The Damsel

by David Dixon

  Her wink told me she was up to something, but I had no idea what. Whatever it was, the boss was way ahead of me. His brow furrowed and he appeared to be working something out in his head.

  “Sixty-forty,” he told Carla.

  She laughed. “His way, maybe.”

  “How? You just said it’s worth one-fifteen,” he protested.

  “I don’t see a whole long line of people out here ready to buy you out, do you?”

  “Fine, then, an even fifty-fifty,” he muttered. “But the liability is his, got it? So, if you decide to take it out in blood, it’s on him, okay?”

  “What good does that do me?” Carla asked. “If I come for something, I’ll come for the collateral, which would mean half. Take it or leave it,” she said with an infuriating smile.

  “I hate the both of you so much,” he groused. “I see why you two hit it off. You’re perfect for each other.”

  “Can somebody explain what’s going on?” I called from atop the ship.

  “Carla just twisted your poor boss’s arm to make you half owner of the ship to secure the loan,” Jade said from her position leaning against the SUV. “Jesus, you are dumb, aren’t you?”

  My boss pointed at her. “You know what? I don’t know you, but you—you—are a voice of reason. I like you.”

  “Thanks,” Jade said with a nod in his direction.

  Carla and I shared a knowing look.

  Not fucking likely, admittedly. But maybe. For a little while.

  “So, wait. Now I’m half owner of the ship?” I asked, amazed. I’d never owned anything that wouldn’t fit in a duffle bag.

  “Technically, I am, until you pay me back,” Carla corrected me.

  “Speaking of which, what exactly are the repayment terms?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Get it back to me when you can. And check in every once in a while.”

  “As co-owner of the ship, I’m sure I can make that happen,” I said, with a taunting look at the boss.

  “I swear on the cosmos, I will drop your ass off in the middle of the desert on Ranier if you keep on like that,” he threatened.

  “Please do,” Jade said, earning her a dirty look from Carla.

  “But let’s see it on paper before I hand over a cashcard,” Carla told my boss. “Fetch the title.”

  Grumbling, he disappeared into the ship while I climbed down to the ground.

  “You really are the luckiest motherfucker in the world. Do you realize we spent the whole night together and you never mentioned the loan? Not even once?” Carla asked.

  “I had other things on my mind.”

  “I bet you did.” She gave me a playful shove.

  The boss reappeared, ship’s title in its plastic book. I realized I had never seen it before and didn’t recognize any of the names of previous owners on the document besides my boss’s. I signed next to his above the spot marked Co-owner ___ Percent, and he wrote 50 in the blank, initialing underneath it.

  Carla tugged on her flight suit zipper and withdrew a cashcard. She used her ring to transfer thirty-five thousand credits to it and handed it to me.

  I took it and turned to my boss—partner. “Boss,” I said. “We’re back in business.” I thought for a second. “Do I still have to call you ‘Boss’ even though I—”

  “Yes,” he interrupted. “Yes, you do. You may be part owner of the ship on paper, but I’m still the captain.”

  Carla shrugged. “That’s fair, honestly.”

  “Thanks for the support,” he muttered.

  I chuckled and clapped him on the back. “Don’t sweat it, Boss. I’ve been saying it so long anyway, I wouldn’t know what else to call you.”

  Carla’s ring beeped and she checked the time.

  “Shit. I gotta go, but before I do, I got a tip for you—actually two,” she said to my partner. “And I’m going give them to you, even though you’re an ungrateful bastard.”

  “Oh, boy,” he said sarcastically. “I can’t wait to hear what you’ve got for me.”

  “Good, so listen up. Tip one: Mr. Tanaka has special runs he needs done occasionally. These are not Tanaka Corporation runs. These are more… personal sorts of things, and they pay well. Anyway, he never reuses a shipper to haul his personal cargo so nobody can get a full picture of what’s going on. He’ll be looking for another crew in two weeks and I put in a good word to him about you guys. Go to Joey’s and ask for Lei Ming and tell her Carla sent you. She’ll hook you up.”

