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They were abandoned and stranded in the middle of interplanetary space in
the Gatewood Collective. Their communication systems were advanced, but a
signal could only be so powerful in such a small form factor. Ramses hadn’t
given them quantum messengers to store in their pocket dimensions, but even
if he had, those were mostly gone. When Spiral Station was thrown into the
quintessence bubble, all of their pockets exploded. He built a new one for
each of them while they were trying to escape, but these were only a
stop-gap measure until he could fabricate a new lab for himself. Their
supplies would be enough for them to survive here for a few days, but if
they didn’t find somewhere to land soon, they could be in trouble.
When they reappeared in the timestream on August 21, 2534, another ship was
waiting for them. It didn’t even reach out first. Whoever was on it was
expecting them to arrive, and at that very second, for it transported them
inside of it instantly. It looked like the average starship bridge, with the
horseshoe-shaped console that allowed everyone to see everyone, as well as
the viewscreen. The difference here was that the room wasn’t rotating. It
didn’t need to. It was equipped with dimensional gravity, which was one of
the few technologies that The Shortlist granted the vonearthans use of
following The Edge meeting. That wasn’t why it was here, though. One of the
people on the list was evidently in command as she was sitting at the head.
It was Pribadium Delgado. “Hey, guys. Perfect timing. I could set my clock
by your appearances...for now.”
That was a weird thing to say, but Leona chose not to address it. She
stepped forward. “Miss Delgado, it’s nice to see you.”
“It’s nice to see you again too, but if you want to get technical, I’m not a
miss. I was selected to be Gatewood’s Chief Asset Manager.”
“Which means...?” Mateo asked vaguely.
“We don’t have presidents or prime ministers here,” Pribadium began to
explain. “This is nothing more than a materials depot. Travelers only come
for what they need to get out of the stellar neighborhood. Not many
of us live here permanently, but we are necessary to manage the resources.
I’m not in charge of the people so much as I’m in charge of the stuff. I
decide who gets what, how much, and from where. Well, I don’t do it alone.
There’s also the Chief Distribution Manager, the Chief Allocation Manager,
the Chief Fabrication Manager, and the Chief Personnel Manager. We’re all
chiefs, but I’m at the tippy top. I’m the Chief Chief.”
“Fitting for you,” Mateo said to her. “Congratulations.”
“They wanted someone from the Shortlist,” Pribadium went on, “and we agreed
that one of us ought to be here since they’re getting so much time tech.
They might have asked you, but your condition makes that impossible.”
“I’m not jealous or mad, Pribadium,” Leona said. “I think they made the
right call. The question is, what call are you making now? Is this a rescue,
or something else?”
“It is a rescue, of course,” Pribadium agreed, “but it’s true, I need to
make sure that you don’t cause any trouble. I’m not saying you need to
leave, but you won’t be going anywhere—or doing anything—without an escort.”
She glanced over at the rest of the crew.
“I was hoping to build a new lab,” Ramses said. “We can’t leave until I do,
and it’s going to take some time because I lost a very valuable piece of
technology. It’s quite sensitive, even in light of the Edge, I would rather
be able to work alone.”
Pribadium nodded. “Gatewood is a well-oiled machine. I don’t have to
micromanage anyone. If you need to build a lab, we will find you a
pre-excavated asteroid, and I will personally monitor you there.” She
pointed at one of the crewmembers on the starboard side, who started tapping
on his console, and then looked back at Ramses. “I’m sorry, but that’s the
best I can do.”
“No, I’m not mad about that,” Ramses insisted. “I trust you to be there. I
just didn’t want someone who, uhh...”
“Doesn’t really understand the nature of the time tech?” Pribadium guessed.
“We still hold secrets. The Edge meeting didn’t result in the promise of one
hundred percent transparency. These guys know not to ask questions.”
The crew had been silent this whole time, but one of them tensed up. “Yes,
sir, no questions, sir!”
“He’s joking,” Pribadium said with a smile. “I mean, what he’s saying is
true, but his tone isn’t genuine. They’re not my minions, or however it
looks from that side of the console.”
“From this side, it looks like you’re judging us,” Romana blurted out.
Pribadium laughed. “Yeah, that’s one purpose of the horseshoe layout. It’s
quite standard. The main purpose is so no one has to crane their neck
to look at anyone else, but there’s a reason why there’s all that open space
in the center, and why it’s two steps down. It’s nice to meet you, by the
way. Pribadium Delgado.” She reached her hand out towards the center.
“Romana Nieman.” She stepped up to a little platform at the top of the
horseshoe, which was designed specifically so the captain could shake hands
from this vantage point. “I’ve heard of you, but not much.”
