Escape (4 page)

Apparently his attitude was about to be proven wrong with one lucky strike. He'd hit the mother lode. The sensors told him he was a few hundred milé-astroms away, yet he could barely see the diamond sparkle of the stars, peeking around the edges of the oblong asteroid. This asteroid was the size of a small moon, with mass readings projecting an estimated 9.6% as tetrillium ore. Even considering his paltry prospector's percentage of 2%, he would walk away with enough money to buy a ship of his choosing and put a few giga-astoms between him and the nearest FMG (Frontier Mining Guild) station.

Grinning helplessly, Kieran flexed his sweaty hands on the flight yoke and fired his
last
prospecting buoy with an eager twitch of his right index finger. (If he'd been smart, he would have brought more than one buoy. But that would necessitate that he actually had more than one.
Buoys cost money.
Now he was sorry that he hadn't made the investment. A whole uncharted belt, and he only had one buoy to tag it!)

A subtle jolt went through the flitter, and then Kieran saw a blinding flash from the buoy's booster rocket as it skipped out from beneath the bow of his ship. A blue contrail streamed from the bow of his flitter to the fast-receding buoy, like an impossibly long ribbon. A few moments later, the buoy impacted invisibly on the distant, shadowy surface of the gargantuan asteroid, but Kieran imagined he could see the resultant cloud of dust as his buoy buried itself in the asteroid, marking it as
his
.

Still grinning wildly, Kieran brought the flitter around, turning it toward dark, starry opulence of space, and the distant, deceptively tiny-looking gray ring of the trilinear space (TLS) gate. He would have to come back tomorrow to scan and tag the remainder of the belt. He fired his flitter's thrusters at full bore for a handful of seconds, reveling in the vibrating roar and sudden, giddying hand of acceleration which pressed him into his flight chair.

After a few seconds, he killed thrust and let the flitter drift toward the gate. It was time to report his find. His buoy’s transmissions were probably already making the short hop through the gate and trilinear space, arriving in the comm center of Outpost 110, the Frontier Mining Guild’s nearest base
—
and his regrettable home. But he needed to add his own verbal report, along with his flight logs, and some tedious paperwork in order to properly make his claim.

Soon.

It took about twenty minutes of drifting before the gray ring of the TLS gate was close enough to begin his approach. With a diameter of four milé-astroms, the space gate was enormous, its size and scale quickly becoming apparent. For frame of reference, there was a control tower on one side of the ring, a bubble of blue transpiranium in which Kieran could vaguely see a few automatons manning the controls. They, and the control tower itself, were a barely distinguishable speck against the greater superstructure of the gate. Kieran could see the swirling, rainbow-colored vortex in the center of the ring, coloring and partially obscuring his view of the stars beyond. Kieran fired his braking thrusters a bit too eagerly, and slammed into his flight harness. The crisscrossing straps dug into his chest and shoulders as he brought his flitter around to face the swirling vortex of the TLS gate. He automatically lined up his flight path with the pair of glowing green lines that were the virtual overlay of his approach lane. Carefully sticking to the approach lane
—
it wouldn’t be smart to wander into the red exit lane and get flattened by a random traveler coming out of TLS
—
and fighting the residual G-force, Kieran reached out with his right hand and punched a flight plan into his navcomp, and then sent it to the TLS gate for approval.

One of the automatons responded over the comm in a flat, inflectionless voice: “Flight plan accepted. Your toll will be 465 tokens. Please proceed.”

Kieran grimaced at the cost as he snapped on the autopilot and settled back in his flight chair to wait. The thrusters fired modestly, boosting him gently down the virtual approach lane and toward the swirling multi-colored wormhole.

The 465 token toll would automatically be deducted from his account before he even arrived at his destination. Experienced prospectors kept to the well-traveled lanes, where the tolls were lower, and where the belts had a previously demonstrated hope of payoff. It wasn't considered good business sense to gamble next month's rent and lease payment on an unknown field. But Kieran was sick of playing it safe. Sick of waiting for his lucky break. Sick of wishing he could get away, out, and on his own with even half a chance to make a life for himself
—
a life of his own choosing.
And
you don’t get rich by picking over the scraps of other people’s finds.

Besides, Kieran had received a tip from beyond the grave, from his late, prospecting father. The tip had come in the form of a starmap, locked away in an encrypted folder, named
Origins
on his father's data pad. He hadn't had any trouble bypassing the encryption. The folder was unlocked by the answer to a question, the same question his father had asked him and Reddick every night for as long as they could remember: what's the most important thing in life?

Every precious moment of it.

The map showed an uncharted belt, off the IF-57 lane. The fact that the belt was still uncharted meant that his father must have died before he'd had a chance to scan it. Even if he'd scanned a few rocks and found nothing there, he was still obligated by the Frontier Mining Guild to report his findings to the claims department. They couldn't afford to have their prospectors going over the same old, unproductive territory time and again.

Kieran frowned into the depthless, rainbow-colored swirl of the TLS wormhole. In a few seconds it would greedily swallow his flitter and accelerate him through interdimensional space
—
a maddening rush of flashing light and color which always gave him a headache to look at. Routine. Just another part of his day. Nothing to frown about. He was frowning because thinking about his father's untimely death always brought a rush of impotent fury boiling to the surface. Made even worse now by knowing that his father's death had come mere days or weeks before he would have struck it rich with the uncharted belt. Their lives could have been so much different. He could have gone to the Academy like Reddick. His father could have retired. Instead, his father's flitter had mysteriously exploded on the way to work. The hull was riddled with stress fractures, the FMG investigators said. Poor maintenance, the news reporters said.
Another keficking injustice for the universe to laugh at,
Kieran thought.

