Galaxy Run: Ibilia, page 6
In between each of the classes of ships are the piles of parts.
Nixon looks at the feed coming from EHL’s external camera. It’s all ships and parts rushing by. Then between two of the stacks Marko flashes by.
“Hold up,” Nixon said. “Circle back. Slower. There’s something I want to check out.”
He begins slowly pushing the camera in closer on the stacks. There he is again: Marko, and he’s not alone.
“Hang here for a second.”
EHL begins to circle. Nixon locks the camera on this shot. The big man is definitely Marko. And Keet is there too. But there are also three others who Nixon doesn’t recognize. They are standing in a circle listening to Marko talk. Two of them are Snapsits. They are big like Keet’s man from the night before.
Marko is laying out points on his fingers. Nixon watches the conversation for a few moments more, and the feeling that something’s wrong starts to build. It begins as a tickle in his gut. Just a little thing. A curiosity. A question from his subconscious. Then it becomes something more, a turning in his stomach. Something that makes him uneasy. From there it becomes a full-on topsy turvy-ness that’s screaming at him to keep his attention sharp because none of this feels good or looks right.
He sits back in the captain’s chair and tells EHL that it can turn off the feed from the camera. He breathes deep. Once. Twice. Then swallows hard, forcing all of these feelings down to his knees. He’s made the note. Something may be up. Be aware. But he can’t let that be the only thing he’s thinking about when he steps off. It’ll color everything. Each word. Each action. Each calculation. Marko will see it. Keet too. It’ll put them off.
He swallows again pushing the feelings down to his toes this time. He exhales.
“OK, EHL,” he says. “Get us to the ground.”
11
EHL circles the yard one more time then sets down in an open area near the gate that looks to Nixon like an entrance.
Nixon looks to the dash and the blaster he’s tossed up there. He reaches for it then hesitates. Having it tucked into his waistband changes things. Yes, it makes him more confident in case that intuition he’d pushed to his toes is right. But it also puts him on edge. He listens differently to what’s being said. He runs everyone’s actions through a different filter. All of it ending with the question “Should I pull my blaster?”
He leaves it. Then, punching in the code to unfold the ramp, he pauses again.
“Don’t be stupid, Trevor,” he whispers to himself. He grabs the blaster off the dash and shoves it into the waistband of his pants and pulls his cloak over the top. He adjusts it so the blaster’s grip isn’t causing a lump in the fabric.
The keypad chirps as Nixon continues entering the code. The ramp unfolds, and the interior of EHL is filled with daylight. He takes one last look around. He half expects to feel something—a tug of some kind hitting him in the chest—but he doesn’t. This ship hasn’t served him well. It’s been a burden, not the blessing that he thought it could be when he saw it standing in that starport on Exte.
He steps down the ramp, and Keet and Marko are there waiting for him. Both Snapsit men smile. They look different in the daylight. Keet seems longer and leaner. Marko is broader here.
“Good morning,” Keet says.
Nixon gives a half wave and says hello.
Marko skips the pleasantries. “That’s the ship you’re trading?”
“That’s the one. She flies well. Better than you might think by looking at her.”
Marko steps next to EHL. He runs a hand along her engines. “Not too warm yet,” he says. “That’s good. Means they are efficient.”
He stops and drags a thumb across the rough surface of one of the seams Nixon repaired.
“You do this?” he asks without looking back to Nixon. “They’re clearly done by an amateur, but they’re not bad. I won’t be able to sell it like this, though. I’ll have to get them redone. Something I’ll have to consider if we try to work something out.”
“Understood.”
Marko looks back to Nixon and points up the ramp. “Mind?”
Nixon shakes no, and Marko steps inside the ship.
Keet and Nixon are alone outside, and Nixon thanks Keet. “You didn’t have to help me. I appreciate it.”
Keet watches the ramp. “Thank my cousin. But this is still just an introduction at this point. You haven’t worked out any kind of deal yet.”
Marko reappears. Nixon asks him what he thinks.
“It’s a ship,” he says as he steps down off the ramp. “But it looks positive so far. Follow me.”
Marko passes and Nixon and Keet turn to follow. Each stay a step off his shoulder and keep up as he winds his way through the yard.
Nixon sees the tops of ships poking over a wide pile of parts. Most of them look like haulers from where he’s at. Blunt noses. Wide profiles. A couple, though, have the tapered fronts of speeders. Those catch his eye.
They round another pile of parts and Nixon can see the ships clearly now. There are three haulers. All of them look to be in worse shape than EHL. One looks to be held together with spit and hope.
Another looks like it could have been put together by the woman who’d helped him fix his engine back on Umel. It’s all various parts welded together. None of it matches. He looks close at it and can make out—maybe—what looks to be a smaller hauler that serves as the base for this thing. But there’s so much hanging off of it that Nixon can’t be sure. Still, thinking back to the woman on and Umel and her ship, he’s intrigued by it. He wants to fly it, to get it up into the sky and put it through its paces.
