“Adresta, this is your six o’clock alarm. As per your preferences, current environmental information is bravo. Scattered debris including three objects class three or larger. Stellar radiation is expected to be…”

“Snooze alarm!” I wasn’t ready for this yet. Sleep still fogged my mind. 

"Adresta, this is your six oh five alarm. Alert, you have a scheduled event on your calendar titled 'Asshole wants me in early'.” My still-addled mental faculties found an amount of humor in the AI’s computerized voice replicating my crass sounding calendar entry. 

“Shall I contact Mr. Kruger and notify him that you will be unable to attend?" 

I groaned loudly and rolled over, kicking the blanket off of me. "No, Vox. I'm awake."

Dragging myself out of bed, I grabbed a cup from the counter of my kitchenette and filled it with coffee from the machine Vox had kindly turned on with the morning alarm. A protein bar from the cabinet joined the life giving liquid in my stomach rather quickly after. I was still pulling my flight jumpsuit on as I walked out the door and I couldn’t stop the yawn that erupted as I boarded the lift.

As the lift began moving, my wrist beeped and I heard the voice of Vox echo through my head. “I took the liberty of locking the door to your quarters and turning off the lights. You usually do so yourself, but you left without doing so today.”

“I don’t know what I would do without you, Vox. Thanks. I’m not really completely awake yet, I guess.” It was a good wake up call to be told that I was slipping that much. It forced me to take a moment as the lift transported me out to the hangars and actually take mental inventory to make sure I was prepared to take on the day. 

I was still lacking. Maybe another cup of coffee would help. Luckily there was a vendor just outside the turbolift shaft in the salvage arm that catered to people needing that extra jolt of caffeine in the mornings. 

Ten minutes and a second cup of coffee later, I was feeling much more prepared. There was bullshit ahead of me in the day, but with the power of caffeine, I could face it. I walked into the Torgal offices with my head held high. The boss was waiting for me, already in his sleazy suit. 

“Good morning, Soren. You are just in time. The freighter with our equipment has already arrived and is offloading the rest of their cargo. You will be on frequency with the captain of the freighter as you remove my new manipulator arm from his aft cargo bay.” 

With the coffee allowing my mind to focus, I drew myself up and answered in turn. “Sounds easy enough. That shouldn’t take too long and hopefully I will have plenty of time to get back to that derelict for the reactor core I told you about yesterday.”

His face took on an even more serious tone as a look was leveled at me that spoke of imminent suffering if I screwed up. “You had best finish this job first, and properly so. I need you to be on your best behavior. That captain is the current head of Erickson Enterprises, and I want to make a good impression. His company is funding construction for a new network of interstellar slipspace gates, including a new gate for this system, and I want to be the provider for raw materials and labor.” 

I took a breath to keep myself steady. I really didn’t feel like dealing with Kruger’s bullshit right now, especially after he’d cut my pay the day before. Unfortunately, I was still in a situation where I couldn’t move on without losing my only income, and without another job waiting for me… Well, I wasn’t willing to risk my transition fund at this point. The idea of the importance of this captain was certainly well heard though.

“Of course, sir. I will do my best.”

“Then get to it, Matson! Time's a wastin’!”

I turned away and left the office. I had exactly zero desire to stay in that office with the greasy slugs that inhabited it. 

Temptation was gnawing at me just to get my belongings together and leave once I finished the day. The job sucked, Kruger was an ass, and I was getting the feeling that the man was out to get me. It was becoming more and more common that he would find extra jobs for me to do during the day that took away from my time in the debris fields. 

As per the standard contract, fuel and berthing costs were covered by the company as long as supply continued coming in and the contractor performed ‘occasional’ extra duties as needed by the company. 

I had gotten the last three odd jobs this last two weeks. 

It was clear that I was being singled out. Part of that being because I was one of the better pilots amongst the contractors, along with the fact that few of the other contractor vessels had the manipulator arms that the Oxide possessed, or at least ones as strong. They enabled my ship to perform tasks with significantly more finesse than the tractor beams or basic grabbing units that most other vessels were equipped with.   

Even still, I hated being stuck in one system for so long. I had spent my entire childhood on one station, unable to leave. After escaping my confines of that prison, I saw the vastness of space and discovered what could mean to be free. It instilled in me a wanderlust that begged to be sated. That drive is what pushed me into building the Oxide in the first place. I wanted the freedom to go where I wanted, when I wanted, with no one to tell me I couldn’t. It was an unrealistic desire, but one that still ate at me. My feelings on my current situation only served to amplify those desires to fling myself out among the countless stars. 

There were a number of things holding me back, however.

