“Well, let’s start with: Where the hell did you come from, and how did you get here?”

“Ok, but you might want to sit down, maybe stop pointing that gun-looking thing at me.

Long ago, the twin planets of Hom and Jup orbited the slightly smaller planet of Xasthop in a configuration that was technically impossible. Xasthop then exploded and its debris formed a circular wave with three ripples and a large lump at the centre.

This arrangement has remained ever since, like an absurdly huge plate dividing the two remaining planets, and was eventually named the Great Barrier Field. This setup was technically even less possible than the initial arrangement, but it was a good few hundred years before anyone realised the whole thing was weird, since the explosion had taken every physicist and astronomer of note with it.

For their part, the bronze-working societies on Hom and Jup both made up weirdly similar myths about where the Xast, or ‘sky people’, had gone with their technological marvels and handy hints about crop rotation and ceramics; they were particularly interested in discovering hidden caches of said marvels. There were dreams and stories about plucky bands of heroes and misfits retrieving some of the shinier implements the Xast had always kept to themselves and thus attaining obscene wealth and power, but quests across the surface of the two planets yielded few remnants, certainly nothing that could be reverse engineered.

Owing to the many misconceptions about the nature of things such as gravity that comes from being in what we all now know is an impossibility, it took the Homians eight hundred years to develop a reliable means of space travel. The first attempt to reach Jup was made by the sister ships ‘Destiny’ and ‘Endeavour’, which were launched on the day of their lord the Blue Ico 672 (which I think translates to the year 1736 AX, but don’t quote me on that). They set out to re-establish contact with the unknown but occasionally glimpsed Jupean society (telescopes had of course been developed, but it was almost impossible to get a line of sight through the swirling cloud of rock that was the Barrier Field). Those two ships were wonders of the age, built of bright shining glass panels with all exposed metal work painted bright blue to glory in the magnificence of the Blue Ico, and were built on an enormous scale to dazzle the primitive Jupeans (After all, how advanced could us idiots on Jup be if we hadn’t yet developed spaceflight?) with technological marvels. They made it an impressive few miles into the Field before being of course hammered apart by the unpredictable mess of asteroids.

In their year 675, the much smaller ship ‘Hope’ was launched with markedly improved armour and manoeuvrability. The ‘Hope’ arrived on Jup after a harrowing fortnight’s journey slightly battered but still entirely functional, and the crew began the peaceful mission of evaluating the planet for colonisation and the Jupeans for enslavement under the guise of establishing trade. They were of course immediately arrested and executed, and their technology was reverse engineered so that the Jupeans could build a fleet capable of defending Jup. Thus began the great interplanetary conflict of 1740 AX (I think from here on I’ll stick with the Jup calendar rather counting from the day the Homians found that damn blue Ico for simplicity’s sake).

I’m trying not to be biased. Obviously, I’m originally from Jup, but I think the evidence is pretty compelling that the Hom guys were looking to take over. I still say the war was a ridiculous mess that just about painted the entire Barrier Field red, but…

Anyway, I’m getting off track. Ok, so the war went on for decades. Everyone could see the enemy coming once they passed the Field as there wasn’t exactly anywhere to hide in empty space, so it was pretty easy to mount a solid defence before the invasion arrived and knock them back, making it inevitable that the whole thing would eventually settle into a stalemate. The Barrier Field was declared a neutral and demilitarised zone where no army presence or weapons of any kind were allowed. Waifs, strays and criminals immediately moved in. A healthy community of traders, smugglers, bounty hunters, etc. was soon established in the outermost ripple of the field, as it spun rather slower than the rest. Many incautious pilots were still routinely caught out by the sheer relentlessness of the assault, or were caught trying to get one over on the authorities, leaving a little gap in the economy for chancers such as me.

