The Damsel

by David Dixon

  BLACK SUN NO.1

  THE

  DAMSEL

  by

  David Dixon

  THE DAMSEL

  Second Edition Copyright © 2021 by Dark Brew Press

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Any characters, names, places, or likenesses are purely fictional. Resemblances to any of the items listed above are merely coincidental.

  For permission requests, please contact the publisher, Dark Brew Press, via e-mail, with subject “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at: editor@darkbrewpress.com

  ISBN

  Paperback: 978-1-990317-02-6

  eBook: 978-1-990317-03-3

  Interior design by Crystal L. Kirkham

  www.darkbrewpress.com

  THE BLACK SUN SERIES

  by David Dixon

  The Damsel

  Six-Gun Shuffle

  (Coming Soon)

  Hell Hath No Fury

  (Coming Soon)

  CHAPTER ONE

  People often think of privateering as a lonely business.

  You know, flying around from planet to planet, living in spaceports, hotels, being stuck in the cramped confines of a cargo ship. Everybody seems to think it’s a job for steely-eyed loners who enjoy their own company, but that’s just wrong. In fact, we meet new people all the time. As privateers, the boss and I spend our time jumping from sector to sector, planet to planet, and station to station. Each landing brings a new set of faces, and we almost never work for the same person twice. Not to mention, we’ve seen the inside of every shitty club and spaceport bar in The Fringe and hit on every waitress, lush, and stripper from Mon Astra to the Tanika Outpost.

  We meet plenty of people.

  The real problem in our line of work is that the human race is generally made up of assholes, and as such, we privateers meet more than our share. The reason we so rarely work for the same people twice is three-quarters of them don’t pay in full, and the rest don’t pay at all. But to be honest, the people we work for are shining examples of virtue compared to the folks we deal with on a daily basis—the competition, customs officers, corrupt cops, hired guns, drug runners, gangsters, death cults, con-men, and the insane. And, don’t even get me started on my boss, though he’d probably say the same about me.

  I’d say the ratio of assholes to good people is probably ninety-nine to one. So, when you meet somebody you might actually like in this business, it’s a goddamn miracle. Problem is, to meet that one person you like, you gotta deal with a lot of assholes.

  This was never truer than during our most recent trip to Ramseur.

  I sat in the cockpit trying to remember how to recover the engine’s maintenance logs from the central computer when I heard footsteps behind me. I thought nothing of it, since the boss had been back in the cargo bay running tests on the engine coolant trying to figure out if we could squeeze another couple of runs out of it before we had to replace it—that stuff isn’t cheap. I figured it was just him coming back up to tell me our savings were going to be wiped out.

  Bad news of the typical sort, in other words.

  A shadow passed over the main computer terminal. A flash of light exploded inside my skull like fireworks and a thousand blasting trumpets and I found myself smashed face first into the keyboard. My head swam and I tasted blood.

  Instinctively, I jerked back and tried to squirm around in the seat to either get away or at least see where the next blow was coming from.

  I failed miserably, of course. Instead of dodging the blow, all I did was ensure the next strike caught me in the mouth. It was no softer than the first, and I felt my left incisor split.

  That hurt. A lot.

  “What the fuck?” I slurred around a busted lip.

  I squinted through the pain and saw a blurry silhouette of a short, thin man I didn’t recognize. What I did recognize, though, was the not-at-all-blurry gun barrel staring me in the face.

  “Now do what I say or else you’re gonna get it again,” the man said in a nervous, high-pitched voice. The pistol flicked to the left to indicate the “it” he referred to meant another gun barrel to the head.

  “Uh huh.” I nodded, trying to focus my eyes through the throbbing crescendo of agony in my head.

  Some small part of my brain not concerned with immediately generating and cataloguing all my various types of pain wondered just exactly what was going on. Namely, where the ever-loving fuck was my boss and why had he been replaced by the Mad Pistol Whipper here? And, of course, if someone had to get beaten by this guy, why couldn’t it have been the boss instead of me?

  “Get us out of here,” my mysterious assailant ordered.

  Just as I was about to object with something completely and perfectly logical like “Well, I’d love to, asshole, but you see I’m not actually the pilot of this rust bucket, so if you’d like to beat someone senseless so you can get off this godforsaken rock of a planet, I’m perfectly fine with that, but you’ll just have to wait until my boss who is the pilot gets here and then you can beat him all you want,” I heard the sound of the boss’s boots as he stepped through the airlock threshold that separated the cargo bay from the rest of the ship.

  My vision returned and the immediate sharpness of my misery subsided into the gentler type of dull, chronic pain that keeps people up for days and causes them to lose all desire to live. The details of my attacker gradually came into focus, and I had a great view of my boss’s face when he looked into the cockpit and saw an armed stranger and saw the stranger’s pistol staring him square in the face. It was the sort of incredulous look somebody might have after they’ve been told they’d just ingested a lethal amount of rat poison.

  “Drop that,” the mystery man ordered my boss, with a jerk of his pistol to indicate my boss’s shoulder rig.

