Too Good To Be True: Chapter 1

The tall, lanky Quillian slid into the booth across from the beautiful Bollian with the blue-gray eyes. He exhibited more grace than the average Quillian, not knocking either of his upper knees against the table or his lower knees on the seat. He grinned across the table at the beautiful woman, both reading her eyes for her intentions and displaying his intentions in his own. His tall, rabbit-like ears stood erect atop his bald head and his arms crossed over his chest. It was the odd Quillian arm-cross, with the midarms tucked in where a normal human's forearm would go, his lower elbow on each arm tucked into the other arm's upper elbow, and his forearms dangling down from there.

His arm-cross would only look odd to someone who'd never seen a Quillian before, though, and there weren't many of those on Olpath. Surely, the delectable Bollian beauty had seen her fair share of Quillians and - if Quincy was reading her face correctly - she did not disapprove. His grin widened.

He regarded her full, glossy lips as he considered how to start the conversation. There was much he wanted to discuss with this woman but really, he was here for business and business - sadly - had to come first.

"You must be Prialla Thrombia," he said through a smile. He intentionally put a slight emphasis on the word "must" and - perhaps unintentionally - on the "Thromb."

She nodded. "And you are mister Merriweather?" Her voice was a song. As beautiful - if that were possible - as she herself.

"Completely," he said. Apparently, she was all business as well. No bother, he thought. If business is good we'll have plenty of time together in flight.

"Sultia," said Quincy, letting the name play across his tongue. "is also Bollian?"

Wait until Chuck hears this, he thought. Then he changed his mind. Chuck won't care about that. All the more for me, then.

Inwardly, Quincy cursed his partner. Nothing red-flags you as a rookie crew like leaving critical information off of your ad. Like how much cargo you can carry.

Prialla continued, "And also, can you take both standard and half-size containers?"

Quincy quickly did the math. half-crates were actually one-eighth the size of a full crate. Their name came from the fact that a full crate was 2 meters on a side, while a half crate was 1 meter on a side. So eight half-crates would fit in the same space as a single full crate.

The ship's cargo bay would hold 15 full crates, or 7 full crates plus ... he frowned. 64 half-crates. They had no storage bays for the other 32 half-crates.

"No..." he said. "No. I just... I'm the navigator. I'm a bit embarrassed but I don't actually know if we can take half-crates. Can I make a call?"

Quincy knew for a fact that the ship could take half crates. All 15 storage slots were fully capable of storing both half and full crates. That was not why he was calling.

Quincy was concerned with storing the 36 other half crates. They had three staterooms, all on B Deck.

Quincy further knew that the larger of the staterooms was just over 2 meters tall and 3 by 4 meters in area. That would hold 24 half-crates. But there was one thing he didn't know.

Quincy shut off the communicator by clenching his jaw, and returned to the lovely but pensive Bollian with a renewed smile on his face. "We can accommodate you. All hundred and three crates. No problem."

Quincy smiled back. Things were looking up for him and his friend Chuck, now co-owners of their own space ship. What had started as a dodgy enterprise - at best - was coming together nicely...

Pilot's Log

Date: October 19th, 523 AG

Location: Olpath, The Outliers

Time: 11:28GT (07:28 local Sunday)

Hi! This is my first log entry. I can't wait to show Quincy the ship. He's going to be so shocked. :)

I hope he likes her as much as I do.

What should we name her?

END LOG

Chuck Williams' face was bright with excitement. The scraggly peach-fuzz that sufficed as his beard bristled as best it could in the morning sun and his arms stretched out to either side to emphasize just how great his achievement was. His smile was the wide, unassuming smile of a child expecting praise.

Quincy Merriweather regarded his friend, and what his friend was showing him, with a disdain that was only tempered by ignorance.

"It's a space ship," answered Quincy. He hoped his simple statement would convey to his friend that he had no idea why, at this early hour of the morning, Chuck had dragged him from his bed in their small apartment, to the Olpath City Spaceport.

And, indeed, it was a space ship. Quincy had pretty much hit the mark with his observation. But it wasn't just any space ship. It was squat, not exactly small but far from large. It was roughly the shape of a brick with a wedge stuck on one end, or a tall house that had fallen on its side.

No, he decided, it was assuredly more of a brick than a house. A brick with wings, a tail fin, and a blister-bubble on its roof that he assumed was a small-caliber mounted turret.

