Olivia stared absently into the glass before her, transfixed by the bubbles rising through the liquid within, surfacing, and bursting in silent explosions. The man across from her kept talking excitedly, gesturing wildly about him, trying desperately to capture her attention. She doubted he would succeed.
“It’s the job of a lifetime,” the portly man cried. “A week’s trip through the Omicrons and you’re made!”
Olivia kept her eyes on her drink. The Omicrons. It would take a fortune to make her venture into that godless void of a stellar region again. A fortune, she assumed, the man didn’t have to offer.
“Not interested,” she replied coldly, hoping to finally get him to back off and leave her to drink in peace.
“You don’t understand!” He instead continued, unfazed by her answer. From within his oversized coat, he produced a small PDA and slid it across the table. It came to a rest against Olivia’s glass with a muffled clang. The mercenary’s eyes instinctively shifted to the lit screen, eyeing it for information.
Damn, she thought. Her eyebrows shot up as she read the number the datapad displayed. She could practically feel the man’s satisfied grin bore into her as she raised her head to finally look into his face. Smug little bastard.
“All that just to fly escort?”
The man nodded, his double-chin shaking asynchronously.
“Oh yeah,” he replied, his grin widening. “It’s the easiest money you’ll ever make!”
Olivia glanced back down at the PDA and scrolled through the screen’s content.
“I doubt it,” she muttered as she read the job’s details.
A shipment of ‘confidential’ cargo to be carried aboard an independent transport from Aomori Station, Honshu, to a small, unregistered depot at the edge of Omicron Delta’s Tokelau Cloud. The captain’s name was familiar to her; a smuggler she had encountered a few times during her work in the Omegas. He was known to be cool-headed and competent, two traits Olivia would always appreciate. The crew, however, seemed to be made up of whatever fortune seekers the employer could cobble together aboard Kusarian stations. Inexperienced and unreliable. The other escort pilots’ names didn’t ring any bells either.
Olivia was skeptical. The Omicrons were dangerous - more so than any other part of space she had been to. The plotted route seemed needlessly risky to her, traversing systems known to be swarming with Outcasts, the Order, Core, and - worst of all - Nomads. The unspecified cargo added a number of red flags to the already impressive bundle.
She scrolled again, returning to the promised payout. It was a lot. Over half of what she currently had on her account. Enough to keep her comfortable for months to come. The temptation gnawed at her.
“Keep your eyes peeled,” Captain Rosary’s voice grated through Olivia’s cockpit speakers. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat, her eyes flitting back and forth across the vast expanse of space visible through the canopy. Around her were the by now familiar shapes of the three other escort craft and the larger silhouette of the transport, all flying in tight formation. To their left loomed Omicron Beta’s outcropping of the Edge Nebula; to their right, the dark shadow of the Torba field. Up ahead, like a giant green hand reaching out to crush their small flotilla, lay the Tafea cloud and, somewhere at its farthest outskirts, their next destination - a jumphole to Omicron Minor.
“Radio silence from here on out,” the transport’s captain relayed. “We don’t need any patrols chasing us down.”
Olivia took a deep breath, trying to relax, but the constant risk of being discovered by either a wing of Order ships or, worse yet, a flight of Maltese raiders, kept her on edge.
The convoy continued on its course, squeezing through the narrow path between the nebula, asteroid field, and system star, hoping that interference from all three would keep them off of the locals’ sensors and out of trouble. The Tafea cloud grew ever larger as the ships approached it, soon taking up Olivia’s entire field of view. Her cockpit was bathed in the eerie, green light of the local star, doing nothing to calm her nerves.
Nothing to worry about, she tried to reassure herself. Rosary knows what he’s doing.
* * *
Their meeting had been brief, over a couple of drinks aboard Aomori Station. The captain had politely shaken her hand, giving her a respectful nod and expressing his gladness to have her along for the journey. The other pilots received the same courteous welcome. Then their employer joined them, his multiple chins jiggling as he went over the assignment’s details once more.
Something about the short, fat man had bothered Olivia. The way he spoke almost a little too enthusiastically, perhaps, never seeming to lose any energy at all. Or maybe the fact that his eyes never seemed to be quite in focus, seemingly glaring right through anyone he spoke with. The other contractors did not seem to notice, or if they did, they didn’t seem fazed by it. Olivia supposed that the more than generous payout helped with alleviating any concern they may have felt.
Preparations were completed quickly. The transport was already loaded, the escorts fueled and armed. According to the convoy’s manifest, they were hauling expensive foodstuffs to the Hawaii, a luxury liner in orbit over the planet Hiran in the neighboring Sigma-19 system. Aomori’s gas miners did not bother checking the transport’s cargo hold and gladly sent them on their way.
* * *
A ripple in space caught Olivia’s attention. Flying ahead of the convoy, she approached the strange phenomenon; a pulsing swirl of energy, bolts of light cascading at its center. Maintaining radio silence, she tugged her flightstick back and forth, wiggling her ship’s wings. At the signal, the rest of the convoy approached and prepared to pass through the jumphole.
The canopy automatically depolarized as the tunnel of blinding light receded around the Sutinga, spitting the ship out into the next system. Olivia glanced around, quickly finding the rest of the convoy scattered vaguely around the jump hole. They had all made it through intact.
They were deep within the Edge now, surrounded on all sides by a vast expanse of green mist and the system’s iconic asteroid field. The strangely flat rocks tumbled through space around them like enormous frisbees, some with edges sharp enough to cut cleanly through the hulls of capital ships.
