The Damsel

by David Dixon

  We were sitting on the tarmac, twenty-sixth in line for takeoff, before I was finally ready to talk again.

  “So,” I said from the turret, “what’s the big plan when we get jumped? ‘Cause you know we’re gonna get jumped.”

  “Glad to see you’re gonna be a big boy about this and start talking again,” he answered.

  “Fuck you.”

  I heard him sigh from the cockpit.

  “No, that was just my response to your smartass comment,” I said. “It wasn’t a fuck you like all the previous fuck yous where you really deserved it for being a fucking fuckhead.”

  “You know what?” he mused. “I’m gonna buy you a vocabulary book, Snake, so you can learn some new words.”

  “Oh, is that a fact? I know plenty of vocabulary words. Want to hear ‘em?”

  “No, not real—”

  “Let’s see… fuckhead, fuckface, fuckstick, fucknut, fuckwit—”

  “Fuckmuch?” the boss interrupted from the cockpit.

  “—Fucktard,” I continued. “Wait. Did you just say fuckmuch?”

  “Uh, maybe, yeah,” he said. “I guess I did.”

  “And just what the hell is a fuckmuch?” I asked.

  “I dunno, it just seemed to fit.”

  “No. No it does not,” I said. “Because all of those other things are words that describe you, and fuck much or anything that sounds even remotely close does not describe you.”

  “How about I come down and fuckstomp that shit-eating grin off your face?” he asked.

  “Now that’s the spirit,” I said with a chuckle. “But don’t think I’m not still pissed. Your infatuation is gonna get us killed. You think that girl is sex on legs, but I’m telling you, she’s just bad news in a flight suit.”

  “Her name is Carla,” he corrected me. “And I took the job because of the job, not because of her. I would’a taken it from anybody.”

  “Come off it,” I said. “That’s more bullshit than a hold full of steers with diarrhea. You wouldn’t have even considered it if it weren’t for the fact she’s cute as all hell and her flight suit’s a size too small. And when she licked her lips? Christ, she had you eating out of her hand.”

  “You’re just jealous,” he said.

  “Say what? What’s there to be jealous of?”

  “She never even talked to you last night, Snake. She’s got eyes only for me, and I know that drives you up the wall. I’m telling you; she’s got something for me.”

  I laughed—not chuckled, not smiled, but straight up laughed.

  “You’re outta your mind, Bossman. First, she was trying to flirt with me. Second, didn’t you see the ice queen look she gave you when you asked about a beer? She wants fuck nothing to do with you. But now I really hope we live through this mission because I can’t wait to see you try to put some more moves on her.”

  “You know what your problem is, Snake?” I could tell he’d turned around in his seat to talk to the turret—I must have really gotten to him.

  “No, but I’m sure you’re gonna tell me,” I said.

  “Your problem is that you always think you know what women are thinking. You’re always telling me ‘no, she doesn’t like you’ or ‘she’s way out of your league’ or ‘she wouldn’t talk to you even if you bought her the whole bar.’ But that’s bullshit. You don’t know what they’re thinking, and you don’t know what they’re gonna do, either.”

  “Have I ever been wrong?” I asked, a self-satisfied grin on my face.

  “Well… um… actually, yes. Yes, you have been,” he answered.

  “When?”

  “Nasra. On Dunbar. Remember Nasra?” he asked. “We’d just picked up a load of Gur Ji Kesk wine and we went to that club? What was it? The Silver Peach or something? You said I had no chance with her, but the only reason she didn’t come back with me was we’d already checked out of the hotel. Remember? Because we had such an early departure time the next day? So, we slept on the ship that night, remember?”

  In the turret, I pondered whether to prove him wrong or get myself in trouble. I decided to split the difference.

  “Maybe that’s what she told you, Boss, but even if we had hotel rooms, she wasn’t going back with you — trust me.”

  “There you go again, Snake. How would you know?”

  “She told me.”

