Princess

Great, I'm a human trafficker now. Just what I wanted for my first crack at mission command. Why couldn't it have been narcos or weapons? Hell, even an old-fashioned dirty bomb would have been better than getting wrapped up with body-snatchers.

"Please tell me it's not a kid." I said.

"All good on that front, middle-aged man." Shores said. That was a relief, though a small one. There was a special place in Hell for people who messed with kids, and the pot was big enough for everyone who helped them do it, knowingly or otherwise. Man-napping wasn't that much better than kid-napping on the cosmic scales, and for a moment, I was sickened that I found one more palatable than the other. Abducting people wasn't a spectrum. It was wrong. But that was the job and it was too late to break off the deal.

"He's breathing. Is his life support intact?" I asked.

"Uhhh…" Shores replied scientifically.

"That's not helpful. Draw a picture for me."

"There's a guy in the nude in the box, and he's breathing. No suit, no gear, no nothing. Just sucking vacuum like it's air. That's it. Picture drawn."

"That's impossible."

"Well, that's what I'm looking at. Woah! That was weird. He's not frozen stiff either. Pupils are average, I think that's good."

"Let me poke him too." Tony said.

"No!" I snapped. "Don't touch him. Is he… Alive? Awake?"

"Alive? He's breathing and I think I see a pulse. Awake… doesn't look like it. Could be he's in a coma or some kind of cryo?"

"Get back up here and take the helm. I need to see this for myself."

On my way to the Cat's rear, I took a second to look through the gaping hole in our hull. My stomach did a little flip as asteroids caught the light of the system's star and were swiftly replaced by the black abyss of the void as we flew past. Scale was a tricky thing in space, those rocks seemed close enough that I could reach out and grab them in my hand, yet despite what my eyes thought they were seeing, those rocks were hundreds—if not thousands or millions—of kilometers away. Space was too damned big for the average person to grasp.

I closed on the opened package. The rest of the squad had already taken a peek but the novelty of what they'd seen hadn't yet faded. They made a hole and I slid in, my eyes fixed forward as I moved through the cabin, held down by damning condemnation as much as by magnetized boots. I sighted its contents and breathed my following words in awe.

"What in the nine rings are you?" It really was just a guy in the nude, breathing vacuum in near absolute zero like it was a mildly chilly evening. It was impossible and it was right in front of me, proving me—and the laws of the universe—wrong with its mere existence.

If I'd walked past him in a station, I wouldn't have looked twice. He wasn't unassuming in that malicious way some people were. He was… normal. He looked like any other less-than-attractive, middle-aged man I'd find working manual labor in the fringe systems. Neither his hands nor his face showed any signs of hidden powers well beyond the supernatural, and below the gut, he was rather disappointing. He wasn't clothed in anything material, but at the lower end of my infra-vision, it almost looked like he was surrounded by a layer of solid heat. His slow breaths didn't leave vapor trails, he wasn't shivering and while his skin was reddened with gooseflesh, he didn't seem particularly cold. The entire thing was surreal but he was undoubtedly real.

"Who the hell is this guy?" I muttered.

"Maybe he's a mut- I mean, you know, like you." Nye said. I couldn't help but bristle at the word she'd barely restrained. Mutant, a genetic dissident, a sub-human to be abducted and experimented on in some backwater black site research station. I took a second to unclench my jaws before speaking.

"Not like me. I don't even like the cold. But this… there's no way this is real."

"If it wasn't right in front of me, I'd agree with you." Tony said.

"So, what do we do boss?" Diaz asked.

The client had warned us against tampering with the package, but it was too late for that now. The cargo—this man—seemed undamaged along with the crate he was packed into. If the client was willing to spend this much money on a job like this, dealing with things that shouldn't be real, what would he do if he found out that we'd looked inside? Whatever it was, I wanted no part in it.

"We're finishing the job. Seal it back up, strap it down and forget what we saw." I commanded.

Though Tony was probably cursing my name every second, we resealed the package. I made a mental note to have a talk with him after we'd touched down back on the Shadow about the age-old saying pertaining to what loose lips did to ships. I could tell that he wanted to tear open the package and shake our guest until every secret he had come to light. If he did, I wasn't sure if I'd want to listen in or make myself scarce. For all his relentless curiosity, I knew Tony would restrain himself— for now at least.

