*
Long, slow hours meandered by, as the Dubious Profit drove on through the wormhole: a tiny bubble of reality within the ocean of unexistence that was witchspace. The air inside the cramped living quarters grew yet more stale. The two mutinous crustaceans were oblivious to promises, persuasions or threats. Being largely aquatic in any case, they had retreated deep within the flooded hydroponic chambers, from whence they used a communications tube to issue occasional irksome new instructions and demands. These random communiqués formed a nagging backdrop to a voyage that grew ever more unpleasant, as the ship’s chronometer doled out time in meagre rations.
When the Profit finally broke back into reality, emerging into Lerela space, oxygen levels had sunk alarmingly. Even with Rus’s emergency carbon scrubbers running at maximum, warning lights were nagging at Hesperus all across his command console. His tiny control room was even more cramped and stuffy than usual: as well as Stepan in the co-pilot’s seat, Rus had crowded in behind them – “To see what we’re getting ourselves into,” he said. Hesperus felt a cool wash of relief as Stepan located the independent station’s beacon, situated on a long, lonely orbit, slanted off the system’s ecliptic plane. Hesperus eased the Profit’s nose around and settled her on course.
A mote swam into view, a speck, a tiny dot pinned against the blackness among the blazing stars. The station was a scarred, potato-shaped asteroid, hollowed out by generations of miners. A little over four klicks in diameter, it had been given a lazy axial spin to provide a degree of centrifugal gravity for the inhabitants inside. A small docking port, marked with a winking green light, was just visible at one of the asteroid’s rotational poles. Two shabby spacecraft drifted nearby: a Cobra Mark I – an antiquated light trader, verging on the obsolete – and a Sidewinder, a small, agile fighter, although this one looked to be many years past its prime. Cautiously, Hesperus pinged them with the Profit’s IFF. Both were tagged “Offender”. Rus grunted, but made no further comment. The occupants of these ships were wanted criminals. Under the Co-operative’s crude legal system, which struggled to encompass the conflicting laws and customs of over two thousand systems, “Offender” could signal any number of things: murder, piracy, smuggling, violation of docking protocols … Hesperus was not immediately concerned. He knew that the Dubious Profit, too – due to his trading in tainted bakha root – would be displaying the same tag.
A third ship slid out from the dock. A Boa this time, larger, and newer too: a substantial modern merchant vessel, bigger than the Profit by some margin. Hesperus raised an eyebrow: such ships were seldom seen around these kinds of ports of call. The Boa dipped away, diffident; the Cobra and the Sidewinder eased into escort formation behind it. The Boa’s engine pulsed, and the two smaller ships matched velocity. A tiny spark lit up on the Boa’s nose, then almost instantaneously ballooned into a glowing sphere, electric blue, alight with frantic energies: the mouth of a newly opened wormhole, swallowing the merchantman completely. The smaller ships cruised forwards, and flew straight into the seething globe of actinic light, to vanish in splashes of short-lived exotic particles. Gradually the wormhole entrance shrank, pressed back down again into the quantum foam by the remorseless expansion of the cosmos; finally it winked out of existence, leaving no trace behind. Somewhere outside our universe, that Boa was caught inside a tiny pocket of physics: and eventually – all being well – it would pop back out again into reality, in some other nearby star system. The Cobra and the Sidewinder, too, were now also tucked into their own private folds of being, bound for the same star as their parent ship.
Hesperus slowed the Profit to a safe regulation speed, and laid a course for the docking port. He thumbed the communicator. “Ahoy, station, ahoy, station. This is Python the Dubious Profit requesting clearance to dock, over.”
The communicator popped and clicked, then issued an answering hail: “Ahoy, Python Dubious Profit, this is traffic control, we see you; you’re on the beam, five by five.”
The ancient surface of the asteroid swelled on the Dubious Profit’s viewscreen. A rash of domes blistered the grey regolith around the port, washed an intermittent sickly green by the pulsing beacon. The rough walls of the docking bay loomed over them, and the comms crackled again: “You’re clear and easy, so come on in. Slot yourself in bay three and we’ll get the dockmaster to you, soon as we can scrape him up. Welcome to our happy home. Welcome to Stranglehold.”
“Oh, lovely,” said Rus.