by Sam Renner
He grabs it off the dash and rolls it over and over in his hands. He plays with the buttons on the top. He pushes them in a random order. He pulls at the two halves of it almost out of habit. It doesn’t move.
He tosses it back to the dash and sinks his body lower into the pilot’s seat.
“Mmm hmm,” Laana says.
++xxx++
The ship Otanzia is a growing spot in front of them. Nixon has heard of these civilization-class ships. Galactic way stations with mostly transient populations of travelers looking for a place to stop and restock. Rooms to rent for those crew members who want some place to sleep that isn’t a thin mattress on top of a moulded platform. Restaurants where you can get food that isn’t rehydrated in some kind of heating unit.
Honestly, it sounds great.
Otanzia is shaped like a brick, wide from this angle and tall. Light from windows dot most of the side, and at the bottom a series of wide openings.
“Point us to one of those gaps,” Laana says. “We’ll put down in there.”
“Did you hear that, EHL?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then do that.”
“Yes, sir.”
The ship drops and sets a course for one of the openings. As they approach, it gets almost impossibly wide, and the size of Otanzia makes Nixon feel impossibly small. All of the galaxy around him, and this is what makes him feel tiny.
It takes up all of his vision. He looks left. He looks right. He can see nothing else. This wide opening swallows up the ship as it moves inside.
“Hello, captain. This is Officer Markum, gate agent for the ship Otanzia. Please state your reason for boarding.”
Nixon turns to Laana.
“Rest and restock,” she whispers.
“Rest and restock,” Nixon repeats.
“Thank you.”
Officer Markum is silent for a moment.
“Space 1112. We’ll push directions to your ship’s systems. Enjoy your stay.”
“Thank you. You too.”
EHL moves deeper into the Otanzia, following the directions that the ship sent.
“You too?” Laana says and smiles.
“Shut up.”
EHL finds space 1112 and sets down. Nixon and Laana go about securing the ship.
“Told you there wasn’t anything to worry about with the new transponder.”
“Still makes me nervous, but this time you were right. What now? You're familiar with places like this.”
“Food? I have credits. My treat.”
Nixon agrees. He grabs his cloak and slips it over his head. He drops his reader into one pocket and the case in another. He pulls his blaster off the dash and shows it to Laana.
She nods. “Wouldn’t hurt to have it.”
He tucks it into his waistband and then hits the button to open the ramp. The relative silence of EHL is replaced by the hustle of activity. Voices talking, shouting. Ships firing up, winding down. Equipment moving here, there. It’s a noisy energy that Nixon hasn’t felt in a while. Even on Ibilia, it wasn’t like this. There was a quietness there, everyone drawn into themselves moving on some kind of invisible path to wherever it was that they were going. All together on those streets but all still somehow alone.
Not here.
With all of these pilots and all of these crews, the whole space is energized. It’s lit bright with huge lights hanging from ceilings that feel exceptionally high. Adding to the cacophony are the fans that keep the air moving, the exhaust and the fumes down, and make everything cold.
Laana steps ahead of Nixon and says “This way.”
She weaves herself through the crowd toward a sign indicating a bank of elevators. It’s less crowded here.
Laana hits the call button, and they wait for the next elevator up. “So,” she says, “what are you hungry for?”
08
Nixon sits back in the seat. His belly is full. He’s happy.
Laana smiles at him. “Enjoy that?”
He exhales then grabs a crust of bread left on his plate. He bites off half of it and says “I did. Very much. Thank you.”
“My pleasure. Partner.”
The crowd in the restaurant—a little place that roasts meats and serves them on silver trays with assorted vegetables—is clearing out. The staff is pulling dishes from tables. Wiping down left-behind messes.
“How about a drink? I know a place that’s a couple of floors up and a good distance away.” Laana points out a window in the front of the restaurant and toward the opposite end of the ship.
“I can show you more of Otanzia while we walk.”
Nixon agrees and stands. The energy in the ship itself isn’t as intense as it is down in the hold. The sheer size of the space helps to dissipate much of that. But there’s still a buzz. Nixon feels it as he walks these corridors, following Laana close. She’s pointing out places and objects. Nixon is sure that what she’s telling him is important stuff, all will be critical to know at some point, but he’s having a hard time listening to her. He’s distracted by his own presence here. It’s dawning on him how outlandish all of this is, that he’s been given this case and this mission. That he accepted it at all, and that the galaxy paired him up with a Snapsit woman. That it put him on one of these civilization-class ships.
All of the stuff that makes a civilization a civilization is on the ship’s edges. There are restaurants like the one Nixon and Laana just left. There are places to get a drink, like where they are headed now.
