FutureSight - a YEAR 10000 story

01 - The Job

"Nerp! Nerp! Nerp! Nerp! Nerp! Nerp! Nerp!"

Daren reached up and slammed his palm down on the clock. It stopped its infernal nerping and quit buzzing. For the time, anyways.

He groaned and slowly sat up out of his bed, flicking the lights on. What time was it anyways?

He looked at the clock to see it was six in the morning, a good three hours earlier than when he usually woke up. But this was his special job clock; it only rang when he had a customer.

Daren was in the business of escorting, sometimes smuggling, precious valuables and people. He used to work for a government named the Glory Star, but they were dead and gone. Yes, those had been the good old days.

He sat there on his bed, staring ahead at a mirror. He had this tired look, but his friends told him he always looked like that. He had curvy lips and a narrow head, and messy mat of black hair on top. Some might call him scruffy looking. Everyone called him an outlaw. Go figure.

Who the hell wanted to do a job with him this time?"

Daren sat up and put his shirt and pants on, then walked over to the living room where he kept his computer television. He turned the CTV on and sat on a chair, waiting for it to boot and register. It better be someone important, or else he might just go on back to bed. It sucked getting woken up early.

The computer registered, and Daren logged into his account. There was a message there, from planet Regridden. It was from one of his friends, Koe Kavoly. He stopped, thought about it.

Why would his friend call him in the middle of the night? Normally this was the part where he turned it off and made a note to bitch at him later, but right now curiosity was getting the better of him.

He opened the registry and opened the letter.

It read," Daren, it's me, Koe. I've been hearing some things in the underground, something about the Sel Sarrak Combine looking for a possible transporter. Contact me when you get this letter."

Daren decided to write him back another e-mail. First he got up and went into the kitchen and turned on the CoffeeMaster. Then he walked back to get to work on his letter.

"Koe, I've got your e-mail," he started out. "I'm interested in this job. Why don't you open up your messenger and we can talk about it." He turned on his IM and sent the mail, waiting.

He got a message.

"Daren, hey buddy, I didn't think you'd be up this late. On your planet it's probably around six in the morning."

"No shit," he wrote back.

"Hey, take it easy man. I was, after all, only looking out for your best interests. I had you in mind Daren. So, what do you think of a deal with the Sel Sarrak? Think you can trust them?"

"Course not," Daren replied," nobody's trustworthy these days. Still, it does sound tempting...do you know how much they're willing to pay?"

"Nope, sorry friend, I don't know that much. But hey, I can set you up with a guy who does. His name is Alex Krenshev and he works for them. I think he might be the one fishing around for contractors. Here's his address."

A list of numbers and names appeared. What solar system he was in, what planet, what city, which village, which street, and finally his house number. Daren nodded and scribbled it down on a piece of paper.

"Anyways, be seeing you around Dar," Koe finished. "I've got to be off. Cheerio."

The IM cut and Daren turned his CTV off. He lay back and yawned, thinking on this deal. He hadn't had much work lately, and this is just the sort of thing he needed to end that dry season. Maybe if he got in good with the Sel Sarrak, he could do repeat jobs for them.

Daren stood up and headed back to the CoffeeMaster. He picked the pitcher up and poured himself a steaming cup of bean juice.

As he sipped at it he contemplated what to do. He should probably drop by Mr. Krenshev's house and debate over the job. He'd want to bring his personal ship, the Anvil, to show off. A smuggler was nothing without his ship.

He turned out some of the other lights in the house, searching for his armor.

He found it stuffed under his bed along with his two Iken guns and specialized Lasersword gauntlet. He put the heavy black armor on and strapped one gun to each side. He slid on the Lasersword gauntlet, hitting the on button briefly to make sure it worked

Out of the gauntlet shot a glowing red spear of light energies. Through some projection of his soul, this weapon drew it's power. It was rumored to be as strong as the wielder was, in spirit. He'd always liked the sound of that.

He turned it off and headed down to his garage. Inside it was his pride and joy, the Anvil.

The Anvil, from above, looked like two half circles connected by a flattened bar in the middle. The ship bristled with hidden weaponry: enough anti-personnel lasers to take on an entire squad, one chamber full of space claymore mines and the opposite chamber filled with scorcher plasma mines, and two retractable super cannons called Punishers. Heavy end particle beam shit, those were.

Yessir, his pride and joy.

The Anvil was big for a ship alright; he'd had to remodel his entire house when he got it just to make a landing platform big enough. It was at least forty feet long.

Daren hit a button so that the roof of the garage opened up. He jogged up into the Anvil and looked around the inside.

Inside there was a smallish living room, an even smaller bedroom, a closet or two and a bunch of crawl spaces for maintenance. Oh yeah, and there was the cockpit. Daren climbed up a flight of stairs and sat down in the captain's seat.

He reached in his pocket and pulled out the paper with directions scribbled on it. He input the coordinates into the ship's computer. It was on a planet named Neelis, in the Croten system. There were hundreds of planets in this portion of the galaxy. Out of all of them, he didn't know which one he liked the most.

The ship started warming up, and he sat back, thinking to older days. He used to work for the Glory star system, but those days were dead and gone. Sometimes it hurt to think about them.

Nowadays everything seemed to run through two factions: the Sel Sarrak Combine or the Triad.

The Triad consisted of three parties that had long ago formed an alliance against the Sel Sarrak Combine: the Beretens, the Dyllus Ruen, and the Angliven. There wasn't really a right or a wrong side to this war, mostly because both sides were fuck-ups.

Daren told the ship's belly thrusters to lift him up out of the garage and take off. He shut the ingress hatch and told the ship's navigational computer to calculate a jump route to Neelis. The computer bleeped and began running numbers.

He yawned and waited, hovering there in the sky like some absurd balloon. The computer bleeped again and said that it had ran all the numbers for gravity and magnetic fields and was now ready to jump.

He reached forwards and hit the jump key, which sent him hurtling through space at faster than light speeds. It would be an hour or two before he stopped.

Enough time to catch up on some sleep.