BARKING AT BINBAGS

Space Cheese

2011-08-17T00:39:00.000+01:00

This is my entry to the Inspired By Images Of Eve Competition 3. More details and links to all entrants can be found at Starfleet Comms.

SPACE CHEESE

I know where I am before I even open my eyes. A powerful odour, like a pair of unwashed feet sitting in a rusty bucket of week-old pus, hangs heavily in the air. It’s a stink that I know will take days to be rid of. Chopper Vench has got to be the only pirate I’ve ever met who ferments cheese in his own quarters. It tastes as bad as it smells. Not something I want to experience again, and the last place I expected to find myself now. On the whole, I think I’d rather be dead.

I slide myself gingerly out of the bunk and stand up. The floor is cold, but still. There’s no tell-tale hum of engine vibrations. The clothing draped over a chair in the corner of the cabin is suitably non-descript. I could search the room for clues, but one of those drawers might contain the cheese, and I’m in no state to deal with that right now. Then I catch sight of myself in a mirror.

“Aw hell,” I groan.

This jumpclone is ridiculously old. I have to think way, way back to figure out when I could possibly have got it made. A fat-faced fool stares stupidly back at me, daring me to remember him. There are no tattoos. When did I get the scar on my chin fixed? And those teeth, I got them fixed an age ago. I can’t even look at my belly. This is from before… well, everything.

Vench fixes me with a grim stare as the door to the common room slides open.

“Well?” he grunts, and holds out a palm expectantly. I go through the motions of patting my pockets and then shrug. He scowls and shakes a finger at me.

“You owe me money, you scheming rat,” he spits.

I should really be going along with anything Chopper wants. After all, he has just saved my life. He is also completely unhinged, excessively violent and very unpredictable. But I do have standards to uphold, fat clone or not.

“Don’t be absurd,” I say, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Yes you do, you lying dog,” bellows Chopper, “Don’t tell me you don’t. Vart’s Bar, the Chemal Factory in Renyn. We were playing Three Stack all night.”

“Wait a minute,” I say, “I won that night.”

“I know that. And that’s why I bet you three grand you’d fleece them CreoDron Execs right back at the beginning. But you seem to have conveniently forgotten all about it.”

“Chopper, the drinks in that place were twenty-five grand apiece. Why would I make a bet with you for just three thousand?”

“Not the point, is it? A bet’s a bet. You owe me money.”

“You’re delusional,” I mutter, “You’ve been breathing space-cheese fumes too long.”

Like a flash, Chopper’s on his feet, slamming my head against the table, the muzzle of his gun pressing against my forehead.

“Are you mocking my cheese?” he whispers, “Are you?”

“I wouldn’t dare,” I say, slowly and carefully, “Furthermore, if it seemed like I was mocking your cheese, then I want to make it very clear that I didn’t intend to give that impression and apologise wholeheartedly if you thought otherwise.”

“It’s a hobby,” Chopper growls, “It’s a craft, a skill. How many people you know can make their own cheese, eh? How many?”

“Not a single one, Chopper.”

And like that, the gun’s back in its holster and he’s walking away from me, the lunatic. I look around the room. Nothing here I recognise.

“Chopper, where the hell are we?”

“3GK-WS,” came the prompt reply. “Wicked Creek. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s where we are. Trying to keep a low one, you know? Can’t really be out wandering at the moment.”

“Huh,” I say. Weird. “You got a station out here?”

“Nah,” he says, shaking his head. “Habitation module.”

I’m actually shocked. Chopper Vench, arch-villain of the high-sec mining community, out of his ship? I would have thought that he’d rather freeze in space than be parted from it. He sees me thinking this, and shrugs.

“So what about you?” he asks. “Last I heard, you were about to get appointed CEO or something. What was the name of that corp? Comfy Toga or something?”

“Comutopia.”

“That’s the one. Anyway, wasn’t expecting to see your clone start up any time soon. What happened, you screw up or something?”

“Quite the opposite,” I say. “Unfortunately, they weren’t expecting someone competent. It turns out, we were supposed to fail, and dismally. Actually succeeding messed their plans up a bit, and you know how megalomaniacs hate it when you do that.”

“Yeah,” he says, master of the understatement.

Yesterday – or whenever it was – I was aboard my Chimera. I was wearing Velochem Silk, with a Flickshow 5400 on my wrist and the latest Looking Glass ocular. I had enough cash to buy a planet and the resources to populate it. My wife – oh man, I’d forgotten about her, damn it – who knows what had happened to her. All of it, gone. My whole life. And I didn’t see it coming until it was too late. Half a day of suspicion, five minutes of utter panic, about twenty seconds where I thought I could get away… and then one bright, cold flash. And now, here I am, wherever that may be, with nothing but some borrowed clothes, an ancient clone and, apparently, a gambling debt.

“Coffee?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say, taking a chair. He goes over to the food module. There’s a long pause while each of us waits for the other to speak. Chopper starts humming, so I guess it’s down to me then.

“So?” I say.

“So what?”

