2.5 billion credit, we only got paid about that much for our whole clearing job and that took months, and that was split between the four of us. With another 2.5 on the way, I don’t know what this woman is running from but there’s not much she can’t run from with that much credit, and to just carelessly throw it at a one-way slip, some people…
“What do you think of her?” I ask Juno as I sit down in the chair next to her.
“Her name is Evelyn; And what I think of her is that no one throws that much credit around because they want to. There’s something very off about her, and I’m suspicious of how exactly you came to be drugged. I didn’t think that she had anything to do with it until she threw out that outrageous number, like fuck, five billion just for a slip, she’s got to be insane. I’m still not sure that she had anything to do with it, but it seems like quite the coincidence that all that happens to you and then the mess with her.” Juno seems peeved, more on edge than she should be given that I’m fine.
“Hey, Juno, I’m okay. I mean it’s not unheard of, some freak at a bar drugs a customer’s drink just for kicks. The important thing is that you got there and got me out, and damn, we just got 5 billion credit, it’s our lucky day. Hell, if she’s paying that well I’d say she’s alright. Hey why don’t you go relax in the back with Liam. I can handle navigation.” Juno sighs, decompressing a little.
“Yeah, I guess so, it’s not unheard of, and Evelyn’s not so bad I guess. Oh well, yeah, I’m going to go back with Liam.” She gets up and starts walking back to the lounge when a delta level travel bar gets blanketed over the whole planet. That’s odd…
“Liam! Get up here,” I yell, he comes jogging up to the front looking a little bewildered.
“I’ve got no idea why there would be a travel bar of that class on this planet, do you think it has something to do with her?”
That’s when it happened, the displays went dark, and we slipped. Straight from the launch bay, I can only imagine the destruction we left behind.
“What the fuck just happened!” I hear Cicero scream from the lounge. I sit still, contemplating what we’re going to do.
“Juno, how did we just slip while planet-side?” I ask. I am aware of the physics of what happens if a space slip occurs near matter outside the space craft, and I am also aware that it is considered one of the highest universal crimes. However, I am not aware of any ship capable of making such a slip, as slip safety protocols run quite deep in all navigation systems.
“I don’t know Gabriel, I’ve never even heard of this happening outside of when the slip drives were used as weapons, but that was only in tests. There is no way that we can be held accountable for this.” Juno just shakes her head, as if in disbelief.
“They will make an example of us; we will never live this down!” Liam has obviously taken a path similar to Cicero’s, one of outrage. “The last ship that slipped planet-side had its entire crew suspended in sensory deprivation till they all went insane and died!” So obviously Liam has heard of a case neither of us have. A case that I agree, sounds rather grim for us.
“Hold on, Juno, where are we first of all?” I ask, as that’s the most pertinent information now. We can deal with how we got here and the repercussions of that later.
“We are out in deep space, the rendezvous point for the payment for our last job. We were locked to slip here, that’s obviously not the problem. We need to figure out how the hell we slipped here straight out of the launch bay. I believe that a conversation is in order with our passenger.” She gets up and starts walking to the guest quarters with Cicero and Liam in tow.
I don’t see how it’d be possible for Evelyn to circumvent ship launch and slip protocols from a locked room with no equipment, as she came with no baggage. I assume that she keeps a room on her somewhere, but there aren’t any substorage access points on the ship. I stand and follow them; I want to see the interaction between Evelyn and the crew. The door to the guest quarters is locked still, no tampering there. Cicero unlocks the door and opens it. There she is, she’s just sitting in a chair in the far corner of the room, waiting for us, staring us down.
“What’s going on?” she asks, she looks distressed, scared even, not like someone who had anything to do with what happened. I can’t pin down what I think of her, she seemed very sure of herself from what I remember at the club, very knowledgeable, she had done her research into us, probably connected with whoever monitors the ships going in and out of the different stations; and yet, she must be desperate to pay so much for passage off world. I can’t imagine why she would pick us, seemly unarmed in her current state, unless we were the only option, and she urgently needed the get out of some situation.
“We just slipped, and we slipped while still planet-side, and obviously that is not standard operating procedure. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about it would you?” Cicero is not happy, and he obviously either doesn’t see that she’s just as in the dark as we are or doesn’t care.
“Wha…, what do you mean,” she sputters, Cicero’s eyes bulge.
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“I mean that we never got to take off, we never launched, one moment we were in the launch bay and second we had slipped, do you have any idea what that means!” Cicero is basically just ranting at this point, nothing productive will emerge from this.
“Enough Cicero; I’m going to talk to her in private in my quarters, you all need to figure out the ETA for Frontier, we should be about 14 hours early, but I want an exact number for when they’re getting here. We need to be together by the time we’re collecting payment. As far as we know, no one knows that we were the ones to make the planet-side slip, so I’m not worried about that just yet. Evelyn, follow me.” What I said was true, I’ve been trying to think of ways that the slip could be connected to us. We purposely used the trans depot because of the lack of logging, not that there are any on premises logs now, but I don’t see any way we could be connected to the crime, so we might actually get away clean on that front.
