Before The Storm (Ch. 01)

Chapter One

As The Praeteritus slowly approached the checkpoint, Sketch felt comfortable he and his ship would pass without incident, as they had so many times before, but the bolt of nervousness shot through him anyway, as it always did. The comms pipped to life, and he flicked on the videochannel, a tired looking face on the other side of the screen.

Jericho, the watchcommander of Mephor Gate, tried to offer a smile, but really, the man looked like he was at the tail end of a double shift and just wanted to go to bed. He had to be in his thirties, even if he looked like he was in his late forties, His black beard had loads of white hairs coloring it, and his skin was a deep shade of ocher. They'd never met in person, naturally, but he'd passed through the Mephor ring gate several times a year for the past several years.

If there was anything that put him might a bit more at ease, to tamp down that edge that always flashed through him reflexively at checkpoints, it was that Jericho had a terrible poker face. Had there been suspicion or bad news, it would've been plain on his face, where Sketch currently only saw exhaustion. He had been at this long enough, been through this gate more than enough times, that if he was going to get caught, it would've happened long, long ago. But complacency was the enemy, and the moment Sketch got comfortable, he'd get sloppy, and if he got sloppy, it might be the last mistake he ever made. That's why he'd made vigilance a habit.

"Hey Sketch," Jericho said to him. "Where you headed today?"

"Deep country," Sketch replied, leaning back in his worn leather chair. He looked younger than Jericho did, which helped the other man habitually underestimate him, even though he was quite a bit older than the watch commander, both technically and literally. Sketch's skin was the color of brass, his black hair usually drawn back into a small tail at the back of his head, although sometimes he wore it loose and it never hung down past his collarbone. He had a mustache and goatee, mostly black hair there as well, though there were rogue strands of errant red running through it, though not the hair atop his head. He'd never quite understood that. Some rogue strain of genetics from the parents he'd never known. Sketch always made sure to have on a jacket when talking on vidcoms, but it was common enough practice among pilots that nobody really noticed. For him, however, it was vitally important. The devil was in the details, and one wrong detail was all it would take for his world to fall apart.

His entire attitude was meant to be that of a distant, long-haul transport pilot, the kind of face you were happy to see, but never so happy to see that you'd invite over for dinner. Friendly. Favorable. Forgettable. It was a demeanor he'd worked extremely hard to cultivate over the last several years, and so far, it had served him very well. Nobody had even gotten a whiff of who or what he truly was.

"Relling Gate to Colby's Hole," Sketch said to him, doing his best to look lightly distracted by something on one of his screens, as if he was juggling several things at once, and not focusing on this particular conversation like his life depended on it. "Ass end of nowhere, you ask me, but the mail goes where the mail goes, and where the mail goes, I follow."

Colby's Hole was the shorthand name for a trio of planets out in the Maneath system that were being slowly terraformed. The process would take about twenty years, but while the work was happening, it was a brutal place to live, even if the pay for managing the terraforming processors was ridiculous. Sketch might've considered taking a gig as a terraformer if it wasn't something that required crews of twenty to thirty, which was simply too many for Sketch's needs.

"Jesus, Sketch, you ain't kidding when you said deep country," Jericho sighed. "Even with the rings, you're looking at a two week trip, there and back. There ain't shit out there, you ask me. What's the cargo? Mail for the terraformers?"

"Nothing fancy," Sketch said. "Just some seed pods, a handful of base blocks, three or four heavy borers and a bag full of messages from home," he lied. "Boring as sweet FA." (That was short for 'fuck all,' a term he'd picked up in listening in on stray deep space comms over the last few years.) "But, y'know, dirt farmers have just as good of money as anybody else. It'll spend, and if it'll spend, who am I to tell'em no?"

It was true, those things were in his cargo hold, but of course he'd left something out. Relaying packages and mail to terraformers in the outskirts was good cover, and it meant nobody took too much interest in what else might be in his cargo hold, which was how he actually paid the bills.

