“You dare muddy my kill?” tumbled the first words over the red comm-holo, deep, authoritative, oozing with murderous intent.
The image of the speaker resolved abruptly on the sizzling holograph, shoving their – his – face into my view, and mine into his.
It was a terrifying visage.
The first thing you noticed were the eyes. There were a few too many for a regular human being – a sane, negotiable human being, as far as I knew from my limited experiences from my dirtworld. No, it was not even those little genemodded animals on corpo shows and adbeams that had many pairs of regular eyes but looked odd and strangely tolerable.
This wasn’t tolerable. Nuh-uh. Embedded into the skin upon the left side of this figure’s face were four open slits, all at irregular angles to each other, out of which many eyeballs swiveled and darted about. Some were long and narrow and sharp, as if giving me a dispassionate glare; some were wide and chasmic, as if to judge my presence with an authority of the divine; another that crossed the eyebrow was looking down upon me, the top half of its sclera visible, its iris a sickening hue of a red rotting wound. At the center of these many inhuman eyes were, thankfully, a regular human eye where it should have been; that, and the right half of his face looked alright. Only just.
There were six eyes in total upon the face of this figure, and apart from his pair of human eyes, all seemed capable of moving independently. Only now were they all focused on just one thing – me, Hana Makoto Reiss.
“Forgotten how to squeak?” remarked the figure, a corner of his lips upturning into a smirk. My own face in return must have looked absolutely terrified.
His many eyes blinked once in irregular sequence with a multitude of squelches, narrowing themselves into what could have been a mocking smile. A primal fear churned in my belly – it was painful and revolting to look.
“You have five seconds,” he commented, twirling a remote on his hands. The lance-barrel upon the underside of his cruiser seemed to track his hands.
“w... W – Wait!” I held up my hands. “We don’t want any trouble. We don’t know the half the hells what you’re talking about.”
“Oh?” he said, leaning in closer. It was only then I noticed the rest of his features; tightly swept-back hair of grey, impeccable in presentation; a sharp jaw and face; a suit of blood and white. “But you do,” he continued, inching closer into my frightened face. “Why else would you be 170 light-years out in a place like this, hmm?”
“We were on a job,” I replied, my voice almost catching in my throat.
“Precisely,” he replied. “Your end of the bargain was to drop the cargo and die. NOT try your hands at a rodeo.”
“What?” I asked. Did he know about our job?
“Indeed I do,” he replied, violating my thoughts. “Or am I to believe that Mr. Ramon was careless in instruction? Ah, but of course.”
Ramon? What? How did this person know all this?
“Who are you?” I pitched first this time, gathering my resolve. Something felt off. A corner of my gut convinced me we were set up by more than just Ramon alone.
“Who am I, you inquire?” he slithered, all his eyes darting to fix upon me. “Why, the last name you may ever hear. Voltaire.”
The figure continued.
“Fixer on this side of the Empyrean. Out on a hunt for my well-deserved meal, only to have that meal dirtied by your mudridden fingers.”
Mudridden. It was one of the thousand slurs they used to call those of us who came from dirtworlds.
“And how did I dirty your meal?” I glowered back.
“By fucking with it,” Voltaire replied, saliva spitting from his enunciation. His many grotesque eyes seized wide open. “Do you possess the slightest idea,” he threatened, “how much their scales are worth?”
“Scales?”
“10,000 credits per KILOGRAM. And look what you’ve accomplished,” he spoke with bottled fury, grabbing hold of a crystal chunk from a silver platter carried out by an officer in his cockpit, no, bridge –
“Tainted cloudy like piss,” he scowled, crushing it with his bare hands to let a rain of shards pepper the floor. Blood seeped forth from his palm, but Voltaire seemed to take no notice, because his eyes once again fixed upon my countenance.
“If only you hadn’t deuced your fuelshells into its jaw.”
“Why’s that important?” I retorted, trying to make sense of the whole thing. “‘Cause it means the drake wouldn’t have been frightened? Cause it means the crystal wouldn’t have looked like –”
“Ah!” Voltaire exclaimed, “So you dirtworlders do have uses for a head other than mute decoration! If only you’d used your mudbrain, every inch of its scale across its body would have been pristine enough for the corpos to drool. And look, where have the fuelshells gotten you?”