“So what’s the deal?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you want?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” I say, waving my arms at him, “You’ve brought me here. You’ve gone to some trouble to keep me alive, and don’t tell me it’s because I owe you a measly three thousand. You spent a billion times that on the clone vat, not to mention transportation costs. And speaking of clones, where did you find this thing?”

“Don’t remember?” grins Chopper. “Verge Vendor.”

“Verge!” I yell, clapping myself on the forehead. “Thank you. So, you track down one of my very first clones, drag it all the way here and revive me… Obviously you want something from me, so what is it?”

There’s a long pause. I’m a bit worried he might pull his gun on me again. With Chopper, you never can tell.

“Nah,” he says at last, “It’s not like that.”

“So what is it like?”

“Nothing, it’s not like nothing. What, I have to have a reason for everything?”

“Chopper, you’re a dirty bloody pirate and I, well I used to be… well, never mind that. We got drunk one night, what… a hundred and forty years ago? There’s got to be something. What is it, a job? I’m your slave now, or something? I have to kill someone? What?”

“You know something?” Chopper says, “That was a good night, that night. That thing you did to the guy… you remember? I don’t think I’ve laughed like that since. It was a good night, that’s all.”

Then he shrugs, and it all makes sense. See, you get these moments, when you’re immortal. They’re sad little moments, but infinitely precious. They cut through all the stuff we do to distract ourselves while we’re living forever. You see behind their eyes, and through to the being that they are. Chopper and me, we’ve been kicking around the galaxy an awful long time now. We’re old. And every now and then, you get a moment that explains why a pirate would save the life of someone like me just because I made him laugh. The answer’s simple. With forever ahead of us, what the hell else are we going to do?

He doesn’t pull a gun on me the rest of the time I’m there, but I still sample the latest batch of cheese. We don’t talk much. He gives me a Rifter. It’s a bit bent out of shape, but its functional. He throws in two thousand rounds of iron ammo and a crate of Quafe. As I undock, I feel small and insignificant, sitting in this tiny hull. I immediately regret leaving so soon, and look down at Choppers module. It peeks out from behind the rock like it’s hiding. Looking ahead, there’s nothing but stars. I have no idea where I’m going, or what I’m going to do for money, shelter or food. Nobody knows I’m here, and hopefully, no one is looking for me. I’m back at the bottom of the pile. I’ve got to start again, from scratch and claw my way back up.

I have to admit, I can’t wait to get started. I bloody love this part.

On Rails of Golden Fire

2010-07-25T16:38:00.000+01:00

This is my entry to the Inspired By Images of Even Competition 2. More details and links to all entrants can be found at Starfleet Comms

ON RAILS OF GOLDEN FIRE

I am not alone.

Countless lives have I lived and yet I am still young and foolish. There is no end to that which I think I know, but do not. I travel the great vastness as I please, believing myself free, the master of my own destiny. I have roamed far and wide. I have mined ice in the Vale of the Silent, threaded my way through the anarchic madness outside stations in Rens. I am welcomed in a dozen systems and reviled in a dozen more. I’ve died in a blaze of fire, gasped my last into the frozen void. I have been reborn over and over again, coughing pink-fluid from my lungs and burst gasping from the clone vat. I stare now at a wall littered with certificates and commendations, medals and looted trinkets. I feel like tearing it all down and jettisoning it with the rest of my waste. I know nothing. I am not alone.

You remember the names of some, no matter if you have no connection to them. There’s the three that everyone knows: Gagarin, 1961; Armstrong, 1969; Chen, 2044. Space, the moon, Mars. Three men who helped us learn to walk. But then we started to run and after that, the names seemed less important. Many live on: Jean-Baptiste Jeunet, Oshoki Jaratino, VeXx MoHawK. But great achievers though those men were, they weren’t the first three. And they weren’t the other three either. Three more brave men, to whom no statue is erected. Though they were times of great endeavour, there was a great deal of sacrifice. We remember them also. Anthony Chindarkar, 2048, the first man to die in space; Allen Strickland, 2501, the first man to die off-world. And Sato Ichikhan who, in 23255, did not die.

Until today, I alone had not believed my ancestor worthy of inclusion on such a list. I knew the stories of course, we all did. My father still owns the real vid shot, not the copy used on the newsfeeds, of young Sato waving cheerfully as he climbed into the cockpit. He was Duvolle Labs’ best test pilot and our family were immensely proud of him. At the time, he had been working on upgrades to Duvolle’s most recent creation, the Tanaris. The R&D team believed they had come up with a way to coax a little more speed out of their new Interceptor. They fitted the vessel with a pair of experimental MWDs (micro-microwarpdrives, if you will), miniaturised to a level that, if successful, would revolutionise space travel all over again. Sato Ichikhan would pilot the vessel on a short flight around the Caille System, and the white coats at Duvolle would take plenty of readings.

No one knows what really happened. Oh, the plot to sabotage the experiment was uncovered in the end and traced back to an Amarr Corporation. It was their agent, posing as a Duvolle lab technician, who inadvertently caused the feedback loop back at the station. He had hidden his monitoring equipment carefully enough, but the miniscule amount of power he leeched to power the bug was sadly just enough to cause a system failure in the main sensors. Some safeguards kicked in; others did not, and the scientists could only watch in horror as the feedback grew exponentially and caused the MWDs to kick in before the ship was ready.

