Sullen Stars: Free Merchant

Space is lonely.

That kept creeping through Rachel's mind as she watched the lidar map refresh on the multifunction display to her right. The station she was scheduled to dock with was still over 500,000 kilometers away, a number which continued to decrement by about 20 per second as the system refreshed its scan, but half a million kilometers was a little when it came to interplanetary distances. Theseus would arrive in about seven and a half hours at this rate, and that was alright. She'd been in transit for three days already. What was another few more hours?

At least it won't be lonely for a little while once I get there.

She tilted her head to the side and stared at the computer display set into the wall, which relayed imagery from cameras set on the outer hull of the ship. A light blue circle enclosed some object so far away she couldn't hope to resolve it. The same distance from the MFD ticked down over it. 512,313 kilometers to go. 7 hours, 31 minutes, 44 seconds. 43 seconds. 42 seconds.

The indicator would be visible for a few hours longer, until the computers swung the ship around to initiate a velocity matching burn so the ship reached the station's orbit. It wasn't much, but the sight of it was enough to keep her on the flight deck. Wasn't much else to do while she waited.

HW WATCHD TRIPPED

RESETTING

The numbers stopped ticking down and a stream of orange gibberish streamed across instead. The blue circle highlighting the station vanished in lines as text scrawled across the star field.

Rachel groaned and rapped a knuckle on the screen. She knew it wouldn't matter. The actual problem was in the computer system somewhere. Banging on the display wouldn't make any difference, but it was hard not to. The only thing she had to do was wait about thirty seconds and it would reboot and sort itself out. Not a big deal at this range.

She leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs atop the console, letting the tips of her hooves rest on the fore screens and blot out two dozen stars she didn't know the name of. At least the computer decided to crash half a million kilometers away instead of a hundred thousand. That was a fun experience. She learned that day, under the blare of alarms and emergency lighting, that Theseus's sensors were able to track active radar locks. She also learned in the call from traffic control that she was “performing unsafe operations” by approaching the station too quickly, and that subject to Anvari law, she could be fined up to five thousand Exchange credits for negligence.

The computer had finished rebooting in time for the ship's navigation computer to initiate the retro burn before the ship was vaporized by the station's debris defense system, and the dock master was kind enough to just give her a slap on the wrist instead of forwarding her to STC for any kind of prosecution, but ever since then she took things a little more slowly. Better to lose a day of transit time than to be hammered by fines or lasers.

If only it didn't make the transit even more insufferable.

LADAR MAPPER v0.12.2

READY

The star field stuttered, and the indicator appeared again.  511,662 kilometers to go. The timer started ticking down again. 7 hours, 31 minutes, 2 seconds. 1 second.

HW WATCHD TRIPPED

RESETTING

“Piece of junk.” Rachel blew out a long sigh instead of giving the screen a kick. That would be an expensive mistake.

Instead, she needed to get freshened up anyway. Seven and a half hours was plenty of time, but it would take time for her fur to dry out and it wasn't like she had anything else to be doing right now.

When she got to Vasili Station she could have one of the deck crew look at the lidar system. A second opinion never hurt, even if she was sure the answer would still come with the sound of a few thousand credits leaving her account attached.

[hr]

There weren't many advantages to being alone aboard a cargo ship meant for a crew of at least three people, but it did afford her the ability to wander through the corridors naked without stirring up trouble.

It wasn't like she got kicks out of doing it, or anything. It was just that combined with the ship running hot and the HVAC system only halfway working ever since the secondary condenser tower went bad last year, her fur dried out much faster than just toweling off. Especially since the drying booth quit working a few months ago. Its major malfunction wasn't much of a mystery, at least, since the diagnostic computer told her a fuse had blown. Of course a blown fuse meant there was a more serious problem somewhere, but that was for a technician to figure out the next time she was in dock.

She hoped the shampoo would overpower the scent of burnt rubber and electronics that somehow still clung to the air in the shower. Not that most deck hands aboard the station would have much room to talk after wrestling with heavy equipment all day, but that wasn't an excuse to go aboard smelling like a boot someone put in an oven.

Her cabin was midships, just past the main lounge and dining area. Empty cabinets, shelves and dispensers lined the wall she passed on her way, followed by a cook top covered in a fine layer of dust. On a whim she held out an arm to let three tiny droplets of water spatter down onto the surface.

“Got almost seven hours left. Guess it wouldn't hurt to try get a little cleaned up before we dock. Err, I dock.” She glanced down and ran her hoof through the tiny puddles forming on the deck plating. A grimace formed as evident grime trailed after it, loosened by the water. “Yeesh. It can't have been that long since I mopped. But, not like I've got anything else to do while I wait.”

