Ett heard it before he saw it. The sleek spaceship whistled a song of doom as it hurled red and angry towards the earth, its nose an arrow notched to destroy itself and anything in its path. Tongues of fire sprayed from the propulsion jets and left thick black streamers in its wake that hung suspended in the windless sky. The farmer crouched with open mouth as the distressed ship blew past his small field of valatian wheat and disappeared behind the tall forest trees not more than 25 miles from his homestead.

Even from that distance, sounds of the crash met his ears, but it wasn’t until the trees burst into flaming flag posts that he was shaken from his paralyzed shock.

Dropping his irreplaceable tools to the ground, he rushed toward the corrugated tin barn adjacent to the field, trampling ripening wheat without care. “Lily. Delya,” he yelled as he flung wide the barn door. “Did you see that? Lily? Quick. We have to go.”

Excitement ran through him. He recognized good fortune when he saw it. That was a newer model star jumper. His mind calculated the kilos of metalik he could salvage, and the reams of copper and titanium wire the walls would hold.

Electronics, mechanical systems, furnishings. Just a single command chair, if in decent shape, could pay their tax for a two whole cycles.

The cargo. Ett’s mind ran wild calculating the riches.

A thought too blessed to be true occurred to him. “The burrilion crystal may still be intact,” he whispered with disbelieving hope. The dream of retiring from the slaving work of farming F-moon entered his head – a city home, on Erdos, maybe, and enough money to start a proper business. An intact burrilion fusion crystal strong enough to power a spaceship would buy him a new life.

His breath caught in his throat as a forbidden desire occurred to him. A new, young wife. Sons. So tangible was his yearning that his eyes jerked to the open doorway to verify his disloyal fantasy had not been observed, convinced the guilty truth was written plain on his face.

Hands shaking with adrenaline, he started the compacted hover hauler, leaving it to regulate while he grabbed work gloves and the electron cutter they would need to size the metalik into manageable pieces. Honking the horn the whole way, he piloted the short distance to the yard where his wife and daughter stood with hands shading squinting eyes, their focus split between the distant burning trees and his loud approach.

The hauler hovered feet above the ground, too high for the women to climb up into the mini cab. Ett set down in a cloud of green dust. Swatting the air, Lily stepped forward to peer through the hole where the passenger window had once been. Her work worn body was permanently hunched as if in constant battle against a strong wind to stay upright, and her once pretty face was a diary of hard times.

Loud, so he could hear her over the engine whine, she asked “What happened?” Worry tensed her voice, more so than usual. Miserable experience had proved nothing both new and good ever happened in the outback of F-moon.

“I’ll tell you on the way. Get in,” he barked. Time was money. Everyone within 200 miles would have seen the crash. Others would come salvage if they could. All of them. First got best, if they managed to survive the later arrivals.

Lily moved back as Delya pushed in. “On the way where? There?” Lily nodded towards the flaming trees, face confused. Jerking her thumb at the small clapboard house, “Dinner’s almost ready.”

“It’ll keep. Get in now.”

“How long will we be gone?” Their dinner was cooking on the dilapidated wood burning stove Ett had scavenged from an abandoned homestead. The fire box door was missing, and the resinous local wood sparked embers out the yawning hole. Ett had done what he could to make it safer, but if they were leaving for any length of time, the fire had to be banked and dampened.

“Lily,” his voice sharp, stabbing.

She wrung her hands. “But I need to…”

“Now,” Ett bellowed, his anxious face resettling into its usual scowl, eyes spitting.

Lily glanced from him to the house. Ett was a hard man. Pioneering the outer moon of Erot 5 demanded it. He didn’t have patience for disobeying women. Ever.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Delya, having never developed a single rebellious bone in her body, opened the rusted door, clambered up into the cab, and scooted across the narrow bench seat to sit close to her father as soon as he said, “get in”.

But Lily hesitated. She’d had plenty of rebel bones in her when she married the handsome F-moon farmer, and two decades of holy matrimony with him and his fists had reset every single one. So, she wasn’t being rebellious or disobedient when she didn’t follow Delya in. Lily just wouldn’t risk a fire to avoid a blackened eye. Fires cause longer-lasting misery than fists.

“Sorry. Got to tend the stove first,” she called over her shoulder as she hurried inside, not waiting for his reaction.

