Prologue
Prologue: Halwat
HT-2000 Bountiful Harvest
In Transit, Gamma Pavonis-Eta Indi,
December 30, 2237
Theeker Halwat groaned quietly as his alarm chimed on the bedside table; he reached out with his talon to ineffectually fumble at the alarm clock for a few moments before letting out an annoyed hiss, he sat up and reached over and turned the device off. It was not in the same spot he’d left it in. He always left the alarm within reach from where he slept in the middle of his bed.
Tabitha, he thought of at once. The Bountiful Harvest’s boatswain had been in here while he’d slept and moved the alarm out of his reach, he grumbled, but as he turned his head, he realised why she’d been in here. Breakfast of steak and eggs were sitting on a tray at the foot of the bed. Tabitha must have just been in here with them.
Halwat slid out of the covers and over to the foot of the bed, opened his jaw wide, and jammed the whole steak in his mouth, letting it sit on his tongue for a few moments before swallowing it whole. Delicious, he thought to himself before doing the same with the eggs.
Theeker Halwat was a sinai, with only four decently sharp fangs, chewing was beyond him, so he pretty much had to swallow everything whole. The appearance of shovelling food whole into his mouth was often unsettling to his human crewmembers, even the ones he’d known for years, so he took his meals alone in his quarters. He slid out of bed and onto the floor, letting out a wide yawn and sliding into the bathroom to clean up.
He looked at himself in the mirror, a set of amber eyes with catlike irises looked back at him as he took in his appearance. Sinai resembled an overlarge snake, like those that developed on the human homeworld of Earth, though with the addition of two raptorial forelimbs that ended in one Ter long sharp talons that could easily pierce flesh should he desire it. His scales were a burnished copper colour, which was admittedly common among his people, though his body was much shorter than average at only 210 Uk’Ahr’Ter. He reached down and turned on the sink and reached out with his talon and splashed himself with some water to wake himself up. He nodded his head, satisfied, and turned his thoughts back to Tabitha has he left the bathroom.
Halwat had known his boatswain, Tabitha Brax for years. Her father had been the Solar Alliance ambassador to Iskrandar, his homeworld, and Tabitha had been the only human in his school growing up. They’d gotten close, and after finishing their schooling, he’d asked her to go into business with him. He’d even gone so far as to borrow money from Ambassador Brax to purchase the Bountiful Harvest, which he promptly made back in the shipping of water from Aquarius in the Gamma Pavonis system, to Cordoba in the Eta Indi system.
Halwat had not been the first sapient to come up with the idea to ship water from Aquarius, but thanks to owning an HT-2000 Commercial Towing Vehicle. He was able to carry more of it to make more money. Well, that was capitalism.
Some things could be said about his growing rich off the Cordoban need for water. Though, when you looked at it, he was bringing the price of water down with his shipments from Aquarius. With the planet being nearly all desert, Cordoba’s water was either locked up in polar ice caps, meaning that a cubic Ter of water could go for a 100,000 Ssk.
If not for the fact that Cordoba had unobium, they might not be able to afford it.
Halwat exited his quarters, sliding along the plas flooring that covered the gravity deck, and made his way along the corridor, before sliding onto the bridge. He found the Operations Officer, fellow sinai Thendor Thoret, lying asleep on the navigation table. Halwat was not pleased and quietly slid over to him. He dialled down the gravity deck on the bridge from the 0.7 of standard he usually kept it at, down to 0.5 and then smacked Thoret across the back of the head.
‘Wake up!’ he cried out.
Thoret jumped, with the gravity lower than he expected, he bounded up into the ceiling, smacking his head against the plas before coming back down to the ground in a crash.
‘Thoret, what did I tell you about sleeping on your watch?’ Halwat hissed, his eyes aflame with anger.
‘To not to,’ Thoret hissed back in their native iskharasH.
‘Don’t let it happen again,’ he said with an angry hiss and turned his head as the bridge door slid open and in strode Tabitha Brax. Tabitha was tall for a human woman in her early twenties, a towering 163 Uk’Ahr’Ter, with braided blonde hair that dropped to her waist, clad in casual dress, an orange zip-up crop top and matching shorts, and the curious footwear that humans called ‘flip flops’ on her feet. Her emerald green eyes seemed to sparkle when she smiled.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked.
Halwat flicked his head slightly to the right to turn on his translator, before smiling back at Tabitha. ‘Delight: Good morning Tabitha, Thoret and I were merely having a discussion of his work ethic,’ his translator related in a flat, monotone, and noticeably artificial voice, as was standard in commercially available translators.
‘Again, huh?’ Tabitha said silkily. ‘I thought I felt myself losing weight when I stepped onto the bridge.’
Halwat’s face scales darkened a little in a blush as he dialled the gravity back up to 0.7 of standard.
‘So, Thoret,’ Tabitha said, turning her eyes back on the operations officer. ‘How long to Cordoba?’
Thoret flicked his head the same way that Halwat had to turn on his translator before tapping at the holographic display on the operations table and pulling up the three-dimensional star map, showing their course. ‘Recitation: 90 minutes, twenty seconds.’
’Excellent, we’re carrying, what? A million cubic Ter of water?′
’Recitation: one million three hundred forty-one thousand two hundred thirty-six cubic Ter of water,′ Thoret said, looking somewhat annoyed at the line of question.
‘So that should net us a payday of—what? 134 Billion Ssk?’ Tabitha asked with a smile.
Thoret frowned. ‘Annoyed: I am not a calculator,’ he said, adding a hiss of displeasure that the translator didn’t vocalise.
‘But?’ Tabitha asked with a pleasant smile.
’Annoyed: one hundred thirty-four billion one hundred twenty-three million six hundred thousand Ssk, assuming 100,000 SSk a cubic Ter, as the going rate,′ Thoret said through his translator before giving an exasperated sigh.
Tabitha turned to smile at Halwat. ‘Jackpot,’ she said.
Halwat’s heart melted at that look. Had anyone else mentioned it, he would have probably gone on to say that most of the money had to go into a general fund for, docking fees, tolls, fuel, maintenance, replacement parts, provisions, border guard bribes. With the state of inflation with the Sinai Ssk being what it was, 134 Billion Ssk would probably get them through to the middle of the new year.
Tabitha already knew all that though, and even if she didn’t, Halwat might not have had the heart to tell her. She was the love of his life. There was not a day in his life that he didn’t imagine a life with her. Oh, how it would be like if they were an item?
But it never took long for him to start thinking the worst. Like what if he wasn’t an adequate partner? Or if he did something that tore them apart? As irrational as his therapist said these ideas were, he still felt that he could not take the risk.
Tabitha was his best friend, and his business partner, if he were to enter into a relationship with her, and mess it up, it would ruin everything. So, he had to be content with things as they were now, and he was okay with that.
Tabitha waved her hand in front of his eyes. ‘Hello? Iskrandar to Halwat? Come in, over!’ she said, forcing Halwat to snap out of it.
‘Curious: Yes? Tabitha?’ he asked, cocking his head to the side.
‘Shall I get the rest of the crew to their posts?’ she asked.
Halwat nodded his head and moved around to the front of the table. There was less than an hour to go until payday, after all. Maybe if a few more of these runs went well, he could put aside enough to take a vacation in oh, maybe three or four years?
