by Sam Renner
Nixon turns his back on Shaine and begins putting a first coat of paint onto EHL. He’s envisioned a two-toned look with red on the bottom and a muddy green on the top. The red is going on first. He concentrates on applying an even coat, and Shaine defends himself.
“Don’t put your disappointments on me. You said you were happy for me. Happy that I’d found someone.”
Nixon continues to work. “I was happy for you. For you. But for me, it was the worst thing that could have happened. I relied on you. I depended on you. My future was tied to yours. And for the last ten years I’ve just been floating out there, like a ship that’s lost its engines. Things pushing me this way or that, but me never getting to go the direction that I want to go. Never getting to live my life.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, friend,” Shaine says. “But your inability to make a decision about what you want to do isn’t my fault.”
Nixon stops painting for a second. He stands and looks to Shaine. This vision of Shaine looks back.
“Good bye, Shaine.”
And he disappears.
07
The second of Makurra’s suns is still behind the mountains when Nixon makes his way outside the next morning. He picks up the first green sprayer of paint and attaches it to the compressor then gets to work.
The green isn’t going on as easy as the red, and he can tell right away that he’s going to need a second coat to get the look he wants to make sure EHL is unrecognizable. He doesn’t mind, though. He’s enjoying himself. He’s stretching a creative side of his brain, something that doesn’t always get used like this unless some con has gone wrong. Then it’s creativity all the time just to figure out how to survive the next few minutes.
This, though, is scratching that creator side, that maker side. It’s taking a steady hand to get the paint to go on even. Even paint means a professional probably did it. Even paint doesn’t look like you’re some small-time crook trying to slap fake glasses or a funny nose on your ship. So it’s slow and methodical, back and forth.
The sprayer of green sputters then stops. He unscrews it from the compressor then steps back to look at his work. His conversation with Stir Crazy Shaine from the night before has been rolling around his head all morning. He keeps replaying one exchange over and over. The idea that Shaine keeps putting forward that they are bound by some kind of galactic force that predetermines who they can be.
He admires his work. “This, Shaine. I could have done this.”
And he really believes it. If his life had taken another turn, he could see himself with a little shop on some crowded planet where he'd have a crew that did nothing but fix busted ships. He’d step out of the office a few times a week to still get his hands dirty. But mostly he’d watch through a window as his team moved ships in and out and the credits accumulated in his bank account.
He attaches the second sprayer and gets back to work. It doesn’t take long before he’s lost again in the work, the rhythm of the painting. He starts to hear those voices in that imaginary shop. He hears the crowds passing on the streets. The laughter of his team. He sees the smiles of happy customers.
He gets so wrapped up in his own mind and lost in the task in front of him—applying this second coat of green paint—that he doesn’t eat. He just works until this sprayer of paint also sputters and stops.
He steps back again and looks at EHL. He’s happy. This new paint gives her personality. She looks mean. She looks like the ship of someone serious. But most importantly, she looks completely different, completely unrecognizable.
His stomach reminds him that he hasn’t eaten since this morning. He sets down the sprayer and heads back into the ship. He thinks about making a stew from his childhood, but doesn’t want to wait that long. So, instead, he grabs what’s left of the loaf of bread from yesterday morning. He takes it back outside with him, tearing big bites with his teeth.
He sits in the opening where the ramp should be closed up and relaxes into the feelings of a job well done. He works on an extra large bite of the bread, and again savors the flavor he hasn’t had since he was a boy.
He looks out through the forest at the field that’s just beyond. It’s filled with knee-high grass and tiny yellow-petalled flowers. Beyond that the foothills of the mountains begin. They rise gently from the meadow. The grass follows about a quarter of the way up. It stops growing about where the trees start. They aren’t gefta trees like the forest that Nixon and EHL crashed into. These trees don’t grow together as tightly. Their trunks are thicker, but they aren’t nearly as tall. And replacing the grass are large stones, some half the size of EHL.
“We’ll set up with our backs to one of these larger rocks.” That’s what his dad would have told him if they’d come to a place like Makkurra on one of those adventures they’d go on after his dad had been gone for a longer than expected long time.
Dad liked to reduce what he called “attack vectors,” he never seemed to realize that while he was eliminating threats from the back he was opening them up to threats from the top. Still, those trips were fun. Any time with dad was fun, until …
No, stop thinking about this.
His mind switches channels. Shaine is the star of this new show, and Nixon smiles. He’d only partially meant what he said to Shaine before. Yes, there are times—most of the time, if he’s being honest—that he wishes he’d never met Shaine. That he thinks about how things might have gone. But you can’t live in “might haves.” A life that involved Shaine was his history. It was the reality, and the reality was that it wasn’t all bad. It wasn’t even mostly bad. There were a lot of good times, and being out here in the quiet and the calm reminds him of some of the best.
