“They discovered a species deadlier than Gelatinous Venom Slugs?!”
“There was an infested shipping container opened by human civilians, and they all survived! Not only that, they claim to have killed the Gelatinous Venom Slugs!”
“Impossible! They can’t be killed, that’s the whole problem!”
“That’s not the unbelievable part! These creatures lack even rudimentary neural crystals, and they claim to be sentient! Floogian scientists checked, just goopy, hot fat in their heads, yet they claim they can reason!”
“They can communicate?”
“It was disgusting! They’re unable to transmit their thoughts, so they wiggle the gases they wallow in to communicate with each other. Thankfully the Floogians set up a proper interface for us to talk to the things.”
“So there are mindless monsters of terrifying deadliness in Floogian space. What’s that got to do with us?”
“Well, Chooser of Routes, they pretend to have minds! They’ve offered to put a single primate into our ship, for a billion seconds, in exchange for twenty kilos of Concentrated Containerized Antimatter!”
“Pah! That’s as much as my ship AND the cargo is worth! Why would we ever pay that much? To a monstrous parasite!”
“As long as that one human, in its nest box of gases, is in the ship, we’ll be immune to all forms of cargo parasites and pirate boardings!”
“That’s like solving starvation with radiation poisoning! I’d have a much worse infestation!”
“It leaves once the time ends. For that billion seconds, we’ll be immune to every major threat to shipping!”
“All threats? Maybe there is something to this. The deals we could get on quarantined worlds…”
“Their ad said a money back guarantee!”
*****
Kait Vodbjorn was a perfectly normal human girl. Maybe calling her a girl was a bit unfair. She was over thirty, which was an adult, even if almost everyone she knew was much older. Years are also a bit tricky, for someone growing up in a habitat orbiting an alien world, around a star ten thousand light-years from Earth. Humans still knew how many seconds were in an Earth year, and thankfully seconds worked everywhere.
She’d been alive for thirty years, but the accelerated direct neural education she received was far more complete than a century of schooling would have been, back pre-diaspora.
In education and in form, she was a perfectly normal woman. From her wavy brown hair, to her diamond fibre skin and the metacarbon muscles under it. Her freckles to her exocortex. Her short pink nails, to the vanadium steel skeleton in her hands, feet and skull. A perfectly normal human. Other than her ambitions.
Kait hated how humans were treated. She understood that no one owed her people anything, and being allowed to stay on this station at all was a kindness, but being treated like a mindless animal constantly grated on her. She remembered when a veteran Barncat, one of the very first to ever complete a contract, came to their dim service passage they used for a classroom. He came to give them a pep talk after a classmate got badly beaten by some aliens.
“Hey kids! It’s important to not give up hope. These aliens might say we are by far the least intelligent species to ever claim to be sentient, and almost all of them are much bigger and stronger than us. Uh, where was I going with this?” He paused, the children sitting on grimy pillows quietly waited. “Oh! We have one thing that no one else can come close to! Our myelinated brains and hot oxygen biology gives us the fastest reaction times, and the largest energy reserves in the galaxy. That’s why only humans can slay parasites! It's why we command a princely salary for keeping our betters safe! Some day, our people will have earned enough antimatter to buy our own station, or even a planet! Maybe even our own star system!”
A little boy raised his hand, “Sir, Why don't we just take the alien’s stuff? If we’re quicker?”
“Oh, they have very good guns, and pretty much perfect aim. It’s been tried. Not really a story for kids. Uh, next question!”
“When? How long do we have to live like this?” a very young Kait asked.
“Until enough contracts have been paid. Working a year on the docks might raise enough credits for one or two grams of CCAM, but a Barncat contract pays entire kilos! Everything else is basically a rounding error.”
It was then that Kait knew she had to be a Barncat. She wanted to be an elite human mercenary, loaded into alien cargo haulers to keep it free from the countless alien horrors that spread through the trade network. Like an ancient cat guarding a town’s granary. Nothing a human could do could earn more Concentrated Containerized Antimatter, the only currency of note between species. A single gram had as much power as a 43 Kiloton nuclear bomb, but tame and usable to the last electron volt. It was absolutely essential for war, and the amount of CCAM a faction had was a pretty reliable proxy for how important and dangerous the group was. Humanity’s lack of ‘money’ meant that there were light cruisers that were ten times as rich and important as her whole species.
Every slight and insult she endured made her desire for a home for her people burn brighter. To Kait, nothing was more important than a future for humanity, proud among the stars, no longer stuck in alien refugee camps, surviving on their kindness. Even if it took centuries to afford a world, humans needed to finally stop running.
She’d scraped and saved her Basic Sustainment just to afford the Barncat guild entrance exams. Her training was exhaustive and exhausting, covering everything from stellar navigation to a hundred forms of combat. For years Kait gave it her all, and strove to be the best she could. Even if she was sleeping in passageways at night, and living off non-food grade carb paste.
