AMP Messenger

  ~~~~~

  “Frig! Get that Bilson wrench over here!” He was a good engineer, but sometimes easily distracted, deep in his own thoughts.

  Frig replied, “I am bringing it now, sir. Just a moment...”

  It was one of those irritating qualities that you had to put up with to have good, loyal help. Frigbimifier—I called him Frig—had a low forehead with bulgy eyes, and a wide mouth. He was of a species we called the Gambit, which came from a swampy world we’d come across in our travels.

  I could not understand why it was that he had left his people. I knew the allure of space travel to a planet-bound species, but I had trouble with the thought of leaving everyone and everything you knew to explore with those who were not of your kind, especially given the fact that those other beings were constantly at war. The six other Gambits that had chosen to follow were aboard the Grid. Frig rarely socialized with them. He seemed to prefer the company of Humans.

  “Here, sir, your Bilson wrench. I took the initiative to clean and oil it. You really should take better care of our tools, sir.”

  I looked up with a sarcastic scowl and then got down to the business at hand. The ionic power feed to the nav system was leaking. The ion leak, while of no danger to us or the ship itself, came with the problem of an automated system shutdown. That meant we weren't going anywhere at present. And if we weren't moving, we were prime targets for the first pirate vessel that happened our way.

  Pirates had been a plague on our existence for as long as we had been in this sector. I had lost two friends in the last four years alone; both Messengers like me, both attacked when they had ship trouble at just the wrong time. And the pirate activity in the Mensa sector, our current location, was particularly bad. We had been in the sector for seven years. In my opinion, it had been seven years too many.

  We were Humans, drifters really. Our home was a space station called Grid-4. As a species, we were in search of a planet we could call home, a planet where our children could play on firm ground, a place where we could build long-lasting defenses against the evil species that inhabited the galaxy.

  Our history logs went back just over a thousand years. There was no record of our existence before that time. Rumors of our humble beginnings circulated constantly. Many were wild tales.

  Some said we came from a green planet, covered in buildings with spectacular white spires that reached to the heavens. Others believed our ocean world had been destroyed when our sun transitioned into its red giant phase. And still others believed we had taken to the stars to escape the wrath of an invading alien species, much like the one that pursued us. Often, discussions on the subject led to heated exchanges. I made an effort not to get involved in the politics of it all.

  Frig had been my engineer for nearly a decade. I had struggled through seven others in a year before finding him. His ability to keep the Swift together and flying was nothing short of a miracle. It was a bucket of rusty bolts that was constantly on the verge of breaking down. Only Frig's continuing obsession with keeping anything mechanical running had kept us from being killed or sold into slavery at some back-world pirate auction. Neither outcome held much appeal.

  The Swift was an old Blevin-class Defender. It had been out of service for over a century before I acquired it from a junk dealer on the Grid. It took three years of scrounging parts from various sources, some not so reputable, before I had a ship worthy of taking into the Messenger Service.

  The Messenger Service was a collective of private ships ferrying everything from sensitive diplomatic information to parts needed for the Grid's maintenance. Our destinations ranged from planets, to colonies, to the occasional hush-hush clandestine meeting with an unknown ship. I tried not to ask too many questions, as being nosy would only keep me from collecting a paycheck. The pay wasn't great, but being my own boss had its appeal.

  Over the decade that followed, Frig and I had made many improvements to the Swift. Those improvements had saved our hides on more than one occasion. Even though her antiquated systems often plagued her with problems, she was a ship that I was proud of.

  One such improvement was made to our ion drive. It had been ramped up with quartz anodes, giving us a 15-percent boost in potential speed. And speed, in the dead of space, was the best defense. The drawback to the quartz anode was that running in boost-mode occasionally caused a crystal to fracture, giving you only a few minutes to change it out before any speed advantage was lost. Distance was king if and when a breakdown occurred.

  We had scrambled through one such fracturing instance with pirates in chase. After a narrow escape, I swore never to use boost again unless death was imminent. However, the quartz anodes remained in place and always at the ready.

