Starhustler

by Chris Turner

  Wren scoffed. “Yeah, just like these bug-like things you talk about that are now extinct. Fat lot of good this tech did them in taking over the galaxy.”

  “The details of the Mentera’s demise are lost in time.”

  My trembling reverie came to an end. “Let’s just keep it out of anybody’s hands for now.” I shuddered to think what a brute like Baer would do with it, or who he might sell it to. He’d talked about some star lord wanting to buy it. It now dawned on me what had happened to Mitch, the guard back there. The phaso seemed to work its mischief when some combination of the alien script and its surface was touched. He’d gone to one of those worlds, but without the device, he couldn’t get back. I only managed to get back because I had a firm grip on it. Mitch didn’t.

  I couldn’t help notice the hungry look in TK’s eye as he studied the disc, despite his gallant words. I quickly gathered the strongbox up from under the conference table and locked up that evil, little treasure. I kept it clasped in my arms, thinking to hide it away somewhere on the ship.

  Mumbling, rubbing hand on chin, I stepped back a few paces, while he rubbed his brow with a dirty cloth. “I’d better start fixing that drive. All of you, leave me alone. Sit on your thumbs, swap tales, play tiddlywinks, I don’t care, just don’t distract me. I need space and quiet to concentrate.”

  “Sure thing, pops,” I said.

  “Billy! Change up the batteries. Load the spares that I charged yesterday. We’re going to need more juice to incite the Barenium.”

  I granted the old man his space. Leaving him to his tasks, I wandered through his workshop, staring in a daze at the maze of machinery. Wren was at my heels.

  Some time later TK came to us, rubbing his oily hands with a soiled rag.

  “So, I did a full scan and mustered what I could. The Barenium’ll will take time to settle in those canisters. I’m guessing about eight hours. We give it a try after. If it starts up first shot, we’re lucky, if not, we’ve got ourselves a problem.”

  “Let’s hope it starts up then.” I wished it was sooner, but realized the settling was out of my hands.

  We edged back out of the workshop, the bright light stinging our eyes. “So what now, professor?” I asked him, squinting under the glare. The sun looked as if it had not dipped a degree in the sky.

  “Time to eat,” he said. He and Billy ratcheted up the tarp. “This way.” He pointed a forked hand to another place, far away from the workshop. “It’s a forty hour day on this world, so it’s easy to get hungry.”

  I could see the method in TK’s madness, keeping his residence far from work, in case one of the ‘mad boys’ happened to stumble on his crib. He’d have a temporary place to lie low in, if that wasn’t compromised too.

  Chapter 8

  TK had made his residence in the side of one of the dung piles, like an igloo of crud, indistinguishable from the rest of the other compost.

  I stepped closer to the fifty-foot-high gummed mass, recoiling at the sudden cloying stench that hit me, but a skittering sound had me turning around wild-eyed. Aiming my blaster at two mean-looking scorpion-like knee-high crab things scuttling across the sand straight at us.

  “Fuck! What are these things?” I got off a shot, but didn’t do any significant damage.

  TK let out a shrill whistle, his finger to lips. He slapped down my weapon before I could get the next shot off and waste it too. The creatures bobbed back, springing on their spindly, segmented legs a foot away. They hissed and clicked, barbed stingers coiling over their scaled backs. The pincers out in front looked like capable clipping machines.

  “Protection,” TK explained. “Come on, inside.”

  I realized the scorpion dung at the side of the mound was the source of the smell. Gingerly I stepped around it, eyeing the six-legged crustaceans with a wary eye. Clear translucent exoskeleton, eyes perched on stalks, armored carapace, one could see right through to the lungs pumping, heart beating, and some black red, kidney-shaped organs.

  I shivered and Wren ducked in a defensive crouch, muttering some foul words under her breath.

  I whirled to another sound, my blaster lifting. A mummy-like shape hobbled out of the shimmering heat waves, a walking stick in hand. Brown-wrapped rags hugged the sleek body, up to the high hood; white albino eyes shone through the black oval of a cowled face. The scorpions didn’t budge.

