6
Irpul-4
’s third class starport consisted of a series of old multilinked bubble domes offering access to starships and other craft along the sides and at key junctures above. The port itself covered nearly thirty square kilometers and formed the central hub of the Gigacorp city sprawled around it.
Naero and her crews
received their delivery orders and dropped down to land, unload, load, and confirm payments. Gray, blue, purple, and brown corrosive dust hurricaned around them, even as they decelerated.
Viewed from above by
Spacer eyes, the old starport looked just like any other Corps dump hole.
Naero
’s jaw ached from clenching it during the flight in, but she ground her teeth again.
Her
brother Jan remained on
The Slipper
with Aunt Sleak, choosing to seclude himself in his room with his feelings about the news.
It might go harder on Jan. He kept everything inside and always tried to act cold and aloof. She worried about how hard the loss could be for him if he shut himself off from his grief.
At times he went off on his own for months at a time, pulling away from everyone. Even her.
How was he coping?
Not to mention, that on a real universe, practical level: losing their parents and their entire fleet also meant a serious loss of Clan status, influence, and wealth for
the both of them. Their parents had sunk every meg they had into that venture.
Now all of those investments were gone
, completely wiped out.
Naero and Jan
’s temporary assignment to Aunt Sleak’s small merchant fleet, the one she bought from their parents, looked more and more like a lifetime appointment now.
They had
nowhere else to go.
An aft stabilizer froze up. Naero compensated before it spun her out of control, crashing into her starboard transports.
Naero gripped the shaking controls harder, steeled herself, and struggled to remain focused. She had a shift to fill, and three blue bands of merchant service rank on her arms to live up to–rank she had fought for and earned, despite her youth. In nearly fifteen years of duty to Clan Maeris since the age of five, she had never missed a shift, never ducked a duty.
She couldn
’t let that slack, no matter what had happened, regardless of how she felt about her and Jan’s loss.
Up ahead loomed Omni
Gigacorp’s primary shipping depot, an old pyramid structure a few klicks high. She and the other six transports made their landing approach. The massive doors of the designated loading bay opened for them.
“
Form up on my mark and vector in,” she commanded.
Naero
piloted her lead transport inside and set it down easy, stiff controls be damned. She plugged in orders to have her crew fix that faulty stabilizer before they left.
She went through the motions and coordinated the
landings of the other six transports and dozens of her aunt’s people sent to unload Omni’s shipments.
Her
teams assembled in front of their glowing, open cargo holds, each Spacer garbed in the same uniform: tight black Nytex Spacer uniform togs, high boots, loading gear, and glowing azure bands of merchant fleet insignia displayed proudly on their arms.
Naero
pushed her inner tension and shock aside once again.
As the lead pilot and team leader, Naero wore a gravwing strapped to her like a small pack with auto-deploying spolymer
nanotek wings. But she hadn’t activated them yet.
Instead
, she walked straight up to the waiting, meaty dock captain, a heavyset lander in faded, dark blue Omni Corps coveralls. He leered at her with a scarlet face, gnashing a short dark stub of Spican harstick, the sides of his maw yellowed and blackened from years of addiction to the synthetic root and the low stim dose it released.
The sharp pungent
odor of harstick permeated the man right down to his glands and the very air about him.
Naero secretly despised most landers.
He nearly threw the trade loading packet into her hands.
“
You spacks have two hours to deliver and vacate my dock,” he snapped. Old Corps military by his tone and his contempt for Spacers. The most hateful landers called them ‘
spack
s,’ a dehumanizing insult from the wars.
She
’d encountered such tiresome attitudes on her merchant runs so often that they hardly bothered her anymore. But today, such insults grated on her.
“
Let’s see what we have,” Naero said. She opened the packet and took out their agreement and inventory exchange chips. She plugged them into her handcomp and double-checked them while the dock captain waited. The precise location for each inbound and outbound package lit up on her filtered display, logistics flowing to the loaders.
“
Looks in order.”
“
I know it’s in order, spack.” He spat out a vile gout of black juice and goo to one side, almost as if vomiting. The stench was putrid
“
My people are waiting. Get on it, spack. You’re burning my simulated daylight.” He turned and walked away; the foul stench faded with him.
Naero
stared after him for an instant and mildly shook her head. Was the guy trying to piss her off? Not a good idea. Not today.
“
And a pleasure doing business with you and the Corps too,” she said. “As always.”
She turned back to her crew
, most of them young and headstrong like her. Naero activated her gravwing and rose a few feet off the ground to help oversee their stop and drop. Her unit hummed slightly and the short wings deployed, flexing and adjusting with the gravfield.
The last
Spacer War with the Corps hadn’t been that long ago. Resentment and even outright hatred between Corps landers and Spacers were still all too common. Naero found it useful to maintain an ironic sense of humor.
“
All right, loaders. The pleasantries are over, so let’s get to it. You’ve had your little inbound nap time. So get your asses in order and do some work. Stay on schedule.”
A spattering of honks, salutes, beeps, and
“yes, sir, commander sir” filtered back in her general direction. The loader crews formed up and took their assignments like a hive of black-and-yellow striped bees buzzing off in various directions.
