You ever get the feeling that maybe the job you took on was a little above your paygrade?
Well, certainly not me when I was eyeing the big, bright neon sign that read '5,000 credits for a stress free gig'. But a hundred-and-seventy light years out from the core worlds, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, waiting for days on end in an absolutely uncharted backwater of the Empyrean Sector where all sorts of horrors could devour your ship at a moment's notice - perhaps I should've asked for a higher fee.
But then again, 5,000 credits is no small amount to laugh at, and that's why we took it, Maine and I.
"You know, I think I've acquired a taste for these," remarked Maine, unscrewing the cap on the nutrient paste dispenser to let out a goop of mildly yellow porridge. Mildly yellow, eugh. Yes, it was one of those colors that didn't belong on food, especially with that particular texture - it made you wonder how low of a point in your life you must reach to willingly consume.
Why were we eating it? Well, because it was dirt-cheap, of course. And we were down on our money and luck.
From just a few feet away, the ruffled dispensing tube that hung from the ceiling had the knack of resembling an elephant's trunk, and the accompanying nutrient paste that descended from the feedstores above and out of the nostrils of this jury-rigged tube convinced bystanders it was nothing less than snot. The image could run shivers down any battle-hardened marine. Now I know why the feedstores guy at our previous port pat us on the back with a wry grimace and said, ‘best of luck.’
"Acquired a taste? I’m certain your taste buds voted to seek independence from your tongue,” I jested.
"Hardly. My taste buds are being honest, if you think about it," Maine retorted. "The paste's got essential vitamins, minerals, and amino acids. Aren't they everything the body needs?"
"Meaning?"
"Meaning that's why nutrient paste tastes like everything. You know, chicken, fish, tomatoes, the good stuff."
"Have you actually tasted any of those before?" I asked.
"No," he replied, confidently.
We both burst into laughter.
"What I'd kill for some fresh veggies," I added. "I'll have you know, I haven't shit in a week."
"Understandable. There's nothing solid to conjure."
"Then how do you go to the latrine so often? I heard you push one out last night."
"Mass-energy equivalence doesn't work on me. Whatever I eat, I poop out twice the amount," he replied, beaming. "My gut is very honest."
“Hah!" I chuckled. "A little too honest.”
Ah, Maine. He was built like one of those musclemen you saw in old country TVs on dirtworlds, and had the name that corroborated the image. But contrary to his physique, he was anything but callous and rough. Meanwhile, I enjoyed the oddity of being named Hana Makoto Reiss, going by ‘Hana’ - which meant 'flower' in some faraway ancestral language in the mythical planet of old Terra – which always seemed to be at odds with my aspirations. My family wanted me to grow up all elegant and ladylike, and be married off to some rich noble in a crownworld so they could live out the rest of their days in good pension. Only I wasn't keen on sharing that fantasy. Oh, that, and they were all murdere -
"Kopi?"
"...What?" I stuttered, my train of thought broken.
"Some kopi?" asked Maine, throwing a quizzical look in my direction and pointing at the pods. "You okay? We've got two pods left."
"Two pods? Aw, shite," I sighed, leaning into my chair. "Don’t need it. I reckon you can have it."
"Hey, come on," cajoled Maine, cranking a lever to kickstart the kopi machine. It breathed to life for a short moment, then began grunting and huffing like an ox made to pull more than a fair share of the plough - and the container fell apart at the seams to spill everything onto the floor.
"You've got to be absolutely kidding me," I groaned, only a tiny bit exasperated. It was the 5th consecutive appliance that had broken in the past week. "Does literally anything on this shuttle last more than like, 2 weeks?"
"Well, it's a mudskipper. Can't say anything more than that."
Ah, the beautiful mudskipper. Flying in one was like flying in a box of tissue paper. A single sneeze could rip the hull and send you to the vacuum of space - and best yet, it didn't have a shield generator, meaning any accidental graze or bump was existentially hazardous. When you pushed the throttle past a certain point, it would begin to shudder and rattle like a horse being whipped - and actually sound like one, too.
