The Passenger Ch. 01

I nodded.

"You've found him."

She smiled.

"Good. I'm Anne. Your passenger."

There was something about her, something that spoke of strength, of competence... Something that I liked. I felt myself stand up straighter.

"In that case, welcome. I'd shake your hand, but as you can see..."

I held up the soiled rubber gloves I was wearing.

Anne wrinkled her nose, but the smile didn't waver. as she nodded. I liked that.

"I see your point," she said. "It can wait."

"You're a little early," I continued. "The fuel tender hasn't arrived yet, and the rest of the maintenance checklist will still take another hour at least. If you'll give me a moment, I'll show you to your quarters."

"Take your time," she said. "Work comes first."

"Glad you understand."

I put the disposal container into a nearby waste chute, followed by the gloves. Then I used the hand sanitation unit set into the bulkhead next to the chute.

"That's better," I said, holding out my hand. "Harvey Ross."

"Anne Ryder."

She shook my hand. Her grip was firm.

"Ryder? Are you related to Deke?"

"Your cargo broker? No. I only first met him today."

I shrugged.

"One of those weird coincidences, I suppose."

I escorted her to the open airlock. In port, both the inner and outer airlock doors are usually open, unless local quarantine regulations don't permit it.

"If you will allow me?"

For some reason I was making an effort to be a gentleman.

"Thank you," she replied as she followed me through the airlock and into the ship.

Freighters usually have fairly cramped living quarters. They're designed to move as much cargo as possible, and there's just enough room for a crew to make the trip in a minimum of comfort. But the Slowboat was an old ship, designed for a crew complement of eight, running in two shifts. I'd made some major upgrades, starting with a new computer system that allowed me to run the entire ship with just a single pilot. I replaced the original air scrubber and the organic waste recycling plant with new models which were less than half the size of those old clunkers. I also ripped out two of the sleeping cubicles and removed the wall between the control cabin and the crew compartment, so you can just walk up to the controls as well as see out the front of the ship.

That left me with living quarters that are pretty roomy, even after I expanded the gym at the rear of the living quarters. The gym isn't exactly a luxury. When you spend weeks on end on a small ship like this, you simply have to work out on a regular basis. The original exercise facilities were cramped, crappy and a pain to use, so I replaced them with a compact but comprehensive new setup.

Also, I like my creature comforts. I put in some decent wall panels and a big 3D screen, as well as some good, comfortable chairs and a reasonably sized mess table. The pilot's seats in the front are large, thickly padded and comfortable. The autokitchen is not the most luxurious model that money can buy, but I got the best I could afford and it's not bad at all, especially after the work I've done on its programming. So all in all, the good old Slowboat is perhaps not as cozy and comfortable as the luxury cabins on a space liner, but it's as close as I can make it.

"Not bad," Anne said, looking around. "I was expecting a tiny steel box."

She sounded impressed, which was somewhat gratifying.

"Ehm... Did you have a Vulpin in here?" she asked.

That raised my eyebrows.

"How in space did you work that out?"

"I can still smell her."

"But I had the entire ship's atmosphere purged. There shouldn't be any residue left."

"I've got a very acute sense of smell," she said, smiling. "Also, there was blue fur in your filters."

"You're observant, I'll give you that."

"That must have been rough, a few weeks in here with a Vulpin."

"I managed to think of it as an exercise in self control," I said with great dignity.

Anne just smiled, nodded and said nothing.

"Anyway," I continued, "here is your... cabin, I suppose you could call it."

The two sleeping cubicles that I left in place out of the original four were located at opposite sides of the living quarters. They're not large, but a lot more comfortable than they used to be. I did fit both of them with their own sanitary facilities (well, just a head, basin and shower, but it's a lot better than nothing) because I knew I would have to put up with passengers sooner or later and I like my privacy. I also replaced the original spartan bunks with decent beds which can be configured into separate singles or doubles. That means there's not too much room left over, but there's not much that can be done about that.

Anne looked around with obvious approval.

"Quite nice," she said. "Almost homey. Are you married?"

"Long ago," I said curtly.

Anne seemed to take the hint. We stood there in awkward silence for a moment. Then I turned to the airlock.

