Dirty Girls

by Rodzil LaBraun

  When the alarm faded from her expression, I pointed to the ceiling. The ruckus above us continued. "Dragons?" I asked.

  "Dragons," she replied, taking another sip of what I assumed was whiskey. The way she was drinking it certainly gave me the impression that it was a liquor. Alcoholic beverages probably advanced like everything else over the last hundred and fifty years. It could be anything, maybe something completely new from an exotic world.

  When Sage gestured for me to take the seat across from her I happily obeyed, eager to earn points with the new woman in charge. I stared at her food in awkward curiosity until she offered me one. The taste was unusually tart and rich, initially repulsive, then somehow soothing before swallowed. Mentioning that I had already been cleared medically against contagious pathogens, she offered me a sip of her drink. It was remarkably like whiskey. However, I felt the social lubricating effect almost immediately.

  "Nanites," she explained. "The feeling of intoxication is controlled by nanites. Tiny little robots in your bloodstream. They get you that tipsy feeling instantly and maintain it until a little while after your last sip. You never quite get drunk, and it is much healthier than real alcohol. They also prevent the stomach from refusing to process their contents, so you never vomit. In fact, I haven't known anyone to puke in my lifetime, except after ingesting something from a strange planet like the one we are one right now. This drink here may be the finest accomplishment of our time. Don't worry, the nanites go dormant and pass painlessly in your piss."

  I laughed. How was I supposed to be afraid of this woman when she sounded like a futuristic barfly? I did my best to avoid staring at her unique body, instead gazing into her eye. I needed to build a connection with this woman.

  "How do you like our ship?" she asked, appearing much mellower than when I first met her.

  "I like it," I replied. "It is a lot better than sleeping outside and scrounging for food. I haven't seen the whole thing yet, though."

  "There's not much else to see," she informed me. "The quarters are all about the same. The control room is nothing exciting when not in use. Just some chairs and monitors. You've been everywhere else on this floor. Below us is mostly cargo holds and some mechanical closets. There is the engine room behind the stairwell, but its currently dormant, and not very inviting anyway."

  "Cinnamon and I were about to come looking for you," I said.

  "I heard."

  "Should we still go out there in search of Strawberry?" I asked.

  "No, give her until tomorrow," she replied. "She has a water treatment bottle, but she's completely out of safe food. If Strawberry is not back by noon, I'll go looking for her myself."

  "I don't mind going," I informed her. "I'd just as soon be helpful rather than sitting around doing nothing."

  Just then there was a scurry of activity right above us on the roof of the ship. Even Sage jolted from the suddenness of it.

  "They must be huge," I said, trying to keep the conversation going.

  Sage asked how familiar I was with the local predators, referring to the flying lizards. I knew very little compared to her. Not only had Sage and her crew been on the planet for two weeks, the ship's sensors provided a ton of data for them. Some of it was received from their low flyby before crashing, but most of the information came from what could be collected from their current location.

  Six separate species of the dragons had been categorized. Conveniently, they were recognizable by color. Yellows were the smallest and tended to travel in packs. They scared easy, though, making them the least deadly among them.

  Black dragons, like the ones that Cinnamon and I had seen on our water run, were the next largest. They were rarely spotted without friends and tended to be more persistent in their pursuit of prey. Pack tactics, like wolves, had been seen implemented by that type to trap animals and humans alike. Koradd, the pilot had been killed in such an attack.

  The green and blue variations of the beasts were more likely to be loners, though they had been spotted often in pairs. Green dragons, like the one I encountered while still alone on this planet, made their homes in trees. Blues slept in the caves. Both had been measured as long as fifteen feet from head to tail. They often appeared to be lazy, conserving their energy until action was needed to satisfy their hunger.

  The ship's computer listed the red dragons as the largest, recording one longer than twenty feet. Fortunately, none of them had been seen within a mile of our location.

  The different types of these overgrown, steamy breath reptiles apparently did not get along. They fought over territory, food, water, and just a general dislike for one another. Though I couldn't read the data on Sage's tablet very well, I was informed that the battle above us consisted of two orange dragons versus five black.

  Though the orange variation of the winged predators only grew to be twelve feet long, they were the fiercest and most determined. They slept during the night, high up in the enormous red bark trees, then menaced the land by day. Sage made it clear that they should be avoided at all costs. If one saw you, it would be relentless in its attempt to eat you. You would have to kill it instead to get free. Since they traveled in pairs, you would need to eliminate both of them. She told me that Captain King had been torn apart by orange ones right in front of her, less than fifty feet from the ship.

  "Nobody will be going anywhere until those nasties are gone," Sage informed me.

  Dragons were the top of the food chain on this planet, as expected. They ate each other when they could, but mostly fed on the Wofurs and the laughing goats. The furry bear-like animals ate the goats and leapers. Goats only fed on vegetation. The small leaping animals ate the bugs, which in turn pretty much ate anything. Even a dragon carcass could be consumed in a one day by a horde of crawling insects.

