Throttle Five

The Gift of Boney Ingenuity—which Diana still thought was a strange name for a space station—wasn’t laid out in any logical fashion that she could make out. The docking area the Star Skimmer rested in was in turn connected to a series of tight corridors with frequent airlocks cutting them off. A system, she imagined, designed to keep the entire station from getting sucked into the vacuum if one section was breached.

The fact that they had so many doors like that wasn’t a good sign in Diana’s book.

They arrived at a four-way intersection, and Diana paused. A few aliens were moving on by. Mostly they were osel, with some of those cute little aliens with the breathing tanks on scurrying about, but occasionally there were other, new aliens moving by.

Diana watched a dolphin-like creature roll past in an elaborate—and long—wheeled rover that was filled with water around the alien’s head.

“Whoa,” she said as she followed it with her gaze. “Uh, right, so this place has to have… wait, what are we even looking for?”

“I suspect that you’re looking for entertainment, Mistress. Which would be exceptionally irresponsible of you, especially seeing as we should currently be on the lookout for additional monetary resources.”

“Oh yeah, we need a job,” Diana said. “They have a job board on here?”

The droid behind her turned its head left then right. “There is nothing quite like the internet onboard this station, though from intercepted open-frequency communications, I note that there is a kiosk where simple job requests are sent and answered. It should be approximately eighty metres spinward and three floors down from here.”

Diana glanced up at the signs hanging from the ceiling, most nestled in between exposed pipes and air-ducts. “I can’t tell which way that is,” she said after failing to read any of them.

“That way, Mistress,” ChaOS said, pointing down one of the passages.

Diana took the lead, and with some pointed directions from ChaOS, they moved down a winding ramp and finally, after a good ten minutes of wandering, arrived at a large atrium. Kiosks and stalls lined the edges of a room that had obviously once been a ship dock. They had arrived from some of the catwalks above the main floor, affording them a clear view across the room.

“That’s a whole lot of aliens,” Diana said.

She couldn’t even begin to catalogue the dozens of weird creatures moving below her, and some few moving through the air on hovering machines and occasionally under their own power.

There was a clear penchant towards some species though, the members of those being a lot more common.

“Where do we even begin?” Diana asked. “Look, they have little kiosks! I bet they have neat souvenirs!”

“Mistress, I would remind you that we have no money with which to purchase any such thing,” ChaOS said. The droid turned and pointed down towards a storefront built into the wall off to the side. “That location is, as far as I can tell from the primitive wireless communication systems, the job board. There is a staircase on the other side where we can—”

Diana grabbed the edge of the rail and flipped over it. Her coat barely had time to flap before she landed on both feet next to some aliens in long robes who darted back from her sudden appearance. “Heh, sorry,” she said before standing up from her landing crouch.

A heavy thump next to her announced the presence of ChaOS doing the same. “That was entirely careless, Mistress.”

“Yeah, but it was faster,” she said. She grinned at her AI companion then started off towards the job board.

It was currently occupied by a bone-faced alien who was sweating behind a glass panel. Its arms were moving about, working over a keyboard with the hurried speed of someone that had been fooling around and who now had little time to catch up to the task they were supposed to have done.

“Heya,” Diana said.

“Mistress, no one here other than the two of us speak any Sol-based languages.”

“Doesn’t mean I can’t say hi,” Diana said.

The alien behind the counter looked up, then gestured hurriedly to the side and towards a flatscreen panel hanging next to the glass. It was covered in boxes with text in them, and a wave of Diana’s hand near it made a large cursor appear. Motion sensors, as opposed to touch sensors. It made sense, what with some aliens likely having difficulty with the panel.

“Let me navigate the options, Mistress.”

“Look for something racing-related,” Diana asked. She looked at the options scrolling by as ChaOS flickered through page after page of job offers. Some came with pictures, occasionally with weird and contrasting colours to them, of rooms and machines and locations that she could only guess at.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“I doubt there will be—disregard that. There is currently one listing Mistress, that is racing-related.”

The posting had an image of a strange wreck of a vehicle. The first thing that caught her eye was the large engine, obviously some sort of jet-like design, with directional thrusters on the sides and two wheels jutting out of stalks by the front. The cockpit was an open-air thing near the rear, two seats, reached by a stubby ladder on the side.

“That thing looks like crap,” Diana said.

No two parts were the same colour, unless rust brown counted, in which case the vehicle did have something of a unifying theme. Parts were bolted and riveted in place, and several pipes and tubes were sticking out of the body where holes had been cut for them.

“The listing is searching for a co-pilot in what is called the Overflow Cup. I can’t find any other information about the race itself, other than the fact that it is a race, one being held tomorrow on the planet below.”

“Someone’s going to race in that thing?” Diana asked.

She grinned. Whomever that was, they had guts, and she liked them already.

“It seems so, Mistress.”

“We’re taking the job,” Diana decided.

“Mistress, you haven’t asked about the potential remunerations,” ChaOS said.

She shrugged. “What’s it pay? Enough to keep the Star Skimmer in dock for a day or two?”

“The job application states that the payment is a third of any monetary winnings earned in the race itself,” ChaOS said.

“Nice!” Diana said. “We’re definitely taking it.”

“We don’t know what the race’s monetary winnings are. Or if there even are any.”

Diana shrugged, then stepped away from the screen. A couple of those long, stalky aliens were waiting behind them already. “Come on, show me where this death-trap’s parked. I want to see it for myself.”

The droid nodded, then started walking through the room and to the other side. “The listing included the location of the lister.”

They crossed the bazaar-like room, then entered a wider passageway with an opened airlock. One side of the passage was filled with transparent panes, and because of the station’s rotation, they could see the planet below, framed next to one of its larger moons.

They soon veered out of the larger passages, and into the smaller tunnels that snaked through the station. ChaOS had them wait for an elevator, which carried them up past a dozen floors before opening onto a narrow corridor lined with exposed machinery and pipes, and whose floor was covered in random detritus.

Diana scrunched her nose at the look of some of the trash left behind. “Do they allow cattle on their stations here, or did someone not find the alien bathroom?”

“I do not know, Mistress,” ChaOS said. “Our client should be right around this corner, at one of the station’s smaller docks. By the way, I think I’ve learned something interesting about these aliens.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“They have terrible data infrastructure. Decent firewalls, but the main thing protecting their systems from machine-tampering is the wildly different set of coding languages, non-universal connection types, and programming styles. I think every race involved with this station has brought their own way of creating and adjusting code with them, and it was all connected together in a most haphazard fashion.”

“At least you’re having fun,” Diana said. All she had for entertainment were a few posters stuck on walls. Some of them had glowing images, which was neat, but most were incomprehensible messes of squiggly text over out of context images.

Even the aliens, it seemed, couldn’t escape the allure of things like soft drinks.

They came around the corner, and Diana’s walk slowed down. There was an altercation ahead.

Three aliens, two of them the four-legged bony ones, and the third a large, bipedal alien with a barrel chest and a face that resembled that of a tiger, if the person looking at them was far away, nearsighted, and had lost their glasses.

They were arguing with a fourth alien, a blue-furred creature barely tall enough to reach Diana’s hip, that looked to Diana like a two-legged mouse with a tiny potbelly and a knitted jumper covering some grease-stained overalls.

“That the one hiring?” Diana asked.

“I’m afraid so, Mistress. Her name and basic information claim that she is Ahvie the Rhack.”

“Well, it looks to me like she’s getting bullied. Come on, let’s make a good first impression.”

***