Chapter 114: I Guess I’m Strong, Then?

I never actually figured out how to land in Sean’s time-line out of order. It’s like he’s blasting through time in a straight line, and I’m corkscrewing around him. If he isn’t around, I might jump ahead ten years. If he’s the destination, it’s always a few weeks or months after the last time I saw him.

I’ve never seen him in the future, so I don’t know for sure that he gets tough. But given how many people are looking for him every damn place I go, I suspect it pretty damn hard.

First thing I have to do anywhere I show up is figure out if anyone seems to recognize me. If they do, it means Sean fucked something or someone up, and I’ve got trouble to deal with. If I get far enough in to the future, half the time it’s because I need to deal with someone who’s trying to find him through me. It’s a pain in the ass.

I’m proud of him.

The Glorious Jeff Greco

—

“So how far is this place?”

“Did your planet have warp drives? Or anything like them?”

“No.”

“Then you wouldn’t understand the distance. It’s basically on the other side of the universe, in an inconvenient way.” Itto pulled a seatbelt across his chest. “Strap in.”

Sean sat down next to Itto, in what he suspected was supposed to be the second-in-command’s chair, and put the belt on. “Do I need these? For actual safety?”

“No, probably not, but the damn thing won’t take off without it.” Itto flipped some switches. “You’ve never been in a private craft?”

“Nope.”

“So, this one is pretty fast. Not very good in a fight, but fast. Going flat out, I could get you to that planet in a couple hours.”

“All the way across the universe? Uncountable light years away?”

“System bullshit. It’s complex. But the actual time we spend will be longer. Days, weeks. It just depends.”

“On what?”

Itto toggled a few more switches, checked some dials, and then appeared satisfied.

“There, good. Now we just wait for clearance.” He sat back in his chair. “It depends on that. Clearances. You get a few billion ships careening through the blackness and they tend to bump into each other. Not all routes are created equal, and the good ones tend to get clogged. The system controls traffic.”

“So we have to wait on the system to travel?”

“You don’t have to. You can go however you want. But when you get blown up or eaten by some deep-space challenge monster, it’s your own fault. I’m not taking that kind of a risk.”

“Got it.”

“The upside is, it’s pretty safe. Some people have jobs patrolling the popular routes, and there’s a lot of combat power at any given point of any given trip. You go slow, but you don’t get eaten.”

Itto opened up a compartment, sifting through various pendants, rings, and slips of paper before he found what he appeared to be looking for and tossed it to Sean.

“Put this on.”

“What is it?”

“Jamming ring. It takes up a jewelry spot.” Itto sat back again, looking to see if he had any communications clearing him to lift off. “When we leave the planet, the ship gets scanned, and scanned dozens of more times along the way. Jeff said to do this quietly, and to make you hard to track.”

“This does that?”

“Yeah, this ship has a few modifications that ring takes advantage of. It will make you pretty invisible.” The console in front of Itto started blinking, finally. “Ah, there it is. Prepare for liftoff.”

Sean braced himself, then relaxed after several seconds passed without anything happening.

“How long does this take?” Sean said. “You faked me out.”

“Look out the window, idiot.” Itto said.

Sean did. Not only was the spaceport gone, but the planet was completely out of view, too.

“It cracks me up. Every time, you tell some backwoods yokel the ship goes fast enough to clear the universe in an hour, and they expect it to take ten minutes to get you off a single planet.” He reached down and unclipped his belt, still chuckling. “I told you these things were useless.”

—

“What are you looking at?” Itto asked. Sean was sitting on a ledge set up near the bottom of a window, staring out into literal space. Itto didn’t make a lot of noise moving around, and as Sean started when he announced his presence.

“Nothing. Everything, I guess. There’s so many stars.” Out here, where there wasn’t any light except what the stars themselves put out, he could see distances he wouldn’t have imagined before. His eyes were working better than ever before, too, and the combination of those two things made his head spin with the knowledge of distances so vast he couldn’t have really imagined them before.

“Oh, yeah, huh.” Itto said. “That makes sense, I guess. I’ve been in ships pretty much my whole life, given what species I am. I can’t really imagine what it’s like for that not to just be normal.”

“Your species?”

“I’m a Yiggan. No, it doesn’t sound cute. You just would think anything sounds cute if it was attached to a small species.”

“You might be a lot of things, Itto. But cute isn’t really on the list for me.”

