The Damsel

by David Dixon

  Through my closed eyelids, I could make out the bones in my fingers.

  The light dissipated and I opened my eyes. My vision was full of spots and the image of my skeletal fingers lingered. As best I could tell we were still alive, but the part of the nebula’s dust cloud we’d been using for concealment was no more—along with the pirate flagship. I had a sudden metallic taste in my mouth, which made no sense until every radiation alarm in the ship started chirping rad spike warnings.

  “Snake,” the boss coughed. “You still alive down there?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” I said as my vision blurred. “But I got a pretty good radiation dose. Like, a lot. I don’t feel so good.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of, buddy,” he said.

  I tried to climb out of the turret but collapsed back into my seat. I heard his flight harness unbuckle and then a storage locker open. I closed my eyes and was treated again to the psychedelic vision of my finger bones. My tongue tasted like steel and I felt like I was going to be sick.

  The boss appeared above me in the turret hatch, worry etched across his face. He tossed down a pair of autoinjectors which landed on my chest.

  “Use those,” he said. “And after that, I’ve got the exposure pills.”

  I nodded weakly, fumbled around getting the cap off the first one, and pressed it to my right thigh. The needle hurt, but my nausea subsided almost instantly. I flipped the safety cap off the second injector and hit myself in the left thigh. A coolness washed over me, and the metallic taste began to fade. I pulled up the autoinjectors and looked at the label. I frowned.

  “Boss,” I rasped, “these things expired two years ago.”

  He shrugged. “I’m sure they still work. They just put expiration dates on there to get you to buy new ones, you know?”

  “Yeah, sure, whatever. How old are the exposure pills?”

  He checked the box. “Umm, good news there, Snake. They only expired last month.”

  I shrugged. “I’ll take what I can get, I guess.”

  He tossed the box down along with a bottle of water.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Four hours later, the boss and I stood amidships, lit by red emergency lighting. We wore our full environmental protection suits except our helmets, which we’d just removed after getting back in from our walk around our unpressurized cargo bay to check for damage.

  “I counted three breaches. How about you?” the boss asked me.

  “Yeah. And the one by the port hydraulic reservoir is gonna be a bitch to patch,” I answered.

  “Aww, shit. I didn’t even think about that, because of the—”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did it puncture the tank too?”

  I snorted. “Of course. I think it may have caught the line on fire too, but I couldn’t tell for sure.”

  The boss frowned. “That would explain why we’ve got oxygen generation, but CO2 scrubbing is at fifty percent. The portside filter bank probably burned up with it. Also means we probably lost all our port side sensors from the midships back. The lines run through the same conduit.”

  “Shit,” I said with a glance at my notebook. “I’ll add it to the list.”

  I sighed. It had been four hours since the boss and I had started our damage assessment, and we still hadn’t figured out everything wrong with our Black Sun 490. We hadn’t had functioning comms of any sort since the radiation spike from the Peterbilt’s reactor going critical. Instead, we’d been reduced to sending Carla Morse code messages via emergency flashlight, since we didn’t even have running lights or interior lighting. Only the number one engine was operational. Primary navigation was out, but the boss thought it would come back on with a reboot of the ship’s main computer, although he didn’t want to try that for fear that with all the sensors we had damaged, the computer would freeze in diagnostic mode on restart. Judging by the radiation damage, our radiation shields were shot, and Carla had confirmed with us via Morse code that all our reentry heat shields had been holed through with laser fire. According to the ship’s computer, our top-mounted planetary navigation and weather suite wasn’t responding, which we felt pretty sure was because it wasn’t there anymore. In addition, despite the boss’s best efforts, there had been a capacitor fire in bank five, which meant the port side shield generator was probably a solid piece of fused metal. The jump drive was still functional, although we were showing power fluctuations indicating a slight variation in the core temperature.

  The final indignity was that our toilet no longer flushed, which meant the blood-filled piss I’d taken after the anti-radiation shots had done their work was still in the bowl, probably irradiating the tiny latrine.

  The boss climbed back into the cockpit and flipped a few switches. He muttered something under his breath, punched a button, and slapped the side of one of his VDUs.

  “Okay, here goes, Snake.” He flipped another switch and the ship’s interior lighting came back on.

  “Hey,” I said with a grin. “It’s back.”

  The lighting died and the red emergency lighting flickered back to life.

  “I swear to fucking God, something better start working around here or I am going to lose my mind,” he mumbled.

  “What now?”

  “Now I’m gonna try comms again,” he said. He ran through some menus, flipped a switch, and hit a button on his keyboard. “Shit. Oh, wait a minute—that’s why. Snake, check and see if circuit breaker thirty-one is tripped in the midships box.”

  I opened the breaker box and flipped number thirty-one to on.

  “Try it now,” I called.

  He pressed a key and was rewarded with a beep from the console.

  “Yes! We’re back up. We don’t have radio comms, but it looks like we still should have point to point laser comms. I’ll hail Carla and see.”

  “You do that, Boss, and tell her she’s got a whole lot of explaining to do.”

  “Carla, can you read us?”

  “I read you. You two still alive in there?” Her mocking tone did not sit well with me.

