Weasel Hills Golf & C.C. (hole 19)

Starship pilot who is, unfortunately, utterly shipless

The towboat finally showed up and tractor-beamed me and my burned-out, turn-of-the-century ship into its massive cargo hold. They don't ever keep cargo holds pressurized in this business; most merchandise that needs it tends to have the atmospheric controls built in to the crate. A lot of times the crates are more expensive than their contents, but nobody ever notices unless they're damaged enough to trigger the property rights clause in the merchant contracts.

I'd been instructed to stay in my ship. She was only barely holding together by now; the landing skids had been making concerning creaking noises if I shifted in my chair too much, but at least the windows were still sealed. I wanted to stretch my legs, but all I could do was pass the time playing card games on my PDA; like all the other things I owned, it was older than I was.

When we finally arrived at the Lloyd naval base and I was allowed to get off, the boatman pinged me an email with the towing fee. 1,500 credits for the tow, itemized for fuel costs, and "compensation for lost cargo space." I didn't see that he was carrying anything else back there except for me and my husk of a ship. You'd pay that much for a trunk of exotics. Worse, there wasn't a due date attached, so I had no idea when he'd be sending collections agents after me. And collections agents tended to have missiles, these days.

When the nanobots finished looking over my wreck (I could scarcely call it a ship anymore), my PDA once again pinged with an email, my bill for repair and refitting costs. 6,000 credits to replace the lost missile launcher and laser cannon, 750 to load the missile launcher with ammo, 30,000 to replace the burned out shield generator, 20,000 to replace the targeting computer's dead GPU, and 3,500 to replace the alloy hull plating that used to be attached to the side panels. I quit reading before I got to the replacement costs for the wings and afterburners. Strange world we're living in, I mused to myself, when personal protection is more expensive than the stuff it's protecting. I might as well have just scrapped the thing and took out a loan for another one. Assuming anyone in the system would trust anybody enough to sign over a lease.

Starship pilot who is a very legitimate customs inspector and really does need to see the contents of your cargo hold immediately. Honest.

Satisfied that I wasn't being tailed, I finally let my white-knuckled thumb off the afterburner switch. In the old days, I'd jet around willy-nilly, too impatient to just cruise, knowing they'd top off the fuel tank as soon as I landed. Lately, though, my only thoughts were on how much that stuff cost. Life, death, or otherwise; that last skirmish probably just cost me another 136 credits, to say nothing of the cost of repairs.

I turned my chair to check my six out of habit, but all I saw was the rear wall of the pilots' compartment. I hadn't had a ship with a rear window since leaving Coalition service. My only comfort was my radar - each blip flickering and dancing randomly, as the signatures hit parts of the dish that the computer wasn't expecting them to. I didn't have the money or expertise to fix it, so I just spent time learning to read the raw outputs on the amber-scale monitor. The debug output from my aging targeting system - so old, it had reverted to its text-only failsafe mode - assured me I was the only ship in the vicinity, as of about 2 minutes ago.

I kicked back in the chair, propping my feet up on the sill of my side window (the only place on my dash on which it was safe to do so, without accidentally kicking the keyboard). maptty told me it was about 200 kilometers until I'd be at the last jump back to the Lloyd system. I was still drifting at a fairly decent pace, coming off of afterburners, but I figured it'd be a long while before I got there.

(I'm going to start posting the random isolated bits of fiction I've had tucked away on a personal wiki for years - I don't know when they'll be useful otherwise and they're largely parts of projects I'm no longer interested in pursuing, but damn it, somebody should be able to read them besides me. -ww)

You know those stories about regular, ordinary people? Probably not. They're just regular, ordinary people. If their lives were interesting enough to tell stories about, they wouldn't be regular, ordinary people. But you throw in anything extraordinary, and they're the latest sensation of the world. Like that one about the kid that lived in an abusive family, until they learned they could use magic. They're still regular people, so you could still relate to them, but the things that happen to them are anything but ordinary.

That actually used to be my favorite kind of book to read. The closet wizards and accidental adventurers of the world were my every day fantasy. I'd prayed every day that something would happen to me that'd put me in their ranks. But every day I'd wake up, eat breakfast, go for a walk, and find that all the interesting events of the day had just missed me. It wasn't a problem with where I lived - my city was well known for its prevalence of Weird Stuff - but maybe I either wasn't looking hard enough, or it's one of those "watched pot" things, and it'll never happen if you expect it to. Such was the life of an unemployed college grad, I supposed.

I rolled out of bed at about 9 in the morning. I was tired of the daily grind, of applying for work and idly maintaining my various journals and micro-blog accounts. Nothing was happening, online or off. As I closed my five year old laptop (hey, it'd gotten me through a four-year degree at least), I swore I saw something flickering out the corner of my eye. Did that wall just turn black for a split second? No. Walls don't flicker. I even said this to myself. "Walls don't flicker," I declared, staring at the painted slab of drywall next to my door. Sure enough, it didn't. Not while I was watching it, anyway.

Starship pilot who is a registered warlock

This would have been a few hundred cycles ago. Certainly before Archmage Kasiell's ejection, because it does involve Archmage Kasiell.

I shall confess, first of all, that I accepted my posting aboard the Vessel of the Creators without fully reading its description. I've made it this far into life without worrying too much about the details; it's not difficult when you answer to a higher power, especially such a power as Prambiot, The Shadow-Guide. But before I reached the Vessel, I'd been under the impression that she was a seafaring ship. Beyond me, it was, why she was simply standing on-end in the middle of the palace grounds, her boarding ramp extended to ground level all the same. "Don't question it, just keep walking the ramp," urged another young mage behind me. "I'm sure they'll explain once we're aboard."

Don't question it. Ever the refrain, it was, with the Creators. Nearly everything was somebody's doing. The eccentricities of each member of the crew would become clearer each day on duty. And my duty was somehow the least important of all: navigation and helms. One might think that driving a huge spacefaring galleon full of wizards, sorcerers, and other magic-users, being solely responsible for the direction it was going, avoiding each blazing star and gas-giant lest the whole thing be torn asunder, would be important. They, however, had much bigger problems: forestalling the collapse of the Universe, I'm told.