Irpul-4’s third class starport consisted of a series of old, multilinked bubble domes offering access to starships and other craft along the sides and at key junctures above. The port itself covered nearly thirty square kilometers and formed the central hub of the Gigacorp city sprawled around it.
Naero and her crews received their delivery orders and dropped down to land, unload, load, and confirm payments. Gray, blue, purple, and brown corrosive dust hurricaned around them, even as they decelerated.
Viewed from above by Spacer eyes, the old starport looked just like any other Corps dump hole.
Naero’s jaw ached from clenching it during the flight in, but she ground her teeth again.
Her brother Jan remained on The Slipper with Aunt Sleak, choosing to seclude himself in his quarters with his feelings about the news.
It might go harder on Jan. He kept everything inside and always tried to act cold and aloof. She worried about how hard the loss could be for him if he shut himself off from his grief. At times he went off on his own for months at a time, pulling away from everyone. Even her.
How was he coping?
Not to mention, that on a real universe, practical level: losing their parents and their entire fleet also meant a serious loss of Clan status, influence, and wealth for the both of them. Their parents had sunk every meg they had into that venture.
Now all of those investments were gone, completely wiped out.
Naero and Jan’s temporary assignment to Aunt Sleak’s small merchant fleet, the one she bought from their parents, looked more and more like a lifetime appointment now.
They had nowhere else to go.
An aft stabilizer froze up. Naero compensated before it spun her out of control, crashing into her starboard transports.
Naero gripped the shaking controls harder, steeled herself, and struggled to remain focused. She had a shift to fill, and three blue bands of merchant service rank on her arms to live up to–rank she had fought for and earned, despite her youth. In nearly fifteen years of duty to Clan Maeris since the age of five, she had never missed a shift, never ducked a duty.
She couldn’t let that slack, no matter what had happened, regardless of how she felt about her and Jan’s loss.
Up ahead loomed Omni Gigacorp’s primary shipping depot, an old pyramid structure a few klicks high. She and the other six transports made their landing approach. The massive doors of the designated loading bay opened for them.
“Form up on my mark and vector in,” she commanded.
Naero piloted her lead transport inside and set it down easy, stiff controls be damned. She plugged in orders to have her crew fix that faulty stabilizer before they left.
She went through the motions and coordinated the landings of the other six transports and dozens of her aunt’s people sent to unload Omni’s shipments.
Her teams assembled in front of their glowing, open cargo holds. Each Spacer stood garbed in the same uniform: tight black Nytex Spacer uniform togs, high boots, loading gear, and glowing azure bands of merchant fleet rank and insignia displayed proudly on their arms.
Naero pushed her inner tension and shock aside once again.
As the lead pilot and team leader, Naero wore a gravwing strapped to her like a small pack with auto-deploying, spolymer nanotek wings. But she hadn’t activated them yet.
Instead, she walked straight up to the waiting, meaty dock captain, a heavyset lander in faded, dark blue Omni Corps coveralls. He leered at her with a scarlet face, gnashing a short dark stub of Spican harstick, the sides of his maw yellowed and blackened from years of addiction to the synthetic root and the low stim dose it released.
The sharp pungent odor of harstick permeated the man right down to his glands and the very air about him.
Naero secretly despised most landers.
He nearly threw the trade loading packet into her hands.
“You spacks have two hours to deliver and vacate my dock,” he snapped. Old Corps military by his tone and his contempt for Spacers. The most hateful landers called them ‘spacks,’ a dehumanizing insult from the wars.
She’d encountered such tiresome attitudes on her merchant runs so often that they hardly bothered her anymore. But today, such insults grated on her.
“Let’s see what we have,” Naero said. She opened the packet and took out their agreement and inventory exchange chips. She plugged them into her handcomp and double-checked them while the dock captain waited. The precise location for each inbound and outbound package lit up on her filtered display, logistics flowing to the loaders.
“Looks in order.”
“I know it’s in order, spack.” He spat out a vile gout of black juice and goo to one side, almost as if vomiting. The stench was putrid
“My people are waiting. Get on it, spack. You’re burning my simulated daylight.” He turned and walked away; the foul stench faded with him.
Naero stared after him for an instant and mildly shook her head. Was the guy trying to piss her off? Not a good idea. Not today.
“And a pleasure doing business with you and the Corps too,” she said. “As always.”
She turned back to her crew, most of them young and headstrong like her. Naero activated her gravwing and rose a few feet off the ground to help oversee their stop and drop. Her unit hummed slightly and the short wings deployed, flexing and adjusting with the gravfields.
