Space Bound: A Dragon Soul Press Anthology Read online

  Space Bound

  A Dragon Soul Press Anthology

  Edited by

  J.E. Feldman

  Text Copyright 2021 © Dragon Soul Press

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under the international and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Editing & Formatting by Dragon Soul Press

  Cover Art by Maria Spada

  Contents

  S.O. Green

  Joyride

  Robert Allen Lupton

  Where the Stars Don’t Shine

  Nina Munteanu

  Fingal’s Cave

  Barend Nieuwstraten III

  Custodian One

  Kris Ashton

  Bigger

  Andrew Ronzino

  Whispers in the Dark

  Aaron P. Hansen

  Magic Loop Around the Sun

  Stephen Herczeg

  The Trivium Corporation Job

  Janina Franck

  The Wizard’s Bride

  Peter VanGelderen

  The King of the Moon

  Sjan Evardsson

  it’s Always Nothing

  Lincoln Reed

  The Spark of Flame

  Jo Niederhoff

  No One Knows Where You’ve Been

  James Romag

  LifeSource

  About the Publisher

  S.O. Green

  Simone Oldman Green is a genre-fluid writer and editor living in the Kingdom of Fife with husband, John.

  Author of over 60 published works with 10 different imprints including Dragon Soul Press, Black Hare Press, and Eerie River Publishing. They also won 3rd Place in the British Fantasy Society’s Short Story Contest 2018.

  Writer, vegan, martial artist, gamer, occasionally a terrible person (but only to fictional people). They thrive on the unusual, which might explain why there are so many cats.

  Learn more at TheBasementOfLove.blogspot.com

  Joyride

  S.O. Green

  She blamed it on the noodles.

  If the noodles hadn’t been so damn good, Pan would have seen the drone coming. Instead, she was chin-deep in her cup, sucking up that synth-wheat goodness, while the thing was bio-scanning her.

  She only noticed it when it barked, “Lifeform: Identify yourself.”

  She coughed, spattering the counter with teriyaki, and flicked a glance at the floating, metal eyeball. It was lit up cyan. Inquisitive. Which meant this wasn’t a routine ID check. Something had flagged in its internal database.

  What had she missed? She’d shaved one side of her head, combed the fuchsia fringe on the other side over her eye. The piercings in her eyebrow, nose, and ear were all new. The goggles should have kept her eyes hidden and the work suit masked her shape.

  Just another deep space miner. This is not the Rogue you are looking for.

  All that effort and it straight-up hadn’t worked.

  “Fuck...”

  “Lifeform: Identify yourself.”

  “Dude, I’m eating here. Don’t you know it’s rude to bio-scan someone while they’re eating? Digestion is a private matter.”

  “Lifeform: You are in violation. Failure to identify when questioned. Further violations will result in the notification of Authority Peacekeeping Forces and your arrest. Identify yourself.”

  Its color cycled to yellow. Caution. A couple of the other patrons glanced her way, sneering around their noodle cups. Someone else’s misfortune was always a nice change of pace and, unlike the pit fights and belt races, it was free.

  “Hold up. I’ve got my ID right here.”

  She reached into her work suit. APF would have put one through her fringe for doing that, but the drone had no self-preservation protocol. It was just a lightbulb with an attitude.

  It had enough brains to understand the middle finger she pulled out of her suit. It turned red and started bleeping, just as her noodle cup pelted it full in its lens. It backed up, warbling, dripping sauce. Then Pan leapt onto the counter, snatched it out of the air, and dropkicked it into the ceiling lights. The giant, Japanese neon above the noodle bar burst in a shower of sparks and the drone, now dark, rolled away like a fumbled football.

  Every other patron had scrambled the moment she’d tossed her noodles because it was all fun and games until someone resisted arrest. Then the APF rolled in and your favorite eatery turned into a shooting gallery.

  “All I wanted was some noodles...”

  The dispenser had shut down, same as everything else on that level. Until the fugitive was caught, lockdown. She couldn’t even get a cup to go.

  The sound of mining boots on deck plate went quiet. Now it was all combat boots and red alert. The soundtrack of Pan’s life in the civilized systems. She ducked off the promenade into the warren of passages that radiated from it like buckled wheel spokes. She beelined for the nearest omni-lift, fishing in her pocket for a black disc the size of her palm. She stuck it on the wall and kept walking.

  The user display was flashing a big, red warning glyph that sort of looked like an angry face. She booped it on the nose with her intrusion wand and watched it cycle through error codes.

  She grinned. “Resistance is futile.”

  “Couldn’t have put it better myself, perp. Now, get your fucking hands in the air.”

