Short Story: The Sagittarius Sniper

The Sagittarius Sniper

Gino breathed a sigh of relief when, after one more jump, he was looking at the cold blue light of Sagittarius Gate.

The trip from Maribel had taken more than two months – months Gino had spent completely alone in the tiny crew compartment of Ida's Venture. The autopilot had done most of the work, leaving the one-man crew to perform maintenance, read, watch archived vidcasts, and do anything else to avoid paying attention to the perfect solitude through which his ship was traveling.

For all that Gino had crossed the Sagittarius Gap voluntarily, he'd decided after only two jumps that he hated the Gap with a passion that exceeded all rationality. It was more than that, though. Gino had become convinced that the Gap hated him back. Too many things had gone wrong in transit for him to believe anything else.

The trouble had started only a few jumps out from Maribel. Despite having been overhauled before departure, his star drive unit had failed early in the trip and then twice farther in, each requiring him to suit up and clamber out onto the hull for several hours to make repairs. The atmospherics had broken down once, the navigation computer had lost its course four times, and the food synthesizer had broken down twice, the second time, despite all Gino's efforts, permanently. For the last week of his transit, the lone spacer had been gulping down evil-tasting nutrient sludge without the benefit of the machine's ministrations, fighting his gag reflex with every meal.

Still, despite the best efforts of the Gap, he'd made it through, and now the star which had been a faint pinprick in his astrogation telescope from Maribel was a blazing mote dead ahead, impossible to look directly at without the aid of the smart-glass of his cockpit dome.

Gino set a leisurely course in-system toward the star, flicking on his wide-angle radio receiver to let the purest static fill the ship. Sagittarius Gate was empty and had been since the beginning of time. The giant, temperamental star had no planets, only an orbital ring of scorched asteroids. Only brief, hesitant visits from explorers like Gino himself had ever livened up the place.

From Saggitarius Gate, most of the previous explorers had gone on to other stars near the Sagittarius shore, looking for habitable planets. Gino had other ideas; he wanted nothing to do with planets and had no affiliation with Survey. Gino was a businessman, and Sagittarius Gate was an investment.

As soon as Gino had set the autopilot onto a course that would suit his needs, he left the controls and climbed down the ladder into the depths of the ship to a control panel hastily installed in an aft-facing bulkhead. Behind that bulkhead, he knew that control cabling ran into the unpressurized bulk of Ida's Venture, where it began the process of warming up huge banks of machinery which had been powered down in transit. As he watched, the panel's indicators lit up red, then turned one by one to yellow, then to green, and finally to blue. The payload – a rather large, high-quality mass fabricator – had survived the trip. The deck below Gino's feet shuddered as the payload installed in the old cargo hauler's hull unfolded and began a battery of self-tests. Satisfied, he headed back up to the cockpit.

Gino didn't get even halfway up the ladder before something went wrong. A screeching noise like tearing metal carried through the structure of the ship, accompanied by a flickering of the overhead lights. Gino hesitated, fighting panic, wondering whether he should hurry to the cockpit or the payload console he'd just departed.

As he hesitated, there was a second shriek and the ship's gravitics failed. Gino, suddenly weightless, pulled himself up toward the cockpit, he tried to focus on the bright side of his predicament – after all, when the gravitics had failed, the overhead lighting had stopped flickering, and the shrieking sound seemed to fade away as well.

Reaching the cockpit and awkwardly strapping himself into the pilot's seat, Gino checked the readouts. Everything was still green, except the gravitics, which were off, as if they had been powered down. A quick view of the cameras in the evacuated hold showed the payload to have shut down in a partially unfolded state, with no sign of damage that could have caused the metal-tearing screech.

Gino jabbed the control to restart the ship's gravitic axis, then watched the readout as it went through its startup sequence. Everything appeared normal, and soon enough, he felt the tug of amplified gravity, weak at first but increasing steadily.

Now more confused than concerned, Gino kicked off every diagnostic sequence Ida's Venture had. Mechanical problems this far from home were bad enough; even a minor unaddressed failure could cost his life on the return trip. He was almost unsurprised when none of the diagnostics discovered any errors, except that the ship was evidently slightly off course.

Gino, resigning himself to manually checking every system, cable feed, and relay on the ship, climbed back down the ladder and shrugged on a vacsuit. As far as he could tell, the problem had started when he'd activated the payload; most likely, the fault would be found there, in machinery he hadn't even looked at while crossing the Gap.

The payload, half-unfolded, looked like a titanic horror crouched at the back of its lair, waiting for a chance to spring. Fortunately, even when it was on, the mass fabricator ate only asteroids and metal debris, and then only on his command. As Gino pushed off from the airlock doorway toward his monster, he could see nothing wrong; evidently, the machine had simply failed and stopped all motion partway through a diagnostic. Only when he got closer did he see the problem. There was a hole large enough to accommodate his helmet in the machine's housing, directly over the mass fabricator's control unit.

Cursing into his helmet, the lone entrepreneur clambered up to examine the damage. It was, if anything, worse than he'd thought. The hole, edges neither burnt nor shattered, bored cleanly through the heart of the gigantic machine and out the other side. Gino could even see that there was a hole in the inner paneling of the hold – and, he realized, probably a matching hole in the outer hull.

Looking in the opposite direction, he saw the entry wound – a perfectly circular opening behind him, directly in line with the damage to his machinery.

Hell." Gino muttered to himself, seeing the promise of fame and fortune which had brought him to Sagittarius vanish into the void. "Did someone just shoot at me?"

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Originally posted on Cosmic Background on 2946-06-12.