This is a fan translation of The Black Relay Race (Чёрная эстафета) by Vladimir Vasilyev. This is the second book in the Death or Glory (Смерть или слава) series. I strongly recommend that you read the novel Death or Glory first. Its fan translation is available on this website.
I claim no rights to the contents herein.
Note: Footnotes can be found at the end of the chapter.
Leg 1
Wojciech Shondrakowski, Human, Ophelia — Nabla Quadrant
The bar had a simple and uncomplicated name: Volga.
Wojciech snorted. He actually knew what that name meant. But how many humans in Earth's sphere of influence could claim the same?
He doubted that it was more than a few million.
But the aliens likely remembered planet Volga well. After all, that had been the place where events had taken place a hundred and fifty years ago, thanks to which humans went from being backwards and despised savages into one of the strongest races of the galaxy in one fell swoop.
Besides that, there was a river called Volga on humanity's homeworld. It was likely that the planet Volga, the birthplace of Roman Savelyev and Julia Jurgenson, had once been named after the river.
The entire galaxy now knew those humans. From the technocratic elite of the Ayeshi to the poorest bum on a peripheral human colony. From the imperturbable Swarm to the "singing skeletons", the Shat-Tzoor, probably the most inveterate slobs in the known universe. They knew those humans. But the name of that distant planet that had died a hundred and fifty years ago was now forgotten.
Time was merciless towards memories.
Wojciech spat the half-empty capsule of "delirium" out onto the sidewalk and stepped to the membrane.
As soon as Wojciech touched it, the membrane parted and admitted the patron into the dimly lit room before almost immediately closing behind him and cutting the bar off from the street. It grew darker, while the sounds took on a clarity and voluminosity that was beyond compare. The bar was clearly equipped with a surround. Wojciech was a little surprised at that, since places like this one rarely spent money on expensive equipment.
It wasn't that Volga was a drug den or an establishment of a dubious nature; more than anything, this small bar next to Ophelia's second largest spaceport looked more like a cross between a stock market and a charter office. Here one could hire a ship to go pretty much anywhere. Or, just the opposite, hire onto a ship to make some money, assuming one was a spacer specialist, of course. One could send or receive cargo. One could easily find the location of any of tens of thousands of human ships, except for military vessels, of course. Then again, if one was persistent enough, it was even possible to learn about the military ships too.
Such tasks could be done no easier and no harder at the spaceport or at the agency than at Volga. Any human or alien connected to space and flights had long ago established a preference for where to go first.
Wojciech had chosen bars for himself. Since his very first freight.
His small ship with the toy-like name Pencil was incapable of carrying large freight. After all, how much cargo could be fit into something with the rest mass of only fifty registered ton? Which was why Wojciech was laboring in the sector of one-time contracts with private traders. The work wasn't particularly profitable, but at least it was generally calm and reliable.
It wasn't that Wojciech deliberately avoided risk, he just simply tried to reduce it to a minimum. Unfortunately, even minimal risk sometimes resulted in such scrapes that someone with weaker nerves would've gone gray in the head several times over. At the age of twenty-nine, Wojciech's hair was only half-gray, and from a distance it looked simply ashen under his ever-present baseball cap. One could even assume that he dyed the hair. But up-close it became clear that there was an even mix of gray and black hair up there.
The bar looked half-empty; a cloud of cigarette smoke rose over the matte partitions that separated the booths. Wojciech chose a table in the middle of the room, away from the booths. He summoned a waiter—a live one, by the way, not a machine—with a snap of his fingers. The waiter wasn't in a hurry to approach, though, only glanced at Wojciech before returning his gaze to someone hidden behind a partition.
Then again, Wojciech wasn't in a hurry either. When the waiter finally deigned to approach (five minutes later), Wojciech ordered a bottle of Ophelia Gewürztraminer—a vintage he loved—and the day's special with an unpronounceable local name.
When the wine was brought out, Wojciech set a chromed nameplate with "Pencil. 50 reg. ton" on the table.
That was it. Now everyone could tell that he was a pilot looking for a client. A lone yachtsman, a daredevil, a space wanderer. And his tub's load capacity was clear as well.
He'd be sitting there for a long time, which was why Wojciech wasn't in a hurry.
Closer to the evening, patrons began pouring into the bar, since the spaceport was where people preferred to do business in daytime. But this was the place for evening business. Any lone yachtsman had to have plenty of patience.
A group of four Svaigh, who looked like giant geckos in jumpsuits, left one of the booths. I wonder what they were eating, Wojciech thought. Fish?
Wojciech knew about these creatures no more and no less than any other human. A race of sentient reptiles, one of the most powerful in the galaxy. Along with humanity.
Once, their Gallery had kept all Svaigh in known space and several satellite races in strict obedience. Unfortunately, the acquaintance with the human civilization had an effect on the entire Alliance. It just so happened that, in exchange for humanity's technological might, the Alliance received all the lowest and vilest things humans had: crime, smuggling, laziness, deceit, betrayal…
For some reason, trash heaps always grew incredibly quickly. Except now they weren't dominated by wood shavings, rags, and scraps, but by plastic, organosilicon, and biological neurochips. That was all that had chanced since Earth's acceptance into the Alliance, the composition of the trash and the size of the trash heap.
Only the Ayeshi changed relatively little, as it was difficult for sentient crystals to adopt human vices. Then again, these cold in every respect creatures had taken the art of smuggling to such new heights that couldn't be imagined by the Russians and the Chinese back in the day.
The only race not to change at all was the Swarm. But the Swarm had always been a thing unto itself, poorly understood by the other races.
As for the Svaigh, the Aczanny, and the Zoopht, this once-great triumvirate had taken on so many human traits and habits since the final victory over the Imperishables that even the spheres of influence of Earth and her colonies, the Gallery of Svaighe, the Pyramids of the Aczanny, and the Zoopht Triad seemed to wash out and blur, melding into a single whole over time.
Wojciech was thinking while sipping on the wine. He'd consumed the day's special, which turned out to be very delicious, long ago.
The Alliance had broken into two uneven pieces: the space of humans, avians, and reptiles, a certain amorphous commonality without particular laws and rules, and the islands of influence of the Ayeshi and the unfathomable in every respect Swarm. Wojciech believe that only the presence of a common enemy in the galaxy, the Imperishables, had kept the Alliance together for such a long time. As soon as the threat was gone, the Alliance began to show cracks. Four of the races started to rapidly assimilate their cultures into one, one began to lean towards total isolation, while the frozen crystals started to eagerly do their own business using the somewhat warped human recipes. Naturally, the Ayeshi were primarily interested in planets that were unsuitable for oxygen-breathers. And if there was no conflict of interest, then it was time for trade and smuggling rather than war.
Wojciech would've gladly agreed to deliver cargo to the Ayeshi. Or from them to anywhere. A partnership with the former technocrats promised lots of profit, and Wojciech had had several opportunities to make sure of that.
Too bad such a profitable freight was unlikely to come his way on Ophelia.
The first potential client walked up to him about two hours before the official date change, the local midnight. A tall fellow with an eyepatch. Wojciech noticed that the man was uncomfortable with the eyepatch, that he was unused to such a detail on his face, which meant he'd put it on as a disguise.
Moron. Not much of a disguise. But Wojciech wasn't about to say that out loud, of course.
"Freight?" the man began without a preamble.
"Freight," Wojciech nodded.
"Fifty?" the man shifted his available eye to the nameplate; at that, the eyepatch noticeably moved.
The man was moving both eyes.
"Fifty," Wojciech confirmed, feeling a little annoyed. It was right there on the nameplate, why bother asking?
The man sat heavily opposite him; the plastic chair squeaked plaintively under his bulk.
"How long you been flying?" he inquired.
"Six years as captain," Wojciech replied a little more dryly than he should have.
In point of fact, a client had every right to ask such questions before making a deal, but Wojciech always disliked such meticulous and dull people.
