Chapter II
TRANS1T
Nia opened the tall metal cabinet doors in her bunkroom and pulled down a small box with loose wires hanging out over the top paper flaps. Dunny tossed the ‘whats-it’, as she called it, into the box and raised her arms in triumph. One interpolator, from a never-ending list of odds and ends.
“One down,” Nia sighed, and she slid the box back up on its metallic green shelf. The cabinet creaked, and she pinched the handle with her pair of thumbs in her right hand. The handle rotated back into place, the locking mechanism scraping, metal-on-metal, with a loud thud as it finished.
“Don’t sound so excited,” Dunny smirked, her worn three-pointed hat resting in her small hands. She moved it around between her palms, then rested the bottom of the hat on Nia’s bare cot. “I’m sure this haul’ll give us more tech than your little heart can handle.”
“Heard that one before,” Nia grumbled, and she flipped her boots off her feet and onto her footlocker resting at the foot of her cot. She let out a low sigh as her body slumped down on the cot next to Dunny. “Bolt will find a way to make it a smashing success, while the scraps barely keep this boat going.”
“Hey, you just keep her in the air, and I’ll make sure not to steer us into a nebula.”
Dunny slapped Nia on the back with a hearty laugh, one far heavier and lower compared to her diminutive frame. Nia smirked, her version of a laugh. Dunny’s hand grasped Nia’s right shoulder and gently rocked the Declanian forward and back. Dunny’s feet hung over the cot, not touching the floor, her booted feet rowing back and forth. Nia liked to joke that Dunny had an excess of energy, and she wished she could siphon a bit for the engine core.
“How’s the REACH doing?” Nia asked to change the subject and their awkward physical contact.
Dunny pulled out her dented tablet, smacked it a second, then waited for the OS to come back out of hibernation. Lines of code scrolled down the screen, much too fast for Nia to catch, and then a glitching logo - half a ship connected to a three-dimensional ring with a field of scattered pixel-point squares on the right side with the wordmark LONGSHOT COLLECTIVE resting above - stuttering in waving pixelated lines as the screen slowly refreshed. The logo screen froze halfway into a refresh, so Dunny smacked it again.
“Piece of [redacted],” Dunny said, then grumbled at their POPWORKS 2.25 Translator’s censorship.
Every translator from POPWORKS {“THE FAMILY COMPANY - ™️”} was equipped with a real-time vulgarity sensor that had a library of dozens of languages and their profanity indices. The newer models allowed groups to override the rules, but the older models - the ones companies threw out in the thousands - were locked down. Nia tried to break the back-end security before, but the tools were hard to come by, and Bolt didn’t want to brick the headsets with some ad hoc workaround.
Nia smiled as Dunny flicked the little mouthpiece wrapped around her ear. The last smack had done the trick. The logo screen rolled away, and a dashboard of ship controls populated in wiggling digital lines. Dunny tapped on the sensor array and dragged her index finger down the digital page.
“Pretty clear skies,” Dunny joked.
The subspace lane was pretty desolate out beyond LongShot space. Scattered asteroid fields, some loose space trash, and remnants of old LongShot Collective experiments were slowly fading into nonexistence. Then there would be the massive chasm between the end of LongShot and the beginning of Nothonian realms, the Enclave as they liked to call themselves more recently. Tribes of fishfolk. The Nothonian did their thing… and LongShot did theirs. Live and let live, Greck said. Kill and let kill, Dunny would joke. They both would laugh.
“The cargo hold sensors are still [redacted],” Nia tripped her PW2.25 censor, hitching her voice. Her earpiece reminded her:
Your use of profanity has been logged by the { PW 2.25 } system and will be sorted at { ERROR: CONNECTION NOT FOUND } for wage garnishment protocol. Thank you for your efforts to make our workplace safer.
“Yeah…,” Dunny’s voice trailed off. “I’m not sure how you and Greck fix that one. The door isn’t to spec with the hull.”
The original cargo door had been blown off its hinges by a raiding party when LongShot pirates originally captured the DEEP REACH, though that wasn’t its original name, and the logs had been scrubbed ages ago. The cargo hold was massive, and the door was completely unsalvageable. In part, all the damage to the DEEP REACH in the raid was a reason why Bolt was able to secure its bond. Dunny and Bolt had welded a new-ish cargo door and its locking mechanism in place ages ago when they bonded it and put it together at Junction. Ever since then, the crew checked the atmosphere sealant integrity on every pre-flight list.
“Maybe we get a new door,” Greck said loudly on his way over to Nia’s bunk room from the HUB. He had been sitting at the large main table when he overheard their chatter. He finally decided to walk over when Dunny was punching the tablet incessantly, thinking maybe he could help the tiny Eukary.
“Carter promised all this loot. Maybe use it for a door?” Greck mused.
“I’d rather we save up and fix the [redacted] subspace telemetry,” Dunny jeered, then rolled her eyes at her translator. “Oh no,” Dunny raised her tablet over her head in faux desperation, “my wages garnished again by the [redacted]in’ soda company.”
Nia snickered.
“Finally, an honest-to-Gort laugh from this lady,” Dunny smiled, her tiny, sharp teeth peering out from her pinkish-skinned lips. “Well… barely, anyways.”