  A second improvement, adapted from technology on Frig's home world, was a signal inhibitor that would make us undetectable by all standard sensors, except for optical. We were a small ship, which meant our visual signature was difficult to detect against the vast blackness of space. Unless you were close enough that you could physically see us, you had no indication that we were there. Ion leaks, however, were a signature that could not be masked.

  The Swift had very little weaponry. We added a peashooter of a coil gun some years before, with the excuse of needing to blast menacing space debris in our path—an object the size of a marble could bring us a quick death. We traveled at 132 times the speed of light. A strike from a small stone could easily disable or destroy us, delivering the same force as a heavy ion cannon. The thin layer of Tantric armor on the ship's nose and forward surfaces did well to deaden the impact of a strike, but its effectiveness would only go so far.

  During my years in the Service, I had encountered two such strikes that rocked the ship to its core. Even though the armor had done its job of keeping the ship together, my confidence in our nav avoidance system had been shaken. It took six months of pay to acquire a military-grade sensor and nav computer link that would keep us safe at that speed. It came from a nefarious source, and Frig had done an excellent job of disguising its appearance, should we ever happen to be searched by the SCore.

  The SCore was the Grid Security Corps. They kept their nose in everything related to anything, particularly when it came to the business of Messengers. Our interactions with other species were always regarded with suspicion, and rightly so. Twice there had been incursions on the Grid that had only been enabled by corrupt Messengers giving up information on our defenses. Both captains, after lengthy trials, had been summarily executed by ejection into space. It was a cruel death, and with helmet, it was less than instantaneous.

  Our historical logs had references to four other Grid stations. Three were known to have been destroyed during pirate or hostile-species encounters, while the remaining Grid, Grid-1, had gone missing. Grid-4 had been our home, Man's home, for a thousand years. Life on the Grid was a constant struggle to survive. And on this day, our struggle continued.

  The ion leak was coming from a coupler feed that was just at the far end of my reach. Frig had removed the deck plate closest to the problem coupler and I had stuffed my wide-shoulders through the deck opening, dangling upside down, with my right arm stretched out to its fullest. Every turn of the wrench was a painful exercise in space mechanics. It seemed the Blevin-class designers had made every effort to place the most-likely-to-fail parts just out of reach. On more than one occasion, I had cursed at Frig for having such short, stubby arms.

  As I extended my arm in an attempt to make another turn with the wrench, Frig began to poke at my ribs with one of his bony fingers. “Sir, we have a problem. Sir...”

  I reacted in a bad way, agitated to the point where I attempted to swat back at him. The result was a loss of my balance, causing me to drop further into the deck hole, striking my forehead on a cross member as I shifted. In anger I writhed and pushed until I emerged from the hole with a mean grin on my face.

  “You better have a good reason for irritating me this morning. That leak already has me worked up.
I am real tempted to just—”

  Frig cut in, “Sir, we have an incoming ship alert. I thought you would want to know.”

  I picked myself up from the deck and sprinted the eighteen steps to my console. A lone craft, almost double our size, was almost upon us. I tried in vain to restart the nav computer. Each attempt was a failure. The ion leak continued to cause an immediate safety shutdown. With no propulsion, we were at the mercy of whoever was approaching.

  I raced back to the cargo hold and pulled two blasters from my locker. I tossed one to Frig as I again made my way back to the console.

  I said as I sat, “Hope you remember how to use that. Whoever this is, they are coming in hot.”

  Frig tucked the blaster into his belt as he stepped up behind me to look at the proximity screen. “I remain proficient with a blaster, sir. Just as I was the last time I outscored you at the target range.”

  Frig had a way of phrasing his responses that was extremely polite, but at the same time left you feeling like he had just smacked you in the face. I often found his delivery to be irritating, and at the same time I likened it to the sarcastic humor that I loved.

  “5509... 5509. This is Captain Michael Felix of the Deveroe. Are you in need of assistance?”

  I rolled my eyes. Of all the ships to come to my aid, it had to be Felix. He was my nemesis in the Messenger Service, always plying for the good contracts and usually talking his way into them. He was the one person standing in the way of me making a good living as a Messenger. And he was always smug about it.

