AN: As you all can see, Chapters are getting titles now. I was recommended by some of my friends to include titles for the public releases to give me a bigger reach. They said that people tend to browse chapter titles after reading a synopsis to decide if the book will be worth their time or not... That means I have a lot of titles to make...
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The credits of the movie rolled, washing the darkened galley in a soft, scrolling blue light. Lyra was fast asleep against my side, her breathing rhythmic, and a small line of drool pooled on the sleeve of my shirt. I shifted carefully, trying not to wake her, my massive frame almost making the simple act of standing up from the booth a tactical maneuver.
It had only been after I had come to care for Lyra and started interacting with other humans that I realized that, at seven feet tall, the universe often felt like it was built on a scale just slightly too small for me. It was as if there was a constant reminder that I took up more space than most, a feeling that was made clear whenever the people I interacted with had to crane their necks or step back to look me in the eye.
I scooped Lyra up, her weight negligible in my arms, and carried her to her bunk, where she had returned to sleep after realizing that I wasn't going to abandon her. After tucking her in and whispering a quiet goodnight to the air, I stepped out of my quarters and into the corridor, just outside the bridge of the Shepherd.
I felt the ship humming in a low, subsonic vibration that could be felt in the bones more than heard with one's ears. It was like a soft vibration, one that most people would not notice unless they were acclimated to it, or, like me, had very enhanced senses.
"Marcos," I said, my voice low as I walked toward the bridge.
"I see that little Lyra is sound asleep. So, tell me, Marky Mark, what can I do for you?" the AI responded, his voice emanating from the nearest panel.
"Prep the reactor for travelling at 0500 hours six days from today," I said. "We'll be moving again. I want to hit Sector 4 of the station, where the heavy freight lanes are. If I recall correctly, the Dust Bunny pilot mentioned that's where the independent ore haulers congregate on Mondays."
"Marky Mark, I feel obligated to inform you that Sector 4 has a higher traffic density and tighter clearance protocols," Marcos noted. "Navigating a vessel of the Shepherd's classification into what is pretty much a commercial loading zone there will require a certain level of... finesse."
I stepped onto the bridge, the displays of the viewport screens coming to life to show me the expansive view of the starfield and one of the rings of Mechanicus Station, pretty much a city, filling the viewport. "Finesse is my middle name, Marcos. Just have the engines ready."
"You're ignoring my Marky Mark remark? Huh... interesting. Also, I thought your middle name was Anthony," Marcos quipped.
"Haha, Mark Anthony, very funny," I said. "As for ignoring the Marky Mark thing, well, I've heard it said that the best way to move past an idiot's comment is to ignore it."
Silence filled the bridge for about thirty seconds before I broke it.
"Marcos? What's going on, bud?"
"I've heard it said that the best way to move past an idiot's comment is to ignore it, Mark," he said while materializing right in front of me with a smirk on his face.
"Ha. Ha. Very funny," I deadpanned. "I order you to go into sleep mode until we are about to move."
"Oh for fu-" Marcos started to speak, but his words stopped immediately, and he dematerialized.
"Yeah, not so funny now..." I said with a low chuckle, knowing I would have to order him back out of it in a few hours.
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AN: Captain's Chair -> Pilot's Chair
I spent a few more days with Lyra before dropping her off at the Orphanage again and getting ready to depart for another week. I sat in the pilot's command chair, the leather groaning under my weight as I buckled in. The controls of the Shepherd were more than familiar to me. After having spent hundreds of virtual hours in the time-dilated virtual space of the training room, the controls had all but become extensions of my own hands.
The only difference was that I wasn't hunting pirates or fending off an armada with a single ship in some souped-up super last-stand like I was in the simulations. I was just a traveling salesman with a railgun-equipped storefront who was moving shop from place to place.
"Mechanicus Traffic Control, this is Heavy Frigate Strathos' Shepherd, registry 93708," I spoke into the comms, my voice dropping into a practiced professional, gravelly cadence I only reserved for official channels. "Requesting disconnect from Docking Platform 2 of the Shephard Orbital Works shipyard and transit clearance to Commercial Sector 4, Berth 12-Bravo."
There was a pause on the line, likely the controller staring at their screen and wondering why a military-grade vessel was hopping around the station like a flea.
"Station Control to Shepherd," a bored voice crackled back. "State your intentions for Sector 4 transit. That's a tight squeeze for a vessel of your registered size. You sure you fit?"
"I sure am," I replied, my hands dancing over the haptic interface, pre-loading the thruster vectors. "Intentions are the same as last week's. Commercial distribution and on-site consultation on behalf of Shephard Orbital Works. I'm pretty sure that I have a registered berth reservation."
