by David Dixon
For half an instant, me and the kid locked eyes—mine cruelly triumphant and his wide in panic—before he vanished out the hatch, through the cargo bay, and into the void.
I smashed the hatch button in the cockpit and the hatch slammed shut with a resounding clash of steel. The ship’s life support system roared for a second to replace all the lost atmosphere, and I could breathe again.
I gasped, heart pounding and head throbbing. After a few seconds’ rest, I let myself out of the cockpit and kicked the mag release switch with my foot. The hatch slid open and the boss stared up at me from inside the turret.
“Sweet mother of Jesus, Snake, you talked him into spacing himself. Fuckin’ awesome. Remind me not to cross you, eh?”
I nodded weakly. In the absence of adrenaline, I now felt every strike our unwelcome visitor had laid on me.
I jerked a thumb toward the cockpit.
“You,” I told him, “out of the turret and up there. I’m done for the day. It’s all I can do to fix this crate and shoot well enough to keep us alive despite your dodgy piloting, but I now gotta to fly it too?”
“Trust me,” he said as he climbed out of the turret and squeezed past me. “I’d much rather be up there than in here. God only knows what you fucked up, up there.”
I ignored him as I dropped down inside and settled into my familiar cramped quarters and lit a much-needed cigarette. “What in Jesus fuck were you doing back there when he came on board? Did you just wave to him as he waltzed in right past you?” Before he had a chance to answer, I cut him off. “And what’s with the crazy gun ninja moves, bro? You nearly shot my damn head off!”
“I didn’t see him,” he answered as he settled into his seat. “I was checking the level in the aft hydraulic tank and he must have walked right past without seeing me.”
“Well, next time, how about you pay a little more attention?” I groused.
“I almost got shot too, you know,” he reminded me. “When he fired down through the turret hatch, I felt the wind as the rounds went past.”
“My heart bleeds for you,” I said. “And so do my teeth, and my ear, and my lip. Now get us back down to Ramseur. I’m going to sleep.”
I got comfortable and closed my eyes.
From above, I heard a cascade of profanity from the boss. “Snake, what the hell did you do? Did you turn the targeting radar on full power on the ground? You fried the receiver dome!”
Without opening my eyes, I raised my right hand and extended my middle finger.
“I’m still a better pilot than you are, and if you’ve got a problem with it, just flip the third switch from the end, would you?”
CHAPTER THREE
The next afternoon, we stood looking at the Black Sun 490’s targeting system receiver dome. We’d spent the entire morning getting the cover off, resetting the system, replacing two of the transistors with spares, and generally trying to get the array to show anything but a waterfall of green static. We were tired, hungry, and getting nowhere, and I still had a splitting headache from the previous day’s misadventures.
The boss scowled as he looked up from the laptop plugged into the radar’s auxiliary data-port. “Nope. Still nothing. The whole fucking array’s going to have to be replaced.”
“I’ve done this before, man, I’m telling you, when I was on the Wang Fu,” I said. “Last time, all I did was replace the magnetrons, reset the—”
He cut me off with a wave of his hand. “And I’m telling you, again, this isn’t a passively scanned array. For the fiftieth time, there is no goddamn magnetron to replace. You looking for the magnetron on an actively scanned array is like me looking for your brain—there’s no point in looking for something that was never there in the first place.”
“You’re just pissed off because you think it’s my fault,” I said.
“As I see it, it pretty much is.”
“I’m not the pilot, how was I supposed to know?”
“Why’d you turn it on in the first place?” he asked, stabbing an angry finger at the radar array. “You didn’t need targeting. You weren’t going to duke it out with anybody. You should have just left it off if you didn’t know what you were doing.”
“You say that now,” I said, “but me not knowing what I was doing applies to pretty much everything I did yesterday, which, I’d just like to note, ended with us in one piece solely due to my quick thinking, so I don’t want to hear any bullshit from you. It’s just as much your fault as it is mine, ‘cause if you’d have been paying more attention in the first place, he wouldn’t have been able to sneak aboard and threaten to shoot me if I didn’t figure out real quick how to fly this piece of space salvage.”