  His mouth dropped open. I could tell he’d expected her to give him some more smartass “life advice.” To be honest, so did I.

  “Uh, well, thanks, I guess—really,” he said. “What’s the second tip?”

  “Never trust a pretty face.”

  That’s what I was expecting.

  “Yeah. Thanks for that too, Carla. Don’t you have somewhere to be?”

  Carla laughed. “Yeah, I do. Anyway, take care of Snake for me, would ya?”

  “Somebody has to,” he muttered.

  “And, Snake,” she said to me, her green eyes dazzling in the first sunset, “see you around. Soon.”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Two weeks later, we sat on the taxiway, exhausted from long hours and backbreaking work, but at least it was done.

  “Black Sun 490. Greenly Space Control clears you off LZ 5 for flight corridor bravo. You are go for takeoff,” the controller’s voice said over the comms.

  In my turret, I couldn’t help but smile.

  “Roger, Greenly Control,” the boss said.

  He engaged the retro-rockets and we leapt off the pad, punching through the low cloud cover and into the brightness of Greenly’s twin suns above. He banked the ship left and right to make sure it maneuvered as expected.

  “Everything looking good up there, Boss?” I called up to the cockpit as we ascended, the bright sky giving way to deeper blues and blacks of the high atmosphere. “I’m showing all normal readings down here, but I got a little static on the targeting display.”

  “It’s used. What do you expect?”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Switching to primary engines,” he called. Our Black Sun 490 shuddered as the engines roared and we punched out of the atmosphere into space.

  “Well, I guess our test procedures were good and we did the work generally right,” I said as he steered us toward the nav lane.

  “Well, we’re alive now, but let’s wait and see if the heat shields hold up during reentry before we start celebrating,” he cracked. “Now that would be an unpleasant—”

  Thunk.

  A square piece of metal from somewhere well forward of the turret tumbled past my station and streaked bright as it burned up in the Greenly atmosphere.

  “Yo, man, did you tighten down the P1 access panel?” I asked.

  “No. You said you were gonna do it, remember?”

  I sighed, because as soon as he brought it up, I did remember.

  “Shit.”

  Snake and the Boss will return in…

  SIX-GUN SHUFFLE

  Snake and the boss have made a lot of enemies, but up until their trip to Yaeger, they’ve never had any beef with Michael Ver, the galaxy’s most bankable popstar—mainly because they haven’t met him yet. After Ver’s security steals the boss’s coat during a video shoot, he drags Snake into Ver’s inner circle to get it back. The boss teaches Ver a lesson about the difference between looking tough and being tough, and when video of the incident leaks, he finds himself a minor viral video star. His fame wins him a lot of free drinks, and even better, catches the eye of a gorgeous redhead named Kell. Things are looking up.

  Looking up, that is, until Kell goes missing and the boss goes after her. After a shootout with Ver’s crew, things go from bad to worse—nobody can find Ver, and Snake and the boss are the prime suspects in his disappearance. They decide to get off Yaeger while they can,
but when they catch Ver’s head of security trying to steal their ship after he’s loaded his own cargo in the hold, they realize they’ve stumbled into the sort of scheme that’s impossible to run from.

  The next thing they know they’ve got a bounty on their heads and hardly a friend in sight. Carla and Kell are the only people they can count on, but Snake is starting to think that Kell knows more than she’s letting on. They can only play with the hand they’re dealt, but has Kell been playing a different game all along? It’s a mixed-up tale of bounty hunters, crooked cops, popstars and… insurance agents?… in Six-Gun Shuffle.

  SIX-GUN SHUFFLE TEASER

  You ever noticed how something can seem small and insignificant when it starts and then—boom—the next thing you know that little speck of light behind you is a missile screaming right for your ass? Life is like that a lot for the boss and me, it seems. One minute something is a minor inconvenience and the next minute it’s a matter of life and death.

