Gael looked up at the stars, as she had every night as a child. Flickering lights of white, green, and pale red intimated far off lives. But it was the null space, the blackness in between the bright pinpoints, that still called to her. Finally she was answering.

Not to that larger red spot just cresting the broomwood tree. She’d been to Drey LX half a dozen times as an inner-system shuttle pilot. She’d been to all the planets and half-respectable moons in the Dreyaconous System. Each planet, named sequentially, Romanly, and by the tens, and their satellites, named similarly by the ones. Drey LIV, her own planet’s primary moon, rose slightly above LX, the light half shining amber light over the pale white sand. The dark half was spotted with artificial lights from settlements.

No. Tomorrow would be the first step in the culmination of her dreams, to take a long-distance voyage to true stars that lit the sky and the blackness between them. There, strange, un-human creatures lived and died. Trees made of light flickered and danced until killed by a shadow. And Neplonium Seas, rich with ghastier, the most efficient fuel every discovered, waited to be harvested by any who wished to be rich.

She gave the stars one more glance, and went inside to bed.

###

Gael half-walked, half-glided into the registration room of the training facility on Drey LIV. Two Clarvadians sat on chairs, weaving intricate designs into their green fur. A black Gratchel sat on one of the Clarvadian’s legs and looked up at Gael with bored amusement through green, catlike eyes. The other Clarvadian nodded toward a door, and Gael passed through it.

She spent the next several hours in-processing through a number of people who barely looked up from her scanned data. Any attempt of conversation on her part was met with stony silence or canned responses. She reached the final booth, and a short, thin man with purple hair ushered her in.

He gave her a cursory physical, then looked up at her.

“Would you mind if I drew some blood?”

“Don’t you have that already? It’s in my files.”

“Oh, this isn’t official.” He peered around the booth as if looking for spies. “It’s for my own work. I’m curious if the impulse to embark on long-term exploration can be identified genetically.”

“Sure.”

He ran his blood scanner over her inner arm. “That’ll do it. Thank you.”

“So, do you compare it to a sample when I get back?”

His eyebrows rose into his purple bangs. “Don’t usually get the chance to do that. Off you go.”

That afternoon, Gael sat in a domed room. Around her, several hundred other candidates awaited their next instruction and drank weak coffee out of thermal pouches. A door in the back of the room opened, and Dr. Jerkin, psycho-analyzer for The Company, entered. Men and women in his path stopped him to shake his hand, all vying for attention from the one person who could make or break their barely-started careers. He made his way serpentine-like toward the front of the room, but stopped when he reached Gael.

“Ah, and who are you?” he asked, stretching out his hand.

At over six-foot tall, with pale blonde hair that reached beyond her waist and ivory skin that glowed like Drey XII, Gael was used to garnering attention. She suppressed a sigh and took his hand. “Gael, sir.”

Before she could say another word, his face broken into a look of excited surprise. “Gael? You come highly recommended. Your aunt told us all about you. Glad to have a true Benevolent on board. Very glad.”

She started to speak, to disabuse him of her dear aunt’s over-simplification, but he moved on, eventually climbing the platform at the front of the room.

“Welcome,” Dr. Jerkin said. “This afternoon, you will begin a series of tests to determine what role you are best suited for in The Company. You will be given a personality enhancer, a psycho-pharmaceutical concoction that will exaggerate your dominant personality trait. You will then be placed in a hypnotic state where you will experience a scenario that will complement this trait. Our analyzers are very good at pre-determining your dominant profile—this will confirm their findings.

“Once the scenario is complete, you will go through intensive training to further develop your dominant trait. As you know, without this training, the enhancement drugs will simply wash out of your system and any work you have accomplished to that point will diminish.”

Gael scanned the room, suspecting everyone had the same thought. Here, she was only a shuttle pilot. Out there, though, she would really see what she was capable of.

She followed the other candidates into a long room, lined on both sides with upright, coffin-shaped booths. In the center of the room ran a table where, her tech explained, the various analysts could monitor the candidates’ progression through the simulations. Gael accepted the drug pad from the tech and placed it on her forehead. She then stepped back into the booth. The tech closed the door, and Gael blinked.

She opened her eyes to a great forest. She stood in a clearing, but the darkness beneath the nearby trees seemed to suck the light out of even the high sun. Past the forest, she could hear an ocean surf. But it sounded strange—high pitched. She realized it was not made of water, but something less viscous. Neplonium.

