The Man with a Beef Jerky
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The tired tape crackled. Poetic harmonies swiftly followed by Chester Arthur Burnett’s hoarse voice immediately interrupted a half-recorded radio commercial. Smokestack Lightnin’ took off the moment the bullet train pulled out of the orbital station. A vestigial umbilical cord connected the pebble-shaped launch base and its rotative hangars to the satellite. Made of steel, glass and rubber, the low-pressure tube snaked over the curved horizon.
To the white moon of Enceladus, the Alliance of the Auxiliaries of Justice sent a quiet thirty-five years old insurance representative. The man was dressed in civilian clothes—a pair of jeans with mismatched sneakers and an oversized canary-yellow wool sweater. The only proof of his affiliation with the bounty hunters’ guild appeared to be his square brass badge hanging nonchalantly from his hem.
Listening to his Walkam, his head resting against the scratched plexiglass, the envoy lengthily contemplated the inner rings of Saturn. Rocks and ice fields, sometimes hiding a tiny moon within, expanded towards the gas giant and its pale-yellow-blue hue within a perfect horizon line.
After a while, a defective visual alert over the sliding doors notified the pod passengers—mostly ice-hauler pilots and mechanics working on the station—that the bullet train would reach its destination within two minutes.
Drowsy, the envoy stretched his arms. As the atmosphere thickened, his reflection appeared on the plastic glass. His brown skin was covered with scars. He seemed sick and tired, but D2/3 shots and sugar pills would be as useful as homeo-drugs. Because that’s just what he looked like these days.
Hidden in a shallow crater below, his final destination appeared to be in an even bad shape. New-Savannah—a decrepit black dome anchored to the white ocean like a tick on a dog’s back, claimed to be nothing else than a godforsaken backwater.
The Alliance representative let out a yawn that veered into a cough. From his ears where dark locks of fuzzy hair fell slowly slipped his headphones. He didn’t catch them, and preferred to turn off his Walkman. Gravity trapping him meant he had landed on Saturn II. It was a matter of seconds before the rude cleaning drone would kick him out to vacuum the carriage.
Last man to leave the pod, he walked with a shuffling gait towards four men waiting in the cigarette smoke. They wore cowboy hats, were all dressed in faded brown velvet suits far too large for them despite their build, and displayed brushy mustaches. The walrus-looking sheriff and family made deputies all look alike—notwithstanding the different shade of anger.
Despite seeing the men fume, the envoy slowly pulled a jerky stick out of his back pocket and began to unwrap it, breaking the silence of the empty room. A seasoned meat at the corner of his lips, he casually saluted them with a nod.
“You’re five hours late!” barked the biggest of them—the lawman’s brother—showing the black plates screwed on his gums to reduce chewing tobacco’s toxicity.
“My partner got a little emergency in orbit,” the stranger replied, loudly masticating his snack. “Ought to stay onboard.”
“Have the Alliance bigwigs lost their mind?” the ‘deputy-in-son’ interjected, stepping up to gauge the lenient newcomer from head to toes. “They really sent you? A darn Zipperhead?”
Raising his hand, the sheriff stopped the hazing and spoke for the first time with a calmer tone. The bigger the mustache, the wiser they grew out there in the Rings. “What’s your name, son?”
Glancing at a fan on top of the exit door, the envoy swallowed half his jerky. “Slim Jim,” he replied before tossing the plastic film into the nearest trash can. The low gravity sent the packaging flying in all directions, but a providential draft managed to make it find its destination. “Somethin’ like that.”
“Somethin’ like that?” mimicked the son, his swollen palm leaning on the faux-wood grip of his Colt. “Ain’t no name for brown Chinks!”
“My great-grandparents were born in Georgia,” Jim snapped.
Fortunately, Walrus Junior’s embarrassing lack of snappy comeback lines allowed his father to carry on: “That’ll do for now. Have we met before?”
“Never been on Enceladus.”
