Hulljacker

NOBODY can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. But, if you ever uttered such platitudes around a Hulljacker, you were liable to end up on the wrong end of a hurtling bottle of cank gin or an overclocked stun charge. That, or the offended party might simply roll up a sleeve, and exhibit to the patrons of whatever half-g pit bar, or vape-filled track where they were laying low, the unmistakable lava-red javelins of breach burn, scoring an angry, welted path up inside a set of suspiciously clean civvies.

Col “Pathfinder” Petra had promised herself she wouldn’t scream the first time she dropped out of the lurch and rode the white knuckle slingshot arc of a flimsy, requisitioned v-bike right at the hull of LE80243: a 51st century cargo class carrier, lumbering along in the depthless black at 60 km per second. She’d kept her cool when the lab coats at H-town disabled her control panel and locked up her handlebars; she’d stayed calm as the hellfire chorus shook her cockpit like a tuning fork and threatened to tear a hole in the flimsy stabilization field, hastily fitted only one day before. Even as the hulking expanse of the leviathan rushed up to meet her, snuffing out the winking stars and the shimmering Perote Nebula, leaving nothing but its vast riveted visage, she’d clenched her teeth and swallowed the urge to call out, held steadfast by the infuriating memory of Warn’s unnatural, jooce-widened grin. Your scream’s the only scream that counts bud, so have at it. It’s not like anyone else is listening.

Of course, she did scream. The first time. Every time. No hasty walkthrough in a dingy hanger office, or glassy-eyed monologue from a hardened fellow jacker, could prepare you for the thing itself. The thundering jolt of contact; the rending screech of the v-bike’s jaws tearing through mechanical skin and bone. Then, the panicked fumbling with harnesses and lanyards, the manual override and the brace for internal ejection, face first at 60 kmph, through that self-cauterizing, snaggle-toothed maw. It was here that Col had first screamed. A touch slow on her ejection, she had caught a full burst from an antiquated PLATLX defense system as it raked the breach with searing jets of military grade plasti-blend that hardened on impact. Any slower, and the hole would have become impassible, leaving Col marooned on the side of the ship, forced to choose between fiery dismemberment or a brief turn as as a blood barnacle, clinging helplessly to the hull of the ship, awaiting its inevitable jump to 60 PSL and her accompanying liquidation (What does PSL stand for? Pirate splatter!).

Instead, she had tumbled violently onto the steel grate of a top-tier cargo level, her trailing survival pack careening into her back as the hole clotted behind her and the corridor repressurized, reverting to an industry standard half-g, ¼ O2. Here, Col had made her second rookie mistake. Disoriented by adrenaline, and by the pain coursing through the melted streaks on her shredded landing suit, she had punched through the seals on both of her IV lines, activating the snorkel drip and the field meds simultaneously. The combined bradycardic blow had hit her like a sledgehammer, forcing the air from her lungs and clamping down on her heart with such violence that her pulse almost stopped completely. Splayed out on the grate like a flattened sandhopper on a New Texas highway, she had screamed a second time: a panicked crescendo that was choked-off at her esophagus, and left her body as the merest, plaintive trickle. Space is full of screams. Loud, silent. Atmo, vacuum. Half-g, full-g. They’re all screams.

That had been then. As a young-un, Col had recorded three more breaches following the near disaster of LE80243, during which she’d assisted two boarding parties, banked three cash-and-carries, and taken home two part-plans. That was more than enough for Arlan to scoop her up for advanced training and to put her on a fast track to Pathfinder. It was then that Col had learned how little The Syndicate bothered to share with its rookies. How the H-Town talent scouts syphoned up as many destitute, desperate, or greedy fools as possible from the surrounding star system, just for them to be shot out into the lurch towards distant, unverified coordinates, without so much as a sim-run or a ride along to their name. Arlan and the rest of the higher ups knew full well that less than half of the rookies would make it out of their bikes, let alone onto the floor of a cargo bay, but they invested so little in the process that it didn’t matter. It was simple economics. A good prospect was a live prospect. The best ability was availability. And so, the real training only started when—if—you survived.

