Hailing Frequencies (Part 2)
A/N: Yes, it's finally here! I don't know how many of you were waiting for it, but Springworld is back and it's getting gayer as we speak! Follow for Part 3, or if you're feeling nostalgic, head on over to the Springworld site on Neocities which I have somehow taught myself enough HTML to make work on both desktop and mobile. (There's a cute cursor on desktop though.)
Petal was a smuggler. You wouldn't think that looking at him. Or maybe you would. I don't know you. But be aware, he was just a little guy. A bunny boy! Even for a lagoform, his ears were big, and the way they flopped down beneath that fluffy mess of red hair obscuring his face gave him the air of an adorable plushie come to life. He was a lop, and with all the intended impartiality in the world, it was hard for most creatures to see him as anything other than a cute, cuddly fuzzbrain who didn't know the meaning of the word "smuggler," let alone how to trawl nullboards for illicit spacehop jobs.
It's not like Petal had intended to be a smuggler. Few young bunnies stand up at Show & Tell with a hacked datapad and regale their classmates with aspirations to a life of crime, danger, and paranoid self-isolation, and fewer still are the guidance counselors who might advocate for such a path, or the career aptitude tests that would mention the criminal profession outside the bounds of a heady word problem on the math and logic portion. But things happen, life doesn't always go as you think it will, plans change, and career aptitude tests have always been of more use to the people who run factories and armies than to the people taking them. Imposed destinies are a dime a dozen, but they don't come in very many sizes, after all. The fact is, Petal was good at smuggling, though he hadn't been doing it very long, and if creatures tended to underestimate him due to silly things like the shape of his ears, so much the better—as long as his employers knew he meant business, it was better that way. Who did he think he needed to impress?
It's not like he had many folks to impress, anyway. Planetside, maybe. Not out here where you weren't weaving through traffic so much as looking for three molecules close enough to juggle. It was quiet out here, not in the way that nighttime is quiet on the far side of your local star, but in the way that death is, or the time before you were born. Fathomless, both in yawning depth and mystery, unshrouded but empty, unresponsive, baffling in every way. It was space, but it wasn't a place—just an unlit alleyway between where one system ended and another began. A distance like that couldn't be reckoned like a little jaunt between planets, the numbers lost all meaning in the face of actually traversing such a gulf. Even time didn't work right out here, not if your engines were functioning properly, and you couldn't rely on your own senses to tell you much more than if you were hungry, sleepy, or needed to piss. A trip like this, a job like this one, could only ever be properly accounted for by the fuel it took to propel the agreed-upon cargo from point A to point B, and by the evident wear on the ship whenever the work was done.
There was a reason most of these long-haul jobs went to bots and augments—nobody paid extra for the psychological toll it took to spend so long alone, surrounded by nothing but the ship you rode in on and the certain knowledge that, if something were to go wrong, the chance of a rescue was effectively zero. It wouldn't even be worth trying to recover the cargo. Nobody with a lick of sense was going to let themselves be implicated in this venture, even if they knew where to look, because plotting a course through deep space meant sticking to approved lanes for approved travelers, or avoiding them like the plague if you weren't one.
Petal somehow got the feeling that he wasn't one.
That had never stopped him so far, though.
Turning to the viewscreen, Petal once again examined the readout: SHIP ON COURSE. NO EXTERNAL HEAT SIGNATURES DETECTED WITHIN HAILING FREQUENCIES, it had said for the past however long. Though he wasn't technically supposed to be using this lane, the chances of running into anyone else out here, even on an approved shipping route, were literally astronomical, and the onboard navigation system collaborated with an impressive array of sensors to make sure he really was alone out here. SHIP ON COURSE, he read at a quick glance. EXTERNAL HEAT SIGNATURES DETECTED WITHIN HAILING FREQUENCIES. There, you see? Nothing to worry about.
He sighed, curling up in the pilot's seat, once again thanking his past self for having the foresight to install aftermarket smart-gel cushions in the old craft. They buoyed his soft body up against the effects of artificial gravity out in space, or real gravity planetside, and protected his neck from whiplash during sudden bursts of real acceleration. He didn't know what the old transport pilots used to do in such situations, back when this ship had been used for more above-board operations. Die, he guessed. Maybe that was the reason he'd gotten the ship so cheap, after all. Damn. He thought it had been his boyish charms.
Petal pulled out his datapad and checked the manifest for the 13 billionth time. Of course, it didn't have the actual names of what he was carrying, that would have been a risk, and boyish charms or no, Petal was not inclined to fly in the face of fate from too many directions at once. A light on the primary viewscreen blinked, barely registering in the corner of his vision as he scrolled through the list in front of him. PREFABRICATED ALUMINUM SANITATION UNIT x12, said the first entry, causing him to yawn at the sheer dullness of it. That was good, maybe too good. He'd intentionally chosen aliases for his illicit goods that wouldn't inspire many questions, but now he wondered if he'd gone too boring. He'd have a hard time accounting for his supposed cargo if simply reading the names was enough to put him to sleep. Then again, it didn't take much. He was a cozy creature, at his center. It didn't matter if he was curled up in his overstuffed bed at home or halfway through a perilous leap between the stars, he couldn't help but get comfortable wherever he was, and if you were comfortable, who could help dozing off a little from time to time? Or all the time?
"And there's nothing wrong with that," he said to the absolute absence of anybody, who listened dutifully.
He turned back to the manifest again, blinking slowly just as the viewscreen blinked back, missing it entirely this time. PREFABRICATED ALUMINUM—no, that was the first one again. His head nodded downward as he put one small paw on the datapad, underlining the second entry.
REFURBISHED PERSONAL/SMALL INDUSTRIAL CONDENSATION AGGREGATOR x8, he read, barely getting the words to sound aloud in his brain before tumbling out the back of his skull. He'd once heard that prehistoric lagoforms had had brains that were literally smooth, and while he'd have been insulted at the insinuation coming from someone else, he sometimes secretly wondered if he had more in common with his distant ancestors than not.
Petal sighed again, a comfortable sound, and let the datapad dip down as he held it, his eyes beginning to droop closed as his leporine face relaxed. It would probably all work out, he thought. It always did. He stretched his arms out and yawned wide, then gathered himself in, slipping further into the accommodating embrace of his seat and tucking his knees up beneath his chin.
The light on the main viewscreen began to blink out a slow, methodical rhythm as a fuzzy chest rose and fell, a warm machine's silent lullaby for a very, very sleepy bunny boy. As Petal nodded off, the datapad slid lethargically from his paws and, with the damning grace of a melting glacier, began to press a button on the screen.
To be continued in Hailing Frequencies (Part 3) . . .
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