Art feels something he hasn't felt in years: True fear. He stares down the container, all right angles and utility divots for ease of transport through the rigors of space, and ponders the cosmic level of shit he will be in if it goes off in a New-New Mexicoish Spaceport. He imagines his face being obliterated atom-by-atom, each particle detaching from its neighbor, probably waving goodbye politely. In his mind, he sees the ships docked adjacent to the Celestial Horizon snap like twigs, then watches those two halves snap like smaller half-twigs, and then *those* two halves... well there's a tremendous amount of snapping, I can tell you that.
Explosives are one thing. Really Illegal Explosives (RIEs, in the parlance of space law enforcement) are another can of Zarathaxian worms entirely.
Art shakes it off. Paranoia and vivid imaginings of large-scale demise are known after effects of most dream parasites, and also of hangovers. The ship may not be going anywhere, but Art knows it's time to get moving.
Old man Neuman bends over the crate, sucking in air through his teeth. "Would you stop touching that?" suggests Art. "We don't want to trigger a detonation."
Neuman, seeing the wisdom in this, takes a step back and puts his hands in his pockets. "The scanner team is on the way. They'll find out what kind of RIEs are in your container." He lets out a long breath. "I've apprised them of the situation and enacted NPP."
"What's NPP?"
"No-Poke Protocol. Strictly hands-off, zero-contact scans," says Neuman. "Like you said. We don't want this thing going off in a spaceport at the height of tourist season."
"Good thinking, Ron."
"However," continues Neuman, "there are several sub-varieties of Really Illegal Explosives with RSDs, or Really Sensitive Detonators, which could be triggered by the energies used to scan them."
"Okay, well," says Art, "maybe we shouldn't do it?"
Ron shrugs. "It's probably fine."
Art smacks his lips--he's dryer than New-New Mexico's Ultrablanco Dune Sea. He still needs to hydrate, but at least that aspirin is kicking in. The thought of spaceport food makes his stomache do zero-g somersaults, but he thinks he can keep water down. It's time to get to the bottom of this.
"Listen up. Sam, with me. Mark, I want you to take the BZ parasite to the nearest pet store and run some tests on it."
Mark rubs his thick beard and twinkles his eyes as bluely as possible in the sallow luminescence of the docking range. "What kind of tests, Skipper?"
"Any kind of test," says Art. "DNA, PSAT, IQ, Bechdel, reflexes. Anything that might give us hard evidence around Rueben's involvement."
"Aye-aye, Cap'n."
"Want me to isolate and question the crew, Captain?" asks Barb.
Art shakes his head, sending vertiginous waves through his central nervous system. "Negative. I've got a higher priority for you. You remember how you're very flexible?"
"Superhumanly so, Skipper," said Barb. "It's kind of my whole deal. Test tube baby. Designed for space assassinations. Highly classified stuff, sir."
"Well, I need you to retrieve my RIEDK--"
"The Really Illegal Explosive Defusal Kit?"
Art snaps his fingers. "You got it. It's in Carbo Bay 3, which took some damage while we were in hyperspace. I have to assume someone tampered with our Nav Computer routing and made us clip a comet or something. Probably Rueben, too, but we need to know more."
"We do know more," said Sam, her fists on her hips. "You did that while you were drunk."
"What?" says Art.
"You were three thrusters to the wind, and you pushed Helmsman Seltzer out of his chair on the bridge. You started slamming your drunk hands down on the keypads and wiggling the control stick, yelling 'I'M DRIVING THE SPACE CAR! LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME I'M THE CAPTAIN NOW HAHA ARE WE THERE YET ARE WE THERE YET' and you took us right through several consecutive asteroid fields." Sam shivers at the memory. "Longest four minutes and thirty-two seconds of my life, sir."
"Well," says Art, "we may never know what happened. Dahl, you are to rely on your extremely cartilaginous body to squeeze through that damaged cargo bay and get my kit."
"Roger that," says Barb.
He turns to Jackson. "Gear up, Jackson. We're headed to New-New Mexico proper. Rueben would never leave this to chance, and I'm willing to wager all the star credits tucked into my secret underwear pocket that he has assets on this very planet."
"How much is that, sir?" asks Sam.
"Say again?"
"How many star credits are in your secret underwear pocket?"
Art narrows his eyes, his hand slowly moving towards the secret knife he keeps, quite uncomfortably, in his secret underwear pocket. "How the galactic FUCK did you know about my secret underwear pocket?"
----------------------------------------
Neuman is a by-the-numbers guy and pushes back on their vacating the scene of the Really Illegal Crime (RIC), but Art distracts him with a five-dimensional sudoku. Art and Sam slip out as Neuman sinks into an uninterruptible, impenetrable, impermeable, inviolable flow state out of which no by-the-numbers guy can ever be retrieved until he reaches the solution to the puzzle.