  The boss hesitated and our uninvited guest swung the barrel of the gun into my head again. Fireworks exploded in my skull and vomit rose in my throat.

  “What was that for?” I whined through clenched teeth, “I’m plenty subdued, hit him for fuck’s sake.”

  “Shut up,” the high-pitched voice answered as he swung the pistol back toward my boss. He locked eyes with my pistol-wielding tormenter but made no move.

  “I said drop it.” The man’s gun went up to between the boss’s eyes. Despite this, my boss managed a sidelong glance at me, which told me he was planning something. Somebody was about to get shot.

  Both of us, most likely.

  “All right, all right, I’m just going to pull it out real slow like. No need to get jumpy here,” my boss said calmly while he reached for the .45 in his shoulder holster. As he put his hand on the grip, I saw his pinky finger flick almost imperceptibly.

  Halfway twisted around in the pilot’s chair as I was, I barely had enough time to throw myself as far as I could over the right-hand armrest and switchboard and smash my head—again—into the navigation display.

  It was a good thing I did, because that was all that saved me from taking a .45 round right in the chin.

  The boss had his revolver up in a flash, firing at least twice inside the cramped interior of the ship at a target less than eight feet from him. Of course, Snake isn’t his nickname, it’s mine, so he didn’t exactly move with mamba-like speed, which meant our mystery assailant had time to shoot too.

  And because this kind of failure is what he excels at, my boss a
lso missed. His two rounds slammed into the back of the pilot’s seat where my head had been not a millisecond earlier and through that into the instrument console. There was a ringing in my ears like the world’s loudest cymbals, and something warm and wet in my left ear told me I now had a ruptured an eardrum.

  Our attacker, meanwhile, had missed also, but had considerably more to show for it than did the boss: in the mad confusion of a gun battle inside our already-cramped ship, the boss had backpedaled wildly, tripped over the open turret hatch, and fallen backwards inside it, cracking his head soundly on the outer mag lock ring for good measure before he disappeared down into the turret. Not content to bungle his rescue attempt merely by almost killing me and managing to fall into the most confined space in the craft, my intrepid boss also managed to flail about as he fell and pull an improperly-secured storage locker down with him.

  It opened as it fell, spilling a cascade of tools, dirty rags, and a five-gallon bucket of hydraulic fluid into the turret with him. Our mysterious hijacker sprung to the edge of the turret and, without looking, fired two shots down after my companion. Then he slid the turret hatch closed and set the external magnetic safety lock—effectively locking the turret from the outside, so even if my boss and pilot were still alive, he was trapped inside.

  When it rains, it pours, and when it pours it’s a goddamn monsoon.

  I was going to have to get myself out of this without help from my boss, which bummed me out more than it should have, given his already-demonstrated lack of skill in the help department. Bleeding from my ears, nose, and mouth, I was pretty sure my goose was well and fully cooked.

  The gunman turned his attention back to me, smoking pistol in his hand.

  I decided compliance to be the smartest policy.

  Our attacker’s voice was now a register higher than it had been before, almost an excited squeak: “Get us out of here!”

  “I’m not actually the…” I sighed, realizing the futility of trying to protest. “Fine. Fine. You know what? Fuck it, all right?”

  This guy wanted me to fly, which meant he couldn’t, and trying to explain to him that as the turret gunner I wasn’t exactly a pilot in much the same way I wasn’t exactly a space ship was going to wind up one of two ways. Either me being shot and him going to hijack somebody else—which I’d have been perfectly fine with except for the being shot part—or him shooting me and trying to fly it himself. Either way, I was a dead man, so I figured being a pilot was my best shot.

  How hard could it be?

  “All right,” I said. “But you two shooting the place up hasn’t done much for the ship, so give me a minute before you crack me over the head again, will you?”

  “Just get us gone!” he yelled.

  I swore under my breath as I looked around me. The cockpit was full of switches, VDUs, buttons, indicator lights, a few analog gauges here and there, and a myriad of taped notes and procedures the boss had left himself. I kind of knew what everything was, but that was different than knowing how to fly the thing.

  A ship is like a woman—just because you know what all the parts are doesn’t mean you know how to operate them.

  The boss had taped his preflight checklist to the left armrest, and I tried to follow it as best I could. Unfortunately, his handwriting was worse than my kindergarten Chinese, and what little I could make out was so dirty and sweat-stained that I wasn’t sure if trying to follow the list did more harm than good.

  At the very least, I knew how to start the engines. After a little hunting around to verify the ground locks were engaged, I switched the engines on and was rewarded by the satisfying thump-whine as they engaged. From there, things got tricky.

  I knew, for instance, that a proper preflight included revving them through a full power cycle and checking to see they provided the proper power output at all throttle ranges, but I had no idea how to do this from the cockpit station, and I wasn’t even going to bother asking my captor if I could climb back to the cargo bay maintenance panel where I felt more comfortable doing engine work. Oh well, fuck it, I thought, we’ll skip making sure the engines actually work—after all, they worked last time, right?