I should introduce myself, I’m Phil Ashmore, and I tell people that everyone calls me Ash, but that’s mainly because ‘Phil’ isn’t a good name for a, well let’s call me a freelance courier. I have a little size-5 Salvage and Extraction Unit ship (meaning it has room for five crew), I called it the Seus (because its official designation was SEU-5) and I’m not saying it didn’t have a few hidey holes where one or two high value items could be transported for interested parties, but I was mainly about finding people, salvaging tech from burned-out wrecks, picking up rescues, whatever came along. I was fairly lucky in that I could occasionally pick up military contracts, which paid extra to keep me quiet about it, not that it matters much now.

Anyway, I mention that because I was on one such contract when this all started. Some pack of hopeful idiots had crowded onto a bus, many fell afoul of religious or political types on their home world or heard tales of available jobs, better lives, or streets paved with gold on the other one, a real ‘grass is always greener on the other side’ syndrome. These guys had bluffed past the Hom checkpoint to get into the Field, successfully navigated the inner ripple which is pretty damn remarkable in itself, but then had come up against the monolith of implacable, implacable stupidity that is the standard Jupean checkpoint guard. I was told that then guard suspected that there could have been a bomb onboard, but it’s reasonably likely that the guard was just bored and a psychopath. There was no official line, because no one on the surface had spotted ‘the incident’, and I was sent into the Field to investigate the wreck since no military craft could risk being spotted entering the demilitarised zone. I didn’t point out the hypocrisy that murdering civilians was acceptable but flying a few miles was forbidden; idealists tended to die quickly out there. Of course, if I found that there actually was a bomb on board, the guard would be hailed as a hero and there would be Repercussions, but to their credit, the Jup navy had never to my knowledge planted evidence on wrecks, just hushed up unfavourable news such as the presence of innocents.

I headed out from the rendezvous in the direction the ship had been thrown; the momentum of the ordinance that had hit it meant that the wreck was drifting in the direction of the dense ball of rock in the middle of the Field, known as the ‘Dead Zone’.

No one ever made it out of there alive.

Hell, no one even tried going in any more. It was a weird particularly dense cloud of oddly swirling rock. Daredevils and conspiracy theorist lunatics had occasionally tried to get in, claiming that Xasthop was still in there (although the Dead Zone is big enough to contain a planet, they never seemed to have a good explanation for where all the damn asteroids had come from if they weren’t chunks of the planet, which they were) The first guy to make it any substantial distance was a Hom pilot veteran turned daredevil called Weller, some say that PTSD from the war compelled him to keep taking larger risks, others try not to psychologically assess someone they’ve never met. He decided to go ten kilometres in, get a scan of the area, then weave his way out of that swirling mess.

The intermittent signal from a powerful tracking beacon on his ship slowly grew weaker then vanished, and after a tense drawn-out pause that put him at an estimated two and a half kilometres deep, an enormous, violent green flash emanated out from within and he vanished forever. A few other legends of the early days like Chan, Lt. Ormiston (who I actually once met, he was an old friend of my father) and seven-finger Joe had gotten in far enough to be met with similar green flash, making the question of what it was and why no one ever came back out to say what it was one of those oddities of the Field. Eventually, enough people had vanished without a trace that the attraction wore off and the more level-headed went on to explore less deadly phenomena. This left only the less level-headed.

A few guys gathered together into a cult to worship the green light; their leader proved his divine right to rule by giving followers immunity to the light in return for all their worldly goods and sending them flying in. The families of those he’d sent in eventually tracked him down and had a go at giving him his own immunity, free of charge. The Dead Zone now gets used for ritual executions carried out by the Blues. They’d fling pods containing living people they’d deemed heretical at the rock and watch them shatter and burst after a few seconds, offerings to their stupid damn Blue god. No one on the Jup side quite understood at the time why the Hom authorities seemed to just let this carry on.

