“Well, fine,” Daizy concedes, chasing after him. “Where are we going, then?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “But we can’t stay here.”
As they step into the cockpit, she looks around and complains, “There’s no place for me to sit.”
Grandpa scoots over and pats the edge of his seat. “You can squeeze in next to me.”
“You’ll have to sit in the back,” Adam tells her.
“Oh, great.” She folds her arms and pads back to the living room, her tail wagging furiously.
Grandpa watches as she goes and wipes his forehead.
“Keep your eyes up front,” Adam says.
“Try not to let that one get away again,” Grandpa says. “There aren’t many like her.”
As Adam starts the ship, he can hear Daizy pawing through his stuff, and he tells Grandpa, “I’m still not sure if I can trust her.”
“Who can you trust?” Grandpa says. “Anyway, she saved your life, from the sound of it, and came back. She’s already way ahead of most.”
“Well…” Adam tries to come up with a good argument but, failing, says, “You might be right.”
“Hey, I’m lonely back here,” Daizy moans.
“Fine, come on,” Adam yells. He reaches across the aisle and yanks out an L-shaped tray tucked into the side of the passenger seat. “You can take the kiddie chair.”
“Oh, yay,” Daizy deadpans as she scrunches onto the little metal slab and straps the safety belt across her lap. “Where are we off to?”
“I don’t know yet,” Adam says.
“You still don’t know?” she complains.
“Don’t you know any places we could take this thing?” Adam asks Grandpa. “You’re always telling me stories about some old collector or other.”
“Oh, I got a million of ‘em,” Grandpa says. “But that was from back when I was your age. Most of those folks are long gone, their vast collections split up and sold off piecemeal.”
“Well I’m starving,” Daizy says. “Can we get something to eat first?”
“There’s food in the cupboard,” Adam tells her.
She glares at him, nostrils flaring. “If I get out of this seat and the only thing I find is rations, I’m going to lose it.”
Adam gives her some lip music and says, “Take it or leave it.”
“Can’t we stop at Moon Burger?” she pleads. “Real quick.”
Grandpa lifts his hand in the air. “I vote Moon Burger. She’s right about the rations. I can’t eat that artificial chalk.”
“Fine,” Adam relents. “First we’ll stop at Moon Burger, and then we’ll figure out what to do about the armies of homicidal lunatics that are, as we speak, racing to turn us to space dust.”
“Yay,” Daizy cheers.
“Finally, someone who can talk some sense into this boy,” Grandpa says.
Adam sets his ship’s autopilot for Moon Burger, but before he can take off, Daizy stops him. “Wait, can we put on a movie? It really is better than staring into space.”
“Yeah,” Grandpa seconds the motion. “But none of that horror stuff you’re always watching.”
“Fine,” Adam says, pulling up a long list of meticulously curated titles. “But I have what I have. You’ll just have to make do.” He sighs and leans on the dash as they pore over his collection.
“Ugh,” Grandpa groans. “Is this it?”
Steve lights a cigarette and glances over the Scrapper’s Delight parking lot as ships hum past overhead through the overly warm, forever-night air. Before long, Dave stumbles out the front door of the dark pyramid, carefully steering their enormous shrimp tray through a crowd of tourists.
“There you are,” Steve complains.
“Gahhh?” Dave’s better half asks.
“Would you get rid of that thing already?” Steve says. “It’s grossing me out.”
“Don’t say that!” Dave says cupping his hands over the blob of malformed flesh perched on his shoulder. “Super Dave is like a son to me.”
Steve rolls his eyes, and tells the Daves, “We better start looking for the van.”
A sudden look of despair comes over Dave’s face. “Don’t tell me…”
“Okay, I won’t,” Steve says. Taking a final drag off his cigarette, he stubs out the butt on the wall of the glowing pyramid and tucks it into his shirt pocket. “I’m pretty sure we were abaft.” He points toward a section of the lot sprawled beneath a sign labeled “Abaft,” and they languidly plod toward it.
