The Damsel

by David Dixon

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I think she’s just fucking with you by trying to make you pissed off at me,” I said. And to be honest, that’s what I actually thought. Mostly.

  “So, you think she’s just trying to get under my skin?” he asked. “What for?”

  “Why do you think?” I responded.

  “Because she kinda likes me, but she’s afraid to let it show.”

  I laughed. “Oh, you think so? She’s like twenty-five, not fifteen, boss. This isn’t fuckin’ high school.”

  “Fine. So, answer my damn question. Why do you think she’s trying to get under my skin?” he snapped.

  “Simple. She doesn’t like you, so seeing you pissed off makes her happy.”

  The boss gave me the middle finger. “Fuck you, Snake. Sit tight while I call her about the money.”

  He stood and walked the length of the cabin to knock on the hatch. It cracked open a bit and a middle-aged woman poked her head out.

  “Yes?”

  “Can I use your comms to call our partner on this job? She’s gonna have to transfer some money so we can… Well, anyway, we just need… the money.”

  As the boss choked out his last few words, I covered my smirk with my hand. I’d always found it funny how much he hated to admit when he was out of money or needed help, even though he should have been used to it by this point in his life.

  “Oh, you can’t make the payment, huh, sweetie? Well, I hope she loans it to you—”

  “No, we can make the payment,” the boss protested. “And it’s not a loan, it’s what she owes—”

  The woman ignored him and kept talking. “I’m sorry, but you can’t use our comms. Company policy. You know what channel she’s running on? There’s a pay station over there, honey.” She pointed a hand through the hatch to the back wall, toward a dull gray meter-by-meter cube with a scuffed screen attached.

  The woman closed the hatch, leaving the boss fuming, his hands balled into fists.

  “The next time I read about one of these tugs getting bushwhacked out past the H115 jump point, I’m gonna laugh my ass off,” he declared as he stomped over to the pay station.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Oh, it’s you again,” Carla said by way of hello as she opened the comm channel.

  “Yeah, it’s me again. Who else would it be?” the boss asked.

  “What do you want?”

  “We want our money, Carla. You owe us fifteen large and we want it.”

  Carla chuckled. I noticed she had quite an attractive laugh. “You can’t pay the tug fee, can you?” she asked. “Horace hit you with some bullshit jump calculations, did he?”

  “Wait. You know this guy?” I asked.

  “Who’s that talking?” Carla said.

  “That’s Snake,” the boss answered.

  “Who?”

  I scowled. She knew damn well who I was.

  “Snake. You know, my turret gunner.”

  “Oh. Him. I only talk to whoever’s in charge, ace. So, tell your pet reptile to get lost.”

  The boss chortled as my expression darkened. I gave him the finger.

  “He’s run along, Carla,” he told her. “I think you hurt poor Snake’s feelings.”

  “He’ll live. So, what’s up? You need the money to pay Horace?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t have to,” she said. “I know Horace well enough to know when he has somebody over a barrel, he squeezes ‘em for every credit he can get, but whatever. Send me your payment info and I’ll transfer it to you. Fifteen grand, as promised.”

  He fumbled through a few menus on the touchscreen, typed in the transfer number, and hit send. A dialogue box said Message Received.

  “Okay, Carla, you got it. But I can’t see my account from here. How do I know you’ll pay it? I don’t wanna walk in to pay Horace or whatever his name is and find out you shorted us.”

  “Flyboy, if I wanted to get away without paying up, I could’a done it a hundred times already. You’re gonna have to trust me on this.”

  “Ha!” the boss barked. “Last time I trusted you, you led us on some crazy death run. Trust is running mighty damn low at the moment, Carla.”

  “That’s on you, not me.”

  “Speaking of trust, what was all that bullshit out at the nav point anyway? Just what were you doing out there? What was the real job?” he demanded.

  “I’m not talking about it over an open channel, and if you know what’s good for you, you won’t either. When we get down to Greenly, I’ll explain. Pad nine. South spaceport.”