"I suggest you make yourself comfortable," I said. "There's a small 3D screen in your cabin, or you can use the big one by the table if you like. I've got the rest of the maintenance checklist to go through. If there are no problems, we should be ready for departure in about four hours."

"Thanks.

She hesitated for a moment.

"Harvey?"

"Yeah?"

"Sorry if I got too personal."

I shrugged, then nodded and smiled.

"No problem."

With that I stepped out of the airlock. There was still a lot to be done to get the Slowboat ready for the trip ahead.

* * *

The first leg of any flight is essentially a matter of getting up to FTL transition speed, which means that the time spent on it is a factor of two things: the mass of the ship including cargo, supplies and occupants, and the amount of grunt you have in your sublight engines. STL flight is the most expensive part of the trip, because the sublight engines guzzle fuel. But there's no way around that, the laws of physics being what they are.

Then, once you have worked up sufficient speed for the transition from Slower-Than-Light to Faster-Than-Light flight, the hyperdrive takes over. The hyperdrive uses almost no fuel at all. Don't ask me why, because the answer can only be explained through math that is completely over my head. During FTL flight the hyperdrive only uses some power to compensate for losses in the drive system, because in hyperspace the ship has no speed at all, technically speaking. At the same time it does take time to enter hyperspace at one point and emerge from it at another point, which makes no sense to me, either. At any rate, in hyperspace you only need some energy for life support, artificial gravity, recycling and all the other onboard systems. So while you're in hyperspace you do use some fuel, but not much.

Then, finally, after dropping out of hyperspace, you switch back to the sublight engines to decelerate from FTL transition speed to whatever orbital velocity your destination planet has, using more fuel.

All this requires some careful planning, because once you enter hyperspace you can't change direction. In fact, there is no such thing as direction in hyperspace, which I'm also completely unable to explain. Just take my word for it. What it boils down to is that when you drop out of hyperspace, you do so at the same speed and in the same direction you were going when you entered it. And because course changes during STL flight cost extra fuel, you want to avoid them whenever possible. That means you need to plot a straight-line course that avoids collisions with inconvenient obstacles such as stars and planets, involving a minimum of course changes, and letting you exit hyperspace at the end of the trip still going in the right direction.

So you file a flight plan before you set off. Part of the service that Traffic Control charges you for is to run the necessary calculations through their computers for you. Hyperspace jump calculations require massive amounts of computing power, but only prior to departure. While some ships carry computers powerful enough to do that onboard, your average space freighter pilot will do the sensible thing and have the calculations done for him, in port, and only carry a computer big enough to navigate once a precalculated hyperspace jump solution has been fed into it.

With our course laid in, the computer could essentially fly the Slowboat all by itself. But I'm a hands-on kind of guy and I like to be in the pilot's seat during the crucial phases of the flight: take-off and arrival, mid-flight course changes if there are any, and FTL transition. The flight computer has never failed me, but I reckon there's a first time for everything.

After I had transferred payment of the various port fees, filed a flight plan to Ursa and requested a hyperspace jump calculation, I spent some time explaining all of this to Anne. That's unusual for me. Normally it just irritates me when passengers start asking questions about what I do and why I do it. But she seemed genuinely interested in learning about the details of flying a ship like this, and we had to wait for Traffic Control to come back with the jump calculations anyway. Also, she was... well, easy to be with. I found that I enjoyed chatting with her.

Eventually TC sent me the jump solution and assigned me a launch slot. Take-off was uneventful, just the way I like it. With the cargo weighing in at about a quarter of what the Slowboat can carry, we didn't need any strap-on boosters even under Radix' high gravity, and less than an hour later we were in space and on course, the sublight drive grumbling softly behind us.

Most of the time there's little to see during flight. That's because you want it that way: a straight course as far away from everything as you can get. But that's not always possible. And sometimes a fly-by past a planet can save you a lot of fuel. That doesn't happen too often, but sometimes the planets align, so to speak, and then it's well worth the extra maneuvering. This time I happened to get lucky: the course plotted for me by Traffic Control took us around one of the system's outer planets, saving me about ten percent on fuel costs in the process; something that I could really do with right now.

