The Retrieval – Choose Your Own Adventure
Finding a dead body in space was always a shock. David had scouted over two hundred ghost ships in his long career as a smuggler, but he’d never grown use to the way cadavers float in zero gravity like scorched, water-logged ragdolls abandoned in the ocean. Usually there were dozens scattered with the debris of a ship. Cargo containers, cooks, ping-pong paddles, flight officers, family pictures—life and all its accouterments expelled like trash from a tipped over garbage can.
But this dead body was alone and impossible. David found it 30,000 light years from the nearest human colony. There was no damaged Community Pod or cargo ship. No sign of the X-Verse or Regency space empires. No debris. Not even a dwarf planet or asteroid with a gravity low enough to allow the man to accidentally leap off its surface and into an eternal fall.
There were no clues as to how this dead man found himself surrounded by 5,000 light years of empty space.
“Retrieve?” a breathy female voice called.
“Hold on, Robin,” David replied to the onboard computer, named after his wife. The system was loaded with her voice and a few key personality traits to keep him from getting too lonely on his long trips across the universe. He suspected the ship also spied on him when he veered a bit too close to the more libertine solar systems.
A glitch of his Chaos Machine engine jumped David to within a hundred yards of the body. Even so close, David still almost jumped again without noticing the man. A lesser smuggler would have missed it, but David was always good about seeing the opportunities that others missed. Where there was a body, there was always a treasure.
The first thing to do when encountering a dead body was to discern its loyalty. Most deep space explorers or traders worked for either X-Verse or Regency, the two largest commercial empires in the universe that had claimed the largest swaths of territory. These were always the most lucrative finds, followed by dozens of other small competitors that were elbowing out their own meager domains. Then came the pilgrims, which sometimes yielded a little wealth, but were often just as poor as David. Finally came the other smugglers, caught by mercenaries working for the commercial empires and left to rot in space as a warning.
Open space was unregulated, so wars between the X-Verse, Regency, and the other traders were inevitable. This presented opportunities for anyone brash enough to sneak through blockades to claim treasure lost on the interstellar free market battlefields.
It just took the resolve to push aside the dead bodies in massive transports or within devastated colonies, then a ship fast enough to slip through the trade blockades. David was born with the resolve of a smuggler, but the ship was a lucky find that he’d stumbled across while running scotch whiskey to a dry planet in the Andromeda system.
He’d dubbed the ship The Bettie Page and emblazoned its hull with an image of a black-haired vixen in a leopard print bikini and eyes as fierce and hungry as the ship’s forward cannons. It was an early high-speed transport designed with a second generation Chaos Machine. It was also the first X-Verse ship capable of planetary and interstellar travel. The Bettie Page never saw service and was instead mothballed in an X-Verse warehouse until David took it upon himself to liberate the ship.
He spent two years modernizing all of the ship’s components. His wife said it looked like a brick with wings drawn on it by a drunken three-year-old. But when most smugglers were either dead or imprisoned in their first year, Bettie Page kept David alive, free, and thriving for over two decades. In that time, he’d seen the amazing and the horrific, yet never flinched. Never paused. If he was not certain about a salvage mission, he moved on and never looked back. Every trip into space was a gamble and he knew when to push away from the table.
As he examined the dead body, his instincts told him to run. Yet, he feathered the air jets to inch closer. The cadaver wore no space suit. His head was exposed, preserved. In fact, as David pulled his cargo transport ship closer to the floating body, the man’s face looked almost flush and alive like he was simply asleep. A little pale, but not the mangled, bloated, sun-scorched death he’d seen on so many other crewmen expelled out into open space through a ruptured hull.
“Seriously, are we going to retrieve him or not?” Robin snapped.
“Hold on, damnit!”
The Betty Paige rotated around the man, allowing David to get a better view. That is when David saw the cape. He trained his forward lights on the man, sweeping across the crimson costume, a burnt yellow “L” scrawled across his chest. He knew the image. All humans knew that image.
This was a Wonderboy. “Lima” if David remembered correctly. It had been centuries since the last Wonderboy clone died. There were always rumors, of course, but sensible adults discarded them as fantasy.
Yet, adrift in the middle of space was a dead superhero. This was the billion dollar find, the scavenger trip that every smuggler dreamed of. Instant wealth and fame. David began mentally thumbing through his list of eccentric trillionaires, searching for one crazy enough to pay for a Wonderboy cadavre, but not so crazy as to be dangerous.
“Come on. Retrieve, yes or no? Shit or get off the pot, David.”
“Retrieve it,” David grunted.
“Thank you! Jesus. Do you want me to bring it on board or just latch it to the hull?”
Dangerous cargo was never brought on board, but rather fixed onto the outside of the ship so it could be released in a moment’s notice, whether it became unstable or there was a chance of being boarded and searched by mercenaries.
He’d carried bodies inside the ship before, usually officers with families wealthy enough to pay a retrieval fee. he just quarantined the bodies in the hold for safekeeping.
But this was a Wonderboy. How do you smuggle a god?
WHAT DO YOU DO?
Bring on board OR Store against the outside hull?
