Life debt, p.1
Life-Debt, page 1
LIFE-DEBT
R.J. BLAIN
Life-Debt
by R.J. Blain
When scavenger and hybrid fox Viva comes across a derelict in empty space, what she and her furry partner, Pandora, discover puts them on a collision course for adventure, fame and wealth—assuming she survives the experience. Teaming up with the derelict's living cargo isn't wise, but the handsome stranger might hold the key to the ship and its many secrets. Add in some pirates out to profit from Viva's living head, and she's in for a wild ride.
Delivering the cargo to its rightful owner is the right thing to do, but getting the job done will test her skills, her sanity, and her limits.
Copyright © 2023 by RJ Blain
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover Design by Rebecca Frank of Bewitching Book Covers.
Contents
1. I went beyond foolhardy straight into the insane category
2. While I prided myself on my general ethics, I wasn’t dead
3. “I look forward to your arrival.”
4. “The next stage is unpleasant.”
5. Only larger ships boasted such features
6. Good men—of any species—were hard to find
7. Pandora would ultimately decide
8. He could read the manual and listen
9. One of them was the prized rainbow black
10. “Guard her.”
11. “It won’t be comfortable, but I can hold three.”
12. They called her Miracle Star
13. Their life-debt claim trumped everything else
14. They adored each other to the point of death
About the Author
ONE
I went beyond foolhardy straight into the insane category
When in the farthest reaches of space, the sane and wise stuck near the shiftgem gates, prayed to whatever entity they believed in, and traveled the most direct route to their destination. The rest risked death straying off the beaten path to venture into the void between the planets, stars, and space stations littering the universe.
I fit in the second category, and I cursed my foolhardy ways while cramming my tail into my spacesuit in preparation for a walk outside my ship. No, I went beyond foolhardy straight into the insane category. Only someone insane headed into the darkest, coldest reaches of space alone.
Well, sort of alone.
Where I went, Pandora followed, all ten, fluffy pounds of her. The red fox, Earth-bred with minor genetic manipulation to increase her intelligence and lengthen her lifespan, made for the ideal companion on long, lonely journeys. Sure, she couldn’t speak the primary languages spoken in the explored universe, but she made up for her linguistic failings through being adorable, trainable, and willing to go through hell and back with me for profit.
She preferred her pay in the form of treats, toys, and brushing. I took mine in a variety of currencies, with a preference for galactic standard tokens.
To earn our keep, we tangoed with a derelict that had drifted away from the nearest gate, likely the victim of technical failure. According to my scanners, a few of the derelict’s systems worked, and I failed to detect any signs of life aboard the ship. I’d already done the basics for the dead, using the tiny shrine I kept in my cargo bay.
The last thing I needed were ghosts haunting me because I hadn’t offered up a prayer for the lost.
With no life to worry about, I could blitz through, grab anything of use or value, and check if their engine still had intact shiftgem crystals. A single pair of crystals, which came in a myriad of colors and qualities, would pay my keep for years. If the freighter boasted a pair of black crystals, I’d be set for life, assuming neither had been damaged.
Without shiftgems, ships couldn’t make use of gates, which warped space, time, and distance to allow quick travel between various galaxies without requiring stasis or generational ships. Some still traveled via generational ship, although they were typically reserved for experiments requiring no access to the rest of the universe.
My ancestors, descendants from Earth, had once traveled on a generational ship. Over a thousand years after the start of their journey, I’d been born, a product of their determination to survive. My mother sometimes told me about life on the ship, but she always stated she was glad I’d been born on a tiny, habitable planet in Andromeda. I still questioned how the generational ship had traveled almost three million light years from Earth in only a thousand years.
My mother had shrugged, but she’d given me my first shiftgem shard that day, set in a pendant I still wore.
Until that day, I hadn’t realized Earth had been eradicated by the very stones we used to travel between the stars. I questioned how close to human I was, as I shared certain genes with Pandora. My mother claimed I came as close as it got, as I’d been conceived on the generational ship and born shortly after they’d made landfall. Something about her tone, a little sharper, warned me about digging into the little things separating me from my parents.
Neither of them had my ears or tail, a match for my Pandora’s. I appreciated having them, however. My ears offered heightened hearing, excellent for planetary exploration. My tail worked wonders for aiding my balance in sketchy situations.
A rather annoying genetic modification involved a tendency to grow a full coat of fur if I stayed in cold temperatures for too long, which shed out after exposure to heat for more than a week. Little sucked more than having to deal with shedding fur on a spaceship.
I supposed my parents, upon being granted permission to have me, had assumed I would need genetic modification for when they made their home on their new world. In reality, the modifications hindered as much as helped.
