by Sam Renner
He stands and starts walking again. He’s making a show of doing some mental math. He looks to the ceiling. He counts imaginary numbers on his fingers.
He lets this go on for a moment then turns back to Roland.
“Four thousand credits,” he says, “and a crate of rods.”
Roland shakes no. “Three thousand credits and a rod.”
“Twelve rods,” Nixon counters.
“Three.”
“Five.”
Roland doesn’t come back with another offer. He doesn’t come back with anything for a long second, muffled waves crashing on the rocks a block away the only thing filling the silence.
“Three thousand and five rods.” Roland says it like a question.
Nixon nods, and Roland is quiet again for another long second.
“Damn it. OK.”
Roland turns to the man from the night before and tells him to go get one of the movers.
“Wait!” Nixon interrupts. “If I’m driving it with this stuff on the back then I want to be the one to pick it out.”
“Whatever,” Roland says. “Just be quick.”
Nixon goes back out to the main floor of the warehouse and over to the movers that are parked on the wall. Someone has already loaded one of the movers with crates, so Nixon begins inspecting the first of the two that are left.
He drops to his back and slides underneath. He looks at the suspension system. He inspects the shocks. He looks closer at the tires, running a hand along a section of rubber that’s as smooth as a cut gem.
He jumps up in the cab and looks at the steering column. He wiggles the wheel to see what kind of play is there.
He gets down and crawls under the second mover. On the outside, this one looks like it’s been through a war zone—and who knows, maybe it has. There are large holes in some of the body panels. Half of others are just missing altogether.
But under here, it’s not bad. Better than the first mover. Parts here are newer. The shocks look solid.
He jumps in the cab of the second mover and looks it over. He plays with the wheel. This is it. This is where he earns his three thousand credits.
He sees Roland watching him from the doorway to the back room. He points to the second mover then gives Roland a thumbs up.
“Keys are in the door!” Roland shouts. “Bring it around back.”
The warehouse is quiet. Everyone stopped working when Roland shouted his instructions. Nixon looks around. There are more faces here than he’d realized before. There are Snapsits, but there seem to be Snapsits everywhere on Umel. There are Gomans, big things that are double tall and extra strong. And there are Uzeks. Far in the back and looking at him closely. On their toes to see around the Gomans.
Nixon looks away quickly and opens the door to his mover again. He reaches into the pocket and fishes out the keys. He starts the mover and pulls it away from the wall and out into the street in front of the warehouse.
The man from the night before is waiting around back near the now-open bay door. Nixon backs the mover in then jumps out. Roland is still in the doorway, and there’s a small crowd standing behind him. The Uzeks are there.
He can’t worry about that now. He’s a new face. They don’t recognize him. That’s what he repeats over and over and over as he helps the man from the night before load these crates onto the back of the mover.
He grabs five rods from the open case and places them on the seat next to him before he closes and seals the top. Then he loads it, the last box, onto the back of the mover.
He helps get the crates strapped down tight then heads over to Roland, the Uzeks still watching him from a distance. They are talking now and looking right at him.
Nixon looks to Roland. “OK, boss. Where am I headed?”
09
Nixon climbs back into the cab and settles himself into the seat. Roland comes to the window and asks to see Nixon’s datapad. He holds it up and Roland starts tapping the screen of his own. He swipes and gestures his way to a map. He shows the screen to Nixon.
There’s a pair of flashing markers.
Roland points to the one at the bottom of the screen. “That’s us.”
He points to the marker at the top of the screen. “That’s where you’re going.”
Roland turns his pad back so the screen is facing him and swipes up. A moment later Nixon’s pad vibrates, and an indicator flashes that he has a new message. He accepts and the map is now up on his screen. He studies it closely. The drive should be easy once he gets out of Umel’s main district.
“Who am I asking for once I get there?” He’s still looking at the map, trying to remember street names and when to turn where. He doesn’t want to be looking at the screen all the time considering what’s sitting in the crates behind him.
“Ask for Daryl. He’s expecting you. I told him you’d be there in a few hours, and that was about an hour ago.”
Nixon looks up at Roland. A small crowd has gathered. There’s the man from the night before. Then behind him are a couple of the other workers. And farther back, the Uzeks.
“Got it,” Nixon says. Roland steps back and Nixon eases the mover out of the bay doors and onto the street.
Weighted down, the mover drives tougher than Nixon expected. He can feel the tires grabbing the road, and it’s work to get it back to his own ship.
He looks in the space behind his seat and finds a handful of dirty rags. He pulls them up one after the other until he finds one that's big enough. He lays it out flat on the seat next to him and sets the fuel rods on top. He wraps them up like a package and takes them into the ship.
He searches quickly for a locking storage unit, but doesn’t find one. He heads to the galley and pulls open one of the empty drawers there. They’re long and shallow and will give the rods the tightest fit. He carefully places them inside then heads back for the mover.