He knows better, though. Even if that ship flies like a dream, it won’t work. There aren’t any others like it. If people were recognizing EHL then he stands no chance in that one. No, he needs something that looks like everything else. Something that is the spaceship equivalent of beige. And that’s exactly what the next ship is.
It’s a Redbrook 2401. They’ve popped these out of a dozen factories all across the galaxies. They are feature free and cheap. Nixon could have likely built his own custom Redbrook just by digging though the stack of parts behind him.
He steps to the ship and runs a finger over a dent in the housing over one of the engines. He leans in and looks at the seams where everything comes together. That’s when he sees them, two of the Snapsits that he’d seen before he landed. They’d been talking with Marko. Now, they were here looking at ships just a bit farther down the line from where Marko had led Nixon.
Nixon runs the scenarios. He lands on two, and they are exactly the opposite of each other.
The first: These are two Snapsits looking for a ship and they’ve come to another Snapsit to buy. What Nixon saw from the air was Marko giving them the sales pitch, counting out all the reasons they should buy from him.
The second: They are all working together, and Nixon is being set up. After some kind of cue these two Snapsits would be on Nixon quicker than he could blink.
He looks back to Marko then points to the inside of the ship. “You mind?”
“Go ahead. I’ll be right …” Marko takes a pair of steps toward the ship, ready to follow Nixon on.
Nixon stops him.
“No,” he says. “I’ll come out with questions if I have them.”
Marko returns to where he’d been standing next to Keet.
Nixon walks up the ramp, his boots thumping as he climbs.
The ship is fine, if a little small. But he doesn’t care about the ship. He needs a moment to sort out a plan, and this gives him that. He begins to think.
He goes back to running scams with Shaine and their extended crew. He thinks about how big some of those teams were. Five or six, even a dozen depending. Shaine in the role of Marko. Nixon as Keet.
It only got to a crew of twelve when things were complicated. If it was just some loner guy they were trying to pick clean then it was a handful of them. Five tops.
He pictures the scene from above in his head again, and recounts the bodies. Five for sure. Out on the yard he’d only seen four, but number five was likely hanging back out of site as insurance of some kind.
Marko shouts from outside: “Everything OK in there?”
“Yeah! Good!”
Nixon runs his hand over his cloak and lets it rest on the blaster.
Pull it out? If he does then he has to be ready to start shooting right away.
Leave it tucked and he can just see how all of this plays out. Run it to its natural end, which still could be him getting off this planet in a new ship. He walks back down the ramp and toward Marko and Keet with the blaster tucked away and hidden under his cloak.
For now.
12
“What did we think?” Marko asks.
Nixon steps back to the ground and gives Marko a shrug. “It’s fine. I mean, it’ll fly, and that’s something.”
He looks down the line of ships in front of him and points to one that’s three away. It’s a speeder. Older and showing some wear. But the three big engines on the back say that even at its age this ship should still be able to bring big fire.
“I was hoping to find something a little more …” Nixon points a thumb at the speeder.
Marko smiles and nods. “Take a look.”
Nixon turns and is facing the two men he’d seen talking with Marko earlier. They both look up at the small crowd now approaching. They both watch for a moment. Then Nixon sees one nod. Small, but it was there. Right? It was there.
Nixon turns quickly to look at Marko and Keet, hoping to catch them in the middle of some kind of unspoken communication. A wink. A returned nod. A gesture with the head. Something. Anything. But they only smile at him, and he says “I’m going to climb inside.”
He looks back to the other two just in time to see them walk away. Noted.
“Let me know if you have any questions,” Marko shouts as Nixon disappears inside of the ship.
The wear on the inside is twice as bad as what is on the outside. There’s only one seat in the cockpit, and it’s been worn smooth by the pilots who’ve come before him. Crowded around that seat are banks of dated controls.
Nixon wiggles his way into the seat and starts pushing buttons, not that he knows how to fly something like this. Not that he knows anything at all without any of these panels lit up. But he can pretend. He can try to get a feel. He looks in front of him and pictures himself with everything turned on. The engine’s low rumble behind him. He’s going through some kind of pre-flight check, making sure that everything mechanical is doing what it’s supposed to do. Making sure that all the atmospherics are operational.
Then he gives the ship the go, and he can feel inertia push him hard into his seat, a giant hand planted firmly on his chest. The speeder leaps from the surface of Ibilia and is through the atmosphere and into the deep black in a matter of seconds, shooting through the traffic lanes like they aren’t even there.
