stream 1 - Welcome to Xanxia
Copyright & Credit: Suse Hammond-Pears
Xanxia was the name of the moon where he finally found the contact he was looking for.
Shansah was a hard Mar’gian to get hold of, Luka had found out, but after the first two solar weeks it was just as easy to keep on looking rather than quit. As it turned out, it had taken him another solar week to pinpoint her last known location and fire off a coded burst through premium relay; six days for a reply; two solar weeks after that in slipstream, and half a local day in negotiating orbit rights while he went planetside.
He wasn’t really in a hurry, though, to tell the truth. In fact, as far as Luka ever considered such a thing, this was practically a vacation. There was nothing wrong in his eyes to take a little time out now and then; jump the ship just a little into the slow part of the stream and catch a few days of hypersleep. Patch up a couple of bulkheads here, decode a bootleg file there, that kind of idle maintenance in between watching the great unknown slide past the viewscreens. Kicking about in zerogee without a care in the world.
Yeah, this was the way to unwind. Go hunting down an old friend to see what was cooking on the grand intergalactic buffet of life.
stream 2 - You could have just called
Copyright & Credit: Suse Hammond-Pears
The atmosphere in the transport pod was almost uncomfortably cool after the heat outside.
The little trickles of sweat that had sprung up to dampen his skin chilled and made Luka feel slightly uncomfortable. He moved slightly in his seat so that the fabric clothes he was wearing - a loose white shirt and khaki pants - soaked up the dampness in the small of his back.
It had been a while since he’d gone groundside anywhere and thus it had been a while since he’d been out of low-gee space fabrics. Mmmm, space fabrics. There wasn’t a spacer alive who didn’t love the fabrics that high tech had brought them for use in their clothing, bedding, and safety padding. Fabrics that breathed with your skin, fibres opening out to cool you down and closing down to warm you up, fabrics that provided you with a decent protection factor against explosive decompression and fire, fabrics that could give you a few more than the usual half a minute in hard vacuum. Fabrics that changed colours in the presence of dangerous levels of radioactivity and could suppress minor levels of electrical current.
stream 3 - Farewell and swim carefully
Copyright & Credit: Suse Hammond-Pears
The transport pod skimmed to a halt outside one of the upper levels of the unambiguously named Auction Ring (Section 2 Veda-Kilan) docking port. Luka dropped a credit chip into the fare tally and cheerfully let the scanner read his fingerprints and compare them against those registered on the chip.
He was cheerful about this although he wouldn’t have trusted a netbooth with even a lowlevel scan of his neural network. Neither of the sets were actually his real prints, though for the purposes of this lowtech scanner, the ones taken from the pads of his fingers matched the ones encoded onto the credit chip. And at the end of the day, that was all that the driver was really interested in - that and the hefty tip Luka put onto the fare.
With a last tentacle wave that his translation chip told him was “Farewell and swim carefully (context sorrowful departure with resigned defeat)” the pod slid away from the docking port and dropped back down to rejoin the thoroughfare of traffic. The door hissed shut behind it; and Luka was left standing in a corridor.
stream 4 - Techfuck?
Copyright & Credit: Suse Hammond-Pears
Luka stood there looking like an idiot, his hand still held up in the air, his fingers a hair’s breadth from touching the comm link at Shansah’s door. Automatic human reflex had made his eyes open a little wider than his usual laconic squint and draw his head back a very little as though flinching from a blow that might have followed.
The big Mar’gai on the other side of the door looked just as surprised as he was. Automatic Mar’gai reflex had drawn him back onto his hind limbs and shot his dark grey fur through with a startled shade of iridescent yellow.
Shithell, this could be bad. The Mar’gai was not only big and very definitely male but that was a military insignia perm-dyed into his shoulder tufts, and there were odd little lines in his fur where the grain of his skin had been twisted by scars earned in honour and battle. Even on four limbs (well, mostly) the male’s back came up to Luka’s chest, and he looked as solid as a five foot bulkhead did.
There were ways in which one was introduced to a Mar’gai and kept face.
This was not one of them.
stream 5 - Prhy
Copyright & Credit: Suse Hammond-Pears
Luka was in freefall. His arms and legs were splayed out in the automatic attitude that the human anatomy created when the instinct to ‘flop’ occurred. Little bits of superheated metal were skimming past his floating body.
He’d kicked off hard from the airlock, using most of his oxygen reserves to gain speed and impetus. It had meant that he’d been in time to see the craft’s thick hull ripple over the struts and inner bulkheads like metallic cloth stretched tight over a skeleton of bones. The inevitable rupture had caused the ship to implode as explosive decompression crumpled it, and then the parts of the propulsion gear and weaponry detail that objected in a volatile manner to being decompressed exploded.
He hadn’t managed to get as far away from the ship as he would have liked; he’d had to vent nearly all his breathable oxygen mixes to get some impetus in the temporary gravity well around the craft. He was sleepy now; the lack of oxygen meaning that some of the other gases housed in his backpack were starting to kick into his suit. Soon his body would close itself down and hibernate until he was picked up by another unit in his squadron.
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