The two friends got in hot water. A lot. And most of the time it was trouble they could talk their way out of. And if they couldn’t they could just go hole up somewhere for a few days and whatever it was would pass. But sometimes, they got into the deep stuff, the kind of hot water that couldn’t be waited out. When they did, they fled. Shaine would somehow get a ship and they’d take off. They’d fly who knew where, but a lot of the time it was somewhere like Makurra. Land the ship somewhere remote on an already remote planet and spend a couple of weeks eating noodles and doing a whole lot of nothing.
They are Nixon’s favorite memories with Shaine, and they are playing on a loop in his head. He smiles around another big bite of the bread. He needs to fix this ramp. No matter how pretty EHL looks now, and no matter what her system checks tell her, she’s not going anywhere if this ramp isn’t functional. But it’s getting dark, and he can’t focus. He’s too happily distracted by his mental yesterdays.
08
Nixon wakes the next morning. He’s rested and relaxed and happy. He didn’t think a mental trip a bunch of years back would do that, but here he is.
He makes himself breakfast, something his dad had called “Glop”. It’s a mixture of grains and dried berries soaked overnight in Bowtan milk. He’s sures there’s a real name for it, but he never heard it. It was always just Glop, and it’s what they’d make when they went out on their little adventures.
He takes his bowl to the broken ramp and sits. He looks out through the forest to the open field. A fog hangs just above the tall grass and stretches to the trees. A breeze starts blowing and pushes the fog farther up the foothill.
He hears a snort and sees the grass start to ripple. The Fison hogs are back. Only two this time, and they are small. Babies. They chase each other through the grass and then up into the forest. They run right past the ship, no more than a dozen feet from where Nixon sits, but they don’t pay him any attention. Just run by him and then off.
He smiles and takes his last bite of Glop. He starts to wonder if this is it. Is this what he wants? He hasn’t thought about the case in a few days. But it’s still there. Literally in one of the cabinets in his quarters. And it’s still there in the back of his mind. Always looming. Always coloring everything he’s doing. It’s why he’s here on Mak
urra at all. But maybe this was the blessing the case was supposed to show him. The life he was meant to have, one of quiet and of solitude.
He looks back out to the opening and imagines if this was every morning. Up with the first sun. Out on some kind of patio or porch on the small house he’s built from these trees that are all around him. It’s a rough-sided place. Small. Just the one room. But it’s just him. He doesn’t need much space.
He’d need some kind of hot box to prepare food. This imagined life doesn’t come with rehydrated noodles. But he’s sure that someone back in that little town could help him secure what he needed.
He’d watch the animals early in the morning. He’d wait until the second sun was up to go into the hills and check if the traps he’d set the evening before had found anything. Finding his own food and foraging would mean he never needed many credits. That payment for delivering the case should set him up well. But he’d keep EHL stored next to his little cabin in the woods just in case he needed to run off somewhere and find work to restock his credit balance.
When the suns had both set he’d spend nights eating meals his mother made, watching shows on his reader, and listen to the mewling of whatever animals those were he’d heard the first night here.
He looks away from his imagined cabin and back down at his ship. She’s still broken, still unflyable. And if he’s going to have any shot at even part of this imagined life he has to deliver this case. That means fixing the ramp.
He stands and takes his bowl back to the galley then gathers his tools. Back at the ramp he removes body panels and tries to puzzle out what he’s seeing.
This can’t be that complicated, can it?
No, it can’t. It all looks pretty simple, and it doesn’t appear that any of the triggering mechanisms are broken. When Nixon initiates the ramp to unfold or retract and the gears and inner workings of the ramp itself bind up and grind.
He begins to work, and again convinces himself that this could have been it. This could have been his life. He could have fixed ships. Then, mentally, the cabin is back, but this time it’s not alone. There’s another building there. This one is bigger and more permanent. He sees himself stepping out of it, wiping his hands clean on a rag that he’s hung from the belt of his coveralls. He’s waving at someone. Nixon mentally swings his attention that direction and sees the back end of a ship as it accelerates out and away from Makurra.
Nixon works on the ramp most of the day, skipping lunch—dad wasn’t wrong when he said Glop will stick with you. But being crouched over this busted ramp for this long has done a number on his back.
He stands. He stretches. He tries to twist some life back into sore muscles.
He interlocks his fingers; he closes his eyes and pushes his arms high above his head. He breathes in deep then lets it out slowly.
