Galaxy Run: Makurra

by Sam Renner

  “Come in,” the woman says then turns and disappears into the dark of her shop. “But leave the cart out there.”

  His goal of charming her just got much harder.

  “What can I get you?” she asks Nixon as he climbs the steps and crosses through the door.

  “I need to get …” he begins to answer then stops. He was going to ask for a case of noodles to rehydrate. Planet like this, that’s the best he figures he can get. But, no. This building is packed to the point of bursting with food he hasn’t seen in years. Things he’d only see through restaurant windows on Exte. Or on the plates of people eating on a patio.

  “You need to get what?” the woman asks.

  “Food,” Nixon says, still taking all of it in.

  “Well …” she says and gestures broadly to the room.

  Nixon doesn't know where to start. All of it is tantalising. He wants to grab armfuls of everything and take them back to the float cart and load it down so heavy that it overwhelms all of the cart’s internal technology and just lays on the ground.

  But he realizes he doesn't have enough room on the cart or enough storage space on the ship to handle that much food. So he’s as judicious as his hungry mind will let him be. He starts picking out things he hasn't eaten in years. He grabs ingredients for dishes his mom made. He doesn’t know these recipes, but he doesn’t care. He’ll figure them out. And even if all he can figure out is a close approximation, it’ll be better than eating another container of noodles.

  But his judicious mind tells him that all of this other food is fine, but he also needs to be practical. He grabs a case of the noodles that he’s come to hate. No, they don't taste good, and no, they offer very little nutritional value. But they are easy to make and easy to store, and that accounts for quite a lot out here.

  He thanks the woman after he gets the last of the boxes loaded onto his cart then begins the long walk back to his ship. This cart makes his walk easier, no doubt. But it also makes it longer. He learns quickly that he can't walk through the forest the same way he came. The cart sits too low to navigate its way over the stumps, and it’ll be too wide to fit between the trees once he gets closer to EHL. So he's walking around the forest, and he’s not nearly halfway back to his ship by the time the suns start to set behind the mountains and everything in the valley gets quickly dark.

  Finding a place to camp isn't nearly as easy this time. Without the protection of the trees, he feels very exposed. The mewling he heard the previous morning is back. And it's louder. And there's definitely more than one of them this time.

  He turns the light on from his reader and pulls boxes off the float cart and stacks them like bricks one on top of the other. He tips the float card up on its side and makes for himself a bunker. It's not much protection, but at least it makes him feel more confident.

  He lays his head down and hopes that sleep will come. He begins thinking of the day and then thinking more specifically of the food in the boxes all around him.

  He gets excited about the meals in the coming days. He thinks again about dishes his mother used to make. About their small, cramped apartment outside the city. About the stories she used to tell him when dad still hadn’t come home after he’d been expected days earlier. Thinks about how even though dad was more than a week late arriving from whatever questionable job he’d taken, she’d explain it away with a story for Nixon that seemed plausible at the time. Then he thinks about the smells that came from the kitchen and the food on the plates in front of him. About how mom used food as a salve, as medicine to calm a young boy’s worried mind.

  He’s thinking about one specific meal—it was the meal she always made the night before dad would come back home. It was a signal to Nixon that everything was going to be alright. He finally falls asleep thinking about the food in the boxes that he’s hoping to use to recreate that feeling.

  He wakes the next morning and reloads the cart, putting everything back on in the same order that he took it off. It’s easy work, but it takes time. When he’s finished, the suns are well above the mountain tops, and Nixon has worked up a sweat. He takes off his cloak and drapes it across the top of the boxes on the cart.

  He gives the cart a push and it slides and bounces forward. He stays a couple steps behind, This is the pattern the entire day. He gives the cart a gentle push and it slides a little bit forward. He walks to catch up. He gives a push again. Over and over and over until it's dark. Finally using the light from his reader to guide his path back to EHL.

  He unloads the float cart in the dark, stacking the food boxes on top of the ship near the busted ramp. He puts all of the repair gear in neat piles close to the ship. He covers the smaller bits with the large metal panels. He knows there's no one out here to see his gear, but life has taught him but it's better to be safe than sorry.

  He tries to jump on legs that are tired from a full day's walk, and he can barely do it. He needs to hook his fingers on the opening of the busted ramp and scramble his way inside of the ship. He tries and misses. He leans a hand on the ship and tries to will a bit of energy in his muscles. He gives it one more shot, and the fingertips of one hand just catch. He swings the other hand up to grab the opening. He works his feet up the side of the ship and swings his legs up and into the hole left by the ramp. He drops inside.

  He’d dropped the food in before him. He looks at the boxes. He’s hungry. No, he’s starving. It's been two full days since he’s eaten anything at all, and that was just noodles.

  He thinks long and hard about digging into the new food, the good food. Making one of those meals he spent the entire day thinking about. But he doesn't. It's late; he’s tired, and he just needs to eat. So, he unpacks noodles—more noodles—and eats them cold.