  “Listen, you lying, crazy bitch,” the boss snarled. Apparently, her tone didn’t sit well with him either. “We are still alive and you’d better be glad, because if we’d died, I was gonna come back and haunt your every dream!”

  “Calm down, I’ll explain when we reach Bascia Station—”

  “Bascia?” the boss cut in. “I thought the job was a run to Markins?”

  “Follow me to Bascia Station,” she repeated. “Carla, out.”

  “Come on,” I said from my position on the couch. “You still think there’s any truth to whatever bullshit she told you back at the bar? Besides, we can’t even land on Markins anyway. No heat shields for reentry, remember? I say if she wants to end it early rather than fly through the rest of Tellison, let’s go for it.”

  The boss looked over his shoulder at me. “I’m worried about the paycheck. After this mess, we’re going to need all the cash we can get. Last thing I want to do is land and have her say we didn’t execute the contract.”

  “I know you got a lot of funny ideas about chivalry,” I said. “But she’s a bounty hunter, plain and simple. And in the world she runs in, there ain’t no guys or girls—you’re either a killer or a body. I suggest you start looking at her the same way. If she tries to back out of paying, I think staring her down the barrel of that pistol you wear would go a long way toward changing her mind.”

  The boss turned around and slouched lower in his seat. I’d seen that posture from him before, although it was usually in a booth. He didn’t have to say anything for me to know what he was thinking: I guess I’m not gonna get laid tonight, either.

  I dropped back down in the turret and began cycling through the ship systems, checking for any damage that had escaped our notice. I figured the long, slow trip back to the jump point on one engine would give me plenty of time to find anything we missed.

  Unfortunat
ely, while the boss and I break a lot of laws, the one law that never gets broken belongs to Murphy.

  Not five minutes after I’d gotten comfortable, Carla’s voice piped back up over the comm set.

  “Hey, ace, you got a large heat bloom coming off your number one engine.”

  The boss tapped on his keyboard a few times before he answered. “I’m not showing any—”

  The explosion and rush of air and heat startled me so much that had I not already taken my post-radiation-poisoning piss I probably would have wet myself. As it was, I looked up from the turret just in time to see a fireball flame into the crew cabin just above the turret ring. It died as quickly as it had come, but when it did, so did everything else. I waited for the emergency lighting and life support to come back on, but they—like most of the rest of the ship, it seemed—had given up.

  The ship was as silent as a grave.

  “Boss, you all right up there?” I called into the darkness.

  “Yeah, I think so. My ears are ringing like a sonofabitch, though.”

  I smiled. “It’ll get better in a day or two. That’s what they told me at the aid station after you almost shot my head off a few days ago anyway.”

  “I appreciate your concern,” he muttered.

  “What happened?”

  “Fuck if I know,” he said. “I wasn’t showing anything abnormal on the readings. Probably got a coolant leak but the sensor that’s supposed to tell us and the engine got shot up, so the system ran to failure.”

  “Any chance the reactor went critical?”

  “If it did, we wouldn’t still be here.”

  I sighed in the dark. “Okay. What now?”

  “Well, now, I try to restart, which probably won’t work. After that, we put on our EVP helmets back on.” I heard the boss shuffling around in the cockpit, then open a computer cabinet.

  “And wait? For what, the next passing pirate crew or salvage team to come by and jack our lifeless corpses?” I asked.

  “Nope. We’ll go outside, have an external look at the damage and see if we can reset the engines from the maintenance access out there.”

  “You are out of your mind,” I argued. “You want to vent what little air and heat we have left out, so we can get outside in an EVP suit rated for three hours to attempt a fix I can already tell you isn’t going to work? I’d rather just shoot myself, thanks.”

  “Look,” he said, exasperated. “What else can we do?”

  “Ask Carla for help.”

  “Fuck that bitch. She’s the one who got us into this mess. Weren’t you just saying to her everybody’s a killer or a body? Why would she help us when it would be easier just to let us die out here?”

  “Well, I did say that, yeah,” I conceded. “But that was before we needed her help. Now, I say let’s take a chance on her humanity and generosity.”

  Harsh light streamed in through the cockpit. I poked my head up from the turret into the blinding glare of Carla’s searchlights. They flicked on and off in rapid succession and I struggled to decode the message as fast as she sent it. It took a second, but I finally got it.

  Hope you have EVP suits onboard. Sit tight. Called for jump tug.

  “No,” the boss said. “Absolutely not. I’ve never been towed and I’m not starting now. The fee will kill us.”

  Using his flashlight, he flicked back his message: No need for tug. We’ll be fine.

  Behind him, using my cigarette lighter as the light and my hand to signal, I sent back my own reply, which he couldn’t read: No, we won’t. He’s an idiot. Call tug.

  Her reply came back in the same rapid-fire pace she’d used before: Too late, ace. Knew you wouldn’t make it. Called tug 5 hours ago. ETA 45 mins.

  “God damn it, do I hate this girl,” the boss muttered.

  Carla killed her searchlights and turned on her cockpit illumination instead. She’d taken her helmet off and her Razor hung close enough for us to barely make out her face. She smirked and shook her head at us. Just before her cockpit lights blinked out, I thought I saw her wink. I wasn’t sure until I heard the boss’s dumbfounded voice in the darkness.