For the next three hours a tiny speck ahead of us grew into a dot, then into a small baby-blue disc, and finally into a globe with fluffy, pale blue and white streaks and swirls. As gas giants go, this one was quite beautiful. That's one thing I like about space: you've never seen it all.

Something else I'd never seen before was a passenger sitting next to me in what is officially the co-pilot's seat. Anne had been at the table in the back, watching the view on the 3D screen. But some things really need to be seen with the naked eye, and this was one of them. Yet I surprised myself when I head myself ask her to come sit next to me. What was this woman doing to me?

"Just make sure you stay away from the controls," I cautioned her. "I don't have to tell you not to touch anything, but accidents happen, and a button doesn't care whether you press it deliberately or bump into it accidentally."

I'll be careful," she promised, looking out at the enormous blue fluffy ball ahead of us. "It's beautiful. And it looks so close."

"We're still millions of miles away. We'll get a lot closer before perigee. Then we'll swing around it in a 70-degree arc and turn outward."

"Perigee?"

"Our closest point to the planet."

"So why can't we just go in a straight line?"

"It's known as a slingshot maneuver. By swinging around a planet this way, we get a lot of speed for free, which saves fuel."

"Free speed? That sounds too good to be true."

I nodded.

"Almost. When I say free, I mean it's free to us. We're following the planet in its orbit, so its gravity drags us along, much like one vehicle towing another. We're essentially stealing some of the planet's kinetic energy. While we speed up, the planet slows down. But the planet's reduction in orbital velocity is infinitesimal, too little to measure."

"I see," Anne said slowly, still gazing at the view ahead.

The fluffy blue and white sphere grew larger and larger before us. A few small moons orbiting the enormous globe slowly became visible as the planet continued to come closer.

"It's beautiful," she said softly.

I had to agree. While gas giants can be quite featureless, some of them can have atmospheric patterns that are downright spectacular, and this was a really good one. But this time there was something else, too: I found that I enjoyed sharing it with her.

Eventually the planet filled our entire field of view. It hovered before us, then above us as we swung around it in a hyperbolic arc. It was almost as if we could reach out and touch the fluffy clouds that cast their shadows on the atmospheric layers below. Then, ever so slowly, the planet began to drift up and above us, gradually receding from our view as we flew past. Ahead of us lay the blackness of space, dotted with stars.

"Well, that's it," I broke the silence. "For the next five hours we just continue to accelerate until we make the jump to hyperspace."

Next to me, Anne sighed.

"That was lovely. Thank you," she said.

"My pleasure. But we had to do this anyway, so I didn't really do anything."

Anne smiled softly.

"I think you did."

I tapped out the code sequence that locked the controls against accidental operation. You can't be too careful in space. Then I got out of the pilot seat and stretched. I was tired. It had been a long day, and most of it has just been a matter of pushing on until departure.

"I'm going to have a shower and a bit of shut-eye," I said. "You're welcome to stay here or to go and have a nap yourself. If there's a problem the autopilot will wake me."

Anne got up as well.

"I'm not that tired yet," she said. "I think I'll read for a while. Does your media system take standard data modules?"

I nodded.

"It should. So far I haven't found anything it won't handle."

"Good. Then I'd like to feed it one of my textbooks."

"No problem. There's a module port right next to the screen; you can upload there."

I pointed at the socket set into the bulkhead. She looked at it and nodded.

"That looks standard. I'm sure I'll manage."

"Then I'll see you in a couple of hours," I said. "Use the yellow intercom button if you need me."

"Thanks. I'm sure I'll be fine."

She looked at me as if she was going to say more, but she didn't. So I went to my cabin, had a quick shower, and went to bed. But I kept thinking about Anne: about her eyes, the color of her hair, the sound of her voice, the way she moved... It was quite a while before I drifted off to sleep.

* * *

Anne's hair fell silky-soft against my face. Her skin was smooth and warm as she moved against me, on top of me, her inner thighs wet against my hips as she straddled me. I slipped inside her, and her inner flesh slid down around my hard cock, hot and wet and tight. I tried not to cum, not yet, but she moved up and down on top of me, her velvety insides stroking me, caressing me, sliding back and forth around the engorged head of my cock as she rode me... I was on the verge or orgasm, but she got there just ahead of me, her cries of ecstasy ringing in my ears as she came on my cock...