It’s spitting rain now, and he hustles back into the cab. He tries to pull away, and the mover struggles to find purchase on the now damp ground. The sand is getting wet. The dirt is turning muddy. It makes the whole drive more treacherous. The mover shifts and slides under Nixon as he turns through the city streets, and he can’t help but picture some kind of disaster.
He tries to navigate a turn, traffic and pedestrians not minding that he’s driving this loaded down beast of a machine. He has to make a quick adjustment and over-corrects. The mover slides away and out of control. It goes hard into the side of one of these buildings and all of it explodes in a ball of green fire. He burns up with it, and Shaine’s case never makes it any farther than here—a damp, useless little planet.
He sits himself up straighter. He grips the wheel tighter and eases off the gas. This isn’t a race with some kind of prize for the person who gets there first. He guides the mover slowly and carefully through the muddy rutty streets until he gets out of the main district and finds the road north.
They’ve taken the time to pave this road with large smooth stones. It’s not the gentlest ride, so Nixon doesn’t open up the throttle. But the tires do feel more solid under him, not like he’ll go flinging off sideways if he jostles the wheel wrong.
There’s nothing on his left side, just more sand like the field that he landed in a few days ago. On his right side is the water, a wide open sea that’s crashing hard into the rocks and throwing spray up onto these stones. It’s stopped raining, but the surface is still slick.
Wind howls outside, and it pushes water onto his windshield. He looks at his datapad. Twenty klicks left. He settles into the seat and focuses on the road ahead of him, trying to not let the winds from the water catch his stack of crates and push the mover into the sand. It’s a fight all the way, but he finally sees buildings on the horizon. Like back in the main district, these are long and low.
Pulling closer he can see the bay doors, all open. One man steps outside. He’s just a small smudgy shape against the tan wall at this distance. By the time Nixon has covered his last klick there’s a
small crowd outside to watch him pull up. He quickly scans the faces as he brings the mover to an easy stop.
There are Snapsits here. Uzeks. Humans. More species that Nixon has never seen. He doesn’t recognize anyone who’s watched him pull up until … . It’s an Uzek, and not like the Uzeks back in the main district. This one is familiar. It’s a face he knows. This mashed-in snout or these scarred and yellowing tusks, one slightly shorter than the other. He knows he’s seen these heavy-lidded eyes before.
The Uzek cranes his neck, strains to see around the pair of Snapsits in front of him, and for a second he and Nixon lock eyes. Then a rapping on the driver’s window pulls away Nixon’s attention.
He cranks the window down and the man who was first out of the warehouse is looking up at him.
“Bring it ‘round back,” he says and points down the length of the warehouse with his hand and then indicates that Nixon will need to make a right turn once he’s to the end.
Nixon pulls the mover back away from the doors and passes the crowd that’s assembled. Everyone watches him drive past. He looks in the open bay doors as he drives by and sees workers inside stacking crates that are all organized into groups, loaded onto pallets and into containers. They are clearly shipments getting organized to go out. And when he makes the right, he sees where all of this material is headed.
There, just past the back of the warehouse is a small dock, and moored to its posts are a pair of ships. They are big, but Nixon has seen bigger. They are loaded, but Nixon has seen fuller. Men are walking the dock, wearing long cloaks that are dripping with water whipped up from the sea. All of their efforts are coordinated. This one pushing these crates to that one. These two loading a container on a lift that will take it up to two more men waiting on the ship. Men walking slowly up and down the docks supervising it all.
Nixon completes his turn and straightens up the mover. The man from the front of the warehouse waves Nixon forward. Nixon slows as he approaches and eases the mover to a stop. He jumps down out of the cab and sees that the crowd from the front has shown up again. At the back is the Uzek.
They lock eyes again, and the Uzek leans over and says something to the man standing next to him. He doesn’t look away from Nixon. Nixon returns the stare, damned if this big, green thing is going to intimidate him.
Nixon steps to the mover and unlocks the straps holding the crates down. Each of the men gathered there starts pulling the crates down and loading them onto pallets with all the care of Hogun beast tearing into a fresh kill.
Nixon steps back and the man from the front joins him.
“You’re Darryl, I assume,” Nixon says.
“I am.”
“They know what’s inside those crates?”
“They don’t.”
Nixon winces as one of the boxes falls off the back of the mover and crashes to the ground. He hears the wood crack.
“Think you should tell them?”
Darryl shakes his head. “Wouldn’t matter,” he says. “They get paid by the load. The quicker they finish this one the faster they can get to another, and I have three more shipments due in a few.”
Men are tossing boxes from the top of the stacks down to men waiting on the back of the mover and then down again to men waiting on the ground. They make quick work of thirty-six crates.
