The Delivery

Sa’li had been alone for two weeks now. The near barren rock where she was stranded had almost no traffic. And what there was, she couldn’t afford a charter, even if she was near port. The moon was smaller than her homeworld back starward. The gravity still made her uneasy. She tripped over a crack in the carved stone of the ground and lofted into a nearby wall before stumbling to her feet. The air glistened with the silicate dust she had kicked up. An incomprehensibly geometric flow of stars illuminated by the long evening sun stormed from where her hand landed on the wall.

Two weeks earlier, her ship had crashed. It was a small subluminal ship with a small crew she had only recently joined. It was her first trip to the outer planets. They had been hired as couriers of two locked crates. She hadn’t asked what was in them, and the captain hadn’t offered that information. They were headed to a large moon in orbit around the gas giant Tiash’a.

After weeks sailing, she had picked up a ghost signal in their wake. She didn’t want to be the nervous new comms officer and thought better of bringing it up. It was only there for a moment, probably just signal noise she explained away in her head. Maybe just first mission jitters. A hard lesson was learned a few days later when that signal firmed up just a few hundred klicks off their stern. It was dark, but it was definitely a ship, and no captain on the level flies dark. Just as they were readying for entry, the pirates attempted their boarding. The captain had been prepared as soon as she built up the courage to tell him. But it wasn’t enough time. A mercantile craft like the Shona doesn’t have robust defenses. They put up a good fight, knocked the pirates out of commission, but the Shona went down with them.

Sa’li woke a day later, laying atop a small dune of sand that had built itself along a perimeter wall. She was a few hundred yards from what remained of the Shona. She spent the next three days digging five graves and giving last rites for people she hardly knew, who had died for no reason, in defense of a couple of boxes to be passed from one stranger to another. They had been kind. Given her a chance when the world hadn’t. Helped her break free of the well and the poverty that fell into it. What was the old saying? Money is lighter than air? If so then poverty is an anchor.

The cold bit her face after sunfall. The emergency heater didn’t help much but it was all she had. She had scoured the ship for everything of use. A simple sled that she packed with all of the rations, water, weapons, and sundries she could find to keep herself alive for the foreseeable future. Along with the supplies she had also brought the two locked crates and a little black notebook that she had found in a drawer that had once lived in the captain’s desk.

She fanned through its pages as the dry cold wicked her heat away. Thin, soft, yellowed as if they were aged. The notebook was filled. Schematics. Diagrams. Maps. Unintelligible scratchings that might be sloppy common, or maybe code. Folded up and stuffed in the back cover were coordinates for the exchange of the locked crates they had toted halfway across the system.

She pulled up the map on her handheld and logged the distance she had traveled that day, and plotted her route towards the coordinates. She still had a hard day of hiking before she reached her destination. It would be late, but she would make it. She had to. If she could just make the delivery, then she would have the money to get off this rock. Maybe not back home. But what was waiting there for her anyway? No, she didn’t need to get home. She just needed to get away from here. To get away from death. The cold eventually lulled her to sleep as she pulled the heater in closer to herself and folded into the crook of her makeshift windbreak that was her sled.

Images of her mangled crewmates being torn from the Shona while the fires of reentry burned in the viewports woke her with a start. She grabbed her chest, heart pounding. Sweating even though the air still gnawed at her skin. Shaking, but not from the cold. The sun just beginning to break the horizon. It was weaker here than at home. But luckily the nights were short, and the days were long by some fortune of celestial mechanics. It kept the temperature bearable. Mostly.

She sat up and swallowed hard feeling the sand of thirst grate at the back of her throat. She pulled her water skin from inside her suit and took a long swallow. It hurt like swallowing a steel ball that was too large to go down. She keeled over as the pain made its way down her neck and eventually subsided. These dry nights would kill her soon if she didn’t pick up her pace. She tenderly took another sip and stood up.

Her map showed a ravine coming up that she would have to pass through. It wasn’t ideal, limited room for maneuvering, even more limited visibility. Like going down a dark alley back home, a tactical nightmare to be avoided at all costs, but it was the only way to make it in time.

The sled was caught on a pile of rocks that had spilled across the gorge. She had spent half an hour taking everything off so that it could be heaved over the remainder of the blockage. With one more push, the sled edged over the mass of stones and slid away in the direction of her destination, stopping with a thud as it hit one of the mysterious crates. She would have to hurry up and repack the sled if she was going to meet her goal for the day. Without the setback of the landslide, she might have been able to hike into the night and make it. But now it would take at least another day at an average clip.