The guild coordinator comm’ed her personal connection late one night.
“Kait! I’ve great news! There’s some deep void aliens that got the platinum package! You’re the top of my list, this is your berth!”
Kait couldn’t believe her luck. Deep void aliens were the richest and most ancient kind of aliens, and the platinum package was by far the most expensive guild offering.
“That’s incredible! Wait, does that mean it’s a deep space contract?”
The guild rep paused. “Yeah. Max duration, no leave. A billion seconds. They are paying the full asking price though! Twenty Kilos of CCAM!”
“Oof. That’s a hard assignment. But it's an easy decision! I’m one hundred percent in!” Kait said, trembling with excitement. This would bring her people more money than ten regular contracts!
Walking towards her future home the next morning was daunting. It felt so sudden, even though she’d been waiting over twenty years for this moment. It was a culmination of so much training, and an end of her life as she knew it. It was also the start of a whole new challenging and exciting life! She would live in a custom built hab, the exact size of six interstellar shipping containers, called spacecans by cargo handlers. It was going to be like living in an old Earth house, all by herself for the next billion seconds. 31.7 Earther years. She followed the dim pathways through the transhipment yard to the dock the guild specified. Her footsteps rang out on the smooth ceramic walkway, and luminescent panels cast blurry shadows against the alien text stencilled on smooth grey walls.
Two humans stood at the end of the walkway, by a gleaming steel module. Pride swelled in Kait’s chest. A rare example of genuine human construction! It was probably the most expensive project humanity had undertaken all year.
They looked as nervous as she felt. It was tough to identify them in the dim light but it could only be her guild coordinator and a well dressed rep from the provisional government.
The one in a fancy suit approached her first. “Miss Vodbjorn! So glad to meet you! I’m your assemblyman from Humanity Ascendant, and on behalf of the entire human race, thank you for your commitment!” His hands were warm and soft as he shook hers.
“A momentous day! I’ve got your official Barncat pin! Make us proud, Kait! Any last minute questions?” The gruff guild veteran attached a small pin to the collar of her coveralls.
“All good, sirs.” She shrugged and looked around the empty bay. It would have been nice if more people came out to wish her well, but that wasn't why she was doing this.
“I guess I’ll just get in the box then?”
“I’ve personally certified all the gear has been loaded. You are good to begin your mission!” the guild rep said, his warmth tinged with sympathy.
“Okay, I guess goodbye, and see you in a billion seconds?” Kait slowly approached her new home.
The guild rep’s left eye twitched to the side to look at something on his personal interface. “A billion seconds, starting in about an hour," he clarified.
Kait entered the airlock, and closed the armoured external door. She turned to wave goodbye through the door’s tiny window to the only two people that came to see her off. Her heart sank when she saw they had already started walking back to the human quarter. Not a warm start to her very long and lonely road. She felt like she wanted to cry, but that’s not what Barncats do. A wave of anxiety spiked.
What did I agree to? Did I just make the biggest mistake of my life? No. Nothing is more important than our shared future. Nothing can help more than this contract. This is what I want.
She took a moment to admire her new burnished copper pin, with a lean black cat sitting on a haybale. It's official. She was where she always wanted to be.
She steadied her breathing and took inventory of her module. Her self contained home for the next forever. It had a kitchen, a hydroponics niche, a bedroom, an armoury, and a workshop. All small and cramped. A storage pantry took up much of the interior space. In theory more supplies would be loaded whenever they docked at a port with a Barncats guild office, but in case they never did, she wouldn’t starve.
She checked the entertainment offerings available on her terminal. She was relieved to see all six computer games and twenty books that survived the diaspora were all there, but neither of the songs were. Some examples of each from the last century were on there. Post-Earth culture being what it was, she was all too familiar with all of these works too. They said on old Earth there were over a hundred computer games, a thousand books and twice as many songs. Kait didn’t believe the old timers of course, but she still liked the idea. They also said, way back then there were almost as many humans as stars in the Milky Way, so clearly honesty isn’t a virtue among Earthborn.
Her pleasant daydream of a universe thick with humans and songs got interrupted when the whole module rocked and swayed for a few seconds.
Their cargo handler is moving me to their ship! Only a few minutes before the contract begins!
She looked at the briefing in her ocular interface; Her new ship was called The Bringer of Value. Well, an esoteric alien thought-shape, best translated to Human as The Bringer of Value.
It was as big of a ship as exists. A GateMax class bulk hauler. Bow to engine nozzle, the ship was over two kilometres long. The cargo bay was stretched for half its length, a cylinder about 400 metres across. Keeping it clear of critters was her new life’s mission. A duty to uphold for about as long as she’d been alive so far. A daunting thought.
She yelped despite her training when the hauler left the gravity field of the station, and she became weightless. That was the other part that would be tough, it might be 31.7 years until she felt a gravity field again. These ships ply the cold dark, far from any planet, and she wouldn't be leaving the ship until the contract’s over.