Giving the entire ship interior a thorough cleaning would have been a project to start when she left the Dukas Triad Platforms three days ago, but she could get the crud out of the cracks here in the lounge, the airlock and the flight deck in a couple of hours. She didn't have to impress anyone, but she'd heard two deck hands talking about the stacks of trash blocking off corridors in some cargo hauler they were servicing and joking about turning the captain over to STC for safety violations. Theseus was nowhere near that bad, but still, it was good not to be the subject of gossip, right?

The temptation to blow it off was great, since literally nobody but a cleaning robot got excited at the thought of spraying noxious cleaners on counter tops and wiping them down, but after retrieving her compad from her cabin and tossing it on the table, she dragged the mop and sprays out of the utility closet and set to work.

The deck plating turned out to be more clean than she feared. It wasn't pristine white beneath a layer of filth, and even here in the lounge everything was a muted light gray that kept it from being blindingly bright under the warm lighting. And it was different back on Anvari where bugs would take up residence in little cracks if not sussed out with a duster, so wiping everything down was quick enough.

“Probably should have showered after this,” she grumbled at the feeling of getting her knees and feet wet all over again from the damp floor. “At least black fur doesn't show dirt...”

As it turned out, time flies when you're not having fun, and in the middle of scrubbing dust embedded in the instruction panel next to the emergency EVA suit lockers in the docking tube entrance when the faint chime of her compad echoed through the ship. Then again. And again.

“Ah, shoot!” She dropped the rag and sprinted back down the corridor, slowing after almost slipping on the slick plating, and reached for the device lying on the table. “Two hours can't have passed already!”

She thumbed the scanner on its side to unlock it, and sure enough, spotted an incoming call from local space traffic control being routed through the ship's comm system. One more glance down reminded her that she still hadn't gotten dressed, so she switched off video and answers.

“This is Theseus, captain Rachel Freeman speaking.”

“Theseus, this is Vasili Station, STC tower one,” a young male voice replied. Oh good, I answered in time. “We're calling to confirm your approach and plans to dock.”

“Uh, yes, that's right. I should be on your schedule. We-I've got a shipment of one hundred kilotons of water ice to deliver in an external tank, alongside some machinery and personal mail to deliver.”

“We've cross checked the manifests and you're clear to approach. Tune your autopilot to beacon six and it'll give you the telemetry. Once you're in proximity we'll send out the tugs to take the tank, then we'll guide you in for a landing. You've got two ships ahead of you so take your time.”

She rolled her eyes. That wasn't going to be an issue. “Understood. I'll call back once I'm at ten thousand.”

“Acknowledged.”

He cut the call, leaving the faint hum of the ship's engines to penetrate the new silence again. Rachel skimmed her compad's notifications to make sure she had caught everything else in her eleventh hour cleaning spree, and pondered her next step. She still had over four hours to go before docking began, but she really needed to be back on the flight deck soon in case the navigation computer or sensors had a stroke. She'd whip the ship around and start a manual deceleration burn before she had a repeat of that fiasco.

But first, she needed to get dressed.

[hr]

For once, all of the electronics and computers seemed to have their act together, and the final approach to the station went off without a hitch.

Now that the ship had slowed down to a few hundred meters per second and reached the inner range of the station's perimeter sphere, she'd turned back around to face the station again. One thousand kilometers away now. It sounded like a lot, but at this range she could pick out the thousands of lights pockmarking the surface of Haruta ahead, which dominated the display now. She even convinced herself that she could see some moving, maybe from mining robots on the surface, but she knew she'd need a lot of magnification for that still.

Vasili Station was positioned in a synchronous orbit above ore mining and refining stations on Haruta's surface, where a series of elevator systems allowed crews to transfer to and from the orbital station as needed. Last she heard there were about two hundred people working in the complexes now, but given all of the job postings she'd seen looking for metallurgists and technicians, maybe the station had had a large influx of new workers and needed a boost to their water stocks to keep up. Ice was rare this far into the system, so digging it up didn't supply much. They had to source it from the outer belts or moons, and that's where this contract work came in.

Her compad chirped a warning, followed by the speaker set into one of the consoles to her left. Four small objects were approaching from Haruta, around a kilometer away now and closing at twenty meters per second.

“I've got the tugs on lidar and radar,” she announced.

“Release the tank and we'll take it from here,” the same voice from before said. Ian Hallas, if the call information was correct. She didn't recognize him from the last time she'd been here, but that was a year ago or so. He was a definite improvement over the last STC operative she dealt with here. That poor guy sounded like he hadn't slept in ten days.

