Fieldborn

It’s only when they open the airlock that it hits you. Canned air, recycled a million times, but it’s got a life to it, and after three weeks cooped up in the D13, you could almost think you were dirt-side for a moment. Then, you get that taste in your mouth, that metallic sweetness, and it’s like they spun up the gravity. By then, my feet had already turned right and headed down the corridor.

Turn right, fifty steps, and there you are. The Pub in glowing orange letters above your head. Precisely the same as every other Pub on every other station. Hell, it wasn’t like you had a choice; Station and Crew didn’t mix, so I walked into the din of people trying to forget their shitty lives, found a cubicle against the wall and ordered a burger.

My fingers tapped in the code without me looking: 65-22-05X, like they’d been doing for ten years—burger, strawberry shake, fries—large. Trust me. After a few weeks of ship food, a Pub burger is all you think about. Maybe half the crew had ordered burgers the moment they stepped off their ships, just like me. The other half had the pizza if you can believe it, and it’s not that there were three choices.

Jesus, the first few bites were delicious. Back a few years, I might have been stupid enough to eat the whole thing. Instead, I pressed 33 for a beer to drink with the fries. They were the best part, anyhow. The girl who brought it was young, smiling. Just not her eyes. The wrist that handed me my beer had been Etched, a swirl of slowly moving green on pale white skin. Indentured, available. I waved her away, first-day tired and rested my head against the wall, letting the noise wash over me. We were all of us living the dream.

Humanity discovered a crashed ship on Phobos two centuries ago with a working hyperdrive, and the first mission set off into the nearer stars in a blaze of hope and glory. Only to find someone was there first, lots of them. Everywhere they went, every reachable star system with even a half-habitable planet was taken. Hell, you could pick some rock randomly in an asteroid belt, and if it had a credit’s worth of nickel in it, you’d find somebody mining. The galaxy had long been settled, except for a few overlooked spots like Sol. Luckily, fusion and hyperdrive, even a found one, brought us to Tier One. Civilised enough so no one could get away with clearing out the pesky natives and settling in. And we were so grateful…

I open my eyes at the familiar sound of fists. Over by the bar, the second fight since I’d sat down had broken out. Just two strangers who’d spent a month cooped up in a sixty-year-old ship letting off steam. I’d spotted Hagen, my navigator, when I’d come in, but I glanced at my chromo, for the next ninety-seven hours, I didn’t know him and couldn’t see him. I couldn’t have cared less what the other three were doing. After hearing the same jokes, the same laugh, the same little noise each time they ate? Cooped up together, sweating to keep going with no decent spares, just enough in the reactor, and the sound of hyperspace scratching down the hull like nails on glass. Twenty days on, five off at a station like a melted doughnut and round again. If you had to ask why ship days were twenty-two hours and station days twenty, you didn’t know the Guild. A hundred hours to yourself. To eat, drink, sleep and get laid. And fight. I went back to my beer. Both men were already down, casually neuro-slapped by the bartender and shoved into a corner. There were worse ways to spend furlough.

They found us a job, all right, those rich old aliens. You need something delivered? The Human Transport Guild will do it. Cheap, fast, guaranteed. Using way stations scattered throughout the sector, made of standard 100x10x10 metre shipping containers welded together, radiation foam and a fusion spindle. Identical, cheap, throwaway. HTG rented a rock and built one in every no-name, worthless system that they could. And a swarm of ships like the D13 to crawl between them, still at five lights, because that’s good enough for humans. 

I punched up SP100? Got a sleeping pod assignment in the tier above for later. Pods were less popular than communal racks. Mainly because they only had enough room for one. But warm and quiet, so quiet, and I had a routine. After twelve hours of sleep, I’d call Judy to tell her I was safe. Four years now since I’d been in the same system as her and the girls. Then, another meal, get some shopping in the little arcade, treats for myself like an apple and something left for the next jump. Chillis and peppermints, dark chocolate. Anything with a strong taste. Then maybe some VR or a holo. Another meal. More sleep. One hundred hours, less eight, because it started at the airlock but finished back at the ship. Then off with a fresh load. Golden bark from Vesta, metals, containers of tech we couldn’t understand, plants, animals in cryo, sentient machines, and a thousand other things that flowed around this corner of the galaxy. Station to station. One Pub after another. 

I ordered another beer and watched the people who made it possible fight and drink. My fingers had written an Etch code in beer on one corner of the table, and I took a picture with my comm. Judy never asks, but I know she understands.