“I can’t believe The Foreman is a robot,” Dave says.
“I knew from the moment I saw her,” Steve lies, as he struggles to wrestle the ship’s keys from his pocket. “There’s no substitute for the real thing.” He randomly points the fob around the lot and hopes for the best.
“It makes me feel kind of weird,” Dave says.
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been attracted to a robot before. It seems kinda… unnatural.”
“Hmph, natural or not, she’s got a fine chassis,” Steve says. “But she’s in a league of her own – the league of extraordinarily hot robots. That’s why she’s in there,” he juts his thumb toward the glowing epicurean edifice, “while you and I are stuck wandering the parking lot with the rest of the passable-at-best humanoids.” He turns to glance down the adjoining aisle and sighs.
“We’ll probably die out here,” Dave says. “They’ll engrave it on our space urns – ‘missed the boat.’”
“Can’t somebody come up with a better way to do this?” Steve says, jamming his thumb down on the fob. “What about a tracking device you can attach to your ship?”
“That already exists,” Dave says. “But it’s not free. The ICA would never pay for it.”
“Oh…” Steve shrugs. “You’d think they’d want to keep track of their ships.”
“And pass up the opportunity to turn a profit foisting inflated damages onto the employee? I used to work in Internal Recoupment. Believe it or not, this job is a step-up.” Dave sets down the tray and arches his back. “My arms are getting tired. I wish we could just forget about work and live here. What are you going to miss most about this place?”
“Definitely the shrimp,” Steve says.
“Yeah…” Dave lifts the tray close to his face and smiles at it longingly.
“Hey, is that it?” Steve points across the aisle.
Dave whips his head up and drops it just as quickly. “Nah.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
As they’re resting, a small hover cart zips past them down the aisle, stopping sporadically to drop passengers at their vehicles.
“Hey, what’s that thing?” Steve asks.
“That’s the valet,” Dave says. “They offered it to us when we got here, but you didn’t want to pay for it. You said it was, and I quote, ‘a scam made to trick the chidiot space rubes out of their crits.’”
“Ahh, that’s right. Fish.”
Steve drags himself through the maze in a half-doze, the perpetual darkness of the artificial moon having altered his circadian rhythm. After a short while, the aisles begin melding together, and he has trouble distinguishing one from the next.
“Seriously, what are we going to do?” Dave asks. “We lost Adam Jones, and we can’t go back to Mr. Trant without the money.”
“I know that,” Steve grumbles. “Don’t you think I know that?”
“Hey, you don’t have to get snippy,” Dave says, nearly dropping the tray as he adjusts his grip.
“He’ll have to go back to Misery Acres at some point. We could wait for him to show up there. That is, if we can ever find our way out of this metal hell.” He points the fob and desperately presses the button. “Is that the ship?”
“That doesn’t look anything like our ship,” Dave says.
Rubbing his eyes and squinting, Steve says, “I think I’m starting to see things.”
“I’m pretty sure we were parked next to a multi-mil
k delivery truck. I remember thinking it might not be a bad job. You know, for when I lose this one.”
“Yeah, but that was days ago. That truck is probably long gone.” Steve feels a sudden twinge of panic rise in his chest as it occurs to him that they might be scouring the wrong end of the lot, but the idea is so depressing he pushes it from his mind.
“You think robots are endowed with the same parts as us?” Dave asks.
“Huh?” Steve mumbles, hoping his partner will take it as a cue to chut up.
“Well, you figure they’re just a bunch of metal and wires,” Dave goes on. “But they got skin and hair. Do they bother with the other humanoid… bits?”
“I really don’t have any idea,” Steve says, “nor the slightest bit of interest.”
“I bet The Foreman fantasizes about being with a human sometimes. It’s taboo, after all. What she needs is a gentle, caring ICA man to show her the forbidden ways of robo-human love.”
“Ughh,” Steve groans.
“Guhhh,” Super Dave concurs.
“Hey, crazier things have happened,” Dave claims.
“I think all this searching is making you delusional.”
