A Mirror in the Dark by Barry D.



Marie tapped impatiently on the status monitor, her feet hooked into the rail on the floor to keep from pushing herself away in null gravity. The lights in the access corridor were dimmed to conserve power, the panel rhythmically bathing her features in red as it flashed “NO SEAL” in large block letters. The din of hundreds of servos, armatures, and rollers filled the air around her. Given that they operated in the vacuum of the cargo bay, their report came only in the vibrations they channeled through the ship’s structure. It was still just loud enough for her to plausibly ignore the comm bell ringing in her earpiece, though.



Then all at once, the corridor was silent. Her hearing readjusted quickly, and she was just barely able to make out the faded whine of large-scale hydraulics as “NO SEAL” faded into a warm yellow and steadied its blinking. This quiet was brief, another repetition of the comm bell shattering it before it had a chance to sink in. Marie tapped again at the panel, though this time with purpose, and used her free hand to activate her earpiece.



“Marie,” Sam’s voice filled her one ear. “The autoloader reports all green, and it’s only a matter of time before those Crewers’ friends show up to finish what they started. I need you up here on navigation.” She had expected impatience, but instead all she could hear was urgency mixed with concern. The latter resonated in her tightening stomach. The panel animated and morphed under her touch to expose the atmospheric controls she wanted, and she jammed her thumb on a wide orange icon labelled “pressurize.”



“You jerking my leash, Commander?” she bit back reflexively, regretting it immediately. Every time she felt the need to challenge Sam’s authority, she did so by reminding him he owned her. Holding the deed to an imperial slave had always made him uncomfortable. But she had come with the ship and one did not turn down the gift of an Imperial Clipper from a Duke. Since then, he had taken her on as a copilot and taught her much of what she now knew of ship operations. She painfully awaited his reply.



“You’ve got five minutes,” he finally sighed into her ear, the resignation in his words twisting her gut into more knots. “If you’re not back up here by then, strap into something. I’m precharging the drive now, and I mean to cane it.”



Her jaw was set firm by now, so she didn’t thank him. The hissing and whirring of the cargo bay air circulators was slowly becoming audible. For the first time in what seemed like forever, she tore her gaze from the display panel to glance at the bay access door. She carefully unhooked her feet from the retention rail on the floor, and gently glided herself to one of the vertical rails flanking the doorframe. Though the handle could be used to lever the cargo bay open if power failed, all it took was a few degrees of a twist to have the servo rail take over. With a short hiss and breeze of air it gaped open.



The ship’s corridors were dim, but the cargo bay was downright foreboding. Gone were the smooth white plastics, soft metal surfaces, and spacious hallways that made Gutamaya a luxury brand. She was now in a dark, cramped world of bare metal and painted warnings illuminated with minimal, cream-colored spot lamps. Despite her core-world upbringing, she wasn’t the type to shy away from getting her hands dirty. But her belly continued to ratchet down in size the further she pushed onward.





In front of her, not two meters from the access door, was a large block of metal that didn’t match the color of any of the structure supporting it. In fact, most of it didn’t match itself. Score marks, uneven patches, and occasional rough graffiti adorned the otherwise standardized cargo container that hadn’t been there some ten minutes before. The bay itself only had a four-container capacity, but in the darkness just the one was enough to dwarf her. Its chamfered edges were well outside her arm-span, and in the forced proximity she could see frost already collecting on the surface, as if consuming it. She didn’t know if it was thermodynamics or knowledge of what was inside that chilled her, but she suppressed a shiver.



Using rails welded to the cargo bay’s back wall, it didn’t take long to reach where two of the containers sat side-by-side. The space between them was a black sliver of empty air to narrow to fit a person. But the railings split above and below to give access to the triangular spaces left near the ceiling and floor by the fact that they weren’t square in cross-section. Normally, there would be maintenance access ports on all four of these chamfers, but given the state of disrepair the cargo container was in she wasn’t confident she’d find a working one on the first try. Pirates weren’t known for handling their cargo with a gentle touch.



They had been raiding Kumo Crew transports on their home turf on and off for months. Usually, they just focused a pair of beam lasers on their quarry until they dumped their cargo, arranging to have the “salvage” picked up by someone else. They had managed to cause a lot of economic damage along the borders of pirate-held space, costing the Crew and their benefactors hundreds of millions of credits in a three-month period.



This week’s salvage fleet was a pair of Lakon Type-9’s flying Utopian colors, and one of them had been half-laden when the ambush came. No one knew how the Crew had found them hiding in normal space between planets. The Hookshot had shown up in time to melt the three smaller ships down, but not before they had crippled one of the transports. These four containers she was gliding between were all they could take on before the Utopians bugged out for repairs. They likely wouldn’t be coming back; the operation was over for now.