“It’s –”
“That’s right. They’re intact,” he admonished, three of his eyes focused beyond the comm-holo and probably beyond the viewdome of his bridge. I squinted out into the void black and just about made out the silhouette of three fuel shells, still intact, in the shadow of the star. “They’ve done absolutely nothing but to flush millions of credits down the drain.”
Maine stirred to wakefulness, groaning.
But wait – why was this six-eyed sonofabitch mad at me? If anything, I should be! Because if this guy knew Ramon, then I’m pretty sure –
“You baited us with Ramon, didn’t you?” sputtered Maine, raising his head and straight into the many eyes of the grotesque horror called Voltaire. Equal parts shock and relief washed over my face. Maine’s been listening in, though I didn’t know for how long. “You sent us here as bait.”
“Correct,” Voltaire replied with casual air, as if it was the plainest thing in the world. “And?”
His And? caught whatever we wanted to say in our throats.
“Go on. Speak your mind,” he continued, taking a swig from his spicer, leaning back. All his eyes stared into our souls, twisted like in the midst of cackling laughter.
“You –” I paused, trying to reel in my bubbling disdain, “– are an asshole. A coward for not taking the job yourself, given that shiny-ass cruiser of yours.”
“And sending spacers like us to die in your grand game of chase,” added Maine, as politely as the situation would allow. The main gun of the cruiser was still pointed in our face.
“Calling yourself a spacer? From your looks, you’ve just crawled out of the dirt,” he smirked. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be complaining.”
“5,000 credits for two human lives?” I retorted.
“5,000 credits for millions of credits,” reminded Voltaire, waving his index finger. “My credits. Still juvenile enough to believe in the technoshaman blabbering about human worth?”
“What of it?”
“Explains why you’re in a mudskipper,” he puffed out, slowly shaking his head. The iridescent paintjob of his cruiser seemed to glint in scorn. “Done yet?”
“Done with what?” I snapped back.
“Your last words,” he replied, still as ever. “If you think I’ve been letting you mix words with me without respect for my time, you are rather mistaken. The only reason I am allowing you to do so is out of barest courtesy. You’re going to die,” he answered, commanding a cylindrical glass tube into his hands from an officer standing behind him.
A pair of eyes floated in a suspended solution, making us both recoil in our cockpit seats; nerves were still attached to those eyes, opened wide in horror at what they must’ve seen and sent to its previous owner.
“Do you know whose eyes these are?”
We sat silent.
“Ramon’s, Ramon’s, Mr. Ramon’s,” Voltaire elucidated, rolling the name off his tongue.
I tried to hold back a gasp from escaping. Maine cupped his brows.
“Trusted him, thought him good, only to double-cross me on a job last week. Lost me a valuable client. These eyes are frankly not worth enough to make up for my loss,” Voltaire monologued, throwing the cylinder aside and letting it roll away.
“300 credits for each cornea. Beats having RPCs from corpos jacked into artificial ones and beam you advertisements, that’s why people prefer natural. 1,500 credits for a pair of your lungs, 1,300 credits for your heart, 980 credits for your liver, and 620 credits for each kidney of yours. Each of you – let’s see – are worth 5,620 credits if I harvest you here and now. A thousandth of what it could’ve been for me, but that certainly puts ‘human worth’ into perspective, doesn’t it?”
“Wait, what? No! This isn’t the –” Maine retorted, holding up my hands.
“Isn’t the way, we don’t want to die, adorable pleas. Very adorable. Ready the harvesting chamber,” remarked Voltaire, one of his eyes flicking to a bridge officer next to him. From away, several hanger-bays on the cruiser opened to let out a cohort of shuttles, probably filled with squads of boarding marines.
Terror seized my heart and Maine’s.
“Wait, please – please – we apologize, we apologize, we’re sorry. We’re sorry for messing with your kill and making it go all awry,” I sputtered, racing the words out of my mouth.