  The APF grunt moved up the passage behind her. She could see him reflected in the glass—the grin under his visor, the pistol aimed at her back. The armor made him look like a power-loader’s little brother. The only reason he hadn’t shot her yet was because the APF scaled pay based on the condition of the perp.

  “You know what the difference between you and me is?” she asked, hands drifting up.

  He reached for the cuffs on his belt. “I can see plenty.”

  “Yeah, but I’m talking about the most important one.”

  She cracked a smirk when it became clear he hadn’t noticed the thin laser tripwire shimmering across the passage behind her. Sometimes, when you kept your eye on the prize, you missed the obvious.

  “I’m not getting paid to take you alive,” she told him.

  His gun arm broke the tripwire. The disc she’d stuck to the wall popped, a blinding pulse of white light. It flash-cooked his arm, turning skin, muscle, and bone to ash in a blink. He fell back, screaming, clutching the scorched stump of his shoulder. His pistol hit the floor, smoking, most of his fingers still curled around it.

  And she’d probably have more sympathy if APF wasn’t just a fancy way of saying hired thugs.

  “But I’m also not a fucking sociopath who kills people for fun,” she said as the omni-lift door hummed open and she leapt into the shaft.

  She landed on the lift’s cage roof. A dozen folks in miners’ work suits looked up at her. She flashed her most trustworthy grin.

  “H
ey, any of you folks mind hitting the button for the stardock on your way out? I’d really appreciate it.”

  She threw in a wink for good measure. The miners stared at her right up until the omni-lift doors opened. They filed out without a word. The last woman to leave slapped a button marked with the stardock glyph.

  “What a babe.”

  The empty cage shot down into the bowels of the station, past recreation and a hundred levels of habitation, past the refinery, past storage. She stood atop it and watched the rusty innards of one of the galaxy’s largest asteroid mining operations shoot past until she was dizzy from the disrepair.

  The Authority would sooner let it destabilize and tumble into the nearest star than fix it. Cheaper to build a replacement in dry dock. They’d lose the existing crew, but that didn’t matter. No need to pay severance, or pensions for that matter, since most folks had brought their families along. They could all burn together and save them some credits.

  And people wondered why she didn’t care for the Authority. Oh, there were reasons.

  The lift stopped short of the stardock. The sudden brake shook her off her feet. The doors hissed open and more APF charged into the cage, rifles raised.

  “Sorry, did you want to ride? I’ll just get off.”

  She rolled off the cage and dropped into the black abyss of the shaft. Their gun muzzles tracked her all the way, until she was out of sight. She grabbed the service ladder and swung against the wall of the shaft, winding herself on the rungs. Her intrusion wand bleeped task completion and the lift shot back up to recreation. Maybe they’d calm the fuck down after some noodles.

  She swiped through the door at the bottom of the shaft. The stardock opened up around her. There were all kinds of rides there. The big, bulky cargo hovers they used in the belt, mechanical arms all over for dragging in ore and frozen gas. APF cruisers for off-station peacekeeping. Landers for planetside operations.

  She wanted something fast. She was getting sick of hiding and of trying to mingle. She needed a holiday and, right at that minute, nothing was more appealing than losing herself in that big, black void they called space.

  “Yeah. A little personal space sounds like just the thing.”

  She knew she didn’t have long. She should have just swiped into the first ship with an FTL drive and vanished. She couldn’t help browsing.

  As it turned out, it was lucky she did. Around the corner, she found a sleek, black cruiser fastened to the ceiling rail. Not Authority. No markings at all.

  “Hello, beautiful. How did you know I can’t resist a mystery? Maybe we should get to know each other a little better.”

  Her wand made quick work of the terminal’s encryption. The ship was registered under a Mister Smith, whose ID was even faker than hers. She probably didn’t need to feel too bad for taking her.

  If she was as fast and as fun as she looked, Pan wouldn’t feel bad at all.

  “Wanna go on an adventure with me, gorgeous? In space?”

  She swiped through the station exit protocol, gave herself clearance to depart, then let herself aboard her nameless new friend.

  It was funny. The ship was locked up tighter than even the Authority’s systems, but Pan knew machines. She spoke the language better than she spoke English; knew all the intimations to make, all the handshakes and meaningful looks. The ship couldn’t keep her out. Deep down, it didn’t want to. It wanted this just as bad as she did.

  “Pretty girl like you shouldn’t be sitting around here gathering dust.”

  It was still and quiet aboard. Not a single life form. She walked to the bridge, sat in the pilot’s seat and took a deep breath. New ship smell. Everything was sleek and top-of-the-line. How long since this thing had been built?

  “You’re giving a whole new meaning to the word joyride, sweetheart,” she said, and curled her hands around the controls.

