Privateer's Supremacy (Privateer Tales Book 20) by Jamie McFarlane

Author:Jamie McFarlane
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Fickle Dragon Publishing LLC
Published: 2024-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

Diversity. That’s probably the best word I can come up with for what surrounded us as we approached Port Control for the wormhole. At ninety meters, we were on the smaller side of the medium vessels around us. There were completely spherical vessels that Parlastio informed us were host to an aquatic species and filled with water. There was also a ship shaped like a big wheel with small spokes connecting in the dead center. Now, I’d seen space stations that were wheel-shaped, but the practicality of an eighty-meter diameter vessel of that shape evaded me.

And then, there were other vessels that had more standardized rectangular forms but had just as many design extremes. We saw vessels that were basically rafts with cargo strapped and netted around a central core to one ship with almost no hull. When I drew Parlastio’s attention to it, he explained that there was a hull, but the occupants averaged ten centimeters in height and the beasts walking around on the raft were much like camels that, instead of storing water in their humps, stored oxygen.

I found the extremes reassuring from a maybe we can all get along standpoint and concerning in a perhaps nobody cares what happens in the western region of Aeratroas.

“Are those advertisements?” Gaina asked when we fell into the Port Control line.

I’d seen the massive billboards the last time I’d been through this area, but it didn’t make them any less impressive. Hundreds of meters across and hundreds of meters tall, the brilliant light displays showed semi-holographic images of just about anything you might imagine, especially if related to space travel. There were advertisements for ship services, some of them too lewd to mention, as well as gambling establishments that boasted the ability to host every size of vessel. There were recruiting advertisements for ship’s crews. It was way over the top and impossible to ignore.

Fortunately, our diplomatic designation allowed us to use a lane of travel reserved for Confederation flagged vessels. When I asked Parlastio why we were no longer worried about being attacked by rogue Confederation employees, he was evasive, alluding to the increase in nearby observers.

The wormhole should have been surrounded by a cosmic anomaly as it was in every other system. The anomaly is there, it’s just hard to detect, but that’s a distraction from the conversation. No, this anomaly, which surrounded the wormhole from the Kneble system to the Abeline system, had been all but swallowed by a massive steel structure, the purpose of which I couldn’t begin to fathom.

So instead of rolling up to a colorful, if eerie, point in space and engaging wormhole engines, we entered a long metallic tube that was several kilometers long. As we slowed on approach to the wormhole, I realized the structure was housing and that people, or aliens, called the location home.

“Parl, why do people live here?” I asked. The structure hadn’t been nearly so massive last time I’d been through, some twenty years previous. “What’s this all about?”

“It is not uncommon,” Parlastio said.

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