A whip-crack rang throughout Jack Fenway’s ship as the pressure of the gas giant’s atmosphere took its toll on the hull. Jack didn’t flinch as he watched the readouts from the pilot’s chair. He was past the rated design limit, but he knew that shipwrights over-engineered everything out of caution. The Aster-steel would flex and complain, but his small and well-hidden freighter would be fine.

Outside, thousands of tons per square inch of hydrogen and helium bore down on the small pocket of life preserving atmosphere, while Jack waited. In the void of space beyond the planet’s exosphere, a frontier patrol vessel was coasting, waiting to see if its sensor readings about an engine trail had been correct.

The Helvetic League really had no hope of policing the far-flung frontiers of colonized space, but as far as Jack was concerned, everything they did was for show. He had only taken the risk of travelling so close to one of their observation stations because his boss had demanded it. She needed him to join her immediately, and didn’t care what risks he had to take. If he had had more time, he would have taken a long route meandering through the Chiasmi bubble. But when Allana Rayker snapped her fingers, Jack had no choice but to obey.

He had left a probe, running on passive systems, drifting in the ice debris that made up the gas giant’s rings. Once it had detected the patrol ship jumping away, it would return to join him, and he would continue on his journey to whatever godforsaken spot Rayker had found, far beyond the warm candlelight of human consciousness.

On the other hand, if he had left noticeable vortices in the planet’s cloud layer as he entered his hiding spot, he would have only seconds of warning before an armed cruiser was on top of him. His ship would be seized, he would be arrested, and he would spend at least a week in prison. He would not leave alive, obviously. When Rayker was disappointed by failure, she made sure to exact the harshest punishments.

The ship’s superstructure moaned its melodrama, while the seconds ticked by on the command console’s clock, and Jack wondered how much of a delay his boss would tolerate. Every minute that he was stuck there would provoke further anger from her.

An electronic chirp filled his cockpit, and he felt a shock of adrenaline. A vessel was in close proximity. Range: five hundred yards. Size…

Jack smacked his head back against the chair’s headrest. Four meters.

He tapped out commands into the console, bringing the engines back online. The probe nestled itself into its storage bracket on the hull, and soon the ghostly brown world was falling away behind him.

Through the viewscreen, a comet glinted against the infinite black void like a mote caught in a beam of light. The ball of dust and ice looked unimpressive on Jack’s scope, orbiting far from its host star, and lacking the tail that made the more well-known comets spectacular tourist attractions.

What the hell was his employer doing out here, so far beyond the borders of settled space? Brilliant and ruthless as she was, Jack knew there was nothing she wouldn’t do in pursuit of her goals. But she rarely told him more than he needed to know.

His gaze slipped past his destination to the space beyond. For a split second, he was caught by a wave of vertigo, as though he were teetering over the edge of a terrifying abyss. Nobody knew what creatures lay beyond the huddled firelights of human civilization and its thirty-seven worlds, but Jack knew that if they too could produce a being like Rayker, it was better not to go looking.

After an orbital docking rig secured his ship, workers wearing corporate industrial suits ushered him onto a shuttle. VennZech employees, Jack noted; the largest weapons manufacturer in the galaxy, and Rayker’s usual partners. They didn’t speak, though their body language—hunched shoulders and averted gazes—said a great deal.

Once they landed on the surface of the tiny body, he was ushered into a tramcar that took him through rugged canyons and past deep crevasses until they reached what looked to be a dig site. Giant floodlights augmented the meager light of the distant star, focused down towards a village of reinforced vacuum tents. These were clustered around a borehole, where brilliant scars of blue shone through a white crust of ice—the comet’s subsurface, visible now that the excavators had dislodged the thick layer of surface dust.

Jack passed through an airlock and, after freeing himself from the travel suit, was led through several tunnels to the command tent, where he found himself face to face with a familiar gaunt and tall figure.

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She flashed him a cold glare. “You are an hour behind schedule.”

“My apologies, Madam Rayker,” Jack said, without letting any emotion enter his voice. “I ran into a frontier patrol ship and had to wait for it to move on.”

She flicked a speck of dirt from her sleeve. “Very well. You may take a longer return journey, as you see fit. I don’t want any risks taken with this shipment.

An array of monitors displayed camera views from the drilling site, and she turned back to them. “You may begin, Reskov.”

