The Damsel by David Dixon

Author:David Dixon [Dixon, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Noir, Pulp, science fiction, Space Opera
Publisher: Dark Brew Press
Published: 2021-06-29T06:00:00+00:00

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.

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