by Sam Renner
Nixon wants to say that he doesn’t care. He wants to tell Laana that her opinion isn’t important. He’s made his decision. They are jumping the line and getting off the Otanzia. That he’ll instruct EHL to put so much into the engines that they’ll be nothing more than a blur of color and smoke.
But he knows Laana’s right. No matter how fast EHL gets going, they will trip alarms. They will burn that transponder. They will create trouble behind them when they already have plenty ahead of them.
“Stop, EHL,” Nixon says. “Put us back down. Wait for the signal that our spot in the pattern is up.”
03
EHL is on auto pilot. It’s flying to Azken, and Nixon sits in the pilot’s seat barely paying attention to where he’s headed. He is too distracted by the now-open case.
He holds the orbs in one hand and rotates them around each other in his palm. With the other hand he’s entering coordinates into the case. They are random combinations of numbers, but he doesn’t care. He tosses the orbs out in front of him and watches them spread into a rectangle and the shimmering black film fill the space between them.
He stares into the gap trying to pick out what’s on the other side. It all looks like a screen to him, like he’s watching something on a busted reader. He’ll stare into the black until he determines that he can’t see anything in there then gathers up the orbs in a wide, sweeping motion.
He programs more random coordinates into the case and tosses the orbs again. Every third toss, he sticks his arm into the black and it disappears to his elbow.
“You know that’s dumb,” Laana says as she sits in the navigator’s seat. She begins checking coordinates and settings, confirming that EHL still has them on the right course.
After hurrying to get off Otanzia, the whole trip to Aken has been quiet. They’ve seen no signs of Tychon security coming for the case.
“What’s dumb?” Nixon gathers all of the orbs.
“That,” Laana says. She enters a few final commands into EHL’s system then turns. She looks at him. “Everything you’re doing there is dumb.”
Nixon punches more numbers into the case then tosses the orbs again.
“I’m not sure,” Laana says, “that you should be playing with portal tech on a moving ship. Seems like you’re playing with fire with some of the physics. More importantly, though, you’re jamming your arm into the black up to your elbow without knowing what’s on the other side. There could be someone waiting to cut it off or some big hungry beast looking for some kind of snack.”
He sticks his arm back into the black once Laana finishes speaking. “You’ll never know what’s on the other side. That’s what makes this kind of exciting.”
Laana pulls something up on her reader and begins to watch. “Suit yourself,” she says. “But when you pull your arm back and you’re missing your thumb, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Nixon gathers up the orbs but doesn’t enter new coordinates into the case. Instead, he packs it all back up. He refolds the case and sticks the orbs inside. The only thing he doesn’t do is set the locking mechanism. He carries the case back to the crew quarters and sets it at the foot of his bunk then climbs on himself.
He stretches out and starts to think about everything that’s happened in the span of just a few weeks. It wasn’t that long ago he was in that courtyard with Shaine seeing the case for the first time. He thinks about all the chaos that followed that moment. The spaceport on Exte. Mira. The Uzeks. Finding EHL in that shipyard and dodging blaster fire just to get her engines started and fire off the planet.
Carting a mover full of Bastic fuels rods to earn credits on Umel. Learning everything he has so far about repairing a ship. Outgunned on Ibilia. A stop in the Otanzia that was supposed to be a breather but turned out to be anything but.
And picking up a partner on Makurra, someone to do all of this with. It’s more adventure than he’s ever had, and he survived in ways that he never thought he could. It’s been tiring. It’s been dangerous. It’s been deadly. But damn if it also hasn’t been fun.
Nixon tries to think father back. Think to his previous life on Exte. To his little hole of a place, ceilings so short that he couldn’t stand up straight once he was inside. He tries to think about meals cooked on a hot box in the corner. He tries to think about watching his credit balance, just hoping that it would somehow miraculously increase by a credit or two. He tries to think about all of that, but his mind has made so much of it a blur. It’s like it’s all been wiped with a wet rag and now it’s just a swirl of colors. He can recall bits and pieces of things. He can see moments. Little snippets of time. Enough, that he knows he doesn’t want to go back to that after this case is delivered.
He pulls his own reader from the side table next to him and pulls up the boards he used to look at back on Exte, dreaming of a different life than the one he’d had. Back then, the messages left there by those rogue captains all mentioned places he never thought he’d see. Now, they include names of planets that he recognizes. They include names of cities that he’s been to.
He scrolls through the messages from captains asking for help. He scrolls through the messages that offer bounties. He scrolls through the messages that offer delivery work. All of it pulls at him. All of it feels like opportunity now. Real opportunity. Things that he legitimately could do. These offers don’t feel like the impossible opportunity they were back on Exte. There they were something to dream about.