Maybe he wanted to know his blood type too…
"Six?" the man tilted his head to the side. "How old were you when you started, buddy?"
Wojciech took a deliberately slow sip from his glass. Then he raised his eyes onto the other man, who was waiting for a reply.
"Do you want a flight or a confession?"
The man snorted and made some mental calculations. At that moment, Wojciech figured out the price he'd accept for dealing with this slippery fellow.
Fifty large. Regardless of the distance. Fifty thousand pangals. A grand for every registered ton of the Pencil…
"Fine!" the man grinned. "I've got a cargo to Celentine."
"Contraband?" Wojciech asked directly, and the man immediately began to look around, like a gopher far from its burrow.
"Keep it quiet, will you?" he lowered his voice and wiped the sweat off his brow.
Newbie, Wojciech concluded. Green and lop-eared…
"Five large!" the man continued in a whisper. "Half up-front. Two and a half tons of cargo, plus me and two others. Agreed?"
Wojciech's lips stretched in a smile that turned out to be condescending. At first, he wanted to give a rude and spiteful reply, but then decided against it.
"Listen, guy…" he said in a surprisingly gentle voice. "Why don't you go find yourself a rookie, okay? I wouldn't even take you to the local moon for a pittance like that."
That was a gross overstatement about the moon, of course. Wojciech would've taken a passenger to the moon for a mere hundred and would've only spent at most half a pan's worth of fuel. Well, maybe ten or twenty more for spaceport procedures. He would've made seventy-five to eighty pans on such a mini-flight, enough by buy fuel for the next flight, which would let him to cross half the galaxy, somewhere towards the Swarm's border territories.
"Seven large," the man offered in a scary whisper and stared at Wojciech with his uncovered eye.
"Heh-heh!" Wojciech said, leaned back in the chair, pulled the cap down to his eyes, and folded his arms on his chest. He knew that he was behaving boldly, but if he didn't, then this moron wouldn't stop bothering him for a while.
"Eight!" the man whispered.
"Seventy-five," Wojciech said with the equanimity of a stock market titan. "And not a pan less."
The man jerked back in surprise. He rose, making the chair slide loudly, moved to the side, then paused for a moment, "Just think…" Then he left into the gloom.
Wojciech took a large sip, extremely pleased with himself.
"Bravo!" he heard right over his ear. Wojciech jerked in surprise.
The unseen spectator gave him a reserved applause, remaining hidden. He was being concealed by a bluish cone of light that was being cast down by a long waveguide with a prism attached to the end. The waveguides were hanging down from the ceiling without any rhyme or reason, in the most unexpected places.
"Bravo, Captain! You clearly know your price."
Wojciech's first impulse was to get up and step into the clearly defined bluish cone, to get close and look at whomever was speaking to him. But Wojciech forced himself to stay seated. If he really knew his own price, then it wouldn't do to bring it down. So he remained in his chair.
A few seconds later, Wojciech realized that he'd done the right thing; the stranger came out himself. He was tall, a head taller than Wojciech, and wrapped in an impenetrable cloak. His face remained in the shadow, the bluish light fell along the cloak's shifting folds and lay on the brim of his Fayette umbrella hat.
The stranger pulled up the chair, the one recently occupied by the man with the eyepatch, and sat silently. Then he removed the hat and casually tossed it onto the table.
The stranger's movements were quick and jerky.
Wojciech could tell right away that he wasn't human: huge eyes with vertical pupils and unusual cheekbones, elongated lower jaw, and a complete lack of a nose. Naturally, he wasn't a Svaigh, a Zoopht, or a small Aczanny.
Wojciech had trouble figuring out the stranger's race.
But he wasn't going to ask, of course.
"Seventy-five thousand?" the stranger asked. "That's good money, my friend, but still unworthy of such a brave yachtsman as Wojciech Shondrakowski. Am I right?"
Wojciech frowned. This guy seemed to know his name. Most likely, the name wasn't all the stranger knew about him.
"And you can offer more for a single flight?" Wojciech answered evasively.
"I can," the stranger's thin lips spread in a creepy smile, and Wojciech was able to make out two rows of tiny even teeth. "I can and I am. Fifty million pangals."
Wojciech relaxed.
This guy wasn't a client, he was just a lunatic.
With fifty million pans, Wojciech could retire and spend the rest of his life if not quite bathing in luxury, then living quite well on the dividends alone.
"I trust your credit card is with you?" the stranger asked in the same tone. "Don't worry, I'm not crazy."
He called up a flat terminal with a keyboard and two reader slots onto the table. He inserted a Svenel—one of the three wealthiest corporations in known space—credit card into one of the slots.
"Slide it in and enter your receipt password," the stranger offered.
Wojciech gave him a twisted smile. That was how fools got hooked: they took the money and were then forced into whatever the other person wanted.
The stranger once more produced his creepy smile.
"Don't worry. This is not an advance, it's simply a payment for our negotiation. I'm sure you're recording this conversation—as am I, by the way—so here it is: this financial operation does not impose any obligations on either side. Regardless of the outcome of the negotiation, the transferred money remains your property, Wojciech, and I have no intention of demanding anything in return."
Now that's a different story, Wojciech thought and inserted his own card into the second slot. I wonder how much he's giving me.
He punched in his receipt password, while the stranger deliberately looked away. Not that knowing the password would do anyone any good. First of all, it could only be used to deposit money on the account. And second, the keyboard was checking his fingerprints and his personal biocode while he was typing.
A dimly glowing cube appeared over the keyboard.
The stranger also entered a password and initiated the transfer. A sum was deposited into Wojciech's account from the stranger's.
A sum.
A million pangals. No more, no less.
In a shock, Wojciech stared into the cube, at the glowing even numbers.
1,000,000 pG.
The stranger ejected his card and hid it somewhere under the cloak.
With shaking fingers, Wojciech cleared the terminal and checked his account balance.
Everything looked right.
1,004,862.47 pG.
Only five minutes ago, there'd been just under five grand on his account, which equated to two or three months of normal life.
And now he could do nothing for a few years.
"So," the stranger smiled yet again. "Shall we continue?"
Wojciech kept trying to figure out what to do next. Should he refuse to negotiate any further? But the stranger could simply have him killed for wasting his money. If there were millions involved, then what sort of whales were involved here? Some captain of a tiny yacht wasn't even a stray dog that could be shot without a problem. He was a bug on the road. Dust.
"Excuse me," Wojciech could barely move his suddenly dry lips. "I'm going to order more wine. Do you drink Gewürztraminer?"
"With pleasure!" the stranger said.
The waiter appeared at the table almost before Wojciech raised his hand.
Wojciech's shaking fingers closed around the cool plastic of his wine glass. The lone yachtsman was doing his best to suppress his confusion and to at least seem perfectly calm.
"So," the stranger lifted his glass to his thin lips in a social gesture and sipped the Gewürztraminer. "Obviously, I need a very particular service from you. To deliver a specific cargo to a specific place. Plus a small complication: you're going to have to go get the cargo too, since it's not here on Ophelia."
"May I ask where it is?" Wojciech inquired carefully.
The stranger snorted quietly into his glass.
"Of course you may. You're going to have to go there, aren't you?"
He once again drank the wine and smacked his lips in pleasure the way a human might have.
"The cargo is currently located on one of the remote Zoopht bases, in the Southeastern Sector, the Nabla Quadrant system. Do you know where it is?"
Wojciech nodded. Nabla Quadrant… That was damned far away. Very far. Not even in the neighboring spiral arm — it was beyond the Core, in the original alien territories. Not even in the disk — in one of the globular clusters "below" the main galactic disk. It was entirely possible that humans had never gone anywhere near Nabla Quadrant. That was at least three dozen pulsations. And only if he pushed the drive to the limit.
"The detailed coordinates are on this disk," the stranger pulled a circle of astrogation instructions from under his cloak. "I made sure that it was compatible with your ship's systems."