Evelyn stands and I turn to walk towards my quarters, everyone else clears out and finds something useful to do. She follows me closely, not leaving much room behind me as we walk. I just am having a hard time wrapping my head around how this debacle occurred, if it was a system malfunction, it was a grave one and I would be very surprised if that was the case, Star Fury is more than top of the line, doubling as a linear craft rated up to 40C and a slip craft, and equipped with a small armada’s worth of firepower; a malfunction of that magnitude is unheard of. The closest maintenance station is… 300 lightyears away, we could slip, as we are in deep space, but I don't know if that would be wise given what happened last time, who knows what else might happen if the systems truly are malfunctioning. Traveling at max linear speed that would be 7.5 years in stasis, not that long relatively, but after slipping for so long, getting used to instantaneous travel, stasis would be a huge inconvenience. I'll have to ask Liam to take a look at mechanical and software, see what he thinks, I can decide from there whether we’ll be taking a linear path or a slip.
I sit down at my desk and gesture for Evelyn to sit down also.
“So, tell me, why exactly did you need to get off planet? The last couple hours have been a complete mess for my team and I. This is highly unusual and the only common denominator here is you. No one throws around the kind of credit you did to get this transport, I'd say you must be quite desperate.” It is odd, not only did I suffer an attack on my person, but our ship malfunctions right afterwards, it cannot be a coincidence.
“Okay. I needed to get off planet because I'm running from a corp, Sequel, I'm sure you saw the travel ban, I believe that was for me. I leaked trade secrets and now I'm running. I didn't have any other options, it was either find transport, or get taken in by Sequel where who knows what they'll do to me. It's not as if The Government could punish them any further. Speaking of the travel bar, that might be why the ship did what it did, if it was already locked to slip and there was a bar on planet-side traffic, just a thought, I'm no expert,” she says. She looks uncomfortable, like it was hard to admit that she was on the run, as if that wasn't obvious already. As for her explanation for our slip, I doubt that could be the cause, but it's possible, it's better than any other explanation at the moment.
“If that's the case, the 2.5 billion should cover your trip, don't worry about the other two and a half. Now, I am going to be letting the rest of the crew know that you're on the run. They deserve an explanation and in Cicero's case you might be better off if he knows. We are meeting a corp out here, they have no affiliation with Sequel, as just about no one has an official affiliation with Sequel anymore. But regardless, you’ll be staying put here on Star Fury on the off chance that there are open lines of communication between the two corps. We are currently at the rendezvous point so we're not going anywhere until we've met with Frontier, but afterwards, we will be going to a maintenance station to have the ship checked out. What happened on Huyto cannot happen again. I'm going to have Liam look at the ship to see if he can find whatever went wrong, that will determine whether we travel to the maintenance station by slipping or by linear travel. I know that you probably picked this ship specifically because you did not want to travel linearly, however, I'm not taking any chances.” If she looked uncomfortable before, the moment that I mentioned linear space travel, the look intensified. I know that some have worse side effects from stasis than others, and others just have issues in regard to the vast passage of time that occurs, but it looks less that she is reluctant to enter stasis and more that she is aggravated by the thought of it, possibly a religious qualm?
“Okay, I understand your decision to tell the rest of your crew, but there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the actual function of the slip drive, just the timing of the activation, surely we can just slip to the station. We are in deep space so we shouldn’t have to worry about another planet-side slip,” she says. For the most part I agree, however it really just depends on what Liam comes back with.
“I understand that you are reluctant to travel linearly, but what we do depends on what Liam can determine from examining the ship. Now, I need to communicate all this to the crew and get things moving to prepare for the meet with Frontier, you need to go back and stay out of sight and out of mind.” It’s blunt but true, the less she interacts with the crew the better, regardless of if she was intentionally involved in the untimely slip, the crew certainly associates the mishap with her presence, and I can’t blame them.
I stand up, we have some preparation to do before Frontier gets here, I open the door to leave, she files out first, heading straight back to her room. ‘We now have a pretty good idea of why she is here with us. She apparently let some corp secret slip and now is on the run, Sequel Corp, one of the big ones. She says that was the reason for the travel bar back on Huyto. She also had the thought that the travel bar in addition to already being locked to slip may be the cause of our mishap, though that seems unlikely to me. Liam, I need you to take a look at the ship’s system logs and do as conclusive of a hardware and software check as you can, if you can figure out whether slipping is safe at this point that would be appreciated. Juno and Cicero, you both need to start preparing accounts receivable and going over clearing expenses, I want Frontier paying for every last drop of plasma we used.’ Having a crew in the know always simplifies situations.
‘Got it, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can on those checks’ Liam, helpful as ever.