  “Damn it, Carla, we want some answers and I’m not—”

  “Carla out,” she said, and closed the channel.

  The cold rain came down in buckets, soaking me and the boss as we stood outside in the Greenly night. We watched the crane operators move our battle-scarred Black Sun 490 off the space elevator and onto a pad under the harsh spotlights at the west spaceport.

  “Shit, man, it hurts the heart,” I said.

  “Yeah,” the boss agreed, eyes never leaving the ship. “I know the feeling, Snake. When you spend as much time aboard as we do, she’s like family. Seeing the ship like this is like… like something bad happened to your mom, and you’re watching the nurses move her from one bed at the hospital to another. You look at her and wonder if she’s in pain. How she feels. It’s sad. Like you said, man, ‘it hurts the heart.’ I know what you mean, for sure.”

  I gave him an incredulous look. “Obviously you don’t know what I mean, because I didn’t mean any of that. What hurts my heart is how much work it’s gonna take to get it back flying. I could give two shits how the ship looks. Or how it ‘feels.’”

  “You know, Snake, only you could somehow make standing out in the pouring rain at night watching other people move my beat-up ship around feel even worse. So, thanks for being there for me, bud.”

  “Sorry. All your other friends were busy, I guess.”

  After another hour of maneuver, the crane finally set the ship down. Working as quickly as we could given the wind and rain, the boss and I secured the ship and connected it to the spaceport utility hookups. Then we waited in the rain a half an hour longer until the crew of the Retriever’s Star showed up so we could authorize the transfer of a whopping eleven thousand, three hundred and ninety-two credits from our account to theirs to cover the recovery, jumps, fees, taxes, and whatever other outright theft they could come up with.

  “What now?” I asked when we were back aboard our darkened ship, hoping he would say we were packing our bags for the local shipper’s hostel.

  “We change out of these wet clothes and then we go to pad nine at the south spaceport and get some answers from Carla,” he answered, voice full of resolve and dashing my hopes for sleep anytime soon.

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes, tonight. She said she’d wait for us, but I don’t want to push our luck.”

  “Boss, she already paid us. Let it go. What more do you think you’re gonna get from her?”

  “Answers, Snake, like I said. I want to know who she was working for.”

  “Why? What difference does it make?” I asked, throwing my hands up.

  “I dunno,” he said. “Maybe I was born curious like you were born an asshole. Or maybe, I want to know what the real story is because I want to know if we need to be watching our back, and if so, who from. Maybe that.”

  I opened my mouth to argue but realized I didn’t actually have a come back to his line of logic. I shrugged. “Pad nine it is, I guess.”

  By the time we got to the south spaceport another hour had passed, but so had the storm. When we got off the tram, the first thing I noticed was the massive apartment buildings that towered over the east side of the spaceport and continued in an unbroken string of lights as far as I could see. The second thing I noticed was how much newer and nicer the south spaceport was tha
n the spaceport where we’d spent the last few miserable hours.

  “Wow. Carla keeps her ship in the nice part of town,” I said.

  “Yeah, and that’s why,” the boss said as he pointed to a gleaming yellow sign, which read Long Term and Greenly Resident Storage, Pads 1-75.

  “She lives here, huh?”

  “Looks that way.”

  We followed the signs to pad nine around two huge maintenance buildings to the pads themselves, arranged in rows of ten.

  Pad nine wasn’t hard to find.

  It was the one without a ship parked in it.

  The boss and I stared at each other without saying anything for a few seconds, then we cut loose cursing at Carla, kicking gravel, and generally making a scene.

  “Excuse me,” a voice said from behind us. “You two looking for Carla?”

  We turned around to see a uniformed security guard eyeing us warily.

  “Actually, yes we are,” the boss said. “How’d you know?”

  “She told me she had to fly out to a private pad unexpectedly, but two men might come looking for her. She said you’d be upset you didn’t find her and probably start acting the fool.”