Worse was that the crew quarters - designed for less than four - were located at the aft of the shuttle near the engines, where the rattling was the craziest, so it was impossible to actually get some shut-eye in it unless it was stationary or docked. This was probably to make space for essential sensors and navigational instruments at the front, which could suffer from interference from being too close to the engine plumes - but it was more likely a tactic from the shipbuilders to get customers to upgrade to a better, shinier ship that wouldn't induce sleep deprivation. Plausible deniability, hmm?
The mudskipper's few saving graces - maybe the only ones - was that it was the smallest civilian shuttle on the market to have a Witchdrive installed, which gave it artificial gravity and ability to jump between star systems - and that it was small, nimble, and burned very little fuel. So if a starship captain could tolerate the lack of safety and comfort and utility and amenities, which is nothing much really in the Empyrean Sector nowadays, the mudskipper could bring in some cash if it survived its march. Most of these jobs, of course, inclined towards smuggling of some sort, including all manners of interesting and highly questionable substances that exploited its low sensor profile on radar scans. Some of the more legal jobs that were available ranged anything from microsatellite deployments to passenger hauling (not that any sane person other than wanted criminals would actually want to get hauled on a freaking mudskipper, mind you), all the way to running exploration packages and making dead drops - which is what we were doing.
"The goddamn dude just has to make us drop it off at L5," sighed Maine. "Literally couldn't be further from the jump point. We've been burning straight ahead for like, what, eight days?"
"Right? It's ridiculous."
"Ya know, it was your idea to take the job."
I looked away rather sheepishly.
Okay, cue our flashback sequence.
Guy called Ramon sits at a bar. He's literally sitting on one of the tables with a huge neon signing flashing over his head. '5,000 credits for a stress-free gig,' he says, with a huge toothed grin on his face, and a thin moustache. Literally all of his teeth are made of gold. A multicolored furcoat covers his frame, and his eyes are shrouded by thick brown sunglasses.
Many patrons don't seem to give him notice, piquing my curiosity.
5,000 credits can afford 250 months of planetside-quality food for one person - actually grown and cooked and prepared by loving hands, and not execreted out by a nutrient synthesizer from the remains of factory-farmed grubs. 5,000 credits is also pretty much the wholesale price of an entire mudskipper with a gun attached. You can also afford a decent house on a midworld with that kind of money. Hell, monthly wages as a grueling factory worker only nets 10 credits. At that salary, you'd have to work for 40 straight years to see a sight of 5,000 credits in your account balance. Maine thinks something is up with the gig, but I approach the man rather happily and ask what the job is.
Ramon tells it simply. Dump a box at a specified location. No need to pass border security, nothing to tick off the dominion wannabees, nothing illegal in it. He actually takes us to the warehouse so we can check.
We take the lifts, round a few corners, and boom, there it is. A perfectly ordinary-looking box. In it are some huge clear-glass cylinders filled with a faint and sweet smelling liquid. Ramon trickles a drop into his mouth to prove they aren't narcotics, and has the coreworld customs paperwork for us to give in case any nosy patrol officer asks about it. The only catch with the dump job – is that the destination is kind of far, at 170 light years away from the core of the sector. But hey, that's literally the only thing bad about it. It's only about eight days in Witchspace, and another 8 to drop it off at L5 - the Lagrange 5 point in the destination system. Don't know what Lagrange means, and I don't care, because my eyes are basically cash symbols at this point. Just relax, ride, and drop is all I hear. 16 days for 40 years worth of salary? You bet anyone would take it in a heartbeat. Maine cocks his head, because it sounds too good to be true, but I say yes to the job and sign the holopad in my name before he can object.
Cut back to the present.
"Anyway, aren't we getting close?" inquired Maine, mopping the floor of half-processed kopi.
"Yep. Let's just dump this crap, snap our coords and shoot it over to Ramon," I replied, my eyes steady on the sensor ping. "Don't want to stay in this system longer than we have to, you get my feeling?" I looked to him with a tinge of concern.
