Page 27 of Monsters After Dark

Star Crossed

Leslie Chase

In hindsight, drinking coffee during the transition out of hyperspace was a terrible idea, but how was I to know? I’d done this a thousand times, and every one of them I’d dropped into realspace to see black emptiness punctuated with distant stars.

This time a chunk of starship hull the size of a car greeted me. I barely had time to swerve out of its path, and it wasn’t alone.

The sensors filled with vectors showing dozens of contacts, all whirling in different orbits. I dodged the second piece to come my way, but the third hit, and hit hard. Luckily for me, it was small enough not to tear my ship in half. That was the only good news.

The Stardancer jerked and shook from the impact, artificial gravity failing for a second. I had just enough time to see the coffee float free of its cup, a weird dark sphere, before the gravity snapped back on. The hot coffee went from floating to splashing instantly. On me, on the controls, on the photo of my family I kept on the wall for good luck. Everywhere.

Behind me, in the living area, Freefall yowled a protest. As the ship’s cat, she had every right to complain, but as the ship’s human, I ignored her. With the holoprojectors covered in coffee the displays were unreadable chaos and I ran through every swearword I knew in English, Galtrade, Spanish, and Hormza as I tried to steer onto a safe course from memory. If the coffee got into the circuits and fried them, there was no repairing them, but if another of those hunks of junk hit I’d be just as dead.

Alarms blared all around me, overlapping each other as I settled into what I thought was a junk-free orbit. “Yes, I know,” I called back to the cat, pulling off my stained t-shirt and using it to mop up the spill as fast as possible. No way was I about to leave the pilot’s chair to look for a more suitable cloth, not when every second counted.

The displays blurred back into visibility as I scrubbed the projectors. Too many of them were red for my liking, but the most pressing was the proximity alarm, flashing COLLISION IMMINENT in unmissable urgency. I grabbed the controls, abandoning clean up in favor of survival and cursing the universe for not giving me a moment to catch my breath.

“What the fuck—” I stared at the sensor display, incredulous. Dozens had been an understatement—there were hundreds of contacts. No, thousands, moving in different directions at various speeds. Instead of arriving at the edge of the debris field as I’d intended, I’d landed in the middle of it. My shock lasted a second too long, and the clang of something hitting the hull rattled my bones.

The lights flickered and a horrible grinding noise behind me filled my heart with dread. If the impact tore the ship open, that would be that.

No deadly whistle of escaping air followed, though, and the lighting steadied. I got my breathing under control as I maneuvered the Stardancer out of the way of more incoming debris. The scanners picked up more details on the near-misses, and I whistled, my eyes widening. Rumors of an Elder Race wreck had led me here, but I’d never expected this much treasure to be flying around. This was the richest I’d ever seen, enough to start a gold rush, and I was here first. At the heart of the debris was the big prize, a battleship nearly a kilometer long, untouched in the ten thousand years since the Elder War.

If I could get to it, filling the Stardancer’s hold with salvage would make for the biggest payday Stardancer Salvage had seen since Grandma founded the firm.

Unfortunately, big prizes made for big junkfields. I’d expected a much smaller vessel, a destroyer at most. No one expected to find a battleship, it was like hitting a dozen jackpots at once. Over the millennia, scavengers had picked the big battlefields clean. Somehow, this one went unseen until a couple of astronomy undergrads on the closest planet spotted the faint traces of the Elder gravitic engines, and rumors started to spread.

A smaller wreck and my jump would have put me far enough out to assess the salvage safely, while still being close enough to get in fast before some of the bigger players turned up and claimed everything. Instead, I’d landed in the middle of this whirling vortex of junk.

“At least now I can see where’s safe,” I said to Freefall as I shunted the Stardancer into a path with relatively few chunks of spaceship to avoid. In this chaotic swarm of wreckage, safety was a fragile and temporary thing, but now I could afford to split my attention. “We’re alive, the Stardancer’s still flying, and the wreck is much bigger than I thought. I’ve even beaten Kyross here. This is a good day.”

Freefall tilted her head to the side and flicked her ears. I didn’t blame her for her skepticism—I had to get enough salvage to pay for the repairs as well as turn a profit.

“Time to see how much trouble I’m in,” I said. The collision alarm had stopped screaming at me, so I could spare the attention to see how fucked I was. “Status report.”

The damage control display glowed an ominous red, and reports scrolled past. I greeted each one with a different swearword.

Life support: marginal.Fuck. Survivable, but frightening. The ship was rated for six adult humans, so Freefall and I would be fine unless things deteriorated, but it would be an expensive repair.

Communications: short range only. Damn. The impact had sheared off the long-range antenna. I didn’t want to call for help, but the option would have been nice. I kept the short-range retracted and safe—the antenna would give me a longer range, but that wasn’t worth the risk of losing it.

Engines: 73% function.Shit. That looked worse than it was: I’d launched with them at 80%. Couldn’t afford to put any more stress on them, though.

Hyperdrive: offline.

“Fuckshitgoddamn.”

That was the most coherent thought I could form. Without a hyperdrive, my chances of surviving this little disaster dropped from ‘slim’ to ‘laughable.’ Like most leftovers from the War, this debris field lay well away from inhabited space, far enough out that the sun it orbited just looked like a brighter-than-usual star. With a hyperdrive, home was a week away. In realspace, just getting back to the inhabited inner system would take months.

“Assuming the engines hold,” I muttered. “And the food stock lasts. And—”

The collision alarm blared again, loud enough to drown out my thoughts. This time I was ready and before I thought about it, I’d jinked the Stardancer out of the way of a chunk of hull nearly as big as my ship. The yowl of a cat being rudely flung about by my desperate maneuvers replaced the alarm.

“Sorry, sorry,” I called back without looking. Freefall could fend for herself on a spaceship, and I needed my attention on the scanners and thrust controls. Debris floated everywhere, and the prize I planned to loot lay right at the heart of it.

Backing out might have been the smart plan, but I had no intention of coming home with a half-wrecked ship and an empty hold, ruining the family business. Second best would be to fly clear of the debris, get some distance and look for things worth snatching from the edges of the vortex. But that would take time, and time I didn’t have. The one advantage of being a small business was that we could respond to news fast.

The wreck of an Elder battleship would get all our rivals scrambling for a share. The longer I took to stake my claim on the valuables, the more risk that one of the big players would turn up and keep me away from the good stuff. They might be slower getting here, but once they arrived, I wouldn’t be able to keep up. Even another small firm would be competition I didn’t need.

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