Kieran watched as his ship drew closer to the wormhole. Tendrils of multicolored light appeared to be arcing and flicking out toward his ship, like a rainbow on fire. His navcomp began an audible countdown:
three, two, one
—

With a blinding flash, the
Fat Chance
disappeared into trilinear space, leaving a spreading ripple fading across the surface of the swirling wormhole to mark its passage.

* * *

“Docking sequence initiated,” a robotic voice announced. Kieran immediately lost control of his flitter as Outpost 110 took remote control of his vessel. In order to avoid traffic accidents and terrorism, all stations maintain a no-manual-flight zone, the size of which depending on the value of the station and potential threat of attack. In this case Kieran had been forced to stop a quarter of an astrom
—
250 milé-astroms from Outpost 110. A modest drone zone (as pilots like to call it). At that distance, even an interceptor with a maximum acceleration of 450 µA/s
2
(micró-astroms per second per second)
would take half a minute to close to effective firing range, giving the station time to raise its shields.

Kieran watched the red-tinted, metallic gray outpost slowly swelling against the breathless infinity of stars as flight control guided him in. Parts of the station were shadowed by its own bird’s nest of connecting corridors and modules, since the nearest sun, a red giant, was providing directional lighting from slightly above and behind. In the shadowed areas, Kieran could see the muted yellow glow of the station's viewports.

Like all other stations of modular construction, Outpost 110 was one cylindrical, spherical, or boxy module after another, each one connected to another, and to another, and to another by skinny corridors, which jutted from the modules at consistent right angles. The structure looked haphazard, like a child had been left to play with a chemistry professor's models of atoms. It was flimsy construction, but cheap. Kieran didn't like to think what would happen if a crazed drilling platform pilot plowed his rig into that maze of toothpicks.

Hence the drone zone.

Kieran had given flight control his preference to land on the extreme port side of the station, where the claims department had its offices. He wanted to get his claim into the system as quickly as possible. For some reason, his father had waited to file his own claim, and then had never had the chance to do so. Kieran wasn't going to make the same mistake. Unfortunately, it seemed that the nearest hangar with an empty berth was closer to the middle of the station than the far port side.

Looks like I'm going to be getting some exercise on the company treadmill.

The flitter didn't even stop in front of the hangar bay doors, the automatons working up in flight control having timed his approach and opening the doors with precision that only an AI could manage. The doors were opening, his flitter was approaching, and the gap looked dangerously small.

Kieran braced himself, gripping the arms of his flight chair hard enough to make indentations in the synthetic material. AI's don't make mistakes. AI's don't make mistakes. AI's don't
—

The Fat Chance sailed through the gap with seemingly only micró-astroms on either side. Kieran let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding, and then watched on his rear display screen as the hangar doors immediately began closing after him.

He keyed his comm: “Control, what's the big idea? Trying to give me a heart attack?”

A suspicious hiss of static came over the comm. Robotic laughter? “Sorry, prospector five sixty-seven, just trying to improve efficiency ratings. There have been rumors of a coming memory wipe.”

Kieran snorted and shook his head. “Well, if you don't watch it, I'm going to come up there and do it myself.”

Another hiss of static. “FMG company policy, article 11, section b, subsection II. On the treatment of automatons: Only a registered technician may perform maintenance on company automatons. Unauthorized modification is grounds for dismissal and punitive charges
—
in layman's terms
—
” An electronic raspberry followed.

Kieran silenced the comm with a stab of his finger. He had a pretty good idea about the reasons for the rumored memory wipe. Nothing to do with efficiency.

The Fat Chance coasted through the cavernous hangar, past tiny flitters, boxy transports (freelance traders mostly), and even a few of the smaller yachts and corvettes of the company execs. With their smooth lines, and gleaming hulls, those corvettes, and to a lesser extent, the yachts, always gave Kieran a pang of envy to look at. Of course, these corvettes and yachts were nothing compared to some. The largest ships required a dedicated airlock or a shuttle to dock with the station.

Finding an empty berth, the remote pilot turned his flitter around and reversed into the space, being careful to line up airlock to airlock. A few minutes after the Fat Chance came to a stop, Kieran felt more than heard the subtle clunk of the docking tube extending from the station to connect with the matching portal at the back of his ship.

As Kieran unbuckled his flight harness and spun his flight chair around to face the airlock behind him, his comm crackled to life:

“Docking successful. Welcome back to FMG Outpost 110, prospector five sixty-seven.”

Was it too much to ask for the flight controllers to remember his name? They're AI's, after all, perfect recall and all that. Then again, there's probably a company policy about being too friendly to employees
.
 
.
 
.
 
.

Kieran stood up from his chair and cycled the airlock doors. His ship's sensors noted the presence of atmosphere in the docking tube, and both sets of doors inside his airlock cycled open at the same time, revealing the docking tube and the station beyond. Kieran started through the docking tube at a brisk pace. It was going to be quite a walk to get to the claims office.

* * *

“What do you mean you haven't received a transmission yet? I watched the buoy impact on the surface!”

The claims officer, Dennis Liquay, was sitting at his desk, steepling his chubby fingers in front of his double chin. “I don't know what to tell you, Kieran. Did you remember to verify the signal strength?”

“Of course I verified it! I mean, I didn't have to, right? How often does a buoy fail?” Kieran shot out of his chair, and began pacing around the office. A vein was pulsing insistently in his forehead. He impatiently massaged the area, squinting his eyes against an encroaching headache. Kieran stopped pacing and turned to face the claims officer.