Quick Current
Overview
The Quick Current is a heavily modified Wayfarer-class light courier registered under Outer Verge Small Carrier Permit #VR‑227/33, with the call sign “Slick‑Nine.” The vessel is owned and operated by the independent pilot Slick Hendricks, who runs courier contracts, passenger charters, and occasional odd jobs throughout the Outer Verge. As of the current charter, the Quick Current is ferrying two passengers — ISA auditors under the aliases J. Sable and an unnamed male counterpart — from Waystation Kestrel to Dispatch Hub 7‑Gamma, a journey of approximately sixty-seven hours at cruising speed.
The ship’s significance lies in its role as a dependable if unglamorous workhorse of the Verge, a region where reliable transport is scarce and discretion is often more valued than polish. The Quick Current is too small to attract serious attention and too unassuming to be worth stealing, which has allowed it to survive nearly four decades of frontier service.
Description
The Quick Current is a potato-shaped vessel spanning 38.2 metres, wrapped around a spine of recycled bulkhead alloy. Its hull bears layers of weld-burn scorches and patch plates, with only scattered islands of the original faded mustard-yellow paint still visible. Retractable wings extend to 19.6 metres for atmospheric flight, giving it a slightly ungainly profile.
Stepping aboard requires ducking through a cramped side-mounted airlock with a gasket patched with yellowed metallic tape. The main cabin, a polygonal chamber roughly five metres by four, serves as the social heart of the ship. Two salvaged net-frame seats face each other across a central compartment row, their webbing worn into distinct patterns. A folding table that never quite locks flat sits between them, and a yellow-digit chronometer with a cracked display gel ticks off the hours with a soft click. A single self-healing amber light tube provides a sepia-toned haze, flickering three times when the secondary life support cycles on.
The cockpit, a step up and forward, is intimate and worn. A pilot’s couch of khaki synth-foam faces an array of analogue dials, struggling holographic panels, and a nav console whose amber drift-correction alert glows persistently. The smell of old coffee and warm capacitor gel hangs in the air. Aft, the engine bay fills the entire ship with a standing vibration — a harmonic wobble that registers in the teeth, rising and falling as the phase coil hunts for alignment. At steady cruise the hum is a lullaby; under acceleration it becomes a guttural thrum that makes smooth writing impossible.
Surfaces throughout bear a fine patina of grime and faint oil-solvent residue, the accumulated texture of years of hands and incomplete cleanings. Equipment lockers hum with anti-shock mounts, and a narrow shelf holds sealed emergency rations with labels curled at the edges.
Society
The Quick Current is not a democracy. Slick Hendricks, a Verge-born pilot of indeterminate middle age, owns and operates the vessel with the easy fatalism of someone who has survived too much to raise his voice. He wears a leather vest covered in mismatched patches, hums tuneless space shanties while piloting, and has developed an encyclopaedic vocabulary for the ship’s mechanical complaints. The Quick Current is both his home and his livelihood, and their relationship resembles that of a long-married couple that only speaks during arguments.
On the current charter, the social dynamic is officially commercial: Slick is contracted by the Department of Improbable Emergencies (through a shell account) to deliver two auditors to their destination and wait three days. He views them as “audit-types” — clean, officious, and the reason he cannot smoke aboard for the duration. The passengers, for their part, maintain the crisp politeness of junior ISA personnel, though Slick’s peripheral awareness notes small inconsistencies: a faint chemical scent that isn’t cheap deodorant, a scorched mark on a jacket that doesn’t fit a career auditor’s budget. For now, Slick treats these details as not his problem, provided the credit remains good.
Notable Features
The Quick Current’s propulsion system consists of twin Durand-Yee phased-ion thruster nacelles, retrofitted with aftermarket phase-coil regulators that have not been recertified in nine years. A short-range jump shunt allows hops of two light-seconds within a star system but requires cooling between cycles. The single Gollan-7 fusion bottle has logged 10,843 of its documented 11,200-hour half-lifetime and sits cradled in a dampened sleeve that howls when cycling.
Life support endurance is fourteen standard days for four beings, though the water reclaimer whines in competition with the coffee brewer, and the atmospheric recycler’s secondary loop cycles 1.4 seconds slower than specification. The forward cargo hold, accessible via a floor hatch, contains seismic survey gear and two cases of “calibration media” wrapped in anti-static foam.
The port inertial damper grid produces a noise like “a wet parrot” above 1.8 G, so the ship is never pushed beyond that limit. The chronometer’s front gel bears a pebbly crack under fingertip, and one segment of its middle digit occasionally blinks out. The locker latches are cold metal with sharp-edged release levers that pinch if handled incorrectly. These accumulated quirks give the Quick Current a stubborn, lived-in character — a vessel that has outlasted threats by being too unremarkable to notice and too idiosyncratic to easily replace.