Armed

By Jeff Gerke

 

"And…I've…gotcha."

My glove turned bright orange as I grasped the glowing chunk of ore. Funny how it twisted in a my wrist a bit as I plucked it from its eternal tumble through weightlessness. Almost as if a billion years of perpetual motion gave it a bit more inertia than its mass would suggest.

The nebula was spectacular here. All purple and teal laid like a semitransparent layer over the endless stars beyond. I tucked the ore into my pouch and then just hung there, drifting in a slow cartwheel. Depending upon where you were viewing it from, the Butterfly Nebula resembled a crescent wafer, a dented basin, or some long-extinct insect that had evidently had wide wings.

For me, it was just a gold mine of free-floating armalcolite ore.

I let my own motion spin me away from the nebula. The respiration system on my suit gave its quiet squew every time I took a breath, sounding like a leisurely laser battle far away. My samples pouch was full, but if I happened to spot any other chunks of ore floating around nearby, I'd snag them. Who knew how long this would be my own private cache?

The stars around me were mostly galaxies, I knew. I loved the variety in their form. Some were white, while others were yellow or orange or blue or pink. Some seemed like glowing orbs, while others were dots or spirals or dyads or crosses or lines with a bulging middle like pregnant uikke worms. Then there were the clusters, smash-ups of three or five types merged by a trick of distance. In one blink, I took in ten thousand galaxies, which translated to more habitable planets than I could fathom.

I sighed, suddenly melancholy.

My eyes caught a flash of something big. I thought at first it might be a gleaming boulder of armalcolite, but then I saw it was just the Hector. Wallop, I'd drifted off a long way.

I extended my legs and hit the goose-jets. The tubes circling the soles of my boots shot a burst of my expelled carbon dioxide out the bottom, propelling me toward my ship. The jets always felt like someone smacking the bottoms of my feet with a crossbeam, but I had at least learned a position to get into so the burst didn't send me into another vomit-inducing tumble across the heavens.

Slowly, the Hector grew in my vision. The green numbers displayed on my faceplate spun down through the kilometers as I approached the cruiser. I gave the jets another burp and then shut them down. I could go faster, but then I'd spend too much time and CO2 slowing so I didn't hit the ship like a meteor. I wasn't confident enough yet to try that. Better to just go slow and enjoy the ride.

Squew. Squew. Squew.

The Hector was a beautiful ship. More ship than I deserved, actually. It was white and sleek. Refined. Curved sinuously like the hip of a beautiful woman.

Instantly, heat flared in my suit and a yellow warning corona glowed at the edges of my faceplate display. Overheating. Too funny. I needed to find a place with some women my age, if only for pleasant conversation. Space could be a very lonely place.

Red and yellow lights blinked periodically off the ship's bow, aft, top, and bottom. Its twin Gexule-Hyath rockets swam in my vision as the plasmanites encircled them, itching to push the ship wherever I needed it to go.

The long slope of the cockpit Emul-glas reflected the aquamarine of the nebula. Even from this distance, I could see the amber of the dash panel displays bathing the interior. It almost looked as if the embers of a relaxing campfire smoldered within. The observation panels along the side of the ship stood like black trapezoids against the white hull. The ship had lots of room. More than enough for a companion.

Time to decelerate. I did the tuck-and-flex move I'd figured out over the last several weeks, deftly flipping until my feet pointed down at the Hector as if I were going to land on it. Now the ship was my "down." When I got old, would my brain still be fluid enough to handle hemispheric changes like that?

With a last pfft of the goose-jets, I touched down on the hull right at the side egress panel. I pressed the button on my right forearm, and the panel slid open.

Thirty seconds later, I was safely inside the ship, breathing without my helmet, and enjoying the d-com spray. Uncle Wyatt had somehow given the spray a fragrance—something called mint—that always made me feel invigorated.

I peeled out of the suit and stuffed all the pieces into the netting against the bulkhead. In my grey flightsuit I floated into the interior of the ship, pushing the bag of ore before me. As I entered the main cabin, the lighting blossomed from all around, giving the empty space its customary shadowless illumination. The central stripe light along the ceiling hissed when it came on, like it was booing me. Or about to burn out.

Either way, it didn't bode well.

I pushed off the engineering pod and stopped at the science table. A press of a button, and the bag of armalcolite adhered to the white tabletop as if under gravity. It was some combination of magnetics and resonance differentials—Wyatt had tried to explain it once—but all I cared about was that it held stuff down even in zero-g.

I had twenty-six pieces, all emanating a vaguely orange luminescence. They ranged in size from one twice as big as the last one I'd grabbed all the way down to one barely bigger than the tip of my pinky. I stared at them feverishly.

I was rich.

I planted my feet on the wall and launched myself headlong toward the cockpit, laughing like a lunatic. Finally, something I'd done myself! I grabbed the bulkhead over the instrument board and hooked my feet through the restraining belt. As I hovered over the keyboard, I called up the interface to stake my mining claim on this sector of space.

The combination of conditions in this quadrant—the mathematical formula I had devised and bet my last peptoles to test—had, in fact, resulted in a find so rich that ore was just floating around to be picked up by hand. And if the thermal emission spectrometer could be believed, I would be picking it up for a long time to come.

My mind spun even as I logged the coordinates for my claim and submitted the application for approval. I would need to hire miners to come here to harvest everything. Then it would have to be transported for sale. Or should it be refined first? Where was the best place to sell the stuff? But I couldn't hang around here to oversee this find. The formula worked! I had to be out using it to find other undiscovered sectors and staking those claims.

But the formula—I had to hide it. Bury it. It was an industrial secret that corporations would resort to anything to obtain. Whom to trust?

Ah, the possibilities! I could hire people to do all of this for me. I could retire before I'd even really had a job. It was too much.

And surely some beautiful woman would be enticed by a young man of wealth and good looks. Or at least wealth. Security, she'll call it when explaining to her mother why she's marrying someone like me.

 I drifted back toward the ore I'd plucked from the ether, floating like a dust mote toward my source of wealth. Something about its warm glow, almost as if it were not entirely of this universe, sent my mind to a place I rarely went anymore.

Um, God, it's me. Reedophilus Graaber. Most people call me Reed. You can too, I guess. I just, you know, want to thank you. For…for letting me be smart. And for how Uncle Wyatt helped me. Oh, if you see him— I mean, of course you see him. Wait…would you? Aw, I don't know that stuff. Anyway, if you see him, tell him thanks. Tell him I did good with his stuff and…and…I'll try to walk tall and keep my nose clean and stuff. Aw, that's no good. I should quit. But…bye. For now.

I found myself staring out the ob-portal at the Butterfly Nebula. From here it looked like a blue and green splash thrown up by a comet slamming into the edge of space. Fiery and violent and beautiful.

I had my future to seize now. Time to go.

 

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