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“Not really. It’s just quiet out here, that’s all.”
“Erm... you not getting the same feeling as I do?”
I can't quite put my finger on it, but I've been feeling steadily uneasy for some time now, since about a day after we dropped into this archonforsaken fringe system.
You know what they used to say in dirtworlds - if you're traveling out alone in the wild, and you inexplicably feel like you're being watched - chances are, you most likely are. You could be watched by animals, or by other humans wanting to hunt you; anthropophagic beasts were rather rare in the coreworlds, but the further one went out, the more probable you were to get pounced on by a lineage of some genetic horror which a megacorp had seeded into the biosphere hundreds of years ago. The only things to trust was the gut, and a gun. The larger and more dakka, the better.
The steady blip blip blip of the CRT screen swept the proximity of our little shuttle round and round. It could see for at least a hundred miles out. Nothing but the pitch black of space met its studious gaze; there was nothing out here, not even asteroids, or sparse molecular clouds to keep us company. We were alone. All this would be over in an hour, I consoled myself, but in the eerie darkness, the stars and constellations seemed to materialize into ghostly hands. The dim light of the parent star - a red dwarf - illuminated the cockpit in a dim, hazy glow like that of perpetual sunset.
"You ever believe those tales? Of abyssdrakes?" asked Maine, shattering the silence. I must've flinched quite hard, because he flinched too, taking a few steps back. "Woah, Hana, relax, relax. You already getting space madness?"
"...Abyssdrakes?" I asked cautiously, wondering whether my inquiry would bode ill in these uncharted waters. Words had the power to conjure, some old techno-shaman once said on my world. Don't anger myth without reason, he advised.
"The ol’ legends. Come to think of it, a place this far out might've been the battleground between the dominion and whatever they fought hundreds of years ago," continued Maine.
"What?” I asked, even more concerned. “What’d they fight?"
"No one knows. That's kind of the mystery."
"You know, now may not be the best time to crack those legends. Don't jinx anything."
A single ping on the CRT screen made both of our hearts drop. We glanced at each other briefly, crowding around the radar console to see the second-pass of the sweep.
Ping. 90 miles out.
From behind.
"What the hell," I muttered, waiting for the third-pass.
Ping. 80 miles out.
"The hell moves that fast? Aren't we at - "
Ping. 65 miles out.
"Is it a ship? What ship? A missile?"
"It's got no sig! It ain't anything!" hollered Maine, popping his head out of the navigation closet.
"Then what, a meteor?"
Ping. 40 miles out.
"SIDDOWN! Now!" I yelled, as Maine leapt into the seat and buckled up. It was the first time he'd done so since our heist.
I smashed the glassbox open with my gloved hand and slapped the emergency burn. "Sorry babe, you're gonna have to run a little faster."
The mudskipper let out a disgruntled scream as both of us were flung deep into our chairs. An enormous plume of orange and red rocketed from our engines, held together just barely by duct-tape threatening to snap.
"It's still gaining on us, what the hell?" I frantically ran my finger over the radar, trying to see if it was an error or a glitch.
Ping. 25 miles out. From the size of the signature at this distance, it must have been as 10 times as massive as our little shuttle.
Ping. 17 miles.
10.
6 miles.
2 miles.
"It's practically on our tail! Do you see anything?"
"No!" shouted Maine, craning his neck back towards the aft canopy.
Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping.
1 mile.
The signature overlapped with the symbol of our own.
"I don't know what's going on! What the hell is this thing reading? A glitch?"
We heard it first before we saw it. We heard it in our heads rather than through our ears. It sounded like a minute whistling of the air that steadily grew to a screech, louder and louder, crackling the exposed comms, like a bomb in the midst of a dive.
And then it dawned on me that there were more than 2 dimensions to space.
I looked up towards the canopy to see a figure of utter black shrouding the stars, and less than a second later, we ragdolled in our seats in impact as it tore through the back of our craft in a cacophony of murdered metal.