But it was there. Like clockwork. Like a rainbow after a summer storm, except the only rainbows Ett ever strew were the yellow, green and purple hues of battered skin. Ett death-gripped the steering wheel and let out a string of loud curses. In anticipation of her mother dutifully following her into the cab, Delya had pressed shoulder to shoulder with her now fuming father, an unsafe place neither lady would choose to be. Moving away would draw his attention to her, so she shrunk into herself instead, hoping to be smaller and less noticeable.

Lily came rushing back and squeezed in next to her daughter on the lumpy bench designed to fit two. She slammed the door shut hard enough for the latch to catch, bruising her squashed thigh in the process.

Ett gunned the engine and the hauler rose in a swirl of dust, jolting forward. He steered out of the yard before shooting Lily a baleful eye, “Must have wax in your ears, woman. I’ll knock it loose for you.” Lily winced and Delya kept her lips buttoned against the questions buzzing on her tongue.

Ett knew tending the stove had been the right decision, that goes without saying. A bird in hand and all. But it didn’t matter. Ett couldn’t allow any challenge to his authority, no matter how small. Or right. Today’s defiance had caused no immediate harm, maybe even prevented it, but such behavior, if left unchecked, may encourage defiance tomorrow which costs one of them an arm or worse. Life in the outback was unforgiving. The right decision, done without permission, was wrong in his book. Period. Ett ran a fiefdom not a democracy. He was king and warden, quick to put his boot to ass. But he was a serf, too. Whatever was required. Responsibilities laid like a ton-weight mantle on his sloped shoulders.

The hauler flew over the dirt and shrubs at top speed, which wasn’t all that fast. Powered by an antiquated micro reactor and framed from heavy steel and welds, it was an old-world relic produced long before the nearly indestructible lite-weight polymer known as metalik became commercially available. Lumbering and rusted, the extendable flatbed would be their saving grace with its 2-ton cargo allowance.

The silence in the cab was tense but was not altogether unlike the silence at their breakfast, lunch, and dinner table. Or the silence when they chored together or sat under the lean-to on evenings too hot and humid for indoors. They were three people living in two rooms on a subsistence farm more rural than rural generally means. They’d had 19 years of silences together.

Delya, who was as dull witted as she was plain, had been birthed, weaned, and raised on uncompanionable silence, but that didn’t stop her from asking, “What happened? Why’re we going toward the fire?”

Figuring he had reestablished the hierarchy, Ett let loose with the life changing news. “Our ship has come in.” Ett smirked with satisfaction at his choice of words.

It’s true Ett didn’t talk much to Lily or Delya. There wasn’t much to discuss other than the basics - do this, go there, stop that. Ett made all the family’s decisions, which was usually no hard task since their situation offered few real choices. What was left to talk about? Were they going to gossip about the birds in the trees? Or rhapsodize about the sunset that looked unremarkably similar to the 3000 sunsets before it?

But deep in Ett’s heart, lying stunted like a seed in winter, was a passion for words. It was a remnant of his former self, of the intellectual he had fancied himself to be before bad decisions and worse luck had exiled him to the hellish terra of F-moon and gifted him a crusted over wife and a worthless daughter.

“A star jumper crashed. A new one,” he filled in with a grin.

“Crashed? And I missed it?” Delya shrilled, her low forehead furrowed in pique, angry she had missed the biggest thing to happen in her whole life. Not five minutes before she had been outside tending the vegetable patch, but her mother called her in to help with dinner. Delya side-eyed Lily a cup of bitter and continued with a pronounced pout, “Well, it’s over now. Why’re we rushing? You think someone’s alive?”

Ett grunted, a sour twist in his stomach. The possibility of survivors hadn’t crossed his mind. He had been too busy budgeting his future wealth. He shrugged. Survival was unlikely, in any case. “We’re going for the salvage. If anyone lived, they’ll be wishing they were dead.” The last thought was comforting. He didn’t like to think of himself as a cold-blooded person who would see an accident and immediately think about the money to be made. In his mind, he was a good man, a hero, even. A nose-to-the-grindstone type hero who kept the farm producing and his family alive.

Across the tight bench, Lily stared unseeing out the dirty windshield digesting the news. Then, like a light bulb coming on, her eyes refocused and she started to laugh, steepled hands pressing against her nose. “Fates be praised. I don’t want to count our gorcs before they hatch, but this could be the best thing that’s ever happened to us.”

Lily leaned forward and looked over at Ett. He smirked back. They both nodded, excited determination in their eyes.

This was their chance.