Salvage Stories 2

*Radio click, then clothing rustles; a chair creaks; a cigarette crackles, then a heavy exhale*

Hey folks, it’s Jack. Welcome back to, uh, well, I’m not sure what to call this. Some folks here are calling it Space Stories or Salvage Stories with Jack, which is fine—I’ve heard Spacing Out with Jack, which I think has a ring to it. Nicer than Jack Shit, which Graham is trying to push.

Now, seems I may have struck a chord with some of you out there; I’ve gotten more personal messages in the last day than the previous, I’d say, five years combined, and I want to express my appreciation. Truly. Even those of you who felt it necessary to explain to me how I’m an old fool who needs to get his everything checked.

But there’s something we all know as truth out in the expanse: if you’re hitting hyperspace, you leave the controls alone. Everyone knows this, young and old alike, even people who ain’t never been off-planet before. It’s like ‘keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle,’ at amusement parks. Common knowledge. And in the vast majority of cases it’s not even possible anyway, what with mandatory autopathing and control wresting and all. But what most don’t know is what happens if you find a way to break the rules.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. ‘You’ll die, Jack. You’ll explode.’ Sure, sure. You hit the walls of a hyperspace tunnel at five times the speed of light and there’s not much left to bother cleaning up after it’s over. Right?

Well, not always. Sometimes, in the right ship, in the right tunnels, at the right angle, with the right speed, you might not. Something else might happen; something worse. ‘What could be worse than evaporating between folds of reality?’ I hear you asking, and I’d tell you that it’s popping out somewhere in the middle of that fold, anywhere and nowhere with no way to get back. 

*Crackling, then an exhale; a chair creaks, and Jack laughs as his heels thump onto a table*

I don’t know why I’m laughing; it’s not funny, falling out of space-time. ‘Cause what folks don’t understand is that hyperspace isn’t like a rocky tunnel blasted through a mountain; no, it’s more like a surge of oxygen through an ocean. You’re not traveling through a hole so much as you’re being pressed through an area where something isn’t. Does that make sense? Probably not, but let this be the take away: when you push out through the wall of a bubble, sometimes the bubble doesn’t pop. No, sometimes you simply exit the bubble.

But then the bubble floats away. So where does that leave you?

*Voice in the background; scratching as a hand muffles the mic; Jack responds in a flat tone and the voice answers back; someone laughs as the mic is uncovered*

Guess I can’t smoke in here. Oops.

What was I saying? I- uh, right, bubble leaves you. Yep.

*Silence for several seconds*

Never happens to me, though. No, no, I’m a good boy. I follow the rules.

*Someone laughs again, then says something too faint to discern*

Yeah, I’ll tell them—it happened to Hugh, who’s right here next to me. The guy who don’t believe nothing I say actually has a good yarn to spin, believe it or not. He thinks just because he has rock-solid, undeniable proof, it makes his story more credible than any of mine. But I think it’s awful small-minded to dismiss me like that.

*The two share a laugh*

But he don’t want to tell this one himself. Rather I do it for him. Isn’t that right, Hugh?

*Silence*

See what I mean? The man’s got a problem with words, you understand. Lot going on in his skull but not much of it makes it to his mouth. It’s like a tornado up there, see, and he—ow, okay! Alright, alright, Hugh says it’s time to get on with it, so get on we shall.

So, if Hugh is to be believed—which I reiterate: proof don’t mean it really happened—all of this took place about 40-odd years ago when he was just a young buck. This was before he and Graham and I had ever met. Before the salvage business, before his military service… you didn’t even have a license for atmospheric flight yet, let alone—right, okay, Hugh says I’m gonna spoil the story.

Anyway, so Hugh’s a kid, right? And that means Hugh’s living at home with his parents. But Hugh, well, he don’t get on with his pa too good. I’ll spare you the brutalities, but he’s a public official in his hometown and Work Pa ain’t the same man as Home Pa. So, one day, little Hugh and his ma decide enough’s enough, and they go. She don’t have half a plan, but what she does have is a license to leave the system and her own ship—a Pleiades, one of the Maia models, and Hugh says it’s spitfire-fast and she can fly it like it’s her own body. His ma’s a fascinating woman, but that’s a story for another time.