  06

  It’s a grunt. Or a snort. Nixon can’t tell. He hasn’t heard another, but one was enough to wake him from a fitful night of sleep. His mind sprints hard and fast to the Uzeks.

  Nixon reaches all around him, looking for his blaster. He peeled off the cloak last night once he was inside the ship. He tossed it aside, pulled the blaster from his waistband and tossed it too.

  He finds the cloak first, his hand landing with a dull thump on crumpled fabric. He hits the case next, his hand knocking it across the floor when it connects. But there’s still no blaster. He spins, slapping around faster, frantic.

  Another grunt comes from outside. He looks to the opening that the ramp can’t close up. He’s feeling around behind him and watching and waiting. Any moment now he’s expecting to see fat, green fingers wrap themselves around that edge.

  And if I had this damn blaster, I’d be able to turn them into a pulpy mess.

  But there are no fingers, and Nixon has finally had enough of this blind searching. He looks away from the opening and quickly scans the room—he’d slept in the main cabin on what should be the wall since EHL was still resting on its side. There’s the blaster, far behind him—an impossible reach if he was still groping around. He scrambles on his hands and heels and grabs the blaster. He aims it at the opening. He waits a moment and then another, still expecting to see something look down on him.

  And when it does …

  He fakes a shot.

  But after a third and fourth moment, the opening is still empty. He approaches cautiously then tucks the blaster into his waistband when he gets directly underneath. He jumps and grabs hold of the edge of the opening and pulls himself up quickly. If someone is out there, this is when he’ll be most vulnerable. He’ll do what he can to limit that.

  He sticks his head out and scans the area around his ship quickly. He can’t see anything, but he does hear a third grunt. It’s coming from right below him. He slips his body almost imperceptibly closer to the edge of the ship and looks down.

  A Fison hog. That’s all it is. Rooting around the ship and the gear stacked outside.

  He laughs at himself. The Fison hog looks up once it hears him then scampers off.

  Another one app
ears from the other side of the ship and runs off after its companion, snorting as it heads for the opening that leads from the trees out into the open field.

  Nixon watches these two rejoin a group of five or six gathered there then drops back into the ship. He tears into one of the boxes of new food and pulls out a package of bread that he’d eagerly picked up yesterday. He grabs a knife from the galley and cuts himself a thick slice. He eats it slowly, savoring the sweet and spice on his tongue. He wraps up the remains of the loaf and puts it and the rest of the food into the cabinets and bins in the galley.

  He goes through the rest of the ship securing anything loose.With EHL still on its side, his first task, before he can begin any of the real work, is going to be getting the ship back upright.

  He jumps back up through the ramp and slides down the side of the ship. He looks back out to the clearing. More Fison hogs have joined the others that were already there. They all have their heads down, digging through the dirt with their snouts.

  Across the field is a hill, and beyond that are mountains. Everything is bright and green. It’s all calm and quiet. And it’s all things that Nixon has missed. He’s spent so much of his adult life around others, trapped inside of civilization, he forgets that not everything is like that. Most things aren’t like that. Places like Makurra still exist, and being here doesn’t seem like such a bad life.

  One day, I’ll get back. Bring buckets of credits and buy supplies and another float cart from someone and build myself a little place here where I can listen to the sounds of nothing and just enjoy the peace.

  He turns to EHL and puts a hand on her side. The metal is cool. He gives the ship a push and she doesn’t move. He steps closer and leans a shoulder into the ship and digs his feet into the dirt. He pushes hard, and she rocks. It’s slight, but it’s something. He leans in hard again and digs his feet a little deeper into the dirt. He pushes harder, and it moves again. He’ll never get her over on his own, but she will go over. He just needs some help.

  He steps back and looks around the forest floor. He needs a rock, a good-sized rock, something vaguely triangular if he can find it. EHL’s crash landing into the forest floor left a deep trench dug deep into the dirt. It’s snapped smaller trees and scattered their branches and trunks all over. It’s also helped to uncover rocks that Nixon would have never found on his own.

  It doesn’t take long for him to find what he needs. It’s a rock with a broad flat side. And rising from that flat side, the rest of the rock narrows. It’s perfect.

  Nixon doesn’t know much about science. He quit going to school long before they ever got to the tough stuff. But he did learn about simple machines. Ramps and pulleys. Levers and … he holds the rock out in front of him. Fulcrums.

  He looks at the ship and places the rock in approximately the center of her mass a couple of feet away.

  Next, he needs something for leverage. He needs a pole, something long and heavy. Luckily, the crash landing helped there too. The tops of the trees EHL snapped off are scattered among the limbs and trunks of the smaller ones.

  Nixon quickly finds a pair of thick and sturdy trunks. He drags them closer to the ship and begins pulling off the small limbs and branches that survived the fall to the forest floor.

