Excerpt: Here Be Angels (working title)

The observation pod was warm and comfortable, over the years he had lived on ship the pod had accumulated more comfortable blankets and cushions than his bedroom, due to runs like this where he ended up living in the pod, waiting. He lay along the length of the bubble that nested in the ship's otherwise solid metal hull and stared out at the black.

'It isn't like the movies,' Paxan thought bitterly as he scratched at his several day old stubble and stared out along the ship's nose, 'ships aren't grey shapes all lit up, you don't see them floating through space from miles away, you're lucky if you see them before the short distance radar pings them up'. The panel his arms were folded on remained unhelpfully dark, beside it another monitored his slowly deteriorating orbit around the large asteroid. He rolled over onto his back in the nest of blankets and stared straight up through the reinforced window, far below him the barren rock turned on its axis, he stared at it without seeing as he had for the last two days.

The rock itself was deeply scarred and cracked, in a less stable area it would have broken up long before now but in one of the Lagrangian points around an unnamed white dwarf it provided a recognisable marker for the less than honest side of small goods trading, and redistribution of goods paid for food and fuel as well if not better than legal haulage, even with the few corporate contacts he had.

Stretching in the confined space his arm brushed the sleeping panel under him and the pod filled with light as the microfillament displays in the glass activated in front of his face, an endless list of systems and subsystems the ship was ticking through on its own. It greeted him as he scanned status updates and he closed his eyes and sank into the ship's virtual space, ruffling the head of the ship's AI in greeting as he corrected orbit. The Persephone's AI wagged it tail and offered up a new course home once the goods were on board with allowances for weight and the most recent, but admitedly out of date, rates for fuel in systems that he could trade at without too much inspection of his Globe sponsored papers.