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The Outer Routes, Episode 6: Halvren's Way
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ShamanSquirrel
ShamanSquirrel's Gallery (400)

The Outer Routes, Episode 7: Twenty Jobs
outer_routes_ep07_twenty_jobs.doc
Keywords male 1313166, female 1194778, human 113171, hybrid 77714, squirrel 33502, alien 26260, ferret 11543, space 8722, sci-fi 5084, ai assisted 2940, iskret 21, space pirates 7, hadruni 4
Twenty Jobs

An Outer Routes Story — About 11 Years Before Silvania

~ I ~
Raskon kept a count in his navigator's log. He had started it the night he wrote the rules on the galley wall. Each job got a number, a place and a line about how it went.
Job 1. Tallis. Seed. Nobody hurt.
Job 7. Merrow. Drive cores. Nobody hurt.
Job 12. Sennik. Halvren barge. Nobody hurt.
There were nineteen entries in five years. Some of the jobs had been good ones, like Tallis. Most had just been work. They had taken cargo from people who had too much and sold it to people who didn't ask. Nineteen times, the line at the end had been the same.
Job twenty was at Pallas Ring, a freight station with nine thousand people and a customs warehouse. A small hauler named Dessa Roon had lost sixty crates of machine tools there. A freight company had seized them over a debt she swore she had already paid. She couldn't afford a lawyer. She could afford a crew.
"It's routine," Raskon said in the galley. "Corrin has a release order. Riska has the dock codes. We load sixty crates at the night shift change, when there's no guard on the floor for eleven minutes. We've done this twenty times."
"Nineteen," Keldan said.
"Nineteen. This makes twenty."
Zethik was cleaning a pistol at the end of the table. He had bought it at Brannock the year before. Raskon had told him to leave it in the locker on jobs. Zethik had said yes, Captain. It was what he always said.
Hessa was sitting next to her much smaller mate, mending a cargo strap. They had been together eight years. Her silver cord was still on his wrist, having replaced the knot twice.
"Leave it in the locker," Raskon said.
"Yes, Captain," Zethik said.
~ II ~
The shift change was at hour four. The crew was on the warehouse floor at hour four and one minute.
It went the way it had gone nineteen times. Corrin's order got them through the front office. Riska opened the cage. Borrik and Hessa carried, and Zethik and Hollis ran the lift. Raskon and Keldan counted.
At crate forty-one, the side door opened.
The guard was a human in his forties, heavy, with a gray beard. He was not supposed to be there for another six minutes. He had a stunner in his hand, because he had heard noise. He came around a stack of crates and found himself two meters from Hessa.
He raised the stunner. Anyone would have. Hessa was two meters tall and carrying three crates.
"Easy," Corrin said, with his hands up, already walking toward him. "Easy, friend. We have a release order. It's in the front office. Nobody's in any trouble here."
The guard looked at Corrin. He looked at the open cage and the lift. Raskon watched him work it out. He was one person, and there were eight of them. He wasn't paid enough.
The stunner started to come down.
Raskon saw that. Hessa saw that. Corrin saw it and started to smile.
Zethik shot him.
The sound was very loud in the warehouse. The guard went down on his side with a noise like the air going out of him. The stunner slid across the floor.
For a moment nobody moved. Then Hollis was running. He was on his knees beside the guard before Raskon had taken a step.
"Hip," Hollis said. "Low, left side. It's in the joint." He had his kit open. His hands were steady. "He's bleeding, but it's not the artery. He'll live if somebody gets him to a surgeon inside an hour."
"He had it pointed at her," Zethik said. He was still holding the pistol. His voice was high. "He had it pointed right at her."
"He was putting it down," Hessa said.
Zethik turned and looked at her.
"I watched him," Hessa said. She had set the crates on the floor. She did not sound angry. She sounded very tired. "He was putting it down, Zethik. You didn’t need to play the hero."
~ III ~
"Finish loading," Raskon said. "Keldan, get everyone aboard. Go."
"And you?" Keldan said.
"Hollis is staying until the station medics come. So am I."
"Captain, if station security finds you here—"
"I know what happens." Raskon looked down at the guard. The guard's eyes were open. He was looking at the ceiling and breathing in short pulls. "Hollis can't carry him. And I'm not leaving Hollis alone."
Hollis didn't look up. "Call the medics now," he said. "Tell them a gunshot to the left hip, conscious, pressure applied. Then they'll bring the right kit."
Raskon made the call from the guard's own comm. Then he knelt on the other side and held the dressing where Hollis showed him.
"What's your name?" he said.
"Marsh," the guard said. "Deven Marsh."