The ship is into space and pushing hard. The engines are running as hot as they can, going full bore with no sign of slowing. They rumble deep and low behind Nixon, and he waits for eventual alarms to sound, but no warnings trigger. The ship is just fast.
Weaponry is light, though, Nixon notes. On the panel to his left, he assumes, are a couple of places to activate guns, but they would be purely defensive on a ship like this, meant more for distraction than damage. This ship’s greatest defense is its speed. It doesn’t get into trouble because it can outrun anyone who wants to start it.
This is it. This is the kind of ship he needs if he’s going to deliver Shaine’s damn case.
“What do you think?” Marko has poked his head into the ship and startles Nixon. Everything Nixon had been imagining suddenly disappears. The banks of screens are dark again. The engines are quiet.
“So?” Marko asks again.
Nixon begins to nod slowly. “I like it. I didn’t think I would. It’s kind of a junker. But I like it.”
He stands, and Marko backs out of the ship. Nixon exits too and turns to get a better look at the back end of the ship. Marko follows.
Nixon runs a hand along the ship’s metal side, his fingers catching on the seams in the metal. He gets to the back of the ship and steps away to get a closer look. It’s three big engines set in a triangular pattern—one on top and two below. He reaches out and runs the palm of his hand along the exhaust cone of one of them and for a moment he swears it’s warm.
“Those aren’t standard. They are about twenty-five percent bigger than what you’d get if you bought this thing new.”
“Factory upgrade or did someone do it on their own?”
Marko has his arms crossed across his chest. He shrugs. “I don’t do business with folks who like to answer a lot of questions. That was just what the guy who traded her to me said. But I’d guess it was a custom job. The way he talked, he wanted me to assume it was his handiwork.”
Nixon steps closer to get a better look at the engines. What he’s looking for he doesn’t really know. Obvious signs of shoddy work, maybe. Bad welds. Open gaps in the seams. Nothing stands out, though. It’s competent work if not pretty.
“Want to go make this official?”
Nixon nods. He leans forward and touches the ship again. “Yeah,” he says. “Let’s do it.”
13
Nixon follows Marko back through the twists and turns of the yard to where they’d left EHL earlier. Marko starts negotiations almost immediately.
“That little speeder you’re looking at is a good ship. I know she’s not pretty. And I don’t know too many details, like I said. But I’ve got a couple of mechanics here who look at every trade before I take them in, and they really liked that one a lot.”
Marko stops for a moment at one of the piles of parts and looks left then right. Bearings. Then begins walking again. And talking.
“Your ship is nice, but, as you saw, I have a lot of mid-sized haulers right now.”
“I saw what you showed me.”
“It’s pretty representative.”
Nixon doesn’t say anything right away, but eventually settles for “OK.”
“I’m not meaning anything by that. Just walking conversation.”
“OK” again. “But stands to reason you’d have more haulers. That’s what most ships are. Speeders are kind of rare.”
Marko stops again and looks around, trying to see over and around the piles of parts. Keet follows but doesn’t say anything.
“I mean, I think we’ll still be able to work something out.”
Nixon hangs back, a step off Marko’s heel. “I never doubted that we could.”
He brings a hand up in front of him and lets the heel of his palm brush the blaster handle sticking up under his cloak.
They come around a pile of parts, a sloppy stack of wired panels, and there’s EHL. He sees his repairs again after spending time with the speeder and admires his work. For a guy who’s lived off whatever work he can scramble up, maybe he missed his calling.
Marko walks up to EHL and gets a close look at her again. He runs a hand along her sides. He drops a finger into one of the blaster holes Nixon never had a chance to patch.
He shakes his head and looks over to Nixon. He looks concerned.
Both of Ibilia’s suns have come up over the tops of the buildings now, and they are baking the yard. A bead of sweat forms on the top of Nixon’s head, and he feels it drop slowly through his hair then streak across his forehead and down to the end of his nose. He wipes it away with the back of his hand, always watching Marko.
He takes a finger and starts picking at some of the patches that Nixon had put in place to seal up EHL. He digs a sharp Snapsit nail into the brittle putty and starts to pull it out in small chunks.
Keet steps forward and pulls a knife out from under his cloak. He flips the blade out and starts picking at another seam. His comes out in larger pieces, exposing large openings between the panels.
“Hey!” Nixon shouts.
“I don’t think I got as good a look as I needed to earlier. Clearly this ship…” Marko kicks a big foot into the side panel behind him. His heel creates a new dent, the metal creasing in the middle. “... is in need of some serious repair.”
“You Grascow’s pet. What are you doing?”
But Nixon knows exactly what Marko is doing. He may own this big yard. He may have a place of his own to lay his head at night. And he may have a Snapsit woman who will be there in the middle of the night to open the door for him. But he isn’t any different than Nixon. Not a bit. He is still running scams. He is still scheming for ways to get more.