  “Relax.” TK pulled down my weapon. “I know him.” He lifted a hand in greeting. “Oi, Toog. Some new friends I’d like you to meet.”

  He introduced the wary figure to us. The newcomer was about five seven, thin, wiry like others of his kind. Only his eyes showed, white pools into nowhere. Even his hands were mitted as if he had scabies. Those eyes, as white as an egg, mesmerized me.

  “Toog’s been a friend for a long time. Ever since Billy caught desert fever and almost died two seasons back.” My foggy, tired brain pondered on how long a Talyon year was.

  “You’re welcome to join us, Toog,” he said. “We’re just sitting down to a meal. This here’s Wren and that there’s Rusco.”

  Toog dipped his head in thanks, accepted Wren and I as equals, seeing as we were friends of TK’s.

  A trap door led inside the igloo of sanctuary, camouflaged to look like the other junk metal and plastics in the pile. Inside it was dark and surprisingly cool, protection at least from the mad boys.

  “Toog’s one of the few who fled from the crawlers, searching other ways. He’s one of the good ones, Rusco. You’ve nothing to fear.” He glanced at my clenched fists on my assault rifle.

  To my relief the house pets stayed outside.

  “Raised those dervishes from babies. I fed them, tamed them and watered their backs. Now they’re loyal to me, as long as I keep feeding them.”

  “What do you feed them?” asked Wren.

  “Dead meat. Anything I can catch. I look for the condors or buzzards circling overhead. Anywhere they’re circling means fresh meat is about. Sometimes they sight a sick crawler wandered off to die or some fresh carrion. Rest of the time I hunt whatever I can for food with my bow.”

  I nodded as if nothing could be more natural.

  The floor was fine white sand, the ceiling beamed with girders; the walls, dried mud, making it cool and dry inside, and a relief to my pounding head. Billy went running over to a shelf of pots to gulp water from a beat-up bucket. I saw the old man kept a crude, fire-stoked stove complete with chimney. Buckets of water ranged around, dozens of them; a chest of junk for fuel, elsewhere a few potted cacti, some low cots. Spartan but serviceable. A mystery where TK got water.

  He motioned us to a low steel table with woven place mats in the middle of the room. While we sat around it, the old man fired up the pot-iron stove, rustled up some food, banging various pots and before long he served us a piping-hot soup of green vegetables and some crunchy brown sticks.

  I dove in, famished. Munching away, I lifted my spoon to him. “This is not half bad, TK. What is it?”

  “The green stuff’s cactus, high in trace minerals and nutrients. The desert insects, those brown sticks you’re shoveling in by the forkful, are common to this region, easy to catch and super high in protein.”

  I dropped my utensil on the plate, coughed, and my mouth hung open.

  Wren smirked. “What’s the matter, Rusco, lose your appetite? There’re more in the pot where that came from. Grasshopper is a novelty on Talyon.”

  Loosing a sigh, I studied my company. Toog with his quiet, diminutive movements, never taking a mouthful too swiftly, Wren, her challenging stare, as if everything was wrong in the world, and TK, a glint of amusement in his gray eyes, watching us as if we were all a study in social experiment.

  TK read my mind about the next question about the water. “Don’t worry. I have to manufacture my own liquids. I have a rig further down. I call it the hydrophon.” He grinned. “My back’s not what it used to be in the old days so I rig up the AGs and get Billy to help me haul a barrow of filled buckets to this
place.”

  I nodded. “Seems as if you have everything worked out. Except maybe the bloodthirsty scorps and the zombie mummies lurking about your doorstep.”

  “Them…well, I have my ways of keeping them at bay. Xig and Xag, those two brutes outside, help me with that. They’ve killed many wandering crawly boys who’ve come nosing around. If word got out me and Billy were holed up here…” He let the idea hang in dead air.

  “So you’ve survived,” I said. “I’d count that as impressive. Was there ever a better yesterday?”

  “Dezran City used to be a self-supporting community. A bunch of us used to live in scattered settlements. Along the foot of the desert ridge, not like the big metropolises you see on the settled planets. Talyon was different, had a fresh start, even though it served as the recycling center of the solar system. Then they came and burned up the town.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Some glory-seeking warlords out to make a name for themselves. Heard this place was fair game, rich in mining, beryllium and other elements, and laid waste to the city.”

