by Sam Renner
“What?” Nixon barks out a moment later.
“Did you need something?” EHL asks.
Nixon takes a moment. “What? Oh. No. Nothing. I’m fine. Just frustrated.”
“Yes, sir.”
Nixon stands and thinks about picking the case back up and taking it with him to the thin-mattressed bunk back in the crew quarters. Laying down and going through every combination there is to get this case open. But he doesn't. He lets it lie and goes back to his room.
He lays on that mattress, feeling every single seam left in the molded plastic shelf that's supposed to be a bed.
++xxx++
The heat from Umel's suns makes Nixon's patchwork fixes to the outside of his ship pop as the metal begins to warm in the heat of the day.
Snap.
Ping.
Nixon blinks his eyes open. He’s still in his clothes from the day before, and he’s sprawled across the mattress perpendicular. He crashed and crashed hard once the adrenaline from last evening’s adventure wore off.
He drags his tongue across dry lips and sits up. He looks around the room and orients himself before standing. He does and exits the room. He runs his hands down the front of his clothes to try and get them something closer to straight.
He comes into the main deck and grabs the case off the floor beneath the navigator’s chair. He tries the buttons one more time before tossing it back onto the dash. He pulls up his datapad and checks the time.
It’s late. Too late. He’s overslept any good paying jobs. But he needs to work. No, he needs the credits. So he goes back to the galley and finds something he can call breakfast, a tin of Bowtan steer meat that he bought a few days ago when he picked up a bit of food at one of the little shops on his way back here. He’s sick of these little tins, but they are cheap and filling. He’s already eaten through the packages of dehydrated fruit and containers of crackers.
He puts the tin of meat into the pocket inside his cloak then heads back to the main deck. He’ll eat this tin of meat on the way to Umel’s main district and look for work. He punches the button on the wall to release the ramp. It unfolds with a whoosh.
Nixon begins to exit the ship, but he can’t. At the foot of the ramp is a man he hasn’t seen before.
He’s in a black cloak. His hair is wet and pulled back tight behind him. He’s eating noodles from a cup, and they smell about one thousand times better than Nixon’s tin of meat.
“Good morning. Well …” the man takes a quick glance at his own datapad. “Yes, still morning.”
“Can I help you with something?”
A sloppy forkful of noodles dangles down across his chin. He slurps them into his mouth in a noisy production.
The man puts the fork into his cup and extends a hand for Nixon to shake. Nixon lets the hand hang there for a moment then grabs it. They shake then the man pulls Nixon’s hand up close to his face. He studies Nixon’s fingers. Inspects his knuckles.
Nixon pulls his hand away. The man takes another bite of the noodles and offers some to Nixon. He shakes the man off.
“How can I help you, friend?” Nixon asks.
The man chews quicker then says with a mouth still half full: “The man you beat up last night was mine.”
Nixon takes two quick steps back. “Was yours?”
The man crumples up the cup into a tight ball and tosses it to the ground then wipes his hands on the front of his cloak.
“I hired him. Asked him to follow you.”
Nixon balls his fists, preparing for another fight. He looks beyond the man in front of him. Looks to the left and then the right.
“I’m alone,” the man reassures Nixon. “Last night was a test.”
“Excuse me?”
“I wanted to test you. See if you can spot someone trailing you.”
“I’m still not …”
“If I’m going to offer you work then I need to know you can handle it.”
The man explains that he has a warehouse in the main district, a block or so off the water. That he saw Laana showing Nixon around one night. Had seen him come back almost every day since. He could tell that Nixon was a hard worker. But also that he was capable of more.
“What made you think that?”
The man points him up and down. “You don’t look like the others who come out scrambling for credits.”
He reaches over and grabs a handful of Nixon’s cloak. “You’ve got proper clothing.”
He reaches out and tries to grab Nixon’s chin, but Nixon ducks away. “You keep up your appearance.”
He pats his own belly. “I’m guessing you have food on you or have the shelves in your galley stocked up. You aren’t like the other guys I see over there, and I have a job that needs not just another guy.”
“How’d you find me?”
“I asked around. Like I said, you stand out.”
That phrase sends chills rattling though Nixon. He doesn’t want to stand out. Doesn’t like being obvious. He hates that he’s had to stay on Umel for as long as he has. Now he hears that he’s being noticed. That his presence is being noted, that people are trying to mark where he’s staying and monitoring his comings and goings.
The man begins again. “Again, I have work if you want it.”
“I can find work,” Nixon says.
