Galaxy Run: Otanzia Read online

Nixon looks at the work he’s completed. He looks at the ship. His ship now. He’s made too many repairs, made it too much his own for him to think about it as anything else. This isn’t Shaine’s ship any more. It’s not the ship that Mira let him borrow. It’s the ship that he's earned.

  He starts to nod as he takes it all in: “I’m gonna be.”

  03

  “Come on,” Nixon says. “We are going to get that transponder.”

  “You mind if I stay?”

  Nixon thinks for a moment then repeats himself. “Come on.”

  “I’m serious. I’d love to try and rest.”

  “If you have anything you want to take with us, grab it. It’s two days walk where we’re headed.”

  Laana’s nice enough. He likes her company, although he likes any company that’s not just some kind of complicated programming at this point. She’s smart. Knows people that he doesn’t know, and that could be handy. Still, only a few days ago she was winging blaster bolts by his head, hoping to earn a ship full of credits. He’s not letting her hang around his ship unattended.

  The truth was he hadn’t slept well in the two nights since he brought her onto the ship. It was thin sleep, every small sound waking him. And that’s if he got to sleep at all. Something still pricks his insides whenever he doesn’t have something else to occupy his mind.

  “I don’t have anything. Unless you want to give me back my gun.”

  “You won’t need it.”

  Nixon steps around Laana and pulls a bag from a cabinet. He takes it to the galley and fills it with food. He grabs the case and puts it in the pocket inside his cloak then tucks the blaster inside his waistband. Laana watches him walk around the ship then follows him out the ramp.

  The suns are just coming up, their light sneaking over the tops of the hills and pouring down into the valley. It’s just now beginning to push its way through the trees of the forest, and the air is hanging onto the chill of the night.

  Laana crosses her arms, hugging her chest. Nixon heads out ahead of her and his long steps put quick distance between them. They walk most of the first day separated like this. They say very little to each other, and Nixon stops walking just as the first of the suns drops behind the hills and the light changes.

  “We’ll lose that second sun sooner than we realize. Better find a place to bed down for the night.”

  Laana waits for Nixon to find a spot to settle. It takes him a moment, but he finally finds a gap between the trees that’s wide enough for both of them to lay down. He drops the bag off his shoulder and sits. Laana follows.

  Nixon opens the bag and pulls out a couple of tins of meat and a sleeve of crackers. He opens the tins and sets them on the ground between them then opens the crackers and does the same. He pulls a cracker from the sleeve and drags it through the meat. It’s the consistency of a paste, and it mounds up on the cracker as he pulls it. He pops it in his mouth then grabs for another cracker. Laana watches him go through the process again.

  “This is all I brought, so if you want to eat then grab a cracker. You don’t want it, suit yourself. I’m sure you could trap something small out here, but I didn’t bring anyway to clean it or start a fire to cook it on.”

  Laana grabs a cracker and picks up her tin of meat. She copies Nixon’s move and drags a heavy pile of the paste onto her cracker. She takes a hesitant bite, and her eyes pinch narrow and her mouth puckers into an O.

  Nixon laughs.

  “Yeah, it’s kind of an acquired taste.”

  “Salty.”

  “I’ve been eating it since I was a kid. Shaine and I practically lived off the stuff when we first got to Exte. It’s cheap. Crackers are too. When our big schemes weren’t paying off we could hustle up enough credits to buy a few tins and sleeves.”

  Laana picks up another cracker and is less aggressive with the paste this time.

  “Well, if you can’t taste good at least be cheap.”

  She pops the cracker into her mouth.

  They eat the rest of the tins in silence, the only sounds come from the forest’s night time creatures waking up. Nixon puts the empty tins and what’s left of the crackers back into his bag then lays down, resting his head on his arm.

  “Get some sleep,” he says. “We’ve got another day ahead of us tomorrow.”

  ++xxx++

  Nixon doesn’t sleep. His mind can’t stop thinking about the blaster in his waistband. He rests an arm across it when he lays down and keeps it pinned there. He has his eyes closed, and he’s waiting for Laana to try something. Waiting for her to gently try to shift his hand, to move a finger. Free the blaster so she can free herself.

  Each time she turns over in the night he sneaks an eye open to make sure she isn’t creeping just a little closer to him. Each time one of the forest’s night creatures pads by on little paws he does the same thing. Paranoid? Maybe. He prefers to think of it as cautious.

  When the first of the suns begins to come up, he’s already sitting with his back against one of the trees watching Laana sleep. He gives her a few extra minutes then pushes her shoulder with the toe of his boot. She jostles awake and tries to slide her tongue across dry lips. She sits up, and he opens his bag. He tosses her another thick slice of the bread he gave her the morning before.