By this point, Col’s timing and sequencing was almost impeccable. She could shift to a landing posture while still in flight, and punch eject at the very instant of wounding, catapulting through the breach a split second before even the most advanced defense systems had time to activate. Through trial and error, she’d also learned how to nurse the last trickle of oxygen from her flight suit, moving as fast as possible through the darkened, cavernous bays, and securing a suitable camping spot—four walls, plentiful cover, one entrance—before hitting the snorkel drip, and dramatically reducing her cardiovascular capability. This, Col learned, had the added benefit of prolonging her ability to survive in the field, upping her chances of making it to a landing craft or airlock rendezvous before the IV ran dry and she suffocated like a fish at the bottom of dried pond.

The real trick, though, was the field meds. Despite her agonizing encounter with the PLATLX system, Col had emerged from that first landing unscarred. The second, optional IV line contained an anti-inflammatory, anti-scarring, opioid combo, calibrated to counteract the worst symptoms of breach burn. It also severely dulled the user’s senses and response times, leaving them virtually helpless in the face of the oncoming patrol drones. Taken together, the two IVs could easily lead to cardiac arrest. Somehow, on that disastrous first run, Col had managed to drag herself behind a stack of nearby vacuum crates and wait out the worst of it without being incinerated by the F-class drones she’d spotted marauding across the deck through the subsequent weeks of her deployment. But, she also learned that even with the pain and the scarring, it wasn't worth taking the same risk again. So, on her second landing, despite being just as slow to eject, she’d let the breach burn cook. She'd then cut an agonizing but efficient path toward the nearest 4-and-1 where she'd staggered the IVs in two hour increments. By the time she punched the seal of the field med line, her burns had ripened and set in, leaving her arms and hands—the body parts most exposed by jacker flight suits—permanently imprinted with those deep red spears of reconstituted tissue. A mark of honor and of castigation. A free drink or a swift trip to lock-up (depending on who saw them). Show me a jacker with no breach burn, Arlan liked to say, and I’ll show you a dead man, or a liar.

-[ -[ -[ -[

Col unzipped her right suit sleeve and gingerly inspected the two new burns on her forearm, noting how they seemed to cross over the previous scars like coiled snakes on an Old World biker tat. The field meds had run out one day prior, and the red scorch marks were once more hot to touch. She snapped off the last ice strip from a pack in her survival kit and smoothed it gently over the most painful area, before slowly zipping the suit back up. As the ache subsided, she quickly scanned her base camp: a tiny, inactive service hub, piled high with spent vacuum crates and rusted pallets. The kind of mid-level blind spot that was easily overlooked, nestled, as it was, among so many labyrinthine hectares of slumbering treasure.

Col flexed her left hand and grimaced. She was getting slow. It had been so long since her last burn, that she’d forgotten how hard it was to keep moving. Even with the synthetic adrenalin Arlon liked to pump into his jackers, it had taken every ounce of willpower Col possessed to get off the main floor and to hunker down in a suitable location. There, at least, she had been lucky. This camp was the best she’d found yet, and after days of slow, painstaking pathfinding, this overlooked byway was starting to feel like home. In a well-sheltered corner, she’d set up her monitoring equipment and supplies, along with a new, multi-atmo sleeping bag—a gift she’d received from the syndicate following her last spate of ground leave. The meandering dots on the monitor lent a hypnotic familiarity to her hours of solitude, and the pale blue glow of a ghost lamp cast an eerie pallor over her slow, patterned movements, conjuring sickly, half-formed shadows on the adjacent wall.

