Galaxy Run: Makurra Read online

  GALAXY RUN:

  MAKURRA

  by

  Sam Renner

  +++++

  PUBLISHED BY:

  SIX to ONE Books & Media

  Copyright © 2021

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  01

  Nixon white-knuckles the captain’s seat and digs deep gouges into its arms while EHL shouts a warning.

  “Brace for impact, sir. Our approach is too fast.”

  All Nixon can see out the ship’s front window is the on-rush of green. He closes his eyes, bracing for the ship to clip the tops of these trees. He cinches the seat belt tighter on his waist then grabs the arm of the chair again, ready for the ship to ping pong through the trees then crash into the ground and roll who knows where.

  He knows nothing about this planet, but judging from these tree tops, he knows the surface isn’t soft like some pillow. Hit it hard and fast, and it’s going to split EHL right open. That will send him tumbling out across its unknown surface into the arms, or pincers, or tentacles of who knows what.

  The trees are on them now, and Nixon hears the tops of them start to brush the ship’s bottom.

  “Brace, sir.”

  “I brace any harder I’m going to have handfuls of threads and cushion. Just get us down safe.”

  The trees start to swallow the ship, their topmost leaves now being pulled from their branches and obscuring Nixon’s view out the front windshield. Their whish on the sides of the ship gets louder, and the snap of the first tree to break off echoes throughout the ship’s interior.

  EHL sinks lower into the canopy and the snapping trees become concussive, like Nixon is in some railgun shooting gallery. Pop! Pop! POP! He strains against his belt as the ship suddenly slows.

  Then ...

  Silence.

  The leaves are gone. The branches are cleared. EHL is flying free.

  Until…

  The trunks on these trees are tight together, and the ship is still impossibly high. EHL attempts to navigate between, banking hard left, but it’s too late. The ship clips a trunk and goes spinning. Everything outside the window is now a swirl. EHL is no longer in control. Nixon shouts for her to straighten them up, but there’s no time. They clip another trunk, and it sends them spinning off in the opposite direction.

  “Do something!” Nixon shouts again.

  “There’s nothing I can do, sir. We are at the mercy of the galaxy at the moment.”

  The galaxy—and physics—have them falling faster now. They hit one more tree before colliding with the ground. The impact sends Nixon bouncing out of his seat. His shoulders push hard against the restraints, but he doesn’t slip free. EHL bounces once more and then again before sliding to a stop.

  Nixon hangs upside down, the seat’s restraints and his grip on the arms of the chair the only thing keeping him from falling into the ceiling of the ship.

  “Are you okay, sir? EHL asks.

  Nixon slips one shoulder out of still-clasped restraints. He pulls the second shoulder out next then grabs the belts and lets gravity do the rest of the work. It flips him around, and he drops feet first from the seat.

  He puts a hand up on a weary shoulder and tries to rub away the pain. He can feel a bruise working its way to the surface.

  “I’m okay,” he says. “Or will be.”

  He kicks away items at his feet. It’s all gear that’s fallen from the cabinets and cases that jostled open as EHL pinballed through the trees and across the ground.

  “How are you doing?” Nixon asks the ship.

  “Assessing, sir.” Then the ship goes quiet.

  Nixon waits for more of an answer, but one doesn’t come. “You let me know when you have something to report.”

  Nixon starts organizing the mess, pushing related bits of gear into piles. He gets most of the ceiling cleared and has begun putting things back into opened cabinets when the ship returns.

  “Preliminarily, my environmental systems are operational. Somehow everything that needs to be working in mechanical is working. It’s not perfect, but it’s functional. I don’t have any way of assessing my physical state. That’s something…”

  Nixon interrupts: “Yea, that’s on me. Do you think you can get that ramp open at least enough for me to crawl out?”

  Gears start to grind. They sound worse than normal, and Nixon’s breathing quickens. Sweat begins to dampen his forehead. He wants to see light peak through that opening, even if it’s just a bit. Otherwise, it means he’s stuck in here, like a piece of Bowtan steer meat trapped in the tin.

  The gears struggle. The motors that work them slip and whine, but eventually there is light. It’s just a sliver, but it’s there. Nixon’s heart slows, and he waits. The ramp never opens fully, but it opens enough for Nixon to crawl out.

  He grabs the opening and swings his legs above his head and forces himself out feet first. He twists and contorts his body so he’s laying his front side across the side of EHL. The metal is cool against his belly. He lets himself hang there for a moment. He doesn’t know what’s below him. He assumes it’s solid ground, but it doesn’t have to be. He counts a mental three then lets his fingers loose. Gravity pulls him down the side of the ship, and he holds his breath until he feels dirt crunch beneath his feet.

  He steps back and looks at EHL. She’s in rough shape. Dents all over. A trail of ripped-off side panels litter the forest floor. Almost none of the putty that Nixon had worked so hard to apply to her sides has survived the crash.

