Oolite Bulletins

(In a shameless piece of bandwagon jumping, I'm taking a leaf out of Mossfoot's book and trying one of these episodic things. Herewith the first thousand words. Go on, count them.)

They don’t pay enough for this job.

‘Course, when I took the job, it was more money than I’d ever seen in my life. Enough to save some, maybe dream of retiring on some planet somewhere that has good housing, enough government to keep the bandits off of the farm your family spent three generations trying to build up, maybe some luxuries and good doctoring, and meanwhile there’s enough to spend at the end of a hitch on some fun times with a girl, or maybe a boy if that’s what you prefer. It ain’t to my taste, much, but I guess if I think of settling down some time –

But that’s all by the by. I’m not saying I’m the best there is at what I do, but up to now it’s been good enough to bring me back. ‘Course, anyone else in this business can say the same – ‘cos anyone who can’t say it, well, they ain’t in the business any more and they ain’t saying much of anything to anyone either. That’s the kind of crack we fling around when we’re in the station and we got a night-cycle to kill and we’re still too wired to sleep, which is how it goes down most times once we dock.

Some runs are just straight out, through the wormhole and in again, when you figure either the goonies haven’t got the word that there’s a fat trader coming through or else GalCop’s doing its job better than usual, or even that we’ve earned our pay the best way of all by scaring off anyone that might have been looking to score some free cargo. Mostly it’s not that way, though.

That’s when it gets to be real lonely out there in a singleship with no Witchdrive, likely in a system that’s got no time for your kind if it happens that your mothership goes down and you’ve got no-one left to make you a wormhole, and all you have to keep yourself alive is a front laser, some energy banks, and a ship you sure hope can turn tighter than what it can’t outrun. That, and some hullmetal, a water spigot and a couple of tubes of peanut paste, plus a pair of spaceman’s pants – the kind you won’t be washing and using again – is your own little universe for a few hours, plus some more thinking-it-over time in Witchspace assuming you and your wingmate didn’t bump each other trying to get in the wormhole at the same time.

Still, like I say, up to now I’m shooting straighter and ducking faster than the enemy, and that’s good enough for one day at a time, which is mostly how we live. There’s a kind of group spirit, for sure, but we don’t make what you’d call real close bonds.

Although –

There was this time in Tionisla Station, when we’d just got in from Isinor and riding guard on a rustbucket of a Python. We’d gotten bounced by another Python and his buddies out near the Witchpoint (and listen to me talking like an old spaceman. You’ll laugh when I tell you about my homeworld), and for once everything went right and we even scored some bonus money from the salvage to go with not losing so much as one of us, and you bet that was a night to party.

Well, Conor and I were laughing away, each of us with one arm round a girl, and mine was pouring a stream of Blue Fire straight out of the spout into my mouth while Conor’s was doing the same for him, and he meets my eye and says “Want to make up a foursome? My room’s plenty big enough,” and I thought it over and said “Why not? But we’re not touching each other!” and laughed.

Anyhow, the girls went along with it – and believe me, in the spacers’ bar, not the fancy one for the rich traders and playboys but the one they keep for the real fighting pilots, and you’d better believe you’re in for a fight if you try to come in when you hadn’t oughta, you get all sorts, and they aren’t even there to make any money, they’re just there for the crazy fun – and if Conor was disappointed he didn’t do more than look it for a moment. Maybe he just wanted to watch and compare. I figured I could live with that.

For my money Conor had scored a little medical aid, which was something else I’d never heard of until I saw my first Coriolis station, but then, he had to keep up with me – and he was doing it, too. The girls found it interesting enough to compare notes and then swap over, and I don’t reckon either of them went away disappointed when the dawnside crescent showed through the porthole.

Before then though, while it was still dark and we’d caught some sleep in an every-which-way tangle of arms and legs, I got one of the girls to move over and let me take her place, and I had a go at waking up Conor in a nice way while it was still black dark. If he knew who it was he didn’t let on, and I figure I didn’t do it badly at that, though I don’t want to change over from girls for realsies.

We were all back in our own places, allowing for the tangle I just mentioned, before it got light enough to see, and next morning it was business as usual – which this time meant I stayed with the rustbucket and Conor signed up along with a rich man in a Fer-de-lance that was going another way, and who knows whether we’ll be meeting again soon, late or ever? That’s why we don’t make real close bonds.