Muttering a thanks, Wojciech reached for the disk. It was also human-made and also by Sveneld. Wojciech made sure to remember that, just in case.
"The docking and the cargo codes are on the same disk."
"Docking?" Wojciech asked. "Is it a space station?"
"It is, a Zoopht research module. You'll be received in a zero-gravity zone. I suggest you don't delay your departure, as Zoopht scientists tend not to linger in the same place for long."
"I see… Is the cargo large?"
"Not particularly. Two uns by three and seven. In meters it's—"
"Thank you, I got it," Wojciech interrupted the client. "Any expected problems with the paperwork?"
"Not at all. The cargo does not contain any forbidden compounds, data storage, or technology. Besides, customs restrictions apply only on inhabited planets and large orbital settlements, while your route will for the most part lie away from any inhabited places. You may treat the cargo as… as a sarcophagus, for example. Or a refrigerator."
For the first time, Wojciech dared to stared into the stranger's eyes.
"So one can assume that the sarcophagus isn't empty then?" he asked quietly.
"One can assume," the stranger agreed without any reaction. "But God forbid (is that how humans say it?) if you try to open the sarcophagus. Now that really is dangerous. If you don't touch it, then your trip won't be different from any ordinary tourist flight. Do you understand me?"
"I do," Wojciech nodded readily. "I understand very well, especially in the light of the payment…"
"About the payment. The remainder, meaning forty-nine million pans, will be paid at the final point of the trip, after the intact, I repeat, intact and undamaged sarcophagus ends up in the location specified on the disk without any traces of attempted opening. The location is somewhere in the Swarm's sphere of influence. I don't know exactly where."
Even he doesn't know, Wojciech thought. Or maybe he's just pretending not to know.
"Each new leg of the trip will be revealed after the previous one is completed, which is how the disk is encoded. Preliminary calculations will be sent to your astrogation computer the same way, and you will do the rest yourself in accordance with the situation."
"The time frame?" Wojciech inquired.
Not a trace of his fright and indecisiveness remained. The client was behaving like an ordinary client. The only strange thing was the incredibly large payment. It seemed the sarcophagus's mysterious owners really wanted to avoid any publicity or curiosity. Well then… Wojciech knew how to be uncurious. He would be uncurious now, especially when this amount of money was involved.
Then again, there were still doubts as to whether he would actually see the remainder of the payment. But even if they never paid him, he already had an entire million on his personal account. That in itself was a decent payday. And if they did pay the rest, well…
Basically, Wojciech decided to take the chance.
"The time frame?" the stranger loved to repeat the question. "The time frame, my brave captain, is, as always, short. Get started right away, without delay. And get it done the sooner the better."
Wojciech wasn't a stranger to some theatricality in his actions.
"Well then," he said, getting up and putting on his cap after the freight agreement had been signed and uploaded to the net. "Then, by your leave, I'm on my way to the spaceport…"
Damn, Wojciech thought with some inner surprise. What's up with this politeness? "By your leave…" Only a million pans, and I'm already dropping pleasantries like a footman at a reception…
"And another thing," the stranger didn't get up, only turning to Wojciech with the chair. His voice remained benevolent and even slightly paternal. "I would strongly suggest, Captain Shondrakowski, that you avoid getting lost in the interstellar void. You have one week; if the Pencil doesn't dock at the Zoopht base within a week, then our disappointment will have no bounds. Moreover, your little ship's linear dimensions will also lose all bounds and will spread through a fairly large part of space. Am I being clear?"
Wojciech nodded several times, "Yes. Very clear. But I have no intention of… getting lost in the interstellar void. You have my word."
"Excellent," the stranger nodded and lifted his glass with the remains of the Gewürztraminer. "To your luck, Captain!"
Bastards, Wojciech thought, doing his best to push the chill from his chest. Probably filled the Pencil with explosives and are giving me a polite hint…
But Wojciech had prepared for a surprise like that when he decided to take the chance.
No risk, no reward. And no Gewürztraminer. And Wojciech really liked Gewürztraminer.
"And if I get delayed by something unforeseen?" he asked. "Anything can happen in space…"
"There's an instant mail browser on the disk set to my terminal. We will pay for the call. We're not animals, after all. Just make sure you give us a warning… But we will still be very disappointed at any delay."
"Then I'll do my best to avoid them," Wojciech sighed. "Goodbye."
He was at the spaceport an hour later.
Lifting off from a planet was an extremely routine task. Connect to traffic control, request a launchway, request refueling, run a test of the ship's systems… Wojciech had done all that hundreds of times.
His ship, the tiny Pencil, built about forty years ago on one of the human shipyards, was still brand-new by alien standards. Some Ayeshi raiders were thousands of years old, having been built when human ancestors were still knocking down fruit from the trees with sticks. Compared to that, what was a mere four human decades? A moment not worth mentioning. The Pencil was equipped with the most compact of x-drives. An old design of the same Ayeshi, a device that allowed one to trick space. Humans called flying interstellar distances a puncture, a pulsation, or simply a jump. But none of these words reflected the nature of the process. To be honest, few humans understood the physics of the x-jump, low-, medium-, and high-powered x-drives had been assembled on human planets and orbital shipyards for over half a century. The large and giant drives that could be put on supercruisers and even some asteroids were still beyond human capabilities. But humanity didn't build large ships anyway. Human might was based on armadas of medium-sized starships and legions of small ones. Supercruisers were nice, of course. But they were useless for assaulting planets anyway, only destroying them. And planets and moons were the only thing of value for warring sides; the void itself wasn't of any particular interest to even the Imperishables, the ancient enemies of the Alliance. In recent past, humans had brilliantly demonstrated to the entire galaxy the usefulness of the expression, "Why destroy when you can take and use?" Besides, supercruisers could be destroyed by other supercruisers, while vaporizing every single medium-sized ship was a significantly more difficult task. Mobility, maneuverability, and persistence — these three qualities had forced the aliens to respect human tactics and battle strategy.
While the refueler was filling the tanks, Wojciech walked around the ship, carefully examining the hull. He even climbed halfway into the evaporators and looked inside the housing of both grav-drives. Afterwards, finding nothing suspicious, he got back inside, sealed the hatches, sat in the captain's chair, and loaded the astrogation disk. The disk really did turn out to be recorded in a format familiar to the Pencil's computers. The systems were reading and processing the first pulsation, while Wojciech stared pointlessly at the fuel indicators.
Strangely enough, the x-drive didn't need the fuel for moving through space. It was only used for navigation, to create a clear gravitational picture of the space surrounding the ship. The more powerful the drive, the larger the sphere of space being scanned. And the more energy, and therefore fuel, being needed. Any drive could only move within a scanned sphere. For the Pencil, the optimal pulsation was between a sliding zero and two hundred and twenty to two hundred and fifty light years. When necessary and with a certain dose of risk, she could "eat up" nearly a thousand light years. But only if the need was extreme. Supercruisers could theoretically leave the bounds of the galaxy and reach the neighboring ones, but in practice no one had actually bothered doing that. Even the five most advanced races of the Alliance. There had been attempts in times immemorial, but there turned out to be far too few gravity wells in the intergalactic void, so the drives simply lost all orientation and began to jump randomly, from one void to another, until their fuel ran out. And then the Imperishables came, and the war left no time for research.
Of course, fuel was also used up during lift-off and for maneuvering at sublight. But the amounts were so miniscule compared to pulsations that people generally ignored such parasitic expenditures in calculations.
In a mere twenty years, humans had gotten access to the entire galaxy. Instead of a tiny sphere around old Earth, there were now billions of stars and billions of planets. Humanity got used to being able to reach the most remote corners of the galaxy incredibly quickly. A mere century and a half, and humans turned from timid pioneers into one of the most populous and ubiquitous races in the inhabited universe.
Life sometimes threw out marvelous tricks. Humans had long ago called such situations a "from slumdom to stardom" story.
