Jennifer Wells - Beyond the Stars - At Galaxy's Edge

“Shit. Wix left his schoolbook. Enjoy your coffee, Ed,” he said, picking the pad up and starting off down Bickam Boulevard, heading towards the school.

He ran into someone carrying a bag of ‘just-add-water’ meals, and they spilled all over the sidewalk.

“Mrs. Doughby! I’m terribly, terribly sorry!” He stooped to pick them up. She joined him.

“Mr. Bickham! Not a problem!” She stuffed a few packages into the bag, and noticed Wix’s notebook. “Heading to school?”

“Yep. Wixam Hanuman left his schoolwork at my table.”

“Then you let me handle this mess. School’s starting in less than a minute‌—‌if you don’t get moving you’ll be late.”

Frank glanced at his watch. “Naw. I’ve got all the time in the world.” He lowered his voice. “Plus, just between you and me, his teacher owes me one for that class presentation I gave last week. Nailed it.”

“Well, in that case...” She trailed off, kneeling down to reach for a few that had strayed onto the street.

He stuffed the last package into her bag, and helped her up. “So? How’s work going?”

Where did this story come from?

Someday, someone will be the very first human to die on another planet. I don’t know if that makes me morbid or not, but it’s fascinating to think about. Will they die there on a failed exploration mission? Or will they die there because they live there, and, well, dying is just what regular people *do*. I hope to be able to see that day, when living on another planet is so normal for people, that imagining people dying there feels entirely natural, because then we’ll know we’ve finally arrived as a multi-planetary civilization.

Do you want to die on another planet?

No! I won’t even get in an airplane!

Really?

I hate flying. But if space travel ever gets safe enough, with hundreds of safe launches per day, and as long as I’m over eighty or so and lived a full life, then I’d absolutely like to go to another planet.

So are you Frank Bickham, your protagonist? He’s an old guy who’s lived a full life, and now wants to go live on another planet in retirement....

There might be a little Frank Bickham in me. Not that I’d feel compelled to have to be “the first” at something, like Frank is, but ever since I grew up watching Captain Picard vacation on Riisa, I knew I wanted to get to another world. Someday. When it’s safe. And cheap.

Where can readers find you, and learn more about your books?

My website, for one: nickwebbwrites.com

Or, I’m active on Facebook: facebook.com/authornickwebb

ONE MORE, DESH thought. Forty-nine kills completed. Just one more, and then you’re out. But no sooner had the thought formed than a mission update notification appeared in his heads-up display, and he felt a pit form in his stomach, cold dread washing over him. Don’t get worked up yet. It could be a routine update. He forced himself to ignore the notification, and instead checked his ship’s arrival time on his datascroll. Five minutes to deceleration.

Desh loathed interstellar travel, from the queasy feeling of the faster-than-light accelerations, to the interminable waiting aboard the transports. In an effort to encourage travel, the spaceliners featured exercise rooms and entertainment centers whose use could be purchased for a nominal fee, but a week or more of traveling through the vacuum of deep space drove most passengers slightly insane regardless of the activities available. For Desh, it just meant more idle time to spend fretting about the mission, worrying the details like a sore tooth. And more time trying to forget the anguished faces of his victims. So he sighed with relief when the arrival announcement flashed on the bulkhead displays, and he quickly made his way to his cabin to finish packing his gear.

At one time in his career, arrival announcements had triggered an adrenaline rush in anticipation of the mission, but all he felt today was exhaustion.

Exhaustion is acceptable, given the circumstances, Desh reasoned. But it’s still a sign of weakness. His target had canceled his business trip, but Desh had already been en route to the man’s intended destination, and he had wasted nearly two weeks traveling to the wrong planet as a result. Two weeks stuck on spaceliners, with nothing to do but watch the mission clock count down.

But that’s not why I’m tired.

He touched the metal bracelet on his right wrist, his finger sliding over the smooth surface, coming to rest on the button in the center. As he pressed it, a three-dimensional hologram appeared over the bracelet, a spinning golden number 1.

My first kill, fresh out of Training. Strangling a loan shark in his office above a laundromat.

As Desh watched, the numbers changed, counting upwards with increasing speed.

Fourteen: poisoning a minor government functionary on Mars.

Thirty-two: faking the suicide of an unfaithful husband.

Each of his targets’ faces clawed up out of his memory in turn, their eyes full of fear, anger, desperation. And then the numbers stopped, and he watched as the ‘49’ spun slowly, and then winked out. Number fifty would soon have a face, too, but for Desh, the number meant only one thing.

Freedom.

Over the long, tense years, the meaning of those numbers had changed so much. Desh had signed his contract with the Guild to vault his way out of poverty and into the privileged class, like most guildsmen. The Guild’s famous “Fifty for Fifty” deal was the same for each of them: if he completed fifty missions, he would be entitled to fifty percent of the commissions he had earned. He couldn’t choose his missions, and he couldn’t fail to complete those he was assigned‌—‌success, or death while trying, were the only acceptable outcomes. Guild training was brutally direct on this matter; Desh still remembered the video they had used to illustrate their point, in which several masked men demonstrated just how long a guildsman who tried to break his contract could be made to suffer before dying. Recalling the images, Desh shuddered involuntarily. The sizable fortune that would soon be deposited to his account was of only marginal interest to Desh; what mattered far more was bringing an end to the missions, the ceaseless trips through the void, and the pleading, desperate faces he found waiting for him with each new assignment.

Desh opened his datascroll and accessed the mission brief for the hundredth time, but instead of reading, he watched the ship’s external footage on his cabin’s viewscreen. Silently, the spaceliner coasted through the navigational satellites, whose yellow lights winked to show the path toward Aleppo. His mission brief stated that the planet’s gravity was slightly less than that of Earth, which of course allowed them to excel at the industrial work Aleppo had become known for. Even a five percent gravity drop could yield significantly higher profit margins, he knew, with less stress on heavy machinery and less fuel to boost the finished products into orbit. Desh shook his head, and forced his gaze away from the viewscreen, concentrating on the mission brief.

His target was an industrial baron who owned several interplanetary conglomerates, and whose draconian employment practices had upset the local unions. The man was wealthy enough that he might have been able to live on Earth, but having been born on Aleppo, he had decided to call it home. Given the barren terrain appearing on his viewscreen, Desh failed to see its appeal entirely. The colonists had begun atmospheric introduction, but they were still decades away from making the atmosphere breathable, and since most of the world’s industrial plants belched out toxic gases anyway, nobody was in a particular hurry. A rocky planet, rich in ore deposits but utterly devoid of indigenous life, Aleppo’s chief terrain feature was a massive canyon nearly encircling the equator, as if a giant claw had torn the planet’s crust. It was in this canyon that the colonists had built their settlements, choosing to remain below ground and inconspicuous in case the planet hid any nasty surprises the early explorers had failed to document. Desh planned to follow their example.