Tonight, though, these messages have him more than dreaming. He opens one message and reads it. There’s a space for the request. There’s a space for whatever the job pays. Then there are the coordinates pointing to wherever in the galaxy this job is taking place.
He opens another message and the format is the same: Request. Price. Coordinates.
Another message: Request. Price. Coordinates.
And another: Request. Price. Coordinates.
Coordinates.
Coordinates.
He remembers what Aldius said just a few days ago. He’d just cracked the case and was looking inside for the first time.
What did he see? His answer “The whole universe.”
Suddenly, Nixon feels like he’s been slapped. He has the coordinates for every worthwhile job in this galaxy. And now, with this case, he has the ability to jump to any of those coordinates he wants to.
That previous plan–to deliver the case and move on—it’s out the window. He now has an idea that will be much more lucrative.
04
Nixon stands and sticks his head out into the hall and shouts for Laana.
“What is it?” she asks a few moments later when she’s standing in the doorway to the crew quarters. Nixon is standing too, and he’s smiling. He hands her his reader.
“Look at this,” he says, “and tell me what you see.”
She looks at the screen for a moment then drags a finger along the screen, scrolling the lists of messages there.
Nixon waits for her to have the same observation he did. He waits for her to come to the same realization.
“Job boards? I knew about these.”
“Yeah, I did too.” Nixon takes back his reader. He taps on one of the listings.
He hands the reader back to her. “There. Now look.”
She again runs her finger up and down the screen. “I mean, it looks like a good job. Seems like something I could, I mean, we could, pursue after we get the case delivered. Doesn’t look like it pays …”
Nixon snatches the reader from her hands before she can finish her sentence. He quickly scrolls the screen to the bottom of the post then hands it back to Laana.
“Now,” he says.
“The coordinates,” she says, and he smiles. He waits for her to now make the connection. She doesn’t.
“Every job ends with coordinates,” he says.
“Yeah?” She’s still not getting it.
“You’ve done this. You’ve chased jobs on these boards. What’s the most important e
lement to catching one of them?”
She steps through the door and sits on his bunk. “Time,” she says.
Nixon nods. “Faster you can get there better chance you have to get any job, right?”
“Sure.”
“And what do we have now?”
She thinks for a moment.
“The case,” Nixon says, his patience for this little game worn away. “We have the case. And like Aldius said, it’s not really a case. It’s the whole galaxy.”
“Are you saying you want …”
Nixon sits down and doesn’t let her finish. “I want to take that case and what’s inside of it and use it to be first to every significant bounty job and courier job in the galaxy. Anything where there’s a pilot or someone willing to pay ten thousand credits or more I want to be there. I want us first in line. We can make a fortune.”
“Sure,” Laana says, “ assuming we can avoid Tychon. You think they are going to just not come looking for their case?”
It’s the part of the plan that Nixon hadn’t figured out yet.
“Probably,” he says, then he switches. “Yes. They’re going to come looking for it. But think about how much we can make before they catch us?”
“So you expect them to catch us?”
“Yes. … No. ... I don’t know. They are going to come looking. I know that. But if we got distant enough. Go somewhere in the galaxy where there’s nothing. No planets. No ships. Just stray asteroid fields and other space junk. Just park ourselves out there and use the orbs in that case to jump in and out of all the good jobs. We get enough time to collect enough credits we could even turn the case in ourselves and both head our separate ways and retire.”
Laana picks at a stitch on Nixon’s bed cover. She pops a thread loose and spins it between her fingers. “I don’t hate the idea,” she says. “But I hate the plan. Come up with something more concrete, something that accounts for Tychon, and something that defines how all of this will actually work then I’m in.”
Nixon smiles and claps his hands together. “OK,” he says. “Go back up front. I’ve got some thinking to do.”
Laana leaves and Nixon sits back on his bunk. He pulls the case from the side table and unpacks all of its parts again. He lays the keyboard in front of him and keeps the orbs in one hand. He picks up his reader, and the last job listing he showed to Laana is still there on the screen. It’s specifically showing the coordinates.
He looks to the keyboard and hesitates for a moment then turns back to his reader. He memorizes the coordinates then enters them into the keyboard. He tosses the orbs out in front of him before he can think too long or too hard about what he’s doing.
The orbs split and bounce and the shimmering black barrier forms between them. Nixon jumps down from his bunk and lifts a leg to put it through the barrier, but hesitates again. He drops his leg back to the ground.
Is this dumb? Probably so. But …
He steps through the barrier before he can talk himself out of doing this.
On the other side it’s green and lush, and he’s immediately met with the sound of fire from three different blasters. There’s yelling in a language that he doesn’t understand. He drops to the ground as he watches the big leaves of whatever plants these are rip and shred as the fight that he’s stepped into ramps up.
