Terran Incognito, page 1
TERRAN INCOGNITO
MISSION 2
BLACK OCEAN: PASSAGE OF TIME
J.S. MORIN
Copyright © 2022 J.S. Morin
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J.S. Morin — First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-64355-376-4
TERRAN INCOGNITO
MISSION 2
Three days passed like three years. The events of Mars loomed over the rest of Jessie’s life without enough information to formulate a solid plan. She was trapped aboard a tiny ship with a pair of strangers and her little brother. Her bones ached from med-kit-grade treatment. She had gone from a promising young officer to a fugitive from justice.
No. Those three days passed like decades because of five years gone in the blink of an eye.
At the end of those interminable days, the personal freighter Kierkegaard arrived at space station Echo Niner. While the station appeared from an approach vector to be in good working order, the surrounding space was an artificial asteroid belt of improperly disposed-of garbage. A light pelting of the hull accompanied their passage through the debris, absorbed by the vessel’s frighteningly inadequate shields. The ricochets sent objects pinging off in every direction. With every other vessel doing the same, the zone around the station was a chaotic billiard table, with every ship a cue ball and no one taking turns.
The comm crackled. “Got ya in seven. Manual docking. You scratch it, you pay for it.”
Lorenzo snickered before keying a reply. “Copy that, Echo Niner. But I swear it was like that before I landed.”
From the co-pilot’s seat, Jessie fixed him with an earnest stare. “Want me to handle it?”
He grinned back. “Hey, I might not be some navy ace, but I can handle my own ship.”
She jerked her head toward the lounge. “Should I run this one by the boss?”
Figarus of Alspen technically owned the vessel. Jessie enjoyed reminding Lorenzo that he was just employee of the month, not the CEO of this little two-person venture.
“Hah! He wouldn’t dare replace me. You’re gone in ten minutes. I’ll be hauling his furry ass around the Milky Way until the bolts fall out of this thing. Unless we’re getting shot at, I think he’s plenty happy letting me fly.”
“Anyone shoots at this thing, it’ll explode. No amount of piloting skill can make up for the lack of lateral thrust and shields. Go ahead. Land us. If you get fined for landing violations, I won’t make fun of you… much.”
Echo Niner loomed ever larger. Jessie had been aboard larger deep-space structures, but this place was city-sized. It was a place where two dozen ships an hour arrived or departed. A place where thousands lived and thousands more visited. A place where goods changed ships while crisscrossing the galaxy.
A place where a pair of travelers could allow solar winds to blow away their footprints in the stars.
Jessie watched all the way to touchdown, savoring the pleasant little hum of the hull passing through the airlock force field. Lorenzo parked them beneath a spotlight blinking to direct them to an open space in Docking Hangar 7. There had to have been… well, the grid was four by six with a few empty spaces at the moment. Maybe twenty-ish vessels without being all obsessive and counting them.
The gentle thud prompted Lorenzo to shoot her a wry smile. “I pass?”
Jessie extracted herself from the worn-out cushions of the co-pilot’s seat. “I’m not your pilot’s ed instructor.” She tried to hide first her smile, then a wince as her ribs twinged. Three days hadn’t done as much for those cracked bones as she would have liked. The Kierkegaard’s med kit had provided basic care, speeding her natural recovery but not actually fixing anything.
“If you need a ride off Echo Niner, I’ll be here a few days. You know where to find us.”
Jessie kept her feet moving. “Thanks. But I think we need to shuffle the shells. If we get sighted at your next stop, someone’s going to sift that data.”
Those words hurt worse than her ribs. Little ships like this were cozy. Homey. Not to mention that she still hadn’t tested her theory that Lorenzo knew exactly what to do with a woman. But she was far from tip-top shape, and the idea of taking sex gingerly defeated the whole point.
Eric stood by the ramp, waiting for someone to open it for him. He wrung his hands for lack of anything useful to carry. They’d boarded the Kierkegaard as beggars and were leaving with a handful of marbits and an IOU that neither party expected to be repaid.
“Any last-minute advice?” Jessie asked as she thumped the release for the passenger ramp.
Lorenzo folded his arms, leaned against a wall, and donned a thoughtful frown. “Well, I wouldn’t tell anyone your real name.”
Jessie rolled her eyes. “Thanks.”
Figgy called out from the upper level. “Beware politics. Not war—though there’s that—but local tribal business. This station isn’t a single entity. We docked in the Blue Zone because it’s cheapest, and Power Core follows the rules they set. What they say is law. If you wander out of the Blue Zone, laws change. Render unto Caesar and all that. All the factions know that interstellar trade keeps them from starving, so just keep your heads down and go with the casual injustices you might find.”
“Works for me. Thanks,” Jessie replied more sincerely. She turned to her brother. “You fine ignoring injustices?”
Eric’s eyes weren’t focused. “No. But I’m used to letting them go. Merlin’s law for me, king’s laws for the rest. Except the petty kings are cruel.”