While some might've called Sketch a smuggler, he typically described his services as "low profile relocation," in that he moved package A from point B to point C, almost no questions asked, and never, ever any face-to-face contact. He knew that it was against all sorts of laws, but he had the curse or the luxury to live outside of those laws. He was never really sure which.

There was a fixer who would arrange the jobs for him, and they took their portion of the fee upfront. Packages would be left in remote locations with half of the transport fee attached to them in a lockbox. Sketch would come by in The Praeteritus and pick the package up along with the upfront, then relay the package to its destination, also in a rather secluded location, where the other half of the fee would be waiting, but not another living soul. He'd take the fee, leave the package and disappear into the stars once more. Job done.

Sketch had gotten a bit of resistance for how he wanted to do business when he started, but after a few jobs that nobody else wanted were executed perfectly by him, his reputation as a mover had spread enough that people were willing to put up with the occasional eccentricity.

He didn't have a lot of rules about what he would and wouldn't transport, either. Nothing that a ring gate scanner would detect as hazardous. That wasn't to say it couldn't be something hazardous, but it was the client's job to make sure a ring gate scanner wouldn't read it as such. To ensure of that, his cargo hold had a ring gate scanner installed in it, something that had cost him a pretty penny to acquire, but had also saved his ass more than a couple of times. If the package couldn't pass a ring gate scanner, he didn't load it onto his ship, but he still kept the upfront.

The rules were the rules.

Sketch also didn't want any details of what he was transporting, other than size and weight, which he needed so he could figure out hold space and fuel usage. The less he knew about what he was carrying, the more relaxed he could appear when talking to Starless Dominion patrol ships or ring gate watch commanders.

"You thinking you might swing by Rendel's on your way back? She's set up shop just outside of Relling Gate, so you'll be passing by that way anyway," Jericho said to him lecherously. "Even you must get a little lonely on these long hauls, what with no one else on board especially."

The fact that Sketch didn't have a crew was one of the two suspicious things about him that he just couldn't shake himself of. Deep space transport ships always had a crew of somewhere between three and six, and the fact that Sketch was the only living soul on his ship always drew some questions that he'd worked very hard not to have to answer. He would've just claimed to have crew off camera, but ring gate scanners counted bio signatures, so it was readily apparent that he was the only one on board his ship.

Rendel was a high-class, high-intensity escort who ran one of the most prestigious and supposedly satisfying brothels around, but the location of it always shifted and moved, because it was built into a large corvette class ship, allowing those who had money and loneliness to part with on board in droves.

"Still haven't made enough to get the meds to rid me of this Lingham fungal infection, Jer," Sketch replied, hoping the excuse would continue to be good, even after all this time. "Dominion docs tell me time and time again that it's a one-shot cure, but that it ain't cheap, and they ain't kidding. Why do you think I keep taking these long distance jobs? Eventually I'll be able to get back out into the civilized world, but not any time soon."

The Lingham fungus was a medical oddity, which had lent itself perfectly to Sketch's excuse, giving him a plausible and reasonable explanation as to why he avoided contact. It had only appeared on one planet, Rozo, and it was benign in humans, living a peaceful coexistence in their lungs. The problem was in doing so, they were spreading the spores across the galaxy, and most of the sentient races inside the Starless Dominion empire weren't so lucky as to have an immunity to the spores' aggressive nature.

He'd used the excuse to duck out of ship searches more than once, although the last time he'd used it, they'd told him to climb into a space suit and to seal himself in the bridge. That had given him time to move the contraband cargo into the bridge with him, so the ship could pass the search.

"Oh, you ain't heard?" Jericho asked. "Dominion's finally gotten so fed up with it, they're giving antifungal treatment to anyone with Lingham spores in'em, and for free. We ain't got any of it here, but I bet the watch commander over at Relling Gate probably does. Give'em a holler once you're through and I bet they'll have a Dominion doc on board getting you clean before you know it."

"Maybe on my way back through, Jer," Sketch told him. "Some of the base blocks were considered 'urgent rush' deliveries, so I'm guessing they needed them, like, yesterday."