The fact that my salvage was heading in that direction meant that I had to hurry while the wreck was still retrievable. Switching on the infrared detector showed the glowing remnants of the ship, I could even still see where some of the engine exhaust wash had stuck to a slow asteroid as it passed nearby; that boat had some pretty crappy engines, clearly not worth retrieving. I wove my way through to it, pulled up fairly close and matched momentum with it. It was a block of a thing, looked welded out of cargo shipping containers, which was entirely possible; it had seen better days, but not really by much.

A few blocks of random equipment and/or cargo were drifting out of three fairly large holes and it was spinning in all three axes, but only slowly. I gave my pressure suit a quick check before decompressing the airlock, then stepped out and threw a large electromagnet on a cable at it (yeah, even basic harpoon guns were considered weapons and banned) the same way I had for hundreds of other wrecks. I’d gotten so good at this I could sometimes even hit the ship, but it only needed to be close enough to engage the pretty powerful magnet. Once we were attached I went back to the pilot station to gently manoeuvre us to a large asteroid nearby that I could attach to and use as cover. The Seus had pretty good bounce panels, much better than the ones it had when I started flying her, but the best armour a ship can have is common sense. Taking my time meant there I could investigate the wreckage before handing it over.

I went back to the airlock, judged when it was safe and shimmied over using mag gloves to stick to the cable and mag boots to land on the hull, making a note to scavenge jetpack monopropellant, or at least buy some when I was next on a station; maybe scrounge some from the checkpoint. After clipping the magnet onto the hull with a safety tie and a quick look at the nearest ripped hole, I took out a crowbar and manually overrode the airlock. A hole might look like the easy way in, but sharp edges are no joke when you’re only four thin layers of cloth from the vacuum, no matter what anyone says about the resilience of the pressure suits they’re peddling.

Inside was a mess; bloodstains, decompressed corpses, equipment strapped into ungainly bundles. The absence of explosives, the sort of wiring that would join explosives throughout a ship to a detonator, and/or bags of shrapnel showed that the military overreacted. It’s not the most honourable pursuit, but if there was ever anything I could use to identify a contact, I’d always do my best to let relatives know what had happened. No one around was alive, but there were two rescue pods. Most ships had something like this, a sealable panic pod with a bottle of compressed air, enough to give rescuers a chance. Their main design flaw is that space is fast; when a ship decompresses, it’s not like running from a fire, your whole damn body will explode within about three seconds, so unless you’re already in there when your ship pops, you’re done. There’s no way to know what’s in a pod until you open it and this wasn’t exactly a good place for that, but they were both sealed shut and the little air circulation systems were going, which are normally good signs (If the fan isn’t blowing air around, carbon dioxide pools around your body and you suffocate. It’s weird stuff). One had a small heat signature, the other was dark. Certainly not a great sign; normally the infrared pouring out of a person would light it up like a beacon on thermal vision. It could have been an animal or radioactive cargo in the warm one, I took both back with me just in case, giving them a quick tap on the off chance that there was someone in there. There’s nothing like that feeling of being alone stuck in a tiny compartment for hours beset by the uncaring void on all sides, praying that someone, anyone comes along then hearing ‘shave and a haircut’ through the shell. Obviously I couldn’t hear any response from inside, outer space being what it is.

I turned the release keys to unbuckle the pods from the hull (they’re attached at strong points to make recovery reasonably possible), hooked them together and floated them towards the airlock. Most of the ship’s cargo hold had detached, but there were a few canisters labelled ‘monopropellant’ that looked in reasonable condition. Of course, I’d have to get them back and test them before trying them, there’s no telling what’s actually in there and I couldn’t risk breaking my jetpack even if it really is monoprop in there, as it’s a damn expensive piece of kit and pissing about like that is a good way of making whatever you’re holding explode in the vacuum. Into the loot bag they went. Don’t get me wrong here by the way, I wasn’t picking over corpses. For one, the Jup military were paying me enough that I didn’t have to go scraping out gold teeth; for two, I can only stomach so much of that sort of thing before I start getting nightmares.