He headed down the ramp before Jessie, which was a welcome development. Maybe a little backbone would do him some good. Then again, this smelled more like sulking because they were visiting a shithole space station.
Lorenzo caught up with her before she reached the bottom. “You sure he’s OK out in the galaxy?”
She shrugged. “He’s just a wizard—sort of. He’s fine.”
“He spent half the trip singing along with Frumple Bear holos. He sleeps with his eyes open. He puts coffee in his cereal.”
“I used to use beer,” Jessie replied dryly. “Don’t worry. He’s an ampersand-shaped peg in a galaxy full of square and round holes, but we grew up spacers. He finds a way to fit where he needs to.”
As she took her leave, Jessie hoped she hadn’t been lying.
Customs was a concept that dated back to the era of nation-states on Earth. Tariffs, duties, stamps, papers, declarations, searches, and seizures. The tech had evolved. Earth had turned into a single commercial zone. But the core concepts had been copied and re-copied over the centuries, handed down like an heirloom from one generation of stick-up-the-ass bureaucrats to the next.
Jessie stood in queue to be interviewed by a guy in black body armor with a blue bandanna tied around his scalp. While the guy wasn’t visibly armed, there was a booth built into the hangar exit where a partner guarded by glassteel windows was armed to the teeth. A murder hole would allow him to mow down anyone trying to force their way past the pro forma shakedown.
The customs guy was chewing gum noisily. He looked Jessie and Eric up and down. “Anything to declare?”
“You have nice gravity,” Eric replied with offhanded earnestness, not looking at the guard.
“Smartass. You selling? Buying? What’s your business on Echo Niner?”
“Looking for work,” Jessie replied semi-honestly. It wasn’t their primary goal, but unless they planned to hijack, stow away, or extort their way across the galaxy, they were going to need to earn some cash.
“No outside weapons. You can check your personal firearms with us or drop ’em back on your ship.” He waved a scanner over them. Jessie shot Eric a look that warned him the scanner better do its job on him.
“Not our ship. Just passengers. Traveling light.”
The guard reevaluated them. “Echo Niner can get a little rough. Blue Zone’s secure. If you plan to venture outta Blue, I’d buy some heat if I was you.”
Oh, how subtle. “So, I can’t bring a blaster in, but your guy’ll sell me one. They pay you extra for that pitch?”
The guard smirked. “Yeah. Maybe you’re not complete bait.”
“Oh. I’m bait,” Jessie replied with a hungry look in her eye. This customs guy might be a two-meter-tall brick with muscle from toes to skull, but sometimes that was all it took.
As the Ramseys got waved through with a lewd parting wink, Jessie thought to herself, I gotta break me off a piece of someone before I do something dumb. There were pills that could even out brain chemicals, improve concentration,
Before they left, Jessie promised herself to find a proper med facility.
The corridor beyond the hangar was plastered with vid boards playing looping adverts and others displaying directories and maps. Jessie took a casual glance over them but headed toward the interior of the station along with the general flow of foot traffic.
“So, this is Echo Niner…” Eric mused.
“You make it sound like this is a tourist trap.”
“Dad came here once.”
Jessie hadn’t heard anything to corroborate that. “Dad’s mysterious vagabond days, when he couldn’t afford guitar strings.”
“He and Uncle Roddy were here for a job.”
Jessie snorted. “Some third-rate nightclub probably threw them a pity gig when their real act canceled. Not that that helps us at all. We should find some new clothes. Look less like us-in-borrowed-clothes.”
“Hats,” Eric declared. “Hats with brims are great disguises.”
“Much as I hate to admit it, I think you’re right.”
Eric drew up, forcing Jessie to stop in the middle of traffic not to lose him. “Why do you hate admitting that? I have good ideas. Just yesterday, I suggested we switch from bridge to rummy.”
“We could have cleaned them out at poker. At least I wouldn’t owe Lorenzo, even if we didn’t rob them blind. But it’s you. I just hate hats. A helmet is one thing. It’s got a purpose. Hats just make my head look stupid. I’m due for a buzz anyway; it’s getting shaggy.”
“Your hair’s shorter than mine.”
“Yours isn’t a liability in close quarters. And a hat makes a weird imprint when you take it off, telling everyone you just wore a hat. So you’re stuck wearing it until you can find a shower or a styling rod. They’re like scalp parasites.”
“Wow. That’s some hella hat hate, honey.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Sorry.”
Jessie blew a sigh and finally paid attention to one of the station maps. Pedestrians flowed around her as she got her bearings.
As the customs hunk had suggested, the station was divided into four rough quadrants, each controlling a share of the docks around the circumference. They were color coded. As indicated, they were in the Blue Zone, controlled by the Power Core faction. Then there was the Yellow Zone, run by the Fuel Depot, which also seemed to include the main shopping concourses. Traffic Control and station operations ran the Green Zone. Then, of most interest to Jessie, there was the Red Zone, run by the Medical Bay.
