Free Sliding Void by Stephen Hunt

using human navigators. Most humans lasted a maximum of five jumps before they had to be retired. After that, they just went crazy, chasing the hyperspace high. Kept on jumping their ship all the way to the next galaxy until the skipper put a bullet through their skull. Artificial intelligences can navigate a jump without getting addicted, but then you’ve just made your ship smart enough to want to bug off and do something more interesting than carrying fleshies about like donkey rides on the beach. Hell, even I’d get addicted if I tried to jump us. My brain’s wiring is too damn close to yours for it to be otherwise.’
    ‘It is not a drug,’ insisted Polter. ‘To travel hyperspace is to travel through the lowest plane of heaven. When you breech the mortal world, you are connecting with God. It the holy bliss of the maker of all things that I feel. The kaggenish are the godliest of all creatures, thus it is we may travel within the creator’s rapture and blessing.’
    ‘So you say,’ observed Zeno.
    ‘I keep on hoping for a miracle every time we jump,’ smiled Lana. ‘Like we might exit at some shit-hole world and find our anti-matter engines have been upgraded with some nice new shiny Rolls Royce models. Or discover my cargo holds have been filled with precious metals. That’s the sort of service this girl would be happy with if I were sliding heaven, rather than sliding void.’
    ‘God sends us life, revered skipper,’ corrected Polter, ‘that we might shape miracles from its raw materials.’
    ‘And right now we’ve been sent six-foot of disenfranchised nobleman,’ said Lana, banging Calder’s arm. ‘Although I’m damned if Rex Matobo is any kind of prophet. Talking of which, where’s my oracle of the drive rooms? I’m sure I ordered Zack Paopao to the bridge to meet our new crew.’
    ‘I intercepted the chief’s response to your missive,’ said Skrat. ‘The old boy was not particularly polite. The gist, I believe, was that he’s rather too busy to run about on ship socials when the engines are falling apart around his ears. There was considerably more profanity in his original memo, however.’
    ‘That’s not a memo, that’s a cry for help,’ said Lana. She nodded slyly toward Calder. ‘And I think that’s just the place for a new crew on his uppers to learn the ropes on board. Wouldn’t you say?’
    Calder had to wonder why all the others started laughing. The joke, I suspect, is on me .
     
    ***
     
    Calder rode the rickety transport tube down the length of the Gravity Rose , listening to the bleeping of a short bipedal robot that was supposedly leading him towards the engine rooms. The low-level machine accompanying him was nothing like Zeno. A boxy four-foot tall slab of electronics with short waddling pipe-like legs. A collection of tool arms hung off either side in lieu of arms – little more than steel poles with pincers, diagnostic sensors, cutters, welders and assorted other tools. The robot had a single eye in the top-right hand corner of its flat casing, a lens behind a circle of glass that would open or contract as it stared short-sightedly at its human charge, whirring each time it refocused. It hummed and hawed and impatiently stamped its steel feet as it stood in front of the control panel at the transparent capsule’s nose. Every now and then, the robot would intersperse a single word among the digital birdsong coming from the speaker on its front – usually follow or sometimes engines . Calder had experienced his first episode of Hell Fleet now, served by Zeno like a pusher feeding a new client. Calder’s avatar had started out as a console tech and board swapper in Hell Fleet , a junior programmer attached to a carrier vessel’s SysMaint division. It seemed an unglamorous start, but then, as Zeno had later proposed, that was the point. Most of the sims’ audience were stuck in similarly mundane white and blue collar jobs across the alliance. Such lowly origins