Her Last Run

by Michael Penmore

  Rhys grabbed a piece of tarp and pulled it out. When the fabric spread out, Isabel let her end go and it dove right into the muck.

  “Come on, Rocarion. Why did you have to do that?” Rhys picked up the wet stuff. “This was supposed to be the Earth Union flag.”

  “It’s perfect,” Nadie said. “White, dirty, and tattered. That’s what the Earth flag will look like when they all surrender, lying in the mud under my boot.”

  Rhys shook his head and covered the four coffins with the unflattering material. He stepped back, admired his work from a distance, and then said, “Anyone got a bugle?”

  “Do I look like a one-woman band to you, dredge fuzz?” Isabel barked back. Nadie chuckled some more. “Good to know someone is having fun.”

  “This isn’t fun. Fun would be throwing these guys into the incinerator. Do you have one on the ship, custodian Isa?”

  “Custodian?” Rhys asked while he struck buttons on his wristwatch. “Never mind. I got it.”

  On his command, sharp riffs of guitar music carried over the room. Isabel perked up. The tune wasn’t so bad. It could use some upping the tempo, but the guitar player knew what he was doing. And then a rasping, half-singing, half-reciting, almost unmelodious male voice took over to the keening of bagpipes. Without knowing why, Isabel saw an image of rolling hills in her mind. She almost got lulled into sleep before she realised what the male was singing about between the guitar’s harmonious discords.

  If this is a soldier’s song, it’s not half bad, she thought. Poetry wasn’t her thing, but the lyrics in this ditty moved her. She had heard the tune somewhere before. It was old, perhaps from before the space-faring days? She listened to the mentions of baptisms of fire and a high-riding moon. She appreciated the new direct meaning, aside from the metaphorical one, when the voice sang about living in different worlds, but having just one. The male kept singing to his brothers in arms, saying war was for fools. She agreed, of course; wasn't sure how well it fitted Dreyfus’ military funeral, but agreed nonetheless.

  The song dragged a little, six minutes or thereabouts. When the final notes rang out and got swallowed by silence, Rhys stepped out. “We are gathered here to say the last goodbye to Captain Santiago, Sergeant Caruso, Privates Ramsonias and… err… Fink, I think.”

  “You know their names?” Isabel expressed mild curiosity.

  “Read them off their uniforms.”

  “OK. Carry on.”

  Rhys closed his eyes, breathed in, breathed out, cleared his throat. Behind him, Nadie made a grunting noise that prompted him to start talking. “Custom is to say something about the recently deceased. Any ideas?”

  ”No,” Nadie said.

  ”Santiago was a sly bastard,” Isabel offered.

  ”Something nice about the deceased is what I had in mind.” Rhys treated her to a long stare, trying to make her feel embarrassed. It only annoyed her.

  “That was a compliment.”

  “I’m not gonna ask why.” Rhys thought for a bit. “OK. I didn’t know you that well.”

  “You didn’t know them at all, Rhys,” Nadie reminded him.

  “I know you were soldiers. And that means you knew how to work in a team, understood discipline and listened to orders. You devoted your lives to Earth, and you died in her service.”

  Nadie clapped lightly. “Great speech. Let’s dump them in the black soup now.”

  Rhys turned sharply with his hips. “I know you don’t care about this, Nadie. If you don’t want to be here, go. I have something to say to them. They’re dead because of me, so it kinda matters to me, all right?”

  “You’re the weepiest Space Marine in the galaxy, dredge fuzz,” Isabel said. Rhys then turned towards her to give more of the same, but she cut him off. “Do continue.”

  The Marine swivelled back, inclined his head, then raised it. “When I was ten years old, my dad came back from a tour in Iran. He was changed. I couldn't put my finger on it, but now I'd say he had both sadness and hope inside him. You all know the story about the last war fought on Earth, nearly a world war three, and the miracles that happened next: power transition inside Russia, the Pragmatic Realignment in China, the peace accords, reduction of national armies, ban on nukes in space, and so on, and so on. Mankind seemed to have made a great jump ahead in quite a short time.

  “And now? Twenty years later, look at us. We’re fighting another war, but this one is Earth against the colonised planets. This war makes no sense. Space was supposed to be new hope for us, a fresh opportunity for everyone. But now we’re squabbling, and it’s destroying all the good in us. Nadie’s stuck fighting a losing fight-“

  “Hey!” the Corporal raised her fist.

  Rhys ignored her and carried on. “I’m a fugitive because I did what’s right. And you four are dead. Because of us, yeah, but none of us would be here if it weren’t for the war. That’s a right mess. I say we do something about it.”

  “Like what?” Nadie asked.

  “Like… I don’t know. Start talking. Listening to each other.”

  “How about you listen to me, first?” Isabel adjusted her glasses. The display inside of the lenses told her it was time to scoot. “There’s a whole lot of nasty background rads seeping in from the room above. Few more minutes and our insides will turn into glow sticks.”

  Nadie pushed herself off the wall and walked towards the door. “I’m getting out of here.”