On the central monitor, a derrick pulled a reinforced container up from the darkness of the bore. Jack glanced at one of the pit chiefs. Would he have enjoyed excavation instead of smuggling? The job had a romantic appeal, combined with a technical mastery that had always fascinated him—but of course it could never be. He was not the master of his own fate.

The crew worked to keep the cargo clear of the pit walls with a diligence that betrayed their fear. Nobody liked to upset Rayker.

“What’s down there?” he asked once the silence became too awkward.

Rayker waved a hand. “A crashed ship. A research vessel.”

Jack did not like taking an object of unknown origin and nature aboard his vessel, though it wasn’t unusual for either VennZech or Rayker to make such demands of him. Normally, he could deduce what he was carrying. Salvaged off a crashed navy ship; either a weapon or a powerplant. Handed over by grim-faced cartel members; contraband of one form or another.

He trusted that his employer wouldn’t endanger her best frontier-runner, and his trust had so far been lucratively rewarded. But a crashed ship, buried deep beneath the ice of a hitherto undisturbed comet? Of course, his job was not to question, it was to deliver on time and without damage. It was a charge he much preferred to the wealth, women, and power with which his brother had tried to buy his loyalty.

“Can you sign for receipt?” Drilling Chief Reskov asked once the package was secured onto a tram car.

“At the orbital rig, sure,” Jack replied.

“But I’m handing it over to you.”

Jack shook his head. “I take responsibility for things on my ship. The container is not on my ship. You want the tram operator to sign? That’s your problem.”

Reskov scowled at him. “VennZech procedure clearly states—”

“Corporate isn’t running this operation,” Rayker snapped. “I am. Mr Fenway will sign when it is on his ship, is that clear?”

The chief went pale and nodded his acceptance. He disappeared to find the truck driver, leaving Jack alone with Rayker.

“No mistakes, Jack.” She instructed him. “No authority between the stars can interdict this shipment, or else you will answer for it. If you don’t like that, you can go back to working for your brother.”

Jack nodded, his throat dry.

“When you get back up there, tell them to prepare my vessel. I’ll leave a day behind you.”

Two hours later, Jack left orbit on a lazy course that evaded the Helvetic League’s scattered watch stations by the simple expedient of going around them. He chose a region of space that was not heavily policed, and while the Leagues’ propaganda might brag about their airtight border security, the reality was far different. Space was vast, ships could be made difficult to detect, and the human pretense at the mastery of anything between the stars was regularly made to look foolish by the hundreds of smugglers that plied the void.

Even in the denser population zones—the dozen core worlds—smugglers got through the checkpoints using high-risk maneuvers. They would drop out of light speed so close to a star that no patrol vessel would dare follow them. Even as they lost the occasional daredevil this way, the payoff was immense. Humanity yearned for luxuries and contraband from the outer worlds, even as the League’s administrators paid billions of credits for educational material to convince them that they didn’t.

Comfortable with his computer’s calculations, Jack accelerated his ship past light speed, locked in the autopilot, and poured himself a whiskey. He preferred Islay scotch, and as he breathed in the heavy, peaty scent, and nestled into the comfort of his ship’s lounge, he began to relax. With the new route he wasn’t concerned about surprises. It was a quiet part of the Cluster—the local collection of star systems that played host to humanity.

Rayker liked to send him on the boring trips, because he was careful and didn’t make mistakes. She was boring as well, in her own way, preferring quiet deception to the loud, clumsy, and occasionally violent operations of the cartels.

Jack felt a rush of anxiety as he visualized her cold smile.

“You wanted to revisit the possibility of a transfer, didn’t you?” she had asked, an edge of disdain in her voice.

Jack had nodded meekly. His oft repeated request to try a different line of work would be ignored, he knew. But she liked to toy with people.

“Perhaps it can be considered after your next assignment.”

She lied so easily.

She was beautiful too, he thought, in the same manner as a well-made knife. It didn’t bother him that she kept his leash tight, and the work easy, sometimes even engaging. Though he ached for novelty, it gave him a thrill to outwit the fools of the Helvetic League’s law enforcement. An empire that had once ruled the stars now reduced to a feeble bureaucracy—it gave Jack pleasure to mock their pretensions of greatness.

A tangle of connections and agreements were all they had left now that the Corporations held sway. The League might set rules for trade and control those too skittish to turn to the cartels, but their real power had been broken, lost beneath spider webs of corruption and grift. They thought they could rule the stars when they couldn’t even rule themselves.