“We –” I glanced at Maine, wanting him not to suffer from my own dastardly impetuousness two weeks ago –”I’ll pay back the amount you lost,” I declared, putting my hand over my heart. “I’ll pay it all back. In exchange, let our ship go. Let us go and I’ll make bank and pay you back.”
“A likely story,” commented Voltaire.
The shuttles were approaching closer.
Fuck, I swore, as I pushed and pulled the throttle to no effect. The engines were dead.
Maine leaned in and pleaded. “Fine, we’ll do anything – anything. We can’t pay you back and we can’t say we can because we’re still green but we’ll do anything to your liking. I know we didn’t know any better but we still apologize, that’s gotta mean something!”
“Mean something?” quizzed Voltaire, cocking his head. “You ready to prove it?”
“Damn right! I’ll – I’ll prove it!”
Voltaire raised his left hand. All the shuttles pinging closer on the CRT screen halted in their onerous march.
“Prove... your... apology.... hmm,” pondered Voltaire, enunciating every syllable. His face and numerous devilish eyes crackled over the red comm-holo. “I’d normally ask to take your knife to your pinky finger, and cut it off right now, but that seems too easy, wouldn’t you agree?”
We sat frozen.
“The pirate’s promise. Not much meaning in a lost pinky finger, when you can mod yourself back with a cyber one,” Voltaire replied. “The pain is brief, humiliation short, tsk,” he mused, his eyes darting here and about and grinning all the way. “Being a spacer has its drawbacks. You live detached from the traditions of planetbounds. They are more creative when it comes to crime and punishment, don’t you think? Up here, it’s just spacing or harvest. Ah, there’s also depressurization, but that’s too tame.”
Maine and I glanced at each other.
“Which one of you is more mudridden?” Voltaire ordered.
I cautiously pointed at myself, despising the word.
“Tch, my intuition is never wrong. Well, lady of the dirt, have any good ideas?”
There were many, I thought. Too many to count. Dirtworlds and crownworlds had the most complicated and elaborate methods of punishment and forging fealty. The tamest of them all was to do something called a Quylay, where you would kneel on the ground and bow so deep that your forehead touched the ground numerous times. Oftentimes it was done until your forehead was bloodied to truly demonstrate that you meant what you said or promised to uphold. Done without proper practice, it could easily leave a permanent scar. I myself had only read the practice on a picture book for feudal etiquette. I hated seeing every page of it. But it was tame. Tame enough.
“If there are none, we could proceed as planned,” commented Voltaire, leaning back in his chair. “You have 5 seconds. 5 – 4 - “
Maine looked to me with desperate concern, and nodded. I had to give the answer.
“I have it! I have it. I have it. It’s called Quylay.”
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
“Elaborate.”
I gave Voltaire the briefest and safest description of the practice. He made a slow clap.
“Sacrificing one’s mental dignity instead of the body’s,” he left out a gruff chuckle, audio distorting over the comm-holo and shaking the air.
“Flavorful and interesting to my ears. Perhaps more ranks of fixers should accept such tradition for fealty forged and crime punished. Go on then, demonstrate it for me until I deem it satisfied.”
I slowly got out of the cockpit seat and backed away.
“Some more, so I can see the ground you’ll be meeting.”
I backed away further until I was just at the edge of the narrow corridor.
“That includes you too, boatswain,” Voltaire remarked over the comm-holo, two of his many eyes fixing upon Maine. The harvesting shuttles surrounded us still in view, their beacons beeping, waiting to pounce or withdraw.
Maine got up with effort, clutching his belly, and limped to where I was. The jacket I had wrapped around his torso to stop his bleeding was soaking wet. How long were we talking to this six-eyed freak?
I shot an understandingly glance – a truly apologetic one – to Maine. Just follow along with me, I thought, hoping Maine could read what I was thinking.
“Well?” Voltaire shrugged.
Never in my life did I think I would have to subject myself to the humiliating practice of Quylay. But I was doing it to survive. Maybe everyone was. Perhaps everyone in history had.
I knelt down in sight of Voltaire’s face, far away, and proceeded to bow down to the floor. I didn’t know how hard or fast I should be coming in to meet the ground, so I hit the grated steel floor pretty hard on my first attempt.