The boss didn’t answer. Instead, he shut his laptop and yanked the cable out of the auxiliary jack. He stomped off toward the forward hatch.
“Hey, where are you going?” I called.
“To lock up the laptop. Fuck the radar. It’s time for a drink.”
I looked uncertainly at the exposed receiver.
“Don’t we need to put the cover back on? I don’t think it’s supposed to be out in the weather.”
“Why bother?” he said as he closed and locked our Black Sun’s forward hatch. “A little rain won’t hurt it. It’s shot anyway.”
I shrugged and followed him off the landing pad and toward the tram station that would take us into the Ramseur Spaceport’s commerce district.
An hour later we sat at a cramped table at The Circuit, a crowded shipper’s bar full of privateers like ourselves, a few insys rat runners, working girls, drunk asteroid miners, and some union boys with patches that said Shipper’s Local 301 who nursed their beers while giving the rest of us the evil eye. The music was shitty and whatever the popular local blend of tobacco was smelled to high heaven, but the beer was good, which was what really mattered, at the moment.
I scrolled through the local listings using the built-in tabletop screen on my side of the table, smoking a cigarette in violation of the no-smoking sign, and looking for anybody who might have a job for us. On his side of the table, the boss scanned through prices for replacement radar arrays and his expression grew sourer as he scrolled. Finally, he sighed, leaned back, and finished off his beer.
“See anything?” he asked.
“Nah. Not much. Some stuff out there for bid but it’s all too big. Oversize cargo, high volume bulk agriculture, that kind of thing.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah,” I said. “What about you? Any luck on the radar replacement?”
“Twelve thou at the low end, and that’s used. And it’s at Ringo’s,” he added.
“Ringo? That motherfucker’s so crooked he can’t even piss in a straight line,” I muttered. “If we buy it from him, I doubt it’ll work any better than the one we’ve already got.”
He grunted. “That’s a given. It’s either that, or the system is still installed in some poor sap’s ship who isn’t gonna know it’s for sale until he wakes up one morning and finds it gone.”
“Okay, so assuming we don’t get it from Ringo, how much are we talking?”
“Looks like the going rate is about seventeen k,” the boss answered as he checked the table again. “Which is about twelve grand more than I’ve got in the account right now, by the way.”
“I suppose I could loan you some of it,” I offered, hiding my smirk behind my beer.
“You could loan me some of it?” he asked, incredulously. “Motherfucker, I should dock it from your pay. You’re gonna loan me some money. That’s a good one.”
At the mention of him docking my pay, my smile disappeared. “You’d have to actually pay me a wage before you could dock it. I haven’t been paid in months,” I pointed out.
“Uh huh. And who buys all the food you eat on board? Who pays for all the docking fees and hotel rooms and even the beer most of the time?” he asked.
I shrugged. It was a fair point.
“
What would you spend it on anyway?” he asked.
“Booze, most likely.”
The boss nodded and signaled for two more beers, which the waiter promptly sat in front of us.
“Ta-da,” he said. “Your paycheck.”
“What’s the legal definition of indenture?” I asked. But I still drank the beer.
“I dunno,” he shot back. “What’s the legal definition of dependent?”
“Har har.”
I sipped my beer and refreshed the list.
“Anything?” he asked.
“Another refresh and… nope, still nothing,” I answered.
“Shit. This is depressing,” the boss said.
“You’re telling me. Just face it, there’s not going to—” I refreshed again, and a new listing caught my eye. “Wait a minute. This might be us. Load of medical supplies out to Preslav. That’s only what, three or four days from here? Pays five grand. Not too bad.”
He shook his head. “Nope. Preslav is outside federated space. And, if memory serves, there’s a civil war on down there.”