They take the space elevator to Nova Santa Fe (Prime), the capital of New-New Mexico. The ride down is just long enough to be awkward, and Art coughs exactly once by way of conversation. Sam ignores him and listens to the muzak version of The Klingoness from Ipanema.
“First Floor,” chimes the space elevator’s digital voice, “Deserts, barren wastelands, tourist attractions. Visitors are encouraged to pick up an actual, physical map or pamphlet at the Visitor’s Center. Remember that all class VII weaponry and schedule omicron mind altering substances are considered Really Illegal and will be confiscated by emotionless security bots. Please enjoy your stay on New-New Mexico!”
The space elevator’s doors clatter open, and with the strangest feeling of deja vu, Art notices that they lack that little piston thingamajig that makes doors close slower.
The desert paradise of New-New Mexico unfurls before him. Moistureless winds scour oceans of powdered gypsum, revealing the bleached and desiccated skulls of dumb-dumb tourists who wanted to take the “New-New Mexico Challenge” for their Space TikTok feeds. (It involves going out into the NNM countryside for sixty seconds without a hydro-protection suit.) Sulphurous clouds the color of chupacabrax bile billow in the lower atmosphere. Art is really, really glad to be secure inside the reinforced hypercanvas tube connecting the space elevator to the Welcome Complex that houses the Nova Santa Fe (Prime) Visitor’s Center.
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Welcome to Nova Santa Fe (Prime), reads the welcome sign in the tube, scrolling through several dozen languages, lingua francas, space pirate creoles, and even old school morse code which is still in use by some hobbyists and quirky alien species such as the Neeeettteeeeteets. 🤷♂️
“Shouldn’t it be Visitors’ Center?” asks Art as they trudge through the hypercanvas connector to the Welcome Complex. The plastic windows flap with every step they take, suspended a couple forty feet above the deadly planet surface.
“What?”
“Like, ‘visitors,’ plural, then the apostrophe. Unless they’re only expecting one visitor. I think that would be more grammatically appropriate, right?”
“I think you might be suffering some gnarly side-effects of the Barium Zarathaxis parasite,” says Sam. “Or else you’re still a little intoxicated. Your BAC was asymptotically approaching infinity this morning, Captain.”
“That sounds like a lot,” Art appraises.
“When I say you were drunk last night, I mean you were Drunk and Drunk was You. You were the whiskey singularity. Nothing Drunk existed that was not you; you were all of it. The essence of plastered-ness. The platonic ideal of shitfacedness. The purest alchemical–”
“Get your head in the game, Jackson,” says Art. They reach the end of the connector tube and the sterile recycled air of the Welcome Complex washes over them. Sam’s eyes dart to and fro, scanning for threats. “And keep it quiet. We know Rueben’s got people here. And we also know this place is lousy with space pirates. It’s Pirate City.”
“With all due respect, sir,” says Sam. “This is Nova Santa Fe (Prime) on New-New Mexico.”
“It’s a figure of speech, Jackson–forget it. The point is: This is the busiest stop on the Metasilk Road. There are plenty of unsavory elements on this world. Sweet, sour, umami, you name it.”
“Umami, sir?”
“The fifth taste?” Art expounds. “Y’know, the flavor experienced through taste receptors that typically respond to glutamates and nucleotides? Widely present in meath broths and fermented products?” Sam looks increasingly concerned, which is when sober Art knows it’s time to change the subject. “It’s not important. I mean it is in culinary schools, just not to us, right now. Just keep in mind that more Really Illegal goods change hands in Nova Santa Fe (Prime) in a solar cycle than you can shake a stick at.”
“Damn,” says Sam, quietly. “This place must be crawling with crime, because I was the Scutus-Centaurus Galactic Arm stick-shaking champ of ‘08.”
“I know,” Art replies, clapping her on the shoulder. “It’s why I recruited you. You’re incredibly talented at something completely pointless, and therefore not a threat to my position as leader and subsequently my ego.”
“So let’s keep a low profile here, huh?”
“You got it, Skip,” says Sam. “So what are we doing, seeing the sights?”
“No,” says Art. “We need to put our ear to the ground and find out who Rueben is working with. What’s his Endgame? Some kind of Infinity War?”
“What?” Sam starts to ask, but they reach the welcome desk and the welcome desk bot bows courteously, interrupting her.
“Welcome to Nova Santa Fe (Prime)!” it exclaims. In the opening nanoseconds, the dark and blank projector screen of its head flips through a couple dozen different faces, scrubbing through a databank of relatable countenances in order to ingratiate itself to its organic visitors. The blue holo-light flickers and lands on a grotesque alien head that looks like a knot of dripping plasma eels strangling and/or mating. Seeing the look on their faces, it flips over to a human face, to their visible relief. “This unit’s apologies. This unit’s External Visage Aligner is in need of fine tuning. Is this your first time on New-New Mexico?”