Itto snorted. “I don’t know if I should be glad or insulted. But Yiggans are spacefarers. We were spacefaring before the system, even. We had colonized ten worlds, before the system torched them all.”

“Apocalypse?”

“Yeah. Long before my time, but yeah. Now most of us live in ships. I’m one of the rare ones that spends much time planetside. Most of us just roam, doing odd delivery jobs, that kind of thing.”

“Not a bad life.”

Sean wasn’t kidding. Itto was working now, in a sense, without much to do. He had seen him circle the ship a few times checking on things, but over the course of a day he had probably only worked about an hour, and that had been mostly strolling. It was calm, probably the calmest environment Sean had been in since Cedarhelm’s grove.

“No, not bad. Although it’s not all like this. I’m a groundie, remember? I have to maintain contacts, bribe officials, all that. It’s periods of rest and periods of stress. I like the variety. Most of my people don’t. No lack of work, though. Always something one of my people needs handled planetside, somewhere, so long as I want to take the risk.”

“That’s cool. I actually wondered what you had on Eshla that made her compliant. Or at least to pretend to be. I didn’t want to ask.”

“I wouldn’t have told you before. Now that she’s dead, no big deal.” He said. “She made the mistake of letting her smuggler know what she liked, then trying to double cross him. There’s some honor and rules about smuggling, at least for me. But when she threw that out the window…”

Sean understood. He knew her for about 15 minutes total, and she tried to screw him over twice. There wasn’t much reason to use kid gloves on someone like that.

“You actually took care of a problem for me, honestly. It’s not easy to stop working with someone in this business. Anyone you have dirt on tends to have dirt on you, and she had plenty. I’m just surprised you could actually do it. Did she even hit you?”

Sean thought about it. She had nicked him, a couple times, nothing he couldn’t tank and mostly just with her body as she pivoted and swung trying to hit him.

“No. Honestly, she didn’t feel that strong.”

“Not that strong? Sean, she was the police chief for a good sized city. That’s a role that’s chosen based off strength, mostly. You could go back, right now, and probably kill everyone in that town, unless there’s a heavy hitter hiding out there for some reason. She was plenty strong. And you dominated her.”

“Huh. I guess I’m strong, then? A little?”

“At least a little.” Itto considered something for a moment. “Do you want to see how strong?”

—

Itto’s ship was big, by Sean’s standards, but he was beginning to see why someone like Eshla would have considered it little. An awful lot of it was taken up by functional, boring things. He had a cargo hold, apparently system-enhanced to make some of the issues related to moving things around the universe a bit easier, but also system-restricted to that use. The engines on the ship were huge, running all the way from the visible part on the rear of the exterior of the ship through the body of the ship in a huge tube. Once things like bathrooms and a modest amount of sleeping quarters were accounted for, the remaining rooms were limited and space was at a premium.

Still, Itto had dedicated one of them to a workout room. From his explanation of things, the system enhanced what you already had, in terms of body. Somewhere under all of Sean’s stat enhancements and skills, there was still a mostly human chassis that everything the system did was bolted on to. Being in excellent baseline shape wasn’t a huge difference, since the system and stats were so powerful, but it was a difference.

“My people mostly use tech. You saw my big gun. That’s how I fight, when I have to, or with the ship. It takes advantage of our MAG skills, without all that fiddly wizard training some people do. But you won’t see many tanks among us, or strength and vitality builds in general. We’d always be running some small percentage behind.”

“But you still lift?”

“I lift and run. Do some vision exercises, which don’t work for everyone. And it helps. You wouldn’t believe how often it helps. Not everyone believes this, but I think the system influences things to keep things close more often than they should be. A little edge is a big edge a lot of the time.”

Sean walked over the the weights. They were tiny, and not in the sense that they were sized for Itto. There were weights with labels ranging from small numbers all the way to hundreds or thousands of the same units, all the same size as each other, and all only about 3” across.

“Why are these so small? And all the same size?”

“Small so I can store them, and have more equipment in the room, and also fit more shit in here if I get something the normal ship’s storage won’t handle. It’s just good policy to keep everything as small as possible on a ship, usually. And the same size because they are expensive as hell to make, but once you get mass-altering magic involved there’s no reason not to have them uniform.”

“Makes sense.” Sean picked up one of middling-heavy weights, and bounced it in his hand. It actually gave him an idea for how to screw with the Trash Compactor, now that he was getting close to finishing the second version of it. “Can I possibly buy one of these weights off you? Or a couple of them?”