“Not like this.”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
“Two thousand credits.”
“What?”
“I’ll pay you two thousand credits.”
Nixon doesn’t know what to say. Hearing that amount—two thousand credits—is deafening. He can’t hear anything else. Can’t think of anything else. It’s enough to finish fixing his ship. It’s enough to get him off of Umel and back on the route to getting this case delivered.
“What’s the job?” he eventually asks.
“Delivery work.”
Nixon pauses again. Thinks more.
“I like this,” the man says. “You’re deliberate.”
“Delivering what?”
The man opens his mouth to speak then stops. He tries again then hesitates a second time. “You want the job?”
“Oh, it’s like that?” Nixon looks back at his ship. He looks at all the work he’s done to it. He looks at all the work that’s left to do. He puts a hand on his datapad and remembers his still-too-low credit balance.
He looks back up the ramp and into the ship. He sees Shaine’s case sitting on the dash. Delivery work, unknown and unspecified. It’s what got him into this spot to begin with. He doesn’t want to compound his problems by creating more enemies. He seems to have enough of those as it is. All he really has to do right now is get his ship in flying shape. Then he thinks about the lack of credits that’s making that impossible right now.
Nixon turns back to the man. “Two thousand credits?”
The man nods. “Two thousand credits.”
“OK. I’m in.”
“One more thing, and it probably doesn’t need to be said, but this work isn’t exactly above board. If you get caught then I don’t know you, and you don’t know me.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m not worried about that. I’ve sold my scruples for a lot less.”
07
“When do we start?” Nixon asks.
“We go now,” the man says.
Nixon asks for a moment. He steps back into the ship and grabs the case off the dash then disappears into the back of the ship. He goes to the crew quarters and opens the drawer of the side table next to the bed that he’s not using. This is where he’s stored the blaster he’d picked up just before leaving Exte.
It feels appropriate to carry it again. New friends don’t introduce themselves by waiting for you to step out of your front door. New friends don’t offer you two thousand credits for a courier job either, so risk reward.
He feels the blaster’s weight in his hand. Lets it pull on his arm. He feels it in his joints, and in the muscles that still hurt from last night.
> “Everything OK?” The man’s shout barely makes it to the back of the ship.
“Yeah!” Nixon shouts back. “Coming.”
He looks at the blaster and almost puts it back into the drawer before sticking it into the waistband of his pants and pulling his cloak over top of it. He gives himself a quick once-over in the mirror on the wall. There’s a small bump where the blaster’s grip pokes away from his body, but it’s barely noticeable.
He heads back out to the hall, through the main deck and down the ramp. The man is looking up to the sky. Umel’s first sun is directly overhead. It’s second is well above the horizon. The skies are clear and the day is humid. Nixon sees a bead of sweat streak down the man’s nose then drop to the sand.
The keypad on the side of the ship beeps as Nixon enters the combination that initiates the ramp locking sequence. The two men wait as everything folds itself back inside the ship and the locking mechanisms set themselves.
Nixon turns and the man has already started walking away. A few quick steps, and Nixon has caught up.
“You worked my man over pretty good.”
“What?”
“Last night. He came back bruised and busted. Like I’ve never seen him.”
“He’s not a great fighter.”
“You don’t think so?”
They pause at a corner as a larger hauler passes then cross the street.
“He left himself vulnerable.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“One kick … down there. That’s all it took. He was mine after that. He relies too much on his size to be threatening. But big often equals slow and out of practice. The size thing works more often than not. But sometimes they’re ...”
The man turns a corner down a narrow street, maybe wide enough for a small hauler to pass through. Nixon thinks he could reach out and touch each of the walls if he wanted. He suddenly feels trapped, like he’s being walked into a narrowing bottle neck. He and Shaine had run plenty of similar schemes. The goal is, at some point, to get him pinned in so tight that he won’t have enough room to get himself out. He tucks his right arm inside his cloak and rests his hand on top of the blaster handle. He flicks the safety off.
The man shouts something over his shoulder that Nixon doesn’t hear.
“My name’s Roland,” the man repeats.
“Nixon.”
“Pleasure, Mr. Nixon.”
“You too.”
Nixon follows Roland around another corner. The street opens up again, and everything inside Nixon exhales. They walk another block. It’s a quiet place, and not one that Nixon recognizes in the daylight.
There’s another turn and then another, all the while Roland makes small talk. He’s asking questions about how long Nixon has been on Umel. Where he was before. What kind of work he does best. What he prefers.