Down the trail toward the surf, a group of Clarvadians wrestled with a giant transporter that had apparently gotten stuck. Another, larger, Clarvadian shouted at them in their strange, coarse language. Gael looked more closely. The smaller ones wore belts. Clarvadians never wore belts. Not unless they were being used as shock collars.

Gale suspected her new station was at the ocean, but she didn’t want to pass the group of convicts and their vulgar keeper. The blackness of the forest both repelled and called to her. Through that forest was the wealth of the ages. She crossed the clearing and entered the trees.

A few yards in, Gael began to make out shapes on the forest floor, half-hidden by the ground cover. Dozens of Clarvadians lounged under the black trees, thin and drawn looking beneath their matted and stained fur. One lifted doleful grey eyes to her. Without thinking, she reached into her flightsuit pocket where, somehow she knew, a piece of chocolate lay waiting. The pathetic creature took the offering and held it in webbed fingers. Gael gave a pitied look to the sad shapes around her and crossed the forest.

The Neplonium ocean spread out before her like oily mercury. The ghastier harvested from this one refinement plant would make every human involved rich for life, turning the ocean into a lifeless vat of acid in return. As she calculated her take of the profit, she vaguely wondered what would become of the Clarvadian natives.

She turned back to the forest, the dark, cold forest where The Company mercifully left its worn laborers to die. The darkness called to her in a silent whisper. Offering a chance to help.

To be a token good in a company that destroyed thousands.

She turned away from the forest and its inhabitants and looked over the ocean. Could she do more with a boat-load of money?

She blinked.

Gael opened her eyes to the soft glow of the simulation pod. A cough echoed from a speaker set into the ceiling.

“Stand by, please,” followed a voice. “Uh, there appears to have been a mix-up in your file.” She heard other voices, whispering violently, in the background. “Just a mo. Here we are. Please continue.”

She blinked.

Gael rubbed the back of her neck and stretched her shoulders. If her calculations were correct, they should have enough ghastier purified and loaded into storage vessels to fill the next tanker when it arrived. Still, they’d lost five more men and fifteen Clarvadians. Harvesting ghastier was profitable—but only if you could live long enough to cash the check. The night air carried the whimpers of three more men, burned by the raw acid. Her fingers absently rubbed the scar on her right arm, remnant of a wayward splash.

Outside, night noises of the forest competed with the steady hum of machinery. She looked up as a shadow blocked the porch light and crossed the door of her hut.

“Well, I’m off,” said Baran, captain of the tanker she’d just filled. She’d always wondered how he kept his cream flightsuit so starched and clean.

“So soon?” she asked.

“Yeah, the longer I stay, the more trouble the crew will get into.” He sat a hip down on her desk. “Thought you should know, my comm. officer says there’s some poachers on the way.”

Gael let out a breath. “Great. More imbeciles come to get rich but leave dead.”

“But don’t they pay a fee?”

“Yeah, they pay for the convenience of dying on our shores.”

“Still, it’s money, right? And if they’re dumb enough to come here…”

Gael shook her head. “Money I got. What I want is…” She looked out the open door and into the night sky.

Baran’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial level. “What do you want?”

The darkness of space held her eyes. “I don’t know. I just didn’t expect to join the greatest space exploration company in history and spend my days chained to a desk in a shack on a beach by an ocean I can’t swim in.”

She smiled in apology and walked him to his transport. Late that night, sitting on her porch and listening to the surf, she stared into the sea. Each wave was fortune. The black Neplonium absorbed all light, pulled even the slightest glimmer from the air. Still, it called—or, rather, pulled her. She felt it in her chest, felt it siphoning out her heart as she siphoned the liquid itself. More money than Solomon crashing on the beach with every swell.

While she destroyed worlds.

She pushed the away the pull of the ocean’s promises and stared into the night sky. Where worlds waited to be discovered, not devoured.

Gael blinked.

“Stand by,” said the nervous voice above her. “Slight problem. OK. All fixed now. We’ve got it this time.”

Gael blinked.

A warning alarm reverberated through the patchwork cockpit, and Gael slammed her fist into the control panel. “Dangit, Grey! I told you to fix that thing.”

