Chapter Text
The star-specked void of hyperspace yawns open before the window of the cockpit. The stern starlight wavers slightly through the folded space layered around the ship’s green-hued metal carapace, and otherwise the view is only disturbed by irregular shimmering ripples as interstellar macroscopic particles impacts the force-field shielding.
Izuku doesn’t think he’ll ever get tired of the sight. He’s been watching it from the pilot’s seat for almost an hour now, getting ready for the final part of the flight to the Dyrae system and the necessary resurfacing from hyperspace. It’s a bit of a wait still, but he doesn’t mind.
If he minded, he wouldn’t be up here. Couldn’t. You can hardly be the lone pilot of a tiny starship if you mind spending most of your life between suns, and especially a ship like Deku.
For Izuku, the cold and steady starlight through his windows is home. Ever since he was old enough to join his mother on her modest, intersystem trading ship, he’s known that. The small family has a house on the small centre planet Mustafu, but altogether he estimates that he’s spent less than a third of his life planetside.
It’s almost hypnotic just to sit there and watch the ripples dissipate across the reinforced crystal of the window with the hum of the hyperspace driver in the background, but now he blinks his way out of his reverie and sweeps his eyes over the stars with more purpose.
He finds what he’s looking for within seconds. Right in front of the ship, a single star is just a little brighter than any others. Dyrae, their destination. If it’s bright enough to stand out, he really does need to start thinking about resurfacing soon, even at this shallow a jump.
A glance at his instruments confirm it. They’re running at a steady space-depth of 0.40, folded well into hyperspace and as deep as Deku is legally allowed to go. At that depth, they’ll reach Dyrae in less than fifteen minutes, but hitting it at many times lightspeed won’t do them any good.
For being a courier ship, Deku is very small, so there is no real need for the intercom. Instead, he sits up straight and raises his voice to reach his passengers. “Guys! We’re closing in on our destination and will be resurfacing in a few minutes, so either buckle up where you are or come out here to watch!”
The door separating the cockpit from the rest of the ship opens before he’s even finished talking and two people barrel out.
Ashido gets there first, jumping over the back of the co-pilot’s seat and throwing her arms up with a whoop of joy. “Yess, I win!”
“Oh, come on, Mina,” Kaminari complains, leaning over the back. “I wanted the front seat this time. You always do this.”
“Then you should’ve been faster!” she says, fingergunning at him.
Over the past two weeks in a small ship together, Izuku has gotten very good at ignoring their friendly banter. It’s far from the worst thing he’s had to deal with from passengers, and it’s relatively easy to let it melt into the background noise while he focuses on his calculations.
He’s been running the calculations in the background during the last week in-jump, and he knows they’re correct, but there’s no such thing as checking things too many times when it comes to hyperspace travel.
Once he’s sure everything is as prepared as it can be, he looks up at his passengers. “If you’re done, you should buckle up now.”
Ashido beams and fastens her seatbelts immediately, but Kaminari groans. “Seriously?” he says, looking back to the only other seat in the cockpit with seatbelts, back against the wall and away from the windows. “It’s like, a super routine thing, isn’t it? I want to see!”
Izuku looks back to meet Kaminari’s eyes and raises an eyebrow.
He rather likes these two, to be honest, but for someone who works in the production of powerful electronics, Kaminari has an underdeveloped appreciation of safety measures.
Oh well, nothing to it.
“First of all,” he says, pulling his right sleeve back to show off the array of ugly scars running from his hand and up almost to his shoulder. “I got these during something you’d call a simple resurfacing.” Admittedly, he’d only just gotten his licence and it was only partially his fault. “Second of all, Deku isn’t the kind of ship with more than one gravitational modulator to the driver, so internal gravitation will be disabled while we resurface, and I’d rather you didn’t float around or get thrown into things if it doesn’t go smoothly enough. So?”
Kaminari has gone slightly pale, and his eyes are fixed on Izuku’s arm, but he nods. “Yeah, okay.”