There’s also every kind of store you need. Ship supplies, ship parts, And every kind of store you most definitely don’t need. Blue neon clouds hang in the windows of some of the shops. Nixon recognizes the little icons from Exte. The shop owner is saying that if you know how to ask for it, he can sell you Cloud 90. Let a couple tabs of the blue powder dissolve under your tongue and you’d forget entirely where you are. A third tab and you’ll lose and entire week. Add a fourth and … well, Nixon had never heard about anyone surviving a fourth. But he’d also never heard of a shop owner-dealer deny someone who wanted to try.
“Just don’t take it here.” Dead bodies are bad advertisements.
Of course a second tab made with the wrong stuff could be just as fatal as four of the good kind.
These little glowing icons are mostly just a reminder to Nixon that he left a bucket of seeds buried in the sands on Exte. He’d kill for those credits right now. His balance is running low, and he was hoping he’d not have to sell the remaining Bastic fuel rods.
The inside of the Otanzia is a dull grey and everything that Laana is pointing out looks vaguely the same, but she hasn’t stopped talking since they left the restaurant. It’s clear that she likes this place. Clear that she’s spent more than a night or two here.
“And then if you follow that hallway down there,” she points down a passageway that disappears around a curve, “you’ll get to…”
Nixon puts up a hand to stop her.
“What?”
He puts a finger to his mouth to signal quiet.
He concentrates.
Yes, he did hear it. Grunts. Snorts.
He sniffs the air. Whatever scent Otanzia pipes in is now mixed with sweat and dirt and that very specific scent of …
“Uzeks,” Nixon says.
“Yeah?”
“You didn’t say there’d be Uzeks here.”
“There could be anything or anyone here. It’s an open ship. No restrictions on who or what shows up.”
“Yeah, but…”
Laana starts walking again. Nixon follows, keeping his head turning and his eyes open.
“Besides, you think it’s the same Uzeks? This far out?”
Nixon considers that. “No. Maybe not. It’s a long way to go, but…”
“No,” Laana interrupts. “It’s not the same Uzeks. I chase bounties. They haven’t come out this far.”
“You came out this far.”
“Nah,” she points to a place just ahead of t
hem. It has a neon sign hanging above a double-wide entrance. There are tables out front of the door. “I stumbled across you. I was already out here. Technically, you came to me.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
They take seats outside of the bar. Nixon sits with his back to the wall. A Snapsit woman comes to the table to take their orders and speaks to Laana. Nixon doesn’t understand any of it, but it’s not where his attention is. He’s watching the long walkway they’re sitting in the middle of. It stretches out for a hundred feet on either side. At one end of those walks it turns in the direction that Nixon and Laana just came from, and he can see down that walk until it almost disappears into the distance.
But the other end of the walk also turns the other direction, and that’s what worries Nixon. He can’t see around that corner. He hasn’t just come from that direction. He’s blind to whatever is over there.
The Snapsit woman returns with two drinks on a tray. It’s the frothy yellow thing that he’d been given back on Ibilia.
His face sinks when the waitress puts his glass in front of him.
“What?” Laana says.
“I’ve had these before.”
“And you didn’t like it?”
He shrugs and looks past Laana to the end of the walkway. Then he turns his head and looks to the opposite end.
“Sorry. You can get the next round.”
She picks up her glass and takes a long drink then puts it down. Yellow froth clings to her upper lip. It looks a pale green against her blue skin.
Nixon picks up the glass and raises it to Laana as a thank you. He takes a drink and smiles.
“Good.”
“Better than what I had on Ibilia. That was bitter. This isn’t.”
He looks back past Laana to the end of the walk then back up the path they took to get here. It’s not empty, but there’s nothing there that’s concerning. He turns his head and checks the opposite direction.
Laana takes another drink then puts her glass down. “Would you relax?”
“How far back to the ship?”
“How far?”
“We need to get back, how long will it take?”
She takes another drink. “You walked it like I did. We are a good ways from where we came in, but you don’t have to worry about that.”
She tries to make more conversation, but Nixon isn’t listening to her. He’s nodding and offering one word responses.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she says. “But you’ve turned into an awful date.”
He begins to tell her that he’s sorry. That this place is so big it’s disorienting. That he’s OK with new planets. That doesn’t freak him out. But here, this ship. It’s all walls. Even if those ultimate walls are so far apart that you could fit a million EHLs inside this place, he’ll never stop feeling claustrophobic here. That he’d just as soon they kept flying to Azken without a plan because at least there he’d have a sky above him. And if he’s got a sky he’s got a way out.
But he doesn’t say any of those things, because just as the words were forming in his head, an Uzek turns the corner. Then another two turn the corner behind the first.
