Excerpt

When in the farthest reaches of space, the sane and wise stuck near the shiftgem gates, prayed to whatever entity they believed in, and traveled the most direct route to their destination. The rest risked death straying off the beaten path to venture into the void between the planets, stars, and space stations littering the universe.

I fit in the second category, and I cursed my foolhardy ways while cramming my tail into my spacesuit in preparation for a walk outside my ship. No, I went beyond foolhardy straight into the insane category. Only someone insane headed into the darkest, coldest reaches of space alone.

Well, sort of alone.

Where I went, Pandora followed, all ten, fluffy pounds of her. The red fox, Earth-bred with minor genetic manipulation to increase her intelligence and lengthen her lifespan, made for the ideal companion on long, lonely journeys. Sure, she couldn't speak the primary languages spoken in the explored universe, but she made up for her linguistic failings through being adorable, trainable, and willing to go through hell and back with me for profit.

She preferred her pay in the form of treats, toys, and brushing. I took mine in a variety of currencies, with a preference for galactic standard tokens.

To earn our keep, we tangoed with a derelict that had drifted away from the nearest gate, likely the victim of technical failure. According to my scanners, a few of the derelict's systems worked, and I failed to detect any signs of life aboard the ship. I'd already done the basics for the dead, using the tiny shrine I kept in my cargo bay.

The last thing I needed were ghosts haunting me because I hadn't offered up a prayer for the lost.

With no life to worry about, I could blitz through, grab anything of use or value, and check if their engine still had intact shiftgem crystals. A single pair of crystals, which came in a myriad of colors and qualities, would pay my keep for years. If the freighter boasted a pair of black crystals, I'd be set for life, assuming neither had been damaged.

Without shiftgems, ships couldn't make use of gates, which warped space, time, and distance to allow quick travel between various galaxies without requiring stasis or generational ships. Some still traveled via generational ship, although they were typically reserved for experiments requiring no access to the rest of the universe.

My ancestors, descendants from Earth, had once traveled on a generational ship. Over a thousand years after the start of their journey, I'd been born, a product of their determination to survive. My mother sometimes told me about life on the ship, but she always stated she was glad I'd been born on a tiny, habitable planet in Andromeda. I still questioned how the generational ship had traveled almost three million light years from Earth in only a thousand years.

My mother had shrugged, but she'd given me my first shiftgem shard that day, set in a pendant I still wore.

Until that day, I hadn't realized Earth had been eradicated by the very stones we used to travel between the stars. I questioned how close to human I was, as I shared certain genes with Pandora. My mother claimed I came as close as it got, as I'd been conceived on the generational ship and born shortly after they'd made landfall. Something about her tone, a little sharper, warned me about digging into the little things separating me from my parents.

Neither of them had my ears or tail, a match for my Pandora's. I appreciated having them, however. My ears offered heightened hearing, excellent for planetary exploration. My tail worked wonders for aiding my balance in sketchy situations.

A rather annoying genetic modification involved a tendency to grow a full coat of fur if I stayed in cold temperatures for too long, which shed out after exposure to heat for more than a week. Little sucked more than having to deal with shedding fur on a spaceship.

I supposed my parents, upon being granted permission to have me, had assumed I would need genetic modification for when they made their home on their new world. In reality, the modifications hindered as much as helped.

Inevitably, I lost hours upon hours cleaning filters and vacuuming to make certain I didn't shut down a mandatory system, thanks to unwanted fur floating around when I had gravity turned off in my ship. Fortunately for me, I rarely needed to turn off gravity, as I'd earned a matched set of tri-color shiftgem crystals early in my career as a salvager. They granted me access to any gate without issue or high risk, powered most of my ship's functions without even a hint of resonance humming, and made me a shiny target for other pirates and treasure seekers.

Well, it would make me a shiny target if anyone knew I had them. As I possessed some common sense and the ability to fix my own engines and gate drive, I had a backup system using a pair of common white shiftgem crystals, which could use a decent number of gates and were often found in exploratory vessels. Anyone without a lot of know-how on the operation of ships like mine would believe the secondary drive operated the entire ship rather than served as my backup. The white crystals couldn't be used to jump often or far without running the risk of resonance or overloading, but their engines tended to zip along at an admirable place.

They could manage faster-than-light travel when set up by someone who knew what they were doing.

As I valued my life, mine could. If my main engine died on me—or my precious tri-color crystals shattered—I could be back online in a matter of hours. In a pinch, I could also move the second engine to another ship.

Like the derelict I meant to board.

Hmm. I'd never tried to haul a dead ship through a shiftgem gate before, but I had a tow assembly, and if I could rig my engine to work with their systems, the large white crystals could handle the extra load.

I finished stuffing my tail into my suit and began the tedious process of checking every seam. A leaking seam led to death, and while my suit had come with enough failsafes to please most, life in space had no room for error.

Rather than trust the failsafes, I did a manual check before running my suit through a base diagnostic scan looking for issues. The oxygen tank, equipped with a tiny green shiftgem crystal, would keep me topped up on oxygen for a period of three hours before I needed to return to the ship to recharge the crystal.

One day, I might understand how a stone could work with technology to circumvent basic science. I struggled enough with the whole idea I could enter the equivalent of an oversized doorway and get yanked across the universe at a rather ridiculous speed.

Chiding myself for allowing my attention to wander to something other than my work, I triple checked the seams before activating the suit's HUD, reading over the diagnostic report. It reported no issues detected. I activated vitals monitoring and crouched beside Pandora, tapping the panel on her suit. While I'd done checks and ensured her oxygen tank worked before gearing up, I pulled up her suit statistics along with her vitals and reviewed them.

She checked out.

"All right, Pandora. Ready to go earn some treats?"

According to her excited squeaking and wiggling of her butt, she was ready to take over the entire universe as long as it earned her a treat.