“We’ll get to know each other better as Mister Abdulrashid focuses on his
lab.” Pribadium looked over at the crewmember who she pointed to earlier.
“Have you found us a good candidate?”
“I assumed you wanted something at the extreme,” he replied. “I found one in
the CDS that is pretty remote.”
“Perfect,” Pribadium decided. She looked over to someone on the port side.
“Plot a jump.”
“CDS?” Mateo asked Leona in a whisper.
“Circumstellar debris shell,” Leona answered, loud enough for the whole team
to hear, in case they also didn’t know. “Like the Oort cloud, but a generic
term. Almost every star system should have one.” She looked back up at
Pribadium. “What is your teleportation range? It’s gonna be a year for us if
it’s only one AU per second.”
Pribadium smirked. It’s not the AU-range. It can jump a light-month in one
second.” She looked over at her pilot again. “Cycle us out.”
After a minute of burst mode, they were at their destination, on approach to
an icy planetesimal which the viewscreen said was about three kilometers
long at the major axis and two at the minor. One of the crewmembers suddenly
stood up. Her section of the console rose up with her. “Sir. I’m picking up
a distinct power signature. Someone is living out here.”
“Mauve alert!” Pribadium ordered. “Registrar?”
“It’s empty!” the registrar insisted. “This body should be empty! It’s
barely excavated, just enough for a standard hopper dock and a pressure
seal!”
“It’s not that one,” the woman who alerted them to the problem clarified.
“But it’s nearby. Computer, highlight the signal.”
The view zoomed out, panned over slightly, then zoomed in to a different
object that was reportedly roughly only 11 million kilometers away from the
first one.
“Get me over there right now,” Pribadium ordered.
They jumped.
Someone who hadn’t spoken yet stood up. “Should I prep an away team?”
Pribadium thought it over, her eyes quickly drifting over to Team Matic.
Leona sighed, not upset or annoyed, more just to focus her breath. “We
better earn our keep.”
Angela rematerialized her helmet, and let the visor slam shut. The rest did
the same at varying speeds. They started to teleport individually to the
celestial body. Before he left, Ramses flicked a comms disc up to Pribadium.
“If you can’t figure out how to integrate this into your comms array, just
hold it against your mastoid.”
The first thing that Ramses and Mateo saw once they caught up was Romana
falling on her face, right at their feet. “Careful,” Mateo told her as he
was lifting her back up. “Ice is slippery.”
“It’s not slippery, though,” Marie contended. She lifted her boot, and it
looked difficult.
Mateo did the same. Yeah, it was tacky, like they were on the surface of a
solidifying tarpit. “What the hell?”
“Ice out here works differently than it does under an atmosphere,” Leona
explained as she started to walk. “Keep moving. Our suits might actually be
welding themselves into it.”
“Why did she fall then?” Mateo questioned.
“Because she tried to slide,” Angela said.
“I’m a little scamp,” Romana said cutely.
“Testing, testing. One, two, three. Testing, testing. You and me. Testing,
testing. Catch a movie?”
“Comms work,” Mateo responded to Pribadium.
“Our scans are detecting a modular habitat; family-sized. One rotating
coin, one dormant hammer, three shuttles. An in situ harvester, and a
fusion torch drive. This thing is a laser bore, which isn’t technically a
weapon, but we’re gonna move away. We’ll keep an eye on signal integrity,
though, and stay in teleporter range. We’re not picking up any lifesigns,
but it could be sufficiently shielded. We’re not exactly equipped with the
best sensors as they are typically not needed.”
“Aye, Captain,” Leona acknowledged.
“Aye, Captain,” Pribadium said back.
Leona generated a hologram of a coin-shaped object. Everyone adjusted their
positions to get a better look at it. She tapped on the image
demonstratively. “I want us in teams of two, back to back. Romana and
Angela, jump right here to twelve o’clock. Ramses and Olimpia, over at three
o’clock. Marie and Mateo, nine o’clock.”
“There are seven of us,” Angela reminded her.
“I’ll be alone at six o’clock, I’ll be fine,” Leona assured them. “We’ll
only be three hundred and fifty meters from each other. Now, get into
position, and go on my mark. We don’t have weapons, but prepare for
resistance. Before you go, lower your center of gravity. Not all of us have
teleported to a spin habitat before. It can be jarring. It’s not the same as
regular mass gravity.”
They all got into position, Leona gave the signal, and they jumped. They
immediately heard weapons fire. Mateo looked over to see bullets ricochet
off of his daughter’s suit. Nothing was getting through, and it didn’t look
like it was hurting her, or Angela, but the shooting needed to stop anyway.
