Transmission

The message petering through the command console was garbled and somewhat foreboding. "May...Plea ... som...spond …" Carl Hawthorne quickly switched the com off least any of his clientele over hear the pleas of Plethora Minor's previous visitors.

The pilot, smuggler, and now would be poacher, stretched, cracked stiff fingers and tipped the faded leather Stetson he wore further down on his brown skinned brow. His arms and legs still ached from cryosleep, his skin itched abominably from the extraction of nano-catheters, and he had a headache that no manner of stim could vanish. Only the hat, a heirloom made from actual cow hide that had been passed down the Hawthorne family line since before the advent of interstellar exploration, seemed able to keep his head from exploding.

Wiping bleary sleep encrusted eyes Hawthorne switched on the Excelsior's external cameras. The mosaic cluster of monitors wrapping around the bulkhead of the cockpit flickered to life revealing the view outside of the ship from multiple angles. Hawthorne centralized the feed so that only the image taken from the bow was displayed. Plethora Minor came slowly into focus, the glare of P 72 painting the starboard screens a hazy red hue. With less than a day's standard time before the Excelsior reached its destination the planet was only a vermilion pea sized blotch stationed amidst a sprinkling of dim stars.

PM was located in the center of a galactic oddity. The red dwarf designated P 72 around which Plethora Minor orbited, was a solar system veiled by a porous spherical boundary of planetoids. The greater majority of the astrological debris shielding the star kept an elliptical orbit far from the baleful sun at the system's core. The barrier was composed of mostly barren rock or ice of varying size and shape, although none came close to the magnitude of even Old Earth's Luna. A few showed signs of methane atmospheres, or volcanic activity. But their distance and sparse mineral value rendered the barrier's assorted rubble of little interest to anyone aside from astrophysicists.

The Excelsior had weaved its way through a projected gap in the barrier two months ago. A procedure that might have been disastrous if those projections had been miscalculated. As it was Hawthorne counted himself lucky not to have been awaken from his cryosleep by imminent collision alarms.

All spacers are intimate with the loneliness of the void, familiar with how every planet felt like the discovery of an island set adrift in an infinite ocean of darkness. Hawthorne knew this feeling better than most. As one of the few non-corporate pilots plying the seas of space he was accustomed to flying the Excelsior solo. Although he had tried having a partner to share his endeavors, those relationships had ultimately failed for one reason or another. Lovers had sat in the copilot seat adjacent to the captain's chair, but time and again those fleeting affairs died. Sooner or later the women in Hawthorne's life realized that his heart belonged to the ship and the ship alone. He'd grown accustomed to loneliness, wore it like a survival suit to protect him from the demands of intimacy. Still, at times such as the approach of a new world he often wished he had someone to share the sight with.

Normally the view of those desolate worlds brought about an empathy for their isolation. PM encouraged no such sentiment. Plethora Minor seemed not so much abandoned in the vast gulf of space separating it from it's brethren encapsulating P 72 as it did imprison. Inexplicably, Hawthorne felt there was something menacing about the red planet. Yes, the precol transmission had been an ill omen, but even without that dire tiding Carl Hawthorne would have disliked the look of Plethora Minor. No matter his gut feelings, Hawthorne would not turn back. He'd promised his clients a safari unlike any other and that was what they'd get.

Watching the red planet's approach did nothing to alleviate his worries, so hoping a little music would calm is misgivings, Hawthorne pressed a button on the command console that cycled through an extensive library of musical artists. The collection consisted of everything from rhythm and blues to classical music from the twenty firsts century to the present. But mostly Hawthorne's taste was for country from bygone eras, a legacy from his historic family line - some of the first African American cowboys of the nineteenth century. Thus, it was little surprise when the random shuffle began playing the Man in Black.

"Go tell that long tongue liar, go and tell that midnight rider, tell the rambler, the gambler, the backstreet fighter, tell'm God is Gonna Cut You Down.", Johnny Cash grumbled through speakers built into the captain's chair. Mortified, Hawthorne turned the music off. Instead he decided to switch on the video feeds monitoring the cryogenic chamber and passenger quarters.

On one of the monitors Hawthorne saw that his two male clients were still in the cryochamber, washing globules of thick blue preservative gel from their bodies in the small community shower. On another screen, his one female passenger was shown dressing in the crew quarter, slipping into a bright green form fitting jumpsuit. Hawthorne watched the lithe woman zip the front of her suit to the neck line. He was not normally voyeuristic, but it had been a long time since there had been a female presence on the Excelsior and Janice Lee was well worth male admiration.