  Those appeared to be the only life forms on the planet, or at least in the scanned areas. As far as vegetation, there was a limited variation as well. The big reds and the skinny dancing yellow trees. Sticky bushes were abundant but had no competition in the shrub department. Grass grew almost everywhere, either green or yellow. Then there was a moss that only existed in certain locations. The only other plant documented was a water vine that survived on the surface of lethargic waterways.

  The ship's computer recorded a variety of fish in deep water, but not within miles of us. Only the snake like fish that I had already seen were documented for our area. And most of the rivers where they lived never went more than a few feet deep.

  When the battle above us moved toward the front of the ship, I felt the table and chair rumble beneath. I stared at Sage who obviously felt it, too. It continued periodically for almost a minute, ending with a slight jolt of the floor before all disruption stopped. The fight above us had then ended. Any survivors had either flown away or were peacefully eating their fallen adversaries.

  We both released a long breath, allowing the intoxicating effect of the brown liquid to subdue us once again. We sat quietly until Honeysuckle barged into the galley in search of her leader. She did not appear to be coming for me with another kiss on her mind.

  With a panicked expression, the foxy young lady told Sage, "The ship has moved! Part of the cliff has crumbled. The calculated risk of going over the edge has increased from point seven percent to twenty-one point four."

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:

  The control room was a bustle of activity for the first time since the day the Arketa Koreta had crashed. It was the best way to get all of them in the same room as they analyzed the data on the screens. The double to triple monitors of each station were considerably larger than the handheld units that they had previously been relying on.

  The seat submerged into the floor all the way to the front remained empty. It was the only one with a different configuration of controls on the panel, almost resembling an airplane from my day. That was presumably the pilot's chair. The station was u-shaped as well, providing a larger workspace.

  The captain's chair sat one step high
er but had a wraparound panel similar to the pilot. Sage parked her oversized ass there using her finger to swipe-type at an incredible rate. What appeared on the screen looked to be a calculation. As soon as it was complete, she wiped it clean and began again.

  Coffee had gone to the far right, which was the communication station. There was no one for her to talk to, but she had access to the same data as the other girls from her usual seat. She was scrolling through schematics giving herself barely enough time to recognize each one before it disappeared.

  Front left would have been Sage's station for navigation, I was told. As highest-ranking crew member, she opted for the captain's chair instead. The next seat on the left was empty as well, normally occupied by Strawberry who was the crew's dedicated systems analyst.

  Honeysuckle sat in the last position on the left, just inside the door. She said that she was typically a redundant set of eyes when in flight, but spent more time monitoring the performance of the engines than anything else. Today she was viewing an image of the ship with damaged sections highlighted, several numeric messages beside each. The front right of the ship, where my quarters were, had sustained the most damage. But there were sections on the lower level just as bad. I leaned on her chair looking over her shoulder as she worked. My best guess was that there wasn't near enough structural damage to cause the vessel to possibly crack like a karate-chopped wooden board. The threat would be for the whole craft to go over the edge.

  Vanilla was positioned just inside the door on the right but seemed lost in the panic. She wasn't sure what she was supposed to be looking at. As the ship's doctor, her focus was typically more on life-support, cabin pressure and air quality when in that seat.

  Cinnamon slid into the middle chair on the right. When she pulled up a schematic of the cargo holds, I urgently shifted my attention to her screens. Color coded squares occupied most of the diagram indicating type and weight of each cargo container. Surprisingly, she swiped it off the screen and focused on Sage's requests for calculating suspension adjustments.

  "Can we adjust the landing buffers to gain some stability?" Sage asked. I heard the creaking of the ship teetering slightly forward when we all rushed into the control room. It had stabilized until I shifted my position to look over my girl Cinnamon's shoulder. I stopped short of the back of her chair, just in case.

  They were all focused on what the ship's computer could do to rectify the situation. Once we had all entered the foremost room of the ship, Honey announced that the risk had jumped to over thirty-two percent. To me it was a no brainer that it was due to all of us tossing our weight forward. But as the new guy, and not officially part of the crew, I kept my mouth shut. With all their adjustments over the course of ten minutes, they only managed to get that critical number down to twenty-three percent.

  "Can I make a suggestion?" I asked.

  "Do you know anything about the Merchanter C Seventeen Series crafts?" Sage asked with an impatient attitude.

  I didn't bother to answer. Of course, I didn't have any useful knowledge regarding the specific systems of their ship. I hardly knew anything about the space shuttle from more than a century ago. Hell, I wasn't even sure how jets flew through the air.

  It was Vanilla that replied instead. "He has an outsider's perspective, Sage. Maybe you could hear him out. What would it hurt?"