  This is going to be murder to fix.

  But maybe this is a blessing. He needs to disguise her anyway. With her already in pieces, he can put her back together anyway he wants.

  02

  Nixon returns to the half-opened ramp and jumps, trying to hook his fingers over the narrow opening. He just misses the first time, and he slides down the metal sides of the ship. He just gets hold on his second jump and scrambles his feet up the ship’s slick metal. He drops back through the opening and takes another look around the ship.

  He knows there’s work to do outside, but there’s work to do in here too. Panels are separated from panels. Lights that should be on aren’t. He knows that all the screens on the dash are likely irreparably busted. He starts making a mental list of everything he’ll need to get EHL operational again, when the ship speaks.

  “I have a detailed status report.”

  Nixon finishes picking up a tool set that’s been scattered across the floor and putting it back into a storage bin. The lid closes with a loud snap and he says, “OK. Go.”

  “All of my systems are operational. We have problems with one of the engines. It’s only showing to be operating at half its capability, but that doesn’t preclude us from regular operations.”

  “So you’ll still fly.”

  “Well, my systems are operational. They are in flying shape. I can’t speak to whether or not my condition is flight worthy.”

  “Surprise,” Nixon says. “It’s not.”

  Nixon pulls a loose bin over to him and sits.

  “So, what happened?” he asks. “How did we end up here?”

  “How far back should I go?”

  Nixon thinks back through what he knows, saying out loud that he remembers the alarms sounding.

  “Yes, sir. After our previous pair of visitors I fine tuned our indicators. I set them to pick up traffic earlier. This ship tripped those early warning systems.”

  Nixon says he remembers EHL picking up speed quickly but the alarm not going off.

  “No, sir. This ship continued to gain on us no matter how fast we went.”

  Nixon’s mind immediately goes back to Marko’s speeder that he’d intended to leave Ibilia in. Could thi
s have been that ship? Did someone Marko knew give them chase for a bit of revenge? No, he thinks. Marko and all of his little goons were left worse than dead.

  Nixon says he remembers the evasive maneuvers. He remembers EHL beginning to dip and dive again, twisting one way and then another, throwing Nixon and his equilibrium upside down. He says it nearly caused him to pass out. Then he remembers a second alarm.

  “Yes, sir. Incoming fire warning. The ship started shooting.”

  “Several shots, right?”

  “Yes, sir. We were able to successfully avoid those shots, but as the ship got closer it was going to be harder to keep them off of us. Harder to keep them from getting one of those shots to land.”

  Nixon nods. “So you …”

  “I saw this planet coming up and hoped that I’d be able to use whatever was on the surface as some kind of cover.”

  “And the reckless drop into the trees …”

  “Again, a defensive decision. I was hoping that whoever was the pilot would see how recklessly we were flying and wouldn’t follow us in.”

  “At least you recognize how reckless it was.”

  Nixon moves to one of EHL’s displays and asks the ship to bring up video. He’s hoping to be able to find any kind of identifying marks on whoever or whatever it was that had chased them.

  “One moment.”

  Nixon stares at the black screen and taps a rhythm with his fingers on the display’s frame. A moment later footage from EHL’s rear camera appears.

  “I’m afraid there won’t be much there,” the ship says.

  Nixon doesn’t respond, just watches the images play out in front of him. EHL isn’t wrong. The other ship never gets close. It doesn’t become much more than a dot on the display. It does fire. Three shots jump from that pin point on the display. Blasts of deep green scream by the camera, Nixon recognizing now just how close he’d come to becoming a tangled ball of burning space debris. The decision to take a chance at crashing through the trees looks like the right one now.

  The video stops, and EHL turns the screen black again.

  “Do we know what happened to that ship?”

  EHL doesn’t respond for a moment then: “According to my data it followed us into atmosphere, but I don’t know any more than that. I lost the signal pretty quickly.”

  “And you lost that signal when we crashed onto …”

  “One more moment.”

  “It looks like we are on Makurra.”

  “Makurra,” Nixon repeats.

  “Yes, sir. Mostly uninhabited.”

  That’s not good. Nixon needs supplies. He needs to fix this ship, to give it a new look and a new identity. Some of that he can do without new gear. There’s metal scattered across the ground outside the ship that he can beat back into usable shape. But he can’t do that with all of it. He needs someone or something who can sell him those tools and materials.

  “How uninhabited?” he asks, hoping that EHL will come back that there’s at least a couple of population centers here.

  “One more moment.”

  Nixon paces what should be the ceiling of the ship. It’s quiet while EHL digs for Nixon’s answer, the only sound his feet shuffling across the metal. He makes one circle and then another.

  The displays in front of Nixon light up, and EHL begins talking again. It’s a map of the northern hemisphere of a planet that looks to be mostly lush and green. An indicator appears on one side of the map.