THUNK
His eyes pop open, and a blaster shot sizzles past his ear.
09
The blaser bolt tears a fresh hole into the newly painted side of EHL. Nixon feels the heat from the shot burn his cheek and dives back inside the ship.
The air crackles behind him as another shot follows him into the ship. It rips into EHL’s main deck, and Nixon swears he hears the ship moan.
He grabs the blaster from the dash. He waits for another shot to come, but one doesn’t.
No target.
He takes a deep breath then looks quickly out the ramp opening, across the forest and open field, then up the hill.
THUNK
Another shot. He ducks back inside and the bolt of energy takes out an empty storage bin.
His mind races. Blaster fire? From who? From where? The men from town? But why?
A deep breath and then another. He pushes his head out into the opening again, looking higher up the hill this time.
THUNK
He drops flat to the floor and the shot passes just above his head. He can smell his own singed hair, and the shot tears a deep gash into the floor of the main deck.
He still doesn’t know where these shots are coming from, but he does know he can’t stay here. Even if he did survive this, he’s not sure his ship can.
He crouches by the ramp opening, his back pressed hard to the wall. He counts a mental three then takes off running out of the ship.
THUNKTHUNKTHUNK
Shots explode into clouds of dirt just off his heels. He dives for a spot behind one of the larger trees. It doesn’t offer much cover, but this trunk along with all the others in between him and whoever is shooting means that hitting him is going to require a next level of expertise.
That doesn’t keep whoever this is from trying. Shots splinter three of the trees around him. They don’t offer much in the way of a threat, but they do allow Nixon to narrow in on where the shots are coming from. Up the hill, he knew that. But now it looks like it’s even above the trees.
He focuses his attention there, but he sees nothing. It’s all a landscape of tans and browns. Nothing jumps out … wait.
There.
A flash. Small and quick, but it’s something. The setting sun has caught some…
There. Again.
Behind one of the large rocks. May be nothing. But it may be…
Nixon raises the blaster and squeezes of a volley of shots. He doesn’t count, just keeps shooting until his finger can’t shoot anymore.
He’s only hit rock, but he’s pelted it with so much blaster energy that he’s created a storm of dirt and dust big enough to let him move from behind this tree.
He runs, his head down and shoulders pushed up to his ears, to another tree—a bigger one with a wider trunk—that’s closer to the forest’s edge near the open field. He looks back up to the hill. His cloud of dust has nearly settled. He sits, back pressed against the tree trunk, and he waits.
And he waits.
He turns his head and leans out, trying to find his shooter.
THUNK
A blaster shot catches the tree beside him and splinters of the thin Gefta wood sting his face. He looks out from around the tree again, and there’s movement. His shooter is shifting position.
Nixon wants to run. Make a mad dash. But where? The ship took out too many trees as it came crashing down. There’s no cover there. And, here, where the trees are still standing, they are doing it so close together that he won’t be able to build up any kind of speed to even be considered a moving target.
THUNK
Another shot. A new direction. His shooter has established a new position.
They were moving to the right. That puts them more behind me now.
He looks out to the field, and has two thoughts.
First: He needs to be moving.
Second: This person is keeping their distance for a reason. So let’s take the fight to them.
He stands, and he sprints. The blaster is swinging at his side, and the tops of the tall grass in the open field slap at his knees. He’s aiming for a large rock that sits at the edge of the field just before it starts climbing to become the hill.
THUNKTHUNK
Both shots end up somewhere behind him in the grass, but he feels their heat through his boots. Confirmed: Moving is better than stationary. His rock is coming up fast, and he dives behind it.
The day is fading. Makurra’s first sun is beginning to disappear behind the hill tops, and the valley is being cut up by shadows. He’s harder to see now, and that’s good for him. But the tops of the hill, where his shooter is camping out are still lit bright with the light of the second stronger sun. But even that’s going down and it’s going to soon be shining right in the shooter’s eyes. If they can’t take Nixon out soon, they are going to lose their chance.
So, let’s make them work for it.
Nixon stands, and another shot screams past him. Nixon starts running a zig-zagged path toward another large rock that’s rolled down the hill and ended up in the open field. He’s watching the hill and waiting for …
THUNK
Perfect.
He stays low and sticks his head around the far side of the rock and looks up to where he’d seen the shooter before, but he doesn’t see anything. He gives himself another moment, then sprints from behind his rock. He’s moving up the hill now. His blaster trained on the spot where he’d seen the shooter. He zigs and fires one shot. He zags and fires another. Then he finds a spot behind a tree.