The last Spacer War with the Corps hadn’t been that long ago. Resentment and even outright hatred between Corps landers and Spacers were still all too common. Naero found it useful to maintain an ironic sense of humor.
“All right, loaders. The pleasantries are over, so let’s get to it. You’ve had your little inbound nap time. So get your asses in order and do some work. Stay on schedule.”
A spattering of honks, salutes, beeps, and “yes, sir, Commander sir” filtered back in her general direction. The loader crews formed up and took their assignments like a hive of black-and-yellow striped bees, buzzing off in various directions.
The hum and drone of glifters filled the air–insectoid grav-assisted bot arms attached to a protective cage and lift harness.
She floated around another GV, just in time to overhear Saemar and Chaela, whispering to each other while prepping their glifters.
Her mates kept their voices low.
“Any more word? What kind of run were her parents on?” Chaela asked, her long, blond braid swinging to one side when she bent over.
Saemar shook her pretty geisha-like face and whispered back, “Not much else so far. Some kind of deep space exploration mission with a sect of the Cumi.”
Both of their faces reflected shared grief and anger.
Naero considered zipping forward to let them see her, but what could she say? Her mates and the crew would continue to speculate about the loss of her parents and the exploration mission among themselves, even if they said nothing around her and Jan.
Out of respect, everyone kept their distance and didn’t broach it in front of them.
Even her best friend Gallan seemed quiet and uncertain about what to do or say.
Naero didn’t know herself. Stumbling upon them gossiping made her realize just how much she was still in shock. But perhaps they had heard something more. Anything.
“Any more details?” Chaela asked.
Saemar shook her head again. “Few deets and just a lot of spec, sweetie. There’s talk Intel may have been–”
“Shadowforce?”
“Shh...” Saemar frowned and climbed into the straps of her glifter, adjusting her harness. “Well, if they weren’t in on it before, they are now. The loss of an entire Spacer strike force, including an exploration flagship of The Omaria’s fame is a serious interstellar incident.”
“Who do they really think...?”
“Who else?”
Chaela snarled and clenched her fists. “Matayan corsairs. Always doing the Corps’ dirty work.” She spat on the floor. “Murdering bastards. They’ve butchered enough or our families.
They can eat shit and drink piss.”
“Rep that, sweetie,” Saemar added. “You know how I feel. Piss on their dead.”
That was one of the reasons Saemar was the way she was now.
Matayan raiders had killed the fighter wing captain from Clan Mitsubishi whom she had been engaged to.
Hikaru had taken several enemy fighters down with him, but in the end, he was still gone. Forever.
After that, Saemar had kind of flipped and gone on a binge with other guys. But she never again made any long-term attachments.
Naero did the only thing she could in her current estimation. She bobbed the other way, and went on with her work at hand. Best to keep busy. Inside the loading bay they basically had a large cube to maneuver in, three hundred meters long by nearly as wide and high, lined with loading platforms from top to bottom. Every spot linked and coded.
The Spacer glifter teams went straight to work. With the data Naero sent them, they bobbed up and down in the air to both deliver and gather assigned cargo from their transports and various platforms. It looked like organized chaos to anyone watching, but there was a system to it.
Another jolt of pain reminded her how much it might have been a bad idea to wear that psy helmet.
Naero tried to focus on the automated tally sequences running on her handcomp. Aunt Sleak’s profit margins fluctuated as new market info came in. Naero found it hard to concentrate on the last minute pweaking required to maximize those profits.
All of that suddenly seemed so unimportant now, with her parents gone. Of course rumors and speculation about anything would always run wild.
No, she reminded herself, her parents were not gone. Taken. They had been taken from their family, possibly by Matayan butchers.
The slight body hairs between her shoulders and up the back of her neck flared with a tickling flicker like electric fire. Like an unspoken voice in her mind, straining to warn her.
She quickly scanned the massive inner core of the warehouse section.
Danger? Someone focusing or sighting in on her? What was it?
Something had her on high alert, but she couldn’t place or identify it. Again, it felt like a voice buried deep in her skull, trying to warn her.
She shook her head. Perhaps stress and everything all together simply made her paranoid.
“Frost,” she said aloud. She let out a sigh.
Keep calm, keep your shit together. Just get through your shift.
“That’s right,” she heard Gallan say. She felt her friend’s big gentle hand on her shoulder, almost a stroke as it pulled away. He was half a year older than her, with only one band of rank on his arms. Unlike her, Gallan was too busy enjoying life to worry much about ambition or promotion–let alone getting his own ship someday. He left that all to her.