The tension from her day, and the magnitude of what she signed on for, threatened to overwhelm her. She wanted to sit down to collect her thoughts, but just drifted against the ceiling as the cargo hauler continued to move her module. It occasionally changed direction, and sent her drifting into a different wall. She kicked off the ceiling with enough force to make it to the acceleration couch and strapped herself in. Once the movement stopped she could hear her module’s auto connection system finding and mating to the ship. Cheerful graphics appeared on the living room display, showing data, power and external comms successfully connected. Details of the current cargo manifest filled the screens, the mass, origin and contents of every container flew by. All the things she was responsible for keeping safe. She started to organise the data, but was interrupted by the fast tones of an incoming call.
The comms console flicked to life, displaying an alien that looked like an owl with the head of a frog, but more delicate and pastel blue.
“Good hour, benevolent infestation. I am Chooser of Cargos, Sh’ploda. I will have been chosen to interact with you, to ensure you do not become a malevolent infestation.”
Even though it was a full video call, it was subtitled. The way this alien spoke had nothing to do with speaking, so even calling it a translation was a stretch.
“A pleasure to meet you, Chooser of Cargos.” She recited her Barncat oath, “I have sworn on my life and honour and the honour of my species, to protect the contents of your vessel.“
“Your flesh is emitting liquid ice and an alarming quantity of infrared light. Are you expected to die this hour?”
“We run a lot hotter than the galactic average! I am in peak health, and will be able to serve this contract and many others after.” She hoped her cheerfulness communicated, but there was a chance that the concept of cheerfulness might not exist for these aliens.
“You are as disgusting as you are useful. You are forbidden from venting your gases into my cargo hold, they are hot and reactive. You must wallow in your own oxygen.”
Abruptly the call ended. Kait rolled her eyes.
“Good to meet you, Kait” The barncat said to her own reflection in the now inactive comms screen.
“If you need fresh towels or a mint, just ask, Kait!” she pushed off her command seat, which commanded appallingly little.
Her courses on xeno-empathy were clear that no other species were anything like humans. The dominant races were all deep void creatures, with minds of superconducting junctions and impossibly slow movements. There was no concept of family or bonding, even the ragged version that existed in the human birthing creches. These creatures were Alien, with a capital ‘A’ and that’s okay. With effort she reframed the creature's rudeness as harmless fun, and was feeling calmer already.
It only took a few seconds of research to identify them as Otifians. The Barncat guild file on them speculated they could think several hundred times faster than a human, but move at less than 1% her speed. They could be fatally over-exerted if they kept that up for more than a few seconds. The ship diagnostics showed the command bridge was 7 Kelvin, or the fixtures were, they were in a harder vacuum than normal deep space. Capital ‘A’ aliens.
At the very least, she had access to the ship's information. As the aliens loaded their cargo, she set up alerts and customised the readouts on the module's displays and her ocular interfaces.
She pushed off towards her galley to make a snack. She’d been too nervous to eat breakfast, so wolfing down an agri-yeast sandwich was pretty appealing. It was even more appealing to have her own well stocked kitchen! This was a big step up from living in an overflow shelter, ever since hab authorities evicted half of the human district. Kait hoped that the provisional government would spend some of her contract on short term issues. Renting proper accommodations and buying food for all the humans in the hab would only cost a few dozen grams of antimatter a year. They never do, always saving and planning for their own home, but she hoped they would this time, it was such a lucrative contract.
Calm green text appeared on every screen in the module:
-Station undocking commenced-
This felt like the real start of her mission. They were accelerating away from the only place she’d ever been, the creatively named ‘Floogian Offworlder Orbital Hab 55,’ high above the Floogian homeworld. Everyone she knew, everything she'd experienced was all in that little rotating cylinder. While they were under thrust she did have about a quarter gee of ‘gravity’ in her module, which made perfect sense, but earlier she’d forgotten about it. It reminded her of a banner in the Barncat guildhall:
-Negative thoughts affect performance. They’re nearly as dangerous as positive ones!-
Taking advantage of the gravity, she walked to the airlock to get her vacc suit on. She had a real space suit, but working in a cargo hold meant micrometeorite and rad protection just wasn't needed. Her vacc suit was sleek, armoured with the best metamaterials the guild could afford. It was also very tough. Her metacarbon muscles made her much stronger than any human pre-diaspora, so she didn’t need power armour, just a light flexible vacuum layer with a cooling garment underneath. Her helmet was filled with command and control linkages, even though the only thing she will be giving an order to was her support drone. She loaded her drone full of monitoring buoys to set up a creature detection network within the hold. Her support drone looked like a big garbage can with spindly arms and eight evenly spaced reaction pods- four around the top, and another four around the bottom.
Once the boost ended, her displays changed to a new message in calm green lettering;
-Ballistic transit: 108:33:50 to Hyperlane Gate-
The timer began counting down their arrival to the gate out of the system. Four and a half days of microgravity.
