The Calista was running beautifully. Whatever the noise was that had tormented Kas on her trip to Chantos, it had apparently been left behind there.
The call had come in no more than thirty seconds after she'd left Chantos's atmosphere. Kas hadn't been surprised; she'd counted twenty-two missed calls during her time on surface, one for every hour, but now she was back in the Black, she would expect one per minute until she gave in and answered.
The message filled the entire width of her viewport.
INCOMING CALL FROM SELVA
Kas looked at the words and leaned back in her chair. She had no interest in talking to the Federation again. They were snoopers - had to know everything that was happening the moment it happened. All planetary and lunar activity, including records of incoming and outgoing ships, were forwarded to Selva directly, meaning they knew Kas was in transit the moment she was cleared for departure. It wasn't enough that she'd caught the X1 and was on her way to return it, they wanted a full debriefing. There'd be questions, hundreds of them, an inquisition that would last her practically the entire journey. And for what? Whose benefit really? Certainly not hers.
She bit off one of her cuticles.
Sorry guys, I'm busy...
The message blinked one last time and the call terminated. Kas had no doubt they'd try again in a moment and she'd already decided she would ignore that call too. She didn't appreciate harassment, which is exactly what it was. Nobody else had the power the Federation had, the ability to call whoever they wanted, whenever they wanted. If Kas wanted to get in touch with a buddy back on Holgar - not a great distance away, relatively - she was required to go through Selva who would then have to approve the call before connecting her to the recipient. Kas enjoyed the privacy of space, but the Federation was that creep outside the window, always trying to peer in through the curtain.
They hadn't always been there, of course. Once upon a time, almost a century before Kas had been born, there had been no such thing as the United Galactic Federation. The day they turned up was the day that everything changed.
Of the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe, the Asiman galaxy was not particularly special. It wasn't the oldest or the youngest, the biggest or the smallest - it was just one of many common spiral systems, with two long purple arms that wrapped themselves around each other in a perpetual embrace. The Asiman galaxy consisted of over 150 billion stars. Each of those stars had an average of one-point-six planets in life-sustaining zones, and of those planets, little under one percent were actually inhabited. That amounted to just under two-point-five billion planets, all teeming with alien life.
It didn't take too many millions of years for some of those planets to start venturing out into space, investigating their own solar systems the way a dog sniffs around its backyard, oblivious to the countless other dogs simultaneously lazing around their gardens. But they could not meet each other. Interstellar space separated them like a tall fence, far too large for any of them to jump.
Eventually though, one of those solar systems cultured a very smart dog. That star was called Kiko.
After enough time, Kiko discovered it didn't need to jump over the fence, but that it could crawl under it. The secret to interstellar travel wasn't just to try and travel really fast, but to create 'rifts' in space - wormholes that allowed it to take enormous shortcuts across the galaxy. Once it could do this, Kiko began exploring Asiman like a dog unleashed in a vast neighbourhood. It came across other dogs, though none quite as smart as itself, and not in every solar system, but in enough that they began to form a pack. With Kiko as its leader, suddenly there seemed to be no limit to the scope of Kiko's expansion.
Eventually, the pack grew to over a thousand solar systems, a huge network of stars teeming with sentient life, all unified under Kiko's rule. It was Kiko that created the United Galactic Federation and invited all its new friends to join it - and join it they did. Kiko was the only one that could still achieve interstellar travel independently, but it was kind enough to set up rifts in every single federal solar system, creating something a bit like a galactic underground railway that everyone could use. If one solar system wanted to journey to another, they could travel to their local IRIS (Interstellar Rift Impulse Shuttle) and jump across the cosmos in one big instant leap.
Kiko offered these IRIS's for free, but only if the abiding system agreed to join the Federation and build its own Federal space station. These stations acted as galactic embassies that enabled the Federation to communicate and coordinate themselves effectively. A galaxy is a big place, after all, and order is required.
Over time, the Federation grew and grew, until over a thousand space stations had been built - including Selva. And a titanic beast of a space station it was, too, serving as a permanent residence to over twelve million inhabitants. At least two-thirds of those people were federal staffers, the rest made up by their families.
To imagine Selva is to picture a long tube, one mile thick and fifty-five long - that's the spine. Thirteen huge disks spanned its length, like giant pineapple slices, each a half mile deep and ten wide. The inhabitants lived and worked inside those disks, just under a million to each one. Each habitation disk was also a solar sail that could, thanks to guided lasers mounted on satellites throughout the solar system, propel Selva to incredible speeds, though it didn't really need to - the station generally just bobbed about like a bone adrift on a black sea.
Fortunately for Kas, Selva was bobbing in her direction, drastically reducing her trek time. She'd expected to be in transit for at least a month, but once she'd input Selva's coordinates into the Calista's itinerary and set the temporal conformer to match, she was delighted to see the trek should only last six days.
Kas sat slouched in her chair for three full minutes waiting for the second call to come through, but to her surprise, it never did. Bored of the silence, she decided she could ignore the call from somewhere else and lifted herself out of her seat and away from the controls. The Calista would happily make its own way for most of the journey, steering and course correcting as needed, allowing Kas to relax and put her feet up. She expected a lot of that over the next week.
After refreshing herself in the washroom, Kas returned to the cockpit and went to the weapons cabinet. She'd been required to lock it when she landed on Chantos due to disarmament law, but in the Black, laws were looser than pants on ants. She swiped her hand over the lock and the cabinet door unrolled, revealing her beautiful cache of deadly goods.
Next to her usual go-to delights, Kas had mounted three new weapons: Otto's bluster-dusters (which would need retrofitting if she actually wanted to use them), Remi's carbon knife (though she hated knives as a general rule) and Vima's Ghoster. She had strongly considered selling all three back in Artis (she reckoned they would have gone for at least fifty thousand) but in the end, she decided to keep them - they would be her trophies of a job well done. She picked up the Ghoster and felt the weight in her hand. It was surprisingly light and perfectly balanced.
'Been wanting to play with you for a long time, little missy,' she said as her index finger slipped into the trigger bay. All she had to do was roll her thumb over the back of the neck, select 'non-organic' and it would be armed and ready to melt a hole in the side of the ship. If the Federation weren't tracking her every move, she may well have made her way to a shooting range where she could unleash havoc for an hour or two. Instead, she placed the weapon gently back in the cabinet beside its pals and closed the door.
Feeling a little tired, she headed back to the cargo hold. Her sleeping quarters occupied the space just above the hold, and that was where the access hatch was. She liked to take regular naps when travelling instead of lengthy sleeps as it kept her more alert. Alert was good in space.
Kas barely glanced at Hik on her way in. His presence unsettled her. She'd decided she would put him somewhere else after her nap, perhaps the engine room where she could more easily ignore him, but right now she was tired and in no mood for rearranging the furniture.
She arrived at the ladder that would take her up to bed and stepped on something small and hard. She raised her foot and saw a little black cube beneath it. She picked it up and frowned. It looked like a dice except with sharper corners and no numbers. It was quite weighty for something so small. She ran her thumb over it and deduced it was metal, though what kind she had no idea.
'Where are you from?' she asked.
No reply.
Kas knew every inch of the Calista, every nut and bolt and this wasn't one of them. She put the cube in her pocket, a mystery to solve later, then put one hand and one foot on the ladder.
'Night, Hik,' she said as she climbed. She didn't see the X1 in the centre of the hold shift its weight ever-so-slightly as it turned to look at her.
'Goodnight Kas.'