Low Flyer, page 5
One gig. One payday. Fuel. Vamoose.
It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was a plan.
Chuck found a Jenny & Bart’s and settled down in their outdoor patio seats with a double-chock-nutter covered in rainbow sprinkles. As a father of three, he felt a fleeting twinge of guilt that his kids might have enjoyed a similar treat. Then he reminded himself that Becky was taking Mike and Rhiannon to the playground, and Brad would have his friends. Chuck had a rough afternoon. And it was hot. And Becky wasn’t here.
The thought of Becky brought his waffle cone to a halt halfway to his lips.
He ought to check in.
After all, he wasn’t the only one potentially in danger. She was at the playground with Chuck’s most valuable collateral.
Tapping at the datagoggles with one hand while managing to eat with the other, he entered his comm ID and login, connected to his mid-level-security account, and punched up Becky’s ID.
She answered after a brief delay.
“What’d you buy?” she asked immediately.
Chuck opened his mouth to question her assumption, then remembered that he wouldn’t have used this ID on a public terminal or his usual datapad. “Just a cheapie pair of datagoggles. But forget that. Has anyone suspicious shown up at the playground?”
“Not at the playground…” she replied coyly. “Unless you count our own friends.”
Chuck had to admit, in a vacuum, their friends ran the gamut of shadiness. Heck, Mort was possibly the shadiest person either of them had ever met, and he was bunking with Brad. His wife’s evasion, however, hadn’t gone unnoticed.
“Where are you if you didn’t go to the playground?”
“Been and come back. It’s naptime.”
While the ice cream had been chilling Chuck’s tongue and throat with each bite, those words chilled the rest of him. “You’re back at the ship? Who showed up at the ship?”
“Do you happen to owe someone nearly thirty-eight thousand terras?”
Scowling, Chuck tried to recall the amount in question. That sounded way too high. “No…” he ventured cautiously. He’d paid back the loan to Kempler last time he’d come to Carson. So what if he was couple of days late? What were they doing, compounding interest on a lousy little late fee?
“Then the two skuzzballs with the blasters must have been looking for some other fast-talking comedian named Chuck Ramsey.”
“Must have…” Shit. This was no good. “Look, babe, they hanging around the ship? You need me to—”
“To cancel your show, round up Brad, get you keester back here, and blow this lemonade stand? It was Buddy and his tag-along. He’s a got a deputy’s badge. Ain’t nothing good coming from loitering.”
Chuck blinked. “Um. Cancel the show? And fly out of here on what? Hopes and crossed fingers? We need fuel.” The idea of stealing fuel flitted at the back of his mind, but this wasn’t some fringe core world where the authorities assumed most people were upright and honest citizens. Mucking around with someone else’s fuel rods would get a guy shot on a planet like Carson, and there might not be many questions about a dead nomad afterward.
Before Becky could launch a counter argument, Chuck asked, “Is Mort around?”
“Who d’ya think impersonated my new boyfriend to make them think we weren’t a thing anymore?”
The ice water in Chuck’s blood warmed. He knew it was a ploy. Mort was a mensch. Chuck knew the type. Too stuck-up to slum with a comedian’s wife. The wizard was an Earth blueblood. Still saw himself as a misplaced aristocrat. Every bite of processor-stale food and swig of off-brand beer, Chuck could see the wince of offended dignity concealed behind a wall of stoicism. He’d sooner pay for company than entice Becky to cheat on him.
At least, that’s what Chuck told himself.
The image of the two of them in Chuck’s bed lodged in the fore of his brain, right behind his eyes where he could envision it all too clearly.
The rational side of Chuck, however, saw through the little lady’s plan. “You’re not luring me back to defend your virtue. Hell, I’d sooner rush back to defend his. You just keep him close—not that close—and hang tight till I get back.”
“And Brad?”
“What about him?” Chuck replied testily.
“He’s off playing with his friends.”
“Good for him,” Chuck said with a huff. “One of us ought to enjoy this junket.”
“You just be—”
“Love you, babe,” Chuck cut her off.
There was a heartbeat’s pause. “Love you too, you big dumb lunkhead.”