I checked my wrist display, noting the time. We should be getting close if the initial estimates were accurate, but it would still be hours before we arrived. I wanted to slump against the wall and process what I was doing, but I was a leader. I wasn't allowed to indulge in such weaknesses and now seem as good a time as any to take stock.

Nye was idling, probably gaming on a handheld inside her suit. Diaz was tooling over his weapons, which were already in perfect condition. Jhordan ran clunky mechanized fingers over the new scrapes on her left arm. Her other hand held the severed limb of the bot we'd dispatched. As I watched her, she rolled the limb around, examining it like a hunter would a prized kill. Despite himself, Tony sat quietly, behaving like a proper mercenary for the first time since I'd met him. It must have been taking his entire pool of self-restraint to do so. There was no way it'd last the whole mission, but a girl could dream.

Boomer's slab-faced helmet returned my gaze when his turn came. The old man was holding together, toying with a bundle of wires and a brick of plastic explosive to occupy himself. One of the unspoken joys of working with explosives was the level of complacency that came with it. Someone else might have seen the helter-skelter bomb and lost their nerve, but not me. I could tell Boomer was just giving his hands something to do, and without a detonator, most plastic explosives were about as dangerous as wet clay.

Boomer gave me a soft nod when my gaze lingered a little too long, so I mentally gave my cheeks a slap. Everyone was fine, a little shaken but nothing they couldn't handle. They were professionals— most of them at least. This was fine. Everything was fine. We'd make the drop, collect the rest of our pay and be back on the Shadow before I could say payday.

"Hey Princess," Shores said on a private net between the two of us. "You think you could fly shotgun for me?"

"What happened to wanting me in back?" I asked dubiously. Shores wasn't the type who changed his mind on whims. He waited for the facts and then decided. If he was bringing it up now, over a private comm, then it had to be something serious.

"Nothing, I just… thought an extra set of eyes up here would be good is all."

"Really?"

"Yeah, it's nothing major."

"Shores, you're my pilot and my tech. If something's wrong, I need to know."

"It's stupid, but I can feel a migraine coming on. Pretty soon, it's gonna feel like Thor himself will be ringing my head like a bell. I'd rather you be close at hand in case you need to take over."

"That's it? All of it?"

"Yeah. Pretty stupid, right?" I thought it was a lot stupider for my pilot to risk our shuttle and everyone in it rather than admitting he wasn't operating at one-hundred percent.

"You've been flying almost seven hours straight," I said. "Take a break. I've got this."

"Thanks. Course is laid and I'll start the high-g braking burn before you take over. Just mind the helm, and we should be fine."

Everyone got lessons on voidsmanship when they signed onto the Stalking Shadow. Most of us failed miserably, but anyone who could hack it had a leg up on the rest. Pilots were worth more than any marksman or demolitions expert.

Calling myself a pilot was about as accurate as calling the average toddler an artist; in truth, I was more of an aspiring amateur. Shores was a real pilot. I was just the semi-able set of hands that kept us pointed straight— or in this case, hurtling belly-first towards our destination as we decelerated.

Piloting wasn't an action-packed spectacle like movies portrayed it to be. Most of the time it was watching displays and double-checking your math. An eight mil mistake in bearing looked like a rounding error on screen, but when you arrived at a relative stop eighty million kilometers off-target, you seriously began questioning your life choices. Shores's math looked good, but that didn't necessarily mean it was correct. It just meant if there were any mistakes, I wasn't seeing them.

A single point on my display gradually grew in size and clarity, an asteroid in the outer ring of the closest gas giant to Nothing Wasted. The planet proper was coyly named Rusty, after its orange-red hue, but our destination had no name. It had only its astrological denomination of TB-SOA-FC602125066. By all official records, it was a stable orbit, D-type asteroid whose only noteworthy feature was that it had no mineral deposits worth exploiting. With the wealth of scrap metal and circuitry closer in-system, that lump of worthless rock wasn't profitable, which was better than being invisible.

The dropship rattled noticeably more than usual as it began more intensely decelerating, closing the final million kilometers at a subjective crawl of around a few hundred kilometers per second. With the bulk of our momentum shed, maneuvering was primarily composed of drifting closer and only burning auxiliary thrusters for minor corrections. Whatever tech-wizardry made our inertial dampeners work during high-g flying wasn't with us during these long periods of float as we began verging on our relative coordinates. I gave Shores a prod with my boot caps, partially to keep him from floating in his slack harness but mostly to wake him up. I dialed into the Client's comm frequency and dropped our transmit power to a digital whisper.