The hum and drone of glifters filled the air.
Insectoid grav-assisted bot arms attached to a protective cage and lift harness.
She
floated around another GV, just in time to overhear Saemar and Chaela, whispering to each other while prepping their glifters.
Her mates ke
pt their voices low.
“
Any more word? What kind of run were her parents on?” Chaela asked, her long, blond braid swinging to one side when she bent over.
S
aemar shook her pretty geisha-like face and whispered back, “Not much else so far. Some kind of deep space exploration mission with a sect of the Cumi.”
Both of their faces
reflected shared grief and anger.
Naero considered
zipping forward to let them see her, but what could she say? Her mates and the crew would continue to speculate about the loss of her parents and the exploration mission among themselves, even if they said nothing around her and Jan.
Out of respect, everyone kept their distance
and didn’t broach it in front of them.
Even her best friend
Gallan seemed quiet and uncertain of what to do or say.
Naero didn
’t know herself. Stumbling upon them gossiping made her realize just how much she was still in shock. But perhaps they had heard something more. Anything.
“
Any more details?” Chaela asked.
Saemar shook her head again.
“Few deets and just a lot of spec, sweetie. There’s talk Intel may have been–”
“
Shadowforce?”
“
Shh...” Saemar frowned and climbed into the straps of her glifter, adjusting her harness. “Well, if they weren’t in on it before, they are now. The loss of an entire Spacer strike force, including an exploration flagship of
The Omaria’s
fame is a serious interstellar incident.”
“
Who do they really think...?”
“
Who else?”
Chaela snarled and clenched her fists.
“Matayan corsairs. Always doing the Corps’ dirty work.” She spat on the floor. “Murdering bastards. They’ve butchered enough or our families. They can eat shit and drink piss.”
“
Rep that, sweetie,” Saemar added. “You know how I feel. Piss on their dead.”
That was
one of the reasons Saemar was the way she was now.
Matayan raiders had killed the fighter wing captain from Clan Mitsubishi whom she had been engaged to.
Hikaru had taken several enemy fighters down with him, but in the end, he was still gone. Forever.
After that, Saemar had kind of flipped and gone on a binge with other guys. But she never again made any long-term attachments.
Naero did the only thing she could in her current estimation. She bobbed the other way. Went on with her work at hand. Best to keep busy.
Inside the loading bay they
basically had a large cube to maneuver in, three hundred meters long by nearly as wide and high, lined with loading platforms from top to bottom. Every spot linked and coded.
The
Spacer glifter teams went straight to work. With the data Naero sent them, they bobbed up and down in the air to both deliver and gather assigned cargo from their transports and various platforms. It looked like organized chaos to anyone watching, but there was a system to it.
A
nother jolt of pain reminded her how much it might have been a bad idea to wear that psy helmet.
Naero tried to focus on the automated tally sequences running on her handcomp. Aunt Sleak
’s profit margins fluctuated as new market info came in. Naero found it hard to concentrate on the last minute pweaking required to maximize those profits.
All of that
suddenly seemed so unimportant now, with her parents gone. Of course rumors and speculation about anything would always run wild.
No,
she reminded herself, her parents were not gone. Taken. They had been taken from their family, possibly by Matayan butchers.
The slight body hairs between her shoulders and up the back of her neck flared with a tickling flicker like electric fire.
Like an unspoken voice in her mind, straining to warn her.
She quickly scanned the massive inner cor
e of the warehouse section.
Danger? Someone focusing
or sighting in on her? What was it?
Something had her on
high alert, but she couldn’t place or identify it. Again, like a voice buried deep in her skull, trying to warn her.
She shook her head. Perhaps
stress and everything all together simply made her paranoid.
“
Frost,” she said aloud. She let out a sigh.
Keep calm, keep your
shit together. Just get through your shift.
“
That’s right,” she heard Gallan say. She felt her friend’s big gentle hand on her shoulder, almost a stroke as it pulled away. He was half a year older than her, with only one band of rank on his arms. Unlike her, Gallan was too busy enjoying life to worry much about ambition or promotion–let alone getting his own ship someday. He left that all to her.
With her floating, she was eye level with him.
She looked into the kindness of his thick face and couldn’t help but smile.
Yet neither could she ignore the
same old childhood jealousy between them and felt it creep into her grin.
She
silently cursed Gallan’s side of the family for making him and their cousins so damnably tall.
All her life
Naero had yearned for a few more millimeters herself, but she was exactly the same height as her shorter, slender mother.
Some
might have thought, with her father being so tall, that...
Naero caught herself,
stopped smiling, and felt her brows knit.
All thoughts returned to her
dead parents somehow.
Gallan
looked about to say something when actual warning alarms sounded. Naero’s sense of impending danger spiked again. She glanced around.
Old metal supports
above them groaned and strained for an instant under great stress.
Then an entire section of loading platform gave way, thirty meters above and to their rear. Ton upon metric ton of goods and supplies toppled into the open air, along with three Corp
s personnel–crashing straight down at her and her people.