“Can’t really blame you….” The sheriff looked upon Jim before firmly shaking his hand, noticing the deep scars running over his fingers. “Call me Charles. Charles Colcord. This is my stupid son, Arthur. My brother—Pat, and my nephew, Camillus.”
“Greetings, sir,” tried the latter before his father gave him a dirty look.
“Come on, Slim Jim from Georgia,” Charles continued, showing him the ground terminal’s exit upstairs. “You got a statement to make. We got a gruesome mess to clean up.”
Slim Jim nodded, and followed the sheriff and his deputies outside on the main catwalk.
Underneath stretched a wide steamy lake surrounded by ice and water collectors as large as trucks. The whole city was in reality a huge Adam’s Ale circular factory spewing brown and nauseating smoke. Rising up the dome’s inclined walls, depressing colonial rabbit hutches emerged from time to time through the coppery mist.
On the other side of the long open bridge, the small group found a rickety cableway. The car slowly led them to the heights, where a few air filters still working separated the noxious particles from the barely breathable artificial atmosphere full of chemical components. As they got out on the restaurants’ and bars’ level, breathing felt like inhaling chlorinated water.
Jim coughed. Around him, most of the inhabitants wore makeshift masks like in most mining towns of the main asteroid belt.
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Red and sweating, Sheriff Colcord stopped in front of a French brasserie locked up by yellow holographic cords; and for good reason. The front windows were all shattered, and the door lay on the gallery. A strong smell, accentuated by the dampness emanated from the moldy building made of dwelled containers. It was a grim preface for the sight that awaited Jim, who couldn’t find the words to describe the carnage that happened inside.
Au contraire, the sheriff’s son showed a newfound eloquence: “Three folks sprayed everything that moved—‘cluding the café’s manager and a guest. Two of their targets were ‘lmost cut in half. The big fellow there inherited a hole wide as a chimney pipe in his chest. They must have finished him off with a .44 Magnum. Felt the detonations from ‘cross the lake.”
With a red handkerchief over his nose, his uncle gestured to the carcass resting on a collapsed Formica table. He then pointed to the g-sugar bars that had slipped out of the pilot’s pockets before the sheriff tossed the encryption key of the victims’ ship to Jim. Letting out a sigh, both stepped over the mutant flies-covered remains and invited him to the back. There, the manager and an unlucky prostitute stuffed two emerald-colored recycling bags.
“Another of them strangers got stapled by the phone booth,” the son continued on their way back, pointing to a final corpse hidden behind a steel pillar turned into a colander. “He ain’t in apple-pie order anymore. His head caved like a ripe melon—”
Silent, Jim crossed the place towards the last body. He stopped listening to Walrus Junior’s jokes, and preferred surveying the wrecked room until he walked on a little token. Bending over, he picked up one of the dozen small steel balls stranded in the coated white and red blood.
Curious, he introduced the ball in the weird arcade machine with a hobnailed board. The marble avoided all the pins and fell straight into the large hole at the base. The arcade played a sad jingle to taunt him, and the ball came back.
Jim took it again. Despite cleaning it, the chrome orb kept a pink tone. Shrugging, he tucked it in his back pocket.
“Wanna know who killed them strangers?” the affable sheriff inquired. Sitting on a tool, he struggled to find his breath and poured itself a glass. “The Hemingwests. Half of them hunters.”
Turning to him, Jim raised an eyebrow. “The Wests usually toy around Kuiper.”
The nephew interjected from the body bags room’s door frame: “We heard these Dickens got some family business to take care of in the main belt.”
The Alliance man ousted a couple of flies. Kneeling near the dead with no face, he checked his expensive power suit and his ‘not-so-white-anymore’ shirt. He remained silent for a moment, unable to pull his gaze away from the sunken face of what was once a middle-aged man. He resumed after rolling up the deceased’s right sleeve: “Black suits. Japanese implants. Irezumi tattoos… Yakuza—from Neo-Babylon, on Titan.”
