Sidewinder Precision Pro

[Malacandra]

They let the kids in the spacers’ bar. Once.

The guy escorting us made a big play of tapping on the intercom and yelling “Children coming in! Everybody decent!” but I guessed at the time this was just for show. Now I know that’s so, ‘cos I’ve been on the other side once or twice and if there was anything indecent going on, it would take more than a half minute to get everything ship-shape and fit for kids to see.

Sometimes there’s reason enough. There was a time our convoy just hit the Witchpoint and we were hardly getting our formation reset when a bunch of allsorts – Cobras of both kinds, Mambas, a Fer-de-Lance looking like it was running the show – bounced us. From the chatter it seemed like the freighter was carrying someone that someone else wanted rubbed out and could pay real high to see it done. They took out one of us, a newbie in a Gecko on her first run, straight away while she was trying to figure out why all the hostiles were reading “Clean” on her bounty-meter, but we didn’t stop to shed any tears and once we’d lit up a Cobra I and the Ferdy was starting to take lots of hits, they all burned witchfuel out of there.

Which was when the regular pirates turned up.

Like I said earlier, sometimes both sides know how to count. This time, the bogeys must’ve not counted the three or four of us that were still slamming the door on the Assassins’ tails when they decided it was worth a go. And, unfortunately, for the short but still too long time it took for us to get back, it pretty much was.

Well – happier times, before I pull up the rest of that memory. It’s good to be a youngster full of the thrills of space, rubbing shoulders with some tough guys and gals and, for that matter, some stranger creatures altogether. I’d spent my whole life not knowing that, just a day and a half away by spaceship, there was a whole planet full of creatures that looked kind of like us but smaller and covered in blue fur. And it didn’t stop at furry creatures, by a long way.

They made us good and welcome, though they didn’t talk much shop in front of us – they spoke plenty about the places they’d been and the sights they’d seen, instead. And when they kicked us out, in the nicest possible way, so they could get on with their R&R in peace, there was still plenty to see.

For a bunch of youngsters fresh off the most backward backwater in the whole sector – and right on the bottom rung of the whole Eight – just being on a Coriolis station was the adventure of a lifetime. To begin with, there were the viewports where you could watch the ships coming in and going out, and the docking bay itself where there was a place for greenhorns to watch the ships being worked on and loaded without getting under anyone’s feet. Even the stores they had Space-side were out of this world in every sense as well as the obvious one, with all kinds of fancy goods that I’d never even imagined existed.

But you can’t get too hung up on the toy stores when you know you’re going to be a spacer. That would all have been very well when you were a little younger, but now you’re all grown up you’ve got your dignity to mind, especially in front of all the traders and couriers and Navy pilots and all the rest of them. None of us said so in as many words, but I guessed we were all thinking pretty much the same thing.

Agent Elus gave us some time to take in all the sights, but he had a for-real trip in space lined up for us, and not just in a station-to-ground crawler at that but a ship that could Witch-jump, though she wasn’t going to today – yes, and that was armed like a fighting ship too. He didn’t need to tell us what she was. By this time we’d practised our ship recognition enough that we could spot a Cobra Mk III on sight.

Close to, she looked huge, although we’d learn she was a midget next to some, and she was fully loaded with missiles and a big laser front and rear, just so we would know what firepower looked like close up. No cargo hold for us this time; there was space for us all in the crew cockpit, though we had to squeeze up tight.

There isn’t any way to describe what it’s like to launch from a Coriolis Station in an actual spaceship for the first time, especially when six months ago you’d never seen anything more advanced than a farm cart. If you want to know what it’s like, go and try it. If you’re not able to, then you don’t need me to wring your heart out for you by describing what you can’t ever have.

If it makes you feel any better, you’ll also never know what it’s like to limp into a station with the one other survivor of your whole convoy, knowing that despite your best efforts your freighter bought the farm on this run along with the rest of your wingmates, and you still have to find yourself another job as soon as may be, because that’s what you do and it’s all you can do to try to make the whole Galaxy a little bit less of a crapsack.

It’s at times like that you’re just as glad that the spacers’ bar is an intensely private club. Once the door’s shut behind you, you can indulge in as much grief as it takes to get over the worst day of your life so far. The other spacers in the bar won’t respect you the less for it. They know.

[Malacandra]

(Naturally when the sun is scorching hot I'd be sitting at a keyboard writing fan-fic for a dumb computer game. )

Half a minute is a real long time in a space battle.

It doesn’t make much odds whether you’ve been pulled half a minute away from where the action is going down all over again, or whether that’s the time you need for your laser to cool down before you can give it a sustained-fire burst on the centre of mass. Sometimes you get both at once, which I guess is more economical because while you’re catching up with the furball your laser is cooling anyway. Lasers cool quickly on account of the temperature, but they have to radiate all their heat away into space. Groundside weapons can use air-cooling or even water-cooling, but neither of those works right in space.

Again, that’s what an education does for you. The theory lessons carried on while we were on the Coriolis station – and they had even better facilities there than they did groundside, because no matter what might happen on the planet’s surface, an orbital station’s pretty much invulnerable. You don’t need worry about losing a million credits’ worth of training college when you’re a few thousand klicks above any planet, still less when it’s a backwards place that’s barely got past the sticks and stones level.

We got caught up on the basics of science. The modes of heat transference took a day or two plus some simple demonstrations to cover, and we pretty soon added in Boltzmann’s Law although I will never understand the mathematics if I study it till the day I die. They threw in electronics, laws of gravity and motion, and a whole lot more besides, not to mention enough economics that we could understand what all these ships ferrying stuff from place to place were trying to do.

If it’d been possible to run the galaxy like one of the best-run planets, there’d’ve been Government ships taking things from where they were in plenty to where they didn’t have enough, and everyone would be living the good life on the strength of it. At least, that’s how it looked to me. Even somewhere like Qudira can make something someone wants, and even if it takes fifty tons of exported food to buy a ton of computer gear in return, it all works out fair in the end. A planet that starts to get what it needs to modernise can make more of what it’s selling, buy more of what it needs, and so on up and up. That’s how I understood the economics classes, anyway.

But none of this works quite as it should without a galactic government, when everything that’s going to get done only happens because someone’s making enough money to see that it does happen… and there are too many people who can see a quicker and dirtier way to make a profit.

Which is where I come to be barrelling towards my freighter as fast as I can hustle, and there is only one top speed for any given combination of hull and drive. It helps a mite that I’m only about forty-five kilos, fifty dressed ready for action, but it’s only a fleabite when you count everything else. My computer’s spotting me targets as fast as I can lock ‘em on, but it’s down to me to make my shots count and all I can do is hope that I’m shooting the guys most in need of shooting.