There’s more yelling and more fire. The tail of a ship pokes over the tops of small trees to his right. On his left is some kind of rock face. He follows the rock face up, and sees a dozen men firing big balsters down onto the ship. He reaches for his own blaster, but it’s not tucked into his waistband. It’s still on the dash back on EHL.
His heart begins to race. The yelling gets louder, and the leaves on the trees in front of him begin to rattle and shake. Something bigger than Nixon has ever seen suddenly bursts through and is charging right at him. It’s teeth are wet and bared. It’s eyes are yellow and narrowed. It’s arms, all four of them, are extended out in front of it, the claws sharp and stained with blood.
The ground shakes with every quick step this thing takes. Blaster fire screams out through the plants and slams into this thing’s back, but it’s unaffected.
Nixon scrambles back to his feet and jumps back through the barrier. He quickly swipes the orbs, two into each hand, once he’s back through to kill whatever connection these things create.
He’s still on the floor. His heart is racing, but he’s smiling.
This idea can work. No, he didn’t expect to see whatever that was, but he could have been. He grabs his reader and scrolls back through that last posting. He reads what the captain wrote about the kind of work he was looking to have done. It’s vague, but was clearly a defense job. And the pay—just 500 credits—isn’t worth that kind of risk. But if Nixon can be more discerning about the jobs he takes and strict about the amounts of credits he’ll work for then this idea can work. It can work really well.
05
The thought of buckets of credits has Nixon excited. He wants them. He wants all of them. He wants so many that his reader gets physically heavy because the number on his balance is so high. This plan can get him that.
But if he’s being selfish and greedy—and he is—then he doesn’t just want credits from new jobs. He wants the credits he’s supposed to get from this job. All of those credits that Shaine was promised, he wants them in his account. He wants to be able to see them on his screen.
But how? How does he keep the case but also get the credits for turning it in? He doesn’t know. Not yet, but he will. He just needs time to think this through.
He heads to the galley. All of this excitement, the energy of what’s possible, has left him hungry. He digs into the cabinets and pulls out the tins of meat and crackers.
He sits at the table and starts to think about that heavy reader and all of the things he could do with an account overflowing with credits. His mind dances and bounces between a few scenarios before it lands on the one that sticks. It’s his vision from Makurra. Not the vision of himself running some kind of galactic repair shop, although that does come to mind. The vision that sticks is the one he had of a little house on a quiet piece of land. EHL parked off to the side and a comfortable chair out front where he could spend his days watching whatever world this is pass by him. He sees that solitary life. It’s doubly appealing now as he and Laana speed toward Azken.
He finishes the meat from one tin and starts picking at the off-white label that wraps it. It comes apart easily, and Nixon rolls the paper off the metal and looks at it. That’s when it hits him. This Bowtan meat isn’t the good stuff. He didn’t buy that this time. This is the stuff you buy when your funds are low and you want to get the most you can for whatever credits you have left. Most people call it fake meat. It’s not that, Nixon knows, but it’s not far from it. It’s a trace of Bowtan meat, but it’s mostly filler. Other animals and grains. But if you’re hungry enough, it’ll do.
What if he created a case that looked like the real thing from the outside? What if he created something with a wrapper that said “orb case”? And what if even when you opened it up it looked like the real deal?
If he controlled the meeting where he turned over the case could he make them think this is the real case? Maybe? Probably? Was he willing to try it? Yes.
++xxx++
Nixon has opened and emptied three more tins of the cheap Bowtan meat. He’s dumped their contents out onto a plate that he’s left near the galley’s heating unit. He’s found a hammer in a repair kit that’s stored in one of the cabinets and he’s beating one of the tins flat with it. Every blow is reverberating throughout the ship, and it’s enough to get Laana’s attention.
“What are you doing?” she asks a moment after she appears in the doorway to the galley.
Nixon’s been at this for more than an hour, and Laana kicks one of his previous attempts as she enters the room. It’s made of soft metal and one end is smashed flat from where it hit the wall after Nixon threw it in frustrat
ion.
“Trying to make a fake case.” Nixon says through gritted teeth.
“A fake case?”
He explains his plan.
Laana considers what he’s said.
“I like it,” she says.
Nixon, genuinely surprised: “You do? I’m not so sure it’s a good idea anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not sure it’s possible to create a passable fake. I can’t get past the very basics, and we are running out of raw materials on the ship.”
Laana grabs the plate of Bowtan meat then takes a seat at the galley table across from Nixon. She puts a pinch of the meat in her mouth and says to Nixon: “Let me try.”