Visibility was minimal, hardly two clicks in any direction. Olivia glanced at her sensors, relieved to find only her companions on the list of contacts.
“Alright, listen up,” Captain Rosary’s voice came through the speakers again, even cracklier now than before. “The cloud and rocks should provide enough interference for us to communicate freely on close-range channels.”
Olivia heard the sighs of relief from her wingmen as they reenabled their comms. She could feel for them - no one liked flying through space like this in silence.
The convoy’s ships engaged their engines and edged forward through the cloudy expanse, tendrils of gas and mist swirling around them, grasping at them. Olivia’s head was on a swivel, checking every rock they passed for signs of potential hostiles.
“Coming up on the graveyard,” Rosary announced in a solemn tone. The nebula thinned and finally parted before them, revealing the still burning corpse of a planet, surrounded by an expansive disk of planetary fragments and thousands of shipwrecks. Olivia’s eyes darted from lifeless husk to lifeless husk, worried that any one of them might suddenly spring to life and ambush the small flotilla. They all, however, remained inert.
“Jesus,” one of the escorts muttered as they cautiously passed the remains of a once proud battleship, what remained of its hull scored by hundreds of energy impacts, gaping holes revealing its devastated internals. It served as a reminder to all who came upon it that this region of space harbored a threat far greater than any expanding house, conquering mercenary force, or zealous terrorist cell.
“Junkers must be making a fortune,” another pilot remarked as they left the gutted warship in their wake.
Leaving the ruined planet behind, the convoy passed once more into the clouds.
They pressed on through the endless clouds and rocks, hoping soon to find the next jump hole and leave the eerie graveyard of Omicron Minor behind. Hours had passed since they had left civilized space and the crew’s and escorts’ nerves were beginning to fray. Olivia glanced nervously about, ever worried that from within the green mist an alien ship might emerge and attack without hesitation.
We’re alone out here, she tried to reassure herself, but she knew that it was a feeble lie. Somewhere out in the vast nebula were hidden hordes of Nomads, searching ceaselessly for humans to either slaughter or infect. And if the convoy was not found by them, they would be caught by a patrol belonging to the Order or the Core - neither of whom would be pleased to find smugglers passing through what they believed to be their territory.
Olivia began to regret the decision to take the job. The anxiety alone was not worth the money and she wished she had remained on Aomori to drink with the gas miners, or perhaps to travel the Sigmas and send pretty postcards to the one person she regretted leaving behind in Liberty. For a moment, her thoughts wandered back to the young police officer and the few months they had spent together as friends and - if only briefly - as lovers. A faint smile tugged at the corners of the mercenary’s mouth as she spent a few blissful minutes distracted, reminiscing.
I’ll come back.
An ear-piercing scream blaring from the cockpit speakers tore the mercenary out of her memories. Instinctively, her eyes shot around the canopy, searching for an ambush. But through the Edge’s haze, she could see nothing. Her glance shot to her sensors just in time to see one of the escorts disappear from the list of contacts.
“Jelkin, report!” Rosary’s voice bellowed over the radio. Only static replied.
“Shit,” Olivia growled as her body tensed up, her fingers wrapping tightly around her flightstick.
“He was on our port side,” she spoke into the comms tersely. “I’ll go check.”
Not waiting for a confirmation from the captain, she yanked the Sutinga around and towards the lost escort’s last known position. Behind her, the rest of the convoy quickly disappeared from sight as the nebula closed in around her. Keeping a steady eye on her sensor readouts, Olivia deftly dodged and weaved between the razor-sharp asteroids that tumbled through her path, threatening to cut her ship in two at the slightest touch.
“Jelkin, come in!” She barked. Still no reply. Beads of sweat began to form on her forehead as her certainty that the pilot was gone for good grew. What the hell happened?
Her fighter rolled past a slab of rock the size of a cruiser, her engines illuminating its pockmarked surface. Cresting its edge, Olivia tore at the throttle, bringing her ship to a shuddering halt. Her eyes widened. Before her floated Jelkin’s ship, powered down and inert. It seemed perfectly intact save for the cockpit. A single hole, the size of a dinner plate, presented itself within the canopy, its edges still aglow from the heat of an energy bolt. Through it, Olivia could see the charred remains of the pilot, little still identifying him as human.
“Sable, report!” Rosary’s voice faintly cracked over the radio. Tearing herself from the grisly sight before her, Olivia’s eyes darted around through her canopy as she searched for any trace of the attacker. Reflexively, her fingers released the trigger-guard on her flightstick, powering up the Sutinga’s weapon systems. Around her, the mist of the Edge continued to swirl, impenetrable, unknowable.
“Jelkin is down,” she reported. “Something-”
A flash of light caught her eye. Instinctively, Olivia gunned the throttle, dodging the incoming blast of energy by mere feet. A second followed, impacting her shields. They dropped instantly. A third hurled her way from within the clouds, striking the now naked craft. Sparks erupted from the instruments and a shock of electricity tore through the mercenary’s body. She screamed in pain, releasing the controls. The reactor failed and the screens before her went black. The Sutinga floated powerlessly through space.
Breathing heavily, Olivia glared in the direction the blasts had come from. A look of horror crossed her face as a dark shape emerged from the nebula, its split prow piercing the clouds like a grotesquely misshapen claw. Its central section spun like a centrifuge, faint lights glowing along its surface.
Reflexively, Olivia raised an arm before herself to ward off the impending attack. Another flash of light blinded her. For an instant, she could feel the immense heat of the blast singe her flightsuit and burn the skin beneath. Then all went dark as her life slipped away.