Indeed, stardom, Wojciech thought, still staring absentmindedly at the indicators. We're pushing the aliens back bit-by-bit… Not even bit-by-bit, we're invading their territories without any pomp and ceremony and pressing them against the wall without a care for the future. This might turn out badly…
Then again, Wojciech knew perfectly well that human life was far too short for today's tricksters to live to see the day when such policy came home to roost for humanity.
And it will…
"Refueling complete," the machine's dispassionate voice interrupted Wojciech's thoughts. "The module has disconnected."
"Excellent," Wojciech muttered, connecting to the traffic control channel. Columns of numbers appeared over the controls, but he didn't bother looking at them, figuring that the computers of the Pencil and the spaceport would find a common language without human interference.
Humans were way too slow and clumsy for such tasks.
Then the Pencil lifted off from the surface of Ophelia—one of humanity's oldest outposts—without any roaring or g-forces and soared, piercing the atmosphere. Less than an hour after that, Wojciech was already drifting far beyond the lunar orbit, within the designated jump sphere.
In principle, he could activate the x-drive now.
But Wojciech wasn't in a hurry. He had one immediate task to do before that.
The stranger from the Volga bar had hinted that the Pencil could be blown up if Wojciech decided to run away with the million he'd already received. Flying with a bomb aboard was a dubious pleasure. On the other hand, Wojciech understood that a bomb couldn't be found and disarmed just like that. No one had entered the ship, as the hatch was always sealed and monitored when the Captain wasn't aboard. If someone somehow managed to open the outer hatches, then the monitoring system would've made a note of it in the logs. But no log and no monitoring report showed any attempts at getting aboard. Which meant that if there was a bomb on the ship, it had to be outside.
Where could it have been placed? Well, near the fuel tank, for one. If the fuel detonated… Then the Pencil was done for. It would have to be a very specific detonator, of course, even calling it a bomb was a stretch. But if all or even a large part of the fuel's stored energy was released over a short time period, then the new star would be visible quite a distance away. Adjusting for the speed of light, of course. But Wojciech wouldn't care anymore.
But such an option had its flaws: the detonator—also known as a phased pulse atomic emitter, calibrated to resonate with the fuel's molecular structure—would be easily detectable even with the few instruments aboard the Pencil. Wojciech checked and found that there were four such emitters within several light seconds of the Pencil, and all of them were standard-issue components of the x-drive.
Option two involved an entire explosive device on the outer hull. But Wojciech hadn't found anything large enough that could seriously damage the yacht. So this option was most likely invalid.
But they could've attached an instant comm beacon on the hull. Easily. He wouldn't be able to find a bead like that on the Pencil's hull in a year even with a magnifying glass. Anything could be sent to the beacon's location, from a squadron of warships to an old tender filled with explosives. In that case, Wojciech was helpless, as it was virtually impossible to detect such a beacon. It could remain quiet, spat out a pulse once every hour or once every day. Maybe Wojciech would even get lucky to intercept the message, but he wouldn't be able to track it. That would require three scanners located far from the beacon and each other. Instant comms had their own rules.
To clear his conscience, Wojciech walked around the ship, especially the cargo holds. He peered into every remote corner. No result. If the Pencil really had been rigged, then he could only happen upon the surprise by accident. But the unknown techs would've taken care of that, of course. Basically, he would have to trust his luck and the strength of the client's nerves. And to stop delaying since Wojciech only had a week to get to the Zoophs research base. So he initiated the prelaunch programs.
Forget the bomb. Wojciech knew how to ignore such joys of life. After all, he had no intention of cheating his client, right? The best policy was to keep the unknown aliens from being forced to grab the remote.
The computers were working on the calculations for the first pulsation; since the Pencil would have to do a good thirty jumps in a row, the subsequent jumps were also partly calculated. The invisible and intangible dotted line of the course was being suspended from the space around Ophelia into the heart of a globular cluster, to a group of white and yellow cepheids and old red giants known to humans as Nabla Quadrant.
At the same time, at the second dot of the line, approximately three hundred light years from the first, in the interstellar void with nothing but radiation in it, space was beginning to break and boil. In a short while, the Pencil would materialize there, completing the first pulsation. She hadn't jumped yet, but the jump was cutting through not just space but also shifting the temporal component. The x-drive would appear in the arrival sphere a few billionth of a second before disappearing from the departure sphere.
For a fleetingly brief moment, there would be two Pencils and two Wojciech Shondrakowskis in the universe.
Wojciech thought that such a phenomenon had to have some side effects. But Alliance scientists had yet to find a single side effect, despite the fact that the aliens had been using x-drives for tens of thousands of years. But still, Wojciech thought that such risky games with reality had to have consequences. Someday, all this abuse of space and time would come back to bite them in the ass, and that bite would be a painful one.
For the briefest moment, the world compressed to a tiny icy point, Wojciech was turned inside-out, got twisted like a piece of laundry in a dryer, spread across the infinity, and then released. It all happened so quickly that humans couldn't understand whether the sensations that took place during pulsations were pleasant or painful. There was a lightning-fast chill, like in a rapidly descending elevator, and then it was all over. Arrival.
The abused space was calming down outside the hull, restoring its normal state.
Wojciech didn't even truly know what was wrong with the space outside. Did the space warp during the pulsation? Did the fabric of space tear? Did something else happen? He only knew that, in the arrival sphere, space altered its properties before the jump and then quickly restored it afterwards.
The computers were already working hard on the second phase: locating the known gravity wells, taking inaccuracies into account, adjusting the initial course, stabilizing the new point, reorienting the ship, maneuvering, reorienting again, calculating the second jump…
It usually took anywhere between forty minutes and four hours.
And there it was, a failure.
Despite all their sophistication, machines were still useless without human intervention.
Wojciech pulled the keyboard closer and took a look at what had confused the all-powerful crystalline astrogator…
Five minutes later, Wojciech figured it out: the web of gravitational bindings changed over time, of course, and two distinct adjustments had come from two different base beacons. It wasn't difficult to figure out which of the adjustments was the correct one and to remote the references to the outdated one.
He let the tin can continue working.
Out of an old human habit, Wojciech called the ship's systems tin cans, even though there were probably less than ten percent of metals in them. For the most part, they were composed of degenerate crystals, plastics, and ceramics.
Second jump.
Third.
Fourth.
The chill was giving him a headache, as if he'd taken a sip from an Alpine stream, and a stream of piercing freshness struck his brain and froze into a sharp icicle.
Fifth.
Sixths.
Over this time, Wojciech managed to have two meals, get some sleep, intervene into the machine's operations one more time, watch a movie and a recording of yesterday's basketball game, and repair the A/C unit in the cargo hold, in case the stranger's sarcophagus needed specific conditions.
Seventh…
The Pencil came out to the edge of the cluster at the end of day four from his launch from Ophelia. She arrived to Nabla Quadrant in the first quarter of day five. Wojciech had made it with plenty of time to spare.
"Phew," he said when the space in the arrival sphere settled down after the pulsation, and the wild spectral extravaganza gave way to ordinary-looking stars in the windows, "well, where's the base of our dear birdies?"
The sensors were probing the void, looking for an object of a given mass and linear size. Wojciech kept tapping lazily on the keyboard, filtering out false positives.
The base turned out to be located in a stationary orbit three hundred million kilometers from a dim red giant, which was solitary and decrepit. This monstrosity was half again as large as Antares, and Sol would've looked like a speck of dust next to a basketball in comparison. The Zoopht base had an utterly unique view of space: on one side a vast crimson disk that took up nearly the entire view area, and on the other a solid red haze, with only the light of the brightest stars able to pierce it.
Wojciech set the transmitter to send the docking code on a loop and, not wasting any time, initiated the approach.
He quickly got a reply in Inter, "Pencil, we see you, the code is valid, sending you the docking data…"
"Got it."
The computer absorbed the information transmitted by the base and immediately calculated the optimal approach vector.
