Lagrangian Smuggler

Part 1

A whip-crack rang throughout Jack Fenway's ship as the pressure of the gas giant's atmosphere took its toll on the hull. Jack didn't flinch as he watched the readouts from the pilot's chair. He was past the rated design limit, but he knew that shipwrights over-engineered everything out of caution. The Aster-steel would flex and complain, but his small and well-hidden freighter would be fine.

Outside, thousands of tons per square inch of hydrogen and helium bore down on the small pocket of life preserving atmosphere, while Jack waited. In the void of space beyond the planet's exosphere, a frontier patrol vessel was coasting, waiting to see if its sensor readings about an engine trail had been correct.

The Helvetic League really had no hope of policing the far-flung frontiers of colonized space, but as far as Jack was concerned, everything they did was for show. He had only taken the risk of travelling so close to one of their observation stations because his boss had demanded it. She needed him to join her immediately, and didn't care what risks he had to take. If he had had more time, he would have taken a long route meandering through the Chiasmi bubble. But when Allana Rayker snapped her fingers, Jack had no choice but to obey.

He had left a probe, running on passive systems, drifting in the ice debris that made up the gas giant's rings. Once it had detected the patrol ship jumping away, it would return to join him, and he would continue on his journey to whatever godforsaken spot Rayker had found, far beyond the warm candlelight of human consciousness.

On the other hand, if he had left noticeable vortices in the planet's cloud layer as he entered his hiding spot, he would have only seconds of warning before an armed cruiser was on top of him. His ship would be seized, he would be arrested, and he would spend at least a week in prison. He would not leave alive, obviously. When Rayker was disappointed by failure, she made sure to exact the harshest punishments.

The ship's superstructure moaned its melodrama, while the seconds ticked by on the command console's clock, and Jack wondered how much of a delay his boss would tolerate. Every minute that he was stuck there would provoke further anger from her.

An electronic chirp filled his cockpit, and he felt a shock of adrenaline. A vessel was in close proximity. Range: five hundred yards. Size...

Jack smacked his head back against the chair's headrest. Four meters.

He tapped out commands into the console, bringing the engines back online. The probe nestled itself into its storage bracket on the hull, and soon the ghostly brown world was falling away behind him.

Through the viewscreen, a comet glinted against the infinite black void like a mote caught in a beam of light. The ball of dust and ice looked unimpressive on Jack's scope, orbiting far from its host star, and lacking the tail that made the more well-known comets spectacular tourist attractions.

What the hell was his employer doing out here, so far beyond the borders of settled space? Brilliant and ruthless as she was, Jack knew there was nothing she wouldn't do in pursuit of her goals. But she rarely told him more than he needed to know.

His gaze slipped past his destination to the space beyond. For a split second, he was caught by a wave of vertigo, as though he were teetering over the edge of a terrifying abyss. Nobody knew what creatures lay beyond the huddled firelights of human civilization and its thirty-seven worlds, but Jack knew that if they too could produce a being like Rayker, it was better not to go looking.

After an orbital docking rig secured his ship, workers wearing corporate industrial suits ushered him onto a shuttle. VennZech employees, Jack noted; the largest weapons manufacturer in the galaxy, and Rayker's usual partners. They didn't speak, though their body language—hunched shoulders and averted gazes—said a great deal.