Not All Jobs Are Good Jobs
“I wish you’d consult me on these jobs. Carrying contraband will get me impounded,” Skip said from the speaker in the ceiling. The Valerian Coop Infiltrator was hurtling through the compressed space-time of a wormhole. The low hum of the wormhole generator down in Engineering vibrated through the ship.
Jackson Caruso, Jax to his friends, was sitting at the pilot station. He looked up. “Oh, come on. It’s not like this is the first job like this that we’ve done. It’s always fine. You worry too much.” He grinned. He consulted his console. The cargo hold two decks below had several containers that were almost certainly full of something highly illegal.
“Easy for you to say. The Empire won’t scrap you and reformat your brain over and over until you’re dead.”
From one of the two stations behind Jax’s pilot station, Rudy, a small, rust-colored navigation droid said, “And turn your body into a toaster or dishwasher.”
“For an SI you’re awfully melodramatic. Have I ever told you that?” He looked over his shoulder to Rudy. “Both of you.” Computer intelligences fell into two categories: sentient intelligence (SI) and rudimentary intelligence (RI). Skip and Rudy were both of the former variety. RIs tended to be nav computers, strategy assistants, and the like. Things that didn’t speak and usually had only a single function. SIs ran households, ships, cities, and such. Or at least they did before the Empire.
Skip was the SI that managed the systems of the Osprey, Jax’s Scout Ship. He got his name from Jax as a toddler. Jax’s parents had just addressed the SI as “ship,” but when Jax was learning to speak, ship came out skip, and it stuck.
From the speakers, there was a static crackle. Then Skip said, “Twenty seconds to normal space.”
From his station, Rudy said, “According to the contract, we’re to meet up with a freighter to offload the cargo.”
“Five, four, three, two,” Skip began counting down. When he hit one, the swirling purple-hued vortex the ship was in flashed, and a pitch-black void opened directly ahead of them. In the span of a heartbeat, the Osprey was back in normal space.
“One contact, fifty thousand kilometers out and closing,” Skip announced.
“Must be our contact,” Rudy said. He disconnected from his station. Jax’s parents had modified it when they bought Rudy. Technically, Skip could do navigation calculations on his own. Rudy, however, had specialized processing cores and could run the calculations faster. Every second had made a difference in the war. His cylindrical body had a single smart material rollerball that he balanced on. Jax always teased him that he looked like an upside-down deodorant stick with arms. He rolled forward to stop next to Jax’s seat. “Ugly.” He raised a thin metal arm, pointing out the transparent forward windows.
Now less than twenty thousand kilometers and closing off their port bow was a freighter at least a dozen times bigger than the Osprey. Where the Valerian Coop Infiltrator was sleek and aerodynamic, the freighter was a massive rectangle with engines. The crew and command module made up a spine that ran from the engines forward. Cargo modules were connected to that spine at hardpoints. Jax couldn't see a single module that didn't look older than him. The freighter had closed the gap to less than a kilometer and was still approaching.
Jax nodded. “No kiddin’.” He looked at his console. A light was blinking. He tapped the communications controls, then looked at one of the monitors mounted above his station. A middle-aged woman appeared. Jax smiled. “Hi there, I’m—”
She held up a hand. “I don’t need to know your name. You have the cargo?”
Jax nodded. “Yup. How do you want to do this?” Under his breath he mumbled, “Rude.”
“Fast. Pull alongside. Drift the cargo over.”
Jax groaned as quietly as he could. “Sounds like a plan.” The screen flickered, then resumed showing a schematic of the Osprey. He looked at the ceiling. “Baxter, we’re drifting the cargo over. You good to take care of that?” He looked out the forward window, the ugly freighter was now just over a hundred meters away.
A groan sounded from the ceiling speakers. “Yeah.”
Do The Job You're Paid To Do
Down in the cargo hold of the Osprey, a matte black combat droid was shoving two meter by two meter cargo modules around, moving them closer to the portside cargo door. Wirelessly, he instructed Skip, Kill the gravity, please.