  “Hello, Felix. What brings you to grid 144? I thought you would be out making baby-bottle runs to Amerex-6. Grid 144 is a bit of a tough place for a polished boot like you.”

  Felix was a stickler when it came to going by the book. Grid-4 protocol stated that Messenger Service pilots were obligated to assist stranded ships so long as doing so did not compromise their own safety.

  I was sure Felix found it irritating to offer a hand to the one Messenger who had kept him from unionizing the MS. He had plans to get access to all the information that came to and from the Grid, and to control that information in a way that would only work to increase his power and prosperity. If anyone on the station was bent on a conquest of their own, it was Felix. He lived to control.

  Felix replied, “Mr. Grange, are you in need of assistance, or am I wasting my time here? By the way, I logged four Rythium Snatchers in grid 143. As much as I don't care for you, Mr. Grange, I would not want the Messenger Service to get a black eye from a Rythium encounter. It would be an embarrassment to us all.”

  Rythium pirates were particularly nasty if you happened to be unlucky enough to fall into their hands. Their ships were large. A ship the size of the Swift would easily fit into their cargo hold. They were also heavily armed, but slow. And the Rythium themselves were not very bright. They did, however, take immense pleasure in torturing other species. I had seen their cruelty firsthand, meted out on one of my two friends.

  Mason Brown had been captured by the Rythium four years before. After numerous beatings and other abuses, the Rythium captain sold him to the owner of their ship's lounge, who then chained him up to a wall. Patrons were charged a fee to fire tiny needles at him from across the room. The needles had just enough velocity to fully penetrate the skin, and contained a coagulant which kept him from bleeding out. Although it might take weeks, death was certain..

  The Rythium pirates were so impressed with Mason’s ability to survive nine weeks of needles, that they stuck him in a lifepod with a beacon and fired it into a sector where they knew he would be found. After doctors on the Grid removed twenty-six pounds of needles from his body, an infection, planted by the Rythium, took its toll.

  I said, “Thanks for the heads-up, Felix. We just stopped to take a tea break. We will be on our way soon enough.”

  I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of knowing we were broken down. It was sure to be thrown in my face back on the Grid when negotiating for a contract against him.

  Felix replied, “5509, this is Captain Michael Felix. Since you are not in need of our assistance today, we will be on our way. And good luck with that ion signature you are emitting. I hope it attracts the attention you deserve.”

  With that, the Deveroe turned and sped off toward its destination.

  When I turned toward Frig, he was frowning. “It must be devastating for you to have that man come to your rescue, sir. He is the one man who seems to continually best you... sir.”

  I gritted my teeth as I restrained my fist from landing on Frig’s wide, flat nose. I then walked back to the opening in the deck plating to continue with the task at hand. Half an hour later, the ion meter read “Clean.”

  The nav computer restarted without incident. We were soon on our way to the second moon of Malcon. We had a contract to pick up a shipment of refined Tantric ore for delivery to the Grid. The ore was rare and expensive, and often difficult to come by. It was a required ingredient of most starship shielding. I was a bit suspicious when given the contract without the promise of an armed escort. The pay was lucrative, and, as always, I wasn't the one to speak up if it meant losing out on the equivalent of four months’ pay for a three-week run.

  When we arrived, I was swept through the colony's customs area without so much as a look at my credentials. The buyer of the Tantric ore was supposedly a private shipbuilder who had close ties to the Grid military. From the looks of it, he also had connections throughout the sector that would do his bidding. As the ore was being loaded, I made my way to the local dive while Frig remained with the ship.

  The Rubious Lounge was about as backwater as they came. The clientele were mostly deep-hole miners who had come from Malcon. They were anything but friendly. The red velvet over green satin wall panels clashed with the bright yellow vinyl that covered the stools at the bar and the booths lining the red dumachi gaming tables. The miners didn't much care, as most were colorblind from years of working the dimly lit ore shafts. I could only guess the bartender was so used to the explosion of colors that it no longer registered as offensive to his eyes. A crusty miner in the first booth glared at the tall Human who had entered his bar. I did my best to limit my curious gaze.

