The Privateers

He's never late

I'd been pulling odd jobs for Dr. Pavlović for a few years now. His affairs were... unorthodox, to say the least, but it speaks volumes that he was one of the very few clients who'd been formally banned from posting jobs for the Merchant's Guild. In a way, that made him an even more desirable client, because it meant not only that he'd pay better, but if you were one of the people he'd trust enough to send on errands, he'd often send the jobs to you directly. No need for initiative. No need to dig through the listings.

The last time I'd spoken to him, he'd been working on some experimental new warp technology that wasn't panning out very well for him. I'd asked him at the time why he was so bent on disrupting the established order of space travel, while everybody else in the sector was content with using the jump gates and trade lines. I couldn't really process everything he was saying, but the last thing he'd said in his long tirade was something about never being late again.

It'd been about 3 months since that day. I was starting to worry that he'd vaporized himself or something. It was more of an idle thought, I suppose, in the way of "I wonder how that wacky professor's been," more than any genuine concern. On my end all it meant was I'd lost a decent source of mad money, in more than a couple of ways. But all those concerns vanished like my last wager when I got the ping again.

"Meet me in space, outside the Lifthrasir E400 Refinery in your sector, in precisely one week from receiving this message."

I didn't know a lot of things about Dr. Pavlović, but I did know that he kept to himself in a laboratory that he'd personally carved into an asteroid somewhere out in the fringes of the Seaborg sector. That trip could take anywhere between 3 days and half a month, accounting for all the jumps and refuels, the lines, traffic, and random stops by both Coalitioners and highwaymen. There was no way in Hell he could plot a course that precisely, short of ignoring everything and stopping for nothing. He'd just as likely piss somebody off and get shot up for it. But when the appointed date came up, I figured there was no reason I couldn't be there to see what he had planned.

I'd cut my engines to zero, hanging around outside the Lifthrasir refinery and indulging in some people-watching. A couple of passing bounty hunters buzzed by. An armored freighter wearing Coalition flags took off with a fresh load of Element 400. I simply sat by and watched as a light fighter in bright red livery opened fire on the freighter - the two hunters made short work of him. I hadn't seen anybody else enter the sector, but my comm screen popped up, and it wasn't a signal from any of the ships in front of me.

"Salutations, Lani," said the man over the comm. "Dr. Jordan Pavlović. Mark the time for me, if you please." He was the kind of man who always insisted on announcing his full name and title when he arrived. I figured he recorded all of his conversations for posterity.

I pulled back my jacket sleeve and consulted my watch, and old mil-surp mechanical model that was the only thing I really trusted to tell me the proper time, with all the EMP weaponry out there these days. "Hello, Jordan. It's 1100 hours, on the morning of October 13th."

"Excellent. And what was the time and date of the message I sent?" I'm sure Dr. Pavlović was just showing off at this point, but I'd humor him for the sake of his paycheck.

"Listed date on your email is..." I squinted at my PDA in disbelief. "1100 hours, morning of October 6th." I'd always known him to be punctual to a fault, but this went well beyond that. I spun my ship in circles, trying to find his radar signature. I eventually found him directly behind me, barely 50 meters away, in his one-off experimental craft that looked like a giant syringe. "How in hell did..."

"I'll not get into too much detail over the public channel, but suffice to say, this spawns a whole new frontier for trade lines. It takes quite a lot of computational power to dial in a trip this precisely, but if it scales up, the permanent jump gate may be a thing of the past."

"Some kind of time machine?"

"Only in the sense that it knows what time it is, or what time it will be. Ever forwards, never backwards. Meet me on the refinery and I'll pay you personally."

Already getting straight to the paycheck, and all I'd done was sit there and tell him what time it was. This was why I loved working for Dr. Pavlović.