  I flipped all the rocker switches printed cockpit power, communications power, life support, and an array of rocker switches hand-labeled “Crit. Sys. 1” through “Crit. Sys. 4.” I must have gotten something out of order, because I got amber warning lights above critical systems two and three. The ship’s computer beeped with disapproving tones. I ignored it and flicked a couple of other switches and made a few adjustments I thought looked familiar from when I’d seen the boss do his preflight. The computer really didn’t like this, which prompted a warning chime and VDU message asking me if I really wanted to start the jump computer core without first turning on the cooling relay.

  “What’s that noise?” asked the hijacker, now uncomfortably close behind me in the cockpit.

  “Nothing,” I lied as I cut the jump core computer off. “Just let me do my job and fly, all right?”

  In desperation, I looked over the cockpit again, totally lost in the sea of options in front of me, running down a mental list of ship systems in my head before I remembered navigation and targeting. I turned on the navigation suite and was prompted to enter “Local Navsat Magnetic Correction Offset Factor,” which I was pretty sure was important but had no idea what it was. I punched in 12345 and hit enter. The computer displayed a bunch of data I knew was incorrect, like showing our altitude at three-hundred-thirty meters above ground level, which was off by a rather critical three-hundred-thirty meters.

  I turned my attention to the ship’s targeting system. The labels below the switches and buttons had long since been erased by use. Nothing about the layout resembled my station in the turret, but I knew enough to know the cockpit station had all the options I was used to and then some. I turned every switch on the panel to on but didn’t press any of the buttons and hoped that was good enough. The radar display was a sea of fuzzy green, but I figured that was just backscatter from the radar being so close to the ground.

  “C’mon, c’mon, let’s go!” the hijacker said from behind me.

  “Look,” I said to stall for time as my mind raced to find a way out of the situation that didn’t involve me actually trying to fly this thing, “this stuff takes time. Flying through space ain’t like…” I didn’t know what to compare it to that wasn’t cliché, so I just trailed off.

  “Get us off the ground or I’m gonna start hitting you again,” he warned.

  “Fine,” I said, wincing.

  As I reached for the retro-rocket throttle I noticed an indicator light warning me the rear cargo bay door was open, as was the internal cargo bay hatch, meaning the ship would not pressurize as we flew higher. I entertained a brief notion of trying to fly us up high enough until my assailant passed out, but figured he’d notice the wide-open door and the wind rushing around it and thought better of it.

  I had no idea how to close the rear cargo bay door from the cockpit as I usually did it from the maintenance panel just above the turret, but I did know how to close the internal hatch. I pressed the button and the hatch between the crew compartment and cargo bay swung shut.

  I increased the throttle to the retro-rockets and the ship lurched drunkenly off the ground and slid forward, scraping the front skid across the pavement, snapping us forward and almost making my assailant lose his balance.

  “What the fuck?” the hijacker asked.

  I ignored him, tugged gently back on the stick, engaged the retro rockets, and dialed up the anti-grav boosters as I did so, doing my best to imitate what I’d seen my boss do a thousand times. We lifted off—rather smoothly I might add, considering it was my first takeoff under power.

  A warning light reminded me the cargo bay door was still open, but being as the internal door wasn’t, it wasn’t going to hurt anything.

  Under anti-grav and retro-rocket power, the ship shuddered its way into
Ramseur’s upper atmosphere. When the ascent began to slow, I throttled up the ship’s primary engines, praying I was up high enough to where they didn’t overheat before we got out of the atmosphere.

  We punched through a thick cloud layer and out into space. Problem was, I didn’t have any idea how to calculate or where to look to know when we’d escaped the planet’s gravity well, and an error there would mean the sort of unplanned re-entry that ended with the ship burning up in the atmosphere or screaming into the ocean at meteor-speed. To be safe, I punched the throttle and kept the nose pointed toward the stars.

  I decided the best course was to keep on faking it until I could come up with an actual plan, which was about ninety percent of what the boss and I did anyway, so I’d gotten pretty good at it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Since I’d just blasted off without clearance and no declared flight path, I had expected several calls from the tower and Ramseur authorities. The fact that I hadn’t heard anything meant the comm settings must have been wrong, which wouldn’t have been such a big deal had it not also meant I had no way to call for help.

  I pulled up the autopilot on the main VDU and skimmed through the options presented to me. I pressed the menu button labeled “route to nearest nav beacon.” The ship’s computer chimed and I heard the engine thrust levels change. I took that as a good sign. Unfortunately, it was accompanied by several warning lights on the navigation console, which I took to be a bad sign. I shrugged it off, figuring I’d be dead long before whatever catastrophe they were trying to warn me about happened anyway.

  “All right,” I said, looking over my handiwork. “We’re off planet. Now, I’m going to turn around so I can talk to you, all right?”

  “Don’t turn around!” the voice ordered. “Your buddy tried that with me and look where he wound up.”