  “This,” she says as it begins to blink, “is our current location.”

  A second light begins to blink. “That is the nearest place with any significant population.”

  Nixon studies the distance, and, no matter how he looks at it, it’s far.

  “Two days walk,” EHL says, like it knows what Nixon is thinking. “Two full days.”

  Nixon doesn’t say anything. He looks at one blinking light and then to the other then takes out his datapad. He starts taking inventory and making a list of things he needs. If he’s going to make that walk, he only wants to make it once.

  03

  Nixon keeps repeating the name of the planet, putting the accent on a different syllable every time.

  Ma-KUR-ra.

  MA-kur-ra.

  Ma-kur-RA.

  The last one makes him chuckle, and his laugh fills the forest. He left EHL hours ago with a map displayed on his reader, but the route isn’t complicated. Head east.

  When he first left, all of this was interesting, trees stretching so high that the tops of them disappeared into the suns-brightened sky. Now it’s just monotonous and frustrating.

  The trees grow together so tightly that Nixon has to walk a twisting path through them, and it’s making his progress slow. He runs his fingers across the smooth trunks as he passes them. He pulls off long curls of thin bark and ties them into knots that he then throws to the ground.

  Earlier, the forest had been alive. Animals had scurried at his feet. Wild Farrow birds sang from the trees’ high branches. Now, though, the suns are beginning to disappear and casting slashing shadows across everything. The birds have gone quiet. The animals are all calm, and, except for his steps, everything is silent.

  Nixon stops for a moment and begins to consider whether or not this should be the end of the first day’s walk. He has no plan for this little journey beyond “Walk as long as you can.” He assumed that would be until it became too dark to go any farther, but he can see now that dark is going to come on quickly.

  He looks, for what he doesn’t know. All of this appears the same. Tree after tree after tree as far as he can see in any direction. He has nothing on him but his cloak, the case, the blaster and two Bastic fuel rods.

  The case he’s keeping in a pocket inside his cloak. The blaster is tucked into the waistband of his pants. And the fuel rods are wrapped in an old oily blanket he found on the floor after it fell out of a busted cabinet he never knew existed.

  He begins walking again. If it’s all the same, then he might as well make as much progress as he can before stopping. The forest floor is covered in a thick layer of leaves and branches, and he pushes them into deep piles as he shuffle-steps his way through the trees. The winds begin to pick up, blowing cold. They rustle the leaves above him and push his piles back out flat.

  It’s nearly a full dark now, and he activates the screen on his reader. He holds it out in front of him to give himself enough light to keep going.

  “Would you just stop?”

  Nixon quick-turns, his reader still extended out in front of him, and the light shines bright on Shaine’s face. Stir Crazy Shaine. He’s back.

  Nixon drops the reader, and Shaine stays lit with a soft glow. It does nothing to help light Nixon’s way, but it does make Shaine visible in the dark forest.

  “Hey, Shaine.”

  Shaine steps in front of Nixon and around the next tree. He’s looking into the black sky. “Where are we?”

  “Ma-kur-RA.” Nixon laughs again.

  “Never heard of it.”

  Nixon has his reader back out in front of him and steps around the next tree and then the one after that. “Me either.”

  “Well, if you had and I hadn’t then I’d be surprised.”

  Nixon follows Shaine through a few more trees before Shaine stops. Nixon stops too, and Shaine turns to him.

  “Seriously. This is ridiculous. You need to stop.”

  Nixon knows Shaine’s right. It’s late. His already-slow progress is even slower now. And his body is starting to feel the effects of this walk and the crash earlier.

  He turns a slow circle, holding his reader out in front of him as far as he can. Everything looks the same. Trees. Trees. Trees. So he sits where he stands.

  He pushes the leaves and branches into tall piles behind him until he sees the bare dirt of the forest floor. He pulls his cloak over his head and the blaster from his waistband. He lays the cloak on the ground in front of him and lays the blaster in the middle. He folds the cloak around
the blaster and into a neat square. He places the cloak behind him and lays his head on it like a pillow. Shaine is still standing and watches Nixon make himself comfortable.

  “So what’s your plan?” Shaine asks.

  Nixon thinks for a moment then pushes himself up on his elbows. “My plan?”

  He finishes pushing himself up until he’s sitting upright again. He scoots until his back is leaning against a tree.

  Nixon continues: “My plan is to finish this walk tomorrow and use whatever I can get for these fuel rods to buy whatever I need to build a machine that will take me back to that alley on Exte so I can let the Uzeks do whatever it is they were going to do to me. Let them get their pound of flesh. That way we’d be even. I don’t throw those punches, I don’t shoot Uzel, and I’m not here. I don’t have to meet you. I don’t take that damned case. Life is back to normal.”