The four-hour alarm beeped, loudly and insistently. I woke with a shock. Images of Anne's body against mine slowly faded as I opened my eyes. My erection was a bar of steel, the engorged head purple and shiny with tension as it rubbed against the smooth synthetic fabric covering the bed. My naked skin felt hot and sweaty.

I sat up and rubbed my eyes.

"Dammit, Harvey," I said to myself. "What is this woman doing to you? And why are you letting her?"

Myself didn't have any answers. Was it just the residual effect of the three weeks I'd spend with the Vulpin? Probably, I told myself. Myself agreed: that had to be it. But somewhere, deep down inside, I knew better. This was something different; it was much more than just that.

I got up and into the shower. My erection hadn't subsided, and it didn't look like it was going to. If anything, my cock was getting even harder, and it looked like I would have to take matters into my own hand. My throbbing cock nodded in agreement. When I wrapped my hand around the shaft it felt hot and hard. With the other hand I began to stroke the head. It was slick with pre-cum and more oozed out as I continued to slide my thumb and forefinger up and down around the crown. It felt good. My balls tightened and I felt the beginning of the familiar tingling that told me I was getting closer. I continued to stroke the head of my cock and my pleasure built, built, then peaked rapidly until it erupted. I groaned as a thick white spurt of cum hit the wall of the shower stall, which was filled with steam by now. Another spurt followed, and another, until my orgasm finally ran its course.

I sighed as the wonderful relaxation took hold of me. I savored the sensation for a few moments, then continued to clean myself up. The only thing that bothered me was that while I was stroking myself, I'd been thinking of Anne all the time.

* * *

Anne was sitting at the table, wide awake, when I stepped out of my cabin. She had a stack of datacards in front of her, and she was reading something off the 3D screen. I couldn't see what it was, because it scrolled across the screen at a pace that would be challenging to most speed readers. Interesting.

"Good morning," she said, giving me a smile without taking her eyes off the screen.

She had changed into what looked like a comfortable pair of loose coveralls, made of some sort of soft, light blue fabric.

"Good morning to you too. Although it's more like evening, ship's time."

I punched in an order for a cup of my favorite hot caffeine brew from the autokitchen before sitting down in the pilot's chair and keying in the sequence that unlocked the controls. I quickly checked the display and found everything in order. We were less than half an hour from our jump point.

"Technically speaking," she said, "Whenever you wake up and recaffeinate, it's morning."

I nodded.

"That works for me. Didn't you sleep?"

"No. I don't sleep all that much."

"Well, we're about to make the transition to FTL flight. No way you would have slept through that anyway."

She got up and walked over to the front of the ship until she was standing next to me.

"May I?" she asked, looking at the co-pilot's seat.

I liked the way she made it sound like she considered it an appreciated privilege and not a right.

"Sure. There's nothing much to see, but feel free."

"Thank you," she said as she sat down.

The black starry expanse ahead of us hadn't changed, which was as it should be. The computer started the countdown and the lights dimmed slightly as the power plant began to pour the bulk of its output into the jump capacitors. As the computer ran through the countdown sequence and verified our position, course, velocity and capacitor charge levels, the board slowly turned green.

"Here we go," I said to Anne.

As the countdown reached zero, a hollow thump rang through the ship as the jump capacitors dumped their entire charge into the field coils. The whispering of the sublight engines died down as space collapsed around us in a silent thunderclap, then turned itself inside out, taking us with it at an impossible angle until the universe shrunk to a pinpoint in which nothing could possibly exist. But that wasn't exactly what it was like. It's a feeling you have to experience, because words simply can't describe it.

"Whoa..." Anne said softly. "That one felt... weird. Funny how it's never the same twice."

"You've been through it before?"

She nodded, looking at the view ahead of us, or rather the lack thereof. The star-dotted blackness of space was gone. In its place there was only a featureless nothing, a vaguely luminous black nothingness, like a 3D screen left on without a data feed.