I do require some assurances. Firstly, we want the Interdiction System returned. Secondly, we would like the Flying Brick's coordinates so that I can send someone to complete the mission, if you do not, the various legal expenses to accomplish your request will also be removed from the mission's payout."
"That does sound reasonable to me though I refuse to give up the Flying Brick's coordinates until I am detached from the station and on a route, you know, because of trust issues."
"And I would very much like access to your ship's coordinates before you detach from the station. Because you know, trust issues."
Well, the guy kind of had me there. "Ok. But again, with the trust issues when we dock, I don't wanna see a group of gunmen enter the cargo hold and start spreading out across the ship. If that happens, I'm venting the atmosphere and I very much wanna be disconnected before giving you telemetry on the Flying Brick."
"I think we can see to it. Any other demands?"
I didn't like that. He had kind of just flipped his stance on getting the coordinates for the Flying Brick and I had no idea why. A quick glance at the small medical room showed that Samantha hadn't moved, so she wasn't feeding them any information. I also didn't think she knew how to feed the guys any information. I stared at Samantha for another moment before realizing I was going to have to bring up that.
"There is another armed person on this ship, a member of the former crew. Right now, they are currently armed and holed up. I'm gonna take the rest of the time that we are working on tankage to try to diffuse that situation," he said.
"That would be advisable. Keep in mind, hostile action taken against my men will be met with deadly retaliation."
That was the first time the guy on the other end of the line had threatened me. Though to be fair, he had basically said, you shoot at us, we're gonna shoot back, which at the current moment was my stance on things. I made sure the communication channel with the broker was muted before changing my attention to Samantha Draken. How the hell did I wanna handle this?
I pushed down the intercom button and started speaking. "Samantha Draken." The girl on screen jumped slightly and adjusted her grip on the shotgun, still aimed at the door. "You can put the gun down. I locked myself in the bridge." That certainly got her attention. I was pretty sure she knew where the speaker system was, but judging by the way she was looking around, I was fairly certain she had no idea there was a camera in there.
"I found your file. You know, you're worth 25,000 credits alive. Torture, human experimentation. I mean, holy shit. You seemed worried about me killing you, but at this point, I'm far more concerned for my own life." I tried to watch if her expression changed, but with the angle of the camera, I couldn’t tell. "Give me one reason why I shouldn't just have the station authorities come in here and take control of things. Yeah, I might have killed everybody but, uh, literally everybody in the ship had a warrant. Though to be fair, nobody has a bounty higher than yours."
That was creative license. I had no idea about the other four guys I had killed and the captain and first mate weren't in the sort of trouble that would get them canned on any random station. Specifically not this one. To my surprise, the demon-looking splicer girl on the camera set the shotgun down and curled up, wrapping her arms around her legs and burying her face in her knees, a position in which I assumed she was crying, though I couldn't be sure. One major point was that she wasn't trying to deny it. I gave her a few minutes to mope before speaking again.
"The guy who sent you people to attack my ship just called.” I waited to see if I had her attention and continued when her head poked back up. "He wants whatever you were trying to take off my ship. I'm seriously considering finishing this job for him and as an act of goodwill, I might be handing you over so they can collect the bounty," I said. The idea had only just hit me as something I could do to further increase my odds. The problem was that while the girl had kept me at gunpoint all week and locked in a bathroom, she still kept me fed and otherwise just seemed like a scared girl. She didn't really seem to fit the psycho that the wanted posters made her out to be. That didn't mean she wasn't though. There really wasn't much of a way for me to tell. I wanted to hear it from her. If she could give me just one good reason not to believe the wanted poster.
"So what you got, nothing? Not a single reason why I should risk my neck with you instead of some random mafia or crime boss or whatever the hell these people are?," I asked.
Samantha took some time to wipe her eyes. She slowly got up and made her way towards what I assumed was the comms button. She made like she was gonna push it, but paused to wipe her eyes some more. She then turned around, found something to blow her nose with and then returned to what was probably the comms button. When she finally did press the button, her answer was nine words long.
"I didn't know that they were people at first."
What the hell was that supposed to mean? I tried to figure out how to reask that particular question in a way that seemed a little less, ‘I think you're full of bullshit’. "Please explain that more?" I asked.
"I was indentured to a pharmaceutical company outside of Seriph. I was tasked with making various genetic modifications for primates for all sorts of reasons. I worked there for two years before I was given a sample to test. In order to be thorough, I got a full sequencing of the genome and that's when I realized the primates were human. Then I ran away."
Well, that was kind of horrifying. That didn't mean that she was telling the truth, but breach of an indentured contract was one of her supposed crimes. The way it was listed, that was the first crime.
"You realize all that shit is listed after you ran away?" I asked.
"The charges are, I ratted the company out," Samantha replied.
I supposed that made a reasonable amount of sense. So the question was, could I trust her? The answer is probably no.