A voice fought a background of straining power drives to crawl weakly through the staticy speaker. “I tried, Gael, but you only gave me bailing wire and chewing gum, and I used up all the gum on the hull breach.”

“Got it!” exclaimed a voice from beneath a desk to Gael’s left. A small woman wriggled out of the narrow space holding a wire triumphantly. “The capacitor on the transmorgifi—”

“Glad to hear it, Tin” interrupted Gael. “Now get us out of here.”

The woman gave a quirky grin and spun to take her seat at the helm. She waved her hands over the panel in front of her, and Gael grabbed her armrests to counteract the sudden, and violent, maneuvers.

“We’re clear,” said Yan from the monitoring station.

“Alright,” Gael said, standing gingerly to let her inner ears recover. “Set a course for Kratchet. I’ll be in my quarters.”

Gael collapsed on her bed, covering her eyes with an arm. She couldn’t imagine not traveling through space, but this was ridiculous. The fact the bucket of bolts had survived Tin’s spatial gymnastics was only due to the abilities of her amazing crew and a healthy dose of good luck. She seriously doubted they’d survive another run-in with an unmarked asteroid field.

Being an advance scout for The Company meant her own ship and a freedom she wouldn’t get anywhere else. It also meant almost no support. Scouts didn’t travel established flight paths, and stations were few and far between. And The Company wasn’t about to risk their best equipment on the great unknown. Any scout ship that had more rivets than speed tape was driven by a captain that took jobs on the side—not all legal.

She dropped her arm and stared out the domed window above her bed. The stars shone steadily, mercilessly. But it was the dark that called to her. The unknown. Yet it was the dark, unseen asteroids, abandoned ship hulls, even black holes, that tried to kill her. Still it called, louder every day, drawing her in. Luring her with all the adventure she could ever dream of.

With only bragging rights of first discovery in reward.

She pushed up off the bed and pulled up the ship’s log. Bragging rights were all well and good, but what she needed was the clout to get a decent ship.

Gael blinked.

She stood at the head of an ebony table. Down its length, on each side, sat men and women in finely cut caftans and gold turbans. Gael looked down at the table to see her own hands sporting carefully manicured nails and more jewels than she’d ever seen before.

A nervous young man stood at the other end of the room, holding the controls for the display that floated above the table. He gulped and cleared his throat. “If the board agrees, we can begin mining operations next week. We predict an output of four-hundred thousand liters daily.”

Gael caught the reflection of two dozen heads turning to her. It was her decision to make. Her voice had the power to condemn worlds and make fortunes.

She stared into the depth of the black table. In that blackness was all the power in the known universe. It screamed at her, laughed maniacally. Sang.

Still the board waited for her answer.

She looked up at them. Faces lifted expectantly. Their robes were an exploding kaleidoscope of color. Precious metals weaved through the finest fabric. But, as Gael watched, the patterns darkened. At each left breast, a hole grew, sucking in the glimmer straining vainly from the threads.

Gael threw her head up, took a deep breath, and shouted. “No!”

She blinked.

##

Dr. Jerkin smiled down at Gael. She shakily reached out and took the pouch of hot tea he offered. She let the honey and lemon soothe her raw throat and her nerves.

“What was that?” she asked, embarrassed by the catch in her voice.

“I apologize,” he said. “We screen carefully. Ninety-nine out of one hundred candidates are motivated by money, adventure, or power. They decide what they want and live out of that.”

“What are the other one percent after?” Gael croaked.

“Benevolence. Out to save the world. Well, worlds.” He waved his hand as if to encompass all settled space. “With your aunt’s recommendation, we thought…”

She let it go, not willing to delve into the machinations of a doting aunt with unusual influence. Still, she needed to know. “Which am I?”

He shrugged. “All of them? None of them? I do not think you know yet. And that leaves us in a very interesting situation.” He leaned over. “You can choose. What do you want to be? Savior of innocents? Rich beyond measure? Discoverer of a hundred new worlds? Ruler of all?  You can have it.”

She could see her reflection in the black of his eyes.

“I can choose?”

“Anything your heart desires.”

The darkness in his eyes reached out, freely promising anything she wanted, everything she’d come here for.

She drew back, letting out a gasp. “Nothing,” she said. “I don’t want any of it.”

She stood. Jerkin straightened. She looked him in the eye.

“I will diminish. And remain Gael of Drey L.”