  “Sounds like any of a dozen lowlifes I know.”

  TK shrugged. “The strongest of us banded together and we became fighters. In the end, ultimately refugees, living hand to mouth. Many of us drank poison water, I don’t know what else: some became the mutants you saw out there. Messed up their heads, burned their skin, deformed their bodies. That’s why they’re all wrapped up in rags. Used to be human, but they went—feral, let’s say. If you saw them—” he shuddered and cast a sharp look at Toog.

  Toog stirred and spoke in a lisp. I caught a flash of harelip beneath the cowl as if his teeth were set the wrong way. “Some genetics company had been brewing toxic bio-mixtures. They got mixed up in the water supply when the outlaws were blasting the place all up.”

  TK loosed a choked growl. “That and the toxic waste dump burning and smoldering and seeping scum into the water table. Don’t forget that, Toog. A toxic jury-rigged slurry, a disaster waiting to happen, courtesy of the growing recycle piles!”

  “Where did all this junk come from?” I asked.

  “Shipped in from innumerable planets. All the worlds far and near used Talyon as their dumping grounds. For generations and generations. That all ended when the wars started.”

  I drummed my knuckles on the table. “So how come you guys aren’t all twisted up like our mummy friends out there—no offense to our friend Toog here?”

  TK held up a glass bottle of pills, liquid capsules on the table. “Quizanine. Methyl basene—plus a smidge of isopropyl alcohol.”

  “Well, aren’t you the clever one,” I marveled.

  “I pride myself in knowing things.”

  “I can see that.” I frowned and turned to Wren. “What about you?”

  “What would you like to know?”

  “Why didn’t you turn into one of our mummy friends?”

  “Lucky, I guess. Always added a bit of vinegar from fermented cactus to my water.”

  TK laughed at the notion. “Some of us are just resistant to the effects.”

  Wren shrugged, apparently not in the mood for arguing with the old man.

  “Family?” I turned to her. “How have you been surviving?”

  “Dodge and blast, nothing else. My crib’s hidden far away. On the other side of the pits. I saw your ship come down. Then I came to look. My rod’s been keeping me alive, no thanks to you, losing it out there somewhere in the sand. Built it myself.”

  “Treat that new piece at your waist as your new improved ‘rod’. You still haven’t explained how—”

  “Nothing much different from TK’s story,” she said in a harsh voice. “My family was killed, my daughter too.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Don’t be. You didn’t know her from Eve. Bad shit happens to good people. Happens all the time. I got over it.”

  I could see that Wren hadn’t and probably never would. But I was no grief therapist and so I moved on. “If we get my ship running again, I’m inviting you all out for a ride—you too, skinhead.” I punched her a playful slap on the shoulder. Her body remained rigid. My sudden act of charity was not just in good nature. A little bit of self-preservation was mixed in with a whole lot of scheming. “I could use a resourceful bunch of entrepreneurs like you.”

  TK swigged down a gulp of water.

  “So, you’ve never made it off this rock?”

  “Nope.” He shrugged. “I’ve been off and traveled at lot in my younger days before the space docks and starships were wiped out and communication towers destroyed. A few rogue ships have dropped out of the sky over the years, but on seeing nothing here but desert ruin and mummy freaks they speed off in a hell of a hurry.”

  “Nobody’s come to this planet since I’ve been a girl,” croaked Wren in a faraway voice. “Even then the memory is dim. I remember a silver, cigar-shaped craft angling down in the plain once, before it became another toxic waste dump. I watched from one of the recycle hills.” Her eyes clouded over. “They landed, let out a bunch of people—prisoners, I reckoned, with their arms bound behind their backs. Three tried to make a run for it, and the captors blasted them in cold blood.” She shivered. “The rest they let live. Then they flew off.”

  “What happened to the survivors?” I asked.

  “Dunno, I scrambled away, fast as I could, being just a little kid. When I came back, they were gone. Sand dervishes must have got them.”

  I stared in grim silence. “And you, Toog?”