“There is. Which is probably why they need the medical supplies,” I answered. “But who cares if it’s outside UNF control? The civil war is planetside. It would be a quick run in and out.”
“We don’t have a targeting radar, remember, Snake? UNF space is dangerous enough, already, without a radar, and I’m sure as hell not flying outside it without one.”
“I don’t know what’s gonna come our way that’s gonna be any better,” I said and took another swig of my beer.
“How about that for better?” the boss said, with a nod toward the door.
I turned around in my seat. When I saw what he meant, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. It’s the same every time with him.
She was a pretty, petite brunette in her early twenties. I say brunette, but that was really more of a guess based on the roots, because her straight, chin-length hair was dyed a faded purple. Her olive skin marked both her mixed ethnicity and her birthplace—somewhere on the outer edge of federated space. Her near-skin-tight flight suit was drab green and unzipped to reveal the faintest hint of cleavage, and the long duster she wore didn’t hide her athletic figure any more than it did the pistol she had on her right hip. There was defiance in her step and a glint of purpose in her eye as she surveyed the bar. She was a holo-producer’s idea of a mercenary bad-girl.
In short, she looked like trouble, which as far as I could tell seemed to be my boss’s favorite attribute in a woman.
“Hey, you, Mr. Empty Wallet, hello,” I said to him, tapping the table between us. “Keep your eyes down here looking for radars. I see what you’re looking at over there. Don’t get any wild ideas. We don’t have the money or the time it would take for you to score with her.”
He didn’t stop watching her as he took another sip of his beer. “I dunno, Snake, I think she might have something for me.”
I snorted. “What’s that? An STD? A restraining order? A swift kick to the low hanging fruit?”
“No,” he said as he got up from the table. “A job.”
“Say what?”
“Look,” he said with a nod. “She’s typing something in at her table. I’m telling you; she’s posting a job.”
“Who the fuck cares? Even if she is, you don’t know what it’s gonna be. It could be anything.”
“I’ma go check that out,” he said as he sauntered over to where she sat.
“Yeah, you do that,” I called. “Just make sure you bounce any great ideas she gives you off me. Something about her smells like us getting shot at.”
He ignored me.
I scanned the page again but her ad—if it even existed—hadn’t shown up yet. I finished my beer and glanced over in my employer’s direction. The woman wore a scowl and seemed to be backing away from him, her hand resting dangerously close to her pistol. I shrugged. Overall, he seemed to be doing about as well as he usually did with the fairer sex—on fire and spiraling out of the sky.
I stood and headed toward them, hoping to get a front row seat to what I figured was going to be either a very public rejection or a very public ass kicking and maybe both. The boss noticed me and nodded to me and then looked back at her. I think he thought I was coming to back him up.
I leaned against a nearby post, fished out a cigarette, lit it, and waited for the fireworks. My boss looked over his shoulder and noticed the line of shippers behind him, waiting, I figured, to try their luck at getting whatever she had to offer, job or otherwise. I chuckled.
She stuck out her hand, which he shook.
Oh fuck no.
I cleared the distance between us in a second, parting the crowd like an angry bull.
“This is Snake, my gunner, and we—” the boss said.
“Whoa, whoa,” I interrupted. “I don’t know what just got agreed to here, but—”
She looked me up and down before arching an eyebrow at the boss. “You were saying?”
“Fuck what he was saying,” I snapped. “What I was saying is whatever you two just shook on as a deal, ain’t, because I don’t know anything about it.”
“So, who works for who again?” she asked the boss in a mocking tone.
He gave me a glare that could have curdled milk. “Don’t get it twisted. He works for me. He’ll be fine, Carla, just give—”
“The fuck I will,” I exploded. “I’m not fine with shit until I know what we’re doing. Here’s the deal, Carla. You tell me exactly what you told him and—”
“You need to get your gunner under control, captain,” she told the boss.
I wanted to wring her pretty little neck.
“You need to watch it,” I snapped.