Laana sees him and follows his gaze.
“It’s OK,” she whispers. “There’s lot of Uzeks.”
“There aren’t that many Uzeks.”
Nixon locks eyes with the one who turned the corner first. He stops walking and grunt-snorts something to the other two. He points. They all grunt-snort something to each other. It’s all just noise to Nixon, but he doesn’t need to be able to speak the language to know what they’re saying.
He stands.
“Come on,” he says to Laana. “We’ve got to go. They know me.”
09
Laana jumps up and follows Nixon. They knock two other tables over in their rush. The Uzeks are close behind them chattering things to each other.
Nixon sprints to the end of the walk and turns left heading back the way he and Laana came. He’s regretting that he didn’t pay attention to her little tour now, because he has no plan. She’s not armed. He has his blaster, but there are three of them. One man’s blaster is only going to do so much good for so long.
“Where to?” he shouts over his shoulder.
The path he’s on is nice and wide, but they keep passing narrower walks that look more twisty, more turny, and more advantageous for someone trying to make a foot chase more difficult. Especially if those people are being chased by big and lumbering creatures that are known for their anger but not their agility.
Laana begins to answer, but a blaster bolt passes between them and the sizzle from the shot drowns out anything she says.
They both look behind them in time to see one of the Uzeks approaching quickly. He’s on a motorized float cart, some kind of rigged up contraption created to make moving items around this big ship easier. Nixon has no idea where this thing got the cart from, but it’s standing up and holding a medium-sized blaster pressed to its shoulder with one hand. It isn’t aiming the gun, it’s just firing wild shots with one hand while steering the cart with the other. Two more bolts scream toward them but miss.
Nixon pulls his own blaster and turns to fire at the Uzek on the cart. He only takes one shot, but it’s a good one. It connects with a front corner of the cart and spins it out from under the Uzek. The creature goes flying one direction, the damaged cart flies off in the other. The Uzek hits the ground behind Laana and Nixon and slides across the floor. The blaster is knocked from its hands and slides toward Laana. She stops running and picks it up then shouts for Nixon to stop too.
“Down here,” she says. She’s stopped by an entrance to one of the skinnier passageways. She gestures for Nixon to head down it.
She puts her back to a wall and brings the blaster to her shoulder. The other two Uzeks are still giving chase, grunting and snorting amongst themselves. Laana fires three shots hoping to make quick work of most of the Uzeks, but this blaster fires a wide bolt. It’s noisy and it’s powerful. More powerful than she expects, and she lets out a moan each time the blaster rocks her shoulder.
She lets the gun fall from her hand. It lands with a heavy thud on the ground, and she steps over it to follow Nixon down the hall. The grunting and snorting is still behind them.
“I don’t know where I’m going,” Nixon shouts without slowing down.
“Honestly,” she says, “I don’t know either.”
Nixon keeps running, and a blaster bolt crashes into the wall behind him. Laana screams.
Nixon stops and turns.
“Are you OK?”
She runs past him. He follows.
There’s another blaster shot.
“We’ve got to be faster than this,” Nixon shouts.
Laana moves quicker. He can see it. She’s separating from him. He steps up his pace, and the grunting and snorting behind him becomes more distant. Neither of them stop running, though. They keep the faster pace, making this left and that right. And at some point Nixon follows Laana around another right turn and it dumps them back out into a walkway.
He’s sure all of this makes sense to someone who calls the Otanzia home, but it’s only turned him around more than he already was. Laana too.
“Hmmm,” she says, looking up and around. “Never seen this before.”
The whole area feels abandoned and is only lit with half light. What should be open shop doors are closed. There’s a bit of grit and grime on all the surfaces. Nixon doesn’t like it. He hasn’t liked anything about this place since they put down here. He let Laana lead. He let her determine where they’d lay up while they came up with a plan. Even after she said where she wanted them to go, he didn’t like it. Not for all of the reasons he’d thought through before. Not for all the new ones that are coming to him right now.
“Get us back to the ship,” he tells Laana.
She turns to him and starts to make a joke then stops. Her face gets serious.
“OK. Will do.”
It’s not a “yes, sir” but it’s close. Nixon kind of likes it.
10
Laana is still sleeping in the galley when Nixon gets up for the day. He barely slept. He listened to Laana and gotten too confident, too comfortable. But nowhere is safe. There’s not a spot in the galaxy where he can go that the Uzeks can’t find him. No spot he can go where a bounty hunter won’t be able to track him down. This case is a curse. No more dallying. He wants it off his ship. He wants it out of his life. And he wants all of that yesterday.
