The Damsel

by David Dixon

  The boss avoided my eyes. “Well, that and some other stuff.”

  “Other stuff? Like what?”

  “Apparently the amount of Quaralene you’d absorbed through your skin was at, um, ‘near fatal levels’ I think is how they put it. The detox is what cost most of the cash.”

  “I told you, asshole. I told you I needed a shower. I told you I didn’t feel good, I told you. But no, you were all ‘you’ll be fine, Snake, quit whining.’ I swear, when we get back to the ship, it’s gonna be your ass crawling through the toxic soup down in the subfloor.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said. “I’ve already been down in it actually. I fixed the leak, got the system recharged and got the number three engine running. Number two isn’t far from being back up either.”

  “Well, that’s good news. What about number one?”

  He shook his head. “Needs a total rebuild. And I haven’t even started on all the sensors and fire damage. Or the radiation shields. Or the ECM module, or the targeting system, or comms, or—”

  “We got a lot of work to do. I get it, man, but—”

  “I don’t think you do,” the boss said as he slumped against the train window. “I’m out of cash. Almost flat broke.”

  “Shit, man. If I had any cash to give you, I would, but—”

  “What about that line you gave me back on Ramseur, about loaning me the money to fix the targeting system?” he asked.

  “Are you stupid? Don’t you think I would’ve already forked it over if I had it? You think I would choose to fly on a ship without a targeting system? C’mon, boss. I got like three hundred credits to my name, for real.”

  “I dunno, I was hoping you had a rich uncle or something.”

  I snorted. “Rich uncles are your department.”

  A rich uncle. Right. The boss was the one with the connections. Although he’d always been evasive about it, I had pieced together the fact he’d grown up rich and his father was some kind of powerful political bigshot. I rubbed my face and considered the possibility.

  “Here’s how I see it,” the boss said. “We’ve still got enough to use the elevator, so we—”

  “We could borrow it from your dad, couldn’t we?” I suggested.

  “No. He wouldn’t loan it and I wouldn’t ask. Forget it.”

  “I just figured—”

  “I literally would rather die than ask for money from my father. He’s him, and I’m me,” the boss replied, serious as a lock warning.

  “But we—”

  “End of discussion, Snake.”

  I let it drop.

  “Fine. So, what’s the plan?”

  “Like I was saying, we use the elevator to get back out of orbit, since we can’t with just two engines. I’ve got enough to cover the fee one way. Then, we’ll take an insys run to the T53 Outpost—has to be there because the heat shields are too busted for reentry—and use the cash we got to repair the radiation shields, which have to be the first—”

  “You wanna do a deep space run when our radiation shields are shredded? Are you out of your mind? We’ll be glowing before we reach the second nav point.”

  “The radiation won’t be that high, as long as there’s no solar flares,” the boss said with a dismissive shrug. “We’ll be all right for one run.”

  “And what, just pray we don’t get jumped? Because we’ll have no targeting, no ECM, no port shields, and be limping along with two engines. Jesus fuck, man, listen to yourself! You’re talking about a suicide mission to make probably fifteen-hundred credits—tops. And even if we could afford to buy radiation shields on T53 after the run, could we even afford the docking charges?”

  “We’d have to skip out on ‘em,” the boss said. “But we’ve done that before in other places.”

  “Yeah, but when we did that before we weren’t limping along held together by vacuum tape and a prayer, boss. Plus, it’s kind of a bad idea to cut yourself off from the only place you can land, remember? We still won’t have our heat shields for reentry.”

  “I know. That’s why, after we make the first run to T53, we head for Diis. Big station, plenty of work, even in-system.”

  In my time flying for him, my boss had had a lot of dangerous ideas, and a lot of big, stupid plans, but this had to be the biggest, stupidest, most dangerous plan ever. I remembered telling him that about his decision to do the Tellison-Markins run, but the way I saw it, we’d have better odds doing that twice than reaching Diis in our current state.