Quincy scratched his bald Quillian head and looked at the ship again. "It's ugly?" he offered, truly not knowing what his friend was expecting.

Chuck visibly deflated, lowering his arms a little and lessening his smile to merely normal smile proportions. "Quincy!"

And it was. It was a brick with wings. A large open cargo door on the bottom half of the front triangle showed him a tiny cargo bay. The entire ship appeared to be 3 stories - so maybe 7 or 8 meters - tall and the same amount wide, and probably half as much more long. The proportions weren't wrong per-se, just... unappealing.

"Yeah?" said Chuck, regaining his exuberance. "Well there's something you don't know that may make this ship a bit more attractive to you."

"Oh?" said Quincy, eager to receive the knowledge that his friend appeared unwilling to simply impart on him.

Quincy blinked. He could feel his heartbeat increasing. His right ear, which his mother had spent so much money on classes so he could learn to keep it upright, began drooping. His knees, all four of them, buckled. This new knowledge didn't make the ship any more attractive at all.

Chuck nodded. If the Rigidian's hair ever grew longer than a centimeter, it would have shook he was nodding so violently.

Quincy blinked, his Quillian brain wrapping itself around a word in the sentence. It took him a bit of time to figure out first what word he objected to, and another few moments to figure out exactly why he objected to it. When he zeroed in on what was bothering him, he repeated the word back to Chuck as forcefully as he could.

Quincy began pacing quickly, back and forth. His two wobbly, two-kneed Quillian legs keeping up with his fretting as best they could. It was absurd, he thought to himself. Chuck couldn't have put him on a loan as a cosigner. Banks don't take cosigners on faith. He'd have had to be there, and since he wasn't, there's no way Chuck could have used him to get a loan.

Quincy stopped and looked at his former friend agape. "Oh, no. No no Chuck. Tell me you didn't get a loan to buy a space ship... from a loan shark!"

Chuck sighed, angrily. "Of course not. What do you take me for? I got the loan from a real, actual, bank."

AutoLog

Date: October 19th, 523 AG

Location: Olpath, The Outliers

Time: 12:00GT (08:00 local Sunday)

Environment Check

Temp: 22°C

Air: 0.98atm, Breathable, Healthy

Gravity: 0.97G

Ship State: Level, Landed, Secured, Locked, Standby

END LOG

Quincy sat opposite his supposed friend at a booth in the restaurant nearest the spaceport. It was a dive, but Quincy did not care. Chuck also apparently did not care, but Quincy didn't care about that either. A grease fire could have started on their table and Quincy would have not cared. He cared about one thing.

Chuck nodded. "Come on, Quince. We've been wanting to do this for years. Years."

Quincy frowned. He actually remembered saying that. "That's not what I said at all."

"No," said Quincy. "I said..." he lowered his voice, looked far away and injected as much hope, wistfulness and longing that he could. "We should get a space ship... Get off this rock."

Quincy kept his voice in the same tone. "You hear this? This isn't my normal voice. This is my hopeful voice. My someday voice. It means I'm dreaming and am not really serious."

Quincy frowned, stared his friend in the face and snapped, "This is my normal voice."

Quincy pounded the table so hard that the silverware and glasses - and Chuck - jumped. "Chuck! You can't sink everything into a space ship and just... What? Take off into space and make a fortune!"

"Look. Quincy. Listen to me. You do ad copy and I work in a mail room. We're almost thirty. This isn't what we went to school to learn. I was top of my class in pilot school and you're the best navigator I know. Just because we didn't get bought out by TranSpace doesn't mean we shouldn't be out there!"

Quincy paused. He had no comeback for this argument, because he actually agreed with it.

Chuck continued. "This is our chance. No bosses. No schedules. No working all week and then hanging out on the weekend, waiting for Monday. We can haul cargo. Not a lot but enough to keep us in the black. That ship out there's small, but she's fast. We could run blockades. Help people, even. Make money. Get a better ship."

"You realize that a ship that size, you need to be carrying stuff all the time to make a profit. Do you have anything lined up? Do you have a prospect? A hint of one, even?"

Chuck balked. "Well, not so much, no. But I already put an ad up, both on the net and in the port."