“Those Japs are small fries for the Wests!” Walrus Junior reacted, surprisingly insightful. “They only snatched that guy’s ID and left the others’. C$12,000 down the drain.”
“Why’d they be wastin’ their time in New-Savannah?” Jim asked.
“Frankly, son… I don’t give a damn…” Sheriff Colcord said. “We’re fixin’ to know when we’ll be covered for their antics. Who’s gonna pay for this bag of nails? The Martians, the Alliance or Nouvelle Patrie?”
Heading to the smashed door, Jim answered, his hands back beneath his sweater: “The Alliance. Ought to check the yaks’ ship, and fax my report.”
“The ship ain’t goin’ nowhere ‘til we got the cash!” the son roared.
He was immediately hushed by the father who slapped the back of his head: “Arthur! Pull in your horns!” Colcord then walked towards Jim, and silently escorted him to the catwalk. All around, masked onlookers had gathered.
“Your son’ll run into trouble one day,” Jim said, laying his back on the substandard guardrail outside.
The sheriff breathed out his words, looking away from his family violently dispersing the nosey rubberneckers: “Too much TV… Listen… I’d like the ship to stay on the orbital station. We’ll sell it—cargo included—and give back the money to our victims. Just need your paperwork done. Can you set with that?”
“Sure.”
His headphones back on his ears, Slim Jim had made his way back to orbit alone after a detour to the convenience store to buy a can of condensed milk and new salt-saturated jerky sticks. Two of them were already swallowed when he entered the donut-shaped orbital station’s hangar.
“Naamah?”
Sitting on dirty containers, an android in stained denim overalls religiously watched barrels of water flying towards a docked cargo. She heard him. The green photoreceptors of her only operational eye flickered when she waved at him. “M’sieur Jim! Good to see you back! I’ve stocked up on Blue for your ship. And fixed the seals—washed the windows as a lagniappe. Anything else you need before departin’?”
Jim held up the keys he’d obtained in town, and Naamah nodded before sliding to the floor. Limping more than walking, the robot skirted the hangar’s alveoli with Jim on his heels.
“An old Red Jay, built by Buick on Venus,” the mechanic explained shortly after. “Venusian steel… What a fraud! Naamah knows her whereabouts, M’sieur Jim. She worked in the belt, oui!”
They reached the maintenance zone. There, a few meters from where Jim’s own ship was clamped, they came upon a small rectangular-shaped tarp which has been resewed more times than a Martian politician lied about having an affair. The nef had been hauled into dry dock untouched, meaning the Colcorns never checked it.
“This one got butchered! Maudit!” Naamah pulled back the tarpaulin to reveal the yakuzas’ Jay: a freighter patched up with a supercargo’s cockpit. And indeed, crushing the hull to dust and dump the powder as contraband paprika on Ceres wouldn’t even be worth the thought.
Half a stick stuck at the corner of his lips, Jim cautiously approached the unreliable hatch hidden under fenders that had probably been stolen from Ijiraq’s junkyards. “What kind of twisted surprise the sheriff is leavin’ me dealin’ with…” When he grabbed the airlock’s wheel, it stood firmly still because of the rust. “Naamah? Need a strong hand… or two.”
“Right away, M’sieur Jim!”
Much stronger despite her wretched appearance, the android did most of the work. The door slid aside in a cloud of brown dust.
Closing his eyes by reflex, Jim coughed. He then felt something being tapped between his eyebrows.
When the grime dissipated, he was held at gunpoint by a young Japanese woman with a curious short-barreled rifle and a chrome-colored spiral perm.
“What the—” Jim coughed.
A question snapped in Japanese. Unknown words echoed in his muddled brain. The strange lady was presumably worried about her friends at the café. But with her finger trembling on the submachine gun’s trigger, she’d probably kill him the second she noticed his Alliance badge.