The chances of Stryker snagging any value-adds was diminishing with every decimal point above curve 9.3. The meter was at 9.37 and the shaking of the ship had already reached a point that earned him a trip to the guest quarters.
He stepped into the ship elevator and it whisked him away to the guest deck of the shift. In a world where transporters existed, obsolete technology like elevators and stairs should have disappeared, but despite the absolute assurance that transporters weren’t murdering people and putting exact replicas in place, people still used the old fashioned ways of travel.
It wasn’t like there was any way of proving that Stryker wasn’t dying and being replaced by a clone everytime he transported just as there was no real way to prove that the first time he existed was when he entered the elevator. Since humans could only experience the present, and never the past or the future, they had to assume all the events that led him to enter the elevator already happened.
If Stryker were living in a simulation, then how would he know that the entire program hadn’t started with him entering the elevator? Or what if he were in an alien mind prison and everything about his life was fabricated? There were many possible reasons why humans, always trapped in the present, may not think reality is what it is.
For all Styker knew, he could be a character in a story being read by a person who is another character in a story being written by another person who is a character in a story, and so forth. However, instead of pondering existence, he preferred to deal with only what he could deal with in the present, which was a call from an angry VIP traveler.
The elevator stopped, dinged, and wished him a fabulous day. The computer was less sterile than the processing powerhouses of the IF ships, and programmed to be a digital concierge. He stepped in the hall and walked through the luxurious corridors of the guest space.
Most IF ships were built for functionality with smoothed hallways with no sharp edges incase of sudden changes of gravity. Though most sudden changes in gravity turned crew members not strapped down into puddles of goo. By comparison, the guest area would create a lot of moving projectiles if the ship ever had to change its acceleration quickly.
There were plants and water fountains. Music played gently that could be customized by the guests to taste but hadn’t been altered from the default soothing tone. There were food stations that could create anything and would rotate between popular items when not in use. Had Striker been on one of his old combat ships, the little forks next to the lemon bars would be a death wish for anyone strolling through the corridor.
Despite his unease at all the unsecured items like the decorative rock pond with an iridescent frog, he had gotten used to it. The Second Prize had a weapons loadout because Star Cheap had bought it on police auction and the vessel had been a drug smuggling ship in its previous life. It was the right amount of decadence and battle ready to make the VIPs feel safe on their journey.
Not that they had anything to worry about. Any space pirates with a mind to kidnap and ransom off one of their guests also had the entire IF fleet to worry about as Earth based companies were considered under the protection of the IF. They certainly paid the IF enough in space pirate insurance.
That wasn’t to say that there weren’t thugs stupid or arrogant enough to target a vessel like the Second Prize, it just hadn’t happened yet. Still, Stryker was always vigilant, and combat ready.
He eventually made it to a large set of double doors at the end of the hall that were once the drug kingpin’s personal quarters turned into luxury hotel suite. There were other rooms he had passed along the way were for the entourage of the VIP client, or sometimes filled with different parties depending on how much they paid, but the High Jopnop paid for the entire ship just for one person.
Usually, people who paid for the entire ship were actors or musicians who traveled with their doctors, personal trainers, personal assistants, security guards, agents, managers, lawyers, family, tutors and nannies for the kids, cooks, and all the people hired just to ensure their life was consistent with an entire fridge of Colorado Spring Water no matter which room they happen to be just incase they wanted a drink.
One guest in a ship that could easily support a hundred was making the value-add prospects slim at best. People with entourages were easy to upsell as everyone wanted something, and if one of the security guards wanted to upgrade to the soda package on the boss’s dime, who was he to convince them otherwise, but an empty ship with a guy who’s only communication since entering the ship was to “speak to who’s in charge, right away” wasn’t a good setting.
It also didn’t help that the Captain had taken a supreme disinterest in their primary mission and had decided to spend the time waiting for the ship to finish accelerating to Curve 9.8 by playing Jipnuu with the grease monkeys down in Engineering.
Jipnuu was a card game that was a mix between Poker and Go, played with tokens, 7 sided dice, and a 72 card Drakian deck. Striker didn’t pretend to know all the rules of the game, but it was high stakes and many fortunes had been lost at playing Jipnuu. However, there was a Star Cheap regulation that capped the bets from employees even in personal games, so Jipnuu was mostly a rowdy game with a couple bucks exchanging hands.
The Indentured Servitude Act of 2383 prevented employees doing work for other employees in effort to pay off personal debt, thus ensuring that corporations were the only ones who could own Indentured Servitude contracts. Generally anything that kept money out of the hands of Star Cheap had relegations including gambling that may prevent a crew to cash in future paychecks for shipboard services.
He pressed a button on the panel to the suite and there was a chirp to alert the occupant inside of his presence. Stryker waited for a moment and then the door opened.
“Hello?” he said to no one in particular. He was too used to military vessels where someone would instruct him to come inside. However, civilians rarely followed military protocol and took the open door as an invitation. He wandered into the luxurious room that had plush orange couches and chairs for about twenty people, an infinity pool, a fireplace with brown reading chairs, and a full service bar that was just an atomic printer dressed up to look like a bar.