“Me? Hell no,” says Art. Then he remembers that he must stay undercover. “Yes. Absolutely. I’m F…Frederick… Art…son. Frederick Artson. My friends call me ‘Fart.’ They’re real knuckleheads. Lot of bathroom humor with those guys. I, personally, am not a fan.”
“Are you here for business or pleasure?” asks the welcome bot. Then it puts the palm of its manipulator to the side of its holographic mouth and says, “Or crime? Haha! Just kidding. Unless…”
Art then forgets that he must stay undercover. “Okay, but for real? It is crime-related. We didn’t DO the crime, the crime was done to us. Let’s be clear on that. Somebody put Really Illegal Explosives on my highly legal spaceship without my knowledge, and now we’re trying to figure out who. Do you know? Any crime guys around here?”
A muscular humanoid in the nearby duty-free gift shop stealthily lowers the magazine he is reading–Space Crime Enthusiast, the April 4818 edition–and fixes his eyes on the two. Sam fixes her eyes on the humanoid. He’s wearing a backwards hat, which absolutely screams “crime” in a figurative sense–although they do canonically make screaming hats in the extended lore of this fiction. Check the wiki for more on that.
“And how long will you be staying?”
“Hang on,” says Art. Any memory of his cover story has gone far, far away. He raises a finger to his ear. “I’m getting a call. Hello? This is Captain Art Speitz of the Celestial Horizon. Go ahead for me, Art Speitz.”
“Ca-tain?” comes Zespot’s voice, but it’s staticky. “Tha- -ou, sir? -an you re-d me?”
“Mark? It’s me, but I’m not a ‘ca-tain,’ I’m a ‘captain.’ Do you understand that? We’ve been over this a million times. Cap. Tain.”
“Sir, -ou’re g-nna want to see this. I’m -e’re at the pet st-re run-ing the tests -ou ord-red.”
“Tests? Yeah? Wait, if you are already planetside, why weren’t you in the space elevator with us?”
There is a long pause on the communicator. “S-unds like - plot hole to me, c-ptain,” says Mark.
“Okay, give me your analysis, Zespot.”
“Ru-ben- -ingerprints ar- all -ver this th-ng, sir. I mea- literal finger-rints. It’s filmy and d-sgusting, -aptain.”
Sam’s eyes narrow at a rate correlated exactly to the magazine the heavy in the duty-free gift shop is lowering his magazine. She is becoming overtly suspiciouser by the second.
“S-r, I th-nk we cou-d be i- some deep sh-t here,” comes Mark’s voice again. “W-tch y-ur back, Captai- AaAaaAAA-uuu-ghugh-gh!”
“What?” says Art into the communicator. He speaks loudly in that way that people always do when they’re talking into phones, I mean communicators. Unnecessarily loud. “It sounded like you said ‘AaAaaAAA-uuu-ghugh-gh’ but there were some breakages. Did you mean ‘AaAaaAAAguuuaghughhgh’? Like, ‘AaAaaAAAguuuaghughhgh, I’m being stabbed’?”
The only sound coming from the communicator at this point is a gravelly, crumbly, rasping, abrasive, sabulous, gurgling–a curdling, warbling, zarbling, trickling, frickling, glottal sound.
And it doesn’t sound good.
“Zespot!” shouts Art.
The heavy drops the magazine fluttering to the ground, and makes a run for it. Sam bolts after him, doing a sick slide over a currency exchanger machine, straight out of a buddy cop show.
“Jackson!” shouts Art, but she is halfway across the Visitor’s/Visitors’ Center. The heavy begins pushing over racks of books–light spacecraft reads, like the new Nicholas Sparks clone romance and the seventy-third entry in the 5,0003 Shades of Grey, which is a very smutty fan fiction of a fan fiction of a fan fiction, but has some merit. He also knocks over duty-free bottles of recreational space-alcohol, big ol’ honkin’ space-tubs of New-New Mexico’s finest tequilas. This has the effect of littering the spacious space-floor with shards of space-glass, foaming space-añejo and those space-faring space-scorpions so popular in the space-tequila of New-New Mexico, making all that otherwise open space impossible to cross.
Well, this is just great, thinks Art. Mark is probably dead. Sam is probably going to step on a space-scorpion and die. And who knows, maybe Barb will be crushed trying to flex her way through the banged-up bulkhead of the Celestial Horizon.
Art imagines Rueben’s laughing face. “Ha ha ha, Art!” the imagined Rueben says. “Ha ha ha ha! Oh man! Lol!”
Sure, he knows he is in a pickle. But is Art Steitz, famed (debatable) space captain going to sit back and let his villainous brother laugh at him, literally or otherwise?
Hell to the no. Art looks around to see if anyone is looking. They are. He’s practically the center of whole Welcome Complex’s attention. Oh well. He reaches into the secret hidden pocket of his underwear and pulls out his secret weapon. Not in a gross way. Or, maybe!