  “Diis is what, six or seven jumps away?” I did the calculations in my head. “Twelve days, I think—no wait, we’re on two engines, so more like fifteen or twenty. Through Xiamen and Hadris. Without targeting or portside shields. Or ECM. With CO2 scrubbing at fifty percent. Hell, even if by some miracle we did make it through, when we landed on Diis we wouldn’t even have the cash to cover the landing fees, which means they’d impound the ship as soon as we showed up. No thanks, I think I’m better off flapping my arms and hoping to turn into a bird.”

  “Goddamn it, at least I’m trying to think of something instead of just shooting everything down. What’s your solution then, Snake?” the boss asked.

  “I dunno, man, but not any of that.”

  “You’re a ton of help,” he replied, his voice cutting. “Tell you what, when we get back to the ship, you work and I’ll think.”

  “Pretty sure it was your thinking that got us into this mess, boss,” I shot back, and regretted it as soon the words left my mouth.

  He didn’t reply, but his jaw clenched tight and he stared out the window. He didn’t say anything the rest of the trip.

  When we got to our stop, I had to wheel myself out of the train.

  Three days of solid work under our belts had improved things somewhat, but there was still tension in the air. I could get around without the wheelchair, but my leg still hurt and I moved “like old people fuck,” as the boss put it. My lack of mobility left me doing the work behind the ship’s computers or trying to do research on how to fix problems, which was usually the boss’s job, and left him crawling around, replacing things, running tests, and getting dirty. I never would have admitted it to him, but he was a damn sight better at doing my job than I was at doing his.

  Unfortunately, given our lack of funds, we’d all but exhausted what we could actually fix, so we wound up spending a lot of time fixing minor problems because the major problems were too big to contemplate. That’s how I found myself smoking cigarettes in the cockpit, checking voltage levels, and reading out of a maintenance procedure book to the boss while he crammed himself half inside the midship computer cabinet.

  “Step four,” I read, “Place circuit breaker twelve in off position.”

  “Done,” the boss called, voice muffled by the metal cabinet.

  “Set mode switch to alternate.”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay, now at my station, I set the mode to test,” I told him. I selected test from the menu I’d called up on the VDU. “Then it says… ah—okay, blinking yellow light indicates no fault. Solid yellow light indicates fault and—”

  “I got a solid yellow light,” the boss said. “Of course.”

  “Yep. So now, you press the test button on the panel and read me the voltage and—”

  “I show point two-seven-five,” he interrupted.

  “And I check the voltage up here, which is… One-point-one.”

  “Shit,” he said. “That’s out of tolerance, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Manual says tolerance level is point one-five. And if it’s greater, the relay has to be replaced.”

  I heard him mutter something under his breath and flip a switch. “Okay, what are you showing now?” he asked.

  I took another drag from my cigarette before I answered. “Still showing one-point-one, Boss.”

  “Fuck. Let me try something else. Hold on. How about now?”

  The numbers on my screen didn’t change
. “Nope. Still the same.”

  He flipped a circuit breaker on and off. “That might clear it. Any different?”

  I blew a cloud of smoke at the computer screen. “No. Still one-point-one. It’s hopeless, Boss. The relay has to be replaced.”

  “God-fucking-damn-it. Can’t I get just one, teeny, tiny, fucking break? Is that too much to ask for?” he yelled from inside the cabinet.

  He emerged from the cabinet, banging his head on the door as he did so. I turned around in the cockpit to ask him a question and was surprised to see him stomping out the rear hatch and into the cargo bay, headed for the open bay door.

  “What are you doing?” I called.

  “What difference does it make?” he shouted. “Like you said, Snake, ‘it’s hopeless.’”

  He stomped off toward the tram station. I settled into the cockpit and lit another cigarette.

  I didn’t see him again for four days.

  When he came back, he looked wrung out. He had broken blood vessels around his eyes and the hollow look of a man who’d had too much to drink and too little to eat for several days running. He held a handle of cheap vodka in each hand.