A quiet, staccato cheeping pulled Col’s attention back toward the monitor. There it was again: the pulsing blue dot, distinguished in color and movement from the solid red dots of the F-drones. Blue meant bio. Pulsing meant alive. It had been days now since Col had emerged from camp. Ever since she’d first spotted this other lifeform, she’d been glued to the screen, trying to get a feel for its movements. If there was another group of jackers operating in this quadrant, this was the first she’d heard of it. As far as Col was aware, Arlan had quashed all opposition decades ago through a combination of buyouts, crackdowns and assassinations, plus some greased palms over at the New Texas capitol, where most politicians new better than to obstruct one of the last sources of public works on the whole godforsaken planet. Still, what else could she think? She knew there’d been a second drop since her arrival. She’d felt the familiar shudder of the leviathan exiting the lurch to adjust for the drift of its decades old coordinates. A touch soon perhaps, but some of the newer flight systems tended to overcompensate, leaving plenty of time for those with enough gall and daring to sneak onboard. That, or something had tripped the above deck protocols. But, if any crew members had been awoken and sent down into the bowels of the ship, they surely wouldn’t linger in this manner. And then there was the pattern of movement itself: broad, tentative arcs, followed by hard retreats—the unmistakable MO of a hulljacker.

Col drummed her fingers softly, sluggishly on the crate top where she’d propped the monitor, her oxygen starved nerves endings barely registering the motion. Why this mission? Why now? Other than some minor breach burn, the first three days of her deployment had been textbook, a perfect run. She’d mapped an entire deck in record time, all-the-while evading the handful of drones assigned to her home floor. Then there were the two crates of Old World, Napa Valley wine she’d discovered in an easily decrypted private storage only meters away from her base: likely the last of their kind in the entire universe. Some dusty patriarch’s treasured legacy, shot towards the colonies, steadily accruing value across the interminable loneliness of a long-haul freight trip, in the hopes that they might make it to future generations a priceless heirloom. In other words, the perfect cash-and-carry: small enough to drag to a rendezvous alone, valuable enough to negate The Syndicate tithe.

But then the blue dot had shown up on her monitor. Col had been forced to retreat while she pondered her next move. No doubt, Arlan would be pissed if she returned with only one floor plan and a crate or two of wine. Hell, he might even confiscate the wine outright as recompense for the time and expense. This freighter was a prized mark, and the lower decks were rumored to house all sorts of Old World goodies. The Syndicate agents had been trying to secure these coordinates for over two years, and, with the right floor plans and itineraries, there was the chance of a full scale boarding party to follow, and a massive payout. On the other hand, if it was ever discovered that Col had ignored a potential interloper on their turf, the repercussions could be far worse, the punishment far more severe.

“Shit,” Col exclaimed, weakly. This problem wasn’t going away. She narrowed her eyes at the monitor. The blue dot had started moving again. Based on its early trajectory, the dot seemed to be making a beeline straight for her side of the deck. Col scrolled through the previous days’ recordings and threw all four of the route lines up on the screen together. Judging by the preceding patterns, whoever, or whatever, had joined her in the cargo hold, was heading straight for the far west corner of the cargo deck: a large, exposed loading bay, adjacent to one of the ship’s primary exhaust shafts. If Col timed it right, she would be able to run an interception through one of the more sheltered corridors that led to the bay.

Why the loading bay? On mid-size cargo carriers like this one, such areas were dead-zones: decades-old distribution hubs, long emptied of their contents, with nothing to offer but tactical exposure. And yet, this appeared to be where the lifeform was headed. What kind of pathfinder spends days charting a path to a dead zone? Col studied the dot for several minutes longer, hoping it might turn around, or deviate from its course. No such luck. “Fine,” she muttered softly into her breathing filter. Reluctantly, Col retrieved the monitor from the crate top and shrank it down to its scouting size, clipping it to her wrist and dimming the screen. Then, she felt around on the ground for her sidearm—a hacked police riot gun donated by one of The Syndicate’s many “partners” in law enforcement. With the monitor fitted and her weapon stowed, Col took one last look around her makeshift home, an unexpected pang of nostalgia shooting through her oxygen starved chest. As she checked the monitor for nearby drones, and snuck quietly through the doorway, her regret at leaving was quietly joined by something else: a small but growing sense of dread, of a coming disruption or disturbance, as yet unknown.