Inevitably, I lost hours upon hours cleaning filters and vacuuming to make certain I didn’t shut down a mandatory system, thanks to unwanted fur floating around when I had gravity turned off in my ship. Fortunately for me, I rarely needed to turn off gravity, as I’d earned a matched set of tri-color shiftgem crystals early in my career as a salvager. They granted me access to any gate without issue or high risk, powered most of my ship’s functions without even a hint of resonance humming, and made me a shiny target for other pirates and treasure seekers.
Well, it would make me a shiny target if anyone knew I had them. As I possessed some common sense and the ability to fix my own engines and gate drive, I had a backup system using a pair of common white shiftgem crystals, which could use a decent number of gates and were often found in exploratory vessels. Anyone without a lot of know-how on the operation of ships like mine would believe the secondary drive operated the entire ship rather than served as my backup. The white crystals couldn’t be used to jump often or far without running the risk of resonance or overloading, but their engines tended to zip along at an admirable place.
They could manage faster-than-light travel when set up by someone who knew what they were doing.
As I valued my life, mine could. If my main engine died on me—or my precious tri-color crystals shattered—I could be back online in a matter of hours. In a pinch, I could also move the second engine to another ship.
Like the derelict I meant to board.
Hmm. I’d never tried to haul a dead ship through a shiftgem gate before, but I had a tow assembly, and if I could rig my engine to work with their systems, the large white crystals could handle the extra load.
I finished stuffing my tail into my suit and began the tedious process of checking every seam. A leaking seam led to death, and while my suit had come with enough failsafes to please most, life in space had no room for error.
Rather than trust the failsafes, I did a manual check before running my suit through a base diagnostic scan looking for issues. The oxygen tank, equipped with a tiny green shiftgem crystal, would keep me topped up on oxygen for a period of three hours before I needed to return to the ship to recharge the crystal.
One day, I might understand how a stone could work with technology to circumvent basic science. I struggled enough with the whole idea I could enter the equivalent of an oversized doorway and get yanked across the universe at a rather ridiculous speed.
Chiding myself for allowing my attention to wander to something other than my work, I triple checked the seams before activating the suit’s HUD, reading over the diagnostic report. It reported no issues detected. I activated vitals monitoring and crouched beside Pandora, tapping the panel on her suit. While I’d done checks and ensured her oxygen tank worked before gearing up, I pulled up her suit statistics along with her vitals and reviewed them.
She checked out.
“All right, Pandora. Ready to go earn some treats?”
According to her excited squeaking and wiggling of her butt, she was ready to take over the entire universe as long as it earned her a treat.
I grabbed her leash, clipped one end to my belt and the other to her suit. Once on board, I’d activate her magnets, which would allow her to move around on her own, assuming the ship had no gravity. I hoped for gravity. Gravity made my life a great deal easier when plundering a derelict.
“Time to hit the airlock.” I waited for the fox to bound forward, the metal pads on her suit clanging against the floor, before following in her wake. As I’d taught her, she stopped in the middle of the square room and sat, waiting for me to close the inner door,
“There’s your first treat.” I grabbed the ship’s main tether, clipped it to my suit, and opened the hatch leading into space. The vast emptiness of the void never failed to amaze me, but rather than gawk at the endless stars, I ran to the edge of the gravity boundary, which ended at my ship’s hull, and leapt out, angling towards the derelict.
Yipping her excitement, Pandora followed me.
Upon exiting my ship, I drifted in the direction of the derelict, used a voice command to activate my boot thrusters at their lowest setting, and angled towards the freighter’s airlock hatch. I deactivated the thrusters once on the correct trajectory, gave Pandora’s leash a gentle tug so she’d alter her direction and join me, and activated my boot magnets, preparing for impact. I collided with the ship, feeling the clang that the vacuum of space otherwise devoured.
Had anyone been alive within the ship, they would’ve heard me coming long before I could break into their airlock. I twisted, watched for Pandora, and caught the fox. She made two short yips and a bark, activating her magnets, special made to release and activate in set intervals so she could patter around as she wanted. Sometimes, the fox forgot how to use her magnets in her excitement, requiring me to do the work for her. Once I had her secured to the hull, I pressed my glove to the hatch and tested it.
It spun in my hand.
Under normal circumstances, captains locked the hatches. In an emergency, the wise ones made certain help could get to them without having to break through the airlock. Within a minute, I had the hatch opened, and I clucked my tongue at Pandora. “Bark if there are bodies,” I requested.
The fox waited for her magnets to release before beginning her journey to the opening into the ship, careful to pull herself along. After a lengthy stop-and-go journey, she disappeared inside. Moments later, she yipped, her method of communicating there was nothing of interest. I released my magnets and followed her inside, nodding my approval over the pristine state of the airlock. Closing the hatch, I worked to determine if the airlock system remained online.
