them without their blessing and paying their licensing fees. Freight was one of their biggest sources of income, so you better believe they weren’t letting anyone else deliver using their routes without coughing up. This forced freelancers to use more direct courses. It also forced them to risk getting blasted to pieces by nearly invisible debris and the speeding ships of other freelancers, since the space was barely mapped and completely unmonitored. Well, not completely unmonitored. Regular patrols of corporate ships swept the more useful chunks of space to try to weed out the riffraff, but the sheer size of the area involved made it rather hit or miss.
The better freelancers took a hybrid approach to their deliveries. Standard operating procedure called for a dead sprint toward a star system or asteroid cluster. Then drop down to conventional speeds to weave through it. Anyone tracking you on sensors would more often than not lose you among the other ships and space rocks. Anyone following you directly would have to slow down and take the same route. At that point it was just a test of who was the better pilot, the very fact that attracted Lex to the business to start with. While they are tied up in whatever mess you picked to hide in, you gun it to the next thicket. The popular parlance had dubbed it “Sprints and Jukes.” It was like a needle hopping from haystack to haystack.
Right now he had to find the right haystacks and the paths between that didn’t intersect corporate space, wouldn’t get him killed, and WOULD get him to Tessera V in six days. It didn’t leave much room for error. He tapped and swiped his way through the various stellar maps, downloaded some fresh data, and pushed the whole mess into his flight computer. Before long he’d found a crooked, zigzag path that seemed mostly survivable, and set a course for the first sprint. All that remained was to make it out of the cluttered star system before shifting to FTL speed. He took the opportunity to finish getting out of the monkey suit and into the flight suit. It was just a reinforced and airtight jumpsuit with sealed boots and gloves, but aside from being marginally more comfortable, it could couple with a helmet and keep him from popping like a ripe tick in the event of a sudden change in cabin pressure. That sort of thing was a bit more intense in deep space.
He managed to finish the uniquely awkward dressing maneuver just in time for the autopilot to kick into FTL. One would think that such a thing would be spectacular. Not as such. The inertial inhibitor wiped out any semblance of the sensation of speed. No lurch backward, no pressing into the seat. It had to, or the pilot would be a thin film of organic matter long before the ship even made it to half the speed of light. And as for the sights? Well, everything in the view field took an abrupt shift toward blue, then violet, and then on up into ultraviolet, then into the various levels of high energy radiation, which was summarily blocked by the ship to prevent, among other things, death. Some pilots used view screens that would drop the radiation frequency down to viewable levels, probably the same sort of people who get a kick out of listening to bat sonar. They would get a groovy stretched out light show that, in reality, was a long way behind them. Lex preferred to nap or poke at a casual game on the slidepad until he reached the first stop.
Back in the skies over Golana, an aging but well kept ship, military in design, was maneuvering to dock with a communications pylon. In an earlier age it might have been called a satellite, and in truth that’s all it was, but when things become commonplace, people find the need to come up with more specific names. Just as cars would come to be called coupes and convertibles and roadsters and hatchbacks depending on their shape, satellites earned descriptions like pylon or wheel or hub. Com-pylons had taken the place of cell towers once
The better freelancers took a hybrid approach to their deliveries. Standard operating procedure called for a dead sprint toward a star system or asteroid cluster. Then drop down to conventional speeds to weave through it. Anyone tracking you on sensors would more often than not lose you among the other ships and space rocks. Anyone following you directly would have to slow down and take the same route. At that point it was just a test of who was the better pilot, the very fact that attracted Lex to the business to start with. While they are tied up in whatever mess you picked to hide in, you gun it to the next thicket. The popular parlance had dubbed it “Sprints and Jukes.” It was like a needle hopping from haystack to haystack.
Right now he had to find the right haystacks and the paths between that didn’t intersect corporate space, wouldn’t get him killed, and WOULD get him to Tessera V in six days. It didn’t leave much room for error. He tapped and swiped his way through the various stellar maps, downloaded some fresh data, and pushed the whole mess into his flight computer. Before long he’d found a crooked, zigzag path that seemed mostly survivable, and set a course for the first sprint. All that remained was to make it out of the cluttered star system before shifting to FTL speed. He took the opportunity to finish getting out of the monkey suit and into the flight suit. It was just a reinforced and airtight jumpsuit with sealed boots and gloves, but aside from being marginally more comfortable, it could couple with a helmet and keep him from popping like a ripe tick in the event of a sudden change in cabin pressure. That sort of thing was a bit more intense in deep space.
He managed to finish the uniquely awkward dressing maneuver just in time for the autopilot to kick into FTL. One would think that such a thing would be spectacular. Not as such. The inertial inhibitor wiped out any semblance of the sensation of speed. No lurch backward, no pressing into the seat. It had to, or the pilot would be a thin film of organic matter long before the ship even made it to half the speed of light. And as for the sights? Well, everything in the view field took an abrupt shift toward blue, then violet, and then on up into ultraviolet, then into the various levels of high energy radiation, which was summarily blocked by the ship to prevent, among other things, death. Some pilots used view screens that would drop the radiation frequency down to viewable levels, probably the same sort of people who get a kick out of listening to bat sonar. They would get a groovy stretched out light show that, in reality, was a long way behind them. Lex preferred to nap or poke at a casual game on the slidepad until he reached the first stop.
Back in the skies over Golana, an aging but well kept ship, military in design, was maneuvering to dock with a communications pylon. In an earlier age it might have been called a satellite, and in truth that’s all it was, but when things become commonplace, people find the need to come up with more specific names. Just as cars would come to be called coupes and convertibles and roadsters and hatchbacks depending on their shape, satellites earned descriptions like pylon or wheel or hub. Com-pylons had taken the place of cell towers once
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