  She eats it eagerly. He stands and watches her. A piece of the dried fruit falls from the corner of her mouth and to the ground. She plucks it from the dirt and pops in her mouth. She puts the last bite of the bread in her mouth a second later then brushes her hands together to get rid of the crumbs.

  She stands and says: “Lead the way.”

  Nixon heads out, and Laana follows. It’s quiet for a bit then Nixon tells her more about where they are headed.

  Small settlement. Looks to be a fairly closed group. Most of them here for a reason.

  She asks what he means by that last point.

  “I didn’t get the feeling these people had a lot of other options. They are here because they don’t have any place else they can go. It’s safer to live with your head down in a place where people won’t ask you any questions if you promise not to ask them any either.”

  Laana nods. “Kind of sounds like Heaven.”

  Nixon chuckles then agrees.

  The trees start to thin out. More and more stumps poke up from the forest floor. Again, Nixon hears it before he sees it. Multiple voices. They have to be coming from people standing outside of the buildings. He gestures for Laana to stop. They listen. The conversation is heated, but it doesn’t sound angry. Just passionate.

  Nixon steps out of the forest, through the trees, and into the clearing. The man he met emerging from the woods just a couple of days ago is at the center of the conversation. Again, they are gathered at the fire pit. Nixon can’t tell what the discussion is about, but he knows that it stops once he’s been spotted.

  He raises a hand, a wave to look friendly. “Hello,” he says. “Do you remember me?”

  They all look at him for a moment before the man from the previous day gives a slight nod then says “I remember you. Don’t remember your friend, though.”

  Two others were part of the discussion that Nixon and Laana walked up on, but Nixon doesn’t recognize either one. He quickly scans the buildings in the circle. The woman who sold him the food has her door open, and he can see her moving boxes here and there inside.

  Behind the group in the middle of the circle is the man who sold him the ship parts. He’s leaning in the doorway of his building, his arms crossed across his chest.

  “Didn’t bring her last time,” Nixon says.

  “Maybe shouldn’t have brought her this time.”

  “Ship’s almost ready to go, just need one more part.”

  No one is looking at Nixon. All of them, the three in the middle and the woman in the doorway, are all looking at Laana.

  “I’m afraid we’re all sold out.”

  “I haven’t even told you …”

  A new man has stepped into o
ne of the doorways. He shouts down to Nixon, interrupting him: “Yeah, we’re all out.”

  “I think we all know that’s not true. The other day you all kept making ship parts appear from nowhere.”

  “That was the other day,” the man from the middle says. “Things have changed.”

  He reaches behind his back and leaves his hand there. “Now it’s probably time you two head on back.”

  The others in the circle nod. The man in the doorway isn’t quite as subtle. He pulls a blaster from his waistband and lets it hang loose at his side.

  “Come on,” Laana says. “It’s not worth it. We’re outnumbered.”

  She pulls at his arm, trying to get him to turn around, but Nixon resists. He rests his hand on the blaster in his own waist band.

  “Just a couple of days ago, you were eager to take my credits. Today, I come to ask about a transponder and you want to go to blasters. I don’t get it.”

  The man in the middle’s face brightens. “A transponder? You only ask about one of those if yours is busted …”

  The man in the doorway finishes the thought. “... or you’re trying to hide something or someone. That what’s going on here? What kind of trouble are you into?”

  Nixon doesn’t answer that question. “Do you have a transponder you can sell me?”

  “Fresh out,” the man from the middle says.

  “I don’t believe you. I saw crates of ship parts the other day. You’re saying in all of that…”

  The man from the doorway: “Like we said, things have changed.”

  “What’s changed? You still want credits. I have them to give you.”

  Laana grabs Nixon’s arm again and pulls him around to her. “It’s me, Nixon. I’m the change. Let’s just go.”

  He looks at her for a moment then back to the crowd. The other two in the middle have also pulled blasters. Nixon turns and walks away, Laana at his side. He’s waiting to feel the heat from a blaster bolt suddenly warm his back and burn its way through his front. It’d all go so fast that it’d take a moment for his body and brain to register what had just happened. He’d take a few stumbling steps forward before he fell over, dead by the time he hit the ground.

  But nothing happens. They make it back to the thin cluster of trees. Then they make it to where the forest thickens. Then they are back to where the trees are growing together so tightly that they have to take a winding course just to get through them.

  Neither one has said anything since they turned and started walking, but Laana breaks the silence with an apology.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I know that was your plan, and it didn’t work out.”

  “Not your fault” he says. “I just wasn’t expecting that.”

  They are having to walk single file now, Nixon leading the way.

  “Didn’t surprise me.”

  “I’m not sure what we do now, though. If they won’t sell us a transponder…”

  “Actually,” Laana interrupts. “I know where we can get one.”