"This is the Black Cat, requesting instructions to proceed with landing." I said over the proverbially open air. Shores groggily started scanning for our asteroid while we waited for a response. Several minutes later, a voice so weary it bordered on robotic replied.

"You're behind schedule and bleeding heat. Be quick about it." Their tone was deadpanned, but I could imagine the condescending expression the speaker was wearing with ease.

"I say again, requesting instructions to proceed with landing." I snapped back with forced politeness.

"They're in your comm buffer along with your temporary IFF tags. Failure to—"

"We're familiar with how an IFF works. We'll begin landing shortly."

"Acknowledged." The connection severed.

"Prick." I said, the words sealed within my helmet.

"You can say that again." Shores lazily replied via our still-open private comm. I cursed myself silently for not cutting it earlier, but that didn't stop me from making use of my mistake now.

"Regardless of my thoughts on the client, we've got a job to do. You good to get us inside?" In reply, Shores began approaching the nondescript lumpy grey mass of silicon and carbon in front of us. Determined to make myself a useful co-pilot, I set to task on updating our IFF signature, only to find that Shores had already handled it while I was making an ass of myself to the Client. Resigned, I did the next most helpful thing I could. I sat in my chair quietly and let Shores do his job without getting in his way.

He was a better pilot then I'd ever be by an astronomically wide margin regardless of headache or fatigue. The math and physics of space flight was something no one wanted to take on with anything less than a perfect understanding, yet he handled it like child's play. Even if he was blind stinking drunk, he could still fly with the skill and precision of a surgeon when the rest of us would have been fumbling for bandages. It was hard not to feel undermined by the sheer ease which he steered us through the void with.

In no time at all—despite what the Client thought—Shores got us to our asteroid, flipped over to match the imitation gravity of the rock's quick spin, through the airlocks and hovering in the hanger. A less-than-gentle landing punctuated our arrival in the lofty hanger built into the otherwise unremarkable asteroid. As far as I could tell, there wasn't anything externally that would differentiate it from the millions of other chunks of rock in Rusty's rings.

It was redundant since our hull was breached, but the dropship cycled its internal pressure to match the hanger before dropping the rear cargo ramp and unsealing the cockpit's partition bulkheads. One of the perks of long flights was they gave you lots of time to prepare, and though it may have been needless, I wasted no time issuing orders to the squad.

"Nye, Tony, outside. Get the lay of the land. Diaz, Jhordan, prep the box for delivery. Boomer, Shores, see what you can do about the hull damage and get an estimate on how long it'll take to patch it." It was mostly for show. I was going through the motions, barking the things I remember being barked at me when I was on the job instead of leading it. Satisfied that everyone knew what to do based on the lack of questions, I started mentally preparing myself for the handoff to the Client. The Cat rocked on its landing gear as the powertechs moved about their tasks.

The hanger we'd landed in was big, way more extensive than our current needs, and completely empty other than the harsh overhead lights and a few dozen doors. We could have landed any which way and still had enough room to do some flight practice in the open white space. I suppressed a childish grin at the thought of asking the Client to use his hanger for a bit of training. I could definitely use the practice before trying to dock anywhere I had to pay for. I wondered if it would come up before or after I had to lie to his face about not looking inside the package. My mood fouled, I slid down from the co-pilot's chair and saw Shores slumped in his own.

"Get a move on! The ship's not going to patch itself." I said via our private comm. Half-heartedly he started trying to lift himself out of his chair, swaying more than I'd thought possible without falling over. "Stop. Sit down, bucket off." This time he obeyed with full enthusiasm, letting his helmet clatter to the cockpit floor the instant it was off his head.

His skin was flushed and clammy looking. Twinned lines of watery crimson snot trailed from his nose to his lightly bearded chin. His salt and pepper black hair was slicked down by sweat. His bloodshot eyes were open wide, but they lacked alertness. Each brown-rimmed pupil seemed to be searching for a separate target. In short, he looked like shit.

"Are you drunk?" I asked.

"Not a drop." Shores said.

"Are you dying on me?" I asked, hoping it sounded more like a joke than actual concern.

"Think my air's no good. Need to look into that."

"Okay, you're gassed. We can fix that. There's spare oh-two tanks and ox hypos, just… stay put." I ducked out of the cockpit, found the shuttle's triage bag and started raiding what I thought I'd need while skimming the instructions. First aid was another skill every merc got basic training on, though most would never excel at it. "Okay, the shots go in your neck and I'll swap out your air in case your tank's bad, but you should probably keep your helmet off for a while. You just… take it easy until you're feeling better. Okay? None of this 'I don't want to bother people' shit if you start getting worse."