There was a glass of water and a decanter on the bar. The atomic printers had access to every beverage in the galaxy, many that would produce value-ads and the guy had chosen water. Stryker called out but didn’t get a response. Assuming that the man would not have chosen the hot tub room, he went to the bedroom.
Inside the bedroom there were more dressers, chairs, a brick oven intended for firing pizzas and a fire pole that connected the previous occupant to a full scale shooting range that Star Cheap refitted to be a private gym. sauna, and spa. The previous occupant had a fascination with early human projectile weapons, and the bullet holes were hard to get out of the bulkhead, so the designers sort of worked them into the paint scheme.
Their guest sat in the middle of a bed that could comfortably sleep five average sized humans, and even some more unusual aliens who were more or less humanoid in shape but just larger in size, once again distinguishing aliens by the forehead ridges.
The High Jopnop’s eyes were closed and his legs were folded while he meditated. Styker stood there for a moment then cleared his throat.
Their guest opened his eyes. “How do you expect me to reach Vishhashna with all this damned shaking?” He snapped with all the fury of man who probably rarely heard the word no and was probably used to lots of groveling from his underlings.
“I apologize for the inconvenience. We’ve been directed by Star Cheap to make haste to your destination. Could I interested you in a VR deck experience–”
“I don’t want any VR crap. I want peace and quiet and I can’t get that with my teeth chattering in my skull.”
“Our VR chambers have many soothing–”
“You can tell your damn Captain to slow the damn vessel so I can get some damn mediation before I have to face the den of jackals that is the conclave of the High Joppnops. Now, run along, before I have you stripped of your rank and sent back to whatever bar they dredged you from.”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
The man waved him off and Stryker’s blood boiled. No one would dare talk to an IF officer like that. But the Thorsolian Alliance was one of Star Cheap’s biggest customers as being the budget transportation option of the galaxy. An entire civilization of people who’d travel in a cabin the size of a coffin because it was the affordable interstellar option was big money for Star Cheap.
Stryker muttered his compliance as he left the room and then the word, “Prick” when he was out of earshot.
“Computer, locate captain Peecurd,” Stryker said.
“Captain Peecurd is not on this vessel,” the computer said.
There wasn’t any way a person could leave the vessel at the Curve speed, not unless that person enjoyed their atoms yanking apart and left like a breadcrumb trail. There were many easy ways to die in space but only two offered the chance to be stretched apart until all the atoms in the body popped their bonds. The first was diving into a black hole. The other was leaving the ship at curve speed.
“When did the captain leave the ship?”
“The captain is in Eleven Backward,” the computer said. Eleven Backward was the watering hole for the crew named because it was located in deck eleven at the ass end of the ship.
“Why did you say he wasn’t on the ship?”
“At the time, my sensors didn’t detect him on the ship, but now it does.”
Stryker made a mental note to have Engineering check out the glitch. He couldn’t afford any problems not with Jopnop Asshat on board. Stryker made his way to the lift and then said, “deck 11” when he got inside.
***
Peecurd thanked his lucky stars that the feeding tube eventually went through a self cleaning cycle, and was at least able to get some water. Not that the water did much for his queasy stomach and pounding headache but it was something. The problem with living on a starship and having a drinking problem was there was very little time he had to deal with the consequences of his actions.
Readily available medication meant that if he had one too many, the discomfort of the next day took only as long as the walk to an atomic printer. All the drugs were instantaneous relief and even though his liver was probably producing its own alcohol at this point, he kept it in steady supply.
Peecurd hadn’t always been a drinker. During his tour in the IF, he only touched the stuff on social occasions, and then maybe a drink or two. The heavy drinking didn’t start till he lost his commission and his wife on the same day. He knew that he was cliche but didn’t really care, the less he had time to think the happier he was.
Now that he was in an alien prison, all he had was time to think. Not that he could do much of it between the pounding head and the alien cellmate who wouldn’t shut up with stupid questions about human culture.
“Which do you think is better? George RR Martin’s ending to Game of Thrones? The TV show’s ending? Or the AI replica of George RR Martin that was built to write the ending while they were waiting for the author to finish the series?”
Peecurd only wanted to close his eyes and said. “I never saw the series, or read the books.”
“I thought they were required reading in your schools like the bible or the Beyonce scriptures.”
“Earth has lots of religions.”
“Wait? The Church of Swift doesn’t control the whole planet?”
“They are powerful, but we have separation between church and state. Fapple learned that it’s more profitable to sell to all religions than favoring one. That still doesn’t stop Swifties from passing religious law, but I think that’s always been a part of politics all the way to the first ape who realized it was more profitable to sell the rocks rather than throw them.”
“Do all humans have revelations in high school that make you so wise? Like the great Molly Ringwald, blessed be her name.” The alien did a combination of a cross and wavy hand dance popularized in the late twenty-first century.”
“What? You mean John Hughes movies? Those are… nevermind. Humans just enjoy fiction is all.”