I open up at the full fifteen k’s that an Ingram M1928A2 will carry and I hit what I mean to hit. That’s my particular strength that they identified in training and that I’ve worked on ever since. I burn away the Cobra One’s rear shield in moments and I’m searing through the hull while he’s still panicking and trying to get a missile lock on me. I know what to expect and I cut my speed right down the instant I see a blue-white trace coming in. getting on the horn and calling “Can you ECM please, Mother?” Thankfully my freighter responds in seconds while I’m still trying to sight on the missile. Sidewinders can’t carry countermeasures, rear lasers or fuel injection, which means you have to nail a missile on the run-in or hope you can get out of range before it catches you. And although I score over 80% in simulated missile shoot-downs, that’s not the kind of odds that’s going to keep you alive.

As soon as I hear the computer announce “Counter-measures”, I trust to my luck that it’s not a hardpoint and even as I’m opening the taps again I see the missile blow. I’m already looking for my next target while I’m scolding my laser for not cooling down quicker, and I have plenty of choice and too few wingmen. That half a minute cost us – and I’m not dead sure the Assassins aren’t still sharking around out there, waiting for the fur to stop flying so they can earn their pay after all.

I spot a Gecko in need of attention. He’s slower than me but can turn at least as tight, maybe tighter if he’s good at his work, and once again I open up at maximum range and scorch him good and hard before he breaks, shedding enough plasma to show he’s hurt but still in the fight, and now my laser’s right in the red zone and I don’t have any other firepower. He’s figured that his best chance is to turn and try to cook me before I can finish him, and I pull around as tight as I can and put him directly sternwards where he’ll find the thinnest target I can give him. The odd shot tells, but I’m still doing OK and watching the laser cool until I can turn and give him another burst. He’s decided it’s time to use the one missile he’s packing, and once again I’m asking my freighter to blow it for me.

And my gut wrenches when I hear the silence.

[Malacandra]

(Just about done in time for beer o'clock)

Different pilots are suited to different ships.

That didn’t ought to surprise anyone. Figure all the trainees in my group were the best Agent Elus had found on Qudira, it stands to reason that amongst ourselves some would have better aim, some faster reflexes, some better tactical sense and some a better head for where they are and where they want to be.

To begin with we were all just cutting our teeth on a simple, basic spaceship that would get us out into the system and back to the Coriolis station after some exercises. The best facilities in the sector were at Lave – but that was almost a whole sector away, and what we had were nearly as good.

By now we weren’t at Qudira any more. We were over at Tianve, just about eight light-years over – and I was educated enough to know what that meant, both in scientific terms and in the practicals of how long it took to get there in Witch-space. Too far for a single jump, but you could get there in just over two days with a refuelling stop at Malama. Tianve had almost the best tech in the whole sector, and the only reason, Agent Elus remarked, that it didn’t have the beating of Lave was that the locals wouldn’t vote us enough money. GalCop and the Navy between them funded the training facilities, but over at Lave the planet chipped in with a big contribution on the Factor’s say-so. That more than made up for the fact that Lave’s fancy kit had to be shipped in from several systems over.

However that might be, we had plenty to do, first of all going out with an instructor in a two-seat ship to check that all the hard work we’d done in the simulator paid off, until she was sure that we weren’t going to splash ourselves all over a buoy or, worse, all over the front of Tianve station. Then, after a training run had gone real well, she took us back into the docking bay, opened the hatch, and said “Take her out to the nav buoy and bring her back in one piece.”

Not much of a mission for your first solo in a real ship, but it’s still enough to give you the fidgets when you call for clearance, set yourself to go out the launch tube, get clear of the docking corridor and then head out to round the buoy. Once you’re used to how everything works you might as well get a lock through your rear view, call the station and ask for clearance straight away, because you’ve more than enough time to get round the buoy and back into the station in your two minutes in a fast ship. I for sure didn’t, though.

Later on I’d get used to handling a fast ship, not just rounding buoys but in combat, although a Sidie isn’t fast enough to outrun a missile. You can keep it chasing you until its motor runs out and it self-destructs, though, provided you’re quick enough on the turn when it gets in real close. That’s not something you want to do very many times in your life, though. Practise it in the sim, sure, or with a dummy warhead. That’s a whole heap safer and you’d have to ram it head-on going fast to hurt yourself much that way. Out in realspace, though, you save that for emergencies, like when you’ve called your freighter for ECM and not even gotten a negative by way of courtesy.

I had to put up with that damn Gecko chasing me while I was at it, but I didn’t have too much to worry about there. Pulling the kind of high-gee random turns it takes to keep a missile from impacting you mostly makes you a hard target for laser fire, even for a tight-turning ship like a Gecko. It was longer than I liked before the missile blew, but when it did I had my laser fully cooled down as a bonus, and I figured I had that Gecko on toast.

I was also worried it was too late to matter. I was dead right.

Where my freighter should have been was just a cloud of gently-scattering cargo containers, with a Python slithering in to scoop them up and still three of his escorts showing red on my screen. Just the one trace, which was Terek in his Mamba, the You Shouldn’t Have Done That. Not as fast or agile as my Sidewinder, but tough and capable for its size. I signalled him.

“Screw the odds. If they go home, we don’t.”

We hunted down the escorts one by one. They should’ve been at least as good as we were, with the numbers on their side and the chance of some covering fire from their mother. Maybe we just wanted it worse than they did.

When the going got too rough, the Python Witched out of there. We didn’t even think twice before following him. Then… Well, he should have shelled out for a better rear laser. He tagged both of us, one after the other, screaming for help all the while, but there wasn’t any. He screamed something about lackeys of the Party and dying for the Liberation before he went, too. You can guess how much we cared.

After we’d blown him up, we set ourselves for the Coriolis station in our new system. We fell in with a Boa and her escorts, which made for a slower trip than we’d planned, but we weren’t complaining. There was plenty to drink that nightcycle, but no girls, not for us – and the other spacers left us to our drunk.

Eventually Terek slurred, “Time to hit the sack. I don’t want to be alone tonight. You?”

“Me either. But you know I like girls best?” I smiled, kinda sadly.

He chuckled tiredly. “If it comes to that,” he said, “I like boys best.”

[Malacandra]

(And a happy Sunday to everyone. Keeping to a strict word count is fun!)

“Your median life expectancy will be one minute.”