  “Bullshit. I was with her like the whole night. The only time I left her with you was to go get a drink, and that took like three minutes. There’s no way she just looked at you after I left and said, ‘I’m not going home with your buddy.’ No fuckin’ way she did that.”

  “No, not then,” I said. “Later.”

  I winced, realizing what I’d just done.

  “Later?” he asked, puzzled. “There was no ‘later,’ Snake. We hung out at the club for a bit, but we had such an early day the next morning, we went back to the ship. That was the night it raining like crazy and we found out we had that leaky seal, remember? So, you went out to get a new one.”

  In the turret, I held my breath, wondering how long it was going to take him.

  “And then,” he continued, “you called me at like midnight saying you’d lost your shipyard badge so you couldn’t get back into the…” His voice trailed off.

  In the quiet, I could practically hear the wheels turning in his head.

  I coughed to break up the silence.

  “Fuck you, man,” he said in a small voice.

  “Look, it was—”

  “No, seriously, Snake, fuck you! You slept with my girl!”

  “No,” I said matter-of-factly, “she was not your girl. She made that very clear—in a variety of ways—which is how I know she wasn’t your girl. And how I know she was not going to get with you, even if you did have a room.”

  “I hate you,” he announced.

  “Hey, man, you know what? I’m sorry. Really, I am. It was a low-down thing to do, even for a guy named Snake. And it wasn’t even that good anyway.”

  “You know what, Snake? I hope your dick falls off. I really do.”

  “Aww, c’mon, Boss. That was a long time ago. It was—”

  “It was six fucking weeks ago, asshole!” he shouted.

  “That’s a long time. To some people, I mean.”

  “Tell you what,” my boss said. “Let’s just go back to fuck yous for a while, okay?”

  “Look, if we live through this, let’s just fly back to Dunbar and you can have another shot with her, all right? I promise I’ll even stay on the ship the whole—”

  “Fuck you, Snake.”

  I’m not sure what I expected we would find at nav point two, but whatever it was, it wasn’t what we found. Just outside the nav lane, powered down and almost invisible except for running lights, hung a Razor combat shuttle. The ship’s sharp, radar-defeating angles couldn’t help but give it a menacing look, and whoever owned this one had gone the extra mile, painting it a flat black, with only two dark gray lines down one wing for decoration. My estimation of Carla went up several notches.

  “Holy shit. Is that her? I knew they sold ‘em, but I’ve never seen a civilian Razor before,” I said, marveling at the ship. “Where the fuck did she get the cash for that?”

  “Fuck you, Snake. Maybe she got lucky at an auction or something. Everything isn’t some sort of goddamned conspiracy.”

  “No. I’ll tell you how she got it,” I said. “Shadiness. She’s up to something and she has been for a while, just like I told you back in the bar. We’ll be lucky if she doesn’t wind up turning that thing on us by the time this is over.”

  “Quit your bitching, Snake. Everything is going to be fine.”

  “That statement is the opposite of reassuring,” I said. “The surest way for things to go wrong is for you to say they’re going to be fine. It’s like you’re some sort of cosmic inverter and whenever you say things are going to be one way, the universe flips to make sure things are the
opposite.”

  “Shut. Up.”

  Carla’s voice came across comm channel six zero five: “You’re late.”

  I looked at my watch. Indeed, we were fifteen minutes behind schedule.

  “No biggie,” the boss replied. “Lot of traffic. We had to wait for clearance.”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” she said. “I didn’t know if your gunner had talked you out of it. I never heard of a snake made of chickenshit, but there’s a first time for everything.”

  I heard my boss laughing from the cockpit.

  “You—you tell her to get fucked,” I sputtered.

  “Ha. I’m not telling her anything of the sort, Snake. Just sit down in the turret and take it, asshole. Serves you right.”

  “I’m transmitting the nav data to you now, so even your dumb ass won’t have an excuse to get lost,” she said. The laughing in the cockpit went quiet.