Fuck! That hurt. Stars popped into my vision.
Thump! I heard Maine next to me doing the same.
Voltaire let out a sinuous guffaw.
“Again!”
Maine and I stood up, knelt again, and bowed to touch the floor with our foreheads, softer this time.
“Not hard enough as the first one. I want to hear it, understand?” Voltaire admonished.
You son of a bitch.
Maine and I stood up, knelt again, and bowed to touch the floor with our foreheads, harder this time.
Stars popped into my vision again. It felt like I’ve been swung on the head by a bat.
“More.”
Maine and I stood up, knelt again, and bowed to hit the floor with our foreheads, just as hard.
“Again.”
Maine and I stood up, knelt again, and bowed to hit the floor with our foreheads, just as hard.
“MORE!”
Maine and I stood up, knelt again, and bowed to hit the floor with our foreheads, just as hard.
“HARDER! AGAIN!”
Maine and I stood up, knelt again, and bowed to hit the floor with our foreheads, even harder than the last.
Blood began to seep from the wound where the grated flooring had cut into our forehead like a cookie-cutter.
“AGAIN! MORE!”
Maine and I stood up, knelt again, and bowed to hit the floor with our foreheads, digging deeper into the wound. It began excavating flakes of skin and minute bits of flesh.
“HARDER!”
Maine and I stood up, knelt again, and bowed to hit the floor with our foreheads. Blood trickled past my eyebrow and into my eyes. Stars flooded my vision into an ambulance of sirens.
“NOT GOOD ENOUGH! MORE EFFORT! MORE, MORE, MORE!”
Maine and I stood up, knelt again, and bowed to hit the floor with our foreheads.
Maine and I stood up, knelt again, and bowed to hit the floor with our foreheads.
Maine and I stood up, knelt again, and bowed to hit the floor with our foreheads.
Maine and I stood up, knelt again, and bowed to hit the floor...
Maine and I stood up, knelt again...
Maine and I stood...
Maine and I...
Maine... I...
“Stop,” Voltaire commanded. We could barely stand now, let alone make sense of which direction was which. I felt like I sustained a century’s worth of cerebral damage in the span of 5 minutes. The world seemed to be a blur.
Voltaire’s voice crawled past the centrifuge of blurred colors into our ears.
“Not a bad show. Not a bad show, indeed. You have 10 seconds to crawl back.”
We hastily fumbled towards the direction of the comm holo. Maine, dizzy as he was, helped me drag myself into the cockpit seat, and plopped down on the copilot’s chair, wiping away his bloodied forehead with his sleeves, shaking his head wildly. The griddled pattern of the steel flooring had carved into his forehead, and so must’ve been the same for mine. It was definitely going to leave some kind of scar.
Fuck. I thought myself sick, confused, an absolute fool. 5,000 credits for a stress-free gig, my harebrained ass. Why did you believe it, Hana? Why? This is the price you pay when you sign up for things that’re too good to be true!
“Much better than being harvested while you’re conscious and awake, isn’t it?” Voltaire quizzed, his eyes on both of our trembling forms. “Ramon could testify. If he was still here and kicking.”
The sickly image of the garish, eccentric man invaded our imaginations.
“Well, color me impressed. The entertainment you provided was worth my credits in loss. Far short of millions, but enough to cover the 40-years’ worth of a minimum wage salary.” His many eyes blinked and squelched to fix on my face, and that revolting image on the holo-screen wrung out my insides.
I leaned sideways and threw up onto the floor. There wasn’t much out of it, because nutrient paste didn’t leave chunks. Thank the archons it didn’t smell. Ugh. Cough. Maybe it was the only positive point about nutrient paste. I chucked an oiled-rag from under the console to cover it up.
I’m so sorry, Maine, I thought to myself. I’m so sorry for getting you into this mess...
Voltaire smirked ever so minutely. He held up a single hand; the shuttles surrounding us began to withdraw one by one, back into his cruiser.
“I accept your apology.”
He was a monster, but at least he was a monster of his word. Both Maine and I clutched our hearts in relief.
“With amendments to your wrongdoing demonstrated to par,” Voltaire continued, his voice a vomitous melody of mockery, “you have the opportunity to utter your names.”