-[ -[ -[ -[

Col made her way cautiously along the corridor where she'd found the wine: a secondary artery, mostly dedicated to smaller, private lockers. Shipping companies rarely committed as much firepower to these regions as they did the main warehouses, as they knew full well how easily receipts got misplaced or destroyed from one generation to the next, and how unlikely it was that enough descendants would keep track of their shipments to trigger a significant payout. Every now and then, a neon crest emblazoned the wall above a reinforced security door, bathing the surrounding chrome walls in lurid greens, reds and yellows. Col shook her head derisively. She’d forgotten there were crypts in this direction. A carnivalesque holdover from the most decadent days of Old Earth, such resting places were once considered the most fashionable, premium tier of space burial. Now their occupants drifted through the infinite nothingness of space, alone and forgotten, their once coveted thresholds marked by the comedy stylings of hubris and semiotic drift.

As Col worked her sluggish, methodical way towards the west side of the deck, she made sure to match her trajectory with that of the pulsing blue dot. About 2 kms south-west of camp, the corridor Col had selected intersected with a broader thoroughfare. Here, the walls and ceiling opened up into an endless magazine of shelving units and vacuum crates, interlaced with an intermittent web of motion sensors. She was nearing the loading bay.

Col hurriedly shuffled across the intersection, her magnetized boots clicking gently against the grating below. As she moved deeper and deeper into the private storage wing, it grew increasingly sparse and destitute. Most units stood empty, and nothing but the occasional exit light illuminated her path. Reluctantly, Col flicked on her suit light and, almost immediately, spotted a welcome sight: the circular handle of a service tunnel hatch, winking in the glare of the head beam. If her floorplan was correct, the tunnel would lead her to straight an upper balcony overlooking the storage bay.

Col emerged on the other side of the tunnel without a moment to spare. According to her monitor, she and the other trespasser were practically on top of one another. She eased the hatch closed behind her, praying that the mysterious figure didn’t have access to the same kind of tracking equipment that she did. It was very likely that whoever it was had been readying themselves for a confrontation, watching Col’s own pulsing dot as it made its way towards them. Col always fancied her chances in a firefight, but she’d rather observe than make contact.

Col crawled towards the edge of the balcony and peered over the rim into the cavernous loading area. Here and there, she could make out the odd abandoned forklift, or spent crate, but for the most part, the bay was entirely empty: an ominous, implacable cathedral, a monument to cold, impersonal industry. Deep inside the ships she boarded, Col was always locate some personality, some feeling. She often developed a muted affection for the endless crates and corridors, the corners and tunnels. Despite the drones and security systems, the breach burn and the suffocating discomfort of surviving in half-g and ¼ O2, she had begun to see herself as working concert with these lonely space titans: blind void whales, doomed to swim between dying civilizations without ever coming up for air. She was their temporary companion, a fleeting lover with whom they shared their deepest secrets. But here, at the edge of colossus, staring at the towering bay door and the empty loading deck, she felt nothing but a chill dread, and a sadness.

Snap out of it, Col chided herself, pressing down hard on her fresh burns in an effort to redouble her focus. The strategy worked, the nerves in her arms exploding with pain before succumbing once more the soothing balm of the ice strip. Eyes watering, Col scanned the easternmost entry way, watching attentively for any sign of movement.

Gradually, a dim, humanoid figure, lit by a single ghost lamp, emerged from the opening. The figure was clad in an antiquated snorkel suit, and appeared to daubed with streaks of matte black paint. It was moving slowly, slower even than the atmosphere or the snorkel drip required. Col studied the humanoid with growing confusion: no jacker moves in the open like that, she puzzled. But it wasn’t just the speed. Something else was off. As she watched, the figure seemed to grow several feet taller. Whoever it was had lifted their ghost lamp aloft. The dim orb was now poised in the air like a featureless, disembodied head. Every ten feet or so, the orb would halt, quivering ever so slightly, before being lowered to the ground. After about thirty seconds, it was hoisted back up, and the strange procession continued its trajectory across the darkened loading deck.