“Your gunner’s quite the feisty one, isn’t he,” Carla said to the boss with a nod in my direction. “That makes two of us. This ought to be fun. Bang us together and watch the sparks fly.” She gave me a sly smile which told me her choice of words wasn’t an accident.
I have to admit, usually I’d have been all over an obvious double entendre like that coming from a girl like her, but since she was in the process of roping my boss into what was no doubt going to be the last mission of our lives, I had to let it pass.
“That shit isn’t gonna work on me,” I said. “So, start talking. What the hell are you trying to get us into?”
She stared across the table at the boss as she unzipped her flight suit—which I admit helped to defuse the tension a bit—to withdraw a pack of cigarettes. “Well?” she asked the boss. “You gonna explain it to him? I made the deal with you, so as far as I’m concerned, this asshole is your problem.”
“It’s a cargo run,” he said. “We leave two days from now. No biggie. She’s going to escort us out there and we’ll pick it up.” I could tell by his roundabout explanation he was dancing around whatever the real issue was. “Our cut is fifteen k. Simple, really. We’re just gonna do the Tellison-Markins run and—”
I stabbed a finger in his face. “The Tellison-Markins run? Stop right there,” I warned him. “I literally cannot believe what I’m hearing right now. This is the dumbest thing you’ve ever signed us up for, and you have signed us up for some of the stupidest jobs in the whole damn galaxy. Don’t you get it? There’s no fucking cargo, dipshit, and there’s not gonna be any fifteen grand either, because she knows we won’t live to collect. We’re bait, Boss! Just like she is, coming in here dressed up like a femme fatale to try to find some sad, undersexed clown like you to fall for her and agree to her bullshit.”
“If you can’t do the deal, I’m sure there’s plenty of people who can,” Carla told the boss as she nodded to the men orbiting the table around us.
“Well, we do need to—” he began.
I sensed his uncertainty, so I decided to interrupt and make sure he didn’t jump off the ledge. “Ten minutes ago, you said it was too dangerous to do a fucking milk run to Preslav,” I reminded him. “And now you’re j
ust gonna sign us up to bebop on through the most notorious route in the quadrant? What sense does that make?”
Carla’s eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute,” she said. “The run to Preslav was too dangerous? What are you flying?” she asked the boss.
“It’s a Black Sun 490,” he told her, literally puffing out his chest. “An oldie but a goodie, you know. They’re super reliable,” he lied. “And ours is—”
“Ours is half rusted out and the other half is shot to shit,” I interrupted. “And our targeting array is on the fritz, so…”
She ignored me, which I found infuriating, and did the eyebrow thing at him again. “So, which is it, flyboy? You gonna do this or not? Because like I said—if you aren’t hard enough for this job, I can find somebody who is. This is going to be a hell of a lot worse than a run to Preslav.”
For a half a second, I hoped her admission would make my boss see reason, but when I saw her pretty little red tongue come out and flick across those soft pink lips, I knew we were done for.
“No, no, I—we—can do it,” the boss stammered, eyes glued to her face. “No sweat. No problem at all. Nav point two in two days at 1400, you said, right? We’ll be there, comm channel six zero five.”
“Good,” she said. “You’d better be.”
She slid off her barstool and started to leave. My boss reached for her arm as if to slow her, but she stopped him with a glare which could have frozen a star. He jerked his hand back like he’d just touched a hot stove.
“Don’t, you, uh… Do you want a beer?” he asked.
“No.”
She strode out of the bar, every male eye but mine trailing her.
For my part, I was staring daggers at my boss and wanting to punch his stupid face in.
CHAPTER FOUR
The next two days went by quickly and quietly. I did my work—recalibrating the turret, replacing the number two laser capacitor and changing out the aft hydraulic pump, while the boss did his—a coolant purge and refill, updating the main computer software, and replacing the forward starboard radiation shield. After the first four or five times I answered his questions with “fuck you,” he quit asking me things, which was fine by me.