That’s the kind of quote that gets you to sit up and pay attention, believe me. Our new lecturer was a guy called Anli Hadd’zi, a sleepy-looking humanoid a little taller than we were and a brighter shade of yellow than a pure human coulda been while not actually being dead. But he spoke few words and to the point, and he had graphs and figures and so on to back up what he said.

“That’s timed from the first time you see a red trace,” Hadd’zi added. “I don’t count launch up to Witchspace exit, which could give you forty-nine hours in the cockpit before anything goes down. Once the trouble starts – One minute. We’re doing all we can to push that figure up. The data don’t lie, though.”

He popped a chart up on the wall. There was a blinking red line just a minute along the time axis. To the left, a whole bunch of dots. To the right… then the dots started to get spread out a bit more.

“As you can see, the half of you that live through that first minute have a brighter future. At that point you have a fair chance of surviving the whole fight. Next time round, you’re not so green any more. You’re odds-on to get through your next one okay. And so on up. Pilots that have seen a whole lot of successful missions aren’t rare. But you have to live through that first minute.”

This was a come-down after the first thrill of learning that we were going to be sponsored to a real live fighting ship all of our very own to go off in, have adventures, and help to make the galaxy a better place for everyone. They’d bumped me up to an actual Sidewinder by now, with a live laser and all, because it wasn’t a given that even the outer fringes of Tianve system were dead safe. There was a rumour that there were hired killers out there looking for trainees to pick off. Figures that if we were out to spoil some criminal’s fun in the future, he might be looking to do some spoiling of his own first, before we’d got properly trained. That one-minute statistic would be starting to look kinda hopeful if we got bounced while we were still training, but at least with a proper laser we wouldn’t be sitting targets.

That Sidewinder was going to be my very own provided I passed out of training OK and didn’t want to go home to Qudira. There wasn’t much chance of that. Even if I’d had a home and farm to go back to, once I’d seen what space life had to offer, there was no contest. The medical care was way better, for a start.

“You’ll want the baby shot, of course?” the doctor said. She looked even younger than me, but the ID on the surgery wall had her holo as well as her degrees, so I guess they get schooled real good real young on Xexedi. She already had her hypo loaded with about fifty different immunity formulae and I didn’t see the need for another one, and I said so.

“Don’t see why I’d need it. Just between us, I won’t be getting up to stuff with any guys, if you know what I mean.”

“Sure. But there’s a steady trickle of girls I get through here who weren’t going to be getting up to stuff, only it turns out they did, after all, and now they’ve got something that needs taking care of. You can get that done at any GalCop station no matter the local tech, but there isn’t a doctor in all the Eight can guarantee that your body or your brain will be quite what they would have been if it hadn’t needed doing,” she said.

It was surprising how little visible tech there was in the doctor’s office. Even her instrument case was small and portable, and everything in it might have been a metal stick for all I could tell different. I guess she’d brought it with her from Xexedi. They can do about anything there except turn ships invisible – and I hear rumour they’re working on that. Her class holo was next to her degree. Nearly everyone in it was a green frog, but I knew better by now than to sell them short on that account.

“Well… okay,” I said, studying the infopad she’d handed me. Turns out it’s one shot, fire and forget, reversible any time with a hundred percent success… which was pure magic compared to what I’d grown up with. I wasn’t planning on needing it, but there literally wasn’t a downside that I could see.

And that way you do get to be covered for those times when you’ve already committed yourself to something before you take your sober pill, and it would be heartless to get cold feet even if you actually wanted to.

I really didn’t want to sleep alone and nor did Terek, and we did sleep, but that wasn’t all we did, and in the morning when we woke up next to each other neither of us screamed. He gave a little laugh, and so did I.

“I think I still prefer girls,” I said.

“I think I still prefer boys.”

I yawned and stretched. “You think we ought to make sure?”

So we made sure. We made good and sure, with no half measures, and I reached a couple of important conclusions: firstly, that boys weren’t that bad after all when you really, really didn’t want to sleep alone, and secondly, that the doctor had the right of it.

Once we were up and about again it was business as usual, which meant we were both looking to get hired and neither of us had any difficulty finding a hirer. And just for once, we had a complete milk run.

[Malacandra]

Sooner or later the training is over.

Maybe it’s true for everyone in every occupation, but it’s certainly true in mine: the day you have to put up and show that you’re ready to practise your trade for real always comes too soon. I couldn’t get that one-minute statistic out of my head, and anyone who wasn’t worried by it would have to be an idiot.

We all left Tianve by one means or another. In my case Agent Elus was off to Aate for some leave, and he’d hired himself a passage aboard a Cobra Mk III with a fancy passenger cabin and a hot-shot pilot. For all that he figured it was worth taking a couple of us along as escort, which meant me and a kid called Ramiss, another Sidewinder pilot. It was a two-jump trip by way of Inines, a hi-tech Communist system where the Cobra stopped at a fuel station to top off tanks rather than slog down to the main station. Communists mainly keep the pirates and assassins out, with not much help from GalCop, but you have to grind through a lot of traffic. The mining ships and workers’ transports make up a lot of that, and they are slow with a capital Yawn.

Aate was a come-down after the excitements of Tianve, although it was a few dozen steps up the long ladder compared to home, and the Coriolis station had the usual amusements. The spacers were polite but firm; until we’d seen the elephant (and I looked one up on the computer and couldn’t believe such a funny creature ever existed anywhere) we could have one drink in the bar and then go to our rooms until we got word that someone was hiring. That actually took a day or two. Traffic through Aate was fairly slack, since the profits were likely to be bigger elsewhere – some die-hards were still running computers into Qudira, I heard, but they were mainly looking to buy them cheaper at Esbiza or Malama.

Sooner or later, though, you get someone wanting some company for a trip they have planned. That’s the only way a Sidewinder gets to leave a star system – though you can hitch a lift through someone’s wormhole if you don’t mind them looking at you funny. Ramiss and I both had our names down on the list and I’ll give the spacers this, they didn’t try to stop us taking our fair turn. There was no guarantee we’d get hired together, and as it turned out, we didn’t.

You don’t often make two trips in a row with the same partners, and at the most you might have noticed who was coming up on the cab rank next to you and maybe got to know them the nightcycle before you launched. It was well out of the ordinary when Terek and I actually made three trips in a row together, and after the shock of losing our freighter one trip, the fact that we made it through the next one without a sniff of trouble left us figuring it was party time.