He was the last person I desired to give him my name. Maine probably was in the exact same boat. Hell, he was! But after whatever just happened, we didn’t want to rouse the sadistic ire of this six-eyed creature.
“Hana Reiss,” I said, omitting my middle name.
“Arcturus Maine.”
“Pedestrian. Show your ranks,” ordered Voltaire.
“...Ranks?” Maine huffed, tying the jacket tighter around his waist. Blood squeezed out of it and spattered onto the seat.
“Your Voidnet hierarchies.”
“...Voidnet?” asked Maine, glancing at my face only to meet the same confusion. “Starnet, you mean?”
“My, my, you are wet behind the ears, but I didn’t expect you still to smell like your mother’s milk. You mean to tell me,” continued Voltaire, lowering his tone to a threatening rumble, “you took on this job without knowing the difference? Is this the calibre of spacers nowadays?”
Maine was thinking of an answer, I knew it. But his thoughts clawed at empty air; at the presence of this man called Voltaire, any and every answer that could possibly be articulated would have ended up sounding wrong.
A sharp ping on the comm-holo skewered our ears.
“Open it,” commanded Voltaire. Fizzling away next to the projection of his predatory face was a small icon in the shape of an envelope.
Don’t, I cautioned Maine, swearing under my breath. “He’s gonna dump a viruspack on our comms. We’re all going to die.”
“If you are of prejudice that I will kill you by unloading a virus onto the miserable wreck you call a ship, be minded that I would have done it far sooner with this lance of mine,” remarked Voltaire, twirling in his hands the thin remote. “Let alone returning those harvesting shuttles. Or would you like me to send them back out?”
Maine swallowed painfully, wrecking his already parched throat. Inklings of sweat intermixed with flakes of blood upon his forehead.
“Last chance. Open it.”
With a trembling finger, Maine cautiously crinkled the little envelope icon on the comm-holo, minutely twisting the space on which it lit.
Immediately, the switchboard on the ship shut off with a crackle. All the lights overhead popped and fizzed off in whittles of smoke, the only thing still lit the panoply of stars in the canopy, and just in front, the comm-holo –
Six-eyed-fuckedy-fuck, I swore in my head, as I eyed thousands of lines of arcane script and programming code write itself out in a litany of sheets. A corner of Voltaire’s mouth twisted up in a minute sneer, all six of his eyes still on our faces.
Maine was frozen in place, and so was I – we instinctively reached for each other’s hand below the console board, but just then -
‘Voidnet synchronization successful. Welcome, Hana Makoto Reiss,’ announced the comm-holo.
Since when did this junk of a ship have a VI installed?
“Since now,” commented Voltaire, seizing our attention in his reins yet again. “That’s courtesy of my ship, which linked your junker to our network.”
Maine and I couldn’t speak – we couldn’t say anything. It seemed Voltaire was practically in our heads.
“Turning the light on yet?” Voltaire continued, leaning back in his chair.
I got up to my shaking feet and punched the switch. Once didn’t work. It was only on the third pound that the dim lights overhead flickered to life. The wires stretched and yawned, protesting its duties. I slapped the wall out of the fixer’s sight. The hell you have to complain about, huh? I muttered, launching a globule of bloodied spit towards the wall.
“Turn on your transponder,” ordered Voltaire.
We reluctantly – and cautiously – pulled the two-armed lever on the panel. A heavy clunk and ping rang from our shuttle and radiated to reaches unknown.
A light ping – different in pitch this time – came from the console in response to ours, accompanied by a brief reading.
‘Ship in proximity has turned on their transponder. ID-tag: UID-unregistered-ss03cbx95. Ship Class: Unknown. Capabilities: Unknown.’
Unknown my ass, I muttered under my breath. That thing one-shot a mythical leviathan with its weapon. The drake didn’t see it coming, but still –
Another ping interrupted both of our thoughts on the comm-holo. Displayed on the screen was an option to – curiously enough – check something called the rank of the other ship’s captain. What rank?
Voltaire took a swig from his spicer. “Go on, run it. See what it does,” he breathed out, tendrils of fume flattening against the frizzled display.
