CHAPTER ONE
EXCELLENTIA
Just this one more job, Dirken Nova thought, and I’ll get a ship of my own again. He reached into a breast pocket of his leather jacket and rubbed his lucky Rigellian runestone. Easy money. He closed his eyes and tried to picture his dream ship, but he kept going back to the last one he had. The Brilliant. She had been perfect. Fast. Deadly. For two long years he’d gone without a ship of his own.
Dirken snapped back to reality, focusing on the immaculately clean, white room he shared with his smuggler partner, Yiorgos Ganas, who sat on a cot across from Dirken’s. Yiorgos looked down at his cybernetic right arm, adjusting something in his wrist, his head bent in concentration. The entire top of his head and the right side were robotic, including a computerized cranial implant, an auditory implant in the place of a right ear, and a purple-glowing right eye. His vocal cords were replaced with an implant that could translate and reproduce all Terran languages and many alien ones. Both of his legs were robotic, too. Dirken didn’t want to think about the accident that led to all of these “upgrades,” as Yiorgos put it, but Yiorgos didn’t try to hide his cybernetic additions with realistic limbs or lab-grown tissue. Instead, he embraced his identity as an active member of Cyberalia, a religious interplanetary and interspecies network of cyborgs who practiced the ritual of Netfolding.
Yiorgos glanced up, noticing Dirken’s gaze. Dirken gave a nod of acknowledgment, then turned his gaze out the little window in the door of the room.
Outside the room was a spacious, well-lit corridor. A yeoman with curly blond hair and slim physique stood outside, having been assigned to “assist” them. Dirken knew full well, though, that the captain had put him there to watch over them. The yeoman looked back and gave a nervous nod, his pale blue eyes registering something other than just professional courtesy. Recognition? Dirken had never seen him before this mission.
“The sooner we reach our destination the better,” Yiorgos said, his voice tinged with a metallic rasp. “This gig is fishier than a vat full of Proximan eels.”
“Don’t worry about it. Nothing can go wrong. We’re sitting near the bridge of a United Worlds starship — a destroyer, in fact. No one would dare attack this ship, and no crew would defy the captain.”
Yiorgos shook his head and returned his attention to his wrist. “I still don’t like it. The sooner we can get this safebox to Nüwa the better.”
They both glanced down to the safe that they had been paid to escort. The nondescript metal safebox had an old-fashioned alphanumeric keypad lock on its door and a handle bolted to the top. Dirken continued, “Escort it from Earth to Nüwa, don’t open it or let anyone touch it or scan it, and hand it over to the Nüwan ambassador undamaged. Simple.”
“Well, at least we have more comfortable bunks than the last job.”
Dirken looked away. He hated being on UW starships. Most people thought of them as works of art. Sleek. Silvery. Wide beam. Not a straight edge or sharp corner to be found. Seeing them in orbit was like watching the flexing arm muscles of a fucking gigantic chrome robot.
Inside, each section was wide and well-lit. Feng shui ruled the decks. Wood was used wherever possible. Plants graced the corners. Large screens broadcast video and audio of vibrant forests, babbling streams, and windswept mountaintops. The entire ship was like some sort of corporate lobby.
Worse yet, the philosophy extended to the entire crew. All UW uniforms were matching, white, and clean. Prompt haircuts. A shower every day. Personal grooming was mandated, right down to cleaning their fingernails. Everything was timed, with ship-wide chimes and notifications. Twice each Sol day – at each shift change – there was a mandatory group stretching and aerobic exercise in the Commons.
Plus, when ships of the “Silver Fleet” arrived at their destination, scores of smaller private ships would fly out to meet them in orbit and escort each ship to the surface. They landed like ballerinas, the crew parading down the gangplank like god-damned dignitaries.
And every single member of the crew was human. It shouldn’t be called the United Worlds, Dirken thought. More like the United Human Worlds. Even though the three UW planets, Earth, Nüwa, and Tesla, were majority human, or Terran, and officially speaking the Terran language, alien species were quickly growing in numbers due to immigration and reproduction — and accusing the UW of discriminatory policies — and were now the majority on the various UW offworld mining operations. The other worlds were no longer dependent upon Earth for support and feeling the economic drain from supporting their “parent” planet simply for cultural reasons. Where there’s imbalance, there’s war and corruption, he thought, and that means profits!
Though it hadn’t come to war, yet, there was an ever-growing secessionist movement on both Nüwa and Tesla, with public protests, insurrectionist cells, and even terror attacks. They were self-sustaining worlds, and their economies had overtaken that of Earth. Why be tied to the old homeworld, with its climate-ravaged deserts, cities swallowed by rising oceans, and populations grown fractured by old animosities that, somehow, hadn’t carried over to the new worlds? It was all so… profitable, honestly, for a smuggler like himself.