“Oh no.” Dave whips his head around, searching the lot. “What if this really is space hell?”
“Would you please chut up?”
“Think about it,” Dave says, a mad grin plastered on his face. “Can you imagine a worse way to spend eternity than wandering the parking lot, searching for a ship that doesn’t exist, to get back to a job you hate? We’d have no choice but to keep moving down one endless aisle after the next, or else we’d always wonder if the ship really was out there, somewhere.”
“You’re right – I can’t imagine anything worse than being stuck out here with you,” Steve says. “You’re starting to freak me out.” At the far end of the aisle, a pair of tail lights flashes, and he throws his hands up. “Finally.” He presses another button on the fob, and the ship’s staircase grinds down.
“Gahhh!” Super Dave cheers.
They trudge aboard and, as Dave searches for a place to stash the shrimp, Steve tries to start the engine. It whirs a couple times, and he breathes a sigh of relief when it sputters to life.
Dave plops into the passenger seat and tosses a shrimp into the air, catching it between his teeth. “Man, I’m going to miss these. I wonder if I can get them delivered.”
“Do you have any idea how much those cost?” Steve asks, and Dave shakes his head. “Trust me, you can’t afford them.”
“It’s too bad we can’t get a hold of that black gold thing,” Dave says. “Something like that could buy a lot of shrimp.”
“You could buy a fish of a lot more than shrimp with that,” Steve says. “But we don’t stand a chance of finding it. The whole universe is after that thing. Grab me an Ol’ Guard, will you?”
Dave reaches into the fridge, but he comes out empty-handed.
“Aww, we’re all out of beer?” Steve moans. “This is the worst job I’ve ever had. I gotta hit the space toilet.”
Stepping over piles of used ration trays, empty hyper-pizza boxes, and crushed beer cans, Steve stumbles to the back of the ship and wrenches open the bathroom door. As he’s emptying his bladder, his phone rings. He considers ignoring it, but fearing it might be Mr. Trant, he uses his free hand to fumble the hunk of glass from his pocket. He slips into his work voice as he answers, “Ahoy! I mean, Hello?”
A young woman with cat ears looks up at him from the screen. “Hello? Is this Dave? Or Steve?”
“Yeah, I’m Steve. Who are you? How did you get my number?”
“I’m Daizy. I got your number from The Foreman. Are you peeing?”
“Uh, no,” Steve says. “The Foreman, huh? Tell her she can go fish herself. She fished us over once. We’re not going to let her do it again.”
“You don’t understand,” Daizy says. “I don’t work for her.”
“Then why would she give you my private number?” Steve asks.
“Because she thinks I’m working for her. Just forget about it. It’s complicated, and it doesn’t matter.”
“Well, it matters to me. We had an agreement, and she fished us.”
“Listen to me,” she says. “I think I can help you get what you want. Adam Jones owes you some money, right?”
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s one way of putting it. Another is that he’s in enough debt to fund a chitty army. But how do you know Adam Jones?”
“I’m here with him on his ship, the Asteroid Jones II,” she says. “We don’t have much time. So, let’s make a deal.”
“What kind of deal?” Steve asks through the little glass screen in Daizy’s hand. “You’re gonna give us Adam Jones?”
“Adam is off-limits.” She feels her ears bristle as she struggles to keep her voice to a whisper. “But I’ve got something that’s worth a lot more than he is, and you can have it, in exchange for clearing his debt.”
“Ha!” Steve says, grinning like a chidiot. “Do you have any idea how much he owes us? He’s a whale.”
“It doesn’t matter how much it is,” Daizy says. “What I’m offering is worth a lot more.”
“What, exactly, are we talking about?” he asks.
She looks over her shoulder, paranoid that someone might hear, and whispers, “The black gold.”
A space toilet flushes on Steve’s end, and he looks at her with a puzzled expression. “You mean that thing The Foreman and that UE chithead and everybody is looking for?”
Daizy nods and, thinking of the look on Adam’s face when he discovered she had been working for The Foreman, feels a brief pang of remorse.