  Sage mumbled something that sounded vaguely like approval, so I spoke up. "Cinn, can you bring up the cargo hold contents again?"

  I got a couple strange looks from the crew. I believed it to be for using my nickname for the tan hottie. Cinnamon pulled up the requested screen quickly but said nothing. I asked, "Are those squares on the bottom right empty sections of the cargo hold?"

  "Yes, they are," she replied.

  "And the top left is the section that is hanging over the cliff, correct?" I asked, surprised that no one was following my train of thought. All of their ship control training was blinding them to basic physics equations. "Can't we move those containers to the empty space to shift the weight of the ship toward the back?"

  "No," Sage replied instantly. "Not those containers."

  "Why not?" I asked.

  "The cubes in the forward hold are lighter than those in the central hold," Cinnamon explained. But I got the impression from Sage's urgent answer that there was more involved. My friend pointed at her screen for me, highlighting other containers along the left side of the ship. "These are much heavier. Glass tubes and metal rods for construction. We can move those easily."

  I watched as she told the computer what and where she wanted things shifted. Then Cinnamon tapped a button on the lower right section of the screen to recalculate. The new number to pop up was nine-point-four percent.

  "Yes," Cinnamon shouted. "We'll shift the cargo to get our risk below ten percent!"

  "Great job, Cinnamon!" Sage said. When most of the crew stopped what they were doing to spin and look at their commander, she reluctantly added, "You, too, Kash."

  Cinnamon spun out of her seat and nearly knocked me down as she sprinted for the control room's lone exit behind me. "I'm on it!"

  "Can I help?" I asked. Cinnamon said yes, but I wisely waited for Sage to agree before I chased after my closest friend.

  The cargo hold took up almost the entire lower level and was separated into three sections. The main hold came first. It was openly accessible from the stairs and lift, and it was filled to less than half of its capacity. The next two sections combined took up less space and were concealed behind locked doors. I knew from the display in the control room that the central hold came next and needed to be passed through to reach the forward section. Both of those areas were nearly full of cargo.

  Logically, crates should be taken from the forward hold, the section hanging over the edge of the cliff, to shift enough weight to stabilize the ship. However, Sage was adamant at refusing that advice. Cinnamon quickly agreed, though, so I didn't know how much to read into it. Was there something in the forward hold to be avoided?

  Cubed containers filled with metal rods and glass tubes designed for construction were stacked on the left side of the main and central holds. They weighed more than any of the other cargo I was told. Shifting most of them to the right side of the main hold should make a huge impact on the situation.

  Cinnamon grabbed a controller like one I used to employ for video games. Turning toward the massive robotic loader she pressed the button to activate the impressive unit. It jolted awake, a single red eye lighting up in the center of its squarish head. Flashbacks of alien and sci-fi space movies encouraged me to step back.

  A series of framed lower limbs with swiveling ball feet rose four feet off the ground to connect to a wide flat torso. Two powerful arms jutted forward like a giant clamp wide enough to lift the cargo cubes. Reminiscent of a mech unit from my video game days, the loader towered over us tall enough to nearly scrape the ceiling.

  Cinnamon opened the door to the central hold with an eight-digit key entry, again too fast for me to memorize. Then, with some skilled flicks and button pushes on her controller, she sent the loader into the previously locked storage area.

  "What do I do?" I asked.

  "Guide me when I place the cubes in the open area over there. We want to get them flush to the walls and each other to conserve space."

  I did as I was told, watching in amazement as the loader went about its business with extreme precision at an alarming rate. There was no way that everything was under the petite female's manual control. There had to be an auto-aim feature, or something similar to it. Everything happened so quickly with perfect measurement. At no point in time did Cinnamon need my assistance.

  "You really didn't need my help, did you?" I asked.

  She grinned at me when she confirmed that I was correct. "There was nothing for you to do in the control room. I just figured that you would rather be down here with me." When I noticeably reacted to her statement as a tease, she added, "Watching the loader in progress, I mean."


  "Thanks," I replied. "I am happy to be down here with you. Your cargo skills are impressive. This level is pretty much your office, isn't it?"

  "Yes, it is. Almost never does anyone come down to these cargo bays but me."

  "Almost never?"

  "Honey and Coffee will occasionally check on things while I'm gone outside," she said, looking like she was hiding something. "Or, whenever they feel like it."

  "What needs to be checked on?" I asked.

  "Well, Kash," she answered hesitantly. "Not all cargo just sits there until its ready to be unloaded."

  I didn't understand, not even a little bit. Were there volatile substances in the hold? Did they need to make sure that something didn't blow up?

  "We also store food down here for the crew," she pointed at the three cubes closest to where the loader parked. I felt like it was meant to distract me from what she was about to say. I turned to look through the central hold to where the final door to the forward section remained locked.