The woman’s brow furrowed. “I see you’ve already booked a singler on the fifteenth. Do you want to reschedule that?”
“No. I’ll still need that. Today is just to meet up with an old friend who’s passing through the node.” Even to his own ears that didn’t sound convincing, so he added, “The fifteenth is for a convention on Harmony. Ethan Hephaestus will be presenting a paper on stimulus overload in immersion coding. . . .” Now he was talking too much. It didn’t sound natural. He shut up.
He’d figured that if Tridac thought he intended to flee the station they might take action to prevent it. By booking a later flight he was assuring them there was no rush. Now, hopefully, they would not be paying as close attention to his movements, and if he could move quickly enough—unexpectedly enough—he might get off this benighted station before anyone realized what he intended.
“I have an MKJ47 available,” the woman said, then added apologetically, “It’s the budget model.”
“That’s fine. That’s fine. Bill it to my account.” Oops. What if someone was watching that account? Should he have paid cash? Too late now. God, I really suck at this spy stuff.
The MKJ47 lent new meaning to the phrase “budget model.” Its narrow entrance was just big enough for him to squeeze through, and inside the pod there was barely enough room for the evac equipment, a piss station, and a single chair that had seen better days. All of it was sized for Earth humans, and none of it looked adjustable. Leave it to the Terrans to produce a vehicle no one but a Terran could fly.
He stowed his bag in a small chamber under the seat and strapped himself in, then watched as the pod went through its automated pre-flight routine. His registered flight plan appeared on the forward display monitor, a smooth arc from Tridac to Harmony, just far enough from the median route to avoid most other traffic. Five hours of travel time in all. What few manual controls the pod had were on an emergency panel folded away into the ceiling; Micah pulled it down briefly to familiarize himself with their layout, then locked the panel back in place. In all his years he’d never needed to steer a pod himself and hoped he would never have to.
Then the outer door closed, the inner door did likewise, and a faint hiss could be heard as environmental controls took over. The main display flashed confirmation that all systems were functioning properly, and then, with stomach-lurching abruptness, the pod jerked free of its mooring, and headed toward the launch queue. Not exactly the smoothest exit, but he didn’t care. As long as he was moving in the right direction he was happy.
He set the viewscreen to give him a 360 view of surrounding space. If anyone on Tridac wanted to keep him from leaving they’d have to make their move soon. But no one approached the ship, and soon enough his MKJ47 was at the head of the line. And then . . . launch. The blackness of space folded around the tiny singler and the mooring lights of the station swiftly faded behind him. One hundred miles out. Two. He was so on edge that he had to remind himself to breathe. Three hundred miles—
LEAVING TRIDAC CORPORATE TERRITORY, the viewscreen proclaimed. ENTERING COMMON LAW SPACE. ETA HARMONY STATION: 4.95 E-HOURS.
With a sigh he expelled his last tortured breath. He’d made it! Whatever happened now, it would happen under Common Law. He had rights again.
Mentally exhausted, he leaned back into the padded chair and shut his eyes for a moment, drinking in the solitude. Then he called up a design file to work on. Not his sensory research, of course. Those files were safely tucked away in his brainware in read-only format; he would have to outload them to another system to do any real editing. Instead he called up the setting files for his current project and started reviewing the visual elements in his Viking mead hall virt. It was relaxing to focus on the mundane facets of his job: adding more smoke to the fire, repositioning snowdrifts, tweaking the phase of Earth’s moon until it shed just the right amount of light on the outdoor scenes. He decided to go with a full moon, and wondered if he should alter the gravity profile to reflect its presence. Earth’s moon was powerful enough to shift whole oceans, so surely it had some effect on human beings.
How frightening it must have been for Earth’s primitives, knowing themselves at the mercy of nature! Their gravity was dictated by ancient rocks hurtling through space rather than the ordered science of man-made stations; their world wracked by wind-storms and rain-storms and dust-storms and ice-storms and fires. He loved natural planetary settings for their emotive potential, but God knows he would never want to live in one.
ALERT
The warning appeared in his field of vision, a jarring incongruity in his Viking longhouse. He paused his work and looked at the display screen. MANDATORY COURSE ADJUSTMENT, the pod was telling him. PLEASE CONFIRM.
“Data,” he ordered.
A tri-D map appeared in front of the screen, with Tridac Station at one end of the display and Harmony Station at the other. Between them a webwork of fine lines stretched across the starscape, some connecting the two stations, some heading offscreen to unseen destinations. Each line represented the registered flight plan of a ship currently in transit, and there were so many of them along the main route that it was a miracle none of those ships ever collided. But their passage was a delicate dance, perfectly orchestrated by the ships’ autopilots, in constant communication with one another. No two ships would ever cross the same point at the same time.
But: INTERSECTION IMMINENT, his pod was warning him. Two of the lines were highlighted. One, in red, he recognized as his own flight plan; the other, in blue, was coming from Harmony. The ships themselves were still many miles apart, but Micah’s autopilot had projected both flight paths and determined they would intersect if someone did not adjust his course. A green line appeared on the screen, indicating the detour it was recommending. That would add twelve minutes to Micah’s flight, but if the alternative was colliding with another vehicle, what choice did he have? The other ship was a larger vessel, and would expect Micah to get out of its way. The hierarchical dance of autopilot travel.
“Fine,” he said. “Confirmed.”
The green line turned red as his original course disappeared from the screen. Good enough. He turned his attention back to the virt, studying the array of foods laid out for feasting. It was all pretty basic. Maybe he should add something seasonal for the history buffs to notice. He sent out a query for information on seasonal foods in the Viking era, then cursed himself for being an idiot. Of course there was no response. They’d left Tridac’s innernet behind and weren’t within range of the outernet yet.
ALERT. MANDATORY COURSE ADJUSTMENT. PLEASE CONFIRM.
“Say what?” he muttered. “We did that already.”
But it was a different ship this time. This one was farther away than the first, but apparently Micah’s autopilot was convinced that it, too, was a navigational threat. This time the detour would cost him seventeen minutes. But what choice did he have? Short of taking control of the pod and flying it himself, this was the only way to get where he was going. “Confirmed,” he growled.