For this mission, at least, he and Yiorgos had to suffer through an entire flight from Earth to Nüwa – three Earth days and five hundred light years of stifling uniformity and perfection – onboard the United Worlds destroyer, Excellentia.
Then he reminded himself again of the money he and Yiorgos were earning. Seven-hundred thousand UW chits! Added to their savings, it was enough to purchase a gleaming new interstellar corsair or corvette from the shipyards on Rockmir.
The thought brought him back around to his last ship. Technically a clipper originally built in the Mars shipyards, the Brilliant had been everything the Excellentia wasn’t. Utilitarian. Efficient. He didn’t give a shit about Feng Shui. Parts inside and outside of her had been cobbled together from half a dozen other ships from as many solar systems, each part making it deadlier, faster, or better-defended. Outside were plasma jet engines and expanded gravwell panels, railguns, and a ten-petawatt laser cannon. A pair of Argolan mini-missile arrays had festooned the surface. And inside, the smells of ionized plasma and the sweat of years of tense situations mixed with the exotic scents of distant planets. Yes. And a crew of four besides him and Yiorgos, plus or minus the occasional adventurer. No chimes or schedules or fucking fake scenery on the screens. The crew could be themselves. Laughing, drinking, cussing, and gambling. Every centimeter of the ship served an important purpose without some decorative effect added to it. And the Brilliant was so fast, he could pick up an illicit load and transport it halfway to the other side of the quadrant before any UW ship or planetary militia could figure out it was missing.
But that dream had ended too soon. When the Pleiades Syndicate had found the Brilliant near Rorgos, and Dirken had refused to give them a share of his cargo of illegal Rigellian cloner modules, the resulting firefight didn’t quite go his way. They crash-landed her on Rorgos. Two dead right away. Another two died during the five months of being stranded on that fiery planet, dodging lava flows and surviving earthquakes, until they had finally been rescued. Since then, there had been odd jobs as security to anyone willing to pay, trading legitimate commodities, and the occasional smuggling of illicit goods. He and Yiorgos led a vagabond life.
But this job! This took the cake.
“What are you thinking about?” Yiorgos asked, looking over at him with one human eye and one mechanical one. The human eye blinked; the mechanical one didn’t. It used to unsettle him a little when that happened.
Dirken cleared his throat and looked away. “Who says I’m thinking about anything?”
“You’re doing that thing again,” he said. “Moving your mouth as you soundlessly talk to yourself. Eyes glazed over.” He looked down to Dirken’s hip. “Hand on your blaster.”
Dirken chuckled and took his hand off his weapon, a Gree-tech singlehanded pulse emitter with duel fusion batteries. It was outlawed on the UW worlds — not because the blast was strong enough to blow a hole through eight-centimeter carbon-inconel plates with its plasma pulses, but because the fusion batteries were unstable and potentially explosive. Yet for the right service, such as running a load of unregistered uranium ore from the outer mining colonies, the Gree were still willing to trade for a few blasters.
“This job,” Dirken said, flashing a confident smile. “Look at us. All we have to do is sit here and guard that safebox. Then we go buy a new ship!”
Yiorgos huffed. “We would have had enough by now if you hadn’t screwed up the weapons deal with the Free Sisters of Luhman 16, Dirk. Couldn’t keep your dick in your pants, could you?”
Dirken tensed his brow. “Well how the hell was I to know the Queen’s daughter was still underage… at 86?”
Yiorgos threw out his hand, the mechanical wrist interface whirring as he did so. “She didn’t have her fifth neck-tentacle! Everyone knows Luhmanians don’t reach adulthood until they grow the fifth one.”
Dirken rolled his eyes. “Stupid star system, anyhow. I’d question the sanity of any species that wants to live in orbit around a brown dwarf. That fucking star wreaked havoc on our magnetic systems.”
Yiorgos just shook his head and leaned back on his cot.
In addition to what they earned on this gig, there were people who still owed them plenty. Fellow smuggler, ‘TakTrak, for instance. That birdbrain owes me ten thousand UW chits, Dirken thought.
They were in a small storage room just off the bridge, not even the normal berth that would be given to the crew, much less passengers. Could be worse, Dirken thought. They could have shoved us in the corner of a cargo hold like on that freighter for the last Rigel job. It was obvious that the Captain wanted to keep a close eye on them and the safebox.
He looked again at the safe and wondered for the millionth time what was in it. For gigs like this one, the best course of action was not to ask, and it was clear at the outset that he wasn’t going to get an answer if he did. They were due to arrive at Nüwa in just a day, deliver the safebox, and be on their way. Easy money.
But a niggling doubt kept scratching at the back of his mind. Maybe too easy.
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Strange Worlds of Jason Kilgore 