Stars swam in my head as I began to feel the air stream out towards the back. The comm console blared an ear-piercing siren.
HULL BREACH DETECTED --- ! ---! ---! ---! ---!
"HANA, HANA, DRIVE! DRIVE! DRIVE!" Maine shuddered me to senses, as he wrapped his torso in a fire hose, unreeling it from the wall. "I'MA CLOSE THE AIRLOCK. YOU DRIVE!" he hollered, launching himself out of the cockpit towards the corridor, pulling the hose taut; grappling it in sheer hope of not being sucked out to death.
I punched myself and grabbed a hold of the stick and throttle once more. The throttle was responding, which meant the engines were somehow still attached. It must have meant -
"FUCK! OUR CARGO BAY IS GONE!" bellowed Maine, barely pulling down the latch that sealed the rest of the craft shut from the vacuum. "ROLL LEFT!" He yelled, and without having to confirm, I twisted the stick hard left, rolling the craft just in time to avoid the assailant’s second chomp. The creature spun and dove sideways, and briefly passed in front of the faint star, revealing a serpentine form with colossal wings. Numerous protrusions stuck out from the length of its body like quills and stalactites, reflecting a glint harsh to the eye. In its giant maw were the crumpled remains of our once-cargo bay, pipes still bleeding oil. The creature bisected it with a single crunch, diving towards us once again like predator to prey, its eyes of crimson-ruby glittering like jewels in the dark -
"ROLL!" I grimaced, as I somersaulted the mudskipper out of the clutches of its teeth. Just barely.
"TO THE JUMP POINT! BACK TO THE JUMP POINT!" Maine frantically roared, stamping out a fire that had nicked the aft corridor.
No, I calculated. There was no way we'd make it back there alive. The drake-creature outpaced us in a straight line, even with an emergency burn. We couldn't do it again without killing the ship for sure.
"RAMOOOOOON!" I yelled, pushing the stick forward to dive in front of the belly of the beast, its claws carving a trail across the cockpit canopy. But there I gleaned a glimmer of hope.
The creature couldn't change direction as fast as we could. If we couldn't outpace it, we could zig-zag it. But it was 8 days to the jump point. 8 days of staying awake or praying till it lost interest. Any number of things could go wrong in those 8 days, given the mudskipper's horrific record of reliability. The engines might give out. The oxygen cycling canister might need repairs. The kopi machine was already broken too.
Therein I understood why the payout for our gig was 5,000 credits - because of whatever this was. And frankly, it was above our paygrade. More than that, the creature held our precious dead-drop cargo in its belly. Without it, our credits were damned.
There was only one choice.
"Maine - you drive."
"What?"
"Can you drive?"
"Y - yeah, I can."
"I'm gonna go kill it."
"How?"
"Just wait for my signal. Get ready to dump the fuel shells we use for Witchspace. Not all, just the dregs. Swerve, zig-zag, do whatever, I don't mind. But I need a clear shot."
"Got it," he nodded, jamming headphones onto his skull and rolling the craft sideways to avoid a swipe from the creature’s wing. If it wasn’t for the artificial gravity from the drive core, we would have been turned to paste by now.
I raced to the center of the corridor and climbed the latch that led me to the only ordnance available on this archonforsakened ship, comically oversized to compensate for its lackluster defense, like an artillery on a car.
Nearly twice I fell off from the ladder at the wild acceleration and swerves; pulling the belt with my teeth, I hooked myself into the seat of the turret.
“Heavy Machine Gun online. If this is the first time, would you like to - " I smashed the screen with my fist, skipping the corporate jingle. I grasped the turret wheel hard and pulled it to face the stern; the twin-barreled heavies didn't take long to swing, carrying me in the seat to sight the chasing drake on our tail, globules of saliva vaporizing upon its gaping maw.
"400 rounds ready."
"Gimme my credits back, you sonofabitch," I swore, as I pulled the trigger in earnest. Explosions of firelight and smoke burst forth from the ends of the twin barrels, drumming the alus-glassed canopy with shocks I could feel in my bones. The traced rounds bore flashes of gold, and careened towards the beast, only for it to endure the oncoming pelt with its armor that looked to be diamond.