Col watched, mesmerized, as this curious, halting dance played out on the floor below. All sense of danger, and urgency, evaporated. The figure—whoever it was—clearly had no interest in who else, or what else, might be below deck. Any moment now an F-drone could appear, ready to reduce it, and the lamp, to tidy pile of anonymous embers. But, even then, it seemed, they were likely to continue their procession, right up until the moment of incineration.

As Col continued to study the spectacle beneath her, the cold knot of an idea began to twist itself together and press in on her consciousness. What else had she recorded on this deck? It had been empty, right? Nothing but a cargo door and an exhaust shaft…

The exhaust. Col felt the knot drop to her stomach. Not possible! No jacker had caught sight of Pilgrim for years. No-one she knew, not even the grizzled old-timers who spent their days huddled around the hanger bar, had encountered such a thing. Legend had it that back in the first couple hundred years of interstellar flight, following the discovery of Laradium—Mother of Hellfire, the God Stone—a few scattered acolytes had conspired to find work on the new starships. Left unattended, they had cast themselves into the freshly lit thermodynamic marvel to be spun around in its reconstitutive glow for all eternity, or until its infinitesimal entropic trickle finally won the day.

Life from life. Life eternal. Hell, unmake me. Heaven, unmake me.

That was before anyone really knew what a lit hellfire reactor, or even two vibrating atoms of Laradium, could do to a person's body and mind. How, in its merciless cycle of destruction and revival, this miraculous element could unmake and remake an organic cell so fast that it did not register its own death, only the maddening, exquisite pain of millions upon millions of annihilations and rebirths. There was a name for it: a dreaded phrase, uttered from within the depths of jail complexes and gang hideouts throughout the inhabited galaxies: the never hell. When subjected to such conditions, the human psyche could last no longer than an hour. Standard-issue Laradium torture chips cut off at fifty-five minutes. Col had made it to fifty-four.

Yet, some still craved union with god in the hellfire, and as hulljacking had become more common, cheap, requestioned v-bikes had presented new opportunities for spiritual bliss. Even after the Church of Laros had officially outlawed the practice, Pilgrims had sought the unattended engines of cargo carriers just like this one. And now, years after the last recorded incident, Col was watching a ritualized march straight toward the service hatch of a lit Laradium reactor. She wanted to call out, or to rush the deck and grab this faceless fool by the neck, but syndicate protocol was to avoid all unnecessary confrontation.

Col watched, helplessly, as the dimly lit figure reached the service hatch and slowly lowered the lamp to the ground one last time. From within the folds of their suit, they produced a military-grade decryptor, no larger than coaster. Within a matter of minutes, the child-sized service-hatch had creaked open, releasing a harmless gush of steam into thin atmosphere of the cargo bay. The pilgrim stood at the lip of the opening for what seemed like an age, their head rotating left and right, as if carefully inspecting the entranceway to their demise. Then, one-by-one, the figure placed their personal belongings on the ground. Ghost lamp, rations, decryptor, transmitter, and finally, their face mask. Col just had time to make out a shock of shoulder-length, straw-yellow hair before the Pilgrim tumbled head-first into the exhaust shaft, falling out of sight towards the ravages of the never hell.

Shaking violently, Col switched off her magnetized boots and lowered herself gently to the cargo bay floor. The Pilgrim's personal effects were arrayed in a semi-circle, fanned out like the petals of a deformed flower. As Col studied the items she noticed a faint glow illuminating the ground where they had been positioned. Perplexed, she picked up the ghost lamp, which she extinguished and placed it back on the floor. The faint glow persisted. It was then that her attention was drawn to the service hatch itself. The door had automatically swung shut after the Pilgrim's jump, but a small window still provided a view into the shaft. Tentatively, Col placed her mask against the glass and peered into the tunnel. She gasped, staggering back from the hatch before pressing her face against it once more. How many were there? Fifty? One hundred? Arlan, she muttered to herself, you're going to want to see this.