  We were at Holloway Spaceport on Yaeger VII, having just completed a run from Piker’s Distillery on Talos. We’d gotten confirmation that our payment had come through, so we trudged across the icy, windblown spaceport toward our beat-up Black Sun 490.

  I took a worried glance at the sky. Overhead, massive black clouds churned like my stomach after too many White Russians. The locals had warned us that the coming storm would snow the whole city in for two or three days, if not more. While ordinarily I wouldn’t have minded a break from the confines of the ship for a bit, Yaeger VII was hardly the place to do it. The only thing Yaeger VII was known for was a few second-rate casinos, shitty weather, bad beer, and obnoxious locals. Kinda reminded me of New New England. I scowled and fished a cigarette out of my shirt pocket.

  The boss watched me light it and gave me that grin he has when he thinks he’s about to be clever. “Man, Snake, you sure are smoking a lot these days.”

  I snorted. “I’ve always smoked.”

  “Yeah, but it seems like it’s more here of late. When we left Greenly, you smoked like a chimney until we ran into Carla on Tayir. And you practically quit while we were on Rucker Watson’s with her, and as soon as we left you started back up again. I think they’re like your replacement for Carla.”

  I took a drag before I answered. “At least I’ve got someone to replace.”

  His grin disappeared.

  I clapped him on the back. “Better luck next time, champ.”

  “Have I ever mentioned how much I hate you?” the boss replied.

  I shrugged. “Maybe, but I probably wasn’t listening.”

  “Hey, Snake, there’s a pair of guys hanging out beside the ship,” the boss said, suddenly serious. He nodded to the starboard side of the ship a hundred meters away, where a pair of men stood in the shadow of our Black Sun 490 looking up at the sky. My gut tightened. They were probably just using it as shelter against the wind, but in our line of work, you could never be too careful.

  As we drew closer, the boss tucked his hands under his arms, which to someone else might make it seem like he was just keeping them warm, but I knew he had his right hand on the grip of the .45 revolver tucked in his shoulder holster.

  A roar passing overhead made me flinch, and I looked up to see a large ducted hovercraft coming in low. The pilot flared the engines, which sent icy wind and stinging pellets of ice flying. He landed too close to our ship, and as the boss and I stared in outrage, the side door dropped open and half a dozen more men stepped out, sauntering onto the spaceport tarmac like they owned the place. One of them actually leaned up against our Black Sun 490, a move that in the spacer world is the sort of etiquette violation that would normally earn you anywhere from a broken nose to a bullet in the brainpan, depending on how far out in the Fringe you were.

  The boss and I stomped toward the ship. My blood was boiling. What kind of asshole thought he had the right to just walk up to our shit and lean on it like he was the goddamned UNF General Secretary or something? Did these clowns have a death wish?

  “Yo, dipshit,” the boss shouted across the frozen spaceport. “Touch my ship again and see what happens.”

  The man who’d leaned against it leapt away like he’d been shocked. By now we were close enough to see that they were dressed in the sort of expensive cold weather gear meant to go ice climbing on Titan or something but usually used to keep super rich pricks from suffering even the smallest amount of dick shrinkage.

  “Excuse me?” one of the men snapped. “Are you talking to us? Who the fuck do you think you are? Who gave you permission to be here?”

  “‘Who gave you permission?’ is the question, because last time I checked, I didn’t give you permission to touch shit,” the boss growled as we drew closer.

  “We’re here for the video shoot, and we rented the whole spaceport,” the man huffed. “Everything here is supposed to be available for use.”

  “Well, you’ve been misinformed,” I answered. “This is our ship, and it’s not available for whatever the fuck you think it is. So, you got like, maybe five seconds to clear out before things get ugly.”

  “I think there’s been some sort of misunderstanding,” he replied.

  “Five,” I said as I took another menacing step closer to the ship. I’d been in the game long enough to know that these were the type who’d never even match the ante, much less stick around for the call.