  “I kill mad boys as easily as TK here. Sometimes they hunt me, but I lure them to my special place—where an army of dervishes nest. They feed nicely that day.” He gave a snorting exclamation. “Was just checking on TK here, seeing that he’s feeding his pets properly.”

  “And was I?” TK asked with a crooked grin.

  “Seemed so.”

  “A good trick,” I said. “Letting the dervishes control your mad boys. Surprises me you’d kill your own kind though.”

  Toog grunted, the first real emotion I’d heard from him. “I owe them nothing. They killed my family, ground them up, ate them for stew. Made me one of them. But I escaped. Now I kill them on sight.”

  “You’re one against an army,” I pointed out.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “I admire your spirit, Toog. All of you. Just think you’re on the wrong world.”

  “What world isn’t ‘wrong’?” grunted TK.

  “I invite you to come with us, Toog.”

  He stared at me a long time. “No, this is the only home I’ve known. Call it sentimental, but I’ve a kinship here. There are others like me, like TK and Billy.”

  “Knock yourself out.” I shrugged. But in those eyes I saw the sadness of generations, as I had seen so many times on many worlds. Worlds ripped apart by senseless violence, and privation, sunk in the deepest mire of decadence.

  While TK and Wren went off with Billy and Toog to fetch water and look out for more mad boys crawling about, I drifted off in the opposite direction to the repair shop, my Uzi slung over a shoulder, thinking it better to be closer to my ship. I followed what I remembered of the route we took, wiping my brow in the baking sun. No number of nervous glances over my shoulder allayed my suspicion that those damn sand crabs weren’t following me.

  The ruins came in sight and I heaved myself down on a sand drift at the edge of the pit. The merciless sun beat down on my head and my mind wandered on how I’d always wanted a tan.

  I lay the Uzi on my lap in case a mad boy decided to make a move. It was a good compact submachine gun, modified to fire a heat-swath plus bullets, frying anything within a twenty yard range. Lumo, infrared scope for night fight and laser lock, cool smooth barrel, compact hand stock—I liked the lighter feel, its quickness to slide off the shoulder and into the hands.

  The throb in my knee had receded to a dull ache, that or I’d gotten used to it. Nevertheless, I up-ended the last of the pain pill-bottle I’d p
ulled from Starrunner into my gullet. Seemed I was about due for another dose. I glanced down at the pit: a stark, baking hole with crumbling earth on all sides. No soul would ever guess a hidden workshop lurked down in that abyss holding a Class A starship and stocked with tools.

  I shook my head with an amazed grin, hardly aware that I was starting to doze off.

  I awoke to the drop of something in my lap, a black-leathered figure crouching before me with a wry smile.

  “Must have drifted off.”

  “Dangerous place to do that,” Wren admonished, dropping the handful of pebbles she’d been tossing.

  I gave a careless grunt, rose to my undignified half crouch, squinting in the obnoxious glare.

  “Boring over there hauling water,” she bantered. “Thought I’d bug you instead.” She squinted down at me. “You serious about taking me with you, if the old man fixes the ship?”

  “Why not? I’m generally not a liar. There’re things to discuss first. Like business. Not just a free ride here; work to be done.”

  “Like what?”

  “Let’s cross that bridge when the time comes.”

  A stiff silence came over us and I could see her pouty frown moving across her fine lips, so it prompted me to mellow somewhat.

  “Listen, I’m sorry for what I said back there.”

  “About what?”

  “About saying you had a butch cut.”

  She laughed. “Well, it’s kinda true, isn’t it? Though I’m no butch.”

  “Think you’d look a lot prettier with a whole head of hair though, instead of a few bristles like a porcupine. Not that you aren’t pretty. Just saying.”

  “Opinion noted,” she said dryly. “This brush cut is more for practical reasons than anything. It’s cooler on the skull.”

  “Those leathers sure aren’t.”

  “They’re for protection, Rusco. In case I run into some dervishes. Their pincers are deadly.”

  Voices drifted from down the path and a scuffling of moving figures.

  TK, Billy, and the mummy-ish Toog came trundling up the hot sand, with the old man wearing a worried frown. His two scorpion friends scuttled at his heels.