In a little more confidence this time, I pressed ‘confirm’ before Maine did. It opened up another dialogue box – once again asking me for verification. Bold letters wrote themselves out in a cautionary string: ‘The captain of the ship UID-unregistered-ss03cbx95 may turn hostile to this action. Do you wish to proceed?’
Voltaire cocked his head ever so little.
This freaking guy. Beneath that screen of utter, murderous calm, I was dead sure he was laughing on the inside at our little weaseled-faces.
I pressed the confirmation button a second time, and Voltaire’s face – a forward shot, quite a handsome one, in fact – materialized on the sidebox, accompanied by his obvious name and credentials. As it did so, one of Voltaire’s eyes flicked minutely to a portion of his commanding bridge, returning just as fast to us.
Before more details could write itself, the words OVERWHELMING pasted itself in red capitals immediately below his photograph. A small typeface threw out a chuffed label. It read Relative Rank Index.
“What’s it mean?” I whispered hurriedly to Maine. Maine forced his frozen fingers to bring up an additional list of details below those red letters.
“It says we’re... ‘Toothless’?”
“What?”
“We are ranked ‘Toothless’.”
“And what is –” I paused, wondering whether our words would get us killed. “And what’s his?”
“He’s ranked as... ‘Rex Orca’.”
What the hell does that mean, I wanted to say, but I knew it would probably vaporize us. “I’m guessing that’s... abominably high?”
“That’s eight ranks above us,” replied Maine in a hushed breath, “I mean...” he huffed, clutching his sides, flicking a glance at Voltaire, “At least, according to this table –”
Voltaire let out a chuckle, spinning his remote. “Read it again.”
Maine drew in closer and counted the row on the table with his finger, lest our ship get blasted to smithereens.
“Nine ranks above us.”
Voltaire gave a crooked smile. “Correct.”
I had no idea what those ranks meant – and neither did Maine. But somehow, in that brief moment, I realized I that it was the providence of whatever cosmic deities existed that we were still alive against this monster called Voltaire. The absolute difference in the level of clout hung over both of us like a heavy shadow; in that light, Quylay didn’t seem so bad in retrospect.
“Fair sea back home,” remarked Voltaire, raising his glass in a mocking toast, turning in his chair, “if you can make it in that junk of yours.”
He motioned his bridge officers orders of an unknown capacity; Voltaire’s sleek, predatory cruiser blazed a plume of cyan upon its rear, vibrating our little shuttle and beginning to kick space behind in its wake.
The comm-holo shut off from his end with only static as its remains. Our exhausted heads plopped onto the consoles in green.
We survived, but only just. Our fuel-stores were almost empty; the drive-core status was punctuated in red. The bottom compartment of our ship probably looked like Swiss cheese, and we were pretty sure one of our engines was broken for good. We were a lone, grey wreck in the middle of nowhere, stranded without money, our confidence and hope for the future absolutely obliterated by things beyond our control.
Voltaire’s aquiline cruiser swerved towards the direction of the core worlds, biding its time, churning out a long plume of diamond-fractaled cyan in its gaining pace. With a flash of light, and a muted zap, it cleaved its way through the fabric of space, and vanished. The ripple from the Witchspace jump slapped our derelict shuttle hard, tumbling us away.
We barely used the attitude thrusters to scramble it to a halt. We couldn’t get too far from those fuel shells – we needed those to get back, if we even could.
Archondamned son of a bitch! I seethed, clawing the air. “Six fucking eyes and just has to jump a hair away! At least jump somewhere else, YOU FUCK!”
I pumped the air in frustration. “Anyway,” I continued, clutching my forehead, immediately coming to and opening a drawer of bandages, “how’s the bleeding? You holding up?”
“Just fine,” he grimaced, unwrapping the blood-soaked jacket from his waist and throwing them aside. “You got another?”
“Here.”
“Thanks.”
“Take some for your forehead, too,” I scrambled, opening a can of disinfecting alcohol and dousing my forehead with it, handing it to Maine.
“Ah, shit, it stings like hell...” he swore, grimacing.
