Chapter 4: Bondo

The wind sailed through his short brown hair, little wisps of cloud blowing by him as he flew the mini transport, now free of its cargo, down from the higher bays to the loading dock.

He looked up- the ceiling was made of thick plexiglass, transparent when they set it to receive the rays of whatever sun they needed for the crops they were growing that season. Right now, the yellow sun they were orbiting made the ceiling, a good half-mile above the dirt-floor of the fields, colored blue when it hit the glass and diffused to the thankful rows of agri-grain below.

“Hey, Bondo!"

He looked over to his right and left. Two of his younger brothers were flying back to the docks, too, one on either side of him. They had big smiles on their faces, and Bondo knew what that meant.

He looked at his instruments, measuring the fuel pressure, wind speed and resistance against his current velocity, and checked the scanner to see how his brother’s craft measured up today.

As usual, their ships didn’t measure up very well. Bondo didn’t really understand why they couldn’t see what was so obvious to him: that the speed of a ship depended on a number of factors, all working together in unison, just like how a stalk of grain needed the right sun, light, soil, food and water to work right, so too did a ship to fly its fastest. His brothers only thought it depended on how hard they could push the pedal to the floor.

This didn’t bother Bondo in the least. Being bigger than virtually everyone in his family, he already won every contest of strength or friendly combat against them. And their shortsightedness here only served to give him another area he could defeat them with yet another quiet smile on his face.

He gunned his engine and shot forward. They tried to match his speed, but Bondo always seemed to know what to do to edge ahead of them, even if their little flying trucks had the exact same technical specs. He waited until the best, precise half second and gently pulled the two steering sticks in opposite directions. His ship took a slow spin to the right, then reversed suddenly, flipping over to the left in a move he’d been thinking about pulling for over a week now.

He smiled as he spun upside-down, using his knees placed against the control board to hold him in place (the safety-belts had never been used in living memory by anyone who lived on board), and smiled just a little wider when he heard his brothers yell in mock terror as their ships shuddered in his wake and dodged his own.

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Bondo’s sense of warm, happy contentedness at his victory washed out of his head and heart seconds after he landed.

“Do y’ve any idea how much y’ve cost us?” screeched a voice he’d heard virtually every day growing up on the argo freighter.

The image of his older sister standing over him, screaming at him was one that Bondo had grown up with. Many of his earliest memories of family either started or ended with his sister, a big imposing figure, standing over him and yelling at Bondo.

Bondo had always been big for his age. But it was a long time before he was big enough that his sister didn’t intimidate him. Well, didn’t intimidate him quite so much, anyway. Life on an argo-transport ship left little room for bonding, kindness or other frivolities, and Bondo’s sister and the rest of his family were typical of the families who’d signed on to work on the argo freighter generations ago.

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It wasn’t until he was in his mid-youth years that Bondo realized something:

He was significantly larger than his sister, now.

Three weeks after that, he realized that if she hit him, it didn’t really hurt any more.

So, he obeyed. But when she screamed at him now, he still couldn’t bring himself to yell back. That wasn’t his way. But she’d been head of his work group over him and three of his other siblings for as long as he could remember, be it cleaning up gleanings left by the harvest bots when they were younglings, or hefting large sacks of Rodian grain while one of the loader bot was being repaired.

Over it all, Bondo saw his father watching over them, like one of the good monarchs a traveler had told him stories about years ago, when he was still smaller than his sister. Father was neither mean nor particularly kind, but that never bothered Bondo much. Years of hard work had made him large and strong, and where many had had to sit in a classroom or at the feet of a learning master to grasp their educations, Bondo had lived enough story problems to be as able as most his age in applied mathematics and reading in the common written language.

“What made you think, Bondo, that putting the pile the way you did was a good idea? They tell me you bust open a sack all over everywhere! What made you think it? Answer me, Bondo!”

Bondo looked at his sister. She was by now a good foot shorter than he, and perhaps a hundred pounds lighter, too. The sack of grain in question was one he’d picked up with one hand. It had weighed as much as she did, and he’d dropped it onto the pile of sacks he’d been lifting and arranging on the merchant transport ship he’d just left behind. One sack out of perhaps fifty had burst open, making one of the members of the other ship’s crew scream at Bondo. The crewmember’s anger had intensified when Bondo hadn’t reacted with any visible fear at the tongue-lashing, but instead finished the unload and flown off.

“Cathai,” he said, slowly and with enough resolution to make any who knew him think twice, “I been doin’ this a long time. Sometimes sacks burst open. If y’want me to put ‘em down gentle, I tell you ri’ now, that’s not going to be. Do it y’self if y’want it different.”

He spoke with the dialect that his family had grown to use in the years they’d lived and worked on the Crasna, the freighter their family had called home for generations now. Cathai was only three years older than he was, but acted and believed she was much older. She hated how Bondo and the rest of her family talked, preferring to speak as much as possible like the characters on the vids she liked watching instead.

“Fine, Bondo! I jus’ put you on report today! PawPaw’s gonna hear it ‘bout you!” she yelled again, furiously tapping her finger at the displays on her datapad.

Bondo just looked away. Near the loading docks where his large brothers were loading grain onto the transport, the fields that had produced it stretched out for several hundred yards away. The thick ceiling had been set to transparency to help the crops take advantage of the sun whose core world they were orbiting, and the stars stretched out even farther. Bondo looked further and further out as Cathai kept babbling about cost and profit ratios, making sure her nicer clothes didn’t get dirty as she moved around the other piles of grain and material in a vain effort to get Bondo’s attention and make him afraid of her again.

Bondo kept looking past her, partly because looking at the stars soothed him more and more, partly because he knew it angered his sister no end.

And, partly, because the pretty daughter of the transport clan they’d been doing business with for the last year was watching the whole exchange. For reasons he couldn’t really articulate, Bondo wanted to look unconcerned in front of the girl when Cathai was yelling at him.

And then the girl’s brothers started up.

“Whatcha looking at her like that for, ya big ape?"

Bondo looked around at the source of the voice.

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To Be Continued....