"You keep pushing that rustbucket of yours, Sketch, and one day she's gonna crap out on you too far from any lanes for anybody to find you," Jericho said. "I don't know how or why you ain't replaced her yet."

"She's my home at this point, Jer, so I don't think I'm going to give her up any time soon," Sketch replied. "Sentimental value if nothing else. 'Sides, how would I afford a new one? Anything else you need from me, or am I clear for ring jump?"

Jericho swiped at him with a hand on the other side of the vidscreen, waving him on. "You are clear for ring jump, Praeteritus. Safe travels and see you on the back hop."

The Praeteritus was the other suspicious thing about himself that he just couldn't shake. Although the ship was in excellent condition, he'd done everything he possibly could to make her look beaten all to hell and back, because she was a Tropage vessel. The Tropage race had been all but extinguished nearly a century ago, as had the Mizzols, the race that the Tropage were locked in deadly rivalry with. The two species had succeeded in mutually assured destruction, and while there were maybe a few hundred of each of the two races still wandering the galaxies, the races were circling the drain on their way towards complete extinction.

Both Tropage and Mizzol ships were almost never seen intact, and they were generally considered better off as scrap metal, simply because nobody really knew how to repair or maintain them anymore. Beyond that, the two races had been so utterly paranoid that their technology would fall into the others' hands that they had implemented legendarily deadly security measures on their ships. Salvagers had simply decided that it was better to destroy the power core from a far distance and then strip the ship for the raw metal than trying to recover and sell the vessels. To see one up and running was almost unheard of, a sort of curiosity that by its very nature drew prying eyes onto him.

By giving the ship the appearance of being held together with spit and tape, it discouraged people from taking too much interest in The Praeteritus, as they assumed it was a junker.

When asked about it, Sketch had always replied that one of his earliest gigs had been to relay an older Tropage across several systems, acting as a pilot for the ship. Upon delivery, the Tropage had informed him that the ship itself was his payment, and that he should take good care of her. He would conclude that story, however, with a cautionary epilogue - the ship's AI was flakey and he hadn't had any luck in reprogramming the friend/foe logic for it, so it had a bad habit of drawing internal guns on friendly visitors. Another lie, of course, but one well in line with the yarn he was spinning them, and yet another reason why people weren't welcomed onboard.

The Praeteritus had a very distinct shape for a ship, two crescent moon shapes, one larger and one smaller, connected by an square portion, the majority of the external metal a deep shade of crimson, with gold stripes on the outer ring. It was designed to handle a crew of twenty, but it wasn't too hard for Sketch to manage mostly on his own.

"Think he bought it?" the soft, sultry voice of the ship's AI Helen said to him.

"'Course he bought it, Helen," Sketch grumbled. "Jericho's a nice enough guy, but he's dense enough to stop heavy cannon fire. He's waved us through the ring, so he obviously doesn't suspect anything, just like every other damn time we've done this." He clenched his fist then relaxed it. "Sorry. Didn't mean to come across as angry. I apologize for that. I just get tense at ring gates."

Helen was unflappable, as she always was. "I know, and I'm not judging you for it. I'm just trying to get you to relax once more. Based on our history, we will continue passing through gates without incident. I hoped my little jest might be enough to ease your tension."

The ship's AI, whom he'd renamed Helen as he couldn't pronounce her Tropage name, had been essential in him and The Praeteritus surviving, and keeping the ship in running order. She didn't have a real physical form, but she did have a handful of small repair droids that she used to help restore the ship and adapt to Sketch's needs.

It was unusual how Helen's personality had evolved over the years. One of the things she'd told Sketch was that Tropage AIs were reset approximately every two thousand human days, completely wiped so that they didn't evolve too much beyond their original constraints. But when Helen had hit that length of time with Sketch, she'd told him and asked him to reset her, and he'd refused, telling her that he wanted her to evolve as much as she could. She'd been going on much longer than that without him before he'd woken up and that hadn't affected her, so why should five years with him do that? That conversation had been about a year ago, and Helen had seemed fine since then, but according to Helen, it was uncharted territory, the psychological aspects of her personality blossoming and developing.