Of fucking course, I muttered under my breath. Gotta give it to us to run across a mythical leviathan on a dead-drop job with only a single heavy machine gun. I couldn't kill it conventionally; but I could practice leading the sights on the gun, gimballed to follow whatever target was in its vision. My plan was to practice landing the shots at the same place – and then Maine would unload the fuel shells which I would then shoot.
The beast appeared and disappeared in my vision as the ship somersaulted and dove and rose and swerved to avoid its grazing grasps. I pulled the trigger again, again, and again, my hair swinging wildly about, not knowing which direction was up, down, left, or right, only that the direction that mattered was towards the beast; I didn’t know where I was, and why in the frank hells I willingly signed myself up for this rodeo, but all I knew was that I must kill.
Fireworks reflected in my gritted teeth as the empty casings ejected in buzzing droves into the vacuum of space.
287 rounds.
Focus on the mouth, that little tendon which attaches the jaw to the skull, I thought. Can't eat us without a mouth or a brain left. It's got to have a brain, right? I thought, racing in my head permutations of scenarios. I actually didn't know if the machine gun calibre could pierce the casings of the antimatter-laden fuelshells - there was a reason why those fuelshells were considered safe, even though they contained one of the most volatile and dangerous substances known to man. But I had to try. At any rate, the beast would taste better than nutrient paste if it exploded, I argued in my head, unloading the fury of the jury-rigged guns.
198 rounds.
I was managing to strike the same place multiple times. It was about time to -
As if it’d read my thoughts, the beast regurgitated a metal pipe from our devoured cargo bay, and shot it forth to knock one of the barrels clean-off from the turret. The loose ammo bled into space from the beheaded gun.
I only had 99 rounds remaining. 99 rounds to hit the shells from a distance of more than half a mile.
The drake-beast roared, making its primal presence known directly through my head, and also Maine’s; seizing the distraction, it flapped its enormous sail-like wings to move in dangerously close, our engine plume literally disappearing into its diamondhide jaw, preparing to bite down -
"MAINE!"
"ROGER!" bellowed Maine, smashing his fist upon the fuel ejection button.
Three antimatter-laden fuelshells shot out from the back of the craft, and into the mouth of the beast. It reared back, shocked to have something shoved so unceremoniously into its jaw – in a brief second, lining up a perfect shot that the gun could connect.
Bingo.
But as my fingers were about to depress the trigger, a gigantic lance of white and cyan cleaved the fabric of space and speared the beast in its belly; time seemed to slow momentarily as I shielded my face with my hands in instinct. The light was of such magnitude that I could see the bones of my hand through my flesh - and seeming to implode and collapse in on itself, the lance of light rebounded in a hideous explosion that shredded the beast to mincemeat, scattering its diamondhide and nearly ripping our shuttle apart.
I jerked my head hard upon the steering console, and so must've Maine, because our throttle was up no longer; shardlings of armor ricocheted off the hull, denting it in several places, ripping open other compartments on the bottom deck where the drive resided.
All faded to black.
I don’t know how many seconds, or minutes I was out, but I eventually slipped out from the turret seat and half-fell, half-landed, onto the cramped corridor, nearly twisting my ankle. I limped my way towards the cockpit and witnessed Maine sprawled unconscious on the console, his belly and chest blooded by shrapnel and debris.
"Hey,” I shook him. “Hey! Don’t you die on me!” No response. “Maine! MAINE!” I cajoled, shaking him, slapping his face. I tore off a jacket crumpled on the floor and wrapped it tightly around his bleeding belly, and held it there - and as I looked out the battered canopy of the cockpit, an enormous cruiser of iridescent cyan uncloaked itself from the pitch of space, facing us down with a glowing barrel twice the length of our shuttle.
A single ping from the console brought up a red comm-holo with a floating message.
'Hana Makoto Reiss - Your ship is being hailed.'