Rachel switched the display over to the docking clamps holding the ice tank beneath the ship and tapped the indicator to release them. Faint clacks and clanks echoed up the hallway behind her, and one by one the four indicators toggled.

“Tank is clear, I'll hold this trajectory until you give me an update.” She considered tapping the RCS thrusters to give the ship a little kick upward and make room for the tugs, but this process was automated and she didn't want to confuse the robotic ships. That sounded like a fine waiting to happen.

She never saw the tugs on their approach, but ten minutes later the running lights on the four tugs passed the right view screen, traveling in a square formation toward Haruta. A faint mist trailed the tank in their center, highlighted by the light reflecting from the planetoid.

“Uh, hey, I think there might be a leak. You might want to check on that.” That was just fantastic. Half of the load probably leaked out. She might lose money on this job.

“Probably frost sublimating on the surface, but I'll notify the crews once it's deorbited.” Ian mumbled something to someone on the other side of the call. “You're clear to approach for docking now. You can leave your autopilot on beacon six and it'll direct you around to docking clamp three. Maintain relative velocity by the beacon.”

“Acknowledged...”

Another hour passed as the range ticked down and the autopilot steered the ship to the docking clamps. Her whole body tensed as the massive clawed shape loomed overhead, washing out the colors on the display when they switched to infrared to retain visual acuity. The autopilot had never malfunctioned before, but there was a first for everything, and docking clamps were the worst. At least with a normal bay she could coast in on RCS and set down manually if she had to, but it was literally only possible to line the ship up with a docking claw situated above it with computer guidance.

Stars winked out in sequence as the dark slab of the station ahead moved down the screen. The ship drifted upward and she braced for the lock. Nothing. Nothing. Noth-

Rachel threw her hands up and caught the console halfway to the ground. A deep groan rocked through the ship that she felt through the floor. She almost left the floor as she tried to stand and the ship rebounded down from the clamp, sending her flailing backward against the wall. She shook the daze from her head and scanned the consoles. All three external displays looked fine... MFDs were still online.. no warning or error lights...

“E-everything alright on your end?” she stammered.

No answer.

“Ian? Mr. Hallas?”

“Yeah, board is green here. You came in a little hard but the lock looks solid. We'll pull you in and extend the umbilical in a moment.”

Rachel groaned and brushed the stray hairs out of her vision. “All right. I'll put everything on standby and wait for the welcome party.”

The ship lurched again, and ground closer to the station. Running lights flashed on in sequence, highlighting a tangled mass of pipes and cabling extending along the reach of the docking arm. The light spilled onto the nearest wall of the station, illuminating the fresh matte gray paint that had been applied over an enormous letter 'V'. Micrometeorite impacts marred its surface around the umbilical port, which flashed into view when the last of the lights switched on.

DCK PRT 0 AUX PWR READY

Rachel tapped the icon on the display to switch the ship over to station power, and folded her arms. Shutting down the engines completely would take a-

POWER BUS SWITCH COMPLETE

REACTION CHAMBER WARM STANDBY

Oh, huh, never mind.

HW WATCHD TRIPPED

RESETTING

“Oh, screw you.” She thumped the display and turned to leave.

“Uh, excuse me?” Ian's voice asked over the intercom.

Rachel cringed and grabbed her compad from its holster so she could stop the call. “Nothing! Nothing, just, uh, just talking to myself. See you aboard.” She ended the call and hurried back to the lounge to her cabin to grab the cargo manifest cards and whatever else she'd need while she was aboard.

[hr]

The air that flowed in from the airlock was stale, with an indistinct odor of plastic. The smell of an orbital station if there ever was one. Each had their own subtleties, like the third Triad platform that would forevermore have a hint of degreasing agents after an intense fire in the landing bay baked it into the superstructure twenty years ago, but they all smelled like space, for a lack of a better term.

On the other side of the two-stage door, the man that met her was tall and cervine of some persuasion, lacking antlers but with clear pedicles where they once were. He was dressed in a simple dark gray jumpsuit with the station's signature 'V' emblazoned in red on both shoulders, and carried a larger tablet in one hand.

He glanced up from the compad and gave her a small smile. “Captain Freeman, welcome aboard. I was just looking over the schedule and getting ready to pull a report from your computers. Do you have your manifest?” A deeper voice than Ian, and someone she didn't recognize from her last visit.

“Yes, sir.” She produced the two cards, which he swiped by a reader on his tablet.