With both passengers strapped in, Izuku once again turns his attention to the windows. Dyrae is definitely brighter now, and clearly stands out from the stars around it. Still another minute before he should start the process.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” Ashido says.
He glances at her to see that she’s also looking at his arm.
He rolls his sleeve back down again. “Not anymore, no. Now it mostly just looks…”
“Rad,” she says, which makes him laugh.
It is perhaps a good thing that she finds unusual appearances cool rather than disturbing, considering where she comes from.
When humanity first populated the galaxy, so many centuries ago, they looked for planets so similar to Earth that terraforming could make them almost indistinguishable. Only when they stopped finding planets like that did they turn their eyes to less hospitable planets.
Terraforming could only get them so far, and so certain branches of colonists turned to genetic modification. To meet their planets midway, so to say. Ashido Mina, with her pink skin and black eyes, carries strong signs of being modded for a low-pH environment, though Izuku isn’t sure whether the horns is a part of it or just her own preference.
In the distance, Dyrae grows until it’s the size of a fingernail, and Izuku puts his hands on the controls. He flips the switch to ready the driver, and the sudden weightlessness is as reassuring as it is familiar. Everything works right this far. All his calculations are correct. His destination is in sight. The hum of the driver dies down.
He starts the resurfacing procedure, and the hum starts up again, rises to a whine, until the floor vibrates below their floating feet.
Outside the windows, space unfolds, layers unfurling like the petals of a flower bud peeling away. The starlight wavers and refracts, and what light shines into the cockpit plays over the walls in scattered shadows, as if it comes in through a kaleidoscope of water and void, through the surface of the ocean that is space.
Izuku’s eyes are on his instruments, his focus on the numbers on his screens, on making them match, on making sure they resurface safely, and yet the sight still threatens to take his breath away, like it always does. It’s worth every hardship it takes to get here, every time.
He keeps the ship steady while it shoots back up out of hyperspace towards the lightspeed limit and simple space on the other side of it, and he keeps a watchful eye on the space-depth indicator as the number crawls downwards, until it passes 0.31. The intensity of the light shining through the window suddenly rises.
He squints, ready to close his eyes in a second. “Crossing the light barrier in three, two, one…”
Even with his eyes closed, he can see the flash as the ship crosses light speed and comes hurtling out of hyperspace.
Ashido is blinking against the spots in her vision when he opens his eyes again, and Kaminari is groaning in the back.
“I warned you,” Izuku says. Back in simple space, the rest of the resurfacing is relatively simple, and he no longer has to devote all his focus to his instruments, free to watch as the layers of space folded around the ship keeps stripping away.
“I keep forgetting what that means,” Kaminari says.
In front of the ship, Izuku spots the star-like specks of the system’s planets, and he adjusts the course minutely so they’re heading for the right one. He lets the driver lift them further until they’re at a depth of less than 0.1, and then he stops it there, letting the whine of the driver die back down to a faint hum. Going up the rest of the way will take him half a minute at most, and this way, it won’t take them forever just to get to the planet from the edge of the system.
Then he reactivates the internal gravity and falls back into his seat.
“That was awesome!” Ashido says.
“Yeah,” Izuku agrees, unbuckling his seatbelts. “Yeah, it is.”
Kaminari stands up from his seat and jumps a couple times to test the gravity. “And now we’re almost here, huh?”
“Yup. In…” Izuku checks the time estimates. “One hour and fifty minutes, just about, I’ll have you dropped off at Dyre To. Also, now that we’re back in simple space, you should be able to connect to the local net from here.”
“Sweet.”
They both dive for their phones, which honestly, he can understand. After almost two weeks isolated in transit between planets, too deep in hyperspace to send or receive signals from anywhere, he also feels the need to catch up on what’s happened around the galaxy lately.