There was a brief moment of quiet, likely the controller verifying my statements.
"Copy that, Shepherd. Your flight path has been approved, and you're cleared for disconnect. Please keep your speed below 30 m/s in the transit lane, and watch your drift. We've got tug swarms operating near the pylons today. Control out."
I engaged the maneuvering thrusters and felt the Shepherd groan as the magnetic clamps released with a dull thud reverberating through the hull. I watched the distance indicator on my control console. I had about ten meters of clearance on either side of the airlock tunnel, and for a ship this size, that was threading a needle.
"Marcos, give me proximity warnings only if I'm within two meters," I ordered, my eyes flicking between the sensor readouts and the visual feed.
"As you wish," he answered, "Port bow thruster requires a 2% increase to compensate for the station's gravity gradient."
"Compensating," I stated as I nudged the stick, feeling the massive ship slide laterally. We drifted away from the dock, the metal and glass walls of the station sliding past the viewport like the Grand Canyon, only that this was made of steel and warning lights.
Moving the Shepherd in such tight spaces wasn't very easy. Hell, if it hadn't been for my experience in the Navy, I would've thought that it would be like piloting a fighter from a galaxy far away, but it was more like trying to steer an iceberg. You had to anticipate the inertia, while respecting the mass.
As we entered the transit lane, I saw the swarm of traffic forming ahead of me. It was a sea of small skiffs, cargo drones, and tugs darting around. To them, I was a leviathan. I saw a small courier ship bank hard to avoid my shadow, its thrusters flaring in panic.
"Easy there, buddy," I muttered, feathering the braking thrusters to maintain a steady 25 m/s.
I arrived at Sector 4 twenty minutes later, and I must say, the atmosphere was not what I expected. I had gotten used to the recycled, but clean, air of the residential and commercial rings. But it was grittier here. The air inside the docking bay was hazy with welding smoke and exhaust. And not only that, but the docking system was different, too. I had gotten used to docking a certain part of the ship to clamps with whatever part you wanted to disembark from, being partly inside the station and sealed by sealing doors.
This docking bay was similar in the fact that it had 2 pressurizing doors, but different in the fact that I had to land the whole ship inside the bay. Honestly, they should have somehow figured out a way to make atmospheric or magnetic field barriers by now... or maybe not. After all, it did take one of humanity's most advanced fictional human species in another galaxy thousands of years to develop them.
"Maybe I should make that..." I said to myself before shaking my head. "No, one thing at a time, Mark, one thing at a time."
I backed the Shepherd into Berth 12-Bravo, the proximity sensors screaming until I killed the alarm. I set her down gently, the landing struts compressing with a hydraulic hiss that echoed through the bay.
I looked around to the other docking bays and noticed that the other ships docked here weren't the sleek couriers, but neither were they the desperate rust-buckets of the lower tier. Ore haulers with scarred hulls, heavy lifters with massive robotic arms, and salvage vessels that looked more like flying scrapyards. Sure, they weren't the greatest-looking ships, but they were working ships.
"Docking Bay atmosphere is pressurizing..... We are secured," Marcos announced. "Power diverted to the auxiliary airlock display.... Signage deployed."
I stood up, cracking my neck. "Alright. Let's see what the ore haulers think of our Thermal-Flow vents."
The routine was starting to become second nature to me, but that didn't make it easy. I stood in the cargo bay again, the vast space making me look merely large rather than gigantic. The airlock cycled open, revealing the bustle of Sector 4, which was, in short answer, deafening. The noise from grinders, shouts, and the clang of heavy metal all bounced around the, well, everything around us, and almost gave me a headache due to the sensitivity of my senses.
I stood there for an hour, arms crossed, watching crews move. The people here were harder to deal with and convince, being nicknamed "roughnecks" due to that. They didn't look at the Shepherd with fear or awe, but rather with some amount of professional curiosity. They knew what a ship like this could do, and they probably wondered why it was sitting open like a fruit stand.
My first customer here wasn't a ship's captain, but a chief engineer named Harl. He was a squat man with oil permanently etched into the lines of his face, wiping his hands on a rag that was dirtier than his own jumpsuit. He walked up to the ramp, looked at the sign, looked at the vents displayed on the rack, and then looked up, way up, at me.
"These specs real?" he asked, not bothering with a greeting. He gestured to the scrolling LED sign claiming 50% efficiency.
"Guaranteed," I said, my voice cutting through the industrial din. "I manufacture them myself. They are made with high-grade alloy and have an optimized internal geometry that works to dissipate heat faster than anything all these IUC-sponsored corps are willing to put out."