“Come on, Droney! We’ve got work to do!” She scrunched up her nose, “No. Not Droney, I can do better than that.”
She activated the drone, and tugged it into the airlock with her. She cycled the lock and stepped into the hold, grabbing her cargo hook off the bracket. It was the iconic tool of her trade, a long steel pole with a fixed blade and retractable hooks on either end. Kait always thought it looked a lot more like a halberd or a glaive than a hook, but she wasn’t the one that named it. The retractable hooks allowed her to move quickly and safely through the narrow alleys between the spacecans. Its long diamond edged blade was sharp enough to slice any organism in the galaxy. The pole was twice as tall as Kait, allowing a safe distance to strike from, with enough leverage to crack a war-droid.
The hold of The Bringer of Value was totally dark, other than the bright white light of her support drone’s floodlights. They cast long sharp shadows, without an atmosphere to soften the edges. Kait strained her eyes at every flicker, every shift of the light.
She gently pushed off the bottom of the hold and drifted down the endless rows of ceramic spacecans. The drone puffed out some nitrogen to match her speed, as she travelled along walls of shipping containers. They were stacked thousands high and separated by wide aisles. The manifest listed over four million oversized shipping containers loaded, any one of which could be filled with alien terrors. For some reason she wasn’t clear on, aliens seemed to pick ceramic over steel every time.
This part of her job was one that they covered endlessly in training. She pushed off, attached a monitor buoy to a spacecan, ran calibration, and repeated. Her big drone held nearly a hundred sensor buoys. It followed her and ejected palm sized monitor buoys every time she gestured for one. Kait was skillful and had a manoeuvrable suit, but deploying them still took fourteen exhausting hours. There’s no reason she couldn’t have done it over a few days, but her adrenaline was high. This was her new job, she couldn’t leave it half done! Kait was bone weary when she finally cycled herself into the hab. She clicked the drone into its charger and immediately fell asleep, drifting in just her thermal undersuit.
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Absent gravity, sleeping in her bed wasn’t any better, just a bit safer. She woke up a few hours later, pushed by the air currents into a corner of the ceiling, but refreshed. With a controlled shove, she made her way to the kitchen, cooking and reading reports from her sensor network.
0 Visual detections.
0 Thermal anomalies.
0 Vibration anomalies.
2 Radiation anomalies.
Well, that’s exciting! A bite on my first cast!
Kait assumed the old Earther saying was about wizards wanting to get bitten by dragons? Probably? Old sayings abounded in training and worked themselves into her inner monologue.
She queued up the locations of the two anomalies, referenced the manifest and sighed. Both were reactor containment parts headed for deep space recycling. Not monsters at all. Still, after a shower she’d go and check them out. Not like she had other places to be.
Squeezing back into her vacc suit, she loaded the drone for combat support. This might be her first battle against a real space monster! She arrived at the flagged spacecan and checked for obvious signs of infestation. There were none. She pressed the base of her cargo hook against the ceramic shipping container, and held the middle of the shaft against her helmet. She closed her eyes and listened with enhanced hearing; nothing, not even a space ant.
The other suspect container was far to starboard, so she kicked off and used her hook to stay centred in the aisle as she drifted. Cargo parasites slipped into containers one way or another to reproduce and spread to other containers. Gee Vee Slugs slipped through the seams, Mind Control Spiders laid tiny, nearly invisible egg sacs, Hexrats had venomous saliva that let them gnaw through the corners of spacecans. Chestbursters, Spinestealers and Paralytic XenoFoxes all hid in food containers, so those were rarely shipped at all. In all cases, everyone on the ship or station died and the cargo was written off. By a pleasing quirk of evolution, none of them were especially dangerous to humans. They were too slow or too clumsy or their attacks didn’t affect the unique human nervous system. Even the venom of the gelatinous venom slugs wasn’t much deadlier than Earth scorpions, and people supposedly survived those all the time, even without bionic kidneys.
Her support drone mapped everything they passed while checking for any changes in pressure, the presence of gases, or filaments of spider silk. She used her cargo hook to listen to the second container. Also nothing.
Nothing to worry about anywhere. Some Barncats completed an entire contract without seeing a single parasite, and Kait wasn’t sure if that was the best outcome or the worst. She headed back to her module and started her routine.
The guild emphasized that routine was key. Not for any physical reason, she was literally made for this life, but creeping space madness could kill her. Sleep, eat, work and relax, all at a set time, for a set intensity, with a plan. She spent four hours a day personally inspecting the hold. An amount of time that was both far too little to have a chance to inspect each one, and far too long considering there was never anything to find.
Kait settled into a comfortable steady routine. Soon they reached the gate, and other than polite notification, the transition into the hyperlane was a non-event. The sensor buoys she set in the cargo bay showed no measurable gravitational shear, which she was pretty sure was a sign of skillful piloting. A month in lane, a week in ballistic transfer, and another few days at the next loading facility.