Sato did not die. Perhaps that is the most tragic thing of all. There is no word for what happened to him. Some say he ‘phased’. Others, that he ‘half-warped’. I have watched the feed many times, several times this very day. Even at the highest resolution, the slowest speed, it is not clear. The Tanaris hangs, engines glowing as they power up. Then there is an explosion. The ship bucks, a shockwave rippling through the vessel’s structure, before being engulfed in bright white light. Then it is away, burning twin trails of argent fire. The camera struggles to follow as the Interceptor streaks like a bolt toward the moon. There is a burst of static, the CEO herself cuts across the mic, asking Sato if he can hear her. There is no reply as the vessel continues to pick up speed. There are no accurate readings any more; Sato has surpassed their sensors’ maximum capacity, his velocity off their scales within fractions of a second. Then he hits the moon. There is a cry of alarm from Duvolle and the world holds its breath, waiting to see the tiny flash of impact. But there is none. The Tanaris passes through. Sensors on the moon’s surface detect no landing. Capsuleers on other side of the system report seeing an unidentifiable ship travelling at impossible speed. There is confusion, the camera spins and zooms, out of focus. The Duvolle scientists scramble to get a fix, but he is too fast for them. Sato is gone.

The first sighting took place twenty years later. A Caldari survey fleet traced the path of what they thought to be a comet before their viewscreens displayed the fuzzy image of an insubstantial Gallentean vessel. People say that they have looked out their windows during a jump to see a ghostly ship flying alongside. The barely distinguishable pilot waves at them in greeting before speeding away. Those that drift about the edges of space see him most regularly. They say he appears to lost ships, who follow the trails of his warp drives to safety. More than once a pilot has attributed a narrow escape from a pirate trap to the sudden appearance of a fast ship nearby. ‘Ghost Rider’, they called him. Of course.

I did not believe this any more than I believed half the nonsense said about my great-uncle. One of the chief reasons I have drifted apart from my family is because their mindless superstition and their deification of Sato’s memory. He’ll appear when you need him, they told me, he comes to us all eventually. What nonsense. I rejected this along with all the other rubbish. I believed that Sato had not passed through the moon. I believed his vessel had burnt up long before it had gotten that far. I believed that my great-uncle had been atomised along with the rest of his vessel moments after the accident. The camera was unable to catch it, and the confusion back at the station rendered all the data unuseable. It was a tragedy, nothing more. The rest was a lie, perpetuated by my parasitic relatives, and for those who had spent too long alone, staring out at the stars. I knew it all and of course, I knew nothing.

I had taken on a contract for the military. A rogue drone installation, nothing serious. I hung in space nearby in my Thorax, bored almost to tears as my drones decimated their infected cousins. Then my console began to chime unexpectedly. I fired the engines and started to lock the target. I had no enemies in this system and the salvage I could hope to expect from this mission was paltry compared to the wealth of loot hidden in the null-sec systems nearby. Still, an opportunistic pirate might make quick work of my Cruiser. The targeting computer was struggling to lock and I cursed its slowness, scrolling around the viewscreen to identify this troublesome intruder. And there he was.

I was not travelling fast. I glanced in disbelief at my readout as I gaped at the screen, and I was pushing 300m/s. The vessel next to me certainly looked as if it was moving faster than I was. The prototype MWDs blazed with fire, spitting sparks and gouting energy as they shook the whole ship. The Interceptor rattled and blurred as if travelling at immense speeds, yet it kept pace with me exactly. Scrambling from my chair, I jumped to the starboard porthole. The Tanaris was there and yet not there. I could see stars through it. And there, hunched in his cockpit, my great-uncle Sato.

He did not wave cheerfully at me like the stories say. He looked just the same as he had in that ancient newsfeed. He wore a frown of concentration. His mouth was curved into a rictus of determination, teeth clamped together, tendons straining in his neck. He turned and shouted something. Of course, I could not hear. I just saw his mouth moving, screaming some desperate message that I could not, would never, hear. I banged my fist against the hull in frustration, calling his name but he did not turn back. The sparks of light around him flared brightly and then he was gone, streaking away on rails of golden fire.

So here I stand, amid the ruins and ashes of everything I thought to be true. What need do we immortals have for gods and destiny? We are gods, the concept of destiny has become irrelevant. And yet I have questions. What fate has befallen my uncle? It seems he is trapped in a moment, out of time, doomed to forever fly the universe, struggling for control. And yet he has appeared to me, just as my family said he would. I believed them liars and charlatans. Is this the hour of my greatest need? I had not thought so. Yet I find myself lost. I find I have a strong need to contact my brothers, my father. And if Sato has come to me to set me on the right path, then what hand guides his path?

It seems I have found something to believe in. Or rather, it has found me. Other than that, I know nothing. But my ignorance has already been well established. But something has changed. I now know that no matter where I hide in this great emptiness, I am not alone.