  “Did she just wink at me?”

  I smiled.

  That’s one possibility.

  We sat glumly in the passenger area of the Retriever’s Star; the jump tug Carla had summoned for us. As if being a passenger aboard someone else’s ship wasn’t bad enough, we had a wonderful view of our battered ship through the starboard windows suspended in the tug’s recovery apparatus. From the exterior, the damage looked even worse than it did on the inside: slag marks pockmarked the entire ship, and a long string of scorch marks ran along its spine. From outside, it was obvious the number one engine was a total loss, as was the ECM suite, which had been bolted in its mount atop the engine. The only good news was that Carla’s Razor, running lights on, was visible through the port side windows. She hadn’t left us without paying just yet.

  I sat wrapped in a blanket to help me recover from the chill I’d gotten waiting for the tug to arrive and take us aboard and sipped a mug of black coffee while wishing for something stronger. Beside me, the boss sulked and stared into his own cup.

  The hatch from the crew cabin swung open to admit one of the ship’s crew into the passenger cabin.

  The older man looked like he’d been around the block a few dozen times, his face and fingers scarred. He crossed his arms in front of him before he spoke, and I noticed his right hand rested on the butt of the pistol he kept in his shoulder holster.

  “Now, about payment,” he said with a raised eyebrow. “I don’t get very many calls to Tellison, for pretty obvious reasons, but I ain’t asking questions about what you two fools were doing out there, just like I didn’t ask your lady friend. Her credit was good, so I came. But that was to get me out here. Now let’s talk about what it’s gonna take to get you back.”

  The boss looked up and I saw his eyes flash to the man’s pistol.

  “Okay, let’s talk rates,” the boss said with a sigh. He made a show of spreading his arms wide and rested them nonchalantly on the adjacent seats. His pistol was far out of reach. The man visibly relaxed.

  “It’s twenty-five hundred for me to leave the yard,” the old man said. “And a grand per jump. And an extra five hundred to go to Tellison—hazard pay. Plus fifteen hundred for the elevator.”

  “Elevator?” the boss asked incredulously. “Where are you coming from? The nearest planet with a space elevator is Greenly.”

  “Sounds like you just answered your own question,” the man said.

  “Well, we don’t need to go all the way back there,” I said. “Just drop us off at Bascia Station.”

  “Yeah,” the boss agreed. “Or Rucker Watson’s, since you gotta go back through the N25 jump point to get to Greenly anyway.”

  The tug operator laughed. “I can tell you boys don’t know how this business works. Stations don’t take ships too damaged to dock under their own power, so Bascia and RW’s are out, which means you have to go back somewhere with an elevator or an orbital complex, and I’ll be damned if we’re going all the way to Diis. Plus, I’m the one with your ship in my docking collars, which means I’ll take you where I damn well choose.”

  He had a point. The boss and I shared a resigned look.

  “Fine,” the boss said. “So, it’s what? Let’s see: two and a half grand for the tow, one apiece for two jumps, five hundred for coming to Tellison, and one and a half grand for the space elevator? So that’s… six and a half grand?”

  “Plus tax,” the man said.

  “Fine. Plus tax,” the boss agreed through gritted teeth.

  “Plus the other two thousand.”

  “Other two thousand? For what?” I asked incredulously.

  “I had to jump out here to get you, didn’t I? You gotta pay for jumps both ways.”

  My eyes narrowed. “Bullshit. It’s gonna take us a day to get to Greenly at th
e least, but you got here in like six hours. You couldn’t have been any further out than Bascia when she called.”

  “He’s right,” the boss said. “Where were you when she called? The T53 outpost out there at junction two? Marker nine? We’re not paying for the jumps some other sucker already paid you for.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said with a smile. “All I know is, you can calculate your rate your way and I’ll calculate it mine and we’ll see which one gets your ship released. You got a day to think about it.” He stepped back through the hatch and closed it behind him.

  “And that is why I didn’t want to get towed,” the boss said.

  “Would you rather be dead?”

  “Doesn’t matter. We might as well be. I’ve only got five and a half in the account.”

  “Carla owes us fifteen large, boss. Call her and tell her to transfer the money.”

  “I just hate having to use the money we just made for a job just to get back—”

  “What difference does it make?” I asked. “Call her and get the money.”

  “Oh, I’m gonna call her, all right. I’ma call her and tell her the next time she fucks me like this, it goddamn better be in a bed, that’s what I’m gonna do,” he groused as he stared back into his mug.

  “Well, that sure isn’t gonna get us anywhere. You want me to call her?”

  The boss looked up at me in surprise. “Ha. She doesn’t even talk to you. I’ll call her. Besides, she winked at me, remember?”

  Denial springs eternal.

  Something must have shown on my face because the boss’s eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute. You think she winked at… you? That is what you think. I can see it in your eyes.”

  I plopped down in the seat across from him. “You want to know what I think? What I really think?”

  “Go ahead. Enlighten me.”

  “I don’t think that wink was meant for you, no. Well, not exactly.”