One, I didn’t have anywhere to go. I knew where I wanted to go, but without a job waiting for me, I wouldn’t last long, even with the amount of wealth I had saved. 

Two, if Kruger could get in nice with this Erickson fellow, the construction of a new slipspace gate would be the biggest contract this system had seen since the height of the colonial era. The opportunity for the biggest paychecks I had ever seen was a significant pull and I wouldn’t ever have a chance at it if an out of system company got the contract or I left before it ever was signed.

Three, and perhaps the most vexing for my pride, I wouldn’t be able to take the Oxide with me. As it was, there was no FTL drive installed and no interstellar navigation computer for use with the slipspace gate. Without them, the craft couldn’t leave the system. I would have to sell it and use the profits to buy my way onto a passenger liner or pay an obscene amount of money to buy enough cargo room to fit the entire ship on a large interstellar freighter. 

Luckily, I was working on a solution for that last problem.

The Oxide was a bucket of parts, to be sure, but it was pieced together from condemned ships I salvaged in a planetside junkyard. The runabout I had stolen the aft compartment from had originally been built with a small star drive. It was old and non-functional, but I had kept all of the salvageable components. The reactor I had crammed into my, at the time, finished ship was way oversized for what it was powering, but not for a ship with a jump drive.

The inspector that had approved the craft for flight noted it and commented, but I simply told him that I never wanted to be short on power. I got a weird look for that, but was approved anyway. 

What the casual observer wouldn’t realize though, was that the mounting points for the stardrive nacelles were still preserved within the stubby pylons that also housed the impulse engines. I had been working on the battered old stardrive in my spare time whenever I had the chance, motivation and parts. 

My musings were cut short by my arrival in my hangar. My rust bucket awaited me.

I tapped my wrist to access the voice command function. “Alright, Vox, download environmental information to my holopad and request the comms frequency for the Erickson ship from Torgal. I’ll have things ready for departure in a couple minutes.”

“Acknowledged.”

With a couple of key swipes, the cabin door of the Oxide slid open and I was able to step inside. I immediately began running through my preflight checklists and started flicking switches. The hum of onboard systems soothed my anger-frayed nerves as I settled into the routine. Soon enough, the entire craft jolted lightly as the primary reactor kicked through its startup cycle. Main systems came online fully as the power load transferred from auxiliary batteries and external power lines. 

I pulled the cabin door closed and buckled into my seat. My ears popped slightly as life support pressurized the cabin with oxygenated air. 

Launch procedures went exactly as they always did. My docking pad moved forward on its rails and brought me to the station exterior and, after a short conversation with space traffic control, I was floating free. My fingers danced along the kit-bashed control panels with practiced ease and I let out a pleased sigh as I felt my ship almost breathing with me. We fired our impulse engines as one to move away from the bonds of the dock. I may not have ever had a pet, or even actually seen a dog in person, but I didn’t know how any relationship with an animal could ever match the harmony of myself and my beloved Oxide.

It didn't take long for me to spot the freighter I was going to be pulling from. The thing was frankly huge compared to many of the ships commonly seen at D’reth Station. If my eyes didn’t deceive me, I could estimate the thing at nearly two hundred meters long with a beam that must have been around forty. 

My computer registered the vessel as being the civilian freighter Ratatosk. I keyed comms and broadcast on the supplied frequency.  

“Soren Matson aboard Oxide-77 to Ratatosk, I’m approaching from your starboard fore end. Jeremiah Kruger tasked me with retrieving a crated manipulator arm from your cargo hold.”

It took a moment, but my comms lit up with a visual communications request. I hadn’t been expecting it, but I shrugged and zeroed relative velocity before accepting the request. I didn’t want to be flying distracted, after all.

I immediately found myself with yet another unexpected event. The person that appeared on screen wasn’t the middle-aged freighter captain I had been expecting. Instead, there was what appeared to be a woman around my age with ivory skin and ethereal white hair with streaks of pink and blue throughout, brushed to one side and showing off their side shave. Said person was muted and talking to someone else off screen.

It took everything I had just to keep my jaw in place. 

Then she turned to face the screen. Glittering blue eyes with all of the brightness and energy of a fresh nebula filled my mind and my heart. 

“Hello, Oxide, we’ve been expecting you. My name’s Echo, she and her if you please.” Oh, the mind shattering gay thoughts in my head had a name! Gosh, she was pretty…

“Da-- er, Captain Erikson is actually aboard the station already, he had business with a few people including your boss. So I’ll be managing all of this business, if that’s okay?” 

I nodded numbly, cursing my current anatomy for making the tight flight suit uncomfortable. 

She then did the absolute worst possible thing. She smirked. The nerve of this woman! “Then let’s get started!” 

And there goes my poor gay heart…