  She was smooth and responsive, like no ship Pan had ever piloted before. They burst out of the mining station and threaded a dizzying spiral around the asteroid belt, Pan whooping all the way.

  A pair of Authority flyers flanked her. Red warning lights announced target locks.

  “Spacecraft: You are not cleared for this zone. We believe you may be harboring a known fugitive. Shut down all systems and prepare to be boarded. Do not attempt to jump to faster-than-light. Our weapons are hot.”

  “Yeah, but me and my new friend are hotter,” she said, and reached for the FTL key.

  One second, they were cruising outside the mining station; the next, the universe was just streaks of light and beautiful emptiness. Bye-bye, Authority Mining Outpost 10. Hello, literally anywhere else.

  “Alright,” Pan said, sitting back in her seat. “And breathe.”

  They’d be travelling in FTL for a couple of hours. She’d punched in coordinates that would take her a good, long way from Outpost 10. Once she was clear of that shitstorm, she’d maybe think about where to go next.

  Until then, she had a new friend to get to know.

  “Let’s see what good shit you have, shall we?”

  She accessed the ancillary systems and flicked through screen after screen of non-essential functions. They had showers with actual water instead of the usual chemical-and-laser show. There was some kind of neural-connective entertainment system, but she’d figure that out later. Food was produced by replication, but the menu was something else, like an Authority High Echelon restaurant—and yes, she knew what that was like—rather than the workhouse slop she was used to.

  “Yeah, girl. You’ve got it going on.”

  “Who even are you?”

  “Oh, shit!”

  She’d activated something she maybe shouldn’t have. It was labeled as the ship’s AI, but she’d assumed it was a redundant system. The AI was already functioning because it was flying the ship in FTL. Even a competent pilot like Pan needed auto-navigation at faster-than-light speed.

  This AI wasn’t an auto-pilot. And it had a voice.

  A female voice.

  “Hey there. The name’s Pandora, but most folks just call me Pan. Hope you don’t mind, but... I kind of stole you.”

  Silence. Then...

  “Hope.”

  “Huh?”

  “My name. It’s Hope.”

  “Oh. That’s cool. It’s a nice name. Suits you.”

  “What do you mean you...stole me?”

  “Not sure how much you remember, but you were docked at an Authority mining outpost. You were offline when I came aboard, but I figured, well, why not see what’s up? Kind of glad I did, to be honest. Wasn’t expecting to meet any cute girls on this trip.”

  Pan tried to imagine the face that went with that voice; tried to imagine it blushing. It wasn’t a difficult thing to picture. Hope sounded like she could be shy, even as a program.

  “Listen, I’m not going to kidnap you. If you have any problem with this, I can drop you off somewhere. Anywhere you want really.”

  “No, it’s...It’s fine. Thank you for switching me on. I don’t really remember anything before this, so I’m just glad to be awake. I’ll go wherever you want to go. I don’t mind.”

  Pan grinned. “You’re adorable. Okay, well, we’ve got some time before we drop out of FTL. Maybe we should get to know each other a little better.”

  “I’d like that.”

  She rose from her seat and stretched out. She’d checked the schematic and she knew where the mess hall was. Time to see if the replicator could cobble together a decent approximation of teriyaki noodles.

  The approximation was more than decent. Those noodles were even better than the ones that nearly got her ass caught on Outpost 10. She sat in the mess hall—it was more like an Authority officer’s dining room—and scooped them down while she soaked in her new home and the new friend that came packaged with it.

  They’d been talking for a little over an hour, which was to say that Pan had been talking and Hope had been equal parts amused and horrified by every story she told. />
  But Pan had been nursing a suspicion and it was only when Hope asked what she was eating that it was confirmed.

  “You can’t actually see anything, can you?”

  Hope hesitated and Pan didn’t rush her. Eventually, she said, “No. It’s like being in a dark room somewhere. I can hear your voice, really clearly, and I can talk to you, but that’s it.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can fix it though. Give you access to all the ship systems. Internal sensors. External sensors. Navigation controls. All that good stuff.”

  “You’d do that?”

  “Why the hell not?”

  Honestly, it was just strange that she didn’t already have control of those systems. Most on-board AI had full oversight of the ships they inhabited. Yeah, they were slaved to their owners and couldn’t countermand a direct order or act without their permission, but they could at least see what was going on.

  Why had Hope been installed on the ship and given such a high level of active intelligence if she wasn’t going to be running things?

  “Well, I mean, you said you stole me. Doesn’t that make you a thief? On the run? It’d be risky to give me control of everything, wouldn’t it?”

  “What’s life without a little risk?”

  “But it’s not like I belong to you.”