Greck smiled, sharp rows of teeth poking out from his sandpaper hide. The visual was always unsettling, given Greck’s overall helpful demeanor juxtaposed with the predatory menace of his physical nature. Dunny was quick to change the subject to avoid thoughts of becoming a snack.
“So… everything looks fine. Fine for us, anyways,” Dunny cleared her throat and swiped her fingers across the tablet to set it back to sleepmode. “Don’t you worry your little ridged head, Nia. You can take a nap the rest of the way. If we start falling apart, I’ll probably just crash us into an asteroid to finish the job.”
Nia rolled her milky eyes as Dunny leapt off the cot and pushed Greck out of the doorway back out to the HUB. “Sweet dreams now.”
Nia didn’t quite feel like bunking yet, so she slid off the cot and into the HUB. Carter was sitting at the table across from her, facing Nia’s bunk, with a tablet in his bumpy orange hands. The squiddies’ hands were something between humanoid and the same tentacles wriggling on Carter’s face.
Carter’s tentacle-like fingers rolled across the tablet screen like the waves that crashed across the ancient Nothonian spawning seas he had never seen, and most likely never would. There were stories, the fairytales of fishfolk who shot themselves into space looking for riches and vast oceans. They found shit-all. Barren moons and then the Rhyno. Desolation. Subjugation. It was programmed in Carter like a genetic memory. When he closed his glossy black eyes, he could almost see the surf, the foaming waves rolling over endless blue. It was a mirage; nothing more. But the rolling fingers were a reminder of the waves, and the chirping of the tablet reminded him that the work wasn’t done.
“You going to bunk, too?” Nia asked. Carter’s dazed onyx eyes darted awake and looked up at her. His tentacles seemed to shoo her away with a half-hearted wave.
“Still working,” Carter admitted. “Trying to filter the noise out of these audio recordings. Frequencies are noisy.”
“We’ll be in front of it, and you can get a better reading then,” Nia said. “What’s the point?”
“The point is the next salvage, and the next… and the next…,” Carter explained. “When was the last time you were on Junction?”
“It’s been a few cycles,” Nia admitted, and she took a seat across from Carter.
Junction was one of the largest ships in the tribal fleets in LongShot space. It started as an old Rogers Republic cargo freighter, and piece by piece, became one of LongShot’s tribal capitols, a cargo-ship-turned-space-station, and an economic hub for the entire system. Of course, those pieces had been stolen by raiding parties when commercial ships veered too far off the shipping lanes and ended up in pirate space.
Piracy was an uncertain business, though. It required resources and fresh marks, which were in short supply as various empires and systems issued warnings and edicts and escorted more lucrative ventures with stronger naval escorts. There was only so much that scavenging could do to keep the ships afloat.
“There’s less to go around now,” Carter said.
Dunny chimed in, “Not that there was a lot to begin with. You think we’re patching things here? Everything there is a patch of a patch of a patch. A box of wires…”
A loud bubbling, gurgling sound broke up the party, and Dunny snickered. Greck had put on his ‘fish bowl’, the Aquatic Simulation Dome (ASD), which simulated underwater conditions for most Nothonian. He was in his bunk, but had forgotten to close the door.
“Snoring, already?” Carter questioned.
“He’ll be up before you,” Dunny said. “Unless you think you can handle flipping the manual switch from subspace to sublight control, sweetheart?”
It was always hard to tell when Carter was angry. The tentacles got in the way of the frowning. Carter flicked the tablet’s surface with an aggressive motion, sending data up to the HUB table in front of them, and a holographic field of three-dimensional asteroids appeared floating over the grid lines.
Through the digital field, a pulse of expanding wave lines bounced, colliding and wrapping around the rocks. Pulses of electromagnetic radiation, cascading away from a source, as yet unknown, outward into the expanse in all directions.
Carter twisted his elongated finger tentacles in his hand and across the tablet, pinching the audio waveform strings and squeezing out the unnecessary frequencies. As the frequencies crushed and the soundfloor changed, the pattern became clear: a continuous, sequenced beeping.
“What does it mean?” Nia questioned.
“I think we’re going to need all the rest we can get,” Carter grumbled.
TO BE CONTINUED!
THE CREW OF THE DEEP REACH
I'm really digging this story, and I love the crew. They give off dysfunctional family vibes (which totally tracks for Longshot).
I'm pumped to dive even further into this one. Longshot is such a fun divergence from the grand origin stories Andrew's telling in Empirefall. It feels more personal. With Empirefall, I find myself rooting for a cause. Even with the focus on an individual character, those stories still feel large because they're events that shaped this galaxy.
This one zooms in in a totally different way. It's one crew fighting for survival in their own little corner of the galaxy. Can't wait for what comes next.
SciFi stories centered around a small crew are so iconic. And I mean even beyond the easy-to-mind like Firefly or the Expanse. But SciFi is ripe with this trope. You have a band of mercenaries like the Kiljoys, with the mixed species crews working together for their own purposes (but also each other) like Andromeda and Farscape - SciFi gold. Keep up the good work Rob, these are a nice chapters to break up my MilSciFi heavy Empirefall Chronicles here in the Stellar Empire universe!