So we pick up with Hugh and his mom, she with just one suitcase and he with just a backpack, winding their way through the spaceport, avoiding the eyes of anyone who might recognize them, which is just about anyone aware of politics. Fortunately, it’s early in the morning in the middle of the cold season so the place is relatively empty, and she has security clearance to duck down employee hallways and into conference rooms; things are starting out fine—ideal even, given the situation. Hugh is scared, and he can tell his mom is too, but he feels safe with her.

Here’s the thing though: little Hugh loves spaceships, and the spaceport is his favorite place in the world. So once he starts feeling safe, he stops following his ma as close, starts looking out windows, reading all the travel and transport ads on the walls.

Falls behind.

Gets lost.

‘Course, Hugh doesn’t know it yet. He’s got his nose smashed against a window overlooking the hangar of this Beaumont Gargoyle, 2746 model, classic. All angles and bulk and raw, bone-rattling power; that Reugers engine is no joke even today. And this particular ship’s a real beaut’ with custom blue and gold body work. With the sunrise gleaming off that chrome?

*Jack lets out a low whistle*

Safe to say, little Hugh’s an admirer—though I’d wager he’s more of an obsessed fanatic these days, seeing how he owns three of the damn things—and he watches the pilot step down the ladder from the cockpit. And, boy, that guy’s the picture of cool: tall and broad, bomber jacket over his flight suit, aviator sunglasses, distracted by a call on his shiny new armcom… unaware that the ID keystick he’s given to an attendant has been left out on the security counter. So Hugh’s stuck like glue to that window until he feels a tap on his shoulder. Probably his ma, probably mad he got distracted.

Nope. Hugh looks up to see the face of his father’s enormous bodyguard and, behind, pa himself. Hugh’s frozen in the man’s presence, so his pa gets down on a knee and says real quiet-like that he ain’t mad at Hugh–no, just disappointed he got caught running. Now his ma? Well, he’s real upset with her. Let’s go find her, he says, and he smiles, and Hugh sees the way his pa’s smiling and he runs like hell.

Now, Hugh tells me he didn’t know where he was going, but I think he’s just ashamed to admit he had a plan before his pa even showed up. ‘Cause after Hugh takes off, he’s dodging here and jumping there, taking this turn and that hallway, down this staircase, out this door, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s the Gargoyle and there’s the keystick sitting right there. Security’s gone because this is a smaller spaceport near-about the boonies, and who would steal a ship in a quiet place like this? Hugh would, cause he’s young and scared and stupid.

*A faint voice says, ‘Still am!’; laughter rolls through Jack and others nearby*

Let’s not forget crafty though, because young Hugh knows that the keystick turns the ship on, but you also need conductive ID through the flightstick to get the damn thing off the ground. Hugh also knows that old Beaumont ships aren’t all that advanced security-wise, and that this particular model could have its conductives bypassed with a little rewiring.

Hugh knows how to do the rewiring too, if that wasn’t clear. He pops a panel in the footwell, clips this and twists that, and thoom, the engines start spinning. Hugh looks down at the instrument panel and knows exactly what to do because he’s read the owner’s manual a dozen times for fun.

Right about now, a small militia of security officers come crashing in along with his pa and the bodyguard, hollering at him to stop, but Hugh’s already easing forward on the throttle. Nobody gets hurt, chance or not, and my friend in his newly-acquired Gargoyle breaks atmosphere in minutes. Hugh says he didn’t once consider the threat of orbital security, what with the adrenaline pumping through his developing brain, but even the least populated planets have United Terran Alliance Navy presence.

You can be sure it’s not a moment passes before UTA Navy blares an All-Stop over his comms. So he thinks a bit, maybe more than a bit, still cruising at a decent clip when the targeting display starts screeching. Seems three fighters have missile lock on him. So does Hugh stop? Naw, he punches Display Previous Route on the map and hits warp.

And, boy, this warp hits hard.