Twelve days into her contract, an alarm she had set earlier chimed. All the screens filled with confetti and party hat graphics. One million seconds of the contact complete! She made herself a single cupcake to celebrate the milestone. That first million flew by! Only Nine hundred and ninety nine million more to go. 0.001% done! Oh.
Apprehension washed over her like vertigo. She pushed away the half eaten cupcake, her appetite souring. This had been a bad idea. She cancelled the future milestones and went back to work learning more about her hosts. Most importantly, not thinking about it any further.
Her routine started to feel normal, lonely and dull but not painfully so. Her first birthday alone was tough. She used to get some yeasty beer from one of the few bars that would serve humans back on (F)OOH 55, and remember achievements and make promises about the future. Beer and partying seemed both impractical and pretty pointless by herself. She made a cupcake, finishing it this time. She was slightly worried that cupcakes might start reminding her of sadness at some point, but having a cupcake seemed better than not having one.
The soft light panels, brushed aluminium walls and steel bulkheads were her whole universe. Floating for months at a time in microgee posed no risk to her bones or muscles, unlike ancient human’s first attempts in space. Tedium was never far away, though. She had beaten all the video games and read all the books well before the end of the first year, not a great sign for the duration of her contract, but she could always do it again. And again. Reading the translated ship's data was interesting. They had detailed information on countless planets and species and empires. Galactic law, local law, mercenary customs, and even cooking recipes for dishes that could never get warmer than a few degrees above absolute zero.
Kait’s routine even picked up a meta routine. She’d sleep more during hyperlane, she’d inspect more after a load, and she’d study more during deceleration. The second year had fewer ups and fewer downs, plus another meeting with her employers.
“Disgusting benevolent parasite. Your unliving life-mate’s gases pollute my hold.”
“I have a name, you can just call me Kait.” She paused before continuing, “The contract laid all this out, but if it’s about the drone’s reaction mass I’m happy to swap it to any gas you find less offensive?”
“We will vent to space every ten thousand seconds! It’s gotten too high! You will tell us if venting the cargo hold will cause your death this hour, benevolent parasite Kait.”
Kait keyed up her sensors, confirming the cargo hold pressure had risen to 0.0000001 atm of N2 gas from the drone’s puffs of thrust. She suppressed a sigh.
“Vent the hold as often as you please, however I will continue to use my drone. It’s in the contract.”
“Changing thoughts to sounds then sounds to shapes, then letting shapes determine actions is dumb. To show our fear and greed, we will do nothing. I will vent the hold at intervals.”
The feed cut and Kait was alone again.
She had literally forgotten she had other intelligences on board the ship with her. It sounded like contracts might not be a cultural foundation for these people, but that didn't matter. The guild charged up front and this might have been one of the reasons.
The commander of The Bringer of Value, who Kait only knew from the contract and had never ‘spoken’ to, was getting bolder. The ship went further and further afield, to plague worlds, feral worlds, even trading with unsanctioned species. They didn’t tell her any of this, but she had access to nav data and the ship’s datastores. Kait didn’t mind. She was hoping for some parasites to fight, while also recognizing fighting wouldn’t change anything. There were a few tense shipments from quarantined worlds, overran with invasive life, but the scavenged cargos were all free of nasties.
In the third year of her contract they set course for a station that confused Kait. It was a trade hub for a mighty empire, who were now centuries extinct. Scavenging and looting made perfect sense, but this was deep in a lawless sector, no stable governments for dozens of light years. The only reason she could come up with, is that they must think she was tougher than any potential threats. Even though they hadn’t seen her do anything other than float around and eat the odd sadness cupcake. As they approached the station, with their cargo hold empty other than her housing module, she keyed into the ship’s external sensors. Nav beacons beeped dire warnings of death, but they ignored them. The abandoned station was huge, easily a dozen times the size of Offworlder Orbital Hab 55. She zoomed in on the long shipyard gantries, zero gee mineral refineries, and armoured defence spheres dotted over the enormous station. It was high over an icy barren world, which the datastores informed her was rich in both volatile and radioactive elements.
The station’s massive radiators were stylized like the wings of a great lizard, nearly forty kilometres long. They doubtlessly glowed when under primary power. After all these years though, they were a sullen matte black, with tiny holes where debris punched through. A sign the point defences were disabled at least.
It was starting to make more sense, this station was a treasure trove. Kait was a bit uncomfortable seeing so many newer ships docked, their age and hull design strongly implying they also came to loot the hoard of this specific dead dragon. Not a lot of good reasons to leave your ship here. Kait began to load her drone for combat support, and was interrupted by the fast tones of an incoming call.
“Benevolent and mighty parasite! This is the hour you feast upon lesser parasites! The signs of many lesser parasites shine, you will corrupt them and I will choose cargos from the treasures of the Atrrenol Empire!”