“Fict Shawn?”
The concept of fiction was scarce in the galaxy. Most aliens who evolved the capacity for fiction wiped themselves out of existence before they developed the curve drive engine. When leaders of precurve civilizations made policy decisions based on fiction rather than fact, they usually ended up wiping themselves from existence.
For example, the Groglitdies of KRS-One V were a precurve society who nuked themselves out of existence when they thought nuclear winter would fix their climate change issues created by industrialized society. The Dodadorians from Bun B II turned their entire planet into paperclips when the top brass were convinced that coding ethics into AI was for suckers, and the Eeezzzoocrus from Minaj III all died of preventable infectious disease.
Humans were one of the rare exceptions that against all odds, they limped out of their precurve age and joined the interstellar community despite the human’s propensity to believe in fiction. While there was no rule preventing interstellar species from contact precurve civilizations, most races didn’t do it because there was very little profit to be made from precurve planets because the entire GDP of most precurve societies were equivalent to the peanuts line item on the Star Cheap budget.
Most precurve civilizations developed on their own, not because of high minded idealism, but rather because precurve cultures were the equivalent of driving to the remotest desert on Earth, finding an ant hill, and attempting to sell flood insurance to the local residents. Generally considered not worth the effort.
Thus, Captain Peecurd was used to dealing with aliens that had very limited senses of humor, often understood humans entirely from pop-culture and cat memes, and had about as much understanding of sarcasm as potato does of shepherd's pie. Which was why when a big and hairy ape-lizard-man-she-he-pod creature from Kayne III appeared in a shimmer of yellow light on one of the empty beds and Peecurd said “Just our luck,” the blue alien, named Zank, said, “Yippie!” and promptly got his arm torn off by an angry ape-lizard-man-he-she-pod creature.
“Why did you bring me here?” the ape-lizard-man-he-she-pod creature growled, which we will now be referred to as Fin because the entity’s name is Fin. It should also be noted that it looked more or less like a gorilla wearing a lizard costume or a lizard wearing a gorilla costume depending on the beholder’s perspective. Also the term man was used to describe its shape not gender. Despite having no outwardly distinct gender identifiers, Fin got quite incensed when the gender was misidentified. He/she pronouns were always used when encountering residents of Kayne III for anyone who enjoyed keeping their limbs. Also, pod was to describe that they were a race rather fond of airpods.
Peecurd, who had dealt with Fin’s people before, raised his hands and said, “We mean you no harm!”
“He certainly meant me harm!” Zank squealed as he attempted to staunch the blue blood of spurting out of the socket where his arm used to be.
For reasons mentioned above, Fin roared and tore Zanks another arm from his socket.
“Be careful with your pronouns,” Peecurd said. “He/she is very sensitive about gender identification.”
Fin tossed the limbs to the side, and Zank dove on to them. He tried to pop them back into the sockets, which was a challenge without functional arms and involved a lot of squirming, wriggling, and wrangling.
“What I hate more than gender stereotypes is being kidnapped,” Fin said with a predatory smile and Peecurd held his ground as the creature advanced on him. Kanyeians were known for exceptional strength and it was a fight Peecurd wouldn’t win, but they also respected bravery, so standing his ground was his best option for keeping both his limbs intact.
“If I were the one kidnapping you,” Peecurd said. “Would I be so foolish as to put you in the same cell as me?”
“Perhaps you are playing a sick psychological game.”
“Perhaps, but wouldn’t an intelligent person such as yourself see through it?”
“I have seen all the Saw documentaries.”
“There you have it. If I was a mastermind who’s ultimate goal is to get you to saw your own leg off, would I be foolish enough to be in the room with you while you pummeled me to death with that leg?”
“I do enjoy pummeling people to death with limbs.”
“Clearly, so maybe you can help us get out of here? That door might not be able to withstand your strength.”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Zank said, who now had both of his arms back. Other than the mess the blood had made, it looked like he had escaped his encounter with Fin unscathed.
“Regeneration?” Peecard said, looking at the arms.
“Oh, nothing so sophisticated,” Zank said. “My people just have interchangeable parts like your Mr. Potato Head doll.”
As if to test the theory, Fin tore off Zank’s leg, and the blue alien toppled to the ground but not before cracking his head on the corner of the bed.
“That doesn’t mean we don’t feel pain though,” Zank said in a muffled voice.
Fin tossed the leg back. “No wonder they came off so easily. I usually have to work at it for limb removal. I can demonstrate.”
Fin reached for Peecurd and he cut him/her off. “Maybe you should conserve your strength for the door.”
“That wouldn’t be wise,” Zank said. “As I was about to say, that little nozzle up there.” He pointed to the weapon/camera above the door. “It zaps you if you try to muck with it. I know. I attempted to fiddle with the controls when I first got here.”
“I’m not afraid of any paltry ray gun,” Fin said and attempted to force the door. After a few moments a green beam shot from the device and blew Fin across the room. Lucky for Peecurd and Zank, the ill-tempered creature was knocked unconscious.
Peecurd held his pounding head.
