by Sam Renner
“Because when we swap out these transponders this place is burnt. My old signal sitting stationary, it’s going to be a sounding beacon…”
She doesn’t let him finish. “I know. I knew when I suggested the swap.”
“It’s just that you said …”
“I know what I said. It was for Ruimy’s benefit.”
Nixon is still a couple of steps behind Laana. She’s looking over her shoulder to speak.
“This is me telling you I’m in. I’m giving up my ship to finish this with you. But we still haven’t talked about terms.”
“Terms?”
“What I get for my effort. I’m not doing this for …”
She stops mid-sentence and holds up a hand.
Nixon stops next to her, and she points down the hill and into the trees where EHL is sitting.
“Look,” she says. “Movement. Somebody’s down there.”
05
They quickly hide themselves behind a tree then watch.
Looks to be two men, but the trees are bunched so tightly together that they can’t see faces.
“Recognize them?” Laana asks.
Nixon shakes no. “The only people I know here are you and two of the men from …”
Nixon stops talking and concentrates on the action down by his ship. One of the men continues to walk around out front while the other is exiting the ramp, something in his arms. They’ve somehow gotten the ramp open. Nixon feels blindly through his cloak until he finds the case.
Good. It’s here.
“Wait.”
Laana concentrates on the two men. She chuckles.
“Yep,” she says.
“It’s …”
“Yep.”
Nixon stands. “I don’t guess we should be surprised.” It’s the men Nixon knows, the ones Laana met earlier. They’ve found his ship. They were hoping to find him.
“Nope,” Laana says. “But do we have a plan?”
Nixon pulls the blaster from his waistband. “Nope,” he says and holds the blaster up, a finger resting on the trigger guard, “but I do have this.”
Laana looks back down in between the trees. The man working on the ramp has a medium-sized blaster thrown across his back. The other one who’s pacing a shallow trench to the side of EHL is holding a bigger blaster pointed to the ground.
Laana rocks her head from side to side, likes she’s considering things. Then she says “At least is a fairer fight. And if that still doesn’t matter, it’s a beautiful day. Nothing wrong with spending it dying.”
“You’re not going to die.” Nixon starts down the hill. He picks up speed as he goes, and when he gets to the tall grass he’s shouting.
Shouting and shooting.
“Hey!” Two shots. Both of the men dive to the ground. The one exiting the ramp drops whatever’s in his arms. It glows green, the Bastic fuel rods. Everything inside Nixon tenses, waiting for the rods to go fully unstable and send both men and his ship up in an explosion of fire. But they don’t. They just hit the ground and roll away.
Neither of Nixon’s shots is a threat. Both hit a tree before they come anywhere close to EHL or either of the men. Hitting the ground is instinct. But if you’ve been in a gunfight before, so is getting up. Laying on the ground, belly first, just makes you a nice widening target for someone who’s approaching.
Both of these men are up fast, and Nixon fires another pair of shots. Again, they burn holes into tree trunks but have no chance of hitting anything.
“What are you doing?” Laana shouts, but Nixon doesn’t respond. He sprints into the trees. Luckily, he’s just as hard to hit as his two targets are. Both men fire off a volley of shots. Only one comes close to hitting Nixon, passing over his head as he slides to a stop behind a tree.
Nixon looks behind him. Laana is sitting on the ground at the edge of the forest. She’s made herself small and is putting as much of a tree between her and Nixon and the two men as she can. He turns back to see one of them poke his head around the side of EHL. Nixon lets off a wild shot in the man’s direction. It goes well wide of anything.
“What are you doing?” Laana shouts. “If you’re going to fire, do it expecting to hit. Quit firing right away.”
Nixon keeps an eye on the ship, but she’s right. He’s fighting from anger. He’s mad that these guys have found his ship. He doesn’t know what they want, but they broke into EHL so he assumes it isn’t good. And he’s mad that he started shouting at them from the grass. He let his emotion overwhelm his better sense, and now he’s in a gunfight as opposed to approaching them with a plan and limiting the action.
Think, Nixon. Think.
Scenarios run through his head. All of them end up with him dead and Laana being marched back to their camp. And they all involve him sneaking around the side of the ship to try and surprise at least one of them. If not surprise them, at least catch them flat footed.
So that’s it. The plan that makes the most sense. Mostly because that’s the only plan. He turns to Laana.
“I’m going around,” he says and gestures a wide path with his hand.
