Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

Drug Runner

He grabbed his bag from he conveyer belt and hurried down the hall.

Outside the window he could see the rest of the station glowing I the distance, a massive circular construction almost half a mile in diameter.

There was a pulse of blue form outside the window as one of the warp gates was activated, sending one of the small shuttles right through.

He was supposed to be visiting earth's moon today.

He was just glad that he didn't have to go down to earth itself, and so he sat with his bag and waited in the terminal for his shuttle to be called. It shouldn't take very long. The longest process in intergalactic travel these days was waiting to be boarded for warp which didn't generally take more than an hour or two.

Eventually he was called, scanning his wrist and watching as his boarding pass flashed on the screen before he was waved through. He found his seat in the back of the shuttle and sat down, not having to wait long as the others filtered on and the airlock opened. At least ten shuttles sped out two or three of them accompanying his ship to the warp gate.

Timor closed his eyes.

He hated warping, it always made him feel sick.

There was a bright flash of blue light and he felt a sudden compression around his body as if he was being squeezed through a tube.

A moment later they appeared.

This wouldn't be their last stop.

The humans hated the idea of having a warp gate so close to their mother planet and so only allowed a warp gate at Europa station and generally kept the location of Earth in it's orbit a great secret. The only people who were allowed to fly shuttles and ships to and from earth or mars were humans themselves and had to obey extensively vetted by the UNSC to preform such a task.

They were ushered off the shuttle and into the main landing bay where they were motioned over to another, larger ship. This one would be a small ship with a D class warp drive to get them to and from the other planets.

He had to wait there for almost an hour sitting and reading magazine s from the back of the chair in front of him before they were detached. He hated warping inside a ship with a warp reactor even more than he hated the warp gate. If he could have thrown up he would have, and even so he passed out for a few minutes before their flight made any sort of progress.

When the warp was over, he was sitting down looking at the Earth moon. It was bright white in the darkness, its ground characterized by a filmy sort of surface coating of the strange rock material. On its surface he could see work rovers venturing out into the wastes kicking up clouds of dust behind them. They orbited once before heading towards the bright side of the moon, which was tidally locked with the planet.

From this angle he could see earth glittering like a blue marble in the light above. The human planet was almost three fourth salt water, which had surprised everyone since they would have considered aquatic life to be the most prominent on the planet. However that was not the case, and most of the humans that lived here congregated on the massive broken landmasses in the center.

As he looked down, he saw a massive white spiral cloud forming in the sea just off the coast of one of those land masses. He had heard about earth storms before. Powerful hurricanes that formed in the midst of the ocean where hot air met cold air, turning them into spinning vortexes that could pick buildings from their foundations and toss them into the air.

Despite this, the humans still chose to live there with no complaint.

His sister had told him about that, so he wasn't entirely sure he believed them.