Майкл Бишоп: The Final Frontier: Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

The harbormaster moved closer. The gantry around him was motorized, a long arm moving him anywhere he wanted in the room.

Hundreds of cables, plugged into his scalp like hair, bundled and ran back along the arm of the gantry. Hoses moved effluvia out. More hoses ran purified blood, and other fluids, back in.

“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “Traffic is light. And requests have dropped off. I’ve taken classes. Even language lessons…” I stopped when I saw the wizened hand raise, palm up.

“I know what you’ve been doing.” The harbormaster’s sightless sockets turned back to the depths of space outside. The hardened skin of his face showed few emotions, his artificial voice was toneless. “You would not have been allowed to overdraw if you hadn’t made good faith efforts.”

“For which,” I said, “I am enormously appreciative.”

“That ship that just arrived brings with it a choice for you,” the harbormaster continued without acknowledging what I’d just said. “I cannot let you overdraw any more if you stay on station, so I will have to put you into hibernation. To pay for hibernation and your air debt I would buy your contract. You’d be woken for guaranteed work. I’d take a percentage. You could buy your contract back out, once you had enough liquidity.”

That was exactly what I’d been dreading. But he’d indicated an alternate. “My other option?”

He waved a hand, and a holographic image of the ship I’d just seen coming in to dock hung in the air. “They’re asking for a professional Friend.”

“For their ship?” Surprise tinged my question. I wasn’t crew material. I’d been shipped frozen to the station, just another corpsicle. People like me didn’t stay awake for travel. Not enough room.

The harbormaster shrugged pallid shoulders. “They will not tell me why. I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement just to get them to tell me what they wanted.”

I looked at the long ship. “I’m not a fuckbot. They know that, right?”

“They know that. They reiterated that they do not want sexual services.”

“I’ll be outside the station. Outside your protection. It could still be what they want.”

“That is a risk. How much so, I cannot model for you.” The harbormaster snapped his fingers, and the ship faded away. “But the contractors have extremely high reputational scores on past business dealings. They are freelance scientists: biology, botany, and one linguist.”

So they probably didn’t want me as a pass-around toy.

Probably.

“Rape amendments to the contract?” I asked. I was going to be on a ship, unthawed, by myself, with crew I’d never met. I had to think about the worst.

“Prohibitive. Although, accidental loss of life is not quite as high, which means I’d advise lowering the former so that there is no temptation to murder you after a theoretical rape to evade the higher contract payout.”

“Fuck,” I sighed.

“Would you like to peruse their reputation notes?” the harbormaster asked. And for a moment, I thought maybe the harbormaster sounded concerned.

No. He was just being fair. He’d spent two hundred years of bargaining with ships for goods, fuel, repair, services. Fair was built-in, the half-computer half-human creature in front of me was all about fair. Fair got you repeat business. Fair got you a wide reputation.

“What’s the offer?”

“Half a point on the package,” the harbormaster said.

“And we don’t know what the package is, or how long it will take… or anything.” I bit my lip.

“They assured me that half a point would pay off your debt and then some. It shouldn’t take more than a year.”

A year. For half a percent. Half a percent of what? It could be cargo they were delivering. Or, seeing as it was a crew of scientists, it could be some project they were working on.

All of which just raised more questions.

Questions I wouldn’t have answers to unless I signed up. I sighed. “That’s it, then? No loans? No extensions?”

The harbormaster sighed. “I answer to the Gheda shareholders who built and own this complex. I have already stretched my authority to give you a month’s extension. The debt has to be called. I’m sorry.”

I looked out at the darkness of space out beyond Ops. “Shit choices either way.”

The harbormaster said nothing.

I folded my arms. “Do it.”

The docking arms had transferred the starship from the center structure’s incoming docks down a spoke to a dock on one of the wheels. The entire ship, thanks to being spun along with the wheel of the station, had gravity.

The starship was a quarter of a mile long. Outside: sleek and burnished smooth by impacts with the scattered dust of space at the stunning speeds it achieved. Inside, I realized I’d boarded a creaky, old, outdated vehicle.

Fiberwire spilled out from conduits, evidence of crude repair jobs. Dirt and grime clung to nooks and crannies. The air smelled of sweat and worse.

A purple-haired man with all-black eyes met me at the airlock. “You are the Friend?” he asked. He carried a large walking stick with him.

“Yes.” I let go of the rolling luggage behind me and bowed. “I’m Alex.”

He bowed back. More extravagantly than I did. Maybe even slightly mockingly. “I’m Oslo.” Every time he shifted his walking stick, tiny grains of sand inside rattled and shifted about. He brimmed with impatience, and some regret in the crinkled lines of his eyes. “Is this everything?”

I looked back at the single case behind me. “That is everything.”

“Then welcome aboard,” Oslo said, as the door to the station clanged shut. He raised the stick, and a flash of light blinded me.

“You should have taken a scan of me before you shut the door,” I said. The stick was more than it seemed. Those tiny rustling grains were generators, harnessing power for whatever tools were inside the device via kinetic motion. He turned around and started to walk away. I hurried to catch up.

Oslo smiled, and I noticed tiny little fangs under his lips. “You are who you say you are, so everything ended up okay. Oh, and for protocol, the others aren’t much into it either, by the way. Now, for my own edification, you are a hermaphrodite, correct?”

I flushed. “I am what we Friends prefer to call bi-gendered, yes.” Where the hell was Oslo from? I was having trouble placing his cultural conditionings and how I might adapt to interface with them. He was very direct, that was for sure.

This gig might be more complicated than I thought.

“Your Friend training: did it encompass Compact cross-cultural training?”

I slowed down. “In theory,” I said slowly, worried about losing the contract if they insisted on having someone with Compact experience.

Oslo’s regret dripped from his voice and movements. Was it regret that I didn’t have the experience? Would I lose the contract, minutes into getting it? Or just regret that he couldn’t get someone better? “But you’ve never Friended an actual Compact drone?”

I decided to tell the truth. A gamble. “No.”

“Too bad.” The regret sloughed off, to be replaced with resignation. “But we can’t poke around asking for Friends with that specific experience, or one of our competitors might put two and two together. I recommend you brush up on your training during the trip out.”

He stopped in front of a large, metal door. “Where are we going?” I asked.

“Here is your room for the next three days.” Oslo opened the large door to a five-by-seven foot room with a foldout bunk bed.

My heart skipped a beat, and I put aside the fact that Oslo had avoided the question. “That’s mine?”