"Yeah," Wojciech sighed philosophically, barely glancing at the captain's controls. "You're nothing but a pile of metal without people, but we're also nothing without machines…"
The nameless red giant bloomed with bloody reflections in the windows. The sight was as majestic as it was unusual.
I wonder, Wojciech thought. Am I the first human to see it up-close? It's entirely possible.
The docking was a breeze, not that there was anything complicated or unnatural in the docking process. A routine. In essence, it was just like walking up to a chair and sitting down. Anyone had done that many times.
The Pencil froze in the invisible hands of the gravity clamp, the docking bay doors shut, and air began to pump into the bay. It was the air of the Zoopht homeworld, of course, but humans could breathe it just fine, as its chemical composition barely different from the air of Earth, Ophelia, or Celentine.
A Zoopht in a work jumpsuit appeared in the middle of the cockpit. Naturally, it was just a three-dimensional image.
"Hi, human," the alien said in English. The pronunciation was pretty good for an alien.
The Zoopht looked like a grotesque cross between a human and an ostrich. A small bald head without any auricles but with a beak; a long thin neck; sloping, barely noticeable shoulders; a body that was more spherical than elongated; and long bony legs. Wojciech was particularly struck by the jumpsuit's narrow pant legs. In addition, the alien was clearly using magnetic boots in zero gravity, as he was leaning forward instead of standing up straight.
"Hi, Zoopht," Wojciech answered. "Speak Russian?"
"No, English only."
"Then let's go with Inter," Wojciech switched to the common language. "My English is worse than my Inter."
"All right," the Zoopht answered lightly. "We're already scanned the cargo code. The description is marked as 'Extremely Urgent'. Planning on sticking around?"
"No. Just need to refuel."
"Got it. Open the cargo hold, we'll load it up."
Two others walked past behind the alien, amusingly moving their feet clad in special boots, and the one farther away didn't even fit into transmission column, so Wojciech could only see a part of him. Outside, on the pier, a robotic loader was already waiting with a grayish monolith in a grav-clamp.
Oh! Wojciech thought. They already brought my sarcophagus…
A fueler was carefully moving towards the Pencil from the opposite side.
Wojciech pushed away from a handrail and floated over to the controls. A reader, which he'd lost a week ago, was floating over the panel, blinking a green light. It had fallen into some crevice, but the weightlessness seemed to have found it.
Catching the reader, Wojciech opened the cargo hold and unsealed the fuel tank's receiver. The fueler and the robot with the sarcophagus immediately got to their business, while Wojciech inserted his credit card into the reader's slot and punched in the payment password.
No one was going to refuel for free. Especially an alien.
"Done," the Zoopht clicked his beak in a funny way. "All right: fifteen for docking, five for loading, twenty-three forty-seven for the fuel, five for the docking fee, and a pan for insurance. Do you need any water, provisions, or air?"
"No," Wojciech yawned.
"The total is… forty-nine forty-seven."
"So an even fifty," Wojciech grunted. "Those are some prices you've got here…"
"This is a base, not a spaceport," the Zoopht clicked his beak again, turned his head, and stared at Wojciech with one eye the way a chicken might. Now he could make out a neurochip implanted under the alien's ear opening.
Wojciech punched "50.00" on the keyboard and slapped the Enter key. Then he ejected the card.
"Start the departure," he grunted to the alien, who reached somewhere beyond the column's pickup. Wojciech also gave the initiative to the yacht's computer, deciding to go check the cargo. The Pencil was going to be taken out of the bay in a grav-cramp anyway; the aliens would prefer to spend some energy and avoid taking a chance. There were plenty of daredevils among the humans, and a bay decompression could prove to be very costly.
The seal indicators were glowing a calming green in front of the hatch that separated the cockpit from the cargo holds. Both the inner and the outer ones. Wojciech snorted in satisfaction and poked the lock with his finger. The cockpit's segmented membrane slid into the bulkhead grooves, followed by the outer one, and a round passage was revealed from the cockpit to the tween deck.
The tween deck looked like a short, corrugated intestine and ended in an identical segmented hatch. Wojciech pushed away from the doorjamb and floated smoothly along the tween deck.
Two more membranes, and Wojciech grabbed a brace at the entrance to the cargo hold. The hold seemed empty, with only the lashing ends snaking along the walls. Grav-clamps were one thing, but Wojciech always made sure to secure the cargo using mechanical means as well. There had been precedents… A power system failure would cause the grav-clamp to fail. Tension surges during a pulsation… The silicone cords didn't care about jumping through nothingness. But gravity was a delicate and an extremely unstable thing. That was why interstellar travel was even possible in the first place.
He found the sarcophagus in the central clamp. It had been carefully secured; the robots were dumb but obedient, he couldn't argue with that.
Wojciech approached, squinting his eyes.
A long rectangular box with rounded edges; over two meters in length, a meter in width, and maybe eighty centimeters in height. One of the ends had a short outgrowth that unpleasantly reminded him of an intestine. One as thick as his arm. The surface of the sarcophagus seemed to be both smooth and coarse at the same time, probably due to its scaly structure: each scale was smooth, but the overlapping of the scales created the illusion of coarseness. The sarcophagus was also warm to the touch.
Wojciech thoughtfully took his hand away from the scales.
It was a strange warmth. Not the warmth of hot plastic or metal. Not at all. Like the warmth of a living being, deep, fluttering, like the flame of a candle in a draft.
He saw a thin line the ran along the top of the sarcophagus, splitting it lengthwise. Probably an opening. And no external operators: no buttons, no connectors, no indicators… Hmm. That was some cargo! A giant crocodile skin suitcase. But without a handle. And with an exhaust pipe.
Sighing, Wojciech reached for the floating end of a lash. He habitually wrapped the mysterious box in three loops like a mail package, secured the free end, and tied of the slack. There, now even if the grav-clamp were to fail, the sarcophagus wouldn't be flung about the hold like a cube in a rattle. Who knew what was inside it? The shaking could damage it, and the client might get angry… And who needed that?
Exactly, no one. Wojciech preferred not to anger his clients without a good reason. He did his best to avoid doing that even when there was a reason. He was just a yachtsman, a truck driver. What did he care about the contents?
He didn't. Not at all.
Whistling, he pushed away from the sarcophagus and went back the way he'd come, to the cockpit. When Wojciech was floating through the tween deck, the Pencil shuddered, indicating that the Zoopht were moving the yacht to the base's outer hatch. By the time the Captain fluttered into the cockpit, the dull crimson light of the unnamed red giant was already pouring into the windows.
"Hey, human!" came from the speakers. "Have a good flight!"
"Thanks," Wojciech replied. "And you have happy research…"
But the Zoopht traffic controller had already disconnected and didn't hear the human's words.
A minute later, the local grav-generator engaged, and the amusing but a little annoying feeling of weightlessness was over. Wojciech unstrapped himself from the seat and reinitialized the course disk in the drive.
"Well," he proclaimed cheerfully. "Where to next?"
The drive was chewing over the data silently.
"Amazon," the astrogator informed him. "Twenty-three thousand two hundred and seventeen light years. Sixty-five to seventy-five jumps. Predicted expenditure of fuel: seventy-six percent."
"That's a lot," Wojciech sighed, scanning the lines of text that had appeared over the controls. "A quarter of the galactic diameter. About two weeks of traveling, if not more. And it's not even the final destination…"
In point of fact, his route didn't match the primary plane of the monstrous spiral. Wojciech was currently far "below" the main galactic disk, which was about eighty thousand light years thick. Naturally, the borders of the disk were highly arbitrary but obvious enough. The vast majority of the stars were located within the disk, and only a relatively small number was outside. There were many globular clusters beyond the disk, and the Zoopht research base was currently drifting in one of them.
The Amazon system was located within the disk, but closer to the "upper" edge. Wojciech would probably have to jump along a gently sloping arc, rounding the galactic core. The heart of the core still gave birth to stars, it was full of hard radiation and streams of extremely hot gases. Even the incredibly reliable alien supercruisers did their best to keep away from the core. To say nothing of the tiny Pencil.
