Fracture - Book One of the Glass Galaxy Trilogy

Chapter 2: Ascent

1:31 PM

Aria set down the last crate with a heavy thump, and I engaged the magnetic clamp with a tap on my armour's wrist-comm.

"What do you think is in these?" she asked.

"Not our place to know," I responded gruffly. "We're just the delivery crew."

She frowned, "You don't even wonder a little bit?"

"Like I said, it's not our place to know. Federation corporations value their privacy more than they value us."

Aria rested her chin on one of the many black, metal crates filling up my cargo hold, "Sounds like you've done this before."

I sighed, finishing my check of the cargo, "I've been traveling around for a long time, so I've done the odd job here and there."

"Like what?"

"Look, I'm not just going to tell you my life story, okay?"

Alizabeth piped up through the ship's speakers, "We've done many jobs, from mercenary work and bounty hunting to the more mundane things we're doing now."

Aria stood up and looked around in confusion, "You've got someone else with you on this ship?!"

"If you'll pardon my late introduction, I am Alizabeth. Nice to meet you, Aria."

"She's an AI," I explained as I exited the cargo bay, heading to the cockpit.

I could hear them talking excitedly as I left, their voices echoing down the hall, and I couldn't help but feel nostalgic. How long had it been since I'd heard Alizabeth and Kaeya talking like that too?

I frowned.

As I entered the cockpit Aria caught up to me, and I turned and looked up at her expectantly, recognizing the look of someone trying to figure out how to ask something of me.

"Are you going to take me with you?" she asked sheepishly.

I thought for a moment, weighing the pros and cons of having her on my ship.

Pro: I was probably going to need help moving cargo in the future.

Con: I felt I enjoyed my isolation, and she wouldn't stop talking.

Pro: Despite that, I had to admit that having another person to talk to might be nice.

Con: I was already low on food, and another person to feed could be risky.

"Do you have any other possessions to bring with you?" I asked her. "A change of clothes, or food, or..."

"No..." she said slowly, watching my response to see if she'd given the right answer.

"You need to know that I cannot afford to pay you in credits," I said sternly, "Federation or otherwise. All I can offer you for pay is food, really."

"That's totally okay!" she replied excitedly, nodding vigorously.

"Fine then," I said, turning back towards my cockpit. "Unless something changes in the future, you can continue to travel with me after we've dropped off this cargo."

"Yay!" she exclaimed excitedly, clapping her hands happily. "Thank you very very much... Um... I haven't actually gotten your name, yet."

"Kalani," I informed her.

"Thank you, Kalani," she said, her voice positively soggy with delight.

I threw myself down into the pilot's seat with a dull thud, the bright blue pilot's interface flickering to life, and I initiated the ship's reactor. It came online with a deep thrum audible throughout the ship, and I closed the cargo bay doors as the ship's systems came to life one after another like blood returning to a sleeping limb. Alizabeth automatically ran a deep sensor sweep of our surroundings, picking up a multitude of wildlife fleeing from the sound of my ship, as well as two particularly huge creatures flying through the sky a few kilometres away.

A second sweep revealed them to be some kind of massive, scaled birds, long tails drifting behind their dark yellow bodies as they swept the skies in search of prey. They were both over 10 metres in length, and their wings were tipped with metallic claws that could probably pierce into the hull of a ship.

I heard the clack of Aria's Arachnoid legs as she entered the cockpit behind me, standing in the space behind my sole chair. "Wow, that's a big one!" she exclaimed.

I turned to look at her, pointing at the image of the massive creature, "What are these things?"

She leaned in to get a better look at the image, invading my personal space without a thought, "We call them Wyverns. I used to hunt them with my mother as training. They're really nasty if they find you, breathing lightning everywhere and recklessly crashing through brush."

Breathing lightning, huh? I guess now I knew why the station had such a large array of anti-air weaponry.

I fired up the engines, and the ship gently lifted off the landing pad and began slowly accelerating upwards over the surrounding treeline. "You're gonna want to brace yourself against the wall," I told Aria, "this is gonna be pretty rough for you."

She moved to the back of the cockpit obediently as I turned the ship upwards, initiating full acceleration as we reached a 45 degree angle. The ship's rear thrusters burst into life and sent us forwards and upwards rapidly, the sky outside the cockpit growing gradually darker as we left the confines of the planet's atmosphere. A few minutes later we were in space, rocketing away from the gravitational field that had bound us, the universe an ebony canvas dotted with a million tiny dots in every direction.

Aria practically flew forward, slamming her face into the cockpit window to stare at that vast array of stars all around us. She marveled at the distant nebula on our right, the faint glimmer of infant stars older than life itself reaching us through the haze of dust and gas, while to our left the super-massive black hole that was the centre of the galaxy, Galactus Majoris, formed a notable void in the background of starlight.

She marveled at the spectacle of space like a child seeing snow for the first time, trying to look everywhere at once, her face plastered with awe and amazement.

I couldn't help but smile ever so lightly as I opened the starmaps I had collected over the years, plotting out the delivery route we would take. We had two options: the safe but slow route through Federation space, or the quick but dangerous route through pirate space.

I didn't like either choice, but pirates didn't ask for identification every two minutes, and both were liable to try and take one's property anyways.

I pulled up a local news feed, scanning through it for any hints of danger on the route through pirate space.

"What's this?" Aria asked over my shoulder as she glanced at the news feed, apparently finished with her stargazing. "'A trio of pirate vessels hijacked a small freighter last week, stealing the vessel's cargo and then scuttling it. There were no survivors.' Oh goodness, that sounds like quite a nasty group, will we be safe?"

I closed the news feed with a flick of my hand. "My ship is smaller and faster than a freighter, so they won't have enough time to find and jump to us before we've moved on. Don't worry about it."

I started running a quick diagnostic check in preparation for gravity jumping when Alizabeth shouted out, "Kalani! I just picked up a trio of ships hiding on the edge of the solar system! They've initiated a short-range gravity jump!"

I groaned in frustration. It would seem that I had underestimated the pirates.

So many interruptions to my search.