Time was running short, so when Marie came to the isosceles gap near the top of the bay she didn’t pause before swinging her feet out and nudging herself down between the containers, moving as quickly as she dared. The darkness was thicker in this makeshift crawlspace, but there was a spot lamp illuminating a portion of each container where there was expected to be a maintenance panel. If both panels were carelessly damaged, she wouldn’t have time to slide all the way out to the back of the bay and check the other side. Despite her need for haste, she caught herself hoping.



Whether luck was with her or against her she couldn’t tell. Pulling hard on a railing about halfway down the length off the containers, she could see at a glance that the panel to her left had been welded shut to accommodate a rough patch. The one to her right, however, was dented once but otherwise pristine. This hatch was bare metal with a short handle, and was about the third of the size that would accommodate a person.



For a moment, her hand refused to teach out to the lever that would expose the container’s maintenance panel, her belly cringing painfully and her teeth grinding. Her eyes shut hard, and with and exhale she forced her fingers to action. As the hatch opened, the screen beneath sparked to life, bathing the dark crawlspace in a dull orange glow not unlike the holographic displays in the cockpit.





Unlike the fancy control interfaces on the Hookshot, the monitor here was controlled by a keyboard and touchpad arranged beneath it. A red error message at the bottom of the display told her what she already knew, that the manifest and diagnostics system had been disconnected from the container’s transponder array. Like many things the pirates considered standard procedure, this was the quickest and cheapest way to keep secrets. She didn’t bother trying to repair the connection. The cargo container would tell her all she needed to know, the Utopians had made sure of that.



Her hesitation had by now finally surrendered, and was now content to simply vice-grip her intestines as she worked at the keypad. All that was left was to go through the motions.



The pirate economy flowed on rivers of flesh. The twelve “lots” the manifest reported were stored here weren’t volunteers or debtors with rights protected by their government like Marie. They were men and women taken from their families to—the manifest reported matter-of-factly—serve in a lithium mine deeper in pirate space until the work, disease, or violence ended them. If each of the containers the ship carried were filled like this one, there were another thirty-six souls aboard, which is what truly drove Sam to want to beat a hasty retreat without further confrontation.



Digging through the manifest some more, she found one of them that matched the profile she was looking for. Much worse, she found three. She pulled up the monitor for the first stasis pod with a few quickly typed commands, and on the display glowed a monochrome image of the bust of a man. He looked to be in his mid-twenties with a dark complexion and eyes closed as if asleep. His left cheek was marred by the black brand of the Kumo Crew, what they called “the mark.” The telemetry of his pod reported he was in good health. Whatever other corners the Crewers cut, they did in service of making sure the life-support pods were in working order. This man was money to them, as she had been to some anonymous broker years before.



He still had his standard identification chip. Most every citizen in the civilized galaxy had one under their skin somewhere. The Federation liked to place them in the forearm, but this man had his pushed in where his neck met his right shoulder. She wanted to feel surprised, desperately craving the numbness of shock. Her own neck suddenly throbbed where her imperial ident chip rested.



Her fingers had stopped moving, but this time because they had completed their work. On the monitor now was all the information the man’s ident chip had to offer. It had been tampered with, of course, but she could see his given name was Romus. Age, twenty-seven. Weight, forty-one kilograms…



Occupation, Regulated Imperial Slave. His owner’s identification tag had been replaced with a single asterix character. His transaction history had been deliberately corrupted. Had he completed the Kumo Crews’ processing, the chip would have been removed entirely, like most everyone else sleeping in the cargo bay. This one had been the first she had even checked. The first of three with working ident chips. The first of four containers. The first time in several months of raids that she had had direct access to the cargo they had liberated.



And every last one of them could have been her.



“Sam?” her voice echoed out into the dark. She barely remembered to tap her earpiece to make it work.



“I’m here.” He sounded crestfallen. “You find what you were looking for?”



“It’s not your fault, Sam,” she responded to his tone instead of his words.





“What do you want to do, Marie?” he asked in her ear, some of the previous urgency returning to his voice. Only now had she become aware of the tell-tale hum of charged frameshift drive capacitors.



“Let’s take them home,” she said as she grasped the utility rail above her and started pulling herself back toward the corridor from whence she came. The spartan cargo bay lights shut off in sequence behind her, leaving only the still-open container maintenance panel for illumination.



The orange glow wrapped around a single spherical ball of moisture suspended in the air where her eye had been.