Back then, you needed a special license to have a warp drive with a top speed faster than 2% speed of light, and even then the license only allowed for up to 5%, and only in specially designated lanes outside of the main interplanetary routes. But when Hugh peels his head from the seat just enough to look down at his velocity, he’s pushing 40% speed of light, easy. Because what he doesn’t know is that he’s just stolen the weekend cruiser of Captain Jesco Reugers: distinguished fighter pilot, galactic explorer, and owner of Reugers Astronautica.

After what feels like forever, the ship slams to a stop at the jump gate to B—oohh, I almost said too much. Sorry, Hugh. Lemme say again: he arrives at a jump gate, connecting his system to one quite far away. If you’ve never left your home system, a jump gate is like waiting in line at a border crossing but with more paperwork and a higher chance of getting in trouble for nothing. You got a business like us these days, the process gets a bit faster, sure, but little Hugh ain’t no working man and he sure as shit don’t got no papers. So he’s floating there, spitting distance from the back of the line—a goddamn miracle he ain’t killed anybody—when those three Navy fighters cut out of warp and his missile lock warning starts shrieking like a banshee again.

As older, wiser adults, we know that the military don’t tend to shoot at children, let alone anywhere near a crowded jump gate for god’s sake, but little Hugh doesn’t know that so he puts to application a young lifetime of soaking up ship information. He slams the throttle forward and white-knuckles the stick, whipping between orderly lines of ships waiting patiently—and legally—for their turn at the gate. He feels serenity, he says; never done it before but he’s in the zone, eyes sharp and hands steady as foundation. And that’s the truth through and through, folks. I seen Hugh scared but I ain’t never seen his hands shake, not once, not with a dead engine, not with a gun to his head. Man’s a lot of things, but shaken ain’t one of them.

UTA Navy’s not giving up easy, ‘course. Whatever Hugh can pull, every maneuver he’s barely surviving, the flyboys keep on his tail like they’re tied to him. He’s sure that they’re sure that he’ll stop before the gate itself, but Hugh knows he’s a minor and it’s not really a crime if you’re that young. It’s a mistake, won’t stick to his record, he figures, if he survives it. Didn’t really matter though; Hugh says he’d do it again right now if he had to, knowing what it led to.

Anyway, like I said, he’s whipping all about and mercifully missing every near-catastrophe a pilot of his skill, or absolute lack of, should have suffered. But there he goes, whoosh, right past intergalactic customs, and he knows what speed he needs to be to activate the jump, so that’s how fast he goes. And then, WHAM, the gate fires and he’s gone. He’s got about three seconds to celebrate before he realizes that the Navy fighters are in the jump with him. They’re too far back to see, but the targeting display still says missile lock. UTA is immune to some restrictions, you see, and they’re trained to handle the additional variables involved with blowing up a ship in hyperspace. I’m not privy to any hands-on experience, but I’m told gravity and velocity can become, uh, inconsistent.

Hugh knows this, sure; there’s only been a handful of hyperspace “incidents” as far as memory recalls, but they’re all noteworthy. Makes folks afraid of hyperspace travel for a time, makes security and customs just a bit more of a pain in the ass. It certainly wouldn’t benefit the Navy to commit a minor atrocity against a child, and in all likelihood they’d already put up an EMP net at the destination gate. But being young and scared and stupid, little Hugh doesn’t consider any present danger and instead chooses this moment to remember his ma. Probably still at the spaceport, either looking for him or, worse, found by his pa. I’ve gotta turn back, he’s thinking, gotta save her. So he grits his teeth, grabs the flight stick with both hands, and tries to turn around.That’s right: this little shit here thinks he can just pull a U-turn and head home!

*Laughter rolls through the crowd*

So Hugh, in all his wisdom, pulls the stick so hard to the left he thinks it’s going to snap off. And it’s no joke fighting through the turbulence, all the warning lights and sirens blasting through the cockpit, the All-Stop hails from the Navy commanding him to stop, Stop, STOP!. His hands are numb no doubt, g-force is a real ornery bastard, but he keeps cranking that ship into the outer wall.