A second later, everything in the not-overly-large cargo hold shifted as the artificial gravity disengaged. Baxter, a Mark IX combat droid, magnetized his feet, then asked Skip to open the cargo door. When the thick door slid away, he saw the much larger bulk freighter parked less than one hundred meters away from the Osprey. An equally large cargo door slid open on the other vessel, revealing two crewmen in bulky EVA suits. One of them waved. Their gloves were not the same color as the rest of their suit.
Baxter returned the gesture, then guided the first of ten modules across. It would be nice to have room to move in the cargo hold again. As it moved through the static atmosphere barrier that kept the ship’s atmosphere inside, a faint blue line moved across it. Seeing as he could vaporize a small rodent from over a kilometer away with any of his assorted blasters, drifting a two-ton cargo module a hundred meters to arrive exactly where he wanted without crushing the parties on the receiving end was a piece of cake. In less than ten minutes, Baxter had sent all ten modules across to the other ship. He didn’t wait for the last one to be caught by the other ship as he closed the cargo door. We’re good to go, he wirelessly transmitted to the flight deck.
On the flight deck, Baxter’s voice came out of the overhead speakers. “We’re good to go.”
Jax nodded and toggled the comm system. “We’re heading out, unless you need anything else.”
The woman appeared on the screen again. “We’re all set. I’ve let our contact know that we’ve made the hand off.” She made a mock salute gesture, then closed the channel.
Jax powered up the sub-light engines and guided the Osprey away from the larger cargo hauler. “Wormhole generator ready?” he asked.
From his station, Rudy answered, “Yup, board is green.”
Humanity had been trying to unlock the secrets of Faster Than Light travel for decades when the solution fell into their laps. While most of the United Nations was working on Alcubierre Warp Drive technology, a small Japanese expedition to the Jovian moon Ganymede discovered the ruins of a crashed starship, alien in every way. Aboard the ship was a functional wormhole generator. Once scientists found out what it was, it took less than twenty years to reverse engineer and mass produce human made versions. The owners of the ship never showed up, and no ship like the Ganymede ship was ever seen again, anywhere.
The galactic gold rush began the moment the first colony transport went through the swirling energy vortex of a wormhole bound for the Alpha Centauri System, then Epsilon Eridani, Wolf 359, and so on. Humanity spread quickly from then on.
Once Jax had confirmed that the wormhole was stable, he powered down the flight console, letting Skip take over. “Two days back to Kelso. I’m gonna reheat that pizza and watch some TV.” He went down the stairs.
Are You Jax Caruso?
The Angry Spacer was the type of place that visitors to Kelso station would hear about, then stay as far away from as possible—which was what made it Jax Caruso’s favorite, or at least second favorite, place on the station. His favorite was probably his mechanical bay. After Skip, it was the only thing he owned. Memaw left him the bay when she passed. After his parents were killed, she had raised him for a few years before a rare cancer that medical science couldn’t cure took her.
Lucas wiped the bar in front of Jax with a rag that seemed to apply dirt, not remove it. His cybernetic arm whirred and clicked as it moved. “Haven’t seen you in a bit, Jax.” He placed a tall glass of beer on the bar and pushed it towards Jax’s open hand.
Jax nodded, dropping onto a barstool. “Picked up a courier job, ended up running who knows what out to the Neo Egypt sector.” He looked around. “You haven’t seen the Delphinos, have ya?”
Lucas shook his head, his arm whirring as he grabbed a bottle of something pink from the shelf. “Nope, haven’t seen ‘em in a few days.”
Jax smiled. “Good. I owe ‘em money and don’t think Stevie can keep Marshmallow from kicking my ass for much longer.”
“You know what would keep him from kicking your butt? Paying them. Course, whatever is going on with you and Steve may be complicating that,” the other man offered before nodding to a group of spacers that might have been natives of the Neo Egypt sector themselves.
“Where’s the fun in that?” Jax replied loud enough for Lucas to still hear. The other man shook his head as he approached the ebony-skinned spacers.