"The medics are four minutes out, Deven. This man is a doctor. He's a good one."
"You shot me," Marsh said.
"One of mine did," Raskon said. "That makes it me."
Marsh looked at him for a moment. Then he closed his eyes.
The medics took seven minutes, not four. Raskon counted every one. When he heard boots in the corridor, Hollis stood up. He wrote a line on the dressing in marker, with the time and what he'd given. They went out the side door.
The corridor outside should have been locked down. There should have been an alarm and a sealed bulkhead. Instead, every door between the warehouse and berth six stood open, and every camera they passed had a small red light where the green one should be.
A woman was waiting at the last door. She was in her late twenties, in station coveralls, with a systems tech's handheld. She had dark skin and close-cropped hair. Along her forearms and up the sides of her neck ran a pattern of fine bronze scales.
"You're the ones who stayed," she said. "I watched it on the cameras. The small one shot him. You two knelt on the floor for seven minutes when you could have run." She held the door. "I looped the cameras from hour four. I opened your route. In about twenty minutes, somebody is going to check whose credentials did that."
"Why?" Raskon said.
"Because I've worked here six years, and nobody on this station would have stayed," she said. "My name's Nadia Okoro. I'd like to not be here in twenty minutes."
"Can you break a data lock?" Raskon said.
She looked at him as if he had asked whether she could walk.
"Get aboard," Raskon said.
~ IV ~
Nobody slept. The Drizola ran for six hours before Raskon called the crew to the galley.
Hollis spoke first, because Raskon asked him to.
"The round broke the hip joint," Hollis said. "He'll walk again, with a replacement, if the station pays for one. He'll use a cane and likely won’t work a warehouse floor again."
Zethik was sitting at the end of the table. The pistol was not with him because Keldan had taken it.
"He pointed a weapon at Hessa," Zethik said. "I'd do it again for the one I love. Anybody here would have, for theirs."
Nobody answered him. He looked around the table. Borrik was looking at his hands. Riska was looking at the wall. Sathe was looking straight at him, and it was the saddest Raskon had ever seen the old cook.
"It had to be done," Zethik said. It was what he had said at Corvel, with the rifle. He had said it at Harrow, and at Tallis with the knife. This was the first time nobody at the table agreed, or argued, or said anything at all.
Raskon got up. He went to the wall by the door and stood in front of the second rule for a while. Nobody gets hurt who didn't sign up for it. Riska had traced over the letters so many times that they were thicker than when he had written them.
"I told you I'd come for you," he said, without turning around. "At Brannock. I said the third rule cuts both ways. I meant it. I still mean it. If the Syndicate took you tomorrow, I'd come."
"Captain—"
"But I can't have you on my ship." He turned around. "Three times, somebody stopped you. Me, at Corvel. Hessa at Kesh and at Tallis. Today nobody was fast enough. I can't run a crew where the second rule depends on someone being fast enough."
Zethik's face didn't change, but his hand went to the cord on his wrist.
"Where?" he said.
"Kesh," Raskon said. "The Three Moons. Six days from here."
Hessa looked up.
"You know every dock boss there," Raskon said to her. "You could have dock nine back in a week. I'm not putting you off, Hessa. Only him."
"I know," Hessa said. "You're right about him. I watched it happen. He was putting it down." She put her hand over Zethik's on the table. Her hand covered his entirely. "But I chose him. I didn't choose him for the good days only. I'm going where he goes."
"I thought you would," Raskon said.
"I don't listen well, Captain," Hessa said. "But I watch. You'll be a worse ship without me. You know that."
"I know that too," Raskon said.
~ V ~
It was six days to Kesh. For the first two, nobody knew how to act. Then Sathe started cooking.
He made the dumplings Zethik liked, the ones with too much pepper. He made a Hadruni stew from a recipe Hessa had given him eight years before, which he had never once gotten right until now. Borrik ate four bowls and said it was still made for weaklings.
After that it was easier. Tessik built Hessa a proper cargo harness, sized for a Hadruni, with a loop for her wrench. Riska copied out every dock code she knew for Kesh. Corrin gave Zethik his second-best jacket. "For when you meet her family," he said. "You'll want to look like you have prospects."
Nadia watched all of it from the corner of the galley. On the third night, she asked Ishva about it.
"He shot someone," she said. "They're putting him off the ship. Why is everyone giving him presents?"
Ishva looked at her for a moment. She had been looking at Nadia often since Pallas Ring. She had been looking at the bronze scales.
"Both things are true," Ishva said. "He cannot stay. And he is ours. This crew does not find that difficult." She tilted her head. "May I ask you a question that is not polite?"
"The scales," Nadia said.
"Yes."