"Sure thing, boss lady."

"And don't fall asleep. I'm pretty sure that's bad. You just sit tight. We'll be back before you can say payday."

Shores gave me a flippant wave of his hand as I left the cockpit. As I passed through the crew cabin, I took some time to reread the usage stencil on the ox hypo. If it was just a case of being gassed, then he should be fine in a few minutes. Maybe I should have given him some adrenaline to speed that up; a detox hypo might be a good idea too. I gave my helmet's faceplate a gentle slap on the cheeks. He'd be fine. I was just fussing at this point. I returned the triage bag to its nook and marched down the Black Cat's rear ramp.

"Boomer, think you can handle repairs on your own?" I asked over a private net.

"It won't be pretty, but I should be able to manage." Boomer said. "What happened to my assistant?"

"Just a little gassed. He's taking a break now. Should be out bef-"

"Before I can say payday, yeah yeah, I know. I'll manage. You go make sure there is a payday at the end of this mess."

I lingered with him for a moment longer than I should have, drawing resolve from the old man. He wouldn't be around forever, but I was glad he was here now, lending me his expertise and what strength he could spare. I cycled over to the squad net and robbed my voice of its warmth.

"Nye, you found the client yet?"

"Yes and no…" Nye paused just long enough to agitate me before finishing her statement. "They sent out a bot to guide us to the drop point, but it's 'awaiting self-designation Princess to proceed.' We're at the far side of the hanger. Big doors at the Cat's one O'clock" She'd adopted a robotic monotone while quoting the robot. That damned girl treated everything like some big game. She had a bad habit of being a real smart-ass, but she was a decent shot and more soft-tech savvy than myself, so she wasn't all bad. Still annoying though.

"Got it. I'm heading over with Diaz and Jhordan now." I directed them to form up behind me, package carried between them and headed towards the waiting representative of our client. Though they weren't speaking, the heavy rhythm of their steps echoed around the hanger like a concord of activity. Even if they were trying to be respectfully stealthy, that much metal could only move so quietly.

The robot waiting for us was something of an oddity. The entire thing could have been fished out of the debris field outside. It was a humanoid servant model, something designed to mimic a high-class butler once upon a time. Expect at some point, it had its lower half exchanged for a wide-tracked chassis that rattled in a high-pitched series of sharp pings, even while the robot was stationary. The upper half was still 'wearing' a painted tuxedo, despite its left arm having been replaced with an industrial clamp styled hydraulic claw.

The illusion of an elegant butler was off-put by dozens of scratches and scuffs across the entire body. The dried polymer tracks were rife with tears and its painted tuxedo was perforated with recently rusted holes where paint flakes had peeled off. The robot awaited us with programed patience in front of a bulkhead door, its humanoid hand outstretched as if it was expecting a bribe.

"I'm Princess. Where do you want the package?" I said, ignoring the hand.

"Verify identification, please." The robot replied in passive monotone from a speaker hidden behind its jaw, which moved mechanically up and down in a failed attempt to make the robot seem more life like. Most older models shared this trait, but they usually moved in time with the speech.

"Fine." I removed my helmet and brought my face level with the robot's. "Scan me against the image on the dossier we sent to the client."

"You are injured."

"Just some ship trouble on the way here. I'm fine."

The robot paused for a moment as it executed the task, scanning my albinoid skin, red eyes and severe features before concluding that I was, in fact, the human self-designated as Princess. The robot's findings were noted on some server, and permission was granted to continue its assigned duties. It clacked and churned all the while and I stood fast, waiting for it to finish.

How hard was it to compare me to an image? A human could have done it in a second. The bot finally came to an acceptable answer regarding my face and shuddered into life once more. From a technical standpoint, I'm sure this was all very impressive and complex but it took too long for my liking. Not that we'd be flying out of here in a hurry between the gassed pilot and damaged shuttle.

"Identity verified. Please follow me to the collection point and do not stray. This research station has multiple experiments across the facility. Contamination of these specimens will not be tolerated and those who stray will be terminated." The robot concluded punctually, then it led us deeper into the station away from the hanger. I looked down at the simple visored full helm in my hands, returned it to my crown and tucked up my neck seals.