Harl spat on the deck, missing my boot by an inch. "Damn right you are about IUC-sponsored parts being shit. We blow a vent every three runs on the Iron Mule. Engines decide they specifically want to run hot when we're hauling refined tungsten."
"Tungsten is heavy," I nodded, knowing the strain that put on the fusion drive's cooling loop. "You're probably red-lining your exhaust temps just to break out of an asteroid field's orbit. My vents will drop your core temp by fifteen degrees Kelvin at max thrust. Saves you fuel, saves you the stress on your manifold."
He narrowed his eyes, stepping onto the ramp to inspect a Model 1A. He ran a calloused finger along the welding seam. It was flawless. Printers didn't tend to make mistakes.
"How much?"
"750 credits per unit. Installation included."
Harl laughed, a dry, barking sound. "I can get two pairs of standard vents for that price."
"And you'll replace them within two weeks," I countered, leaning down slightly to look him in the eye. "Not only that, but you'll also burn an extra thousand credits in fuel dragging that tungsten up the gravity well. What I'm selling you isn't some stamped sheet metal, but something engineered to maximize efficiency and extend the runs you can make almost a hundredfold before you have to replace them. You buy six for your main drive, and I guarantee you'll feel the difference. If you don't, I'll buy them back for double the selling price."
The "double" caught him. It was a risky gambit, but I knew my product.
Harl stared at me, gauging if I was crazy or just arrogant. "Double the price?"
"Double."
"You're a big bastard, ain't ya?" Harl grunted. "And you drive a damn good bargain... Alright. Give me six units. But if my manifold cracks, I'm bringing the whole crew back here to dismantle this pretty ship of yours."
I raised an eyebrow and smiled at him. "You've got yourself a deal. Though it would be best for the preservation of your life if you didn't attempt that last part."
The week progressed in a blur of docking fees, transit lanes, and hagglers. I moved the Shepherd every two days, chasing the traffic. Tuesday, I was in the gas-miner sector. Thursday, I risked a docking at the orbital shipyard periphery, selling to independent repair crews who wanted to upsell their own clients.
My sales pitch evolved as I learned to read the pilots and came up with 3 archetypes: The desperate, the greedy, and the proud. The desperate ones needed reliability as they couldn't afford a breakdown. The greedy ones needed efficiency, so I gave them the spiel to save fuel credits. The proud ones just wanted their ship to perform better than the next guy's.
By the time Sunday rolled around, fatigue was starting to set in. I was physically exhausted from hauling crates, constantly moving the ship, and installing vents in cramped maintenance crawlspaces that drones simply couldn't access due to their bulk.
But the numbers... the numbers were beautiful.
I sat in the galley, Lyra coloring at the table while I went over the datapad.
"Current weekly revenue: 168,750 credits," Marcos announced, his avatar appearing as a banker with a monocle. "That is a 50% increase over the previous week. We have moved another 225 units of the Model 1A stock."
I let out a long breath and slumped against the booth. "Small beginnings."
"Indeed. However," Marcos shifted, his avatar turning back to his butler persona, "I must remind you that tomorrow is Monday. Sister Elara sent over a message stating that the orphanage is undergoing structural fumigation for 'void-mites.' It will be closed for three days."
I rubbed my temples. "Void-mites? Seriously?"
"Apparently, a donation of old blankets contained some hitchhikers," he said with a strained face. "The facility is uninhabitable until Wednesday."
I looked at Lyra. She was humming a tune, coloring a starship purple. I couldn't leave her alone on the Shepherd while I was crawling inside someone else's engine casing, and I couldn't stop selling. Momentum was everything, and if I disappeared for three days, people would forget me.
"Lyra," I called out gently.
She looked up, marker streaking across her cheek. "Yeah, Papa?"
"You won't be able to see your friends for a few days," I said. "The orphanage is closed."
Her face fell immediately. "But... but Jory and I were gonna play space-tag!"
"I know, sweetie," I said while stroking the hair away from her face. "But we can't go there for now. So, you're going to have to come with me on the ship on a work trip."
"On a work trip?" Her eyes widened slightly, but the disappointment of missing her friends was still warring with the excitement. "But... It's boring when you talk to the other grown-ups."
I winced internally. She wasn't wrong. "I know it's not as fun as tag, but Marcos will be there with us."
"Marcos?" She looked at the empty air.
"I am always here, Little One," Marcos said, shimmering into existence as a small, glowing cartoon rabbit. Lyra giggled instantly.
"Okay," she said, though her voice was still small. "Can I bring my coloring stuff?"
"You can bring whatever you want," I promised.