While his passengers are lost to their phones, he logs on the local net and sends off a message homewards, though checking the watch in the corner of his screen showing local time for the Mustafu system, his mother is likely still asleep.
For a moment, he feels absurdly jealous of that message. Deku, being a ship with mass and volume, would take months to cross the galaxy to get him home. Over that distance, even the fastest of Ingenium courier ships would take a day or two, but the message is composed of massless photons, driven to a space-depth near 0.994, about as close to the theoretical instantaneous travel as one can get. It will be there in the blink of an eye.
When there’s still no answer from his mother, he assumes she really is asleep, so he pushes it aside and glances at his passengers again. “And you’re still not going to need a ride back?” he asks.
“Nah, we’re good,” Ashido says. “Kiri’s picking us up.”
“Yep.” Kaminari leans over the back of her seat again and waves his phone around. “Just got the message back that he’s in the system, and no offense, but between your tiny ship and a bona fide defence corps fighter…”
“None taken,” Izuku assures him. “Defence corps fighter? Seriously?”
Ashido smacks Kaminari over the head before she answers. “Yeah, Kiri’s a defence corps recruit. He’s on a squad passing through here ‘cause of some pirate activity or something, he didn’t give details. Point is we agreed he’d pick us up here, but the whole squad thing is supposed to be a secret, so…”
Izuku raises a hand as if taking an oath. “My lips are sealed. Goodness knows I’m too grateful to the corps to make trouble for them.” Pirates are bad enough if you can defend yourself, and the only weapon Deku has is the harpoon for emergency landings.
“Great!” Ashido says. “Cause we weren’t supposed to tell.”
Izuku hums laughter and doesn’t quite know how to say what he’s been meaning to say. This part is always awkward, after spending weeks in close quarters with someone, but he has to live. “So,” he says. “Since we’re back online, you think you could transfer the rest of my payment now? Just to make sure it goes through before we land.”
“Ooooh, right, sure,” she says, and she looks like she’d forgotten that was a thing too.
“At least it’s cheap,” Kaminari says, looking over Ashido’s shoulder as she makes the transaction.
Izuku just laughs, because yes, it is. As slow as his ship is, and as small as it is, he can’t take too much and expect to get clients. He gets enough to live on, enough to keep Deku running smoothly, enough that he can realistically live the majority of his life between the stars, and that’s all he ever wanted, but it’s still not a lot.
The computer beeps with a notification that the transaction has gone through, and Ashido stands up and stretches.
“Well!” she says. “We should start packing up our stuff.”
With that, she and Kaminari once again leave Izuku alone in the cockpit, and he falls back to watching the stars through the window, soaking the sight up. Once he docks at the main harbour of Dyre Én, he’ll be stuck planetside for days, maybe weeks, so he watches while he can.
A ping from his computer alerts him that he’s gotten a message, and he looks down. It’s from his mother’s account, but she’s not the one talking.
[Welcome back to the surface, Izuku!] it says. [Voice talk?]
Izuku smiles and types a response. [Thank you, Attra. We made it safe and sound. And, not right now. Still got passengers.]
[Right. Good passengers, at least? Not like that Yoarashi guy?]
Izuku snorts at the memory. Over two years of passengers since then, many of them downright nasty people, and that one still stands out as an unpleasant one. The man was a pilot himself, and though he seemed like a good person at the core, he spent the entire three-week trip loudly and insensitively criticizing everything Izuku did and insisting he knew how to do better, as if Izuku didn’t have more experience than almost any pilot his age.
[Not even close] he types [These two are loud, but I’ll almost be sad to see them go. Pleasant company.]
[That’s good to hear, but you didn’t tell them about your condition?]
The slight disappointment in that message is probably his imagination. Attra may be an AI, but even she can’t transfer more than plain text over the message system.
[They didn’t ask] he says, [so I didn’t feel the need to tell them.]
There’s a pause before the next message.
[I wish you didn’t feel like you need to hide it.]