He stands, and she says no. He can’t hear her, though, because at that moment blaster fire erupts from both guns. Bolt after bolt leap from behind EHL and rocket skyward. They are tearing through the canopy above Nixon and bringing down a rain of large limbs and branches. They are falling from hundreds of feet up, and landing all around him. It sounds like explosions when they hit the ground.
BOOM! BOOM!
Nixon is weaving through trees, trying to get to the back side of EHL. The blaster bolts continue to tear apart the branches above him. He comes around the front side of EHL with his blaster drawn.
“Be careful, you’re about to be fully exposed,” Laana shouts. She’s following him.
BOOM!
His weapon is out in front of him, and he’s ready to fire. Both of the men are looking up, not paying attention. He squares up one of the men in his sites and squeezes off a shot.
CRACK!
One of the falling limbs lands across his shoulders. It knocks him to the ground and the blaster from his hands. The shot goes well wide.
He looks up and sees both men turn to him, a look of surprise on their faces. Then they smile. They bring their blasters toward him, but before they can get trained on him a blaster bolt catches one in the chest. He spins to the ground.
BOOM!
Another limb lands and shakes the ground. Nixon’s vision is going soft, everything beginning to dim. He barely sees Laana jump over him and into his view. She has his blaster, and the next bolt she fires momentarily lights up everything. She’s put a second shot into the man already down, and quickly fires another at the second gentleman before he can get his blaster up and aimed.
Darkness is collapsing in from the sides. Everything is becoming a mess of colors. Two more blaster shots fire off bright, and he can see Laana turn from the second man, who’s now falling to the ground.
The last thing he sees as the darkness overwhelms is her face tensed up in determination, her mouth open and teeth bared. The blaster jammed out in front her on arms that are tight with tension. It’s pointed right at him.
Then … black.
06
Nixon’s shoulders and back more than ache. This is pain he’s not felt in a long time, and it pulses through his whole body when he tries to push himself up to a sitting position.
“Whoa, whoa,” says Laana and offers him a hand.
Nixon’s head is foggy, and that confusion is painted on his face.
“Nothing’s broken,” Laana says. “Not the best I can tell. But you took a pretty good shot.”
Things are fuzzy. A pretty good shot? Nothing’s broken?
He takes Laana’s hand and she pulls him up to a sitting position. She gives him a tin of Bowtan steer meat and some crackers.
“Eat this. You’ve been out a while.”
Nixon doesn’t say anything, just takes the tin from her and drags
a cracker across the top. He puts it in his mouth, and she continues to talk.
“I went ahead and swapped out the transponders. Anyone scanning codes will think we’re a cute little speeder. Until they see us, of course.”
That makes some sense. He’s remembering transponders. Conversations that didn’t go well. He’s remembering a fire fight. And tree limbs landing like explosions.
Falling limbs.
Across his back and shoulders. Limbs pinning him to the ground. Laana leaping over his back and firing his blaster, a look of anger on her face and a touch of crazy in her eyes. Then, finally, staring at the wrong end of his own blaster just before everything going dark.
“Thank you,” he tells her.
“For what?”
“For not killing me.”
“I wasn’t going to kill you.”
“That’s not necessarily what it looked like.”
“You don’t have to worry about me. I’m in this. I’m committed.” She gets up and moves to look at Nixon’s back. He reaches an arm behind him and feels bandages.
“Besides,” she says. I can’t kill you. I don’t know how to fly this ship.”
Nixon laughs and a new wave of pain runs through him.
“How long was I down?”
Laana thinks about it. “A day. Long enough for me to change out the transponder and make preparations to bury the bodies.”
“Bury the bodies?”
She stands and heads out to the main deck. Nixon follows her and sees on the floor a box holding gathered leaves and a tub filled with some kind of brown paste.
“When we take a life, we need to show respect to the universe. Show that we understand that the thing we’ve done has ripples and that we can’t see what those ripples affect. We can’t know. So we give her an offering and return these spirits to her intact.”
“When we take a life?”
“Snapsits. It’s just something I have to do.”
“Did you do it on Umel when you shot Roland’s two men?”
Laana shakes her head no. “And look where it got me. This fight you’re preparing for is bigger than me chasing you around the galaxy. I don’t want the universe still upset with me, so I’m doing this.”
Nixon doesn’t argue with her, just watches her gather the things she’s already put together. He follows her to the ramp and stays in the ship while she walks out to the bodies.