“Aye sir! It’s why I’m here! Any details? Who's living over there?”
“Fatally dangerous creatures, in numbers sufficient to topple a mighty empire. You will infest them, and I become materially enriched. Our cargo handler is moving your nest box into the station. The station is inevitable death to all sentient life, we will remain in a higher, safe orbit. To avoid inevitable death.”
The data/power/comms disconnection notices scrolled across her screen. A second later there was a gentle jolt as the remotely piloted cargo handler disconnected her home and started hauling it to the dead station.
“What? Alright. Wish me luck!”
“It would be our preference that you survive. This is not required.”
The call terminated.
“Gee coach, great pep talk!” Kait said to the inactive comms terminal.
The Barncat was confident in her skills, but this was decidedly against the spirit of her contract. A contract they didn’t seem to care about. Fighting space monsters sounded more exciting than reading the same books yet again so that was fine. It was the part about being trapped on an infested station that housed millions of now dead aliens, that seemed like bullshit.
Like everything in her life, other than becoming a Barncat, it wasn’t like Kait had a vote. She watched the external cams as she approached the huge station. It felt fractal as they got closer and the station kept getting bigger. What she thought were dozens of docking ports were each colossal bay doors that The Bringer of Value could have entered with room to spare. Still they kept drawing closer. Finally she was mag-clamped into a transhipment yard not that different from the one she started her journey in. This one was designed with alien aesthetics and signage, or at least different from the aliens that built her home hab.
She got into her vacc suit, checked the seals and connections, then pulled her support drone into the airlock with her. A few months ago Kait printed off oversized googly eyes and glued them to either side of its nav-cams. Since then Dronothy became much better company. Dronothy was more outgoing, but less insightful than Professor Coffeebeans, the coffeemaker with googly eyes that kept her company inside.
“Come on, you beautiful machine! We’ve a date with alien terrors beyond counting!”
She activated the hab’s external flood lights. It cast a wide bubble of hard white light. Bright lights were a reliable way to attract space parasites, but in this case, that’s okay.
Come out, come out, wherever you are!
The expansive shipping yard had no grav-gen, and was exposed to space. Kait shuddered at the thought of being stranded in open space, helplessly unanchored. She ran a cable to Dronothy, allowing it to tow her. It was a temporary solution; hardly suitable for combat. Her immediate priorities were to activate the grav-gen or find a more enclosed position. Through the magnified visuals from Dronothy’s sensors, she spotted a doorway. The official-looking letters above it gave her hope that it might be their version of a harbour master's office. Drifting over the abandoned transshipment yard, she was taken by how normal and familiar it looked. Normal containers in normal positions, and some parked cargo handling vehicles. There was no indication if the crews were on lunch, or five hundred years extinct. Not even signs of parasites.
The records implied that the Atrrenol were an ammonia based species that lived in pressurised environments, but all shipping yards had to be open to space. Arriving at the doorway, she sent a translation request to The Bringer of Value. A service they were contractually obligated to provide, for as much as contracts bound the icy jerks. The doors were an airlock, and thankfully used the standard symbols for controls. The interior atmo had long since leaked away, leaving vacuum on the inside.
“Drifting Parasite Kait, you entered the cargo command centre. You choose routes like a thinking being.”
“Thanks, boss!”
That seemed almost positive! Maybe they’re warming up to me!
Cycling the airlock into the command centre, Kait saw her very first parasite. It was a Gelatinous Venom Slug. Technically it was none of those things. It was an amorphous, potato shaped sack of green slime, likely twice her mass. The outer skin was dusty green bio-diamondoid that allowed it to live in a hard vacuum, and shrug off military grade weapons. It had a central aceroduct that launched bio-diamond spikes coated in a potent toxin, instantly fatal to non-humans, and pretty unpleasant even for humans.
Kait activated her suit’s dazzle mode, causing segments of her armour to emit light and heat in a random pattern, hopefully confusing the slug’s ability to identify her centre of mass and movement. Unhooking from the drone, she kicked off the wall, hard. She spiralled across the room with her cargo hook in both hands, towards the creature. The problem with fighting microgravity is it’s very hard to dodge mid flight. Thankfully the slug wasn’t much smarter than Earth slugs, freezing for a fraction of a second in confusion.
Snick!
Kait sliced the creature in half while still mid ‘air’ with the long blade. These were the most common parasites in this section of space, and she’d trained for this exact scenario plenty of times. The swinging blade changed her centre of mass, allowing her to land at an ideal striking distance. Kait hooked her foot into a slot of some overturned furniture for leverage, and delivered a fleury of follow up strikes. Her long bladed hook was perfectly silent, and moving too fast for even her own enhanced eyes to see in the dim vacuum of the atrium. As soon as it struck she could hear the wet slicing noise transmitting along the shaft and into her skeleton. Her attacks turned the creature into dozens of gelatinous chunks, slowly drifting apart. Tendrils from each chunk were already reaching out to their common centre. Little snaking columns of slime, questing out for each other. Two met, and the creature began to reassemble itself.