The dynamic changed immediately with Lyra on board during operations, and the Shepherd was upgraded from a mobile store and home to a mobile daycare.
We docked at Sector 7, which was the courier hub, on early Monday. I set up the display, but this time, I set up a small play area in the corner of the cargo bay, shielded by a few crates of inventory to keep her safe from any wandering heavy machinery, stray cargo lifters, or any bastard who got the wrong idea about her.
"Marcos, keep a sensor lock on her at all times," I muttered as I walked down the ramp to greet a potential buyer. "If she steps one foot outside that safety zone, you lock the airlock doors."
"Protocols engaged," Marcos stated. "I have also prepared a curriculum."
"A what?" I blinked.
"A curriculum," he stated again. "If she is to be a spacer's daughter, she should understand her environment."
I was going to retort, but didn't have time to argue as a pilot from a sleek, blocky but needle-nosed blockade runner was walking up. I subconsciously slipped into sales mode, pitching the high-flow dynamics of the Model 1C for high-speed interceptors, ships that weren't as small as fighters, not as big as corvettes, but somewhere in between with high maneuverability and packing quite a punch for their size.
Two hours later, after closing a sale for a full retrofit on the runner, I walked back up the ramp to check on Lyra. I expected to find her bored or asleep. Instead, I found her standing in front of a holographic projection that hovered in the air. It was a simplified, but accurate, wireframe model of some sort of class 1 engines. Marcos, currently appearing as a floating professorial owl with spectacles, was pointing a wing at the combustion chamber.
"Now," Marcos's voice was gentle, modulated to be higher and friendlier. "When the fuel goes whoosh in here, it gets very, very hot. If it gets too hot, the engine goes boom. So, what do we need?"
Lyra scrunched up her face, thinking hard. "We need... to make the hot go away?"
"Precisely!" Marcos chirped. "And that is what your Papa's special vents do. They take the hot air and push it out into space so the ship can go fast! Fast! Fast!"
"Like Zoom!" Lyra shouted, throwing her hands up.
"Exactly. Now, let's count the vents. One, two, three..."
I stood in the shadow of the airlock, watching them, and I felt a lump form in my throat. Watching her learning was a different experience. And she wasn't just learning numbers, she was learning my current world. She looked over, saw me, and her face lit up.
"Papa! Papa! I know how the ship goes zoom!" she yelled, running over and hugging my hip. She had grown quite a bit over the past month and a half, reaching a height of 4'7 (139.7 cm for you heathen unit users).
I patted her hair, looking at Marcos's avatar and nodding. "Good work, Professor."
"When shaping the minds of our future, one does what one can," the AI replied, preening his digital feathers.
The presence of a child in the cargo bay had an unexpected side effect on business. Many of the spacers were a lonely bunch as they would leave their families back on a planet somewhere that they rarely got to see, or they had no one. Seeing a seven-foot-tall ex-military looking guy selling high-end parts while a little girl practiced her ABCs with a hologram in the background... disarmed them.
It humanized me, in a sense. I wasn't just some faceless company or a shady dealer. My image was transformed into that of a father trying to make a living for his child to have a better life.
"She yours?" a gruff transport captain asked on Wednesday, nodding toward Lyra as he signed the transfer for 20,000 credits worth of stock.
"Yeah," I said, glancing back at her. I had noticed that Marcos' statement a few months back about her being a little genius was true, as she was currently helping him 'repair' a virtual drone. "Adopted, but she's mine."
The captain softened, tapping his own chest pocket where a photo likely sat. "Good on you. Parts look solid, and they perform as well as they look, Mark. I'll tell my convoy about you."
"I appreciate that," I nodded at him.
And he must have told them. By Thursday, I didn't have to chase the traffic as they were coming to me. I had moved the Shepherd to a central hub in the mid-tier commercial ring, a bold move that cost a fortune in docking fees since the "no docking fee if you own or rent" rule only applies to the same sector of the station, but the gamble paid off. The reputation of SOW vents, or as they had started to be called, the "Shepherd Specials," was snowballing.
"Mark," Marcos said in my earpiece on Friday afternoon. "Inventory alert. We are critical on Model 1B. There are only 300 units left. We started the week with 2,000."
I paused in the middle of restocking the display rack. "Say that again?"
"We have sold 1,700 Model 1B units in five days," Marcos reiterated. "The total revenue for this week currently stands at 1,275,000 credits. Deducting the 255,000 credits for material costs, we have cleared a net profit of over a million credits. We haven't just doubled last week's performance, Mark. We've gone supernova."
I stood up straight, the sheer number hitting me. Over a million credits. In a week.
"Holy..." I whispered.
