Aeolus Station was one of the newest facilities in known space. It sat at the middle of what old space-farers had nicknamed “The Crux”, a region of space where NC drives simply wouldn’t function. The facility had been built to serve as a sector wide secure-deposit for valuable materials being brought in by Service ships and deposited into the accounts of their wealthy client corporations. Any ship approaching Aeolus had to drop to sub-light and spend a full day at maximum burn to reach it. This meant that surprise attacks by groups of pirate vessels were virtually impossible. This also meant that the Honshu was going to be a couple of days behind schedule and now would be forfeiting a valuable convoy escort contract leaving from Nixirus Prime.

If there was one thing that truly ruffled Captain Tarsik’s feathers it was when a client changed his orders in the middle of fulfilling a contract. Sure, he was within his legal rights to tell them to jet off but that might mean pissing off one of their higher-ups and never getting work from their firm again. Not something that a man in his position was capable of doing if he planned on staying in the business very long. So it was on to this new-fangled high security facility in the middle of the Crux and back to scanning the tele-net trades in search of a new contract.

The captain had already endured the chiding of Doctor Ramus which was probably more painful than having the sometimes shaky-handed older gentleman actually remove the arrow. He was now ready to turn in for the night; job hunting could wait until the morning. He passed the mess hall and heard Jones and several of the other auxiliary crewmen playing a rather rowdy game of cards. Had the day gone differently and it wasn’t strictly against doctor’s orders he’d likely have joined them, more to drink than to gamble. Being the better part of three hundred pounds the burly space-dog was known to be able to put down more than his fair share. Paying far too much attention to the fun going on in the mess hall Captain Tarsik found himself crashing into Ansul who had come around the corner quickly and apparently had other thoughts on his mind as well. Being nearly a foot shorter than his superior Ansul only bounced off of the captain’s rather large torso.

“Sorry Captain.” he said, looking up and rubbing his forehead.

“Don’t apologize Ansul, I should have been watching where I was going instead of contemplating breaking physicians orders and going for a drink.”

The Martian cracked a wry smile. He had quite a talent for drinking as well and had even been known to drink the much larger Captain Tarsik under the table on a couple of occasions. Something about Martian metabolism, at least that’s what the captain assured himself.

“Where are you headed in such a hurry?” the captain asked. It was a dumb question and he knew it. If Ansul was heading aft it was either to the engines or to the drive room.

“We just dropped out of NC-space and I was going to secure the drive before I got some rack time.”

Tarsik nodded and patted his old friend on the shoulder before moving aside to let him pass. The Martian walked away in the peculiar semi-shuffle fashion that Martians called walking. Shortly down the hall, and without turning back, he added “Do not play cards Harry….go to bed!”

The captain couldn’t help but smile to himself. Ansul was the only person onboard that ever called him by his first name. Technically it was Harridor, but Harry was easier and sounded quite old-timey. Emily Faust would also address him in the familiar on occasion but with her it was always Tarsik, not Harry. In private he’d taken to calling her Emily over the years but in front of other crew it was always Pilot Faust, or just Faust in a pinch.

Securing the NC drive was absolutely vital. If a ship flew into the Crux while travelling in NC-space it would simply drop back to normal space, but if the drive accidentally engaged while inside the spatial anomaly the results were disastrous. At least that’s what everyone assumed. One ship had done it ages ago, as an experiment by its foolish captain, and it vanished without a trace. No debris, no wreckage, it just vanished.

The best explanation anyone could come up with was that attempting to engage the drive inside of the Crux had flung the ship off in some random direction at so many multiples of C that it might have ended up in the vast emptiness that existed between galaxies. Not the void between the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds, those were long treks surely but far from impossible. In fact the Honshu herself had made the journey on several occasions. No, if the theory held correct the poor ship and all the souls aboard her had probably ended up millions of light years away from anything, left to die without enough food, fuel or oxygen to ever reach help. The safety procedure for physically locking down the NC drive before entering the Crux had been beamed to the Honshu along with the orders that had instructed her to deliver her cargo to Aeolus Station instead of Teraxia III like the contract had originally stipulated.

Captain Tarsik had complete confidence in Ansul, who served not only as the ship’s second-in-command but also as her chief mechanic. Knowing that everything was in good hands he headed for his bunk to catch a few winks.

Back in normal space and zipping along at full burn the rocket would rendezvous with the station in just over twenty four standard solar hours. That would give her crew the rest they’d all gotten too little of lately. Colonies and corporations had been expanding into Canis Major, a dwarf galaxy whose stars were slowly spiraling in as the Milky Way gobbled it up whole. Any large expansion generally meant big business for ships in the Service. Survey of the dying dwarf galaxy had started before the turn of the century but the go-ahead for settlements and business ventures had only been given by the Federated Worlds two years ago. Servicemen had seen this all before, it had happened eighty years prior with the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. There would be a huge rush at first that would slow to a trickle of interest after ten years or so. In those eight decades less than one quarter of one percent of the Large and Small clouds had been settled and industrialized. Fools and wanderers, that was the typical opinion of those who left the Milky Way behind. A few corporations and individuals did manage to strike it rich in the new territories but more often than not they ended up living out their days on some backwater planet that nobody had ever even heard of. Still, the crew of the Honshu certainly didn’t mind the business, especially since most of them had grown up with stories of how rich their fathers and grandfathers had gotten off of the last “galactic boom”.

Twenty four hours would be plenty for Jones and the other auxiliary-men to sleep off whatever kind of drunken stupor they managed to work up. It also would be time for the captain to nurse his wound. Ansul would no doubt spend his time reviewing technical manuals from the ship’s data-tapes or tinkering with some piece of equipment that he felt was in need of a tune-up. Faust, being a diligent pilot would stay by her post with little to no sleep despite the fact that the ship was flying on automatic and in a straight line through relatively empty space. The doctor was quite interested in culture, of which there was no lack in known space. There was so much in fact that the average person threw up their hands in exasperation at the sheer thought of trying to experience it all, but not Doctor Ramus. One would think that with his advancing years, and subsequently less time left, he’d find more constructive things to do with his time but instead he spent countless hours sifting through documents on the history and cultural traditions of various worlds, listening to their music, watching their films...it made most others’ heads spin.

With no distractions aboard a corporate space station like seedy saloons or bizarre alien brothels they’d simply unload, fill out some paperwork, and quickly be underway again. Then another twenty four hours for drunken card games, alien stage plays and what have you and they’d be back in the normal universe, if the universe could ever be called that. Life would continue as normal and the crew of the Honshu would work their tails off, some of them literally, until the rocket would put in for yearly inspection and one week of leave. That was six months away, however, and the captain had no intentions of letting up on his men for an instant until that day arrived. They knew him to be a very fair man, but one who held the highest of expectations for everyone who served aboard his ship.