  “Jesus, Boss. What the hell happened to you?”

  He didn’t answer and made his way past where I sat in the cargo bay next to a pile of cigarette butts, sorting a huge bunch of mixed fuses by amperage. He collapsed onto the couch amidships and stretched out.

  “I heard there’s a brothel just out of the city. You find a girl you liked?” I joked.

  “Not in the mood, Snake.”

  I nodded. “Okay, fair. But seriously, where have you been?”

  “I went and saw a guy I heard about.”

  I waited for him to say more, but he seemed content to leave it there. I wasn’t. I lit another cigarette and walked into the crew cabin where I extended the pack to him.

  “Cigarette?”

  “Nah.” He unscrewed the cap off one of the bottles of vodka. “That shit’s bad for you.”

  “Uh huh,” I said as I watched him take a long swig. “So come on, man, out with it. What’s up?”

  “Guy I went to see was Eric Keena. You know the name?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He’s the local guy for the Sevens.”

  My blood went cold. The Triple Sevens were the oldest criminal organization in the Outer Systems, with a well-earned reputation for efficiency and brutality. They were the kinds of gangsters even other gangsters steered clear of.

  “Tell me you did not make a deal with the Sevens,” I pleaded. “Those aren’t the kind of deals you walk away from. Dealing with the Sevens is how you wind up with people like Rick tracking you down. Tell me we’re not mixed up with—”

  “No. No, they offered me a loan, but even as stupid drunk as I was, I knew the juice was too much. I just knew two months from now I’d miss a payment, and a week after they’d be chopping off my fingers in some basement in Neo-Beijing. No, I didn’t take the deal.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. “Thanks for that, ‘cause I like having all my digits.”

  “It’s kind of funny,” he mused after he took another long pull. “It took me a day to get drunk enough to work up the courage to say yes and then two days to get drunk enough to face the fact I’d said no.”

  “So where does that leave us, ship-wise?”

  “Fuck if I know, Snake. All I know is I’m gonna drink these two bottles of vodka and see if they make things any better. Feel free to help.”

  “And if that doesn’t work?” I asked, taking a pull from the bottle.

  “Go buy two more bottles, I guess.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The vodka did not make things better.

  I awoke the following afternoon, sprawled out beside my sleeping bag in the cargo bay, vomit all around me. The smell almost made me throw up again. The boss occupied the ship’s latrine, alternating between puking and cursing.

  My head felt like somebody had slammed it in a car door and my breath tasted like a pack of wild dogs had shit in my mouth. I pressed the door release on the cargo bay and wobbled outside, where I promptly threw up when the bright light of Greenly’s second sun hit my eyes.

  “You know what, Snake?” the boss called from the latrine.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I don’t think the vodka did any good. And even though I said I’d buy two more bottles, I don’t think I wanna do this again. Not for a few days, at least.”

  “Yeah. Right there with you, Boss.”

  Since we’d managed to get the ship’s life support circulation back running, the ship had clean water, courtesy of the utility hookups at the pad. Furthermore, since I’d replaced most of the blown fuses in the boss’s absence, the ship had hot water, which meant I could take a shower in the tiny shower closet.

  Once I did, and after I’d changed into my last set of clean clothes, I felt much better. I smoked a cigarette and watched the second sunset from the open cargo bay door. The boss sat where I had several days earlier, sorting the dwindling pile of fuses.

  “I’m going out,” I announced.

  “Where to?” he asked.

  “I dunno. I just need a walk, now that I can again. And I need to get out of the ship for a bit. There’s a couple of restaurants off the first tram stop from here. I’ll grab us some wings or something. Gotta get something in my stomach and I can’t eat another damn banana energy bar right now.”

  “Snake, man, listen,” the boss said, his tone serious. “If you gotta…” He trailed off.

  “What?”