Eric studied alongside her. “If they split off Operations as purple and the food court as orange and swapped the colors of fuel people and the traffic controllers, the station would be a proper color wheel.” He pointed as he went, using his finger like the laser dot of a university lecturer.
“Yeah. I’m sure we can get all these mini-warlords together and redraw the station map to the back of a Wax-i-Rod box. C’mon, Solomon, let’s forget the map and find some hats.”
Jessie tried not to think where someone got clothes that resold for twenty marbits. She suspected someone might have died in them. A gray synth-wool shirt obscured her figure, and baggy sleeves came halfway down her forearms. She’d rather people wonder “hey, what’s that dame look like under those spacer rags” than “wow, don’t see a lot of chicks with biceps cut like marble.” Her vest had pockets, but none that would fit more than a few coins or a mini datapad.
But her disguise was about the hat.
For reasons unknown to God or time travelers, the bonnet had come back into—and quickly retreated from—popular fashion in the past five years. One of the peddlers in the Core Sector was unloading them for the cost of cloth. Jessie found a floppy gray one that matched her shirt and tied it under her chin like some kind of Northern American prairie colonist. It hung lower than the bangs she’d grown as a teenager and shaded her eyes from the glare of overhead station lighting.
Beside her, and supposed to be posing as her husband, Eric wore a frilly white dress shirt that made him look like an extra in a seafaring pirate flatvid. While technically fulfilling the stated requirements, his bowler hat left much to be desired in terms of anonymity.
“A bowler hat? Really? You look just like you—a pretentious, Euro-Islander Earthling you.”
Eric ran pinched fingers along the upturned edge of the hat. “You said brim. I found one I liked with a brim.”
“You weren’t supposed to like it; you’re supposed to be hiding in it.”
“I look snazzy. And you didn’t follow your own rules.”
“I found something better. It’s called improvising.”
An amused snort from her brother gave Jessie an escape hatch to safely evacuate the conversation. He’d never been the easiest guy to win an argument with, something he’d picked up from Enzio. You could prove that guy wrong all day and never get the satisfaction of an admission of defeat.
“Just stick close. This place is crowded enough that we could get separated. I don’t want to have to go looking for you before I even get my bearings.”
“Should we pick a place to meet if we get lost?”
“Hell,” Jessie replied without missing a beat. “If we get separated, we’re probably screwed. And dead. And I’ll catch up with you in hell.”
“Where in hell?” Eric replied, but his little smirk at least hinted he wasn’t serious.
“We’re going to find someone who looks like they’re hiring and not picky about background checks—doubt that’ll be a big deal around here. Maybe freight handling. Maybe food service.”
“I can tutor.”
As they wended their way along a travel corridor leading deeper into the station’s interior, she shot him a scowl. “Tutor what?”
“Languages, literature, pottery, rhetoric—”
“Stopping you right there. You put out that resume, you might as well wear a pointy hat with stars.”
Eric hooked a thumb back the way they came. “You mean it? I didn’t see one, but you said not to be picky, so I—”
“No.”
Eric sighed. “Well, let’s find someplace to eat. Lorenzo’s Oatie-Ohs were stale.”
This region of the station didn’t promise much. While there was a proper concourse filled with legitimate shops on the far side of the station, the Blue Zone was furnished with makeshift storefronts wedged into maintenance storage rooms and restaurants tapping straight off main supply pipes a meter in diameter for cooking water. If there was available space, someone filled it; if there wasn’t, someone found a way to cram their business in anyway.
That said, the human drive for commerce acknowledged the need for advertisement. It was practically an instinct. Colorful spray-tint signs, flatvid boards welded to bulkheads, and strung cloth banners proclaimed the names of these deep-warren establishments.
As she led the way, Jessie scanned for anyplace that looked both cheap and non-toxic for a meal.
Bernie’s Burgers—a street-corner fry cart operated just outside a mechanics’ washroom, wafting an overpowering stench of burnt grease.
Kahb-a-Khuu—someone had set up a laaku food converter, hooked straight into 208-liter drums of the raw slurry and additives. Laaku food was fine when you forgot where it came from, but being that forward with the process turned Jessie’s stomach.
Niner Cone—it took amazing entrepreneurial chutzpah to make snow cones out of the station’s tap water and resell it for eight terras a cone. Jessie hadn’t looked up the marbit conversion on Echo Niner, and this place wasn’t prodding her to find out.
“How about this place?” she asked, turning to suggest Chow Hustle, an outfit that was blatantly reselling name-brand fast food lugged over from the Yellow Zone. It was probably cold or kept warm by means that wouldn’t do the flavor any favors, but at least it was a semi-known quantity. “Eric? ERIC?”
A hand brushed Eric’s shoulder and ran all the way down his sleeve. He’d been bumped into a time or ten thousand in crowds, and this didn’t feel accidental. When he turned to investigate, he discovered a middle-aged woman hiding under several layers of cosmetics and stuffed into a set of clothes two sizes too small.