Our trader captain made no bones about paying us; we get the same whether the other side turn up for a fight or not, and if you’ve just dropped off a big cargo and pocketed a bundle of credits, I guess you don’t mind paying your hired guns whether they’ve had to earn their keep or just been a good-luck charm. The worst you could say about this trip was that Nuclear Nellie, an Anaconda, couldn’t have gone any slower without being fitted with retro-rockets. What she was delivering I don’t know, but even with her auto-loaders running flat out they had the dock tied up a long time. Not that I was hanging around to watch the unloading, not while it was party time – and believe me, right then and there it was party time.

I’m not really sure what the girls in the spacers’ bar actually do for a living. I’ve never out-and-out paid one for a thing, and while I don’t mind standing treat for a bottle or two and maybe some tasty eats, you’d never be able to retire on it. On the other hand, there’s plenty of legitimate business around a Coriolis station and for all I know they all work the make-up bars and novelty stores by day. Is it very terrible of me that as a rule I don’t ask?

There don’t seem to be bar-boys on the same scale, but you generally find that a few spacers on any station are like Terek – happiest with each other’s company. The girls who like boys would be the worst off, except that most boy spacers prefer girls and a girl spacer doesn’t have to do more than ask, even with the local competition.

Well, I found myself a hot little piece, a little shorter than me with pale hair in tight ringlets, slim but stacked in the right places, and we set ourselves to have a fun time. I say they don’t pay us enough, but that’s not to say it’s ever hard to pay a bar bill, and I never hit a spacers’ bar yet that didn’t have a few treats I’d never seen before. This one had actual gold flakes floating in it, and was priced accordingly.

Some party girls like other girls naturally, some are too good-mannered to say no, and this one, whichever way you slice it, was well worth an evening spent listening to her prattle. By rights I ought to have slept right through my alarm call – and yet I found myself wide awake hours before local dawn, cold sober but with my head spinning round.

I slipped out of my apartment and found another one close by. I tapped the buzzer. “Terek? Got company?”

He grunted – but spacers wake up quick. “Not any more.”

“You have now,” I said, trying not to cry. “Open up, will you?”

[Malacandra]

I lasted more than a minute in my first fight.

That ain’t gonna surprise any of you who are reading this. I guess I was lucky it didn’t take very long for my first time to happen. There were three of us, two Mambas who’d seen a fight or two and myself, as green as Leestian evil juice, along of a Python Clipper, a newish looking ship that spanked along a fair bit quicker than the old rustbuckets – and it was all the Mambas could do to keep up with her at full stretch, too. What the Clipper was freighting was none of my business, but the big money into Esbiza, where we were headed, is in furs or any kind of good-class hooch.

We’d left the Witchpoint a few seconds behind us and our freighter was scanning for any friendlies who might be heading down towards the station or, failing that, any local police. Esbiza’s not the worst, but the planetary governments – they’ve got two main ones, and another six or seven looking for a bigger piece of the pie – don’t always haul on the same trace, so the law can be spotty. What we were actually seeing was laser fire in the distance, and not the little flashes you get that tell you a miner’s just blasting rock, either. Also the automatics very kindly told us that the goonies were unusually active at the time, which it helps to know.

One of the Mambas, Predator’s Downfall, signalled to keep the formation tight. I’d’ve been happier if there’d been a few more of us, but that’s the trader’s call and I wasn’t turning down paying work. I just did as I’d been briefed, tucking in on the right flank outboard of and behind Can I Just Interrupt?, the other Mamba, and we waited for the trouble to start.

Pirates have gotten cheeky these days, they tell me. Time was when they didn’t just up and demand cargo with menaces – they’d aim to get the drop on a convoy and vape most of the escorts straight off if they could, then if the freighter started dumping TeeCees they might stop and scoop ‘em if they felt like it. That was before my time. They say that in those days the pirate ambushes were just too obvious for words, and they hadn’t time to stop and chat if they hoped to score any kills. These days, they work together better, and figure they’ve got enough of an edge they can get mouthy.

Well, our Clipper started towards the station as hot as she could trot, with us tagging along but waiting our moment to break to left and right and pincer them. It was the usual mob of pirates, not too well-to-do since they still had a couple of Kraits in the line-up, and they’re dead out of fashion these days; and they had a rustbucket along to scoop the cargo, maybe figuring that if they scored enough booty they could trade her in for something a bit more up-to-date later. Of course, we aimed to stop that.

Chances are that Downfall and Can I? were watching my back as we went in, but I didn’t have time to notice, with my heart trying to thump its way out of my chest and my bladder telling me it was a good job I was wearing spacer’s pants. The nanofibre’s well worth the money and keeps you dry and fresh whether it’s just been too long since you last got to civilised facilities or the nerves have got too much. I locked on to one of the Kraits and lit him up just like I’d been trained to, listening for the audio to confirm that my laser was hitting his shields.

The only thing he had going for him was that his energy could recharge quicker than mine. Otherwise, I had him going and coming – beaten for speed and on the turn. He tried to lose me in a turning fight, and my laser was close to the redline as I took whatever shots I could when it looked like I was either on or pulling just enough lead that he’d fly through my beam. Then he started plasma-shedding and just tried to high-tail it out of there. A Krait can’t outrun a Sidewinder, though. I eased off the speed, checking my six again and again, until my laser was cool enough for a worthwhile burst, and then I ran him through.

According to the log it was then ninety-three seconds since the red traces appeared, so that put me more’n half a minute over the median survival time, for which I was duly thankful. The other two escorts had accounted for another goonie apiece, and that was their cue to snarl something about it not being worth it and light out for the remote reaches. We let ‘em go. We were hired to escort our freighter, not to wipe out every last pirate in the system.

It seemed all so simple then – a lot simpler than when I was lying in Terek’s bunk and trying not be be a silly little girl all over him, but I wanted his arms around me and I couldn’t even give one simple reason why. Put it down to a whole bundle of different reasons.

There’s the thing they call “Survivor’s Guilt”, which happens to anyone who’s lived through something that killed off some of those closest to them. Hired guns get it worse than most, because we’re meant to see that our freighter gets through, and if we weren’t a hundred percent committed to that then we’d be in another job. There was the part where I was replaying that “If they go home, we don’t” routine in my head and realizing at that moment I really didn’t care about staying alive. There was even the bit about how I was getting to realize that boys weren’t bad after all – especially one in particular.

[Zireael]

Nothing like the first combat to show you're not so green!

[Malacandra]

Nothing like the first combat to show you're not so green!

(But you're still Harmless as far as the record is concerned. )

There are times when you just feel so grown up.