  Rhys looked between her and Isabel. “But I haven’t finished yet. I need to speak to these guys directly. They deserve something… something.”

  “I know what they deserve. Let me do this.” Isabel stepped closer to the coffins. “Hey there, guys. Dredge fuzz thinks you need some wise words for a send-off. He can’t think of anything good, so here’s my three penny wisdom: life sucks. You win some, you lose most. Live with it.” She turned with a swish of her coat and joined with Nadie who already had her hand on the long bar of a door handle.

  “One last thing.” Rhys fumbled with his wristwatch.

  “What now? Be quick, or I’ll leave you behind.”

  “Just a sec.” He pried off a lid on one of the coffins and dropped the watch through a crack. He lingered for a few seconds. A punchy tune started playing from the inside. Satisfied, he dropped the lid in place. “OK, we can go now.”

  “What was that?” Isabel asked.

  “His playlist,” Nadie explained.

  “It’ll help them pass the time on the road to… wherever.”

  “Waste of a good watch to me,” Isabel said with a shrug. She didn’t care one way or the other. If she liked Dreyfus a little bit more, she might have told him she agreed: people were in a right mess and somebody should do something about it. But she didn’t like him, so she didn’t say it.

  The door opened and closed with the hissing of a seal. They hopped into a small lead-lined monitoring room and huddled in front of a window to see what happened in the compartment they had just left.

  “3, 2, 1, time to eject someone,” Isabel rhymed. She pressed a big button centre-piecing a small table and red lights started flashing. The floor of the emergency ejection chute rolled back, and the coffins fell out one by one for their final journey. The Anvil was still traveling through long space. Something like an iridescent bubble started to form in the opening, like a living thing coming in to say hello. Isabel got slightly freaked out, so she pushed the button again, and the airlock closed back. The bubble burst with nothing left behind. The room looked much like before, but a good deal cleaner.

  Rhys kept on staring through the glass and Nadie patted him on the shoulder. “That thing about the human side? Good words. Wrong people.”

  “Thanks,” Rhys said absentmindedly. He kept rubbing his empty wrist, as though he’d developed an itch. The skin was getting red from the attention. And then, he froze. Breathing was about as much as he was doing. Very, very slowly a frown developed itself.

  “You’re OK?”

  Rhys looked at Nadie. Hi
s expression fell. “We’ve got to go back.”

  Isabel observed him as though he had spread leathery wings. “What was that?”

  “We gotta go back!” Rhys sprang into frenetic shouting. “My watch! I need it back!”

  “Not a good idea.”

  “I need it back!” Rhys flailed with his hands like a mad man, and a blind one at that.

  “Stop before you poke someone’s eye out,” Nadie grabbed him by the shoulders, trying to stop the convulsive rhythm and calm him down. “Big breaths. Why do you need that watch so bad?”

  Rhys stopped all abrupt movements, but his eyes sparked a little crazy. “I got my mom’s picture on it. It’s the only thing I have of her.”

  “Seriously?” Isabel shook her head. “You wanna turn us back for a trinket?”

  Rhys didn’t say anything. Instead, he slid down to the floor and buried his face in the palms of his hands. He was already in the first stages of a meltdown. With the Space Marine badly rattled, it was up to Nadie to look after her friend. “His mom died when he was five. Leukaemia. Don’t be an ass and give back the boy his picture.”

  Isabel wasn’t just flesh and bones. Somewhere under that dark coat was a beating heart. She glanced at Rhys, searched the expression on Nadie’s face, until at last she threw her hands in surrender. “Sheesh, all right. I’ll turn the ship around. But just one swoop.”

  She knew it was useless. The ship had already covered several parsecs. Finding four boxes dropped out of a vessel traveling at faster-than-light speeds was going to be mighty more tricky than locating the proverbial needle in a haystack. Think more along the lines of one drop of water in an ocean, changing position as currents swept it to sides and storms upended the entire basin. But the hard-nosed gunrunner was going to try. Not because Nadie asked her. Not because Rhys the dredge fuzz was developing some sort of sobbing shakes and it seemed any second now he'd sprawl on the floor with a severe medical condition.

  She was going to do it because it was something she hadn’t attempted in years: the selfless act. Not to mention, she would look awesome if she pulled it off.

  The End

  Escape From Rockwall, Part 1 of Her Last Run

  Thanks for reading all the way to the end. You are my new favourite person.

  Read on. Or not. This is your copy of the book. You’re the boss.

  Still here? Oh, thank the stars! I was worried I lost you.

  Isabel Rocarion and the gang will return in Fall of Libertalia, Part 2 of Her Last Run.

  Coming soon to your local Amazon store.

  What to expect in part 2? Apart from more of the above? Let me see. A hidden planet, political rivalry, the EEF, Ypsilon, Science Consortium, Russian space pirates, African tribespeople, interdimensional beings, backstabbing and treachery, wretched hive of scum and villainy, Leslie Nielsen in underpants...

  OK, maybe not Leslie Nielsen. But it will be quite a ride, nonetheless.

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