*Grumbling from voices in the background, Jack shushing them*

‘How’s that possible?’ you’re asking. ‘Limiters make it impossible to crack a hyperspace tunnel.’ Normally, you’d be right. And nobody in their right mind would even want to. But here’s the thing: safety tech weren’t so good back then, folks, and that little conductive work-around he pulled at the spaceport had the unintended side-effect of disabling a couple other vital limiters, and Hugh doesn’t know that but he’s too panicked to care anyway. Nothing yanks control from him, realigns him with the tunnel, locks him in, nope. He skids against the side and, the moment his wing’s tip breaches, he’s all the way out. Instant stop.

And absolute black as far as the eye can see.

*Hugh mutters something and Jack laughs*

Right, so, if and when you find yourself ejected from hyperspace—getting ”folded” is what Hugh calls it—you come out in a dead stop. No rotation, no momentum. Also, it fries a bunch of systems in your ship, because of course it does. Sometimes you just lose thrusters or cooling, and sometimes you lose life support; sometimes your ship full-out blows up and kills you dead but, whatever the case, it’s never fun. As for young Hugh, he loses everything except basic life support, leaving him immobile and defenseless. All alarms, comms, displays, sensors, external cameras, and cabin lights are down, and looking out the front window offers nothing but darkness and distant, unmarked stars. All that’s on is a single, flashing red emergency light on the wall. So what does little Hugh do? Panic? Cry about it? No, he spins the chair around and feels his way into the small rear cabin because he knows there’s a minifridge and he’s hungry.

*Laughter and a few shouts from the crowd*

No, he didn’t, he—you tell ‘em, Hugh!—he didn’t quite grasp the severity of the situation. Instead, he’s grinding his filthy boots into Jesco Reugers’ couch, eating his food and drinking his soda, thinking it might be a good idea anyway to hide out for a bit. Surely someone will find him, a speck of a speck floating precisely nowhere in the unfathomable black between edge systems, once this has all blown over.

Being a youth, it doesn’t take long for little Hugh to clean out all the snacks and start getting antsy. There’s a vid and music deck back there but, with the power out, they’re no use. There’s no books to skim, no owner’s manual to re-read for comfort, and the tiny blinking red light on the wall makes seeing anything near impossible anyhow. He finds a small closet with a toolbag, but he’s not sure he can fix anything or even know where to start. There’s a short-range emergency transmitter out the nose of the ship, he remembers, but there ain’t a planet nor station nor nothing to aim at. Couldn’t adjust his aim if he wanted to, and the control panel’s completely dead. Hugh starts to worry.

After a bit, Hugh’s bladder starts demanding his attention. Fortunately for him, there’s a restroom. Unfortunately, as it goes, the toilet overflows and Hugh floods the cabin. It stinks, there’s no more food or water, and he’s thinking he may have to evacuate his bowels soon. Hugh starts to get scared.

With only a single emergency light to go by, he starts hitting every single button on the control panel, knowing full well that several would be very bad were they working. Panic’s got its claws sunk deep when, out the corner of his eye, Hugh sees an EVA suit and helmet—the fancy kind with positioning thrusters and a CO₂ scrubber—tucked in a low cubby near the pilot’s seat. The moment’s cut short when Hugh realizes that, while he may be a big kid for his age, he’s no Captain Reugers; that man’s tall enough to hunt birds with a spade, if you catch my meaning. The joke at the time’s that he was a great explorer ‘cause he could see right over anything foolish enough to stand in his way. But if Hugh can get the suit to seal, he might be able to get outside the ship with those tools and do, well, what exactly? Maybe something will come to him. You don’t need a plan to take action, I suppose; youth and foolishness are poorly divorced.

So Hugh’s lifting this enormous suit, and he’s sliding his arms through the endless sleeves, and pushing his feet down endless pant legs, and, once he’s got it on, he looks like a candy bar melted in the wrapper. But the helmet seal’s tight, and the CO₂ scrubber is whirring away, and the airlock door is right there, so he grabs the toolbag and takes one last look at the darkness out the front windshield.

Then he walks into the airlock and starts decompression.

