Prologue

"Beep-Beep!" Stated the door. Still no luck.

Bertonin sighed. He had been working for the last four hours on opening the door to his room. True, he had spent that amount of time opening a door once before, but at the time he had been farther down than up his bottle of Fornian Jack. This time was a little different. For starters, he was now attempting to get out, not in. More importantly, as much as he would currently like to be as far down a bottle of Fornian Jack as he could, there was not a lick of drink in his room. His current 'room' was a former storage compartment in a Class II cargo ship, the Tempest. The bare walls and exposed girders and trusses spoke to the minimal effort given to make the room "human habitable". His artists' eye picked out the different material and poor material transition at the comm console. That was definitely a new addition, even if nothing else was.

The communication console, as well as just about everything else in the room was useless to Berts at the moment. It had shut down (along with his door) as soon as the alarm bells went off four hours ago. With no responses from the crew, he decided that he did not want to wait around to meet whatever had set off the ship's alarms.

He was currently kneeling in a mass of tangled wires spilling out of the hole next to the door that used to hold the door's activator switch. He had some knowledge of wiring from earlier art projects (he had, in fact, designed human body replicas for AIs, although he found the niche profession to not be his calling), and he thought overriding the door would be a trivial matter. He was wrong. Activating the main, backup, tertiary, and emergency circuits did nothing, and even after building his own circuitry, there was still no response from the door but its delightful double-chirp of rejection. He was beginning to hate with a disgusted admiration whomever had wired this bucket of bolts. Who used wires anyway! This is not the twentieth century!

The first priority for Berts was securing his art materials in Cargo Bay FB, across the corridor from his 'room'. It was true that his clothes were a step above the common spacer's garb, but his real money had been spent on the items he had stored in that hold. He had hired this vessel to transport him to the Fringe planet of Decarut, where an annual (their annual meant roughly 1.5 standard earth years) art competition was held. Two competitions ago he had placed third in the innovative materials competition, and the judges and his small group of admirers considered this to be the peak of his career, and did not expect him to surpass that level of achievement again.

He had not, in fact, surpassed himself since then, but this year's competition was different; he was almost broke. On the verge of being artistically forgotten and finding his anemic funds no longer capable of sustaining his lifestyle, he finally found the inspiration (and motivation) to potentially surpass even himself and become a household name once again. He did reproach himself mildly for not taking the opportunity to attach his houeshold name to some household products when he previously had a chance, but business was not his calling, so it was only a small regret.

The goal now was the Decarut Annual Intergalactic Art Competition (DAIAC) XXXVII. The DAIA Committee had said that his previous winning piece was his masterpiece, and therefore would have a difficult time going back on its word by giving him a higher prize, but third place would certainly be open to him should he have a solid entry. Two third-place prizes would be a record, of course, and that alone would give him enough publicity and money to get him back on his feet. All I need is the art.

Since Berts did not have anything to enter, his idea had been to hire a ship that would take sufficiently long to get there, and have enough space to give him an area to work. When the expenses added up, it was cheaper to go this route than to actually rent a space with similar benefits on Certous, where he had been staying. Unfortunately, living on a slow-moving transport ship tended to remove one from the political intrigues, and therefore meant he would be working on a piece without the political edge he was used to, but it was a small price to pay for a distraction free work environment.

This all would be great, except that he was halfway through his journey and he only had a jumble of half-finished projects, nothing remotely good enough to enter the competition, which frustrated him greatly. He had already promised the DAIAC a new and inspired piece, and he was running out of time to deliver.

Berts finally found a way to cross the tertiary and emergency circuits, and inhaled slowly as he secured his wiring. With an appropriate flourish of his hands he touched the final wires together, showering himself with sparks as the door again gave its cheerful double-chirp.

And the doors shuddered open.