I had apparently arrived on the job in the midst of some intense Shadow fishing, and I didn’t think asking her to stop, hear me out, and come with me, even though I couldn’t tell her my full name, even if I guaranteed her safety and a lot of money, would go over well. Not without her trust. Which I had no idea how to earn from the cargo hold. I was having a hard enough time surviving.
The Kaitan floated in stillness, contemplating the endless sea of Shadow off its bow. Then it tilted, a hum reverberating through the ship as subspace engines were fueled to life, and we rocketed straight for the ten or so trillion tons of hurtling rock in the asteroid field. Shadow flashed up toward us faster than any of the debris, then parted, a thousand frantic points of light dispersing out from the ship, vanishing back into the asteroid field.
The display showed the edges of mag-couplings flickering to life as the boom on top of the ship extended out to the side. A winch unspooled the two cables—the polarized top and bottom edge of the “net” attached to Arjan’s skiff—which trailed behind him as he took off.
That was when the light show started. The entire arm flared for a moment as power flowed through the cables to magnetize them, and then a web of shimmering, rippling light arced from top to bottom to create a net stretching between the skiff and the Kaitan.
Where the skiff went, so went the cables, Arjan’s movement manipulating the size and shape of their spread. As stray Shadow began to flit past us and hit the glowing barrier that billowed like an impermeable curtain in the wind, it would explode with a myriad of colors—purple, red, yellow—and then flow like a darting stream along the mag-field net and straight toward the portal that led into the containment hold.
The Kaitan careened after the nearest flickers of Shadow, banking impossibly around asteroids I wasn’t even capable of processing before they tore past the view of the display. The ship shuddered violently in their wake, the Shadow river strobing past in a succession so fast I knew we had completed multiple barrel rolls. The gravitational dampeners groaned and whined in the center of the ship, and several times I felt the brief disorientation of weightlessness. Somehow, Arjan was keeping pace with us in the skiff, racing parallel to the Kaitan.
The comms crackled to life with Qole’s voice. It resonated with the timbre of someone who was steady, alert, and completely in her element. “Do your thing, Arjan.”
The sharp triangle of the skiff gleamed in the gaslight of the clouds as it juked and twisted around space debris to keep up and, miraculously, keep the net out of the worst of the asteroid interference. He created a huge arc, predicting where the Shadow specks would flow next.
“Ready?” His voice came in, calm as could be, as though he hadn’t just threaded the needle of death.
“Count to two, then bring it in.” Qole’s tone carried with it all the same emotions.
While Arjan’s job was difficult, he had the more maneuverable vessel by far. What he was doing was amazing, but not unbelievable. Qole, however, was using the Kaitan in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible. She employed every thruster on the ship to send us corkscrewing around obstacles and darting for Shadow as nimbly as a starfighter a quarter our size. In other subsystems, she would have been a celebrity, the hero of racing circuits and reality daredevil shows. Here, she was just a Shadow fishing captain. The best and from one of the oldest families Alaxak had to offer, but still.
There weren’t many members of the old Shadow fishing families left alive, I’d discovered after arriving on the planet a few weeks ago. At least, not with their wits intact. I’d come to Alaxak chasing rumors of extra senses and preternatural reflexes in humans, and instead found mostly death and madness. But Qole was another matter. She was living proof that I hadn’t come in vain.
For a few moments, both skiff and ship raced in parallel, nose to nose, and then Arjan veered sharply, bringing in the far edge of the net to close the circuit. Straight for the Kaitan, and straight into the path of a lump of space rock that had appeared between him and the ship in the blink of an eye.
A split second later, the grating roar of a mass driver echoed through the ship and the asteroid was harmless debris.
“Clear,” rumbled Eton unnecessarily from his perch in the turret.
Excitement, wonder, elation, terror, wetting one’s pants in abject fear—all these things are what a human might normally go through after being exposed to that experience for the first time. But this was where my job came in, and after more than a few hours on the ship, I was thoroughly numb to it all, in mind and body. The hold, though insulated to allow for human survival in deep space, was not heated for comfort. The near-freezing temperatures would have turned me into a meat icicle, if I weren’t forced to hustle with all the remaining speed I had left.
“Get it processed, Nev. This flare is slowing down, so make it count!” Captain Qole yelled at me over the comm. I stumbled in semihaste, groaning inwardly at both my exhaustion and the continued delay this Shadow run was to my mission.
As Arjan funneled the Shadow into the net, artfully tucking it in, the circuit closed. It formed a containment field that kept most of the substance from escaping, but it couldn’t hold such a volatile and unstable energy source for any prolonged length of time. So that was when I activated the suction scoop on the side of the hull, whisking the Shadow right into the containment hold, which was sealed off from the cargo hold I was in. But of course that couldn’t hold it for long either, as Arjan had told me, because of the damned poor lining.
The containers, of which there were hundreds, happened to weigh approximately half of what I did, even empty. I would heft one, jam it into the slot where it seated with the maglock, and yank the lever that would let the Shadow come blasting inside. The second it was full, I had to close the maglock and replace the canister with another. The faster I moved, the more Shadow we captured, and the less time it had to eat its way through the containment hold and blow us all to smithereens. But even that had stopped providing me with impetus for speed. Only two things kept me going: an overriding desire to be done with the job, followed by the nagging thought that I had to get out of this cargo hold before I ran out of time to convince Qole of anything.
Unless working myself to death was the only way to gain Qole’s trust, in which case I was nearly there.
“Um, Telu?” Arjan’s voice, slightly concerned, crackled into my awareness through the comm.
I glanced up at the display feed, and my blood turned to ice.
“Telu, there’s a drone, bearing zero, zero, two. What’s your status?” Qole chimed in.