Martian Dictator

by Øyvind Harding

  Janus drifts by, and I carefully exhale completely. The chains around my chest slip, and my arms loosen in their constraints. My target is coming up.

  The next drawing is Izzy’s. First the head of a snake slithers past my eyes as she continues her laborious haul. Then the body. Then the head. The Medusa slithers into view, luminescent green and blue, eyes piercing your soul, snakes crawling from her scalp, nibbling her skull and reaching for the observer. It chills me to see it, even if it’s only half-finished. I never saw it before, but it’s glaringly obvious now. The Medusa is Izzy. High cheekbones. Flat and broken nose. Yellow eyes squinting at you, measuring your worth. Unbidden, lyrics from one of my favorite songs pop into my head, and I murmur them aloud.

  “My eyes ain’t green and my hair ain’t yellow, it’s more like the other way around..”

  Izzy stops, panting heavily, having caught only parts of what I said. And she tips the chair forward to relieve her aching leg. The perfect moment. My moment.

  “Walter! E- nograv!”

  We slam into the wall, denting the Medusa. Izzy is caught off guard, and she screams in pain as her bad leg is caught against the low handrail running the length of the corridor. My face takes the brunt of my own impact, and even though I was prepared it still hurts like a motherfucker. I tug and rip at the chains, and I can feel them slipping further even as I drift towards the ceiling. Or the floor, depending on your choice of perspective.

  Guest access. You can’t change anything important. Only the temperature, some doors, what to eat, where to shit. And emergency shutdown of the gravity. Just in case you get stuck underneath something heavy, get beaten up and chained to a chair or some other ridiculous situation passengers might find themselves in. Or captains.

  My beautiful ship has for the first time in years stopped spinning, taking away our borrowed gravity. And it was no gentle easing down of the barrel either. The ‘E-nograv’ command engages deadlocks at all critical junctions. We went from a comfortable 1,2 g’s to a full stop in a second flat. And since our fake gravity was, in reality, centripetal force, the ship stopped spinning and me and Izzy didn’t. I never did bother to explain the guest access system to Izzy since she already had overriding access as the ship mechanic.

  Seconds now, only seconds before Izzy is back in action. She’s confused now, blinded by pain. But it won’t last. I try and I try, but the chains are looped through random openings in the chair, and they won’t come free.

  “Walter! Engage the spin!” Izzy’s voice cuts through me like a knife. I strain to kill the chains.

  “Deadlocks engaged, user Kitty. Spin currently disabled.”

  Kitty. More like saber-tooth. My left leg is free. I’m slowly drifting upwards / downwards.

  “Walter! Disengage the deadlocks. Disable guest access for user ‘Connor the Man’! Engage spin!”

  “Acknowledged, user Kitty.”

  She’s furious. I see her in the corner of my eye now and then as I spin lazily about. She’s drifting in the middle of the corridor, trying to reach the wall. She’s armed as well. I catch a glimpse of her semi in the holster on her thigh. If I can’t free myself immediately I might end up with a bullet between my eyes. Can’t have that. Not before I get to blow myself up.

  My head bumps the ceiling, the floor, and I can feel the thuds reverberating through the ship as the deadlocks are retracted. I sink back towards what used to be the floor and is now my ceiling. But not for long. I drift towards the wall as the ship resumes spinning. The handrail. One up top and one down below, for easy movement in zero gravity when the spin is turned off. My left leg is free, and the rail is right there! I hook my ankle underneath it and tighten my muscles.

  The spin increases.

  I’m upside down now, not floating towards my chosen perception of the floor. There’s no doubt where the floor is right now. That’s where Izzy is standing. She throws me a look of pure fury, then sits down to check her wounds. She knows I’m not going anywhere. Not until I have to.

  1.2 g’s. My brilliant idea more than twenty years earlier is working against me. Most haulers keep the gravity at about 0.8. It makes for comfortable living, and you won’t be so out of shape that you can’t return to Earth. My idea was to keep the gravity higher during transit, actually increasing my strength as I struggled through the added resistance.

  The strain on my ankle is increasing. I’m cramping and in pain. I hold on.

  Directly beneath my head is the very first picture I made in these long corridors. The very reason why it turned into a tradition. A lone gunman in a trench coat, arm extended, holding a revolver, aiming down the corridor. The desert stretches into the distance, and a low sun has forced him to lower the brim on his Stetson. A black shadow is outlined against the setting sun, and the gunman has his adversary in his sights. Another tribute to my taste in literature.

  I need to time this to perfection. Izzy grimaces as she probes her bleeding thigh.

  “Why can’t you just come along like a good, little captain? I am trying to save your life after all.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to be saved, maybe I just want to die.” My voice is strained, leg muscles burning. Soon now. Just got to keep her occupied for a few more seconds, I just need a little more gravity. “’Die a hero, live a villain.’ Wasn’t that what you told me?”

  “Yeah, right before you shot me.” She finishes redressing her wound and leans back on her elbows, enjoying the view of me dangling upside down.

  “I only shot you a little.” Approaching full ship gravity now. It’s almost time.

  “’A little’? You can’t shoot someone ‘a little’! You either shoot them or you don’t, there are no fucking nuances to it.” With a grimace, she puts her good leg underneath her, preparing to stand.

  Now.

  I say a quick prayer to Janus, because why not. I let my ankle slip, and I fall to the floor, nine feet below. The gunman rushes past my eyes, and the chair does a half-summersault, legs hitting the floor first. It bursts apart, legs folding and snapping. The back bends and dislodges from the frame, remnants of the torn metal scraping a deep furrow in my flesh.

  It hurts.

  I wiggle free from the remains of the captain’s chair, shedding my chains as I go. Izzy is behind me. Seconds now, only seconds. I stagger to my feet and face her, holding a length of steel in my hand. She’s already on her feet, playfully smiling at me.

  “Not bad for an old man. But what now? Beat me to death with that chair leg?” Her hand creeps towards the holster on her thigh. Low velocity gas gun. Just in case you need to fire inside a spaceship.

  “No.” I swing the leg at the wall, right at the gunman’s revolver. Glass shatters, glass concealed by my painting. I reach in, grab the hidden revolver and point it at Izzy, right at the same moment she points her gun at me.

  Standoff. Again. Izzy smirks.

  “Been here before, have we not?” Her hand is rock steady.

  “And you would do well to remember how that turned out.” I glance at her bleeding thigh.

  “I do.”

  Her eyes narrow. She pulls the trigger.

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