Neither of us spoke for a long while. I steadied Maine’s heaving breaths with whatever was left of the recycled water, quenching his parched throat; he leaned on me, heaving exhausted breaths, as he wrapped the diminishing cloth around his abdomen, and pressed it hard.
We collapsed both onto the grime-lathered floor, kicking away issues of shrapnel littered at our feet.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah...”
“...He’s like, gone, right?”
“What?” I asked, craning my head.
“Six-eyes. That guy’s ship is gone for real?”
“What do you mean? We ju’saw the bastard show off.”
“Just checkin’. Can you switch the comm-holo off – with Voidnet or whatever – cough – the hell he unloaded?”
“Yeah,” I sighed, hazy with hunger and exhaustion. I banged the holobutton off, and was about to –
“Nonono – don’t turn the arm off,” said Maine, struggling to his feet. I helped him up – damn, he was heavy.
Maine plopped onto the cockpit seat, and slowly grasped his fingers around the joystick. It was only then I noticed it was under the console, and not next to it where it could have been under the purview of Voltaire’s six eyes.
Slowly, he pulled the joystick to bring up the crane-arm.
“Ain’t it retracted?” I remarked.
“Oh, of course not,” said Maine, a look of assurance in his eyes. I furrowed my brow – only to have it vanish as the crane-arm lifted beyond the canopy.
In its grip was a small trove of adamantine shards, glimmering in the dark with the faint light from the red dwarf.
It was crystal-clear, white as snow.
“Are they –”
“Yup.”
“How?” I gasped, incredulous. “I thought he complained everything was tainted –”
“Nah, not this one,” answered Maine, coughing. “He’s – hah – he’s got eyes, but he surely doesn’t use them.”
“But –”
“Remember how you talked to Voltaire first?”
“...Yeah?”
“You thought I was knocked out?”
“Yeah?”
“Truth be told, I woke up just as he was complaining about the shards. I was about to put my head up when I saw the arm control camera was on. The underbelly one.”
Maine continued, tapping on the little CRT screen below the console.
“Saw the shards. They were glimmering white, not piss-colored.” He grinned.
“But how did you’ve the nerve to pick it up?”
“You call when we were both dumbstruck by that Voidnet thing or whatever? ‘Cause we thought it was a virus?”
“Mmmhmm?”
“That’s when I nabbed those shards from our underbelly. He was sorta above us,” he paused, coughing out some more bloodied phlegm, “ – so he couldn’t have seen the arm. Even if his sensors read our ship was poking something out, like a winch, arm – he was too focused on getting his smug satisfaction seeing our faces to notice otherwise. That’s the thing. All his eyes show me where he’s a-lookin’.”
“Oh, Maine!” I exclaimed, trying to hold back a tide of elation bubbling up in my heart.
“That six-eyed bastard,” Maine chuckled, wincing in pain to clutch his belly. “Aw, damn. Anyways –” he continued, “he thought he got us like scared mice between his fingers. But it’s awfully easy to steal something when you’re in someone’s hands,” he explained, wiping away the blood upon his lips. “I know his type. Arrogant, narcissistic, sadistic. Met a bun’cha those types in my midworld,” he carried on, gasping for breath.
“Wait, wait, you don’t have to say it all in one go. I’m here.”
“Cough – thanks,” he said, taking a swig from a flask. “You know what those types love the most?”
“What?”
“When people play by their rules. When people fear them. When people are awestruck. That’s when those self-centered bunches let their guard down, and that’s when you can rob from under them, or rip a nail by twisting their fingers. It’s all just business,” Maine casually remarked, stretching his back and immediately recoiling from the pain.
“I can’t believe you!” I cried and laughed, slapping his back. “You genius!”
“Ow – ow – ow – ow! Holy shit, I’ve barely stopped bleeding, you hear?”
“Oh shit! Sorry, sorry...”
“Not a genius, more a maniac. Maniac Maine,” he held his waist, winking rather painfully.
“Now, let’s see the haul...” he continued, dancing his fingers across a litany of buttons. The little green CRT-screen spit out a figure.
“12.7 kilograms.”
“And that’s –”
“127,000 credits.”