Melding Humans is illegal, in fact it’s very illegal!. You could get banged up for life if the cops got wind that you’d been messing about with that sort of stuff.  I’d never given it much thought before, before I ended up in the ‘facility’ that is.

Shit! …All I ever wanted  was a new ship and a couple of those fancy Company Contracts to keep me going long enough to finish off the payments.

I had it all worked out!.

Shit!… so much for dreams. A couple of months ago I had a ship. OK, so she was past her best and  she had a habit of venting atmosphere  now and then, but we got by. In fact, I was pulling a can full of Grade A ore when that bastard appeared out of nowhere with his weapons fully charged.

Shit!.. I had enough nickel in that can to cover the down payment. It was the best trip we’d had in years and I blew it. If  I’d have been paying more attention to scan I might have spotted him coming.... but instead of  watching my back I was dreaming about  the new ship I was going to buy with the money from the ore. He was on top of me before I knew what was happening.

Corona had pretty good defenses, I might have made it if I’d had the shields up and all the weapons charged. He’d cut the can free and blasted Corona with two impact torpedoes before I’d got the guns halfway charged. We were venting air through  two massively damaged plates. Corona had begun to spin around her long axis, a  grotesque dance of death to the music of howling klaxons. I’d repaired the cockpit release only a few days before the attack --- I'd got so bored on the long trip home that I’d fixed stuff that wasn’t bust! ---  so I pulled the pin and blew the holding bolts. That’s how I survived the wreck.  

I floated around in that tiny coffin for weeks before I was picked up. The cryo units did what they were supposed to do and even the distress beacon had held out until they’d picked me up. If I’d known who was doing the rescuing I might have preferred to stay lost!. But then…I don’t remember anyone asking me what I wanted.

 I knew a lot about the ‘facility’ now. In fact, I know everything that [name1] feels that I need to know in order to carry out all the dirty work that his devious, ambitious little schemes demanded. I was the perfect find for him!. I had no doting family waiting anxiously at some cosy Hab Station for my rare visits. No business partners waiting for a cut of the proceeds. I preferred to conduct business solely on my own account. It was easier that way,  and I got to keep all of the profits for myself.  No, nobody was going to miss one  more free-fall junkie who flew solo in a clapped out ore hauler between the Belt and Lunar One year after year for just enough money for the next trip. I think I have a half brother somewhere on Earth, but he turned out to be a one-gee and for all I know he probably died early in his one hundreds. Earth had that effect on you if you stayed there too long. The thought of all those poisons in the air made me shudder. I’ve always preferred my air scrubbed spotless by ships filters. Not that that would bother me now….I have enough filters stuffed into my nasal cavities to keep me on my feet in downtown LA for a week.

No….what bothered me most of all now was that I hadn’t even seen a woman for over a year….and with all this new hardware [name1] has installed in me I was beginning to think that it might have been that data input slot which triggered my last hard on!.

I’d been out of the ‘facility’ for a  week and I still had no idea where I was going except that I was heading in the general direction of Jupiter. They’d poured me into this slop bucket and launched it from the Low Earth Platform just a couple of days ago. I never got to see Earth of course, that would have been too much for them. I was shipped across orbit under a security net that even the Earth Security Commissioner would have been proud of. The celebrity status didn’t last long. I was heading out towards Jupiter in a ship that I was almost wearing. I knew that the chip in my head was talking to the tiny ship but they were keeping their conversations secret for the time being. All I had to do was eat the slop they called food and watch the data screens. Now and again I got to piss.

Jupiter came and went without so much as an I.D. call from the refueling station. That means that the ships’ profile hadn’t been logged according to Approach and Departure protocols. A and D were a bit fussy about that so now I guess I was illegal on top of everything else. And it looked like I was headed right on out to the jump point.

I’ve never felt comfortable with the concept of the jump. Somehow, long ago, someone had devised a way to allow a distant, Godforsaken spot in the Galaxy to reach out over the vastness of space and snatch a ship-full of people right out from under the nose of all known physical laws, then dump them, unceremoniously in said godforsaken spot nursing a headache and a stomach full of wriggling snakes.  I’ve never been across the void. The mere thought of jumping made me shiver inside. I wasn’t about to jump anywhere in this mote though, I knew that much. A  Jump Drive required a housing larger than fifty of these things piled together. But ships jumped both ways. I was on my  way to meet a ship at the jump point.

What kind of ship?.

Who was on board?.

What was I supposed to do when I got there?.

The unanswered questions just kept piling up.

I was a million kilometers or so from the imaginary boundary of the jump point when the information started to flow into my mind from the huge database tucked into one of my melded system chips. I felt the sudden flow of adrenaline as the systems kicked in. Instantly  alert, I scanned the readouts in front of me and acknowledged the results with a sudden flurry of automatic activity from my fingers into the keypads set into the ends of the slim armrests lying alongside my prone body.