"Language," Lyra piped up from her corner. She was drawing a picture of Marcos, who was posing dramatically as a knight in shining armor.
"Holy cow," I corrected myself, grinning at her. "Holy cow, Lyra. We're gonna need a bigger bank account."
The rush was intoxicating. It reminded me of that one time I invested $30,000 in this one stock when it was $4, and it shot up to $470. I was through the clouds back then, and even after taxes had taken over a million and a half of those earnings, I was in nirvana. This new figure finally hammered into life the reality of what I was doing. I already knew that this idea wasn't a mistake, but now it was pretty evident that I was building something that could possibly dominate the market in the future.
On Friday evening, the station cycle was winding down to "night," and the pedestrian traffic had thinned out, replaced by the late-shift crews and security patrols. I was just about to close the airlock, planning to take Lyra to a decent diner on the promenade to celebrate, when shadows fell across the ramp.
I turned, instinctively stepping in front of Lyra's play area, my posture shifting from 'tired salesman' to 'combat ready' in a heartbeat.
Before me, four men stood at the bottom of the ramp. They weren't your everyday spacers. They weren't your average mechanics. They moved with the synchronized, predatory grace of a tactical unit and wore matching matte-gray armor plating over dark fatigues, high-end magnetic boots, and sidearms that were definitely not civilian issue. Their faces were hard, scarred, and alert.
These were other fellow Mercenaries. Or Private Military Contractors, if they were feeling fancy. I rested my hand casually on the crate next to me, itching to activate my armor and summon my rifle.
"Can I help you, gentlemen?" I asked, my voice dropping an octave, rumbling through the cargo bay. I drew myself up to my full height, letting them see exactly how much mass they would have to move if they wanted trouble.
The man in the lead, a guy with a cybernetic eye and a scar running through his lip, looked up at me. He scanned the ship, the vents, and then his biological eye locked onto mine. He didn't flinch at my size. He assessed it.
"Big rig," the leader said, his voice like grinding stones.
"It gets the job done," I replied neutrally. "Shop's closed for the night, though."
"We aren't here for a browse," the man said, stepping onto the ramp.
"That's far enough," I warned. Marcos, sensing the tension, flickered his avatar out of existence, likely re-routing processing power to the internal defense turrets concealed in the cargo bay ceiling. Yeah, Ani wasn't the only one to put toys in this girl.
The leader stopped, raising his hands slightly to show they were empty. "Ease up, big man. We aren't here to start a fight."
He reached into a pouch on his vest, slowly, telegraphing the move, and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. I scanned it quickly and noticed that it looked like a printout of one of the digital ads I had Marcos running weeks ago.
"We saw a listing on the local net about a month ago," the merc said. " 'Shepherd Orbital Works. High-performance parts and ship retrofits. Military grade specs.' "
He looked at the paper, then back at me. "The ad got pulled from the network before we could lock the coordinates. Disappeared right off the server. Once we got here, a few days back, we started asking around for this Shephard Orbital Works. Traffic Control informed us of the location of a shipyard under that name and under a startup LCC of the same name. We knocked on the door, but no one was home. So we went asking around the docks and heard something about a 'military ship selling vents'."
"The station authority doesn't like my mobile business model," I said, lying about the fact that I had the ad pulled and relaxing my muscles just a fraction. "They tend to flag my ads as spam and scam likely."
The merc chuckled, a dry sound. "Bureaucrats. Look, we run a heavy escort detail for a mining conglomerate out in the belt. We fly modified Gunships, and they tend to run hot, dangerously hot when power is redirected to our weapons systems."
He gestured to the rack of Model 1Cs. "You the guy who makes these? We need parts that don't melt when we start firing away."
I looked at the group and finally released all the tension within my shoulders. These guys weren't a threat. They were customers. And not only that, they were the best kind of customers, the kind with deep pockets and a desperate need for quality.
I smiled, stepping away from the crate.
"Yeah," I said. "I'm the guy. I'm Mark Shephard. And if you're looking for parts that can handle a firefight, you came to the right place."
The leader grinned back, revealing a silver tooth. "Good. Because if these things work half as well as the rumors say, we're looking to outfit the whole squadron. And depending on the quality of your work, we may be intent on performing a handful of upgrades to a select number of our ships."
I glanced back at Lyra, who was peeking over the crates with wide eyes, and winked at her.
"Well then," I turned back to the mercenaries. "Come on in. Let's talk business."
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Starting this week, I'll return to uploading 3 chapters a week. 1 additional Chapter will be uploaded on Sundays.
You can read up to 25 Advanced Chapters on my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/cw/Crimson_Reapr
Crimson_Reapr is the name, and writing Sci-fi is the way.