So for now it’s just me and my Sidewinder, shooting what I’m paid to shoot, and trying to make sure someone doesn’t do unto me first.

It turns out that Qudira has some rich neighbours with a lot of technology.

Not that I knew anything about this when I was growing up. I didn’t look up at the night sky all that often, and even then, only when the skies were a lot clearer than usual. I grew up thinking everywhere had loads of volcanoes – No, that’s not true. I grew up thinking our volcano-studded, sulphurous, cloudy, damp, backward little planet was everything there was in the universe. There was Down Here, and there was Lights in the Sky, and the only place anything lived was Down Here.

One or two of the smart kids at school – if you’d call it school. Most of us could just about read and write, and there wasn’t much to read or to write with, except now and then when one of those mystery boxes turned up and we had some lessons for a few weeks if there was nothing else that we needed to do – anyway, one or two of the smart kids at school reckoned there were people Up There too. Where I lived, there was a little moon that was always low down near the ground line, about where the sun set in the middle of winter. It didn’t always shine, but when it did, it was always in the one place – and it was small next to the real moon, but it was way bigger and brighter than a star. The smart kids said there were men in the little moon, and sometimes they came down to visit, and that was why the mystery boxes turned up now and then and why Grandpa could always sell the “water” he made in his shed to Trader Jho.

These days I hardly know where Qudira is any more. It’s a hard place to pine for, even when the laser beams are glittering in the dust or the attack ships are on fire off the shoulder of Begeabi. Space is big and cold, but when all’s said and done the warmth of a home fire doesn’t mean anything when the hearth’s been ground to dust underfoot and the last home fire you saw was the one you wanted to put out but couldn’t.

Once it was all gone and the screaming had stopped, and I’d waited until everyone left and gave them until after sunset before I came out of the hollow tree and picked through all the ashes, and it finally sank in that everything was burnt down and destroyed, I set myself for a long walk.

The way I saw it was like this. If there was anyone up there in the little moon, and if they ever came down, there must be – Well, I didn’t know how anyone could get down out of the sky, but I figured, where they would come down would be right under the little moon, so all I had to do to meet myself a moon man was to walk until the moon was overhead, and since it never moved, sooner or later I could do that. You need to remember I’d never even seen a map, and I didn’t know where anyone lived once I was half a day’s walk from home.

Anyway, I’d not been on my way long when I fell in with an old-timer. He wasn’t in a much better way than I was, and I figure now he was just going home to die, but he was glad of a young pair of legs to step and fetch for him a few days, and I helped him out for a week or two. After a bit I kind of trusted him enough to tell him where I was going, and he laughed, but not unkindly.

“That’s further’n I ever went,” he said, “or’ll be goin’ now, but there may well be men up in Coriolis – that’s what they call her, so they tell me. An’ you wants to be careful if’n you’re goin’ that way. I hear where they take kids like you up there, an’ no-one ever sees ‘em again – still, you’ll be knowin’ your own business best.”

It was just getting dark, with the little moon still hanging there in the sky, and he reached into his pack and brought out something I’d never seen before – something made of iron and weighing a couple of pounds, with a little bit of glass in each end, and you could look through it, both eyes at once. He showed me how they worked and got me to try out looking at some things nearby – trees and bushes to begin with, then a smoker up on one of the slopes. Then he said “Now try lookin’ at Coriolis through her.”

I did like he said, and I had to hold the thing mighty steady to stop that little circle of white jumping about all over the place, but eventually I got it done, and he said “If’n you got her clear in your sight, you watch real close for a minute or so,” and I once again did like he said. For a little while I couldn’t see what he might be driving at, then I put them down and gasped and looked at him.

“It’s spinning around,” I said.

“Yup,” he chuckled. “Ain’t that something, though? Ain’t nothing else up there that does that.”

It was a clear night for once, with lots of stars out and the moon coming up for the second rising, and I looked at everything I could through that thing, especially the moon, which was about the most beautiful thing I ever saw. Nothing else was spinning like Coriolis did, though, which carried on right the way it was going until it disappeared a few hours after dark.

That night I cuddled up closer to the old-timer than before, and we fell asleep like that by the fire, him snoring and smelling funny, and Coriolis kept on spinning in my head.