For me it was the huge relief that came with realizing I’d gotten into a for-real space combat and come out the winner, without even a scratch on my ship. It had all been so surprisingly easy, too, which kinda led me to hope it was always going to be as easy as that. Of course, the other spacers were quick to put me straight.

But they didn’t bust my bubble first off. Once we’d hit the station and the Clipper was off-loading, we hit the bar and let it be known that there was a new pilot on the block, one who wasn’t green any more. Of course I was still rated Harmless. It takes several trips to lose that – at least, you’d better hope it did, because who needs to get into eight separate duels on one mission? There are some who do it, of course – the galaxy’s a big place – but there are plenty more who buy the farm because they got into more fights than they were ready for in one go.

After I’d been made officially free of every spacers’ bar in the Eight, with a short ceremony and a ritual handing-over of a little plaque they keep behind the counter, I sat nursing my drink for quite a long while. Of course you have to understand that just having the right of entry didn’t mean I ranked up there with all the seasoned campaigners. There’s a pecking order that you don’t ignore, and while there’s no official insignia to show who’s Dangerous and who’s still Poor, there are conventions that let those who need to know recognise the signs. If you ever see someone wearing a laser crystal in their hair, for instance, you need to be real respectful. By the same token, if you make the mistake of wearing one yourself when your record shows less than a thousand kills, be prepared to be in for bad trouble the moment someone checks up on you.

But I wasn’t thinking about that so much, and after a while Taniqua, out of Predator’s Downfall, detached herself from the little group she was with and set herself down by me.

“Why so thoughtful?”

It was a natural question, and it deserved a polite answer, but all I could manage was “Thinking about medians.”

She’d obviously heard the same statistic I had. There was a hint of impatience in her head-toss, which had a snort to go with it. “Maths isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Once you’ve used up your first minute, it doesn’t mean you’re running on borrowed time.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s just… odds are good that half the people I trained with didn’t get through that minute, and it’s less than a standard week since I last saw them.”

Taniqua took in half the bar with a sweep of her arm. “Welcome to our world, kid. Odds are also good that you’ll never see any of these good people here again after tomorrow. Not that they’re all going to become someone’s statistic, but it’s a big galaxy and it can take a long time before your paths cross again, let alone in the same system. If it makes you feel better, tell yourself everyone’s alive until you’ve heard proof to the contrary. You may never be proved wrong.”

“I guess I can do that,” I shrugged, and gave her a brave half-smile.

“That’s the spirit. And meanwhile, you’ve earned your pay for today, so spend a small fraction of it partying hard. Eat and drink, for tomorrow it may be your turn in the barrel.”

I asked her to explain that one to me and she told me a filthy story about men on a ship, the kind that goes on water. Then she laughed and said, “But we can do better for ourselves than that. Go on, have a few drinks, then jump on a cute guy. It’s what you deserve.”

With just the hint of a blush I explained that I’d never been with a man and wasn’t at all sure I ever wanted to, but it just made her laugh again. “Well, a girl then. There’s plenty of choice. Or get your cross-species freak on if that’s what lights your fuse. You won’t be the only one.”

I followed her gaze across the bar to where a black Cat a little smaller than me was rubbing up against a guy with a little Asp-shaped badge on his tunic. Asp pilots swagger like no-one’s business, on account of having massive firepower and hyperspace capability. This one, though, was scratching the Cat’s back like he meant business.

“She’s from Diso,” said Taniqua, “and when she arches her back like that, it’s not a saucer of milk she’s begging for. Good luck to the pair of them figuring out who’s gonna do what with what, but you can bet your boots something’s happening tonight, ‘cos she’s a whole sector away from home and it’s her night to yowl.”

I thought it over and guess Taniqua maybe had a point, and most times it worked out pretty well, then and later. Which was all fine and dandy until I found myself clinging to Terek in the small hours, feeling far more attached to another spacer than it’s real smart to get in our business, and doing a bad job of explaining why.

It’s not good to get attached. You need a clear head when you’re in a fight – you don’t need to be committed to watching one special person’s back, nor wondering where they are when they’re several star systems away and you’re hoping to meet up again. Anli Hadd’zi probably has stats showing how that knocks down your survival chances. I didn’t really care.

Maybe Terek saw things differently, though. He held me as long as I wanted, listened to me making no sense – and he was gone in the morning.

[SteveKing]

Love the whole 'Loss of Innocence' way the tale's unfolding. A heart warm-tale and character too.

Please keep it going, there's lots of room and appreciation in the Ooniverse for all

[Malacandra]

(Thank you! Here's today's first thousand words)

Tomorrow it may be your turn in the barrel.

Even I wasn’t so naïve as to think every run I went on would be as simple as the first one, and to be honest I was expecting the trouble to start sooner rather than later. But as I stretched, yawned, and rolled out of my cot to grab chow and face the new day, I was feeling cautiously hopeful.

There was a dent in the mattress next to where I’d been sleeping. I felt like someone was bound to notice this glow I was giving off, but I decided not to worry about it. She’d slipped away a little before my alarm went off, giving me a polite peck on the forehead on her way out, and I knew she had her own day to get ready for, even if it didn’t mean getting into the seat of a fighting ship and hoping you could shoot straighter and faster than someone else.

Grabbing a bite to eat, I checked the roster board, where everyone’s names came up in cab-rank order for whoever was hiring today. Just before me, name and likeness, was the black Cat I’d noticed the previous night – and she was in the chow line just behind me, too. It might’ve got my face scratched for me if I’d said so, but she looked like she’d had a whole bowl of cream to herself the previous night, and I guess she’d managed to get her yowling done after all even if the soundproofing had kept her from waking everyone else up.

“Hi,” she purred, and if that sounds like I’m trying to be funny, all I can say is that’s how she sounded. “Name’s Maussa. Want to sit together?”

I desperately tried not to crack up when I heard how her name was pronounced. Those hands have opposable thumbs and claws that go all the way back in, but they’re not just for decoration. Maussa was smaller and lighter than me, with soft-looking black fur that ached to be petted… and from the little I knew about the various Felines scattered about the Eight, she could make me wish I’d never been born without even breathing hard.

If she wanted to be friendly then I was not going to say no. We found a table with a view of the planet dawn below, which I’d never got tired of from the first time I’d looked down on one on Qudira. “And you arrre…?”

“Marilee, Sidewinder Get An Honest Job.” I’d named her myself, which is spacer’s privilege no matter how green and even if someone else paid for the ship. Different pilots have different tastes and most of ‘em have a kind of a sense of humour even if the wit’s not always sparkling. Others –

“Mine’s a Sidewinderrr, too. Pause for Thought.”