  A quick DNA scan told the barkeep what liquors were compatible with a Human, and I soon had a red Brivad ale in my hand. The taste and consistency were more like cough syrup than ale, but the effects were the same. If not for my large stature, and the years of practice consuming almost every known concoction of alcohol, I would have been stumbling out of the joint after my second serving.

  As I took a sip from my third glass, a Durian approached me at the bar. The Durians were a very secretive species. They wore dark gray cloaks, and it was rare to ever get a solid glimpse of their scaly blue faces. They moved quietly, and never stayed in the same place for any length of time. The timing of his approach and the nature of my cargo had me on edge.

  The Durian said. “I understand you are a Messenger. If so, I may have something of interest to you... for a tidy fee, of course.”

  Of course there would be a fee attached any time a Durian was involved. Normally I was not a sucker for mysteries, but something told me I wanted to hear what it was the Durian had to offer.

  We moved from the bar to a dark booth in the corner. I had to chuckle at the stereotype of a clandestine meeting in a dive bar. The encounter had every aspect of cliché written all over it. As I sipped on my ale, he rolled out a document with letters that translated to “EID” printed in bold on the front page.

  He quickly flipped through the document to give me just a taste of its contents. “EID” stood for “Enhanced Ion Derangement.” He claimed the document was for a ship's drive alteration, and that whatever it was that I flew as a Messenger could be greatly enhanced with the addition of a single EID to the ion recombination chamber. His claims of nearly doubling my current speed had my full attention. The Durians operated outside of the law—it was something that everyone knew—but the
y had the reputation of delivering on whatever was promised. That reputation was the reason their products and services always came at a premium.

  As I began to haggle with the Durian, he became skittish when two Malcon guards passed the entrance to the lounge. I took it as a sign that he was wanted by someone and was eager to leave the lounge as soon as was physically possible. I leaned in close, and despite his bad breath and decrepit smell, I made a lowball offer of 2,500 credits, the equivalent of about two weeks’ pay. It was an attempt to get a base price out of him, so that real negotiations could begin.

  To my surprise, he pushed the document toward me and then held out a credit store in the palm of his hand. I punched the numbers into my own and then watched as the credits vanished from my account. The Durian quickly stood from the booth and moved over to the bar. Seconds later, he disappeared through a back door as the barkeep pressed a button behind the counter. I stuffed the document into the zippered pouch on my leg, downed the rest of my ale, and then headed back to the Swift.

  Frig had handled the placement and tie-down of the ore load in our hold and was prepping the Swift for departure. I asked for the copy of the manifest that came with every haul.

  Frig replied, “Sir, I think we need to be going. There is no manifest, and the port captain stopped the customs agent as he was coming over to check the cargo. He seemed irritated at first, but after a word from the captain, he walked away smiling. I think it is in our best interest to leave quickly... Sir.”

  I generally did not second-guess Frig's judgment. I rechecked the tie-downs and we soon departed from the colony spaceport, leaving just before the moon's dawn. As always, just after liftoff, I dropped a snapshot transmitter onto the moon's surface. It would relay a warning to us if any other ship left the port heading in our direction. It was a trick I had picked up from a fellow Messenger who would often take on cargo of a black-market nature.

  Privateers found you to be an easy mark if they could snatch a cargo that would never be reported as stolen. I was transporting a load that was of more value than anything I had ever hauled. The contract paperwork looked legit; the job, however, appeared to be anything but that. And for our return trip, we had been directed to travel through grid 279, an area well off any normally-traveled path and at the edge of uncharted space.

  As we cruised toward the outlying grid, Frig called out an alert from his console. “Sir, our snapshot shows that just over an hour after our departure from the colony, a second ship lifted off, heading in our direction. It has been shadowing our heading for the last six hours. Should I lay out decoys, sir?”