  I had to hand it to her—she knew us pretty well for only having worked with us once.

  “So glad she gave you such a good description,” the boss said sarcastically. “So, what’s her info?”

  “She wrote it on a piece of paper,” he said, digging through his pockets. “Here it is.” He pulled out a yellow scrap of folded paper and handed it to the boss.

  The boss unfolded it, read it, refolded it, and handed it to me with a deliberate calm that told me he was ready to explode inside.

  When I opened it up, I understood why.

  There, scrawled in blue pen, was Carla’s message: 867-5309.

  The boss and I didn’t say anything during the train ride back, nor when we finally rolled out sleeping bags in the cargo bay to get some rest, just as the first of Greenly’s two suns came over the horizon.

  I woke up, smoked a cigarette, and ate one of our ship’s complement of banana-flavored energy bars. It took two trips around the cargo bay looking at the damage in the daylight before I realized the boss’s sleeping bag lay empty. I checked the cockpit and ship exterior, but he was nowhere to be found. Figuring he must have gotten an early start hunting down repair parts, I set to work looking for the coolant leak.

  By the time I heard the boss climb aboard, I was covered in grease and grime and soaked in a foul-smelling combination of sweat and reactor coolant.

  “Yo, Bossman, I found where all the coolant went,” I called up to him from where I lay amidships—in a shallow pool of blue coolant, wedged uncomfortably in the claustrophobia-inducing crawlspace between the ship’s floor and outer hull. “Turns out we didn’t vent it all out. The fire in filter bank five ruptured the main line down here and it’s all over the place. Primary heat sinks aren’t damaged, though, which is good, but I think it shorted out the—”

  The boss poked his head into the crawlspace maintenance hatch. “I found her, Snake. I found out where she’s at,” he called.

  “Uh huh,” I grunted, more than a bit pissed he’d been out looking for Carla while I toiled away trying to fix things. “Awesome. Great. Real happy for you. So why aren’t you there getting all your questions answered?”

  “Because I’m gonna need your help. She’s over at Joey Machete’s, and that isn’t the kind of place you walk into alone.”

  “Yeah, well, I dunno if you noticed, but I’m a little busy right now.”

  “C’mon, Snake. She’s at a meeting and she’s not gonna be there all day. This is probably our only chance to get some answers from her.”

  “Fine. Fuckin’ fine,” I muttered as I wiggled my way down the crawlspace toward the maintenance hatch, scraping my back on the number two junction box as I did so. “I’ll just stop what I’m doing and go help you track down your manic pixie dream girl bounty hunter who obviously doesn’t want to be found so you can ask her some questions she obviously doesn’t want to answer.”

  I squeezed through the tiny maintenance hatch and up into the crew cabin, coming face to face with my boss, who was as clean as I was dirty.

  I eyed him with suspicion. “What happened to you?”

  “What?” he asked.

  I folded my arms across my chest and gave him a really? look.

  He glanced down at his clothes. “Oh, this. Yeah, I did some laundry and took a shower at the service station this morning. You shouldn’t’ve slept in so late. Now come on.”

  “I am dirty as shit from the coolant and whatever the hell else is down there in the subfloor and you just want me to hop on the train?” I asked. “Hell no. I need a shower something bad and—”

  “We don’t have time, Snake. Just change into something else and come on, for fuck’s sake. Stop being such a baby. You aren’t going on a date.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Clean clothes didn’t help my smell very much, and by the time we got off the train, my arms and legs had developed a funny sort of tingle as the coolant soaked into my skin. I did my best to ignore it as I followed the boss through a desolate industrial district until we crossed another set of railroad tracks and followed a dead-end street to the gleaming art-deco building at its end. A vintage-style neon sign read Joey Machete’s in hot pink, glowing brightly even in the light of Greenly’s second sun. Several taxis and more than a few expensive late-model performance cars parked in the street out front told me even though it was too early in the day for the club scene, Joey Machete’s was doing brisk business.