Now, decompression tech has come a long way in the last 40 years. These days, you barely have to seal the doors before you’re ready to take a spacewalk but, back for little Hugh, he’s forced to sit in that tiny, pitch-black closet of a room for nearly 20 minutes, waiting for the all-clear. Thinking. So he pulls the lever and sits, fiddling with the tools and thinking.

You’d guess he might be forming a plan now that he has the time, but he’s just thinking about his ma. About what he’ll do to his pa if anything happens to her, his knuckles tight around the handle of a plasma drill from the tool bag. She’s a strong woman, more than capable in a scrap, but pa’s a politician; he don’t need to use his hands to apply pressure.

Time passes and Hugh gets himself worked up, furious. So furious he only now realizes the airlock’s not depressurizing because the ship’s systems are a shambles and nothing works. So furious he squeezes on that drill a little too hard and triggers the coils, pops a hole in the outer airlock. The sudden vacuum rips the bag from his hands and into the door, tearing it from the ship and blasting him into the black, spinning wildly along with nearly everything else not bolted down in the cabin.

The EVA suit’s thrusters have a hell of a time stabilizing him, what with the suit being five sizes too big, and little Hugh batters himself about the head a bit thanks to those long, flailing sleeves. But once he levels out and blinks the pain from his eyes, through the cloud of empty snack bags and toilet water boiling about him, he sees two things—in one direction, the Gargoyle’s torn and twisted form spinning slowly away; in the other, some spot of gray light rotating gently, winking in the dark. He can’t believe it.

Floating in the distance behind the ship—directly behind it, just beyond what he could see from the windows, so close he could practically float there himself—is a UTA Outer Rim Long-Duration Outpost.

*A roar from the crowd, some cheers, mostly boos; Jack shushing*

Yeah, I know, it sounds like a load of horse shit. But more than just the station being there, he can see alert lights flashing near the vehicle bays, and a handful of ships leaving the main station. Hugh must have someone special watching over him because, not only did he avoid obliterating himself with sudden decompression, but the resulting explosion set off the outpost’s scanners and got them in an almighty scurry to see who or what is suddenly way out here in the middle of goddamn nowhere with no indication of how or why.

‘Course, what little Hugh didn’t avoid was shitting his pants in the chaos. Once the fighters and shuttles showed up to confirm he wasn’t a threat, I hear tell the crew that took him made him keep the suit sealed ‘til they got him to the showers.

*Laughter; a light scuffle and Jack chuckling*

Hugh didn’t want me to tell that part.

Once they get back to the LDO, they’re trying to figure out who the hell this child is, running scans and searching for reports of missing children, not even thinking to ask him if he knows where he came from. But Hugh’s a smart kid, so he pulls this one guy aside as he’s running by somewhere, and Hugh gives coordinates specific enough to pinpoint his home town on a starmap. By some chance, the guy he’s grabbed had been a navigator in the UTA Navy for over a decade, so it doesn’t take long before a return mission is charted, approved, and underway.

But the thing about the Outer Rim LDOs is that they’re hard to get to; wouldn’t need them out there if it were someplace easy. And this outpost’s difficulty in particular is that it’s a dozen systems away from the nearest jump gate. So, for Hugh to get home, he’s gotta wait three weeks for the next transport. Long story short, he spends a lot of time reading, learns about the station and its various ships from the crew, and has to answer a few questions about the whats and hows of his arrival. Hugh says those men were nice enough, but became less and less neighborly the further he went into the details of his adventure. 

And, all along, he’s stewing about his dad, though he don’t show it. ‘Course he don’t.

Then, ‘bout two weeks into his stay, Hugh wakes up to something he don’t expect… which is foolish, really, because it was Captain Jesko Reugers and his entourage. He’s standing there over Hugh’s bed when he wakes, Reuger’s huge form eclipsing the light from the hallway. Turns out, he’s come to check up on the thieving little freebooter what lifted his ship and blew it to shreds.

Reugers leans waayyy down, gets his face close. Smiles. Tells Hugh he’d like to have a little chat with him about what happened. That, don’t worry, ain’t nothing gonna happen to him, it’s just a talk. Now get some clothes on and don’t even think of running.