Dronothy scooted up to Kait, and she unhooked the biomatter hose. It was a lot like a wet/dry vacuum with a garbage disposal at the end. Without atmo, a vacuum required a bit of creativity. Human engineers solved this by adding an intimidating looking ring of grinding spikes that grabbed, crushed and accelerated the biomatter down the hose and into Dronothy’s containment chamber. Even ground to fine salsa, the slug was still reforming itself. Once Kait sucked up all its organoids, she tapped the snowflake icon on the containment interface. The unit was flooded with liquid hydrogen, chilling it to just a few degrees above absolute zero. The drone slid the frozen remains into a mylar bag and dropped the bag to the floor. It wasn’t dead, in that the slug could still heal given a few centuries to warm up, but it was no longer a threat. She kicked away the worthless half metre long bio-diamond spikes and moved on.
The bag gently floated away from her in the microgravity. It had a tracking chip so she wasn’t worried. From the main atrium, she explored the passages leading away from it. Finding a long wide hallway, she considered her plan. This was an ideal fighting location, lots of space, good cover. The walls were sturdy enough to push off, and a bit of natural light from the day side of the icy world below.
The parasites probably already detected her warmth, but she might as well make it easier. The same sensor buoys she’d been using to monitor The Bringer’s hold had a decoy mode. She configured four of them to put out the biosigns of common sentient aliens in the region and pushed them down the hall.
Soon she had her first customers, more gee vee slugs. They entered quickly using a rolling tumbling motion that worked well in micrograv. Flattening out to arrest their movement and stabilise, all three launched spikes at one of the decoys. They punched through the polymer sheet with a looping animation of a fluffy bipedal alien, but didn’t hit the buoy projecting it.
Three votes for the teddy bear!
Kait launched off the wall towards the slugs, her vacc suit switched to stealth mode, suppressing all heat and light. She was a lethal vantablack void, crossing the length of the hall in barely a second.
Swish snick swish!
She flipped over, landing on her feet, on the wall behind their severed bodies. She sliced them into smaller pieces, and a few seconds later, three more mylar bags of frozen slime salsa. Kait and Dronothy returned to their starting corner, and she vented heat and de-spun the gyros in her harness. Soon another slug arrived, firing a venom spike into the looping animation of a quadruped alien with an exoskeleton.
One vote for the Ant-dog!
Snick!
It didn’t even see me coming! Easy money!
Another few hours, another thirty-four frozen mylar bags were floating at the back of the room.
“Well Dronothy? I think my shift is over and it’s time for a cold one!” Jerking her thumb at the mylar bags, “Get it? Cold one? Let's go, you cynical tincan. That was a good one.”
Kait deactivated the decoys and slotted them back onto the support drone, then linked a cable through the tops of the slime bags then her own harness. Dronothy pulled them all for a slow ride back to the hab.
Once Kait got there she pulled out the heavy release levers on the side of her home, releasing her specimen incinerator. It was a huge and unwieldy appliance, connected to the module's reactor. An hour of pulling, placing and plugging later it was finally showing status green. She unhooked one of the frozen slug-inna-bags and slid it into the feed mechanism. The incinerator took over and sliced it then fed it into the main chamber. Gelatinous venom slugs are very hard to kill, but are vulnerable to being converted to their component atoms in a 5000 degree plasma furnace. What looked like a small rocket plume released a spray of hot gaseous hydrogen and oxygen and carbon out of the back of the unit.
Waiting for the incineration to complete, Kait saw a problem. Twenty minutes to incinerate each bag, thirty nine bags, that’s thirteen hours. That’s not practical at all.
Kait headed back inside, both to gather her thoughts and to satisfy her growing hunger. The day had been long, filled with physical exertion and emotional stress. As she savoured her noodles, an idea began to take shape in her mind.
Drawing from the extensive engineering she had studied, she made her way to the workshop. Not long after, the metal printer signalled its cheerful completion beep. She carefully removed the newly printed parts and took them outside.
After assembling and locking the pieces into place, she connected her incinerator to her new slug sack hopper. Ingeniously, it even recycled the bags, a necessity considering the station’s slug-to-bag ratio. As she loaded the bags and initiated the process, she watched in satisfaction as the first two cycles finished flawlessly. Glowing with a few flavours of pride, Kait retired for some well-deserved rest, with the incinerator queued to run all ‘night’.
The barncat settled into a whole new routine, a much more interesting one. After a shower and a hearty breakfast, she’d head out and kill slugs for a few hours, or until she got to fifty, the number of empty mylar bags that would fit in the drone. She’d drag them back to the module, fill the incinerator queue, putting any extras in a big mesh bag she’d also printed. Then back out to find more until dinner time, and go to bed after unwinding by taking care of the plants in the hydroponics niche. The slugs were pretty considerate and kept coming to meet her wherever she went. Using the airlock from the first day to access the interior of the station, Kait started exploring. Gelatinous venom slugs seemed to be coming from all over to hang out with her and Dronothy, even if just for a few seconds.
