The grated floor of the cockpit bit a familiar pattern into the back of Jacq's hands as she lay gazing into the drifting motes of light outside. She'd lost track of how much time had passed since she'd stowed away on Perseverance; she ate when the hunger pangs became too much to bear, and she occasionally woke up either in her bed or on the cockpit floor which told her she occasionally slept. Her interface clock told her it had been five standards, twelve hours, and thirty-one minutes since she'd left Estermere.
She'd had to shut off her interface's sensory override to avoid permanently burning-out her sense of smell, grasping feebly at the settings in her thoughts with a mind that sloughed like wet meat through the hunger and poor sleep. The food was still nearly unbearable, but at least the scents of oil, rust, and general damp thickness of Perseverance's air helped distract her from it.
She spent most of her time in Jarett's company, though every sentence of hers was met with a paragraph from him. She'd learned about all she could about the pilot in less than two standards: Nudism was as common as it was controversial on Jarett's home world, since air conditioning was both expensive and necessary due to the high humidity. The expense, however, meant that many lower income communities found more cost-efficient ways to cool down.
The local authorities hadn't taken to the subversion of interplanetary decency, so depending on where you decided to flaunt your birthday suit you would either be arrested on site, or disappear into the crowd of naked bodies. Unappealing as both of those options sounded, Jarett made it clear that he favored the latter.
He'd been less knowledgeable about Nick and Leru, though they were the one topic he waxed poetic about more than himself: "They were definitely smushing each other on the regular at one point -- and between you and me, I'm pretty sure they still do."
"How?" A distant nebula entered her view beyond the window, a swirl of pink and gold stardust drifting lazily towards the wall on her right. "They actively avoid each other -- I haven't seen the two of them in the same room since I first got here."
Jarett's snort echoed behind the metal helmet. "That's cuz they're a couple of prudes."
Jacq watched the nebula begin to disappear around the wall, past her range of vision. "Wait, what?"
"Can hardly blame them," he sighed. "Given the circumstances, I could almost smush 'em both. If it weren't for their fatal flaws, anyway."
"What do you mean?" She couldn't count on two hands the number of flaws she'd found in any of the crew, but she hardly considered any of them fatal.
"Nick's got a tight bod, but he's an asshole, and Leru is all of that minus the asshole -- figuratively speaking -- but her vagina," He frowned audibly, morphing the final consonant into a groan. "I mean no disrespect, but that's a deal-breaker."
"And boobs." Jacq looked up from where she lay, towards the pilot's seat, switching feet as they rested atop each other.
"Eh, I don't mind a little jiggle. I'm not exactly a solid-body myself."
Jacq scrunched up her face as she looked away with a chuckle, and the ship drifted back to calm silence.
Hep walked through the door to Jacq's right some time later, meaning Nick and Leru must have been using the exterior halls to avoid each other. He kept his head down, traveling across to the opposite side of the room with muted steps.
"Hep!" Jacq jumped at Jarett's sudden enthusiasm. "How are you this fine standard?"
"Hi Jarett." Hep stopped briefly as he reached the far side of the room. "And Jacq." He appeared less than once per standard, and always disappeared as soon as he could -- Jarett said the quiet man had snuck onto the ship one day and just started fixing things, and nobody questioned him because, well…
Jacq jumped out of a daydream as Jarett swore, softer than he'd greeted Hep but still harsh enough to cut the silence. "Leru? Wake the captain, please. You and Hep should be here as well." The helmet slid up and he glanced around the room, pulling a hand out of the metal contraption and reaching in Jacq's general direction. "Pants?"
Jacq sat up and tossed him the nearby wadded-up onesie. Despite Jarett's regularly glistening exterior, he wore the garment so rarely that it was oddly unsoiled.
He nodded his thanks as he caught it and pulled the wad down into the metal casing, squirming as he stuffed himself into the legs. He pulled a latch on the inside of the cover and swung it out to the side, stretched, then relaxed back into the chair.