Chuck tried to end the comm, but Becky beat him to it. He blamed the unfamiliar interface on the datagoggles. The patio area was deserted, yet Chuck looked around anyway for potential eavesdroppers who might have overheard his comm.
No candidates within view.
A chilly, gooey wetness drew Chuck’s attention to his hand.
His ice cream was melting.
Naptime was ephemeral and amorphous. The best and most disciplined of parents could no more dictate the sleep cycles of a toddler than they could the tides.
Mort had tried and failed at both, so he spoke from authority.
However, if there was a bit of wisdom that had served well with his own pipsqueaks, it was that stories were a magic all their own.
Rhiannon and Mike shared a bottom bunk while the top was used for toy storage. If they were taller, they’d have slept head to foot, but as it was, feet didn’t even meet in the middle. It didn’t help that Rhiannon slept so cockeyed that her feet barely reached the blanket from her spot on the pillow.
“You sure about this?” Becky asked in a whisper. The restless pair had been up five times between them, requesting snacks, water, and access to the holo-projector. “They’re pretty picky about bedtime stories.”
Inwardly, Mort scoffed. Picky… Children were the softest literary critics in the cosmos. Character motivations could run paper thin. Villains existed for the sake of the hero’s tale, not their own goals. Plots marched along nonsense courses, guided by parable morals and no laws of causes and effects. Add in a few silly voices, and the rest was a simple theater performance.
“What kind of stories do you two like?” Mort asked the pair of willful insomniacs.
“It has to have a mouse,” Mike insisted.
“Daddy story,” Rhiannon proclaimed, stretching out both arms toward the door and making grasping gestures with both tiny hands.
“Daddy’s not here right now,” Mort informed the two calmly. “So, I’ll do my best to substitute for him.”
“I want a mouse story,” Mike reiterated.
Mort didn’t plan to disappoint him. “Mouse story it is.” He cleared his throat. One of the artful portions of fatherhood was the concoction of laboriously silly tales to amuse the next generation. He had a selection of archetypes upon which to draw, tales of heroism, mundane parables, adventures, and stories that were little more than drawn-out setups for a humorous punchline. Since these kids probably got force-feedings of the latter thanks to their father, Mort opted for a tale of adventure. “Once upon a time, there were two mice, a prince and a princess.”
“Real mice,” Mike reminded him. “Not sourions.”
“Real mice,” Mort promised, holding up his oath-swearing hand. Then an idea snuck into his head. He leaned toward Becky, watching from the doorway. “Permission for a bit of ambiance?”
Becky scowled and pursed her lips, then gave a reluctant nod.
It wasn’t as if they were about to fly off. And this was going to be light-touch magic.
Swirling a finger, Mort turned the pseudo-ceiling of the bunk above the children into a tableau upon which to paint directly into their imaginations. A field of wildflowers appeared, crisscrossed with dirt paths just the right size for mice.
As Mort spooled out a tale of lost treasures of cheese and a slumbering cat who guarded the stash, he showed just enough of the environment that the kids had to picture the protagonists for themselves. When the cat woke and hissed at the heroic royal mice, he added a sound effect that had them both squealing in mock terror.
When Becky moved to intervene, Mort patted a hand in the air to reassure her.
The mouse prince and princess backtracked to a wise old dog the pair had met in passing early on and dismissed as trouble. This time, when the dog told them how to scare off the cat, they listened. They fashioned a megaphone from an acorn cap at the dog’s instruction. When they crept near to the cat, the princess lifted the acorn to her little mouse lips and barked.
The cat, mistaking the sound for an actual dog, meowed in panic and ran off, all accompanied by semi-realistic magical sound effects.
“And when the prince and princess returned to their kingdom with all the cheese, the hungry mouse peasants had a feast. And they lived happily ever after.”
With a pinch of his fingers, the mouse kingdom and its smorgasbord of cheeses laid out on long tables vanished.
“Awwww,” the two kids whined in unison.
“Tell us another,” Mike begged.
“Naptime,” Becky chimed in, clapping like a ballet instructor. “That was a really good bedtime story, so don’t you dare waste it.”