The conversation. The twisty turns through narrow streets and alleys. All of it has Nixon backward. Not that he knows Umel that well, but the mental map he’d been building is now a crumpled ball.
He follows Roland around one more corner and then Roland steps through an open bay door. They’re here.
Nixon quickly scans the outside of the place. There’s a 2401 sloppily painted in red above the door. This door is on the corner of a block. He turns around and sees the unfinished tower behind him. It’s not much of a guidepost, but it’s something.
Roland waits inside in the warehouse. There are stacks of crates and boxes all around him, narrow paths left between them for walking. Down one of those paths Nixon sees the bruised face of the man from the night before. Nixon nods, and the man looks away.
“This way,” Roland says and disappears into one of the walkways. Nixon follows him again. They get to the back of the warehouse and pass through a door into a second room, this one smaller and with only one stack of crates on the floor. Nixon does some quick math. Nine crates on each layer. Four layers high. There are thirty-six crates here.
“This is it. Move these and you get two thousand credits.”
The crates are unmarked. Either what’s in these crates isn’t exactly legal or it’s so dangerous to move them that no one would want the job if they knew what was inside.
The man from the night before appears in the doorway to the room. He fills it and then some, and Nixon begins to regret the fight. At best it was foolish. The look on the guy’s face tells him today that it could be fatal.
His cheek is bruised and his left eye won’t open. He’s carrying a crowbar. Nixon slips his arm back inside his cloak and puts his hand around the grip of the blaster.
Unmarked crates. Promise of credits. What if all of this was some kind of elaborate setup to get Nixon into a closed-off space and beat him so thoroughly that he was just a pile on the floor, lock the door and let him die.
The man steps into the room, Nixon and pulls the blaster half free from his waistband. He watches the man walk past him and wrench open one of the cases.
Nixon steps closer and looks inside the crate. It’s glowing a light green.
“Are those …”
“Bastic fuel rods,” Roland says. “Thirty-six crates of them.”
Nixon exhales a long breath. “Each of the crates full?”
“Each of them.”
Nixon pushes the blaster back into his waistband. He steps to the crate and pulls one of the rods out. His entire forearm is bathed in the green glow. He turns the rod over and over, looking at it from all sides and all angles.
Roland holds a hand out. “Be careful, you know those things aren’t stable. You drop that and …”
“I know,” Nixon says. “Big, big boom.”
He places the rod back into the crate with the others and steps back next to Roland.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen four or five of those things in one place at one time. But you have thirty-six crates.”
“I do.”
“And you clearly know how dangerous they are.”
“I do,” Roland says.
“Then you won’t be surprised when I tell you the price has gone up.”
08
Nixon walks around the stack of crates. He looks inside the open box and studies its contents for a second. He looks back up at Roland. The man from the night before is still there, glaring at Nixon through one swollen eye.
“How many does each of these crates hold? Twenty?”
“Twenty-five,” Roland says.
“So that means …” he does the mental math while he circles. “You have about one thousand of these rods.”
“Nine hundred,” Roland corrects.
“You want me to move all of these somewhere then I’m going to need a few of these rods.”
“You are?”
“I think the credits and two crates of these rods.”
Roland laughs a genuine laugh, one that comes from somewhere deep inside of him. “I like you, Nixon. You’re funny.”
“Thirty-six crates filled with the most unstable fuel source in the galaxy. And I’m taking them where?”
“A spot north of here. I’ll give you an address once we get these loaded onto a mover.”
Nixon steps back through the door and out into the warehouse’s main floor. He makes a quick scan. There are three movers parked against a far wall. They’re beaten. They’re worn. They have dents and scratches and mismatched body panels. All three are sitting on tires that are going bald.
Nixon returns to the back room and points over his shoulder and out the door. “One of those movers? Because if it’s one of those then it’s three cases.”
Roland doesn’t say anything.
“This address. How far away is it?”
“It’s in the north docks.”
Nixon shakes his head. “You know I’m new to Umel. That means nothing to me.”
“It’s about thirty klicks,” the man behind Roland mumbles.
Nixon starts pacing the room again, walking half circles around the stack of crates. “And I suppose the roads there
are smooth as glass and nothing like the rut-covered dirt and sand around here.”
“No.”
Nixon stops walking and sits on top of one of the unopened crates. He thinks for a moment.
“And who is it that’s thirty klicks away? Some legitimate businessman?” He pauses. “Of course not. You already said this work was something less than legal. And that’s OK. But also something that needs to be factored into my calculation here.”