"Going somewhere?" Jacq had been about to return to the floor when Jarett began shrugging into the top half of the onesie as well.
"No, I just needed some fresh air." He smiled, but didn't look at her as he zipped the suit up and fussed with his collar.
Nick and Leru entered from the cargo bay a moment later. He approached Jarett, glancing over his shoulder out the window in the ceiling. "What? Leru said you found something."
"I've found the nothing you were looking for." Jarett laughed.
Nick blinked wearily, rubbing at the corners of his eyes. "Jarett-"
Jarett nodded at the ceiling and craned his neck. "Look closer."
Jacq followed his gaze to find, as Jarett had promised, nothing. After a minute she realized what he'd meant: the space in front of them was… growing, as if it were a flat image.
"What..." Nick breathed.
"Mm-mm." Jarett shrugged, responding in the same tone.
Nick turned to him, "Well maybe stop flying straight towards it for a second."
Jarett shook his head. "Something's pulling us."
Nick glared, turning back to the ceiling, "Where in the void are we?"
"All I found on that datachit were coordinates and some encrypted, compressed folder I couldn't open. I don't even think Leru could have opened it with her contacts in private security, this was something proprietary."
As they spoke Jacq watched the wall of nothing grow closer, the stars they had been looking at for the last hour beginning to stretch out in giant flat circles of white and yellow. They still flickered, but as they grew in size, the images became fuzzier.
"The coordinates happened to be on the same ass-end of the galaxy as Esteremere, so I pointed us in that direction and was going to notify you when you woke up. Then about five minutes ago when I tried to angle away from the… nothing, I realized there was an outside force making sure we couldn't."
The white section of the flat image loomed outside of the window, seeming to grow larger now instead of closer. In a matter of minutes, the entire window was consumed by white. Then a hole in the white began to open, slowly at first, with edges crisp as the eye could perceive.
Jacq laced her fingers through the grated floor by her hips as they began to fall through.
The hole began opening faster, and eventually burst open around them as they soared through a latticework of machinery a moon's-orbit away from a sapphire-blue planetoid with a golden marble swirled across its surface. Yellow and orange rippled from pole-to-pole as they grew closer, framed on both sides by a dark ocean that wrapped around the far edges, with more latticed machinery behind it.
"Nullcasters," Nick breathed. "An entire world encased in nullified energy."
"We had a few sting-vehicles that had directional nullcasters, but this…" Leru shook her head. "Those vehicles alone cost almost as much as the company was worth. The amount of quantum layered tech here could send Estermere, even its parent-planet careening out of orbit if the containment were damaged. Why would anyone- and how… There's no way the Inter-Planetary Alliance agreed to having this built." As they neared the surface, a small outcrop of angular, grey patches became visible near the southern coast of the nearest golden landmass.
Jarett closed himself back into the pilot's seat, helmet lowering back over his face. "Whoever and why-ever must be multiple people, because we just got caught by a second tractor beam."
Nick's brow creased as his head rocked back. "What? Who?"
"His name's Jim, he says he'd like to ask you a quick question about ship insurance. How in the void would I know, Nick." Jarett growled.
Nick looked back at the ceiling. "Seems like you got ripped-off on your interface."
"The interface connects to the ship, Cap, it doesn't beam all the way down to the planet below. The point is we have two choices, and I'm not a big fan of either."
"What does he mean?" Jacq had intended to ask Nick, but her silence up to this point had drawn the attention of the entire room. She got to her feet, pulling her fingers out of the floor's grating.
"I'm not sure if the ship's broken, or if it was actually built before autopilot." Nick looked down from the ceiling. "But while they can grab us magnetically, they can't override our systems and fly us wherever they want."
"Oh, well that's good." Jacq's shoulders relaxed.
Nick's gaze drifted between her nowhere. "Yeah. Good." His head slowly tilted back up to the window.
"One of the trajectories is for somewhere in a city on the southern coast, the other seems to be..." He slid the helmet back and squinted out the ceiling. "Somewhere North, in the middle of the desert."