Izuku bites his teeth together as he reads it. It’s not like he doesn’t agree. He wishes that too, but you can’t always have what you wish for.
[No one trusts a manual ship, Attra] he says. [Never mind that Deku at this depth is just as safe as any AI run ship going at its own maximum depth. People find out I’m alone in this and they can’t get away fast enough. If hiding it gets me paid, I’m going to keep doing it.]
It’s not like he’s even hiding it that hard. It’s on all his official documentation for those who bother reading the stuff.
[I know] Attra replies. [We just worry. It’s a mother’s prerogative.]
[You’re not my real mother] he says, and it’s an attempt to alleviate the situation. An old in-joke from when he was a child and his mother tried to explain what AI-synchronization really was.
[I’ve been telepathically connected to her since before you were born, so shush] she replies, light and easy, accepting the shift in the conversation.
[Has anything happened over there while I’ve been under?] he asks.
[Nothing much. You know how it is. Work is steady, and nothing ever happens out here, so the days flow together. And you? Do you have a job lined up for the return trip?]
[Not yet, but there’s bound to be something] he says, and he hopes he’s right. The Dryae system isn’t a centre planet, and isn’t known for getting a lot of people travelling through. Most people who do want to go somewhere either own ships for themselves or will hire someone local.
[Good luck, Izuku] she says, and he sends a hugging emote back.
The channel stays open, but the conversation peters out after that, and he watches the blue and brown-laced shores of Dyre To come into view as the planet grows in front of them.
Before he knows it, he has to take the controls again to resurface completely, back to 0.0, normal space, and then they’re fighting gravity, descending through the atmosphere, relying on the driver’s gravitational manipulations while the engines rumble to life again. Engines aren’t needed between the stars, but for the normal space acceleration and deceleration, he needs them.
Dyre To is a small planet both in size and in activity, truly the secondary planet in a two-planet system, it’s used mostly for industry and stopovers by larger vessels, with very few permanent residents. Izuku supposes it makes sense that a defence corps squad that’s trying to stay covert would land here rather than the main harbour at Dyre Én.
It’s still a sight to behold when he comes in from the sea to see the industrial spires of humanity pierce the horizon. By the awed sounds coming from Kaminari, who stands behind the co-pilot’s seat, gaping at the view, Izuku isn’t the only one enjoying it.
“It’s something, isn’t it?” he asks.
“It’s good to be back planetside!” Kaminari answers.
Izuku laughs. “I suppose it would be, if you’re sunbound.”
“You don’t agree?” Kaminari asks.
Grinning a bit sheepishly, Izuku shrugs. “It is nice to stretch my legs on actual ground sometimes, but I could never settle for only one sun.” He points up, towards the ceiling, and beyond it, the sky. Blue now, above them, but the atmosphere is a flimsy shell between them and the stars. “My home is up there.”
“That’s so poetic,” Ashido sighs from the co-pilot’s seat.
Then the radio hums with an incoming call, and a chipper woman’s voice rings through the cockpit. “Dyre To harbour control calling incoming ship. Identity and purpose, please.”
Izuku presses the button to respond almost before she’s finished the request, answering on reflex. “Courier ship Deku, ID number 48 4108 090538 083, here to drop off two passengers and then continue on to dock at Dyre Én.”
“Alright,” the woman chirps. “Your passengers will have to give their full identity upon landing, but you can wait until you’re at main, if you’d prefer?”
“Thank you, I will,” he says.
“Then you’re cleared for landing. Enjoy your stay!”
The call disconnects, and Deku soars in towards the harbour.
For all they’ve lived in close quarters for weeks, Kaminari and Ashido are eager to get off the ship and through customs, and so the farewell is short and efficient. They both give him hugs, Izuku makes them promise to call him up again if they’re in need of his services and he’s around, even though he doesn’t expect them to want to repeat the experience, and then they’re off.