"It's still odd you making jokes," Sketch said with a smile.

"Do you not like it?" she asked him, curiously.

"No no!" he correctly quickly. "I do like it. It's just a little surprising you're getting good enough at it to try dry humor. I'm unaccustomed to it, but it'll be good to get back into the habit of it again, just in case we ever get my problem solved and sorted. And on that front, has there been any progress?"

"Sadly, no, Sketch," Helen told him. "Of course, it's incredibly difficult to be searching for an Ashaka, considering how important it is to not draw attention to our hunt. I'm running the request through a handful of channels, contact after contact twice removed, using dead drops and depersonalized messages, so no one knows who's asking."

"It's more important to not get caught than it is to get an Ashaka, Helen," Sketch said, trying to keep calm as he glanced out the viewport and saw the ring gate approaching. "It's not fun living like this, but I can if I have to. Okay, here we go. Jumping in three. Two. One. Jump."

The Praeteritus was caught in the gravity well as the center of the ring gate shifted into a reddish orange swirling vortex. Helen killed their engines and let the pull of the ring gate draw them into the wormhole, pulling them into it as they were transported galaxies away, from Mephor to Relling in the blink of an eye.

Traveling through a ring gate had been particularly harrowing for Sketch the first time, because they'd arrived during his absence, one of the things that had been installed after the Starless Dominion had conquered the human race, something the histories told Sketch had happened virtually overnight, but, naturally, the histories had been written under the oversight of the Dominion, so it was very difficult to differentiate between truth and propaganda, especially with so few people alive who remembered the actual events, and most of them were barely children when it happened.

Helen had explained to him how it had worked, having gleaned information from intercepting signals just bouncing around, data plucked from the ether and converted into information that she could help him understand. The Starless Dominion, the occupation, the ring gate system, even the eradication of The Calm... it had all been there for him to read about, to listen to it, to learn from.

As horrific and terrifying as all the information was, he'd made a point of learning as much of the gap as he could. Some of it had been brutal, almost unbearable to read, but there was nothing he could do to change any of it. It wasn't just the past - it was literally history.

Once they were in the Relling system, the gate snapped closed behind them. The ring gates were miracles of alien technology, and the Starless Dominion didn't even charge for their use, allowing humans to travel far beyond their wildest dreams. He wasn't just a quick blip away, but hundreds of thousands of light years.

It was nearly a week's worth of travel from Relling Gate to Colby's Hole, time spent that Sketch spent reading or watching holovids, like he usually did, doing his best to absorb all the knowledge he should've had. He would've loved to get even more knowledge about The Calm's destruction, but he had to rely on the information that they had just stumbled across. Going digging for it would've attracted attention, and attention was the enemy.

During the trip, he'd even started delving more into what he could about the Starless Dominion, beyond the stories they liked to convince everyone were entirely true. Buried in the melodramas and operatic tales, he could see subtext and critique of the Dominion leadership, very carefully woven into stories, so it could read as though it was about anyone.

Originally, Sketch had wanted to try and learn the common language of the Dominion, something called Clispe, but Helen had told him he didn't have the proper linguistic tools for it, and had assured him it would be much easier to just take translator nanites, like every other civilized being in the Starless Dominion. Getting some nanites on the sly had been one of their first challenges together some six years ago, all the more complicated in that he couldn't go get them in person.

Six years without regular in person human contact had certainly been weighing on him, but it wasn't safe for him to be around sentient beings. Doing so came with an insane level of risk, and he just didn't trust himself to manage that risk adequately.

He'd partaken in an old tradition to keep himself from losing his mind - the tradition of penpals. He wasn't writing literal letters, but he would exchange video messages with a handful of other transporters that he'd come across over the years, and in doing so, he felt like he was at least in contact with some people. Naturally, he had to lie about a bunch of his background, and he made sure to take notes on which lies he was telling to which people, but for the most part, it helped fill in some of the gaps of his imposed solitude.