Nick shared a look with Leru. "I'm pretty sure we don't want to be in that city. Not under authority, anyway."
"You think we'll fare better in the middle of nowhere?" Jarett's eyes widened only slightly as he turned to the captain. "Better yet, you think they're pulling us out there to land? I don't know what you've done or who you've pissed off, but I just work here, man."
"You think the authorities are going to care?" Nick slowly turned to him, eyes still unfocussed. "You were free to choose where you work, and you chose to work for me. Like it or not, my problems are now your problems."
Jarett met his gaze, jaw firm beneath his round cheeks. "I'll take that chance."
"He might be right." Leru looked to the floor at her side, arms folded. "If it's who we think it is… Nick knows him better than I do, but he doesn't seem like someone who values nuance. Or life in general, not beyond what it can make him in units. Plus, given the extremely dangerous tech surrounding us, I don't think we're likely to see a courtroom."
Jacq swayed on her heels and her stomach twisted as gravity began to lilt towards the world outside the window.
Jarett swore, disappearing behind the faceplate once again. The planet slowly orbited out of their view a moment later, and gravity followed the mass. "Well, the decision's been made for us. Congratulations: if we survive the landing, we get to die of exposure in the desert."
Leru looked up from the floor. "Decided how?"
"The other beam changed trajectory, they're working together now. Kind of. One is taking us somewhere specific, the other..." he swallowed, "it's basically straight down. And fast."
"So slow us down."
The faceplate slid back and Jarett shook his head as he stared off into the middle distance. The room felt smaller than their quarters with so many people in it. "I just wanted to be a pilot."
Jacq's head began to spin as the cockpit grew farther away down a tunnel -- Were they about to die?
Nick grabbed Jarett by the collar, leaning over the metal casing of the pilot's seat. "So be a pilot and slow us down!"
Jarett's head wobbled as Nick shook him. "Of course, I'll just slow down."
Nick backed off, clenching his fists in front of his face. "What if…" He wiped his wrist across his brow. "Can you sort of… add one more trajectory to the two pulling us, change our angle of arrival?"
Jarett started to shake his head but stopped, looking at Nick through the corner of his eye. "Our engines could barely handle atmospheric reentry when they were built."
Nick frowned, "We can fix the ship if we survive."
Jarett nodded and disappeared behind the faceplate again. "Death by exposure it is." He took a shaky breath. "Strap in."
Jacq watched the scene play out as if it were an interface movie, except she had nowhere else to focus when this one became too stressful. Nick and Hep set about unfolding seats from the protrusions in the wall as the ship began to quake gently.
"Jacq."
She gasped, the scene rushing towards her through the sea of darkness until it practically slapped her in the eyes. She looked around -- There were nearly ten seats still folded into the wall, how did she choose one? She shook her head, moving to the nearest protrusion in the wall, heart beating faster and faster. She clamored over it, hands sweating as she searched in vain for a latch or some other mechanism.
"Jacq."
She whirled around, ready to tear apart whoever was distracting her from her task.
Nick watched her from his seat, brow bent to mirror his frown -- he'd unfolded the seat next to his, nodding towards it when she only stared at him in reply.
She dashed across the short distance between them, nearly running headfirst into the pilot's seat and fumbling with the buckles as she swept them out of the way.
"Whoa, Jacq, it's alright." Nick placed a stiff hand on her shoulder, then quickly removed it to scratch his cheek. "We still have a little under an hour before… Before we really need to be strapped in."
Jacq's head pounded with each heartbeat as her empty stomach wished for something to eject. "What happens after that?"
Nick knocked on the thick metal support beam welded into the wall between the seats. "This is the sturdiest room in the ship -- The rest should crumple around us and absorb most of the impact."
Jacq took a couple deep breaths, but was unable to fill her lungs. She managed to calm her stomach, though her heart still beat in her ears. She looked up at him as she leaned on the unfolded seat. "Is it gonna hurt?"
Nick raised an eyebrow. "How many times do you think I've done this?"