I startled awake at the sound of the cellblock door buzzing open.
‘Buzzing’, for the record, was a really bad word for the noise that thing made. It wasn’t a soothing insectoid drone. It was a heart-stopping, sleep-shattering blaaaaat you never got used to no matter what.
I sat up, rubbing the sleep out of my crumbly eyes. My still damp jumpsuit clung to me like a floppy second skin and all my bones felt sore right down to the marrow. The slick rubberized mattress underneath me had done very little to help warm me up and stuck to my exposed skin as I peeled myself up and off it.
Ugh, I felt awful—yet still better than I had when security had found me sneaking onto the station. I’d been so tired and weak that for the first time in my life I’d been glad to see those black uniforms converging on me. I hadn’t even minded being arrested because it meant being put in a cell with a bed. Sure, it was a narrow coffin of a cell with just enough room to stand up in and lay down, but I’d been asleep the second they shut the grate behind me.
Sitting up, I noted that my headache had faded somewhat. It was still there ghosting around the back of my skull instead of pounding on my temples. I decided to take it as a good sign. Rest had helped. Maybe food would too. Did they feed prisoners wherever it was I’d ended up?
The grate hummed alive and I looked over to realize someone was on the other side; a human male someone in a non-regulation vacsuit; peacock blue with white trim and an open collar. I couldn’t read his shoulder flashes from where I stood, but I could tell he had some. He was a spacer of some variety. We were the only people who’d wear those suits as-is without trying to alter the silhouette with a jacket or something.
He had the stretched-out look of someone who’d grown up in low gravity, medium brown skin, and black hair braided close to his skull in serpentine cornrows. His big happy smile didn’t look like it belonged on someone visiting a stranger in jail.
“Sinope Ananke?” he asked.
“Guilty,” I replied and tried to rub some life back into my stiff, cold hands. Security’s charity had not extended to anything crazy like a blanket. “You are…?”
“Captain Jack Grace.”
That wasn’t a name I knew, but the stars on his collar told me he either wasn’t lying or had put some thought into his act; they had the six points of a commercial starship captain. People who didn’t know better tended to use the five point stars reserved for colonial military command.
I wondered what he wanted with me. All my friends were either gone or not my friends anymore. Any enemies I had thought I was dead and with good cause. I’d thought I was dead there too for a bit.
“I hear you’re a driver.”
“Me and about twenty other people in the work queue here,” I agreed. He couldn’t possibly be looking to hire me. Station Security had put me into the indigents’ labor registry shortly after they booked me and that had only been (I checked my band) fourteen hours ago. Huh. I’d slept for a good long while and I’d probably still be sleeping if the door hadn’t woken me up.
Anyway, there were plenty of workers available who weren’t in jail.
“Technically,” Captain Grace agreed, still smiling.
I shot him a look. He rocked back on his heels looking like he had not a care in the world, but did not explain himself. “Beg pardon?” I prodded.
“There are 38 drivers in the labor queue here and most of them are hardcases, burnouts, and assholes who can’t get a direct hire. Thanks to the Union bylaws, I’d have to take whoever the FSA sent me despite their terrible work history or substance abuse issues …if I didn’t already have a driver.”
FSA. I seized on the acronym and thought hard. The only FSA I knew was Fjord Station Administration. Had Mimir gone all the way to Fjord Orbital? So far, I hadn’t been asked to provide any evidence that I knew where I was and I’d been listening hard for someone to drop me a clue before that happened.
I guess Fjord Orbital made as much sense as anywhere. Fjord was one of the few borderline-legit ports that Mimir visited and that would explain how I’d been left passed out in a cell for almost two duty shifts without being questioned or someone calling medical. Fjord Security didn’t bestir themselves for anything except terrorists and illegal immigrants—although I guess I counted as the latter. Actually, now I was surprised I hadn’t been left to pass out on the floor where they found me. I must have been too close to that airlock for their comfort. Who knew how secure their exterior locks were after decades of administrative apathy?