(And on we go)

No-one lives for ever.

The old-timer told me that before I moved on, and I guess I already knew that pretty well just from how I’d been raised, but it’s plenty true when you fly a singleship for a living. Most times when I fly out with a freighter and a bunch of other hired guns, there’s someone doesn’t make it, either one of us or one of the guys that try to stick up our freighter. The pay’s already banked, of course, and those of us that have next of kin mostly make arrangements ahead of time to have it forwarded if we don’t make it back, but some of us don’t, and unless we’re feeling charitable and have remembered that this might be the mission we don’t come back from and so decide ahead of time which stranger ought to get it, I guess sooner or later it makes its way back to the government or our employer.

Once I’d seen Coriolis through that viewing-thing, I was keener than ever to get to it, and the old-timer seemed to know it. He out and said it himself one day: “Time to move on, kid, if you’re ever to meet your man in the moon”. Winter wasn’t so far off by then, but one way and another it was likely I’d be travelling through at least one winter before I got where I was going, and I figured I could probably manage.

We had one last sit by the fire, then he dug through his pack one more time and fetched out something else which I’d never touched before, though this time I knew what it was and what it was for. He still spelled everything out for me though, before he even let me touch it. “This is for making people be dead,” he said. “Whatever else you might do with it, that’s what it’s for. You don’t ever point this end at anyone you want to still be alive when you’re through, and if you ever do point it at someone, you finish what you started as quick and sure as you can.”

It seemed to fit my hand like it’d been made for it, and he showed me how to load it and which bit to press to make it fire. Then he said “Keep it where you can get at it, and make sure you know how to use it and be sure you can hit what you point it at. I ain’t got many loads for it and I never met a man who knew how to make ‘em, but there’s some that will have some for sale if you ask around careful-like. Mebbe the moon-men bring them.”

I laughed at that, like he meant me to, but it turned out he was dead right as far as that went.

Well, before I moved on I practised a little bit, just to be sure I knew how to use it, and I found it pretty easy to hit what I pointed it at, and even from a standing start with the piece down the waistband of my pants I could fetch it out and hit my mark pretty quick. At the time I didn’t much want to use it to put a hole in a living human being, but when I thought back to how my home burned down – which wasn’t something I thought about very often – I decided there might be worse things that could happen, at that.

“This is quite the present you’re giving me,” I said, “and I ain’t rightly got anything I can give you back for it.”

He laughed hisself. “Kid, if you was six month older and I was even a couple of years younger, I’d have a suggestion for you. But I figure it’s a mite too early for you an’ I know for a cold fact it’s way too late for me. Keep it an’ use it in good health – only make sure you really do need someone dead before you use it on ‘em. Once they’re gone, there’s no second thoughts and no bringin’ back.”

That’s a thought that’s stayed with me ever since, but there’s a time and a place to think it, I’ve found. When you’re in the cockpit and there’s the stink of fear all around you – and you’re way better than me if you keep your pants dry all through the part where your laser’s hot and your energy running low, and there’s still more of the other side than you, and your wingmate’s gone in a burst of fire and all you can do is hope it didn’t hurt – that’s not the time to be asking yourself “You know, does this person need, real-bad need, to be dead right now?”. Nope. If you want to live through to the next fun time with a bottle, a girl and maybe a colleague or two that has the same idea as you, you just concentrate on keeping out of someone’s sights and getting your own locked on for long enough to let them have it.

After my old friend and benefactor, I kept myself pretty much to myself through the months that followed, barring an overnight with someone else who might be headed the same way and have a use for some company on the road, and I was just as glad that I didn’t have to use my gun very often. Every few days Coriolis looked a little higher in the sky, as the winter wore away into spring and I had to score myself some new boots ‘cos I’d worn the old ones out.

Then one night (but I’d not kept up my count) I saw something dropping from the sky on a pillar of blue fire, like it was going to hit just beyond the hills, and after the next sunrise but one – well, I never knew there could be so many buildings all together in the one place.

I love this story! Nice start!

(Glad you're enjoying it! Let's see how long I can keep this shtick up.)

I’d been in the spaceport for about half a day before I had to shoot anyone.