Hugh does as he’s told. Gets up and puts on the oversized clothes the crew gave him, walks down hallways with four burly, well-dressed men surrounding him—not as big as Reugers, sure, but still wide enough to make Hugh think twice. And where’s he gonna go anyway? Only a few specialized shuttles here, maybe a snub fighter or two, but he’s still weeks out from anywhere. He’s trapped.

One of the burly guys opens a door down a nondescript hallway and Hugh’s ushered into a room, but not the cold, hard-angled interrogation room he’s expecting. Rather, it’s one fully alien to the rest of the outpost: overstuffed couches and chairs, plush wall-to-wall carpet, a small conference table made from real wood, not that synth-wood shit—Hugh’s the son of a politician, so he knows quality furniture when he sees it—and, past it all, the entire wall a window out to a twinkling infinity beyond.

Hugh takes a moment to realize, one, the rest of the outpost is depressingly devoid of windows and, two, just how goddamn beautiful it is on the fringes. Those aren’t all stars out there; they’re galaxies. Hugh can see far-off places even now we don’t have the technology to visit. Places our kids’ kids’ kids may never see. He realizes, really for the first time, why people want to travel beyond their home system, why people explore, why people come all the way out here.

Because it’s goddamn beautiful.

Hugh says I’m romanticizing, but I’m an old romantic. What can I say.

Reality snaps back when Reugers tells Hugh to take a seat. Hugh asks where, and Reugers says anywhere, gestures across the room. The four large gentlemen take position by the door, but the easy smile on Reugers’ face gets Hugh to lower his guard. If his pa were here, he’d be screaming ‘til his face turned red as a strawberry, balling his fists up and shaking. But Reugers wasn’t yelling. He was at the liquor cabinet, pouring himself a glass of something the color of honey, whistling and tapping a hand on his thigh in time with the tune.

He turns to the window and takes a sip, smacks his lips and gives a contented sigh. He turns to where Hugh’s taken a seat and trots over, sits across from him and sets his glass down real gentle on a diamond laminate end table. He considers Hugh for a moment, grinning all the while, then takes a breath.

“So,” he goes, “how’d you do it?”

Hugh’s a bit surprised by this question, to be sure, so he don’t answer right away. Stammers. Drools on himself, probably.

*scuffle, Jack grunts and laughs*

Sorry, sorry, okay, so Hugh asks what he means, and Reugers clarifies. “I can’t figure out how you got here. Here, to this LDO, out here at the very edge, when you were thousands of lightyears away just days ago. And you didn’t even do it in my fastest ship… one which I hear you’ve destroyed by the way, thanks.

But I’ve had a while to think on the way over, and I can’t make sense of it.” He rests his hand on Hugh’s shoulder. He don’t look mad. “So, Hugh. Please,” he says, “tell me how you did it.”

So Hugh tells him how he did it. Everything, from the first moment he pushed his greasy little face against that spaceport window to the moment he was dragged into a shuttle by the confused and annoyed LDO crew. Hugh says Reugers’ face did a number of things during the story, but he never said nothing. Just listened. Ultimately, his expression ended on a mix of awe and incredulity.

“You cracked a hyperspace tunnel.”

“Yes.”

“And showed up here.”

“It was a few hundred kilometers away, but yes.”

He thinks for a second, then says “Where’d my ship end up?”

Hugh doesn’t know, so one of the guards slips out into the hallway and back in a matter of seconds. He comes over and whispers something to Reugers, who then stands and asks Hugh to assist him with something. An LDO crewman is waiting for them in the hallway, and leads them through a series of corridors and staircases so twisting that Hugh’s completely lost before they’ve left the deck they started on. Eventually the hallways get taller and wider, and the architecture becomes more severe. Every door is an airlock, and danger signs line the walls between.

The crewman stops at one and punches a code into a pad, scans his badge, and runs his finger over a screen. The door cracks open with a hiss and, sure as shine, there lies a jagged pile of what used to be Reugers’ Gargoyle leaking on the floor of a small hangar. The crewman says they weren’t sure what to do with it. Reugers says this will work just fine.