"My mother was human. A researcher named Abena Okoro. The other half is Swambazi." Nadia rolled up one sleeve. "There was a licensed program at Teller Station, thirty years ago. Cross-species compatibility between humans and Swambazi. They wanted to know if it could be done at all. It could, fourteen times. Then the funding ended, and they closed it. The fourteen of us were adopted by the staff." She rolled the sleeve down. "No tragedy. No escape. I had a good childhood, in a lab full of computers. I just don't look like anyone."
"You look a little like me," Ishva said.
"A little," Nadia said. She almost smiled.
They reached Kesh on the sixth day. It was not Moonrise. Only one moon was up, and the market was quiet. Hessa walked down the ramp, and a dock worker saw her and shouted. In ten minutes, there were thirty Hadruni on the dock. One of them was the dock boss of berth nine, who told Hessa the job had been badly done for eight years and was hers if she wanted it.
The noodle stall owner came too. He looked at Borrik for a long time and then gave him a free bowl.
Borrik picked Zethik up off the ground with one arm, which was how Hadruni said goodbye, and set him down again carefully. Sathe gave him a tin of the dumplings. Keldan shook his hand and said nothing, and Zethik seemed to understand it.
Raskon was last.
"There's no record of your face at Pallas Ring," he said. "Nadia wiped it. Nobody's hunting you. You can stay here as long as you want."
Zethik nodded. He looked at the dock, and at Hessa, who was laughing at something with six of her cousins. Raskon had never seen her laugh like that on the ship.
"She was right," Zethik said. "He was putting his weapon down. I knew it when I pulled the trigger. I just didn't know it fast enough."
"I know."
"Hessa said once that I should say thank you instead of arguing."
"She did."
"Thank you," Zethik said. "For nine years. And for coming to get me, if you ever have to."
He went down the ramp. Hessa put her arm around him, and the Hadruni on the dock made room.
"They'll be all right," Keldan said.
"Better than all right," Raskon said. He meant it and was happy for them, but it still felt like losing a hand.
~ VI ~
The Drizola left Kesh with nine crew under her captain. It was the right number for the ship, Tessik said. It still felt like too few.
Nadia took the systems station on the bridge. She found four things wrong with it in the first hour and fixed three. Tessik brought her the Halvren data core that afternoon and set it down in front of her without a word.
Nadia turned it over. "Halvren Land and Claims," she said. "Who locked this?"
"Halvren."
"They paid for good work." She plugged it in and looked at the screen for a while. "This isn't an afternoon. It's layered. Months, maybe a year, working around everything else." She looked up. "What's in it?"
"Seven planets," Keldan said from the doorway. "One of them was mine."
Nadia looked at him. Then she turned back to the screen and started typing.
That night, Raskon opened his navigator's log. He looked at the nineteen entries for a long time.
Dessa Roon had her sixty crates. She had paid them four thousand credits. Raskon had sent all four thousand back to Pallas Ring, to the station clinic, with a name on it. Nobody on the crew had argued. It would buy part of a hip.
He wrote:
Job 20. Pallas Ring. Machine tools. Deven Marsh, 46, guard. Left hip. He was putting his weapon down.
He read the nineteen lines above it. Nobody hurt, nobody hurt, nobody hurt. He had been proud of that count. He had thought it meant the rules worked.
The rules worked. They had cost him two of his crew this week, and a man at Pallas Ring would walk with a cane.
He closed the log. There would be a job twenty-one. He didn't know yet that it would have no pay in it at all, and that it would be the only one he ever told cubs about.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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For five years, Raskon has numbered every job in his navigator’s log, and nineteen times the last line has read “Nobody hurt.” Job twenty is routine: sixty crates at a freight station, eleven minutes with no guard on the floor. Then the guard walks in early and raises a stunner at Hessa. He is already lowering it when Zethik fires. Raskon and Hollis stay on the warehouse floor for seven minutes until the medics come. A station tech named Nadia Okoro watches them on the cameras and decides to open every door between them and their ship. The guard will walk with a cane. Zethik says it had to be done, and for the first time nobody at the table answers. Raskon tells him he would still come for him, and that he can’t have him on the ship. Six days later the crew leaves Zethik and Hessa on the Three Moons with gifts, dumplings and thirty cheering Hadruni. Can you be glad for someone and still be right to send them away?
Keywords
male 1,313,166, female 1,194,778, human 113,171, hybrid 77,714, squirrel 33,502, alien 26,260, ferret 11,543, space 8,722, sci-fi 5,084, ai assisted 2,940, iskret 21, space pirates 7, hadruni 4
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Type: Writing - Document
Published: 1 day, 14 hrs ago
Rating: General
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