While he looked over the information stored in them, Rachel looked down the cavernous umbilical tube behind him. It was different from the last time she came, which might have been a different clamp. Wide enough for four people to walk down it at a time, it was a sequence of telescoping sections, each comprised by what she guessed was transparent metallic glass. Yet, the large crack running through a pane two sections down made it look like ordinary glass... and she couldn't help but notice that Mr. Deer here was standing on a scuffed warning painted into the floor that read “STRESS POINT – DO NOT STOP.”

He nodded once to himself and handed the cards back. “So, new uniforms, huh?”

She looked down and confirmed she'd put on what she remembered. It was the same plain white shirt, dark green veylon-silk over shirt and pants and white sandals that she'd been wearing for as long as she could remember. “Huh?”

The deer nodded toward the window to her left. “There's another ship with Freeman Express over on clamp one. They're all still dressed in the usual uniform. Orange and white?”

“Oh!” She straightened her belt and waved a hand. “Different company. This is Freeman Shipping.” And it was for the best in many ways. She'd always hated the uniforms. They looked like the kind of thing you'd see some miserable jogger wearing as they plodded by, not to mention it would clash with her dark coat.

He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, huh, okay. That'll be confusing on the paperwork.” He leaned forward to look past her into the ship. “Nobody else coming aboard? I've got to run you all through customs before you can use any station facilities.”

“Nope. Ah, no, just me.”

His other eyebrow rose. “Wow, you're running this ship all by yourself? I hope you've got a good collection of movies to watch between stops.”

“Four hundred and four, last time I checked...”

He tapped a few more things on his compad and waved for her to follow. “Yeah, okay. Let's get you through customs, then we can sort out the cargo.”

Rachel took a careful step past the stress point and followed, making sure not to step on any other stress points or cracks. What was the saying children had about that? Something about breaking someone's back?

Mr. Deer, whose name she still didn't know, paid none of it any mind.

[hr]

Customs, as it turned out, was a single ewe crammed into a corner of an open office space just beyond the umbilical.

The station interior was pretty, as far as such things went. The walls were covered in painted drywall, or some convincing facsimile of it, instead of bare metal plating, and while carpeting had fallen out of favor on Anvari in the last few decades, Rachel found it a nice change of pace to walk on something that didn't clack or clang under her hooves.

And unlike the orbital stations around Anvari, this one was small enough that they'd chosen to pack customs, an administrator and maintenance liaison all in one cozy, easy to access room. No need to hoof it half a kilometer on bare metal flooring to go talk to the guy trying to figure out why your thrusters were jammed shut.

A conflicting odor of coffee and ocean scented air freshener met her as she approached the customs officer's desk. The short, brown coated sheep jotted something down on her compad, set the stylus down and pushed a small stack of boxes aside so she could get a good look at her new arrival. Ms. Callis, judging by the name plate attached to the half-height dividing wall between them.

“Yes ma'am? Captain Freeman of the Theseus?”

“That's right.”

Ms. Callis adjusted her glasses and held her compad up. “All right, one moment. Looks like you've already handed off your shipment, which will be inspected planet side. Did you have any other cargo that needs to come aboard?”

“Yeah, about a ton of parts from Smith & Doe Limited. Spares for rover drive trains, I think it was. Oh, and a few parcels.”

“Okay, those will have to be inspected before they come aboard, but if it's all packaged up I can just have someone run a portable detector aboard and check them. Did you have any other business aboard the station?”

Rachel offered her compad. “I'm supposed to pick up two containers of refined iron to ferry back to Anvari. Scheduled to leave in two days.”

Ms. Callis skimmed the screen and jotted down more notes. “Very good. If you can show me some ID, I'll get you cleared and you can talk to administration about picking up your shipment.”

Oh boy, here we go again. Another new customs officer, another explanation.

She handed over her Anvari ID and waited patiently for the questions to fly.

“Thank you. Everything looks good, so you can head on over to administration. I'll see about getting a scanning crew up here and I'll let you know once you can start unloading.”

“Uh, all right, thank you.” Maybe Ms. Callis wasn't the most observant woman in the galaxy, which didn't give her a lot of confidence in her ability to spot something dangerous coming aboard, but maybe she was just smart enough to figure out what it meant when a grown woman handed her an ID that said she was only fourteen years old.

The administration desk was staffed by two young, cream colored deer, one buck and one doe. The buck, who frustratingly didn't have a name tag or plate anywhere to be seen, was the first to look up as she approached. He set his tablet down and asked, “Yes ma'am?”

“I need to get checked in and get started on the paperwork for my shipments.”  She tapped her chest. “Rachel Freeman. Freeman Shipping, not Freeman Express.”