  04

  Laana takes a moment to orient herself then hesitantly points over a distant hill.

  “I put my ship down over there. Let’s take my transponder.”

  “We can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “What are you flying?”

  “A little speeder.”

  Nixon nods like he was expecting that answer. “Ship data won’t match.”

  Laana chuckles. “You ever deal with a gate agent? Ever try to check into a space port?”

  Nixon shakes no.

  “There isn’t one of those workers getting enough credits to worry that the type of ship they’re talking to doesn’t match the type of ship the transponder says it should be.”

  Laana starts walking toward her distant hill. “It’s not the gate agents you need to be worried about. It’s other hunters like me. They’ll be running scanners waiting for a code to ping. And when it does they’ll be on you so fast you won’t know what happened. And there will be so many of them that you won’t be able to breathe. Suddenly, it’s all over.”

  Laana pulls her hair back and ties it into a loose knot. Nixon follows. The suns are up, and the walking is hot.

  “How do you like your speeder?” Nixon asks.

  He’s thinking back to Ibilia and the shipyard where he got to sit inside of an older model speeder. All of the instrumentation was aged and worn. And he doubted the engines could bring as much speed as he imagined they did. But the push of force that pinned him to the seat. The rush of space coming on as he blasted out of the atmosphere. It all still appealed. Not that he wanted to replace EHL. Not that he could if he wanted to. He owed that ship everything. It’s the only reason he made it off of Ibilia in the first place. Still, something that could jump off a planet’s surface and speed you through space … wow.

  “You mean Ruimy?”

  “What’s Ruimy stand for?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like EHL. That’s my ship. I could call her El. I don’t, but if I wanted to. So what does Ruimy stand for?”

  “Doesn’t stand for anything. It’s her name. Like mine’s Laana.”

  “Oh,” Nixon hesitates. “Then I guess you like her well enough to give her a name.”

  Laana slips on the loose rocks under her feet. They are still climbing the hills—above the trees now—and all of the ground here is less than friendly. Laana puts a hand down to catch her fall.

  “She’s everything,” she says, dusting the dirt off her palm. “But I don’t have to tell you how our head can go a little crazy out here when you’re on your own. She’s a good ship. Saved my hide more than once when a bounty’s gone sideways.”

  “Sideways?”

  “Well, yours didn’t go as planned.”

  They come to the top of the hill, and Laana scans everything in front of them. It’s all flat ground. Nixon expected that the other side of these hills would slope gently down, but they don’t. What he’s been looking at aren’t hills but a plateau of sorts.

  Laana points. She sees her ship. She sees Ruimy.

  There’s not a lot to it. Big engines. A little cockpit. Not much room for anything extra. Any paint that was on her sides has worn off, beaten free by space debris and blaster fire. Now she’s just a dull grey. Laana opens the small port on the side and climbs in.

  She throws out a personal bag, and that’s quickly followed by a smaller bag that clangs when it hits the ground. She pops back out and grabs that smaller bag. She opens it and dumps the contents on the ground. It’s a handful of tools. She pushes the pile around until she finds what she’s looking for. She steps to the back of the ship to a panel between the engines and begins undoing the fasteners that hold it closed.

  It’s all wires and unmarked parts inside. None of it makes sense to Nixon, but Laana works with confidence. She pushes her arms deep inside the ship.

  “So you’re probably wondering what’s happening,” she says. She’s talking to the ship. “This is my friend Nixon, and we need to borrow something. Not forever. Just for a bit.”

  Laana’s hands are buried inside the nest of wires, but Nixon can see the muscles in her forearms flexing and moving. She’s working hard and fast. She pulls the freed transponder out from inside the ship.

  “I’m going to leave you here for now. Again, it’s not forever. Just for a bit. But I’ll be back. I promise.”

  It’s just a small, unmarked box. Smaller than Nixon was expecting for something that’s such a critical piece. She hands it to Nixon and puts the tools back in the bag. She grabs her personal bag and throws it over her shoulder.

  Nixon doesn’t want to tell her, but he knows he has to. Still, his desire to avoid a scene overwhelms his need to make sure she understands that they aren’t coming back here. That they can’t. If they leave his transponder here then it’s going to be a magnet for anyone looking for him. It’s going to become a galactic hotspot, and a place he’s going to have to steer well wide of
from here out.

  Gone are his visions of a little place back in those woods where he can sit in peace and quiet and let the whole day wash over him in a wave.

  They walk in silence for a few moments, negotiating their way through the rocky upper part of the hill. When they get to a point in their trip down where the side of the hill is more grass than rocks, Nixon speaks up.

  “Heard you talking to your ship. Told her you’d come back for her. You know you won’t be doing that with me.”

  Laana doesn’t respond, just continues to walk down the hill.