  “Hey, I didn’t sign on to get insulted,” he snapped to Carla over the comm channel.

  “No, you signed on for fifteen grand,” she radioed back. “And that buys me a whole lot of insults. I’ll call you whatever I damn well please.”

  “Still think she’s into you?” I asked the boss.

  “Shut up, Snake. That’s just foreplay.”

  “Sweet Jesus, you’ve got it bad,” I said.

  “How about you just keep your eyes peeled and your trigger finger warmed up, okay?”

  I heard the beep from the ship’s computer which announced an incoming message and several taps on the boss’s keyboard as he sorted through it.

  “I don’t like this,” he radioed Carla, wariness creeping into his voice.

  “What’s it say? What’s going on?” I asked. When I got no response, I climbed out of the turret and made my way forward, poking my head through the hatch into the cramped cockpit so I could read the navigation data over the boss’s shoulder.

  “Jesus, we’ve been through this, haven’t we?” Carla came back, exasperation in her voice. “I’m on a tight timeline, so I need you to shit or get off the pot. I don’t have time for you to whine about how dangerous everything is each step of the way. Just shut up, come with me, make the run, and get fifteen grand, or get lost. Once this is all over, we can hang out and go over the best way to do it in the future, all right? But not until then.”

  I noticed my boss sat up a little straighter in his seat when she said ‘hang out’.

  “Talk is cheap, Boss. She’s playing you. I looked at the navigation data. Pretty suspicious we don’t pick up ‘cargo’ until Markins, but she’s still having us fly through Tellison to get there, don’t you think? And she’s having us fly the same route back out, too? Right. What was shipment’s final destination again? Somewhere in Lassiter’s Junction? There’s a dozen other ways to get to Markins and then to Lassiter’s Junction without doing the run through Tellison.”

  “Oh yeah?” he asked. “And they’d take two and a half months, too. Doing the run to Markins through Tellison only takes three days.”

  “Did you hear me?” Carla asked over the radio. “You doing this or not? ‘Cause if you are, we got to hit the jump to Bascia before twenty-one hundred. I got a source says the insys boys are gonna start doing random boarding inspections and I don’t have time to get caught up in all that.”

  “No. No, no, no,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Snake, c’mon,” the boss pleaded.

  “You got five seconds to be in or out. Five, four, three…” Carla counted.

  “I said we were in, and we’re in,” he said over the radio avoiding eye contact with me. “Let’s go.”

  I sighed and walked back to the ship’s mid-quarters where I plopped down onto the sole couch that was our ship’s sleeping area. From there, I could make out my boss’s back in the cockpit. I gave him a defiant middle finger.

  “I’m going to sleep,” I announced. “Wake me up when we reach Bascia. From there it’s only two hours to the Tellison jump point and I wanna have plenty of time to make my peace with the Creator before you jump us to our deaths.” I stretched out on the couch and closed my eyes.

  The boss snorted. “Motherfucker, it’s gonna take a lot longer than two hours for you to clear accounts with the cosmos. Hell, it would take more than two hours to settle things with me.”

  I opened my eyes and picked my head up off the couch to answer. “Oh, no. Don’t start that crap, Boss. After this bullshit? We’re even.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Ten hours later, I sat in the turret nervously scanning the emptiness which was the Tellison system. In the two hours we’d been in Tellison so far, the pirates I feared had not leapt out from wherever they lurked to ambush us, but as I saw it, the risk grew greater with every hour that separated us from the jump point. Carla’s menacing Razor flew in tight formation with our Black Sun, below us and at our five o’clock. She’d cut her running lights as soon as we’d entered Tellison, which meant between her ship’s flat black finish, our lack of a radar, and the Razor’s heat dissipating technologies, she was all but invisible—a ghostly predator in the dark.

  Even though it’s a major breach of etiquette for a merchant vessel under guard to point its guns at its own escort, I made a show of sweeping across the Razor when I did my scans. She may have charmed my lovelorn boss with her feminine wiles, but I didn’t trust her one bit.