They have all of them loaded onto a hand mover. Nixon’s Uzek is at the controls. He stands on a platform on the back and starts it moving toward the bay doors, staring at Nixon as he pulls it away.
10
Nixon gets a thank you from Daryl then climbs back up in the cab of the mover. He eases it away from the bay doors and back around to the front of the warehouse. He stops and takes one last look inside before he gets back on the road.
Everyone and everything inside is diligently working. All of them busy, heads down moving crates and boxes here and there, getting them ready to load onto the waiting ships.
Nixon turns and looks one more time at the dock. Everyone and everything there still working hard as well. Getting the ships loaded and then out to sea, moving their cargo to wherever Roland needs it to be. Nixon looks out to the water and sees the silhouettes of two more ships waiting there for their turn to get weighed down with boxes and crates.
The mover drives differently now. Without the weight on the back it gets moving quicker. It’s actually fun to drive. And with the rain ending and the winds dying down, Nixon isn’t having to white knuckle the wheel to keep the thing on the road.
That gives his mind a few moments to wander to things like the case sitting back on his ship and the reason he’s out here at all. He replays that last conversation with Shaine. He sees them sitting back in that courtyard. He hears blaster fire and sees Shaine spin to the ground after being struck in the shoulder. He sees the case tumble end over end and the skitter across the paver stones. He hears Shaine scream for him to grab it and go. Then he sees Shaine’s body tear and splatter when it’s hit by blaster fire.
He closes his eyes quickly and shakes his head free of those memories. He looks out to the water and the waves rolling gently into the rocks. The angry sea that he’d seen and heard on his way to the distant warehouse is much calmer now.
He lets himself sink deeper into the seat and rests just one hand on the steering wheel. The road in front of him is straight and empty and long, the water on his left and nothing but sand on his right.
He feels the work of the day begin to take its toll. He’s tired, and it’s all he can do to fight off sleep. He cranks the window down and feels the light spray from the sea pepper his face. He hears the waves as they turn over.
He lets his mind wander again, and he starts rebuilding the face of the Uzek he saw back at the warehouse, the one who kept staring at him.
It’s the eyes first, yellowed and veiny. Covered by thick, heavy lids dropped down low so they could focus on him.
The mouth is next. It’s drawn tight and curled awkwardly around the two uneven tusks. One of them is shorter than the other and blunt at the tip. Broken, but Its jagged edges worn smooth by time.
After the tusks, it’s the snout. It’s shorter than the snout on other Uzeks, tighter to this one’s face. It moves subtly, in and out. The wide nostrils flare every few seconds, and a scar drops from the bottom of the left one. Maybe there from whatever caused the tusk to break.
The rest of the thing’s head fills in around the face. The skin a lighter shade of green than what was on Uzel before Nixon killed him. Then it’s the rest of the body, all the way down to the feet. The callouses on this one’s arms aren't as thick. It’s skin not as worn. The belly isn’t as pronounced.
Once he has the Uzek fully in his mind, the rest of the picture begins to appear. The surroundings start to fill in, but it’s not the warehouse that Nixon just left. It’s a street corner back on Exte. This Uzek is standing there with a few others, including Uzel. He’s not saying anything, just a background man. Judging by appearances he’s there to look tough and get tough if he needs to.
Was that a look of recognition? Did he know me? Or was he just trying to intimidate?
His mind again: The scene flashes from a street corner to a warehouse back on Exte. There’s Uzel. And there, in the back, is his new Uzek friend. Another flash and another scene. Uzel standing next to one of the small ships that the Uzeks gave him to fly. And again, there is this new Uzek.
So long leisurely drive. If that Uzek knows what happened then he knows enough to say something to Roland. Especially since it wasn’t just Uzel who Nixon killed. Got the daughter too, and a handful of others.
That makes him worth some kind of reward, right? One worth trying to get, or at least get a cut of. Maybe, though, he hasn’t said anything else to anyone. Maybe he wants Nixon—and the reward—for himself.
It’s what I’d do. I’d want the satisfaction of revenge. And I’d want the credits.
Nixon is so lost in his own thoughts that he barely recognizes that Umel’s main district is
quickly approaching. It’s dark now. The day is gone, and the lights from the ships tied to the docks light up the water. The light coming from the warehouses’ open bay doors light up the area around the docks. Workers run back and forth between the two.
Nixon slows the mover as he re-enters the streets of the main district. They are mostly empty, and their muddy surface is still slick. The mover, without the weight of the crates, dances more now than it did before. Nixon slows to almost a crawl. To be safe, he tells himself.
But even slow progress is progress, and he eventually makes that final turn toward Roland’s warehouse. He sees a figure standing outside. As he gets closer, he recognizes the man from the night before. He puts up a big hand, gesturing for Nixon to stop.
