solid

The way those local Feds took after us, you would think they had never dealt with Runners before. And honestly, you think they’d be more worried about the local criminals who had just made off with a cargo of alcohol than with the clearly interstellar traders who just happened to bring it to their junkheap town. In the end they were doing the jobs they’re paid to do, and probably the jobs they believe they’re right in doing, but after all that, they didn’t do a good job of it.

We were all there, unloading the goods out of the shuttle we borrowed, and the contacts played everything straight, and Caban was brimming with glee. In all my years, the Feds have never gotten any better at showing up at any other time than immediately after the coin has been tossed. We didn’t need to shoot, though of course Ice did, and so of course Kon did, and that is probably why they chased us. So there we were, screaming across the desert in that little shuttle, Ice and Kon looking back and shouting when they saw a missle flare, Em squealing and mashing the keyboard in what I can only assume was a helpful way, the Doctor calmly covering his ears and making sure we were all strapped in, Caban unbuckling his harness and standing behind me in the pilot’s chair, his hand gripping my shoulder, laughing. We dodged every last missile they emptied at us, even with the rusty Haveor navs and bolt-bucket engine. We left them blast-end behind, and got the coin, and made the Feds day that much worse, and that much more exciting. Caban is knocking at my door, and I can feel his laughter from here.

making a living

While I am lost in my wonderings, Oberon gets back on-course for Verisan, and we are Running once more. There has been an upturn in ships entering the system, and thus an increase in the amount of Federal patrols. New settlers stream into the Michaela system every day, to Agrafena if they want any measure of security, to Miklund if they’re hearty or harbor any dreams. It used to be that these were carefully planned excursions, sent of with pomp and flare. Since the first colonies called for independence, however, settlement has been more scattered, contract-based. They come from Earth, mainly, answering ads for work. Some come from asteroids and planets they’ve booked passage from. Some come with no promise of work, unsure of what awaits on the next dusty plain. They will find fortune or they will find despair. Often both, for such is the way of life, terran or no.

I have had many lives, even since I left Earth, which I hardly regard as home. I wish to separate my actions from what my grandparents would have wanted for me: would they understand I have done what I have done not just to learn, but to survive? The scavenging, the fighting, the death…was it all somehow avoidable?

Once in the dark times I lived on Verisan, and survived by working out a deal with a local boarding house. I'm not proud of it now, and I know it ranks me among the lowest of the space debris on any heaptown, but I'm alive now because of it. My job was simple, simple for a woman who wasn't chemming and had some nerve. I’d meet a man and coerce him to book a room for the two of us at “this little place down the street, so quiet you can’t hear the dockings” and, once there, summarily abandon him. What was he to do, after laying down his coin for a room, and being left by his lady and imagined conquest? Complain to the manager that his odious personal habits had driven her to flee? In a few days time they wouldn’t remember my face, after all their pocket-books remained mostly intact despite the bruising given to their pride.

The deal worked for me, I got a decent room and good percent of whatever my mark had spent on lodging. However, the nature of the business was so appalling to me that I could not maintain it for long. It required lowering myself to the base of human appeal, and more than once I was forced to break a finger or a jaw when a man's fervor overcame my timely escape. In the end, it was dull and disheartening to play the same game with these tired men, and I blew out of that junkheap town as easily as I had entered it. Running once more.

navigation

My grandfather used to teach me the names of the constellations, the names of plants and trees, the verses of long-forgotten songs. How is it that he gained this information? How is it that no one wants it anymore? There must be a generation of children who learned it, those who remember it are scattered in what is left of Earth. Hiding in the corners of the southern isle I came from, perhaps ranging all across Europe, the union of nations that never bothered with the stars. They were happy enough with Mars and with their own history, and left space to the greedy ones. Someday, perhaps, I will travel back there and find what remains. A work of a lifetime, perhaps of many lifetimes.

The Primos system is the second closest system to our own, my grandfather would point out its sun in Ophiuchus, or as he called it, the Serpent Holder. “Folk live there” he said, “People like you and me, looking back at us”. He had never been adrift in space, but he knew the minds of others already in the black. Hadrian was a hazy twinkle in Leo, the Lion, who roamed overhead those long southern nights. Lys, my own lion, was there as I looked up through the void. Every time I cast my eyes upward, I was staring at him, though I did not know it yet.