With her floating, she was eye level with him. She looked into the kindness of his thick face and couldn’t help but smile.
Yet neither could she ignore the same old childhood jealousy between them and felt it creep into her grin.
She silently cursed Gallan’s side of the family for making him and their cousins so damnably tall.
All her life Naero had yearned for a few more millimeters herself, but she was exactly the same height as her shorter, slender mother–exactly 1.52 meters.
Some might have thought, with her father being so tall, that...
Naero caught herself, stopped smiling, and felt her brows knit.
All thoughts returned to her dead parents somehow.
Gallan looked about to say something when actual warning alarms sounded. Naero’s sense of impending danger spiked again. She glanced around.
Old metal supports above them groaned and strained for an instant under great stress.
Then an entire section of loading platform gave way, thirty meters above and to their rear. Ton upon metric ton of goods and supplies toppled into the open air, along with three Corps personnel–crashing straight down at her and her people.
Concern for Gallan and her crew overrode all else.
“Clear and cover!” she shouted over their open channel.
“All crew, clear and cover!” Gallan looked up. Spacers dropped their loads and zipped in with their glifters, risking their lives to snag the plummeting Corps workers.
Only an instant passed before impact.
Naero accelerated and smashed into Gallan, where he still stood staring up. With him being nearly half again her height and twice her mass, she used her gravwing and her genetically amplified strength and quickness to knock him back, driving him off his feet. She pushed him under the protective overhang of the lower level and into the wall of freight stacked beneath. They hit hard.
She winded Gallan, but at least they’d survive.
Where they had stood a sliver of time before, crashing freight, debris, and equipment pelted the loading bay floor and their armored transports. The resulting tumult deafened everything. Then more screams split the air.
The dust still settled when Naero and Gallan emerged to assess the damage. Bits of wreckage and debris continued to crash down at random.
The front of her transport looked badly battered, but nothing beyond repair. The screaming started again nearby. Naero flitted toward it, dodging falling debris. Gallan ducked into his GV after a medkit.
She spotted part of a crushed Spacer glifter and one of the Corps people’s broken legs, sticking out from under a pile of wreckage.
Then Naero saw Chaela’s blond braid trailing out from the protective cage of her smashed glifter.
“All units,” she said over her com. “Spacer down, one lander. All working glifters converge and secure.”
She surveyed the structures above them. “All working transports–provide cover over rescue site. I want four teams to secure and reinforce the collapsed structure, if possible.”
“My legs, my legs!” the trapped Corps worker shrieked. Gallan scrambled up with the medkit and hit the man up with a sedative.
Moments later, the Spacer transports formed up close and hovered over them protectively, shining their lights down on the wreckage. Saemar swept in in her glifter.
“Who is it, sweetie?” she asked. “Who’s down? Oh, no–Chae. How is she? We have to get her out!”
“Glacier that,” Naero said. “Coordinate with the rest of your team.” Glifters bobbed around them in an instant, awaiting orders.
“Teams one and six, assemble around the rescue site and remove the wreckage. Carefully. I don’t want them hurt worse just because we’re in a hurry.”
The eight Spacers in their glifters cautiously hovered around like humming drones, carefully picking the wreckage off Chaela and the Corps worker, handing it back to the other teams to set aside.
In the end, with the glifter teams working methodically, it only took several seconds, but it seemed a lot longer to Naero and her crew as they stood by and watched.
Lander medteks with two floating medbeds arrived much more quickly than Naero expected.
“What happened here?” the lead medtek asked.
“As near as I can figure,” Naero said, pointing at the collapsed structures. “A faulty platform up there gave way and dumped its load on us.”
By then, Gallan had the Corps man out and stabilized. The big Spacer lifted him up and placed him on one of the medbeds. Naero had had extensive emergency medical training. From the looks of things, other than two broken legs and cuts and bruises, the lander would probably be all right.
“What about the other casualty?” the medtek asked.
“She’s alive,” Saemar shouted. “She took the worst of it trying to protect that guy. Her crush cage saved her. We’ll have to cut her out.”
Naero hovered of them. All four glifter cutter torches fired up bright and blinding at once.
In another few moments, Gallan went back in and carried Chae out. Even she was small in his big arms. He placed her gently on the other medbed.