The lights over the interior hatch activated, and once I pressed the button to gain access to the ship, gravity took hold.
While we’d remain suited for the entirety of our exploration of the derelict, gravity made my job much simpler until it was time to move cargo to my ship—unless I claimed the entire ship as my cargo.
Pandora repeated her double yips and a bark to disable her magnets, went to the interior hatch, and sat to wait for me to give us access. Smiling, I said, “And that’s two treats for my best little girl.”
Pandora stayed put, although she thumped her tail in general excitement.
Like the exterior hatch, the interior one opened with ease, and some form of gas hissed as it entered the airlock. “Scan atmospheric conditions,” I ordered my suit. A moment later, I heard a beep, and the HUD informed me it ran the requested analysis. After a few moments, the report came back with lethal levels of carbon dioxide and other gasses with oxygen levels below the minimum required for life, implying the ship had lost its main oxygenation system somehow.
I wished asphyxiation on nobody, and I murmured another prayer for the dead I’d locate somewhere within the derelict. With luck, they’d be either suited or had already decayed to bone.
The close calls, the ones where if only I’d been a few days earlier, tended to haunt me.
I waited for the hissing to stop before stepping through the hatch and gesturing for Pandora to follow. As I’d taught her, she heeled, and she would continue to do so until I unclipped her leash. Until I got a better feel for the ship, I’d keep her close. After I checked for dangers, I’d turn her loose and give her a chance to shine.
Pandora couldn’t use her nose in a derelict environment, but she had an uncanny knack for finding interesting things in odd places.
Once inside the ship, I closed the interior hatch and checked the panel near the airlock, which included a screen display and a full keyboard. Many ships required link access, and while I had the implants installed behind each of my ears, keyboard access implied the designer of the ship had gone the redundant route. Links could fail. Links and keyboards were unlikely to both fail except during a catastrophic system shutdown, giving those on board the highest chance of survival.
It amused me that the more expensive systems included older, reliable tech.
I tapped the system access key, and the screen turned on, informing me that the ship’s manual override had been activated by the captain. The timestamp indicated the ship had died six weeks ago, and that all members of the crew had gone into their suits to allow for potential recovery of the ship and cargo. Then, in what I counted as a plea I couldn’t ignore, he’d left the ship’s destination.
Had the ship lasted a few more days, they would have passed through the gate and arrived alive.
In what I viewed as admirable bravery, the captain had given a play-by-play of the ship’s final moments, beginning with the breakdown of the main oxygen circulation systems. They had been unable to bring the system back online with no mention of why it refused to work.
To worsen their situation, the communication systems had gone dead during the same event, preventing them from sending word via their crystals, which connected to their destination planet, Cremora Delta 005-26. I recognized the naming convention as something from early human explorers who’d gotten lucky and escaped Earth on faster ships, leaving the generational humans to fend for themselves.
The Cremorans had taken roughly five hundred thousand humans away from Earth, establishing them on a variety of planets named after the Greek alphabet. The relevance of the numbers remained a mystery to me.
I could fix the communication problem readily enough through taking the crystals to my ship and plugging them into my system, reading the origin etchings to retrieve the needed comm code.
“It looks like we’re a proper salvage crew today, Pandora. Whatever cargo they have is important enough the captain bothered with setting the ship up to be easy to take. Now, why would he do that?”
Pandora regarded me with her bright eyes and waited with admirable patience, likely hoping for another treat. Ah, hell. Those eyes got me every time. “And yes, you get a third treat for being so damned cute.”
She squeaked at me.
I read through the message from the captain again, tapped on the keyboard to check if their short-distance relay system was online and discovered it worked. I accessed my ship’s system and began getting a full dump of the logs to review everything from the comfort of my chair without having to wear a suit.
Then, to hopefully keep the ghosts at bay, I offered yet another prayer along with an apology I hadn’t arrived in time to do them any good.
Once the data transmitted to my ship, I accessed the ship’s manuals, learning the layout of the place. My eyes widened as I read the labels of the primary rooms, including a stasis chamber. While a foundational piece of generational ships, stasis chambers cost more tokens than I cared to think about, typically required three people to successfully activate, and could turn people into cargo, which explained a great deal about the situation.
My ship lacked a stasis chamber, but I’d invested in a revival system should I happen across any unfortunate soul abandoned in stasis on a derelict. Authorities across the galaxy paid a fortune for the successful retrieval of those locked in stasis, with a bonus for reviving them and aiding with their recovery.
The derelict’s chamber was located not far from the airlock, and after a little work, I managed to send a copy of the blueprints to my suit for reference along with the crew and passenger list. A dead captain did me no good, but if someone had been locked in stasis, the nature of my work would change yet again.
