Mortensen: "It's not 'Sir' anymore. I'm the captain, but I'm not your Captain. You're not in the Liberty Navy. You drive the ship, you hold the rudder, but am not a passenger, friend."
Halley: "Yes Si.... Stuart."
Mortensen: "Well, patch it through then."
Halley: "Patching. It's full of holes. I didn't think we'd be receiving communications traffic this far out in the barrier. There's no stars for two weeks jump range, at least."
Mortensen: "Strange. Who else would be out here without jumpholes? Barrera!"
Barrera: "Oui?"
Mortensen: "We? What's that meant to mean? Speak English."
Barrera: "Just practising my dead languages, captain. Hold, hold. I'm seeing what I can do to clear the field. It'd be easier if we weren't blasting active jamming into the transmission stream."
Mortensen: "And if we wern't, we'd be plastered all over the colonial news service. Can't have a fresh start with all the eyes on you - you make a herd, people are bound to follow.... I'm diverting. What is it then?"
Barrera: "I think it's an escape pod.... Definite transponder match, there's a drifte!"
Mortensen:"You think?"
Barrera: "Definite match."
Halley: "A pod, out here? Christ. How desperate do you have to be to be ejected in deep space?"
Mortensen: "Right. If it is what it is, we can't leave it out there, discretion be damned. Vector?"
Barrera: "Uerm, it's.... faint. Waypoint established, captain! Navigation onscreen. Twenty Three Klicks out, fifty seven by forty seven degrees offbow."
E.Halley:The Junker looked like he hardly washed. I’m assuming that’s what he is. He didn’t really say. We did everything we could to ID him and then saw something that looked like a serial number running up his arm and along the back of his neck, like a dog-tag you could never take off. The type of marking that you can tell a piece of merchandise by even if you cut the limbs off and quarter it into five pieces, or find it drifting as a corpsicle a hundred thousand years into the great unknown. Once we saw them, we left it at that.
The guy didn’t complain much when we’d dried him up out of the exposure chamber – took him to hydroponics and gave him a mouthful of fruit to break it to him sweetly that he could never be let off again and he had the choice between joining the crew or going right back in that pod – and he gave that type of wordless consent you give when you’re tasting natural sugar for the first time in your life after going five days without calories other than your own flesh and fibre.
He said his name was “John”, if you can believe that. Most easy-to-fish name in the universe yet he felt his lips around it as if it was two-moon sunrise, although that might have been the cherries. Doc says he’s about as broken and fixed as a man can be and still run around without a coffin and he’ll get arthritis as sure as the afterlife, but he sure knows how to cram food under all that grey hair that he’s got passing for a beard. Let him be John. It’s as good a name as any when you don’t know yourself.
Strange voice. Like listening to gravel crunching off a waterfall. Told Barrera this and he asked me what a waterfall sounded like, then gravel, then was bored when I played him something approximate. Spacers.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's outlawed trade unions, determined to take the underworld for themselves.)
![[Image: XTF1d6x.png]](https://i.imgur.com/XTF1d6x.png)