Steve turns away from the camera and she hears him say, “This cat girl wants to give us the black gold to pay off Adam Jones’s debt. What do you think?” His partner mumbles something, and he turns back toward her. “You got yourself a deal. But please, I’m begging you, if this is some kind of trick just tell me now. I’m sick of flying around this chithole galaxy just to get fished over.”
“Trust me, it’s not a trick,” Daizy says. “But there’s not much time, and it will only work if you come to me.”
“Okay,” Steve says. “But we have to stop at Ferd’s to refuel first. We’re running on empty.”
“That’ll take too long,” she says. “It has to be now.”
“Fine,” he relents. “We’ll probably make it. How do we find you?”
“Give me a space minute and I’ll send you the coordinates.” She ends the call, stuffs her phone in her pocket, and grabs the door handle. But before turning it, she reaches back to flush the space toilet, then carefully cracks the door and creeps out into the hall.
“Hey,” Adam says, and she jumps back.
“What are you doing out here?” she asks, catching her breath. “Were you listening to me pee or something, you weirdo?”
“What? No! I just heard you coming out and wanted to tell you – I made a deal with The Big Guy. He’s going to buy the black gold.”
Stomping her foot, she says, “What do you mean? How did you do that?”
Adam shrugs. “I called and told him the whole thing, how he was using the black gold for a cup holder. He thought it was funny. He still wants to buy it, just to rub it in to the UE. He’s even going to pay for our starline tickets. So what’s the problem?”
“What? There’s no problem.” She grabs her tail to keep it from swinging. “But do you really think you can trust him? He might be trying to trick you.”
“Nah, we worked that out,” he says. “We’re going to meet him off planet. He’s actually a really nice guy.”
“Still, what’s to keep him from blasting you to smithereens?”
“He wouldn’t risk damaging the black gold,” Adam argues. “Why are you fighting this, anyway? Soon I’ll have enough crits to get you a real ship.”
“I won’t need a ship if I’m dead,” Daizy says. But watching him pout, in his ragged t-shirt and dirty cargo shorts, and rea
lizing that this is getting them nowhere, she decides to take a different approach. “Maybe you’re right.”
“Thank you.” He nervously pats the cube inside his pocket. “I was starting to feel like I was going crazy.”
“You’re not crazy, just tired. You look like you haven’t slept since you left Earth.” She slips her arm around his and leads him into the living room, where his grandpa is hunched and snoring on the couch. “You have to relax.”
She plops him down on the other end of the couch, and his eyes immediately begin to droop. Careful not to disturb Grandpa, she plods to the front of the ship and grabs an Ol’ Guard from the fridge. By the time she hands it to Adam, he’s already starting to doze.
“What’s this for?” he asks.
“It just seemed like you could use one,” she says.
“Thanks.” He slurps the foam from the top of the can and leans his head back.
She watches him until his eyelids shut, and for a moment she even thinks he looks kind of cute, passed out, holding onto his beer – stupid, but cute. Softly, she creeps up to the cockpit and reduces the ship’s speed to a slow drift. Then she taps at the window to find their current location and sends the coordinates to the ICA fish heads.
“The only thing left to do now is wait.” But as she says it, she realizes she forgot one trivial, yet crucial detail.
The sound of her new undersuit brushing against itself is deafening as she tiptoes into the living room. Spotting the black gold poking from Adam’s pocket, she takes a deep steadying breath and pads toward him. But before she can lay her trembling fingers on the cube, he turns onto his side, mumbling to himself and dribbling beer on the floor. She pulls her hand back and stares at him, frozen, waiting for his eyes to open. But they don’t. So she moves closer and slides her fingers around the exposed corner of the cube. Slipping her hand into his pocket, she yanks and twists, but the thing won’t come loose. She gets a better grip, throwing all of her weight behind it and, with sudden and surprising ease, the cube slips free, and she tumbles back onto the floor. The slumbering men barely react, except by snoring louder.
Space Junk Page 23