She’s pulled them closer to the ship and placed them side by side. Torn open by blaster fire. Features missing. She kneels next to the first one and brings her hands to her face. She begins to gently rock back and forth while chanting something in Snapsit that Nixon doesn’t understand. This goes on for a moment then she drops her hands and dips them into the paste that she’s made. She pulls out heavy handfuls and smears it across the wounds while continuing to say something under her breath.
She stops and looks up to the sky, stretching her arms up to the canopy that was so full just days before. Sun now pours through and lights up her face.
She stands over the first body and bows then turns her attention to body number two. She begins repeating the ritual: covering her face, spreading the paste, standing, bowing.
She hooks her arms under the shoulders of the first man and begins to drag him to one of the shallow holes she’s dug a few feet away.
“You can help me with this part,” she shouts to Nixon, never looking at him.
He hustles out the ramp and begins pulling the second body toward the second grave. Laana rolls her body into its final resting place and kicks dirt piled on the sides back on top of the body. She then goes and gets the piles of branches she’d gathered and places half of them on top of the fresh dirt.
She waits for Nixon to finish filling his hole then places the rest of the branches on top. She steps back and puts her hands back in front of her face and begins again chanting something that Nixon doesn’t understand. He watches until she brings her hands back down.
She looks at him. “OK. Done.”
“Great,” he says and turns to head back to EHL, “because we need to get out of here. Let’s start getting the ship ready to go. Secure anything that’s not already locked down or put away. I want to get us back in the air before these suns start to go down.”
Back on the ship they both get to work. Neither of them are at 100 percent, although Nixon notes that Laana seems to be mostly healed.
That healing ointment is a miracle.
He sits back in the captain’s seat and starts the process of getting EHL’s engines to fire.
It takes a long minute—one longer than he’s comfortable with—but that familiar rumble returns, that gentle vibration in his feet that tells him his ship is just waiting for instructions on where to head.
“You never told me about the Bastic fuel rods,” Laana says, now standing behind him.
“Everything secured?”
“You never told me.”
Nixon is looking at the panels in front of him, these buttons and switches that all felt new just a few days ago. It’s a few days that feel like a few years now.
“I was under no obligations to tell you about the fuel rods.”
“Feels like those obligations may have changed. You kind of owe me. What else should I know about?”
“Owe you? I figure that, at best, we’re even. But those rods are it. No secrets.”
“I put them in the cabinet down by the galley. I didn’t know where you kept them.”
Nixon nods his thank you.
“So, where are we headed, captain?”
“Not sure,” Nixon says. “Not here.”
“That’s not much of a plan.”
“Best I’ve got for now.”
“Then let me out.”
Nixon turns to her, expecting to see a smile. He doesn’t.
“I’m serious,” Laana says. “If you don’t have a plan then I don’t want to be part of this. I won’t follow you or come after you. Like you said, we’re even. But I’m not interested in running from perpetual trouble until you figure something out.”
“Then what do you suggest?”
“Get off this planet. Put down some place where you can be safe and figure something out.”
“Where would we find a place like that?”
“Actually, I know somewhere.”
07
Nixon has never been a bounce-around-the-galaxy guy. He prefers his feet on the ground somewhere. His boots getting dirty. But now, up here in the dark of space, he’s kind of growing fond of it.
There is something about the freedom that’s appealing. Not being bound by gravity or some city planner’s idea of where you can go. This is the life of the pilots and bounty hunters and odd-job takers he read about on those boards. This is the life he dreamed about at night in his little hole on Exte. It may not have been how he thought he’d find it. And it’s always something he thought he’d do with Shaine. But here he is. And, in a way, it’s because of Shaine that he’s doing it at all.
“Tell me again about this place,” he says to Laana. She’s sitting next to him in the navigator’s chair. She’s looking at something on her reader.
“It’s called Otanzia. It’s a civilization-class ship. A flying planet.”
“And we’ll be safe there?”
“Safer than we would finding a planet that’s organic. There’s enough population there that we can hide easily. We can buy plenty of supplies to get everything on this ship stocked up. And there are people there who can help us with that case.”
“Help us with the case?”
“To get it open. See what’s inside.”
“I don’t want to get it open.”
“Liar.”
“I did. Before.” He pauses. “I’m not sure I want to now.”
“Whatever. It’s a good place to lay low for a day or two and create a plan.”
They fly in silence. Laana sticks her head back into her reader. Nixon stares out the front of the ship into the all-
consuming black and gets lost in thought.
Does he really not care about the case?
No, I don’t. Right? Tell yourself that again.
I don’t care about the case. Not anymore. The only thing I want with that case is to turn it over to whoever it is that wants it. It’s cost me too much already.