  “If you gotta go, man, and take a job on another ship, I understand, man. I really do. No hard feelings or anything. You got no money and you’re flying with a guy who’s got no money and no ship, so really, I get it if you gotta go. I’ll even give you a good reference.”

  “I’ll be back, Bossman, don’t sweat it,” I said as I finished my cigarette. “And if I wasn’t, I sure as fuck wouldn’t list you as a reference. I know I wouldn’t hire anybody who’d worked for you.”

  “Get the fuck outta here, Snake,” the boss said with a grin.

  I took the tram to the first stop, but I didn’t feel like going to the restaurant just yet. Instead, I walked out of the concourse and across the street, to the lit sidewalk that ran in front of one of the identical towering apartment complexes that housed most of Greenly’s residents.

  I looked up at the building, wondering what it would be like to live in one of them. I wondered what it would be like to come home to the same place every day, to always know what was coming, to be able to plan around a consistent schedule, to know the neighbors—hell, to have neighbors. I thought about waking up every day and standing out on one of those balconies watching the sunsets while drinking a glass of wine, of a day where my biggest worry was making sure I didn’t miss the train.

  It all sounded pretty fucking terrible, honestly.

  I chuckled as people gave me a wide berth on the sidewalk. Even though I was washed and clean, and even though I was soft as fuck by the standards of my own past, I was still too much for these ground-loving apartment dwellers to take.

  I took cover from the wind behind one of the massive lamp posts to light my cigarette, idly reading the notices taped to the post as I did. One of them caught my eye.

  MOVING SALE! FRIDAY THROUGH SUNDAY! My husband and I are moving from Greenly City to Jefferson, so we’re selling some furniture. Come by anytime this weekend, apt 233-4110.

  233-4110.

  Something about the number format stood out to me for some reason, but I couldn’t—

  It hit me.

  867-5309.

  Holy fuck.

  I jogged down the block to the next entrance in the fence surrounding the apartment grounds. Illuminated by the streetlight, a wrought iron sign announced the apartment complex number: Building 233.

  I remembered something Carla had said at Joey Machete’s:
“I told you where to find me.”

  I remembered something else, too.

  Carla had offered us a loan.

  I ran back to the tram station, thoughts of chicken wings abandoned. I hopped aboard and asked another passenger which stop would put me closest to the 867 block of apartments. I followed her instructions and got off ten stops later, near the south spaceport exit where the boss and I had gone to look for Carla’s Razor.

  From there I walked three blocks east until I stood outside a sleek glass and steel tower, well lit, and displaying 867 in mammoth block letters over its massive bank of revolving doors. I spied an older man struggling with bags of groceries as he exited a taxi, so I grabbed several and carried them toward the door for him, chatting him up along the way. The doorman didn’t give me a second look.

  Once inside, he showed me where the express elevators were and I took one to the fifty-third floor. From there, I padded down the brightly-lit hallway until I found a door covered in psychedelic purple flowers and a peace sign. It didn’t look like how I’d pictured Carla’s apartment would look at all, but below a hand-stenciled bullshit flower-power quote about love and understanding or something were four brass numbers: 5309.

  I knocked on the door. I saw the peephole go dark and then the door swung open. I was greeted by a pretty, buxom brunette about Carla’s age but a few inches taller. She wore an eye-catching sheer green shirt over a lacy bra and a floor-length skirt made of that trendy fabric that displays holographic fractal patterns.

  I was expecting a pretty girl, just not this pretty girl, which threw me for a loop. “Ah, hi,” I said. “I’m looking for—”

  “I know. You’re here for Carla. I’m Jade,” she said, extending a hand, which I shook. “Come on in.”

  Inside, the artistic psychedelic theme continued, where Jade set me down on a couch patterned in a multi-colored fabric that made me think of an exploding sun. Jade disappeared into the kitchen. I looked around at the various wall hangings, pictures of elephants in meditative poses, and fancy antique pictures and decided the apartment had to be Jade’s, not Carla’s.