Naero didn’t wait for the medteks to come ov
er. She landed and shut down her gravwing; it folded up neatly. She and Gallan went to work on their own. Chaela’s right foot was crushed beyond saving; Naero quickly amputated it and sealed it off.
She shuddered and blamed herself.
Any time one of her crew got hurt, her guts twisted. It bothered her something fierce. They were her people, her Clan. They trusted and depended on her to keep them safe. She was responsible for them.
Unfortunately for Chaela, losing the foot meant lots of regrowth treatments, and even more physical therapy. But at least she survived.
She’d lost consciousness from a nasty gash on the top of her head. The medbed kept her stable and strove to eliminate any pain. She bled from several other serious wounds on her arms and legs. Naero worked on cleaning and closing the head wound. Gallan went after the others.
Suddenly she smelled the acrid tang of Spican harstick. The taste of it even cut through the dust and the smell of blood.
“Let me through, you idiots!” she heard the Corps dock captain bellow. She tried to ignore him until he got a thick-fingered hand on her arm and yanked her away from working on Chaela.
“You listen here, you stupid little gash. We’re going to sue your entire spack clan into the next century. Just look at what you careless spacks–”
Naero shook free of him in anger.
As fast as a killing viper, one hand seized his throat and her other clamped onto his groin through his thin coveralls. She squeezed until his breath caught and his eyes bulged and popped wide like small bloodshot balloons.
A new length of harstick dropped from his mouth into the dust. She hoisted the oaf up on his toes at full arm’s length and slammed him into a duranadium beam.
Because of her slender size, her genetically enhanced strength and bone-muscle density that she inherited from her father almost always startled others–especially landers.
“Now you listen, scumbag. Our vids recorded everything, and I bet I can find stress fractures and maintenance violations all over this cheap hole. My people just saved three of your people; one of mine is down. I don’t have time for any shit from you. Get the hell away from me, before I am forced to hurt you.”
With that she let go and turned her back on him. He gasped and collapsed on the floor.
“Why–you!” He scrambled back to his feet, and lunged in toward her.
Gallan stepped in, towering over the fat oaf.
He grabbed the man by the back of his short hairs and lifted him up gasping onto his tip toes once more. He puppet-walked the guy a few meters off and shoved him out of the way into a pile of junk.
Saemar scowled and positioned her glifter between the muttering dock captain and the medbeds, casually testing her cutting torch.
Naero went back to Chaela. One of the lander medteks finished sealing the head wound. He turned to her, incredulous. “I’ve never seen Spacer smartblood at work before. Her wounds have stopped bleeding. They’re already beginning to seal over and heal up.”
Naero shook his hand. “My people and I thank you for your help, Doc.”
Chaela groaned and looked up at them. “The lander?” she asked.
“Alive,” Naero said with a smile. “Two broken legs, but he’ll live.” She nodded to Gallan, who prepared a stronger sedative that would work better on a Spacer metabolism.
Chaela smiled and groaned. “I thought the game was up when all that stuff hit us, N. Everyone else?”
“Fine, Chae. Gallan’s going to give you something to help you sleep and heal. You did good, my friend.”
No reason to tell her about the foot until later.
Chaela gasped in pain. “Tell your aunt what a hero I am. I’ll expect that bonus in my pay.”
“You’ll get it. I’ll make a full report.”
Chae nodded once and was out.
The Corps medteks followed them out of the loading bay, scurrying alongside the medbeds.
“I’m curious,” the medtek asked. “Can I examine you? Do you or anyone else need to be checked out? Do you want us to keep her overnight for observation? What’s the average Spacer rate of regeneration?”
Naero smiled, but this guy seemed a little too interested in them.
Spacers took care of their own whenever possible, and not all Spacer secrets were for landers.
“Thanks for the offer, but we’ll borrow your medbed to take her back to our fleet. She’ll be all right.” The medtek looked amazed, but Naero was used to that from landers as well.
In the end, they finished unloading and loading all of their transports and left the Corps workers to clean up the mess. They just barely made it under the two hour time limit the surly dock captain set. Naero neither saw nor smelled him again.
She suffered another pain spell for a few instants.
She tried to punch up Aunt Sleak on the com, but she could only reach the Fleet Second-in-Command, dashing Captain Zalvano. She made a full report on the incident, and met with The Slipper to load the transports and speed Chaela to Medical.
The very long day continued to stretch out. At least the excitement of the accident at the Omni Depot kept her mind off the loss of her parents. For a little while.
Her shift ended.
Normally she’d go back to her messy quarters and get some rest.
Naero wasn’t sure if she could even do that.
7