  “But I—”

  “Four,” the boss said, slapping his fist into his palm.

  “Can’t we just—”

  “Three,” I said, sighing as I flicked my cigarette away.

  The men scampered toward the hovercraft. The boss and I dropped the cargo ramp and strolled inside, chuckling.

  Fucking earthworms—the same on every planet.

  We got to work doing maintenance, as always. I worked inside, topping off fluid levels, replacing scrubber filters in the life support system, and recalibrating my turret servos. The boss worked outside, running down an intermittent fault in the J7 junction box that kept shorting out our gravimetric sensor every time the shield generator cycled.

  He walked back up the cargo ramp ten minutes later, soaked in sweat and without his coat, muttering curses under his breath. I looked up from the left side scrubber bank. “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Fucking J7 cover is stuck.”

  “Yeah. It was that same way the last time I worked on it. I think the locking ring is busted. You’re probably going to have to pry it off, and that’ll mean we—”

  One of the men from earlier appeared at the base of the ramp, careful not to actually set foot on the cargo ramp itself. He cleared his throat.

  The boss turned to face him, but before either one of us could tell the guy to get lost, another man joined him. This second guy was no rich asshole—redundant, I know—in five thousand credits worth of winter gear. He was a hulking bruiser in black boots, jeans, and only a long-sleeved T-shirt despite the fact that the first few snowflakes had already begun to fall. This was the type of guy who wouldn’t just see the ante, but might even raise it.

  “See, Liz,” the man from earlier said to his new friend, “these are the two I was talking about.”

  Liz looked up the ramp at us, and I got the feeling he was sizing us up. I took a drag from my cigarette and tried to be nonchalant. In this business, sometimes it’s best just to let folks sort out for themselves who they’re dealing with.

  “You giving my man a hard time?” Liz finally said.

  The boss shrugged. “Not really. But if your man comes over here touching our shit again, he might get one.”

  Liz nodded. “I get you, but here’s the thing: you’re not supposed to be here.”

  My expression didn’t change, but something about the way Liz spoke set little warning alarms chiming in my head. He had the sort of quiet, steely confidence that only came from having been here before—and coming out on top.

  “I got a paid invoice for three hundr
ed credits for the use of this pad and utilities that says otherwise,” the boss said.

  Liz shook his head. “I don’t care if you got a paid invoice for fucking Mars. We paid for the whole spaceport. For a video shoot.”

  Liz casually slid up his left sleeve to reveal a brilliant red lizard tattoo, and suddenly the reason for the “Liz” nickname clicked into place—Liz for “lizard.” A half a second later, something else clicked into place for me. That tattoo, like the snake coiled around my left arm, wasn’t just there for decoration. It was a gang sign, which in this case meant he either had been or still was a member of the Iguanas, a sector gang that ran Z on the regular and occasionally pulled side gigs as “personal protection.”

  Fuck.

  Beside me, the boss flared his nostrils. “But like I said, we already paid for the pad, and I’m not paying for another. We got maintenance to do. But you let us finish up our shit here, and we’ll be glad to get gone. We weren’t planning on sticking around anyway.”

  Liz flicked his eyes to the man who’d told us to move the first time. With Liz by his side, he’d regained some of his earlier rich asshole confidence. He shook his head. “No way, Liz. We’re behind a day already, and camera and crew time is running the company four grand a minute. Michael is already unhappy with how things are going, and I need him in a good mood for the video. I want them gone.”

  Liz looked back at us. “You heard him.”

  “We already paid for the pad,” the boss protested. “Call station control. They can’t just—”

  Liz chuckled wickedly. “Go ahead. Call ’em.”

  Holloway Center Control, of course, sided with Liz, giving us some story about how buried deep in the standard twenty-page rental contract was some bullshit clause about “terms and conditions subject to change without notice.”

  “So, there you go,” Liz said after our ten-minute argument with Holloway Center Control. “Get lost.”