“But I want a—”
“One nap, one story,” Mort blurted. Belatedly, he worried that he might have formed an eternal pact that might require daily storytelling duties. He swallowed, hoping the mental palate cleanser of slumber would wash the chalk-written promise from young minds. “That’s the rule.”
Whether they slumbered or not, the adults left them to their attempt and closed the door behind them.
Becky kept her voice down. “Thanks. Not sure I had a story in me right now.”
Mort replied in kind. “My pleasure.”
“Scarier than we usually tell. Usually, mouse stories are about sneaking into a person’s pad and nicking the cheese. But hey, you had a mouse story. Credit where it’s due, like, am I right?” Her gaze strayed to the door leading off the ship.
“Chuck can look after himself. Otherwise, he’d have headed right back.”
“You said it. Not me. If Chuck knew enough to bug out when it’s hairy, he wouldn’t be Chuck. You dig?”
Chuck had a comedy show to perform, even if it was a godawful idea with debt collectors after him. If he had real talent as either a performer or a petty swindler, the Ramsey family wouldn’t have been scraping to get by.
“Chuck’s a big boy,” Mort said.
“I’m not too jazzed about plasma salesmen showing up at the ship.” They both stared at the door to the kids’ room. “That old man of mine doesn’t think the way a mom thinks.”
Somewhere in the middle of his story, Mort’s mind had briefly wandered back to Earth. Mike and Rhiannon had been forgotten in favor of Cassandra and Cedric. Nancy had been standing in the door behind him, enjoying the fanciful fairytale as much as the children—though for entirely different reasons. By the finale of the adventure, reality had drifted back in.
Nancy and the kids—his kids—were safe and cozy back on Earth.
Mort raised a finger that could summon thunder from a clear sky. “Becky, I swear by Merlin’s pointed hat: anyone who comes after your kids goes through me first.”
The ride out came courtesy of a self-powered grav sled pilfered from Anji’s parents’ ship. To say that the wind rushed through Brad’s hair would have been giving too much credit to the vehicle and not enough to the actual weather on Carson. The sled’s ground speed topped out at 6 meters per second, which was faster than any of them could run. Just not by much. Still, in the sun-drenched badlands, any transportation came as a welcome relief.
Brad just wished he were alone with Anji.
Instead, half the kids from the nomad camp piled aboard, safe in the knowledge that the sled was built to haul cargo far heavier than human passengers. Plus, falling off at this speed would be an opportunity for a smooth stunt roll more than a deadly hazard.
Anji stood at the controls, the only one with elbow space as she maneuvered them toward the Echo Canyon.
The rugged terrain rose and fell in jags and clusters of boulders. Cresting a low rise, they came within sight of a gaggle of their underage elders. Another dozen nomads had wandered off from the main camp and loitered around a sight that caught Brad’s breath in his throat.
A hover.
Not just any hover. As Anji piloted them closer aboard the grav sled, Brad got a better look. It was an open-air one-seater, dusky blue and dusted red from the ambient grit in the air. One of the nomads was wiping it clean with a rag as the others clustered around in conversation.
Before the grav sled could get there, the spectators scattered. The hover’s engines whined to max power, and it shot off into the canyon accompanied by cheers and a wash of ozone scent. In the earthy blandness of Carson, it was a whiff of perfume to Brad.
Martin spotted them coming and waved. He returned his attention to a datapad as the others watched the canyon’s maw.
Anji pulled them to a stop, and a few more of the older nomad teens acknowledged their arrival.
Jomek of Omicron IV ambled over on all fours, waving with a lower hand mid-stride as he came. Brad couldn’t remember whether the chimp-like laaku considered themselves to have four hands or two hands and two feet. Despite using them interchangeably and quadridexterously, one term was considered horribly xenoist while the other barely warranted notice. If only Brad could recall which was which. Jomek spoke with a thick accent thanks to learning English only recently. “Friends, hello. Much speed. Many racing. Have the fun we’re having.”
Argruu’s growl snapped Brad’s attention away from the greeting he’d been about to deliver to his only laaku friend. “Oh, look. The runt.”