“Just a moment.” He tapped the doe on the shoulder and asked her, “Harriet, would you pull her flight record? And contact maintenance to get started on a docking inspection.” He glanced back to Rachel. “Unless you want to waive the inspection? It's a one hundred credit fee for the inspection, but if you waive it, you aren't eligible for discounted rates on routine maintenance, refueling and restocking labor.”

After that docking impact? There was a not insignificant chance that the inspection crews would find some serious damage on the docking clamp, but if she waived the inspection they'd likely find it right before she was scheduled to leave and delay her departure. “No, no, go ahead.”

“Very good. Now then, while we wait for that, records show that you were due five-thousand one hundred twenty Exchange credits for the ice delivery, six hundred sixteen credits for the part delivery, and seventy one credits for the parcels. Now, there's a three hundred credit docking fee, the hundred credit inspection fee, not counting fuel and atmosphere restocking and any supplies you purchase while you're aboard. That brings your payment to five-thousand four hundred seven credits. Pending verification of the cargo integrity, of course.”

Docking fees went up again. What a shock. Let's just hope I didn't lose half of the ice on the way here.

“That sounds good, thank you. Can you give me the details of the iron shipment I had for Anvari?”

He nodded. “You're scheduled to depart in sixty-one hours. Two KA class cargo containers of unrefined meteoric iron, massing one-hundred nighty-eight thousand tons. We're paying four-thousand eighty credits for the delivery. You need to get the paperwork back to us within thirty hours or we'll have to cancel the shipment.”

“Don't worry about that, I'll have it back to you right away if you can forward it to my account. Does the station have any drill lock adapters I can rent? My ship's clamps won't work on KA containers.” Money, money, money...

“We do,” he said with a knowing smile. No doubt every other captain coming through here had to rent them since literally nobody had drill locks stock on freighters this size. “It's one thousand credits apiece to rent them, with an eight hundred credit refund if you return them. Should I forward that to the dock crews?”

Rachel sighed and leaned on the half-height wall between them. “Don't have much choice.”

He tapped a few unseen things on his tablet, showed something to Harriet, and said, “Very good. I'll forward all of the paperwork to your account. I'm sure you're familiar with the process by now, so make sure to get it all back to us as soon as you can. Remember that you'll need to be at the dock twelve hours before departure. Oh, yes, and we'll send you the inspection report as soon as it's available.”

“All right, thank you.”

The deer waved to the metal detectors over on the far wall. “Welcome aboard, captain.”

Oh boy, here we go for real.

An overweight white, shaggy canine of some variety dressed in a white and black security uniform waited for her at the detectors. He eased up from his chair amid audible pops of his joints and waved her over. “Got any metal on you, miss?” He held up a box. “Pretty sure I saw a pad earlier.”

Oh, not on me. We might be here for a few minutes.

She dropped her compad into the box and stepped through the detector. Beep beep.

Hey, at least that was working properly.

The security officer looked at a readout on the wall and chuckled. “This thing must need calibrating. It thinks you're trying to smuggle in forty kilograms of eleven different kinds of metal. Do you have any cybernetics? Medical implants?”

Rachel took a deep breath. An artificial, emotional breath. “That sounds about right. No implants, but, well, my body is synthetic.”

He snapped his attention back, and his eyes wandered over her for an uncomfortable while. “C'mon, I might be an old dog but you're no robot. Don't go pulling my leg. I'd say you're hiding something under your shirt, but a lady your size can't just waltz around with that much extra weight without staggering a little.” He set her compad aside and grabbed a scanner wand. “Arms up, let's have a look.”

Rachel complied. “It's not a joke. I've checked into this station before, about two years ago. I figure there's a note somewhere in my record about it.”

The old dog waved the wand over her shoulder, and it wasted no time in complaining. Increasing confusion played over his features as he moved the wand around. “George!” he shouted back toward the lounge. “George, did you get this lady's flight record yet?”

A chair slid against carpet, and the deer appeared around the corner. He held up his tablet and tapped a few times. “Just did. What's the problem?”

“Any notifications from security? Any prior incidents? Arrests?”

“Hmm, yes, actually, now that you mention it. Hold on.” He glanced up toward Rachel and the security dog. “Sorry about this. I should have checked this before sending you on.” He skimmed the screen and his mouth drooped open. “Oh. Oh, uh, it says here that Captain Freeman here is to be referred to the central bureau for check in. The scanners here aren't designed to distinguish possible explosives or contraband carried by Tsoukalos brand synthetics...”

Security dog pulled up his pants and blew out a whistle. “The old lady's not going to be-lieve this.” He shook his head. “I don't believe it. George, you folks hold down the fort. I'll escort her up to the bureau. This way, miss.”

Rachel rolled her eyes and fell in line beside him.

Welcome to Vasili Station!