Sliding Void Read Free

A courier vessel meant the message was important and covert enough it’s sender didn’t want to risk it being hacked rolling about out in the wild. Messages like that, you might be better off ignoring.
    ‘It is a contract offer,’ said Polter. ‘I can feel it in my soul. Our holds are empty and the holy of holies wills the space filled.’
    ‘Yeah, and maybe it’s contract law enforcement,’ said Zeno. ‘How many bills did we leave unpaid at the last planet?’
    Lana rubbed her pale freckled nose. ‘Hell, if it’s a reminder for the docking fees we skipped jumping to this shit-hole, I’ll pay that guy sitting out there solely for persistence.’
    The four of them headed for the bridge, taking the ship’s internal Capsule and Transportation System. The CATS capsule jolted and shuddered, sections of Lana’s four thousand foot-long ship squealing in and out of view as they rode a clear bullet down her transparent lateral tube. At times the capsule was shooting over the ship’s grey dust-pitted hull, then it spiralled down, blasting through the vessel’s interior chambers – passing along the jungle of hydroponics vaults that gave the ship her atmosphere and food, furnishing crew and passengers with the space they needed to stop going stir-crazy on extended flights. By law, all starships needed those. If her hyperspace engines ever failed, they would need to slide to the nearest inhabitable world generation-ship style on her anti-matter thrusters. Although, given Lana’s current motley crew, she’d hate to think what her descendants would end up looking like. As pitted as her hull was, as worn by all dust of the universe that had never quite made it into a planet, Lana loved her ship with all the ferociousness of a tigress protecting her cub. Not because the Gravity Rose was beautiful: she could never be accused of that – the profile of an aircraft carrier taken to space. An eclectic collection of cargo units, hyperspace vanes, passenger cabins, life support modules, in-system antimatter drive, solar panels, self-healing armour, artificial gravity systems, and freight holds from a dozen ship yards and manufacturers welded together with hope, optimism and whatever spare currency Lana and her predecessors had to throw at her. No, not because the Gravity Rose was beautiful, but because the ship was Lana’s home. And because what passed for the vessel’s dysfunctional crew also passed for her family. Lana stretched out her legs and pushed the toes of her long leather boots out towards the opposite side of the capsule, hearing the bone crack of every one of her years . It’s not age, honey; it’s the intermittent low gravity. Yeah, you keep on telling yourself that. The ship looked her age, too. The Gravity Rose would need an overhaul soon to pass authority checks and keep her flightworthy status. Without that, no planet worth a damn was going to allow Fiveworlds Shipping in to trade. Lana could hear the dead voice of bureaucracy whining inside her skull. ‘What if your jump engines lock and you collide with our world? You want us to shoot you down, you want that?’
    When Lana got to the bridge she punched up comms and made the offer to take the message point-to-point on a tight laser line, but the courier refused, which kind of made sense. If you were paranoid enough not to risk your precious message getting hacked in the wild, you weren’t going to chance the danger of someone having a pebble-sized probe hanging tight off your hull and trying to intercept your laser communications.
    The courier ship was a pert matt-black needle, not much more than a pilot cabin and  life support system forward of a jump drive and the pion reaction thrusters she used to kick some tidy little propulsion out. With a hull-to-engine ratio tricked out like that she could tear a strip through this lonely corner of space. Faster than the Gravity Rose , that was for sure, even with the Rose running empty. Speed being of the