They had barely started to settle Michaela when my grandfather died, but it was I who showed him where it was, swimming in Pisces. He loved mythology, said it was the way the ancients ordered their world. They explained everything with stories, and then set the stories in the stars. We’re doing the same thing, now, making stories in the stars. This time we have hardly a glace to spare at anything else.

Delta Pavonis is one of many stars that points a way south, in the constellation my grandparents affectionately called “The Saucepan”. The Romans had no story for it, they could not see it, but those more ancient than they used it to find their way home. We’re no different than those ancestral navigators. They, like us, have no real idea what any of this truly means.

constellations

My grandfather steps from the shadows, and says to me simply, “Sol”. I know he doesn’t say ‘soul’ because this is a dream, I know that he is speaking of the sun beneath which I was born.

Ulysses’ voice comes from somewhere around me, he murmurs “Barnard’s”. Not the words I expected to hear from him, but the unromantic name of the sun that warms the Primos system, that rises each day over Target City and New Bombay. I’m almost expecting it when Jamieson simply says, “Wolf 359”, but somehow manages to name Hadrian’s star with the same wry tone as ever. Then Caban is there, and he smiles with all the jokes we’ve shared in the Michaela system, but speaks only the name of its star, “Van Maanen’s”

Whose voice is this last voice, who speaks new words? I do not know the words he speaks, “Delta Pavonis”. I smell smoke and hear once more Zacharias’ words on that long ago day as he tells me of Dorado Sublime. New words, new worlds. Delta Pavonis.

The words ring in my waking ears even now.

duty

We've been operating at high efficiency, running through to Miklund three times now for the same contact. It's a good run, not the kind that will make you soft, but with a familiar flight. How strange that these paths we tread become familiarized; a world in which rocket entry into a planet's atmosphere is as common as taking a walk. Will there ever be a time when there are new skies to scale?

Ice is pleased because we're making good coin, Kon is pleased because we're keeping out of trouble, Em is pleased because there are time and parts enough for her to bring the engine into flowing speed. The Doctor is pleased because he has a new patient. Caban is not pleased. He caught a bug the last time we were at Verisan's moon, and has been laid up in the Med Bay in a quarantine. For a man like him, quarantine is the cruellest punishment of all. We have to be cautious of these diseases...it's illegal and unwise to bring something new into the environment of another planet. And since the plagues of Africa those years back, we've learned that our antibiotics aren't as powerful as we'd like. Mostly we're kept healthy through the vitamins in our food, and the filtered air spacelings breathe. All of us visit Caban when duties allow, I've read to him from some of my books, and left him the poetry book he bought for me, in hopes he'll come to understand it. Even I cannot comprehend much of it, but everyone brings something new to the words, different verses speak to different experiences.

Mostly, Ice and I have been working side-by-side, making contacts and hauling in crates without a disparaging word passing between us. She keeps a firm grip on her status...she is in charge, taking on Caban's duties as well as her own. Only now is she seeing how much work I was putting into keeping us in order, and I think it grates on her. She doesn't trust me with power anymore, she doesn't trust me at her back. I've never once betrayed her. Have I? I try not to be bitter about the time she shot me, but mostly I try not to remind her of anything at all.