  He grabs one of the branches and tests its weight in his hand. He looks close for any kind of breaks or cracks. Then he heads to the opposite side of EHL, the direction he wants to roll her, and starts to dig at the dirt she’s laying on. He’s pulling it out in large piles. Hopefully, this is going to make it easier to get her to roll back upright. Once the dirt is moved—she looks like she’s perched on a precarious ledge—he goes back around to the other side, tossing the digging stick back out into the brush.

  Cleaned, he shoves the end of one of the trunks underneath EHL and sets what looks like roughly the center of the trunk on the smaller, smoother side of the rock. The free end is angled to the sky, and it’s higher than he anticipated. He jumps, trying to grab the trunk, but it’s too high. His fingertips brush the underside of the trunk, but he can’t get a steady hold in it.

  He finds another rock and sets it on the ground then climbs on top. He jumps from there and grabs the end of the branch, but EHL doesn’t budge. He just hangs a few feet off the ground.

  He drops. He needs more weight, and he has an idea. He climbs back inside of the ship. He pulls out a couple of the deeper drawers from the cabinets in the main cabin. He goes to another cabinet and fights it open, the cabinet’s frame twisted in the crash. He pulls out two long lengths of rope. He tosses it all back through the opening from the ramp and listens to it land on the dirt outside with a thump. He climbs back out and starts securing the rope to the drawers then loops the rope over the top of the tree trunk so both drawers are now hanging there like baskets.

  He steps back and starts looking for rocks again. He grabs the biggest he can and starts putting them into the drawers/baskets. He loads the first and then the second. EHL rocks, but only slightly. He climbs back onto the second rock he found and jumps for the trunk. He hangs there for a second before he feels himself start to drop.

  It’s not the quick and violent flip that he’d played out in his head during his walk back from the little arc of shops. It’s slower. More graceful, but only to a point. There’s a moment when gravity overtakes grace. And when it does, EHL resettles with a rumble and a crash that echoes through the forest. Nixon pauses, half expecting to see someone come running from somewhere in the trees shouting “What was that?”

  But when the echoing stops, there’s no one else there. It’s quiet. He’s alone. He starts digging through the pile of gear he bought the day before. His first step to getting EHL flying again is to patch her holes, so he gets busy cutting metal to fit, he starts slapping it on the ship’s sides. It’s not easy work, but a few hours later, EHL looks whole again. She’s ugly as all get out, looking like one of those long quilts Nixon’s mom made for their bed when he was a boy. But that will soon be taken care of.

  He walks back to the busted ramp and into the ship. He opens the food he bought yesterday and pushes past the containers of noodles and pulls out a tin of hen meat and peels off the top. He dumps the container into a bowl and begins mixing this and that into it, trying to copy a memory that’s playing in his head. It’s his mom making him the same thing for lunch when he was a boy. He’s sitting at the kitchen table and she’s working over at the counter, singing a song to herself.

  He puts the bowl to the side and picks out a package of crackers from his food stash then moves everything over to the small table in the galley. It’s a booth moulded out of plastic. The cushion covering the seats are identical to the thin mattress on top of his bed.

  He piles a large spoonful of the hen mixture on top of a cracker and takes a bite. It’s sweet and tangy, just as he remembers. He closes his eyes and he’s back at that table with his mother. She’s listening to him tell one of those hard-to-follow stories children tell parents. She’s smiling and watching him eat but without a plate of her own, something she did often. It never registered with Nixon as a boy, but it’s something he now thinks about regularly often—mostly when his own stomach is begging for food.

  “That looks delicious.”

  It’s Shaine.

  Nixon opens his eyes. “It is.”

  Nixon takes another bite. “What’s in it?”

  Nixon runs down the list of ingredients then says: “I’ve been thinking about it. Something you told me the other night. That whether or not I’d met you, my life would have turned out the same.”

  Nixon takes another bite then continues through a mouthful of food: “You’re wrong.”

  “I’m not wrong. I was who I was. You are who you are. The galaxy assigns us roles. There’s no shame in it. But it’s better to embrace it.”

  Nixon shakes his head and takes the last bite of his mixture-topped cracker. He takes his bowl over to the counter and wipes it out with a towel that’s lying there.
>
  “I don’t believe that anymore,” he says as he leaves the galley. He heads back through the opening and outside. Shaine is there waiting.

  “It’s not something that’s up to you to believe or not believe. It’s a fact. You and I weren’t made for fancy dress and jobs in those glass towers. We’re lower than that. And I don’t mean that as an insult. It’s just the truth.”

  Nixon is working as Shaine talks. He’s pulling the large sprayers of paint from the stack of gear he’d bought. He’s hooking them up to the large compressor units he’d also bought.

  Shaine continues: “You weren’t unhappy when we were working together. We laughed. We had fun.”

  Nixon gives the sprayer unit a light squeeze and a fine mist shoots from the end.

  “We were. And then you left. The last ten years for me has been brutal. It’s been day-to-day. No planning for anything other than how I get to the next sunrise. You were off making the life we’d both dreamed about. You had Mira and a home and a family.”