  I turned back to my console and brought up the transmission data from the snapshot beacon we had dropped. The ship was a new Delta Runner class that could travel at nearly thirty light-years over our top speed. It had superior shielding and an armament of four particle streamers that could rip through the archaic shielding of a Blevin Defender. Even with the enhanced coatings I had purchased and applied to the Swift, she would only be able to withstand a handful of hits from the Delta's weapons. If the pilot of the Delta Runner wanted our cargo, our ship would be no match in a fight.

  I replied, “Send out a passive probe. Let's see if our signal jammer is having issues or not. We've made several course adjustments since we left the port. If we're being followed, they're following a signal.”

  Frig stepped back to the hold and placed a passive matrix probe into the side launch port. The matrix had top-of-the-line sensors that would detect a signal if our ship was indeed leaking one. A buzz, and flash of light from my console, told me when it was away.

  Returning to his station, Frig announced, “I will scan all the standard frequencies for anomalies, sir. If a signal is coming from our ship... we will know.”

  I nodded my head in agreement even though Frig was not turned my way. If there was a signal coming from our outer hull, or from the 1,800-pound cargo container in our hold, Frig would find it.

  As we continued on our preplanned path out to grid 279, I turned my attention to the document the Durian had sold me. It looked legit. “Frig, you ever heard of an EID enhancement to the recombination chamber?”

  I turned to look for an answer, to which he cocked his wide head slightly to one side. “Why do you ask, sir?”

  “I asked you if you knew anything about an EID. Do you know anything or not?”

  Frig hesitated for several seconds. “The rumor of an EID has been making the rounds for several years now. It is said to have been stolen from an unknown traveler after he fell in with a Harken trader. The trader supposedly killed the traveler when he was told of the advanced technology aboard his ship. But no evidence of any such technology has ever become public, and no word of its existence has surfaced since the initial rumor. Again, I ask the nature of your inquiry.”

  I told Frig that I had heard the same rumor, and to continue with his signal scan. I then got back to the study of the document and to thinking about what it would mean to a Messenger to break 250 times the speed of light. The highest known speed of a craft, 207 times light speed, had come more than seventy years before, when a Mellian cruiser had used its ultrahigh temperature plating to swing in close to a brown dwarf star during a slingshot maneuver.

  I was sure the Grid military had ships that would approach that speed, but a ship capable of more than 250 times the speed of light would make its owner a very wealthy man. Contracts for almost every sensitive or premium cargo would be easily won, and with the speed in question, double the runs could be made. My mind ran wild as I thought of the possibilities.

  Those thoughts were soon interrupted as Frig completed the initial phase of his task. “Sir, I have detected two instances of an encrypted microburst transmission originating from our location. It is at an extremely low power level, and the two broadcasts have come at an interval of several hours apart. If not for my photographic memory, I would not have detected the emergent pattern at that large an interval. I feel I can safely state that we are indeed being tracked.”

  It was the news that I was hoping to not hear, but I was glad that I had. We'd had other contracts, in the past, where the clients were of an unlawful ilk, but I always had an idea of who might want to have a crack at jacking my cargo. The stuff we were currently carrying... was something wanted by everyone.

  “See if you can focus the sensors back to where we just came from. Maybe we can get lucky and get a lock on our tail. Might be useful to know when they try to make their move. When you finish with that... well... I may have another task for you to tackle.”

  We continued on our course for three full days before reaching the edge of grid 279. It was a dead space with only a few star systems within it. Each system had been explored by probes without any returning with signs of life. The identified planets all had low-grade radioactive ore deposits, making them unfit for either habitation or mining.

  I could only reason that grid 279 had been selected for our path home because there would be little chance of a pirate encounter. No one ventured there, as there was nothing to be had. That fact had made me all the more suspicious of our tail.

  Grid 279 was on the edge of the arm of our spiral galaxy. The space beyond held an ionic wall of highly charged particles, then nothing but the black emptiness of space for millions of light-years. It was a scary place for a ship's captain. If a breakdown was to occur, there would be little chance of rescue. Communications would not penetrate the ion wall. Beyond the wall was truly a place of nightmares, a place of being alone. Our planned path was taking us right to the edge.