Her handheld chirped twice from inside her suit and Sa’li quickly looked up and down the channel in the earth. Barren as ever, her eyes tightened as she reached into her breast pocket and pulled out the small terminal. On the screen, a bright red border highlighted a notification.

Location tracking ping detected, return ping fired.

Shit. She thought and stowed the handheld before furiously heaving her gear back onto the sled. The only other people she knew to be out this far were her crew, who probably hadn’t risen from the grave to chase her down. The people she was headed to meet? But they were expecting a ship two weeks ago. Which only left her least favorite option. The pirates. They had gone down somewhere nearby the Shona. If they survived, they could be tracking her.

She tied down the last of the supplies and hefted the sled into motion. The handheld had returned the location of the source ping, and it originated just a couple klicks aft of her. It was definitely not the people she was meeting. Making good time somehow became higher than top priority. Swallowing a protein pack in one gulp, she set off at a light jog.

After a tight bend in the ravine, she checked the location data again and found they had turned off the transponders like she had. Oh, so you noticed? She thought. Her pace had become too much, and a break was needed or her throat would start to bleed from the brittle air. The sled was shored up around the corner. She pulled a rifle from the stockpile and slumped to the ground hidden from the coming party’s view by an outcropping of shimmering stone. The narrow walls of the gorge glistened and fluoresced in the late morning rays that cut in through the mouth a dozen meters above her. The light seemed to ripple across the sheer surface. It transfixed her. Her fatigue was wearing her down. She was seeing things.

Hushed voices and the scratching of boots in sand broke her out of her daze and she stiffened, stock to shoulder. Her pursuers were close, closer than comfortable. And no party of men on a half barren rock silently tracking a woman had her best interests at heart. Hell, it could be a metropolitan rock, still bad news. Only there was no one here to help her. Unfortunately, this would be a shoot first kind of situation. Fortunately, she was well enough practiced that she would make those shots count.

Without another breath, she leaned out from the corner, pulled the lead of the party into her scope, and fired. He collapsed to the ground like a bag of stones. Before the others could react, she put two more on the ground. Then they started scrambling. There weren’t a great many of them, seven to start. Four after the initial three fell. They began to fire wildly up the gorge. She tracked them and made contact within ten more shots. Not her best, but they were all immobile, if breathing, and no longer shooting at her.

She took a grenade from the sled and tossed it back up the ravine and started running. It would give them some rubble to navigate over. Along with the wounded legs they would hopefully be slowed enough so she could make it if she hauled as fast as possible.

She ran and didn’t look back. At least two of the men she shot were dead. She didn’t like to kill, but life rarely gave her much choice in the matter. The others would recover if they could make it to safe harbor. A dark part of her hoped that they wouldn’t make it out of the ravine. Not after what they did to the Shona and her crew. Not after what they were trying to do to her. Leave them for the scavengers.

The anger and adrenaline fueled her. She pushed harder than she thought herself able. An all-out sprint for longer than she could track. A jog thereafter. The gravity probably helped. But she was lost in the struggles of the past weeks. The luck of finding a way out of the brutal city she came up in. The sense of peace and safety. The misfortune of ending up in this position. Finding herself in the same situations she fled.

The sun was setting again. She hadn’t checked her map in hours. She turned the corner and found a triad of ships parked in a small depression of land. A group of people surrounding a woman as she spoke. She made eye contact and Sa’li froze. Her breath finally catching up with her.

“I have,” panting, “your crates,” she said.

“The crates are yours, child,” a pair of clicks came from the sled in front of her, “but where is the journal?”

Sa’li looked at her puzzled, not sure she heard right. She pulled the notebook from her suit’s pocket and held it up. The woman’s eyes widened and she walked over. She opened the book and began to sift through its pages. Relief seemed to wash over her face. Sa’li turned to the crates and opened them both. Inside she found what she assumed was the actual payment for services rendered, twenty-thousand terra-dollars. Enough to keep the Shona and its crew running for a few months. Enough to have kept her off the streets for much longer. Definitely enough to get her off this rock. Why not save a few if I can?

“Hey, can I hitch a ride?”