“Are you Jackson Caruso?” a voice asked from behind him.
Jax didn’t look up. “Nope.”
He looked over his shoulder at a middle-aged white man in what looked like an expensive suit. It took the man a few seconds before he said, “Uh, your business manager said I’d find you here and described you, in detail.”
Jax shrugged. “He’s a liar.”
“So, you are Jackson Caruso?” the man pressed.
Jax exhaled and spun on his barstool. “What do you want? I have a lovely night of getting drunk and making questionable decisions ahead of me.” He turned slightly to catch the eye of a woman sitting with two friends at a table a dozen or two feet from the bar. He winked. The woman blushed while her two friends had what would at best be highly disapproving expressions on their faces.
The business man cleared his throat. “Um, yes, well, I need your help. I’m Sylvester Kline. I represent ReliefCorp. We’d like to hire you.”
Jax looked around. He leaned over to look behind the businessman for the candid vidcast crew that surely was lurking nearby. “Uh, what? Why would you want to me to be a relief worker? Nothing in my life would make anyone think that was a thing I’d excel at.”
From the other end of the bar, Lucas said, “Yeah, he’s pretty selfish.” Jax looked down the length of the bar and flipped him off. Lucas added, “And lazy.” The bartender smirked.
The man cleared his throat. “I…no.” He shook his head. “We don’t want you as a relief worker. We need you to rescue some, actually.”
Jax turned back to the businessman. “I’m sorry, what? Rescue them? The aid workers?”
The man pushed Jax aside to set a data tablet on the bar. The screen came to life showing a data file for a planet, Mariposa.
“Mariposa?” Jax asked, “The bloody-civil-war-in-progress Mariposa?”
Kline looked from the tablet to Jax. “Well, yes, currently. ReliefCorp has had an aid station set up in the lower highlands outside the capital for almost five years. We’ve been helping build out their infrastructure. The Imperial supported government has been making strides in consolidating their control over the planet. Our camp was helping those efforts. We’d assembled several large solar farms to bring power to the capital and several outlying settlements.”
Jax blinked. “And…”
Kline sighed. “Three weeks ago, we lost contact with the camp. We believe the comm sat, left in orbit when the workers were dropped off, has been destroyed.”
Jax tapped the tablet screen, scrolling the data. “So have the Empire take care of it. They want the planet, after all. Their puppet government is in control, right?”
“Well, we would, but,” the man cleared his throat again, looking incredibly uncomfortable, “the Imperials pulled out just over a week ago.” Jax opened his mouth, but Kline continued, “Apparently, whatever the Empire was hoping to get out of having Mariposa under their control didn’t pan out, so they left. Took their equipment, their troops, all of it. Without the Imperial presence, things have quickly spun out of control. The rebels launched full-scale attacks on several cities. There is fighting in the streets of the capital. One of the settlements nearby has been completely destroyed.”
Jax nodded slowly. “I see, and so, what? You want me to go grab your do-gooders, yeah?” Kline nodded. Jax continued, “And my, business manager, gave you our standard contract?”
Again, Kline nodded, “He did, yes.” He reached over and tapped the tablet, and a copy of Jax’s typical contract appeared. He had paid a middling amount to someone he thought was probably a lawyer to draw up the boilerplate agreement.
Jax picked up the tablet, then tapped the earpiece he kept in his ear almost all the time. “Rudy?”
“Yeah, boss?” the voice on the other end replied.
“This contract good?”
“Yeah, they made a few tweaks, added names of the people they want to make sure to get back, where to drop them off, but otherwise, all good.” There was a pause. “The money is good, too.”
Jax grunted and placed his thumb on the sensor at the lower corner of the tablet. He looked up at Mr. Kline. “I’ll leave in an hour.” He handed the tablet back to the man.
“That’s great news, Captain Caruso, thank you.” Kline grabbed his data tablet and backed away.
Jax looked over to where Lucas was standing. “One more.” He picked up his barely touched glass and downed its content in only a few large gulps.
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