  I looked at the boss. “First, she’s here? And second, where is here?”

  “Apparently this is the biggest bounty hunter club in the whole sector.”

  “Like Anne Marie’s over on Diis?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Yeah. Pretty much. Took a bit of asking around, but I ran into an engine mechanic who works for the Tanaka Corporation at a diner this morning who recognized my description of Carla. He—”

  “Wait. You got up, got clean, and had a sit-down breakfast? While I’ve been crawling around in the subfloor?”

  “Listen, you want to hear this or what?” he asked. “Anyway, apparently Carla comes over here for meetings with Tanaka every time he’s in town. He said Tanaka got in last night, just after we did, so I found the club’s number and asked to speak to Carla.”

  “And?”

  “They offered to take a message.”

  “You know, boss, that is actually a good bit of detective work,” I said, impressed.

  “Yeah. Pretty proud of it myself. But here’s the deal. While I don’t think this is a members only type club, I do think they’re not going to take too kindly to me showing up here during ‘bounty hunter hours’ asking questions, so watch my back, would ya?”

  As we did our best to act like we belonged while walking toward the front door, a worrisome thought struck me.

  “Hey, boss, did we ever pay back the money we owed Bouelle? You know, for the—”

  The boss shrugged. “Eh. Most of it?”

  The hulking doorman didn’t open the door for us, but he didn’t stop us from entering either, which I took as a positive sign. Once inside, we stood in an ornately tiled anteroom, the entrance to the club itself barred by two massive wooden doors and flanked by two equally massive bouncers, one white and one black, who made the tough out front look small by comparison. Above the club doors was a wooden sign with brass letters that read No unauthorized weapons. Violators will be handled by club security.

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out that anybody who got “handled” by the two guarding the door would be lucky to leave with all their limbs attached.

  The boss must have been thinking the same, because he faltered for a step as he asked “So, uh, what exactly makes a weapon unauthorized?”

  “If you have to ask, yours is,” the dark-skinned bouncer
told the boss. “Hand it over.”

  The boss surrendered his pistol and the guard deposited it in a hidden drawer recessed into the wall. The bouncer handed him a claim ticket.

  I tried walking through, but a meaty white hand on my chest stopped me.

  “You too, pal,” the white bouncer told me. I gave up my knife up as well.

  We stepped through the anteroom doors and into a vast wood paneled room, dimly lit save for an empty stage illuminated by brilliant white arc lights above. To our left, the bartender looked up at us from a bar that seemed to stretch for kilometers before he went back to his work washing glasses. The whole place reminded me of a movie set.

  “I dunno about you,” I whispered to the boss as we took seats at the otherwise empty bar, “but I don’t think this is my kind of place.”

  “Yeah, you ain’t kidding,” he agreed. “But we aren’t here for a good time. As soon as I make sure our six is clear, it’s back to the ship and back to work.”

  “Speaking of work, boss, what do you think the exposure limit on coolant is? My arms are starting to tingle and my whole lower body is numb.”

  “You’ll be fine,” he replied. “I’m sure it’s not good for you, but as much as you smoke and drink and as bad as you shoot, something else is bound to kill you first.”

  “Easy for you to say,” I muttered as I moved my numb right foot just to make sure I still could.

  I was into my third bourbon by the time I spotted Carla as she descended the darkened staircase beside the bar. She chatted with a silver-haired black man whose attire and swagger screamed “high-end bounty hunter.” For some reason, I’d expected she’d be wearing the same form-fitting flight suit as before, but instead she wore a pair of tight blue jeans and stylish red blouse with a keyhole cutout that couldn’t help but catch my eye. I also noticed that unlike us, she hadn’t had to check her pistol at the door.

  “Yo, boss, there she is,” I said with a nod in her direction.

  “I see her,” he said as he polished off his scotch. “Let’s go have a chat.”