The machines were already busy calculating the imaginary dotted line on the chart. Naturally, accounting for the miniscule change in the ship's resting mass. How heavy was the cargo he'd received? At least a ton.
Wojciech felt a slight, barely noticeable acceleration. The astrogator was taking the yacht to the departure sphere.
"Well, let's fly!" Wojciech said aloud with unexpected enthusiasm, then stretched and rose from the chair. He suddenly had the urge make himself a celebratory dinner. To cook something… tricky. After making sure that the machines were working as expected, Wojciech stuck the emergency communication bead into his ear and went to the galley.
He turned to look back before leaving the cockpit.
"I hope," he addressed the Captain's controls, "that your metal brains can handle being without a human presence for a short while."
Warm yellow light immediately appeared wherever Wojciech was walking. The Pencil, a tiny eggshell in the vast cosmos, had long ago become a home for her captain, and Wojciech definitely did not feel uncomfortable aboard his trusty yacht. He wasn't bothered by the billions of kilometers of emptiness, wasn't bothered by the thought that it would be another thousand years before the light of the nearest human-inhabited star reached here. To feel this way, one had to have been born and raised on some idyllic planet. But Wojciech had been born on a yacht like this one, except one a little larger and older. The void outside the windows, only slightly diluted by the sparks of distant stars, which were different all the time, was as familiar to him as having the sky overhead was to the denizens of planets. He couldn't even imagine anything but the void around him. The void and solitude were two eternal companions of a yachtsman/trucker.
But he was happy to know that the entirely galaxy could be underfoot at any moment. That was why the first thing Wojciech had done after buying the Pencil was attach a specially-ordered sign made of Celentinian chrysoprase over the entrance to the cockpit. With an engraving, "Mobilis in mobili" [Footnote 1].
From that moment on, I felt myself free.
Still feeling upbeat, Wojciech spent a good three hours in the galley, putting together a true feast for the belly, while simultaneously consuming a sixth of his wine supply, then he left the cleanup for the next day and went to bed.
By that moment, the Pencil had completed two pulsations and was in the middle of calculating the third. Leaving the execution of the jump, Wojciech plodded over to his cabin with a clean conscience.
He never left the x-drive active when he went to bed. While the possibility of a failure was minor, it was never zero. It was one thing for the captain to be awake, even if he was busy in the kitchen. It was completely different when he was asleep. Deep down, Wojciech was very much scared of waking up to find the Pencil in complete darkness without a single star, in some zero dimension, on the inverse side of creation.
For some reason, he felt the jump into nothingness could only happen when the captain was asleep. Only when a living person couldn't intervene in the work of machines in time. If they were monitored, then nothing bad could happen.
It was a superstition, of course. But Wojciech would much rather keep up a superstition than sleep with an active x-drive.
Every lone yachtsman, every human or alien whose life was inextricably tied to space and flying probably had this quirk. Irrational, subconscious. And ineradicable.
Morning began when he woke up. Wojciech got up with the vague sense of anxiety, the way a person could somehow feel another's gaze at their back or coming danger. The sensation was weak and all-too-brief, it could've appeared if Wojciech were sleeping in some public park on Ophelia, while a random passerby began to look at the sleeping Wojciech. But not too long, since an intent gaze typically woke Wojciech up. At least that was how it used to be.
Swearing and cursing at his deep subconscious, Wojciech plodded over to take a shower. Seriously, who could be looking at a lone yachtsman, whose freight had taken him to the ass end of the galaxy? Except for maybe his own reflection in the mirror.
The Pencil was drifting with the next jump fully calculated and awaiting the Captain's approval. Half an hour later, having showered and eaten the remains of the previous night's feast, Wojciech sat in the familiar chair in front of the main controls.
"Let's go?" he sighed with a slight questioning intonation while activating the x-drive.
Then he thought about it. Where had those questioning intonations come from? As if he was asking someone's permission… And that dumb feeling of someone else looking at him…
Wojciech suddenly felt extremely uncomfortable in his favorite chair. As if the ship was being haunted.
Wojciech's subsequent actions were entirely senseless from any viewpoint. But he couldn't help himself.
Over the next two-plus hours, he searched through all the compartments aboard the Pencil with a low-power blaster in his hand. It was a very thorough search, and even the monitoring system's logs no longer served as a good argument. A stowaway on a ship always left traces, especially if the ship was a one-person yacht. A captain would immediately feel a disruption in the normal order of things. Or the normal disorder. After all, it was impossible to move about the ship without touching, moving, or dropping anything, right?
Wojciech deliberately left the cargo holds for later.
Naturally, he found absolutely nothing suspicious. Anywhere. Not in the cockpit, and not in the cargo holds. The only thing that violated the usual environment aboard the Pencil was the sarcophagus secured in the middle of the first hold. Wojciech paused thoughtfully in front of it, that scaly box, motionless and strangely warm.
The sarcophagus was clearly being heated from inside, continuing to be warmer than the air in the cargo holds. And once again the warmth felt alive to Wojciech. Heated machines couldn't produce such an even and deep warmth! They just couldn't.
Wojciech meticulously examined the slit at the top. It was extremely thin, thinner than a hair. He scratched his head, called himself an idiot, but then still went to the cockpit to get a stamp, string, and wax. Feeling himself just as idiotic, he split the wax in two halves, attached it to both sides of the barely noticeable line that split the lid of the sarcophagus in two, placed the string, and sealed both halves.
"Well," Wojciech said into empty space with false excitement, "the client did want nobody to even try to open the sarcophagus. This will be the proof…"
It was well-known that not even the seal's owner could adjust the date on it.
With an unpleasant feeling of unnecessary clownery and cheap upbeatness, Wojciech returned to the cockpit. But the gloomy mood wouldn't leave him; on the contrary, it was as if something unspoken and malevolent was suspended inside the Pencil. Not even malevolent, more like misunderstood, unexpected, and therefore undesirable and slightly frightening.
Space wanderers knew many tales. Wojciech always listened to them with a chuckle, and always considered those who believed them to be idiots and weaklings. He'd never once felt uncomfortable aboard any yacht. Not on his parents', not on the one he'd jointly owned with his cousin, and not on his own. Wojciech couldn't even imagine how one might feel uncomfortable aboard a yacht. It was a yacht! His home! Hard-won and cherished!
But now, having felt it for the first time, he was tense to the point of feeling goosebumps.
The sensation turned out to be a nasty one.
Naturally, the machines couldn't care less about their captain's anxiety. The course was being calculated and corrected, with the intervals of one to three hours, the x-drive tossed the Pencil, along with her cargo and crew, along the next dash on the dotted line, two or three hundred light years away. The small steps kept adding up, and Pencil was now drifting within the galactic disk. There was nothing but a glowing haze on the viewscreens, impossible to make out individual stars. The center of the galaxy, the core. It was still very far away, but the light of thousands upon thousands of stars was merged together and once again forced him to feel the insignificance of the human-made eggshell before the vast cosmos.
On the second "morning", Wojciech first went to the cargo hold to check the seals. He had no idea what he was expecting. But the seals turned out to be intact, the string was there, and no one had been trying to scrape off the wax. Besides, who could even do it on a one-person ship? On the other hand, Wojciech hadn't felt the mysterious nocturnal gaze this time at all, having slept for twelve hours straight like a baby. Without any dreams or anxiety, as if he'd fallen into a pulsation. Half of the day was gone.
Slightly disappointed, Wojciech entered the cockpit, gave the go-ahead for the next jump, and already on the way to the shower felt an instant chill. A moment of universal duality.
Based on the dotted line, the Pencil was for the first time crossing inhabited space. One of the oldest Svaigh colonies in the Psta Cluster. Somewhere nearby (on a galactic scale, of course) was the site of the dramatic events that had taken place at planet Volga long ago.