As she explored she found interesting tableaus frozen in time. A wide atrium with a hundred dead mind control spiders, pierced through with slug spikes. A camp of dead mixed species aliens, with their plasma weapons still in their hands, also pierced through with slug spikes. Looking at their gear, these were pretty recent. Nothing worth claiming though, so she let the dead sleep. Countless times she found the mummified remains of Atrrenol, mummified either by time or the slugs. Always in some vain gesture of fear, like barricading a door or cowering in a corner. Tough way to go fellas.
She didn’t really have a plan. Clearing out a station larger than a city all by herself felt hopeless. In theory there were a finite number of creeps to kill, but it was also possible that they were breeding faster than she was killing them. Well, asexually budding faster than she could kill them.
One day Kait even found a slug nursery, something that she couldn’t find any record of ever being discovered before! The dried husk of the ‘trees’ were still stuck to the floor, and the juvenile slugs were in a perfect circle in the middle. Their outer hide was still pliable and transparent. The little guys were about the size of a dinner roll, and there were too many to count. Thankfully they were slow enough for her to ‘vacuum’ them up directly. Kait considered keeping one as a pet, but didn’t want to make Dronothy jealous.
Day in and day out she kept at it, running the fusion powered incinerator without pause. Her stack of frozen slugs grew bigger and bigger as she killed them faster than it could atomize them. After fifty-five days on the station, she’d cleared all the way to the command bridge, in the centre of the whole station. She found the heartbreaking scene of their final siege. The now familiar Atrrenol, spindly bipedal creatures with tiny slit mouths, six eyes and a penchant for big bright outfits made their last stand here. The door was welded shut, and there were ration pack wrappers in a pile in the centre. There were signs of long term stay, and rumpled belongings in a corner. All of them were dead from self-inflicted plasma pistol wounds, from the single ancient pistol in the room. A busted air vent showed how the slugs got in, but she was unsure if it was before or after the suicides. None died to slug spikes though.
Once the frozen bagged slugs and the mummified Atrrenol were moved out, Kait took a look at what her options were. She’d received enough translations from her employers that the translation app in her exocortex could handle most things on its own now. The station commander managed to power everything down in an orderly sequence, which was promising. Shrugging and hoping for the best, she entered the commands for main power restart. Green lights lit one after another. Well, more accurately, lights that the exocortex translated to ‘positive’ were coloured green in her ocular overlay. The second from the last held on solid yellow. Flickering yellow. Red. Dammit.
Primary reactor unable to engage, error 330HH
The secondary power was active. On the console, a variety of options became illuminated, including the one for the grav-gens.
“Good enough!”
Kait slowly increased power into the system, stopping once it got to about a quarter gee. Enough to make movement easier, not enough for things to collapse, hopefully. Dronothy switched to wheeled locomotion as it settled to the floor. Which for the first time in hundreds of years, was serving as a floor.
A fast tone in her helmet.
“Good morning, my frosty Chooser of Cargos, what’s up?”
“Parasite of confusing alignment, Kait! What events? Why is gravity!?”
“I finally got to the command centre! Secondary reactors are online, and I’m just powering up some useful systems. Is it causing any issues?”
“Activating with intent? Only sentients activate systems! Parasites cannot! Kait doesn’t read Atrrenol! How?”
“Well, I didn’t mention it, but yeah, I’ve been sentient this whole time. It’s not a secret. We’ve spoken several times! I've gotten enough translations from you guys to train my AI, nothing sinister.”
“
“Wait! What?”
Signal lost.
Kait frantically searched for the traffic control radar. It was thankfully similar to other alien systems she’d seen before, other than the language. Exactly as she feared, The Bringer of Value left without her. It was boosting out to the hyperlane, at an acceleration she didn’t know it was capable of. There were already several red ‘Parasites-Inevitable Death’ warning beacons they’d ignored, but The Bringer launched a new marker, a purple ‘Parasites-Extinction Risk’ warning beacon.
“Aww guys! I’m not that bad once you get to know me!” she half-heartedly said to the tracking console.
“Well dang, Dronothy! I’ve been marooned in space! Doomed to wander these cursed halls for all time!”
Its googly eyes didn’t even google.
“Just you and me! And uncountable venom slugs, which I guess are my pets now.” She keyed some queries into the command console. “And 32 automated manufacturing bays. And 412 docked spacecraft. And a few hundred tons of Concentrated Containerized Antimatter.”
She leaned back into the uncomfortable alien chair. “And a very good salvage claim under title 304.B of transstellar law.” She set an automated flightpath for an ancient luxury spaceliner that had been docked for centuries, typed a quick invitation, and stood up.
“Well don’t just sit there Dronothy! We need to tidy the house before my family visits!”