For one thing, she was an exotic, a remnant of Old Earth that had teetered on the brink of extinction. Janice Lee was an Asian in a galaxy bereft of her ethnicity since the Shiva virus transmogrified most of her kind toward the closing of the twenty fifth century. Shiva had been a desperate attempt to genetically modify life on Old Earth to its then unbearable conditions. Unfortunately, the virus had worked all too well, creating aberrations completely unrecognizable from their origins. The Shivan, as the mutations were collectively called, were either killed by their transformations, or wiped out during the genocidal strike that came to be called the purge.

Besides her exotic nature, Janice Lee was a beautiful woman. Uncommonly tall for her race, she was slim almost to the point of emaciation but appreciably plump in all the right places. Her thin, somewhat angular face was framed by raven black hair cut short just below her ears and her eyes were large, brown, and ever inquisitive. What Hawthorne found most attractive was her seeming unawareness of her feminine wiles and the ease with which she spoke to the others despite her obviously higher intelligence.

Therein lay one of Hawthorne's misgivings about accepting her inclusion on the safari. Janice Lee was an astrobiologist and probably the only member of the expedition likely to discover that there was something wrong with the lack of precol information. Other than her likelihood of discovering there was something amiss about the safari, Hawthorne also disliked that he could find almost nothing about her past.

Her credentials as an astrobiologist panned out. She had even published several notable theses on the conservation of newly found worlds. However, Hawthorne could find nothing about her life before entering her chosen career. Where she had been born? Who were her parents? How old, including sleep years, she actually was? These were a mystery to him on a job that was rapidly becoming saturated with enigmas.

Hawthorne's ruminations were disturbed by discordant singing in the cryochamber. The sandy haired young man in the shower was murdering a bawdy song as he scrubbed himself. Hawthorne cringed. If there was another client he would rather have not chosen to take it was Bradley Johnson. Heir to Johnson Electronics Inc., a company that produced many of the devices running the Excelsior, Bradley Johnson was wealthy beyond imaging. Hawthorne hadn't had to pull the kid's file to know what he was. Johnson, undoubtedly, was one of those pampered, unguided, and insufferable youths who galloped around the galaxy on a never ending search for the next big thing, the next adrenaline rush.

In Hawthorne's experience, such youths were always looking to impress or shock an inattentive parent into recognizing them. Besides his indulgent life style, Bradley Johnson was ruggedly handsome, witty, and full of energy. Hawthorne had disliked him from the beginning. What made matters even worse was the fact that the other clients had already fallen prey to Johnson's charms, going so far as to referring him as the kid, an affectionate reference to the person with the least standard and sleep years on any star cruising ship. If not for the billionaire playboy's generous contribution to the expedition, more than thrice that of the other clients, Hawthorne would not have considered accepting the brat.

His last client stood outside the shower with a towel around his waist, shaking his bald head at Bradley Johnson's antics. A large, well-muscled man despite his advanced age, Andrew Borlov was not someone Hawthorne would wish to tangle with. He was an illustrated man, his skin telling a tale of war and faith.

The sickle and moon emblem tattooed on his left arm identified him as a member of SAA, counterpart to NASA inc. On his back another tattoo, this one of an exquisitely painted cross, ran from shoulder to waist. His entire body was a map of scar tissue. Puckered bullet wounds, cauterized laser slashes, healed abrasions and grafts of skin covering old burns marked the boundaries of one battle or another. On both legs, thin scars from evasive surgery ran vertically from hip to foot. Some sort of augmentation most likely, thought Hawthorne. The commandant's dossier read like the table of contents for a book dedicated to Soviet interstellar conflicts.

Unlike NASA Inc. which outsourced any martial forces they might need to enforce their claims to newly discovered worlds and their resources, the SAA shed no pretense that they were the governing body of its people. There were always factions within the oligarchy attempting to secede from the regime that had ruled over them on Old Earth. As a soldier in the military branch of the SAA, Andrew Borlov had been party to most of those skirmishes, waking long enough from cryo to perform his duty and perhaps partake in a few years of shore leave.

The commandant was soft spoken and asked few questions. Hawthorne sincerely hoped he would remain unquestioning. Andrew Borlov was the last person the smuggler wanted to piss off. Then again, the commandant was also the first person he'd turn to if things got sketchy.

On the screen Hawthorne saw that Borlov was moving toward the crew quarters, no doubt to get dressed. Janice Lee had already exited the berth and was seated in the small adjoining galley, sipping a steaming hot cup of tea and flexing her own apparently aching joints.

Back in the cryochamber Bradley Johnson had finished bathing and was waving at the ship camera he had somehow spotted. When this failed to raise a reaction, the kid blew the camera a kiss before grabbing a towel. Hawthorne sighed. He really did not like that one.