  “We just cleared nav point five,” the boss announced. “Three more hours to marker six, and then from there another fifteen to the Markins jump point. Piece of cake.”

  “Uh huh, sure,” I said. “Let’s see if you’re still singing the same tune when we reach the jump to Markins. If you’re saying anything at all.”

  An unfamiliar chime accompanied a message on my leftmost VDU: Point to point laser communications transmission incoming. Open channel?

  The boss must have accepted the offer, because the message disappeared.

  Carla’s voice over the ship-to-ship laser channel came through faint and garbled. “Use this channel for comms between us until I say different from here on out. If there’s anybody out there, they’ll be listening for broadcast transmissions.”

  “Roger,” the boss replied. “Will do. Listen, Carla, play it straight. Obviously, you know something’s coming, so just level with us and tell us what we’re up against.”

  “You’ll know what you need to know when you need to know it,” she replied. “Out.”

  In the turret, the general sense of unease I’d been able to joke about was gone, replaced by a very real sense of dread.

  “I’m telling you, Boss,” I said, “she’s setting us up. She’s brought us out here to get killed.”

  “What sense does that make?” he answered, “She’s got no reason to lure us all the way out here with an empty hold. I agree, there’s something up, but she’s not trying to kill us. If she’d wanted to, she could have done it at the linkup point and saved us all the trip out here. Try again, Snake.”

  I scowled. He had a good point, but it did nothing to put my mind at ease.

  We traveled on in silence across the darkened face of the Tellison Nebula for another forty minutes before he spoke up again.

  “Snake, do me a favor. Go to the comms computer and broaden scan range to include restricted-band encrypted channels.”

  “You want to listen to UNF channels?” I asked as I climbed halfway out of the turret and opened the starboard computer cabinet. “There’s not gonna be any UNF out here, and if there are, we wouldn’t be able to crack their encryption anyway.”

  “Yeah, I know,” the boss said. “But here’s the thing. I just saw a spike on a freq that matches one of their bands. The spike was strong, so the source is close. It may very well be encrypted, but I don’t think it’s UNF.”

  I got an icy feeling in my stomach. “From Carla’s Razor?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Shit, shit, shit,” I muttered as I typed in the new scan parameters
. Once finished, I dropped back down in the turret and slewed my guns over to cover Carla.

  Just what kind of game was Carla playing?

  A message from our encryption software popped up on one of my screens: beginning real-time comms decryption.

  “You seeing the message about the encryption, Boss?” I asked.

  “Yep. I see it.”

  The decryption software cut us into the middle of a conversation.

  “—out of luck,” said a sneering male voice. “We know when the runs are scheduled, bitch. We know what you got. You tell your merchie friend to dump it right now, then you two hightail it out of here, and we might let you go. You make us work for it, and you’re gonna regret it.”

  “Negative,” Carla said. “Listen, you fucks. Where’s Anders? You tell that shithead he’s already been paid once, and my employers aren’t gonna pay twice.”

  “What the fuck is she talking about?” the boss shouted from the cockpit. “We’ve got an empty hold. There’s nothing to dump!”

  The sneering man’s reply to Carla cut me off before I could answer. “You wanna talk to Anders? Who do you think you are, the goddamn UNF general secretary? Anders only talks to clients, bitch, and that ain’t you.”

  I slewed my turret around, looking for whoever Carla was talking too. I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  On our port side, emerging from the distant darkness of the Tellison nebula, was a massive Scania-Peterbilt Galaxy Runner, probably originally a colony ship but long since modified for other, less pleasant tasks. I zoomed in with my gun camera just in time to see a pair of fighters drop out the bottom, angled right for us.

  “Boss! We got contacts, port side! Big Peterbilt and two fighters. Range is—” Instinctively, I looked down at my radar display to give him a range. The screen was blank. “Fuck! Range is—”