Others, especially trigger-happy Felines who seem to be looking for any excuse for a cat-fight, choose the kind of name that someone’s likely to laugh at so they can take offence. The one thing you can say is that they aren’t looking to kill you unless you go for a weapon first. They might leave you smarting and with a few days needing some extra meds until the claw-marks heal, but if it’s just a casual fight as between equals, the claws don’t come all the way out and they don’t bite down.

I didn’t find this out at the time and I didn’t go looking to, either. Maussa had a teasing expression that told me she knew what a rookie I was but that the mischief was going to stop at gentle hazing, and if I was smart I’d let it ride.

We got ourselves signed up with a Python an hour after breakfast, along with three other ships – and he already had a couple more tagging along from his last system. Whatever it was he was up to that might make him such a risk, and however much trouble he might have got into on his last jump, well, those are questions you just don’t ask. You can choose for yourself to turn someone down if you don’t like his rep or where he’s going, but you don’t make a habit of that if you want to stay in work.

What the risk might be we found out soon enough. It turned out I was going home – and I knew damn well what that meant by now, especially when our trader let drop that he was carrying computers.

Some of us face up to risks, and some of us run away from them. When I woke up and found Terek gone, it sure felt like he’d run away. Later I’d get to thinking about why he’d do a thing like that, but not straight away. I felt like I’d bared my soul to him and he’d paid me back with a slap in the face.

Whatever the whys and wherefores, I left that station with a bad attitude and a cold intensity I’d not felt before. There wasn’t room in our business for a girl to be a silly emotional female? Then there was room to be a ruthlessly efficient ship-killer, and I figured I had just the equipment for that. I didn’t much care who I signed up with, I just resolved it was going to be so much the worse for anyone who crossed me.

“Ladies and gentlemen, our target for today is Maesin,” read the briefing notes. “Be on your guard for pirates and be aware that we are carrying passengers.”

Maesin. A revolting dump, as the guidebook puts it – and with about as much scum and villainy as Qudira, even before you start counting the risk of a contract hit on the passengers. I gave an evil grin I was glad the girl in the next ship couldn’t possibly see. I was in a bad mood, and a revolting dump full of pirates and assassins was just what I needed.

[Malacandra]

Find out what you do well. Then do it.

That’s not a quote from something someone told me; that’s all my own work. Maybe it’s not so profound as all that, but hey, I do what I can. ‘Course, it helps if what you do well is actually good enough to see you through…

And none of this is rolling out and sounding as wise and deep as I’d hoped, which is why I figure I’ll stick to being a combat pilot, not a lecturer.

I wasn’t yet dead sure that what I do well was good enough. We witched into Qudira system, our trader and his eight escorts, and about ten kilocredits’ worth of fancy electronic goods. That was station prices, of course. If you could get a choke on the market and ship ‘em in yourself, you could likely ask a lot more than a hundred credits a pop. And even if all you did was filch ‘em off the trader and sell them somewhere else, you’re still making a tidy profit – plus, maybe, keeping the planet in the mud where you want it. Well, there I was to try to upset that plan, along of half a dozen other singleships that were likely better at it than I was.

How the word gets around among the pirates, I ain’t yet learned, but the trouble is that there’s only one entry point into a system, to within a few kilometres. The theory’s several astrophysics degrees out of my reach, but the only way in is what’s called the Witchpoint, which they helpfully mark with a buoy in every system I ever went to. That means, if you’re real up-front about what you mean to do to anyone coming in, you can camp close in by the buoy and wait to see who comes through – and with a good computer, they tell me, you can predict people’s arrival time to a couple of hours.

So we knew to expect a reception committee, and we got one – Fer-de-Lances, Asps, and a bunch of hangers-on. They broadcast the usual hail they’re using these days when they want to bully a freighter captain into giving them an easy payday: “We just want your cargo”. Our freighter captain had told us there was no way that was going to happen – he quoted some old poem or other, but what it came down to was this:

Once you’ve paid off a pirate for threatening you, you’ve taught him that he can get paid for making threats. This is not a good thing.

So instead we came about into attack position, our freighter too if it came to that. He fancied his chances with his own laser before turning round and letting them chew on his rear shields for a bit – and he was toting another laser aft as well. Pythons look slow and clumsy, but they can turn good and tight and if they have the rear laser they can catch a lot of suckers.

But for me, I was just looking to get my sights on, same as the first time, only this time someone tagged me first. We’d been trained good. If you’re taking hits, don’t sit there and squeal about it – pull some evasive manoeuvres and break that target lock, quickly! A military-spec laser will go right through you in just a few seconds if you don’t react fast!

With so many other targets around, the one who was tagging me lost interest once I’d broken, and I kept myself weaving and dodging while my regenerators did what they could to balance the energy out again. But you can’t just dodge, you have to make yourself useful – and I found myself with a clear shot at one of the Ferdys, a full fifteen kilometres away.

What I do well, I’ve found, is get my sights on quickly and from maximum weapon range. I checked the distance and saw I was closing, so I cut my speed right down and let rip. Straight away I got the feedback that told me I was on target. But Ferdys turn good too and he spun around and must’ve cut in his injectors, ‘cos he was lighting out fast and I thought I’d seen the last of him.

I pulled round in a wide arc on the edge of the furball, looking for someone else to pick on as soon as my laser was ready. There were a couple of flashes that let me know some ships were gone already, but I hadn’t time to see who was left or even to count the traces on my scope. A Sidewinder screamed past me with a missile trailing it, I couldn’t see who it was or what side it was on, but I hoped the ship wasn’t one of ours as I’d noticed at least one missile boat in our line-up, and anyway Pythons can carry a couple. I didn’t hear any ECM, but with a real quick glance on the scope I saw there were at least two blue-white traces on it, and that often means both sides have fired missiles and they’re waiting to see who chickens out first and ECMs his own along with the other guy’s. That was something I remembered from training, anyway.

I found myself with a Moray Star Boat in my sights – a pretty ship, but I hadn’t time to sit there and admire. I was still busy trying to score my first kill on this trip, ‘cos scaring off the Fer-de-Lance didn’t count, and it might even be back –

“Watch your tail, Get An Honest Job!” screamed the commset, just as a red glare filled my screen. I watched both my shields being scrubbed away, the sure sign you’re being hit halfway down where they overlap. I broke, just in time to see a ship screaming in from the side –

And collide with the Ferdy that was a hundred metres off my six and following my every move.

