Morded is right in that this is, ultimately, my fault. But I’ve won every election the past two decades and he can’t make me call an early one now.”
“Can’t he?”
“I surely hope not.”
----
“What do you mean I’m the captain? Says who, exactly?”
“Dallas,” Dareth said, leaning in and whispering, “I’ll explain how it works in just a second. For now, pretend you’re happy, like them. You unnerstand?”
Dallas nodded his head, and looked around at the still cheering crew, and did his best to smile while the cleanbots dragged away the former Captain’s ponderous corpse and busily scrubbed the blood from the floor.
“Well, Captain Morgan,” said the crew member who’d spoken earlier, his blond braided beard bobbing in the dim bridgelight, “Do you have an official order to give?”
Dallas looked around at the men who had suddenly fallen silent.
“Ah, Captain,” said Gareth, nodding and smiling, “would you, ah, like me to relay the order you gave to me just now?”
Dallas got it. “Yes; yes of course, Gareth!”
“Gentlemen,” Gareth said, “Your Captain just made me first mate, and the rest of you have shore leave for the next two days!”
All but one man on the bridge cheered. “The previous holder of my office gets a firing bonus of a hundred Tee-Dees, fully usable as currency here at the station!”
“Well, all right!” cheered the last man. Everyone laughed again.
“Gentlemen, all of you receive fifty See-Yous as a bonus for being so welcoming to the new captain! Enjoy! But any man not at his post in forty-eight hours, ready to undock and head for the core, wil be fired without any word at all. Savvy?”
“Savvy!” yelled all the men as one, whopping and cheering as they piled towards the doorway, slapping Dallas on the shoulders as they passed him. Dallas smiled, nodded, and wished them all well as they left.
After they all left and the auto-door slid shut, Dallas’ smile faded and he turned to face Gareth. “What in the nine-hells just happened?” he yelled.
“You just took a life, Dallas. It was in self-defense, but that usually doesn’t matter.”
Dallas, suddenly aware, slowly sat down on the edge of the dias, almost exactly where the previous captain had been standing. “I- I didn’t mean to, Gareth.”
“Of course not. It’s really not your fault, Dallas. I said that. He was about as dumb as they come, moving on someone holding a lit sword the way he did. Maybe he had a death wish- who knows? He’s gone now, though, and you’re still here, likely up to your eyeballs in debt and with a short way to figure out how to pay it off.”
“But don’t his debts die with him?”
“Nope. The law’s different out here on the rim; kill a man out here, you assume his responsibilities. He’s not nothing but a shack to his name on some forest moon? It’s yours. He owes some gangster a million creds for botching the last smuggling run? That’s yours, too. He had a wife and fourteen kids to feed? Congratulations, daddy. You’ve got them until the youngest one walks out the door.”
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“Doesn’t that cause a lot of problems?”
“Not when it works. It also makes a lot of men think twice before they get into bar fights. Or try to take some inexperienced kid’s laser sword from him.”
Dallas paused, staring at the spot where the Captain had fallen.
“This is very, very odd,” Dallas said.
“I know, Dallas.”
“No really- I feel like I should be upset, or falling apart or something.”
“You’re in shock. It happens. It’ll hit you later, when you’re on your own.”
“What’s the best thing now, then, Gareth?”
“Distract yourself. First rule of being a captain: Cry on your own time. Never let the crew see you vulnerable, upset, or visibly incapable. Wanna go get your first legal drink of alcohol?”
#
The docking bay door to the space station opened. Later, Dallas would liken it to a thousand-year old vid a tutor had shown him of a person walking into a place the ancients had called a shopping mall. Where the docking bay walls had been covered with who-knew-how-many decades of rust, grime and other refuse, the ‘mall’ in the station was utterly pristine by comparison. Terraced levels of tan stone seemed to shine with people all traveling at the own paces to destinations unknown.
“No plants, though…” Dallas said absentmindedly as they stepped through the doorway.
“What?” Dareth asked. Unlike Dallas who was gawking at everything around him, Gareth seemed completely at home here, with nothing surprising him.
“In the pictures and the ancient vids- the…Americans, when they had places like this; there were plants everywhere. Made people feel comfortable, more like staying around. Spending money.”
Dallas’ wide eyes surveyed everything around him. Rivers of humanity flowed along the wide walkway in front of him, and on the pathways above. Before this, the closest he’d seen to something like this was the marketplace in New Avalon back home. But the stalls, small trucks and other venues were nothing compared to this! The ceiling, too, was so high it looked like a white sky above them. Stone chairs and the occasional statue dotted the walkways around them, and tan stone made up the floors and walls. Stores lined up beside one another, jostling for room as hawkers stood out front calling and trying to gain the attention and money of the rivers of humanity walking by.
And Dallas was surprised, too, at the different expressions of humanity in front of him; New Avalon had no shortage of different races of people in it; to Dallas, people with different colors of skin were of no greater consequence than different colors of hair, or eyes. But there, many kinds of skin was offset by a culture that had fairly uniform tastes in clothing or hairstyles. Where short, wavy hair among the men and longer, wavy or teased hair among the women was all he’d seen and grown up with, Dallas now saw hair dyed every color of the rainbow, sometimes multiple colors, and hair was shaved, decorated or piled into permutations he’d literally never even thought of. Clothing was different, too; here was a small group of young men his own age, dressed in what looked like white military jumpsuits and white-framed sunglasses. THere was a small family, with parents and children all shaved bald, wearing green robes that were tattered only at the cuffs of their sleeves. And then…
Dallas gulped.
Three phenomenally beautiful women, with tan, toned bodies, wearing serious expressions and little else other than what looked like metal bikinis and a jeweled swords hanging from sturdy belts wrapped around their waists, had just emerged from the crowd and were walking in a purposeful, straight line through the crowd to whatever destination they saw fit.
Dallas felt a bump on his side; it was Gareth, smiling. “Rigellians,” he said. “And the green-robed ones are from Proxima Centauri. Places largely isolated from the greater culture of humanity, they develop in some strange ways.”
“Could you introduce me to those Rigellians?”
“I don’t think you want that, Dallas.”
“Sure I do!”
“They mate for life.”
“Works for me.”
“They won’t live anywhere but their home world.”
“Do they all look like that?”
“They’ll only court someone who defeats them in public combat.”
Dallas paused. “I know martial arts.”
“Yes. And the bruises are still healing from the street thug who made mincemeat of your alleged skills in that area,” Gareth finished, raising both his fists to chest level and bobbing his first two fingers in the air at the word ‘skills.’ ”
Dallas hadn’t seen the gesture before, but assumed it was a form of sarcasm.
-----
TO BE CONTINUED...