"Oh, that's all?" He paused, and damned himself for his next words. "Okay. I'm in for now. But if we don't get a prospect today that pays for the month I'm out. You got that? We sell the ship and pay the loan shark back, and you pay off the rest of the loan on your own."

"After breakfast," said Chuck between shoveled mouthfuls of food, "you want to see her?"

They called the waitress over, who handed them their check. Chuck looked, embarrassed, at the check and then at Quincy.

Navigator's Log

Date: October 19th, 523 AG

Location: Olpath, The Outliers

Time: 13:42GT (09:42 local Sunday)

There, Chuck. I made a log. Are you happy?

END LOG

"3 staterooms, one over-sized. So we can each have our own cabin and then have another one for passengers. We can do cargo and carry a passenger or two in the same run, or do passengers WITH cargo which is where the money seems to be."

Quincy stood in the short hallway that ran up the port side of B Deck and looked at the three doorways. Two were along the long starboard wall, and the third was at the hallway's end, leading into the over-sized front room.

He glanced into each room. The two rear staterooms were small - maybe 4 by 3 meters - but each had a large bed that folded up, a desk and couch that did the same, and a good sized circular window. The windows were each opposite a window in the hallway. The third and largest room at the front of the ship would probably be the captain's cabin normally, but they wouldn't have a captain. The room was a large square - 6 meters on a side - and had a large bed, two desks, small private half bathroom and wide front window. Quincy whistled.

The "lift," as Chuck called it, was more of a tube or - more accurately - a set of two holes in the interior decks of the ship. In the floor of the cargo bay on C Deck and in the ceiling of A Deck - which Quincy had not yet been to - were plates that kept anything between them at zero gravity. So you could, from the cargo bay, jump all the way up to the top deck of the ship with little effort. There was also a ladder in the rear wall for more pedestrian travel through the tube. Chuck had - probably with hours of practice before waking Quincy up - perfected running up to the tube from the cargo bay, leaping against the rear wall, and rebounding off of it to B Deck.

"You gotta see the cockpit," said Chuck, leaping into the tube to perform his ascent to the top deck of the ship - A Deck.

Quincy decided he'd stick to the ladder for now. As his head cleared the floor he saw a mid-sized room with a small kitchen, a door to what he assumed was the ship's main bathroom, and a small door on the back wall that probably led to a crawlspace into the ship's engine. At the front end of the kitchen was a sealed tube that connected to the ceiling. Based on its location, he guessed it was the seat for the underpowered turret.

"The mess," corrected Chuck with a smile. "And there's the head. This little door goes to the rel-drive access though we won't have to use it much. The conventional drives are on the outside of the ship behind the wings."

He strode to the front of the kitchen, and the door opened automatically for him. Doors on ships had been doing that for centuries but Chuck still reveled in it, "...is the cockpit."

Quincy's demeanor changed instantly when he stepped though the door. The cockpit was, from the point of view of the pilot and navigator, the most important room on a ship. The ship was controlled from here; it was the seat (or in this case the seats) of power.

Throughout his tour of the ship, Quincy had been fighting off small disappointments. The staterooms were a little too small. The cargo bay was middling. The bomb bay was unnecessary and the lift had no lift. The kitchen was fine but understocked, and the turret would probably elicit more laughter than fear. The initial excitement that he had caught from Chuck in the restaurant had in small bits, as he made his way through the ship, faded. But the cockpit...

Firstly, it had room to move. There were two main seats placed in front of the huge front window, for pilot and copilot, and three workstations placed around the room facing each wall. One was navigation, and the other two were for communications and interior monitoring. He expected that the turret, bomb bay, and other controls were accessible from each. Along the walls were hooks, doors, switches, controls, monitors, and gauges. The chairs were attached to rails that allowed quick transfer to any of the 3 auxiliary workstations, and looked very comfortable to boot.

The rest of the ship, inside and out, looked to be designed by a committee with a goal to get as many different aspects of a space ship into as small a package as possible, with little to no concern on how to place the pieces or if they were even necessary. The cabin, though, wasn't designed by a committee. It had been designed - possibly lovingly - by someone who lived in space and who wanted to fly through it for the rest of his life.

Chuck watched his friend's reaction, allowed the majesty of the room to sink in, and added the cherry to the top of the sundae. "The copilot seat has all the navigation controls too."