Just like many of you, no doubt, Hugh’s not sure why they’re looking at the ruined ship. He doesn’t think it’s to shame him; he feels pretty bad as it is. Reugers takes a walk around the hull and finds the hole where the airlock door used to be, then pulls a tool out of his pocket and climbs in. Hugh watches from the door as Reugers pops a hidden panel open near the cockpit with that tool of his and detaches three small cards from their slots: the ship’s Intergalactic Positioning Radar, a military-grade Jump Location and Tracking System, and, most importantly, something Hugh would later learn was a prototype Redsen-Konrad Time-Space Contractor–if’n you’re civilian, it’s local-scale time compression for those exceedingly long expeditions Reugers was known to go on. Reugers emerges with a grin on his face, fanning the cards at Hugh like he’s solved the mystery already. Says these will be all he needs, and they head back to his lounge.

A few LDO crew have joined them now, and there’s a lot of chatter happening around the cards as Reugers links them to a computer and scans line after line of numbers and codes that Hugh doesn’t understand. The long and short of it is that they use those cards to figure out exactly where Hugh was in the tunnel when he clipped the wall, his speed, his pitch and yaw, the exact weight of the ship, the distance skipped, the time strain on ship components, so on and so forth, running simulations over and over until Reugers leaps back with a shout. Right there, he yells! Right there!

And what was ‘right there,’ you ask? See, Hugh fumbled his way into a wormhole within the hyperspace tunnel that Reugers could apparently reproduce and eventually turn into a new destination for a jump gate. The LDO crew’d been out here studying and refining alloys in the pristine, mineral-rich outer asteroid belts; now the problem of supply transport was moot, and mining corporations could deploy entire teams in earnest and get them home within the day, no big deal. Like they was just dropping in on the neighbors.

So, folks, turns out our little Hugh was a goddamn hero. Reugers shook his hand, even gave him a signed picture–something he never did. Damned picture says ‘Thanks for doing my job for me!’ penned above the very fancy signature of the space ace himself.

As I’m sure many remember, all 2746 Beaumont Gargoyles were then recalled, as well as a smattering of other years and models that were at risk of similar, uhh, rerouting issues. Beaumont Intergalactic earned the reputation for lax security standards along with a multi-trillion-dollar lawsuit. Official story never says why all those recalls happened besides ‘gross security negligence.’ However, what the official story does say is that Reugers found that wormhole all on his own. So, far as the law’s concerned, that picture of yours is a forgery.

*laughter*

Anyway.

Little Hugh finally gets back home, fully expecting to get his ears boxed and blown out from the talking-to his pa’d give him. Not to mention being grounded for the rest of his life. ‘Course, the surprises keep coming as his mother greets him, smothers him with a hug and gives him the rundown of the political rollercoaster that happened while he was gone. From an ugly confrontation between his parents at the spaceport, to unwanted attention about Hugh’s ship theft, rumors of Jesko Reugers’ involvement, to the press digging into their family’s private life… all culminating in his pa’s arrest as a slew of corruption charges–among other things–came to light. His parents divorced and Hugh’s ma got full custody. Last but not least, all charges against Hugh were dropped on account of his age or family situation or some such loopholery. I imagine Reugers had sway in that decision as well.

Some people might call that ironic, or pure fate. Dumb luck, maybe. Me? I dunno… I agree with the ‘dumb’ part, at least. Man has one ill-advised adventure his whole life, breaks a hundred laws and nearly kills everyone unfortunate enough to see him that day, and he’s rewarded. Immortalized, even.

*Jack snorts; a faint voice speaks and chuckles*

Ain’t mad, Hugh. Just jealous is all, and I ain’t too proud to admit it, neither! Never got myself a trophy for nothin’ even a fraction that reckless.

*The faint voice speaks again*

Scars ain’t trophies, Hugh.

*Someone chuckles, Jack lets out a long sigh*

I need a smoke. Talk to all you fine folks later. Jack out.

*A click, then static*