Trick question. I knew.
“If you have a driver then what do you want with me?” I started to rise and ended up aborting the idea about a quarter of the way through, landing on my butt again with an undignified ‘oof.’ My legs weren’t happy with me. I tried again and used the wall as a subtle prop. My body still complained, but I made it upright and walked (gingerly) over to the grate. The more I moved, the easier it got. Within a few moments I was mostly standing on my own.
Captain Grace was taller than me by a little bit. This close I could see his eyes were dark brown and framed by hair-thin laugh lines. When I was younger I’d thought that those lines meant someone was a good person. Later on I figured out it just meant they laughed a lot. There’s no easy way to tell what a person thinks is funny. My last captain looked like a kindly grandpa and had a Santa Clause laugh. I almost hadn’t escaped that ship alive.
“What indeed?” Captain Grace waved at someone just outside my range of vision. “This is her.”
An already annoyed security officer came over and held his band up to the lock plate on my grate. He looked me over and said, “You’re being released into your captain’s custody.” He turned to Captain Grace and his baseline surliness took on a surprising edge. “You might want to consider keeping your medpod locked while someone’s in it from now on. She nearly got out a lock.”
My heart shot into my throat as Captain Grace soothed the officer’s ruffled feathers. I could hardly track what they were saying. All I could focus on was the ocean of relief that broke over me. Security thought I’d been trying to get out.
They hadn’t realized that I’d just gotten in.
Grace went through the motions of having me released, which included a nasty fine to him for reckless endangerment of an incapacitated crew member. I doubted Fjord Station really cared about me. If they had then I’d have been taken to a clinic instead of a jail cell, but all stations lived and died by the income from their fees, fines, and tariffs. Very few of them had the real estate to support actual industry; Fjord, especially, as it didn’t have a friendly planet with a tourist economy to leech off. The economy here was even more of an elaborate ponzi scheme than most space stations.
Fjord was a rim station built to serve an asteroid mining operation that had just about played out. Their economy was supplemented by merchant traffic on the shipping lanes, but that couldn’t replace the miners. Fjord didn’t have the kind of facilities that would attract the big corporate liners and had missed their opportunity to invest in some. When the miners left, the station would likely go dark or start courting the business of ships like Mimir with even more intensity. That meant even less scrutiny over who came and went or disappeared on station.
While Grace was occupied by the Security clerk, I brought my personnel record up on my band. It could access the local station net now that I was out of the security block. I broadcasted it to my ocular so I could read and walk at the same time. In doing so, I discovered that I had apparently been Driver First on the Cassandra for the past three and a half years; coincidentally the length of time I’d served as Driver Third aboard Mimir.
It took a minute, but I figured out that someone had hacked my service jacket and exchanged all mention of Mimir with Cassandra. It wasn’t a fancy hack; just a basic search and replace. It had passed that security agent’s superficial inspection, but wouldn’t hold up to any real kind of audit. Grace’s people must not have had the time to do anything more in depth and I still had no idea why they’d bothered.
My license had been left untouched, thank goodness. They wouldn’t have needed to alter that. All my ratings were still for leviathan-class vessels and, according to public record, Cassandra was a Hermes-style fast packet with capacity for ten crew members, not hundreds like Mimir.
Technically, your maximum rating also qualified you to work on everything below it, but in practice the fast packets were so small there wasn’t much need for a driver on one. You could get by just fine with disposable bots and a human crew. Even cargo bots were programmed to take verbal direction.
You couldn’t operate any of the big freighters profitably without bot labor. Those were the kinds of ships I was used to and I’d never even seen a job posting in my field for anything below a frigate.
I kept my peace until we were well away from Security, but not so close to the docks that he might have friends waiting.
I was grateful for my rescue, but the first thing you learn when you live in the space between stars is that there’s no such thing as a hero—just people who want something.
The question was; who was Jack Grace and what did he want from me?