Brad resented that. He was taller than Booger and Pravesh, not to mention having two younger siblings. If anyone was the runt of his litter, it was Rhiannon.
The eyndar wore a black jacket with a high collar that obscured his lupine features until he turned around. Gray fur covered his face. His fangs gleamed pearly white, bared in a faint snarl. But his ears were up and perky; this was posturing, not a real threat.
“What’s up, bitch?” Brad called back, inclining his head casually.
Argruu folded back his ears as the rumble in his throat deepened. He was full-grown, an adult by his species’ standards. Thirty kilos heavier, and most of it muscle, he could have torn Brad to shreds. But Dad knew the secret to dealing with eyndar in human-controlled space: the first time Argruu proved he was a threat would be the last. If the eyndar was lucky, he’d become persona non grata, denied entry to trading ports and law-abiding colonies. If he wasn’t lucky, he’d be hunted down and killed.
It was a dirty secret all eyndar traders knew and passed down to their pups. Humans, laaku, and tesuds viewed them as a half step better than azrin, civilized, but just barely.
A younger eyndar swatted Argruu in the flank. “You started it, brother. Besides, Ramsey is nearly part of the pack.”
Brad’s face flushed. It had been a long shot, but he’d hoped that the intervening years had let everyone forget about Jamie and Argruu dating. That hope had gotten sucked into a black hole by Garlaa’s remark.
As the others gathered to watch for the hover’s return, Garlaa grasped him by the wrist and towed Brad to a private distance. “How lives Jamie?”
She was tall enough to look Brad in the eye, though his eyes kept drifting to the tops of her fur-covered breasts peeking from beneath her vest. Both her ears bore elaborate hoop rings, and a single silver stud pierced her lolling tongue as she awaited his reply.
Brad cleared his throat to reorient his thoughts. Garlaa radiated heat. Her breath wafted an overpowering scent of artificial peppermint instead of the carrion he’d been expecting. The grip on his wrist threatened to cut off circulation to his hand. “Um. Fine. I guess. She doesn’t send many comms.”
Garlaa leaned close and sniffed him. She whispered in his ear. “You’re breeding age now. Yes?”
Brad froze. He gulped. “Yeah?” he squeaked.
Still keeping her grip on his wrist, she wrapped her other hand behind Brad’s back and pulled him against her. Wherever she wasn’t an unsettlingly pleasant squooshy, Garlaa’s body was firm and unyielding. “Gooooood. There is a great reward among my people to birth human hybrids.”
That was too much. Brad struggled free, thankful that the expected resistance from the amorous eyndar melted at the first hint of opposition.
Far from taking offense, Garlaa was quietly snickering. She took a playful grab toward his crotch that Brad dodged at the last second. “Must be genetic. Good that Jamie did not come back. Argruu mourns with his loins, but all may now act wiser.” Already speaking conspiratorially, Garlaa lowered her voice further. “You pick a human mate. I help. You leave eyndar be. Yes?”
Brad struggled to grab hold of his swirling thoughts. Both Mom and Dad had warned in their own ways about the coming confusion and the disturbing tricks a girl could play with a boy’s mind—or even a man’s, he reminded himself. The effect had been more disconcerting than he’d ever imagined. Despite clearly being meant to spend a lifetime with Anji, Garlaa had nearly ruined him with a few words and the touch of her fully clothed body.
“I don’t need any help,” he insisted testily. He backed away and didn’t take his wary gaze off the eyndar until he’d rejoined the back of the crowd of spectators.
A distant whine of ion engines grew louder. The crowd parted. A line painted on the rock stretched some ten meters across, with Martin poised to capture the finish on his datapad. Still gunning at top speed, the dusky blue hover shot out of Echo Canyon. The crowd cheered. Brad joined in but halfheartedly. He was too busy watching with a critical eye.
The hover tore across the finish line, throwing up a wake of dust that had everyone covering noses and mouths and shielding eyes against the onslaught.
“New record!” Martin announced to another round of cheers. “Golan wins today’s pot!”