Only at the last second does Kaminari stop at the landing and turn around to say, “It’s a shame your AI’s so shy. Would’ve been nice to say hi.”
Izuku just gives a strained smile and waves without saying anything until they’re around a corner and out of sight. Then he closes the door and leans against it, letting out a long breath, once again alone on his own ship.
“…you know,” Attra’s hesitant voice comes over the speakers, out loud now that there is no one to overhear. “I could have pretended to be your AI if you wanted.”
She almost sounds sincere, and he honestly considers it for a moment before he shakes his head. “No. Bad enough that I’m lying by omission. I won’t start lying for real, too. Either way they’d realize something was up.”
“Of course,” she says. “It just hurts to see you like this, and I wish there was anything I could do.”
He shakes his head to rid himself of the heavy thoughts blanketing his mind. These are old wounds, older than the scars marring his arm, persisting from the day he was ten, and his mother had tried to take him to get an AI, and after weeks of frustration a doctor had given the final verdict.
A peculiar quirk of his mental configuration. It’s rare, but it happens sometimes. He will never be able to synchronize with an AI. I think your son should probably give up on his dreams of being a pilot, ma-am.
No. Izuku shakes his head harder. The past is the past. He is a pilot, and he can be a pilot. People were flying manually for ages and ages before AI synchronization was invented.
Yes, it’s slow, and the pay is terrible. Yes, it’s lonely up there without someone to keep him company. Yes, it made him a laughing stock all through his three years at the academy, at least until the stunt in his third year that left him with his scars and several classmates with the fear of death in their hearts, but… But!
He’s here. He can fly, he can soar between the stars, travel freely, as long as he doesn’t mind taking the scenic route. He can meet people, make friends, be of help in those places people don’t often come to help, and it is worth it. It is all worth it, in the end.
“I’m fine,” he says. “I’m fine, Attra. It doesn’t matter. Let’s take off before harbour control starts second-guessing my intentions.”
Deku feels too light, deprived of its passengers and their possessions. Izuku gets them out of Dyre To’s gravity well, sets the course for Dyre Én, and dives. Not all the way to hyperspace, not for a trip this short, but a few points into simple space, to make the trip take minutes instead of days. He sits back and lets the dancing lights of space folding around him wash away thoughts of things he can’t change.
It feels like no time at all before he’s resurfacing again and going down through the atmosphere of a much more densely populated planet, weaving between other ships as he approaches the main harbour.
The person contacting him on the radio this time sounds more tired than Izuku knew it was physically possible to be. “Dyre Én harbour control, identity and purpose,” they drawl.
Izuku rattles off his ship’s name and ID number again, and then adds, “I’m the only person on board, pilot Midoriya Izuku. Just finished a job and am here hoping to find work that will take me back out of the system.”
The tired person hmms. “Yes, I found you in the register. It doesn’t have a registered AI on you. What’re you running?”
“Nothing, sir,” Izuku says, slightly subdued. “This is a manual ship.”
“So it says,” the tired person says, apparently too tired to muster a reaction of surprise, which Izuku doesn’t mind. “Alright. What kind of work and how long are you planning to stay.”
“Just normal courier work. People or cargo, wherever people need it to go. I’ll be posting an ad on the local net once I’m cleared for it. Planning to stay at least two days and no more than two weeks. If I don’t get work within that time I’ll leave without it.”
The tired person hums, and there’s a pause. “Alright, since you’re licenced as a courier with the Ingenium fleet you get one week’s dock and a check-up of your ship free of charge. If you need repairs or want to stay for longer you’ll have to pay. I’ve registered you for a week’s stay at dock 23C. You’re cleared for landing and have a nice stay.”
It might be the single least enthusiastic ‘have a nice stay’ Izuku has ever received, and he has received a lot. He finds himself hoping they get off work soon so they can get some sleep.
Then he locates his dock and lands the ship.
Above him, there’s nothing but blue sky, and once again he feels stranded so very far from home.