opportunity

Back in the days of aimless drifting, I took any job that sent coin my way. I found myself in a junkheap bar working for a man named March, and sat watching the deals go down. My view was suddenly obstructed by a man I hadn’t seen coming. I was dulled and didn’t care about what I was doing, I’m surprised that I didn’t get killed during those dark months. Suddenly a handful of discs clattered on the table in front of me. I jumped, hand on my holster. Looking up, I saw silhouetted by the barlights a lean, grim face, clearly not the Fed I had expected. A tall man loomed over me, his eyes the sharpest thing I’d seen other than the void itself. I glanced down at the charts before speaking, saw the tracks of some of the insane jumps I had taken on the way here. No real reason to make them so wild, I just didn’t care. I glared up at the man with contempt instead of fear.
A hint of a biting smile played on his lips and he spoke, his voice soft, “Let’s get out of here.”
“No.”
“You’ve no idea the trouble you’ve put me through to find you here. I’ve been watching long enough.” This should have scared me more than anything, especially as this man did nothing but put me on edge. There was a ferocity in his eyes that unsettled me.
“I’m on a job” I replied, but he shot back, “I’ll give you a better one.”
“Who are you?’
This was Jameison, the most legendary Runner of any of us. Asking me to work for him, though he could never bring himself to ask for anything properly.
“You’re the one who made these jumps?” He returned my attention to the discs. I nodded.
“Do you have any idea how hard this is to track?”
I nodded again, my brain humming, tumbling over possibilities. It was as if a spark had fallen from his mind into mine, and was settling itself in.
“My last navigator has fallen out. Fly for me.”
“I’m on a job right now.”
“Who is it you’re working for? The fat man in the grey suit? And the contact is the other one, with the three men at his back?” He looked at me and I scarcely nodded, but it was all he needed. He turned to face the bar, and slowly put his hands on his hips. Gunfire rammed through the room, innocent patrons screamed and ran for cover, only one of the contact’s men got a gun out before falling into his own blood. The pot-bellied Captain March had no idea what had happened in the moments preceding his death, he had no notion of betrayal, clarity, forgiveness. In those days, when I was between jobs, I often waited in Runner bars, eyeing those who came and went, sensing when gunfights were imminent. Then I’d stand my ground, and when the shooting ended I’d have my hands on the corpses before anyone’s ears stopped ringing. A sickening job, but it kept me alive for far too long.
The bartender stood up, still holding the glass he had been filling when the guns had started. He looked at Jamieson and caught the bag of coin that was thrown to him. Jamieson’s contacts were more widespread than his legend, at that point. He had indeed been waiting for me. The rest of the crew had holstered their guns and were proceeding rapidly out the door. Jamieson looked down at me, saw the gun in my hand and the rest of my body unmoved, unshaken. In those days, I was bold.
He smiled fully for the first time, and the sparks burst into full flame. I’d go with him.


“Free?” he asked, and for the next two years, I was.

sweet deals

We finally got a good haul, a pull from one junkheap to another, but a paying job. Oberon is filled with crate upon crate of sugar, and it reminds me of the first days on Roller, a full hold and Caban as a genial salesman. Hands in his pockets, he whistled as he inspected the crates, and joking with Em about finding a boxrider half-drowned in sugar. Kon was also considerably cheered, and I managed to illicit looks from Ice that were not threatening but rather long-sufferingly amused as we had to listen to his endless puns about the cargo.
I used our brief stop to conduct business as usual, asking the bartender for recent news. She was new, and young, too young in my opinion to be taking on the hazardous job of bartender and contact for countless Runners. They tend to last a long time, know far too much, and end badly. Maybe she’d retire after her child was born, though I doubt she knows she’s pregnant yet.
The girl told me that Milano has had his business done by the Feds, and he won’t be out for the next several years, with the usual Runner’s charges (unlicensed trade, trespassing, unregistered ship, tariff violations, resisting arrest, unregistered firearms, the same we’d all get) along with broken parole. When I asked about the rest of his crew, she cocked her head and shrugged, “Dead.”
“Dead?”
“Pershing sent them out but they never come back. Contacts said they never showed, so a course Pershing hadta pay. Then Slick shows up in Delaya shot dead.”

The girl was too glib about it, and I doubted she’d seen much death here yet. I wondered if we died, who she’d report it to. The next travelers asking after…who? No one would care, no one would notice, if we never came back to this junkspot, they’d find another Runner to fill our place, with scarcely more than a “remember when”. Anyone who asked would figure we had our business done by the Feds or one of our kind, and we’d be added to the long list most Runners carry inside but refuse to acknowledge.

I shuddered, and remembered the vial waiting for me, all the viable possibilities of life. I thanked the girl and told her to eat another vitamin packet, it would help, and walked away from her quizzical eyes, back to where Caban waited. Suddenly I was flooded with the knowledge that Caban won’t let it happen. He’ll die before he’ll let us die, and nothing in me speaks to an early death for him. There is too much potential there.

Funny thing that those what crossed us would end up dead.