"Well, here's your options. Go lock yourself in the back room, uh, I guess the same bathroom you've been locking me in, with no guns, and I won't inform the people coming aboard to take their Interdiction System that you exist. We'll hash everything else out when we're back in the black, or I turn you in now," I offered.
I waited for her to make her decision. She turned and stared down at the shotgun she had left on the floor. "I’ll go hide in the bathroom," Samantha said dejectedly before she left the room. I was able to track her progress on the cameras. There were a lot of cameras in here. I watched her enter the bathroom, close the door and sit down on the toilet. With that deescalation complete, I contacted the broker and told him that the situation had been diffused and that I still had three more minutes before the tanks were topped.
With a momentary thought that this ship might actually end up mine provided things actually went well and I didn't end up dead, I tried to familiarize myself with some of the systems. A couple of things of note was that there was a large data dump of information that entered into the buffers, but then that went out to several other devices. Considering that most of the crew was dead, I'd have to either find those devices and deactivate them or find some other way to clean up the ship's internal systems. With nothing else to do when I got back out into the deep dark, I found myself some manuals on how to work with the systems and set them to download as I made my request to be moved to a different docking arm. The cool automated voice of the station’s system took control of the docking computer along with its warning about how it was a felony to wrest control away and break off. The ship with a nearly unpronounceable name backed away from the station in such a way that made it look like the station was leaving the ship, which was fairly normal for any type of disembarking. Then the ship went straight up relative to the ship, and technically the station as the docking computer had originally oriented the two so that the artificial gravities matched. After a while of up and moving to the left until the station disappeared off the side of the viewport, there was some changing of orientation before closing in on a different docking arm. All standard stuff, though in the Flying Brick, I had never had to move to different docking stations. My cargo was attached and detached from the outside.
In an attempted show of goodwill, I sent the broker the camera feeds for the passages leading into the cargo bay. I was a little unhappy to see armed men in hard suits take up stations on either side of the cargo bay entrance, but as the next people that came in were technicians and people operating pallet jacks, I figured I’d let it go because who wants to walk into a hostile ship? For some reason, the broker was keeping his word and not raiding the ship. Then again, he might just be waiting for the Interdiction System to be pulled out so that the valuable system wasn't damaged in the crossfire. It took a good 15 minutes for the technicians to disconnect everything, dismount the machines, and start hauling them out in large pieces. The system itself would never fit in the Flying Brick. Then again, the entire crew quarters of the Flying Brick was equivalent to the bridge and the galley of this ship with its difficult to pronounce name. I practically jumped when the voice came over his comm system again.
"Now that we have our equipment, feel free to disembark."
Stars knew there had to be some reason the broker seemed to be just letting me go. Had I missed them planting a bomb or something? I still hadn't given the guy the data and it just didn't feel right that he'd be okay with me leaving before giving up the information. With the people off the ship and all the tanks full, I requested permission to leave and was slightly surprised when the station systems took control and gently eased me away from the station. Again, the station drifted away until the Res-a-tesseract hit the safety line and control was once again in my hands. I turned the ship around and started to burn in a direction that wasn't quite the way I had to go.
"It would seem my end of the deal is done. You are free from the station. Please forward the telemetry for the Flying Brick," I mulled over his response before replying.
"I said I would give you the information before disembarking. And by that, I meant before I entered the Rift. While we're still in the system, I need to file my insurance claim reports. So I expect it to be a while before I actually send you the data."
"And when do you expect to disembark?" came the slightly annoyed voice of the broker, which was the first time I had noted any emotion in said voice.
"Well, if I were in your position, I'd have a gunship ready and waiting. So that as soon as I squirted you the telemetry, you'd send it off to them and then they could meet me if not, beat me, to the Flying Brick. Then they could utterly destroy me, completely wiping your hands of my existence. I figured I'd get out far enough so that the communications delay would be about six hours. Unfortunately, that should take about seven days. Sorry about that. It's just trust issues, you know?"
"Very well," came the now very clearly annoyed voice of the broker several minutes later. I kept an eye on the scanners to make sure I wasn't being hunted down while still in the system. I really did hope I’d make it out of this. A quick glance to one of the camera screens showed my other problem still sitting in the bathroom.
***
The broker leaned back in his chair while examining the data being streamed from the Res-a-tesseract to his console. This new person was being extraordinarily cautious and was clearly someone who had watched too many entertainment vids, but at the same time, that cautiousness could be useful. He reached over to his other console and contacted the waiting ship to inform them that they would need to wait six or so days for the Res-a-tesseract to actually leave. They already had the coordinates, but the broker wanted to give this Grant character the feeling that he had been clever enough to outsmart him. With one reliable crew dead, the broker wanted to know if this new person, this new commander of the Res-a-tesseract, could be useful in the future. There was no time limit on the delivery and the fact that it had already missed its arrival to its intended destination was already a win. The broker spent a few more minutes staring over the system information before filing it off to the side and working on the next project.