[Malacandra]

When there’s violent death all around, you just have to hope it’s someone else’s.

I didn’t even see what the ship was that hit the Fer-de-lance behind me, still less whose it was. For a moment I was terrified it was Maussa’s, if only because she was the only other pilot in our line-up who I even knew. But there wasn’t even time to worry about that. The Moray Star Boat was pulling up hard and was happily going to play chicken with me, and my shields weren’t up to it right at the minute thanks to the hits I’d just taken from the Ferdy. I pulled my stick into the corner and gave the yaw pedal a boot as well, wrenching my own guts sideways as I did it but willing to do anything other than run straight and level, which would have been a suicide note right then.

Thankfully someone else teased the Star Boat off my tail and I was left a few precious seconds to recover. In the fight so far, I’d fired once, nearly fired a second time, nearly been killed and been bailed out by a miracle that had cost someone else their life. It was a big leap up from the first trip out, just the daycycle before.

Experience is a wonderful thing as long as you live long enough to profit from it. When we Witched into Maesin I had my battle plan pretty well thought out, which is great if you can actually stick to it and, even when you can’t, better than just flying in there and waiting for the other side to dictate to you. Our freighter this time was a Boa 2, also called a Boa Class Cruiser, and a superb piece of kit it is too. She’s faster than a Python, more cargo space, has the power for military-spec shields and more hardpoints than you know what to do with. I flew close in to admire her, and just maybe to check out her pylons in case the boss saw fit to drop a mine in mid-battle.

Seeing nothing but missiles, I breathed a little easier. You like to think that no trader’s going to drop a mine and accidentally forget that some of his escorts can’t run away in time with no injectors, but I’d be astonished to see proof that it had never happened.

One after another we dropped into the wormhole behind the 2, with Maesin just a few hours away in Witch-space. There’s a whole lot of weirdness to see in there, but it’s always the same weirdness and after the first few times you’ve pretty much lost interest. You don’t need to do any piloting either; you can’t do anything except drop out of the other end of the tunnel, and even your arrival velocity is fixed, although that can change more or less straight away.

And if it doesn’t change more or less straight away when your scope is full of red traces and someone’s saying “That’s the ship Eeci O’Fannonsdottir hired. Take it!” there’s something wrong with you.

Like anything else, you learn to deal with assassination hits. They’re there to do a job and they figure on delivering value for the money they charge, which is a lot, but they don’t much like seeing their numbers go down and nothing to show for it. I was already hitting the taps as we came out of the tunnel and I spotted the bunch of hostiles, just about my ideal range. I locked onto one, knowing that in the first case they’d be trying to take down the Boa Class Cruiser they’d been hired for, and burned him in one economical burst. I was front-on to them at just about fifteen k’s, and a Sidewinder’s a tough mark at that distance – and when the return fire started getting too close for comfort, I pulled around edge-on to them, giving them an even smaller target, and whipped along straight for a few seconds before turning back round and rolling a quarter-turn to my right.

Soon as my laser cooled, I opened up on another of them. They were getting fire coming in from the other flank too and they didn’t like it much, and this time, when they started getting my range again, I was all ready to pull the same move again, only in a different direction this time. That’s where the quarter-roll came in. I’d thought this one through and practised it, and it was working a treat.

The other part I’d thought through was that when the assassins cut and run, I didn’t even bother trying to follow them. I let my laser cool and my shields top off, closing back in on the Boa Class Cruiser and waiting for the next hit.

Well, the scum and villainy came and gave it a shot, but it was another of those missions where all the grief’s happening to someone else. I made good and sure that no-one got much within that magic fifteen kilometres – not until I was ready to close the range and slice ‘em up. It worked like a treat, again and again. One way and another, I rolled into Maesin station with five more kills to my name and a huge sense of feeling good about myself.

I hit the bar with a celebration on my mind – not only was it not my turn in the barrel that day, but I’d greatly enjoyed cramming a bunch of evildoers in there, one after the other. I felt three metres tall and every millimetre of it swagger. It was a night for chugging a large dose of some seriously good liquor, marking out the hottest girl in there, and spiriting her out from under the noses of all the guys to show her the kind of a good time that only another girl knows how to hand out. And, with next to no modifications, that’s how it worked out.

[Malacandra]

The same job that seemed really easy one day can seem impossible the next.

Whatever nice stories I might have been telling myself about a triumphant homecoming to Qudira – and I sure felt like I’d earned the right one way or another – they didn’t last too long once I got a look at the reality. Qudira system was really busy that day, not just the reception committee but another mob when we got a bit closer in, and I couldn’t put a single one of them down. I kept giving it my best shot, and my best shot kept on being not good enough, and even when I scored a hit I either ran my laser into overheat before the goonie blew, or else I lost my lock, or else I had to take evasive action on my own account.

Some days are just like that, I learned later, but at the time it had me chewing lumps out of my steering yoke, convinced I’d just been lucky with the one kill I’d got the last time and I actually wasn’t good for anything at all except to give my wingmates a liability to take care of. And the second bunch were really annoying, not just for me but for the rest of us, darting in to see if they could score some cheap shots before breaking off again, too many of ‘em with injectors that they could tap to get out of range quicker than we could follow. Our freighter captain made encouraging noises, saying he was fine as long as we got the cargo down to the Coriolis station, but it sure didn’t comfort me having to keep an eye open for that pack of rats for a good hour and a half, always just one side or the other of the twenty-five kilometre line where your targeting computer loses its lock and you can just see a metallic glitter in the darkness against the backdrop of stars to remind you that you’re not getting any peace.

They finally hollered enough just as we were reaching the edge of the station aegis and could have counted on some Vipers if they cut up any more trouble. A few violet traces on the scope would have been welcome long before, but GalCop doesn’t have much reach in a system like Qudira – they keep the few police ships they can sponsor close in to the station, and try to hang on to them while they can. Viper pilots, I don’t mind admitting, are even more underpaid than we are in some systems, and it’s right up to the limit in an every-man-for-himself hellhole like the system I was born in.

Which is why it felt good to breeze into Maesin system and making like the toughest, saltiest critter in all the Eight on the strength of having come in mob-handed, armed to the teeth, and kicked ass every which way down to the station. Sometimes you’ll dock and hit the bar glad to be alive, and sometimes you’ll feel like you deserve to lord it all over the lower lifeforms, meaning anyone who isn’t a spacer laser-for-hire jockey like yourself.

My hot girl snuggled up to me a little extra-sympathetically round about the time the party was finally over – by which I mean our private one; outside our door it sounded like there were still a few that were whooping it up – and asked “Tough trip, lover?”