The call caught Wojciech enjoying a light breakfast, while the computers were finalizing the calculations of the next pulsation. It was a melodic trill of local comms, not even instant comms, which meant that the Pencil was being hailed at nearly visual range. Setting his cooled sandwich aside, Wojciech plodded over to the cockpit.
He hadn't gotten around to getting a surround module, which would allow him to answer comms from any part of the ship.
"Pencil, this is the Patrol and Customs Service, please respond! Pencil, this is the Patrol and Customs Service of Ssameo-Chussi, please respond! Pencil—"
"This is the Pencil," Wojciech answered in Inter. "Captain Shondrakowski. I see you on my screen…"
It would've been extremely difficult for Wojciech to visually spot the Svaigh ship at a distance of several dozen million kilometers, but the x-drive's sensors could pick up even such a tiny gravity well at a great distance.
Crap! Wojciech thought in annoyance. The Patrol and Customs Service! The damn vultures had sniffed me out!
"Where are you heading?"
"Amazon. An urgent freight from Ophelia by way of Nabla Quadrant. Why?"
"What Amazon? What Nabla? Give us the universal coordinates!"
Wojciech grimaced; he'd naturally given them the human names, but old space wanderers typically remembered most of the key names in all languages, except, of course, for the language of the Swarm. No outsider knew the Swarm language. But then these weren't old space wanderers, it was the insatiable customs, a bunch of lazy, fat-bellied bribe-takers. Wojciech read off the universal coordinates of Amazon, Ophelia, and Nabla Quadrant from memory.
"Prepare you ship for inspection… What docking module do you have?"
"Human… What's the reason for the inspection? I have no intention of landing on Ssameo, just transiting."
"Just prepare!" the Svaigh grunted. "And stop your drifting, you're backing up like a dead larva…"
Wojciech lifted his gaze to the ceiling, then gave the command to compensate for the drift. The sensors had already picked up the customs officers' arrival sphere a mere twenty kilometers from the Pencil's trajectory. The Pencil was decelerating, becoming as motionless as possible in relation to the nearby stars.
The customs officers managed to complete the jump in a quarter of an hour; he had to admit that their jump was impressively precise, and they'd immediately stopped the parasitic drift. They began approaching him using maneuvering thrusters; Wojciech waited obediently, having initiated all the machinery of the docking tube. The slightly elongated donut of the patrol boat, looking very much like a shrunken armada battlecruiser, was a little larger than the Pencil, and the sensor screen made it look like a predatory insect sneaking up on its hapless prey. Either the prey was too careless to avoid moving or noticing the danger, or it had spotted the hunter long ago and was simply paralyzed by the fear…
Shaking his head, Wojciech chased away the disturbing thoughts. What predator? While the customs officers had the legal right to inspect a transit transport within the colony's border area, they couldn't do anything to non-restricted cargo, like confiscating or holding it. The problem was that Wojciech couldn't open the sarcophagus. And also Wojciech had no idea how the client would treat the inevitable scanning of the sarcophagus. Would that be constituted an attempt to open it? Or would it simply remain unnoticed?
Who could tell?
"Goddamn you, insatiable bastards," Wojciech grunted, gloomily watching the approaching patrol boat.
The customs officers performed the docking procedure just as quickly and skillfully as the jump. The airlock was already opening while the air was still hissing in the docking node.
Wojciech stood in the antechamber in front of his airlock with his hand on the servo control button. He was staring at the tiny screen showing an image from the tube's outer sensor. Six Svaigh in official jumpsuits of the planetary customs service were formed up into a wedge and were marching in lockstep towards the Pencil's airlock.
Wojciech sighed once again and pushed the button. The hatch began to open slowly.
Any private yachtsman knew perfectly well the appearance of the customs service uniform of any race in the Alliance. No worse than the names of star systems in different languages. The sight of these uniforms rarely brought joy to anyone. Even knowing that he was clean before the customs officers, Wojciech felt a hidden alarm. If this bunch was planning something, they'd always find fault with something. But what the hell were they planning? Did they need a scapegoat for some less-than-legal job? In that case, it was all over. There was no way he'd be able to avoid them.
The thickset green-faced Svaigh sergeant, who was at the tip of the wedge, stopped a few paces from Wojciech. Two tall, even taller than Wojciech, guards with beam rifles pressed against their chests were standing behind him. They were entirely motionless, like statues — only reptiles could freeze like that. Just their eyes with the dark dots of pupils were shifting back and forth.
The base of the wedge consisted of two privates and another guard with a stripe on the left side of his uniform, right above the heart. Wojciech had no idea what the stripe meant.
"I greet you aboard the private yacht Pencil," Wojciech said without much friendliness. It was unlikely that the Svaigh from an old colony were that familiar with humans to be able to pick up on intonations.
"Do you have a port of registry?" the Svaigh sergeant inquired with a frown, at least Wojciech thought it was a frown. He also wasn't particularly well versed in alien emotional subtleties.
"No, I'm a free cargo hauler. I prefer to work in human-controlled space, but sometimes I get freight to other places, like now."
"Are you transporting anything forbidden by the Alliance's trade declaration? Technology, compounds, living beings?"
"No, Sergeant. I'm not."
The Svaigh shifted his throat sac slightly.
"I need to inspect the cargo and the ship's information systems. I will remind you that the crew of the ship being inspected must provide access to all spaces, not just cargo holds, and to the computers, as well as offer full cooperation…"
"I remember, Sergeant."
"Excellent. First take us to your cockpit."
Wojciech obediently turned on his heels and headed for the cockpit.
The Sergeant knew his business well, he had a set of adapter programs for ports of all manner of different computing systems. Without another word, he attached a pocket device to the computer and quickly scanned the memory contents. Operating system, astrogation programs, databases, jump coordinate logs… A purely working set of data. Not a single gigabyte of extraneous information.
"Please enter the password to access your personal sections."
Wojciech frowned, "Sergeant, I don't think that's legal…"
The Svaigh glassy eyes bugged out at Wojciech, and his crest unfolded. At any other time, Wojciech would've enjoyed the view, it really was a rare sight.
"Keep talking back, human!" the Sergeant hissed, stretching out the sounds of Inter like all Svaigh. Any hint of politeness was gone in his voice. "You'll quickly end up in quarantine… and won't get out there for a long, long time. If at all."
Wojciech gloomily punched in the password on the keyboard.
The only thing the Sergeant did was look at the overall file size in Wojciech's personal section. He immediately lost all interest in the computer.
"It's clean," he turned to the guard with the stripe on his chest. "It wouldn't fit in here."
The other Svaigh shifted his crest and throat sac simultaneously.
"Fine," the Sergeant grunted, addressing Wojciech again. "Take us to the cargo."
Wojciech already knew that the patrolmen had scanned the Pencil during their approach. Their computer could give them the approximate molecular structure of the yacht and everything inside, including Wojciech and the bacteria in the living quarters. Were they really interested in the sarcophagus then? By the way the customs officer was asking about technology and immediately went to the computer, one could assume that something like information theft had taken place on Ssameo. Some important data was taken, maybe scientific developments, and the customs officers were doing anything they could to trace the leak. It was a hopeless task, confirmed hundreds of times. But the customs officers wouldn't back down because of the pressure from their bosses, who were, in turn, feeling the pressure from the colony administration, and so on… A foolish situation. Foolish and pointless. And it was always mere mortals like Wojciech who ended up suffering.
The Svaigh didn't pause at the threshold of the first cargo hold.
"Yeah," the Inter analog to this half-exhale and half-exclamation consisted of two hissing noises. The Sergeant hissed with pleasure, "Not much cargo. Or is it in the second hold?"
"The second hold is empty," Wojciech answered with a foreboding feeling. "This is all I'm carrying." He pointed at the lone sarcophagus in the middle of the empty compartment, which looked like a gym in the middle of a renovation.
The Svaigh walked up closer; the guards froze, while the Sergeant slowly walked around the sarcophagus.
