Sci Fi Short Story: “Runner” | This Is Sci-Fi
Ormin Korvastindra punched in coordinates on a holo-projected map of a nearby nebula swirl star system. Had he have been from Earth, or Earth’s Solar System, he would have known his star ships ability to lock onto a location is all because of Euclidean Geometry. But Ormin was from a very distant star system to ours, and they would have their own name for navigation through a three dimensional space. I guess what he was, we would call a space viking. Almost 8ft tall and a solid 268kgs. He wasn’t fat by any means, he was just a solid unit. Long unruly dark brown hair with an almost equally long lighter brown beard. He didn’t like to wear his amour on a long flight, but it was in a closet in his quarters on his small weary ship.
Cosmetically the ship wasn’t much, but it did the job, and ‘the job’ was a boring uneventful transport run. The Thousand Year War had been raging throughout the Known, making galaxy hopping quite difficult. An unbiased side effect: making one’s return to their home world quite difficult, which overtime opened up a knew lucrative industry of ‘Runners’.
Ormin was a great Runner, he made a fantastic living reuniting stranded folk to their respective planets. This run he had only sixteen occupants, half of what he normally would carry. Not unusual, it’s up and down all the time. Has been for the past twenty or so years, he couldn’t remember exactly how long he’d been ‘Running’. The old ship ‘Vlortren’ translated to ‘Spitball’ was a midsize, about the size of a school bus, freighter that had been converted into a transport vehicle. An old technique used by Runners from the beginning. Even before the war, freighters were perfect for navigating the Euclidean Grid, what we know as the intergalactic superhighway.
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