I grinned evilly. “Not for me it wasn’t.” I dare say it was a little tougher for the unlucky five who’d crossed my sights.

“You lose somebody, then? Sorry – I’m not sure I should be asking.”

She was right as far as that went, and I asked, a little tetchily, “Well, why ask then? The answer’s no, for what that’s worth.”

“I was afraid you were hurting, that's all. You… You were rough, you know.”

And Eesti forgive me, but I gave her the asshole’s answer to that one: “I didn’t hear you complaining, sweets.”

I was sorry for it soon enough, but again, it was another protocol thing. Most bar-girls aren’t going to complain about spacers, not for anything short of wilful assault. She gave me a much more patient answer than I deserved at the time. “Well, no. You know what buttons to press and how to press them, and you could see and hear for yourself what that did to me. But I’m still sore right now, and I guess I wanted to know if there was a reason.”

It was still taking too long for the remorse to kick in, which is why I carried right on being an asshole. “Well, I’m sorry,” I said, in the tone that makes it code for “I’m not sorry at all and how dare you make a fuss,” and added, “What’s the matter, decided you’re not into girls after all?”

I should’ve got smacked for that. I might be all kinds of bad news when I’ve got a beam laser in front of me, but I don’t know that I’d stack up all that high in a straightforward slap-fight. Instead she rolled out of bed and picked up her clothes. The stuff they wear along to the spacers’ bar doesn’t take long to get out of, but it goes back on again just about as quickly. Maybe she was figuring I’d take my cue to realize I owed her a few kinder words that might have got her to stay until morning, but I was just too bloody-minded at the time.

“Just so you know,” she said when she was dressed, “a lot of the guys I see through here really don’t have much idea how to show a girl a good time. They just don’t know what to do with what they and I have got, for all their talk. But they try, they have good manners, and not one of them was ever rough with me on purpose.”

And… exit.

[SteveKing]

And… exit.

And ouch!

Just like that, innocence lost

And life experience gained with (hopefully ) a bit of perspective.

Love the character M

[Malacandra]

Another day, another bar, another gloom.

I didn’t see a whole lot to celebrate when we hit Qudira system. Sure, I was alive and I might not have been, but that wasn’t enough to me, not when I’d been telling myself all these lovely stories of how a golden age was going to come to my homeworld one day soon, and I’d be a part of the reason why. We’d had a rough time getting in, we were a couple short, and I had an uneasy feeling about one of them. I was just glad it wasn’t Maussa who’d hit the Fer-de-lance on my tail, but it felt like someone who I didn’t even know had rammed that pirate just to save me from getting burned, and I didn’t feel worth it.

Maussa told it different, though. “Saw the whole thing as I was on my way over. It was the Death or Glory, don’t know the pilot’s name but I saw him the night before… that was before things got interrrrresting,” she purred. “He was a hot shooterrrr, liked to practise on asterrroids and he rrreckoned he could blow one, then blow one of the boulders, then blow one of the splinters, all without thrrrrottling back or overheating his laserrr. I guess he thought he could pull that on the Ferrrry and it must have had a shield upgrrrade.”

I wanted to believe her, but: “You sure?”

“Surrre?” she laughed, her tail twitching a mite. “No-one’s ever surrre. All I’m saying it what it looked like to me, take it for what it’s worrrrth. And learrrn. We all have to take rrrisks, but you need to think it thrrrough and take the ones that give you the best chance. I like to get on someone’s tail and take my time to make surrre they go down, but the moment someone’s on my tail I get out of there like a scalded… well, you figurrre it out. But that’s playing to my strengths. Yourrrs are probably different.”

I sat down and thought it over, and turned in early. Despite what Maussa had said, it wasn’t a night for hard liquor and soft arms, at least not for me. But at least I’d got back to Qudira in one piece, and if that wasn’t the homecoming I’d hoped for, well, it was still a homecoming of sorts.

Maesin, on the other hand, was somewhere I was looking to get away from. Even by planet dawn I hadn’t got around to thinking any of it was my fault, but the next trip out turned out to be a long one with several Witch-jumps in a row before we made our next station. That happens sometimes. Freighters can take on Quirium at a fuel station or a satellite, or they can even sun-skim for it, which I hate because our heat-shielding isn’t up to their standard and never can be. You can get mighty hot deep in a star’s atmosphere, watching the temperature rising to the point where you’re going to burst if your freighter doesn’t hurry up and open up a nice cool wormhole.

This time, at least, it was fuel stations all the way, with us keeping a watch out while they were pumping because you get plenty of goonies that far out and they’re not above firing on a fuel station to try to blow whoever’s inside it. But so far as that goes, we did okay at seeing the bad guys coming and we dealt with ‘em capably.

Long-range missions like that are tiresome, leaving you with your rations needing to be completely restocked and your space pants tested to the limit of the manufacturer’s claims, but at least you can’t accuse the traders of cheaping you out. They’re not making any money until they dock, so if it’s one trip for them, why shouldn’t it be one trip for you? So the reasoning goes.

Anyway, I had plenty of long hours to look at my reflection in my blank viewscreen, and sooner or later I guess my conscience must have finally awoken, and I looked at the smug little face in front of me and I said “You scumball”.

Of course by then Maesin was a long way away and it was likely to be ages before I was headed that way again. Escorts wander all over the galaxy depending where the next trader is bound for. If you really wanted to pick and choose then I guess you could only accept missions that were taking you the right way, but it’s bad business and bad manners; all the other spacers have to take whatever’s up next and they expect you to do so as well.

At the end of it we’d fetched up at Diora, about as unremarkable and nondescript a place as you’d find anywhere. Middle-of-the-road government, middle-of-the-road tech, and an economy that was neither one thing nor the other. I guess if you’re a typical Communist worker bee then it’s as good a place as any, and if the entire Galactic network were to collapse then Diora could bumble along for centuries by itself, turning out just enough machine tools and so on to keep the food production up, but it’s a dull old place and even the Coriolis station didn’t have much excitement.

Not that I felt up for much excitement myself anyway. I checked out of the spacer-bar party before it really got started, spent some time in my own pit for a while before realizing I wasn’t going to sleep, then went for a wander. There’s very little going on in a Coriolis station on nightcycle, and I fetched up in the general R&R area by default. There was just one old freighter captain there, who looked up momentarily, realized I wasn’t hooking, then gave me a friendly smile anyway while he carried on tinkering with something. Oh well. That looked about the only entertainment I was going to find right there.