"What is that?" he asked with the clear sign of awakening curiosity.
"Cargo," Wojciech shrugged. He didn't care whether these stubborn lizards understood human gestures. "I get paid, and I carry."
The Svaigh didn't seem to notice the slightly daring reply.
"What's inside it?"
His gaze kept alternating between Wojciech and the sarcophagus.
"What's inside?"
"No idea," this time Wojciech spread his hands. "A condition of the freight is that I must not be curious about the contents. And definitely mustn't get inside. See? It's sealed. I didn't get inside."
The Svaigh all stared at the seals and the string. It seemed that such ephemeral protection amused them. But the guards were clearly supposed to stay silent, even the one with the stripe, while the lower-ranked customs officers didn't dare to interrupt the Sergeant.
The Sergeant hesitated next to the sarcophagus for a few seconds, then carefully touched it. Wojciech even noticed that the Svaigh's scaly hand looked surprisingly harmonious against the scaly sarcophagus. Only the colors of the hand and the sarcophagus's material were different. The Svaigh's body was grayish green, while the surface of the rectangular box was dark gray with a barely noticeable reddish hue.
The Sergeant probably also felt the strange warmth, as his movements suddenly changed. There was now even a hint of smoothness; until now, he'd been moving like a giant frog, sharply and jerkily. He slowly turned to his patrol colleagues and quickly rustled something in the Svaigh language. His goggle-eyed assistant immediately fished out a long rod, probably a communicator, from his pocket and quickly rustled something into it.
Probably advising with the boat… Or reporting his find to the center, Wojciech thought gloomily. Why are they after me?
The Svaigh were clearly intent on scanning the sarcophagus thoroughly; they were setting up a portable emitter with a reflector on a tripod and a flat hanging monitor.
"Hey, hey!" Wojciech exclaimed with concern. "What are you doing? What if the radiation is harmful to the cargo?"
The Sergeant's frog-like eyes immediately turned to Wojciech.
"Didn't you say that you know nothing about the cargo?"
"I don't!" Wojciech confirmed heatedly. "So what? That's why I'm worried. If you ruin the cargo, I'm going to get a huge bill for damages! I'll spend the rest of my life paying it off!"
The Sergeant continued to stare at Wojciech coolly. His gaze called to him unpleasant associations with a drill.
"Besides, I'm transiting! From God knows where to God knows where! I'm just from a pulsation and will be leaving again! If something happened on your planet, it's definitely not me, can't you see that?"
Wojciech hadn't even noticed when his tirade turned into vulgar shouting. And shouting at government officials never had the desired effect; on the contrary, it served to anger them.
"Uh-huh! So now you're hindering a Patrol and Customs Service inspection? Violating the agreement regarding the planetary laws within the surrounding space? Excellent…"
Wojciech broke off at the "uh-huh." Now he was staring gloomily at the customs officer and was thinking feverishly on what to do. He had a bad feeling that scanning the sarcophagus would not be a good thing.
"Sergeant!" Wojciech found the right words. "Please allow me to at least contact my employer. I will gladly allow you to settle the question of scanning the cargo with him."
"You have instant comms?" the Sergeant inquired. It seemed he had trouble believing it.
"I do, damn it. How else can I contact a ma… an employer who is hundreds of light years away?"
The Sergeant exchanged glances with the striped Svaigh.
"Is it paid?"
Wojciech snorted, once again not caring whether the aliens knew anything about human emotions.
"Contact him."
"Thank you, Sergeant!" Wojciech said with relief and extended a hand towards the exit. "Please!"
They returned to the cockpit, and Wojciech, not hesitating for a second, launched the instant mail browser from the astrogation disk. Pushing the "Call" button on the virtual screen, he felt great relief.
Damn, it felt good to shift the responsibility onto someone else's shoulders! It almost felt like he had wings.
The image of the strange client appeared instead of the screen about three seconds later. This time the stranger wasn't wearing a cloak or a hat; Wojciech would've called his outfit a french two-piece [Footnote 2]. The narrow pants were tucked into silver boots that went up to mid-calf height. His large yes didn't seem to be expressing any emotions.
"Capta-ain?" he drawled inquisitively.
"I've got problems, umm…" Wojciech caught himself thinking that he didn't know how to address the stranger. He hadn't given a name. No name, no nickname. He wasn't going to call him "Doc" or "Master", that was for certain.
"What sort of problems?" the stranger inquired dryly.
Wojciech didn't have time to answer, as the Svaigh sergeant pushed his way into the pickup column. He had to make room and spread his hands, addressing the employer, "Customs…"
"Sergeant Lae Vaazi, Ssameo-Chussi patrol and customs service! The cargo being transported on Wojciech Shondrakowski's yacht belongs to you, doesn't it?"
"It does, Sergeant."
"The Captain has objected to our attempts at scanning the cargo. I trust there is cause for that?"
Wojciech was curiously observing the facial expressions of the aliens: the Svaigh and the stranger. The stranger remained completely calm, while the Svaigh was undoubtedly trying to figure out whom he was talking to. A bigshot or a flea he could press to keep it from annoying him.
Wojciech also felt a slight change in gravity. It seemed the docked patrol boat's was affecting the artificial gravity generator. The boat's mass was pretty decent, at least the mass of the Pencil herself.
"Captain Shondrakowski was right to object to the scanning of the cargo," the stranger said.
Wojciech felt a trickle of cold sweat run down his back. And great relief at the same time.
He hadn't called the big-eyed and toothy alien for naught. It turned out the sarcophagus shouldn't be scanned. So let him deal with the Svaigh customs then…
The Sergeant began a long speech that boiled down to the basic "Who are you to tell me what to do?", but, just in case, it was worded in a polite way.
Before the stranger could reply anything, Wojciech suddenly realized that his onboard computer was working, without any commands from Wojciech. He'd shut everything down after docking with he patrol boat.
The computer was putting out even columns of numbers onto the screen.
Wojciech pulled the keyboard to himself with concern.
"Captain Shondrakowski," the stranger's voice came.
Wojciech looked away from the computer, "Yes?"
"I ask you not to get distracted," the stranger demanded. "Leave the keyboard alone."
"But this—" Wojciech began.
"Later. Let's discuss it later. Is the cargo intact?"
"Of course! As soon as it was loaded at—"
"Excellent," the stranger interrupted him a little more quickly than he should have. Wojciech had a feeling that he really didn't want to let the Svaigh know about the Zoopht research base near Nabla Quadrant. "We're about to settle the issue with the customs…"
His voice suddenly grew distant and meaningless to Wojciech. Because the green light of pulsation lit up in the middle of the control panel. And jumping with the docked customs boat was nearly instantaneously death.
Wojciech barely had time to jump up and intercept the cold gaze of the eyes with vertical pupils, whose owner was thousands of light years away. The Svaigh didn't even have time to realize anything. Tearing open the docking tube, the Pencil jumped and materialized somewhere in deep space. Her hatches remained open, the air rushed outside with a howl, carrying with it anything it could grab. The pressure dropped rapidly. Emergency lights blinked, the machinery unlocked airlock controls and was trying to restore the seals.
For reasons unknown to Wojciech, the seals were not restored. He lived only a few minutes longer than the Svaigh and died from multiple internal hemorrhages.
The instantaneous mail browser had shut off during the jump. A short while later, the only thing aboard the dead Pencil that still retained warmth was the tightly secured gray-brown scaly sarcophagus in the first cargo hold.
Fourteen local days later, the Pencil's emergency rescue system came alive, and the yacht began following its own route, one pulsation after the other, returning virtually to the same spot where the sarcophagus had been loaded onto her. To the vicinity of the Nabla Quadrant system. Except the Zoopht base was no longer there.
Footnotes
1) A Latin phrase meaning "Moving within motion" or "Changing with change". It was the motto of the Nautilus in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
2) A french is a type of tunic worn by Russian Imperial and later Soviet military officers.