He used his HUD to calculate the source, finding one gunman hiding in a
thicket of bamboo trees between the ladies and Ramses and Olimpia. Mateo
jumped over there, and shoulder checked him.
The shooter was barely fazed. He pulled out a handgun, and started shooting
Mateo instead, point blank. They were more powerful than the firearms of
yesteryear, to be sure, but they weren’t even making a dent. Mateo stood
there for a moment, taking it. Finally, he knelt down and snapped his
fingers at a pile of dead bamboo leaves. They caught fire, which began to
spread. The man stopped shooting, not because he was scared of the fire, or
even of losing his bamboo. He was just profoundly confused. As the fire
suppression system was putting it out, Mateo had enough time to disarm the
man, confiscating the rifle from the ground as well.
Leona and the rest of the gang were here by then. She helped the stranger
up, and set him down sideways in a hammock. “Hello,” Leona began in a
friendly voice after receding her nanites until she was wearing normal
clothes, maybe showing a little too much cleavage. “My name is Leona Matic.
That’s my husband, Mateo, and our wife, Olimpia. Ramses, Angela, Marie, and
Romana,” she said, pointing. “Report.”
“I’m nobody. Just tryna live my life.” He adjusted awkwardly. “Could we go
somewhere else? I feel quite vulnerable lying back like this.”
“That’s kind of the point,” Leona replied with a smile. “I understand that
you were trying to protect your home. And if you weren’t—if you’re just a
sadistic murderer—then I’ll go ahead and write self-defense on the
report, okay? But you’re going to answer my questions, because you are
currently violating Gatewood law, as well as Core World law and Earthan law.
Just all the laws. So my first question is, were you aware of that?”
“I was,” the squatter admitted.
“Okay. Did you think you just wouldn’t get caught, or was it an active act
of defiance against the establishment?”
He shrugged. “Maybe a bit of both.”
“All right, I can work with that. Are you alone?”
“I have...a staff. Varying degrees of intelligence.” They heard a rustling
in the leaves several meters away, and looked over to see a beautiful woman
on approach. Now, she—she was showing too much cleavage. She just stood
there with a mousey look on her face once she spotted them. The squatter
looked at her over his shoulder. “That’s my companion model. She won’t hurt
you.”
“Do you have a guard model?” Leona pressed.
The squatter sighed, annoyed. “He’s in maintenance at the moment. You
couldn’t have come at a worse time. Unless...you planned it that way.”
“We didn’t know you were here,” Leona promised. “We might end up neighbors
if the CAM lets you stay.”
“She would do that?”
“I doubt it, but it’s not impossible. You’re supposed to leave. Why
didn’t you just leave?” Leona looked around in general. “At low
subfractional speeds, this shell’s raw materials would last you hundreds of
years, or thousands if you shut off internal systems, and go on ice.”
“It’ll last me a million if I stay put,” the squatter reasoned.
“But you would be in danger for those million years, since you are here
illegally,” Leona volleyed.
“It’s illegal anyway,” he argued. “I didn’t have the resource credits. I
stole this comet. I was trying to stay quiet.”
“Where are you from, partner?” Leona asked, seemingly shifting topics.
“Earth,” he answered.
“You don’t need resource credits if you’re in Sol. You could have taken
something from the Oort cloud.”
He shook his head. “No one would take me there. It costs fuel to decelerate.
Ironically, even though Barnard’s Star is farther away, it was easier to get
here, because the cyclers run constantly. After deceleration, I snagged
myself an escape pod, and drifted all the way out here until I found a
suitable shell.”
“Hm,” Leona said. “That’s probably true, isn’t it?” Silence for a moment.
“Well, I’m sorry, but the boss has already seen you. If we had encountered
you on our own, we would have kept our mouths shut, but there’s no going
back now. You are at her mercy.” She looked at her clock. “And we’re
scheduled for a new assignment at the end of the Earthan day, so we won’t be
able to advocate for you unless you come with us right now, and face the
music.”
They returned to Pribadium’s ship, where they did attempt to advocate for
this man, to the best of their ability. Pribadium said that she would take
their recommendation under advisement, but when they returned to the
timestream a year later, he had been in hock the whole time, and his hermit
habitat had been completely dismantled. She claimed to have no choice, that
if she didn’t enforce the laws, others would seek to be exceptions, and the
entire system would collapse. Her proposal was that they take him out of
there, somewhere very far away, since he had no resource credits, and wasn’t
allowed to stay. They would take her request under advisement.