Actually “spaceport” isn’t quite it. On Qudira at least – it may be different in other places – there’s the ground station itself, which has GalCop money behind it and a bundle of extra cash on account of all of the trade coming through, and all of this allows for a lot of building with, at the very least, piped water and sanitation and switched power and a whole lot else, and the buildings are up to code and don’t fall down for anything short of an asteroid strike. I stood there on the hillside just watching it in the distance for I don’t know how long; we didn’t really count in hours when I was young – you got up with the sun, worked, ate, worked some more, took a break at noontime in the hot season, worked some more, came home when the sun was nearly down, ate and then went to bed – but it couldn’t have been a whole morning at any rate. Not only was it bigger than I’d ever believed possible but it was whiter, too.

And then there was the part outside the station walls, which was still bigger than any settlement I’d seen, imagined or heard tell of. I’d come from very far away, but plenty of folks that lived closer and had heard of the station had left their old life behind and come to see what the spacer city looked like. And it was a sight to see, too: Coriolis was right overhead, but I’d never felt less like looking at it than I did right then. Unfortunately, thousands of folks had come all this way to look for a better life, and thousands of them found out that thousands more had got there first.

So you had this sprawl outside the station that went on for what seemed like a half-day’s walk, clustered around the river so they had somewhere to get water from, and there were too many folks crowded in too close with no proper way to earn a living. Some of them had day jobs in the station, but they couldn’t afford to live there on what they got paid; some of them maybe had the money, but they weren’t the sort that GalCop law wanted about the place; most of them seemed to make a living off each other, don’t ask me how.

I wanted a closer look at the station, but it was pretty clear that I was already shooting for the moon in trying to get myself a place at the shanty town, which stank worse than any farmyard I’d ever seen and was a sight unhealthier besides. I mean, in all my life I’d never seen a place where kids played with sewage running in the open all around them, nor even heard of people trying to earn a crust scavenging trash off city dumps. We had a market town a day’s journey from home that we went to maybe twice a year, but even that didn’t have a big pit set aside for people to throw trash in.

Mind you, the spaceport trash included a few things that would have passed for wealth back at home, where if you could burn it, build with it or even keep the rain off with it then it wasn’t trash in the first place.

Anyway, by the time it was getting towards sunset, I was mighty hungry and there wasn’t much to be done about it, and perhaps that’s what made Fat Hannah notice me – though I didn’t learn her name till later. I was walking by a kind of a stall built on the front of a shack, and there was a cooking smell and I stopped to sniff at it, and this huge woman asked me was I hungry, and there was no sense lying about it.

“You poor kid,” she said, kind of motherly except neither my mother nor anyone else I’d ever seen could afford to eat enough to flesh up like that. “Just get in, did you? Come and have yourself a bite to eat.”

There was a covered area behind the stall where a bunch of people were all tucking in, and if there was anything the matter with it, nobody was complaining. Fat Hannah put a bowl of stew and a spoon in front of me and watched me put the grub away, and served up another ladle-full when the first was gone. Then she said, with a wink, “You know, you look grown-up enough for a little something to help that go down. The first one’s on the house.” And she popped her hand in her apron and came out with a little bottle of what looked like sugar candy – the kind we only saw on market days. She held one out to me.

“You want to be careful about that, child,” said a thin-faced man I’d not noticed before. He wasn’t eating – just looking around the entrance to the eating area. “This could go two ways. Either you’ll feel real good, and then you’ll want some more, and before two days have gone you’ll be ready to do anything to get just one more, and I mean anything no matter what your momma told you never to do… or you’ll wake up somewhere with a strange sky and a strange face looking at you, and be in for all sorts of adventures where you’ll never be coming home again.”

Fat Hannah screamed in rage and yanked a gun out from under her apron, and then there was a bang, and she was stood there looking at where the gun wasn’t in her hand any more, and I was looking too, and trying to decide whether that was really what I’d meant to do just then, because it wasn’t quite how the old-timer had said things ought to go when you pull a gun.

(Not sure how long I can stay on this productive streak, but it's almost writing itself for now)

You got to know when to walk away, and know when to run.

When you’re on escort duty, you can only run away so far. It’s no good to anyone if your freighter buys it – you can pretty much kiss goodbye to your chances of an honest job in future if you let that happen, unless the record shows real clear that you were doing your darndest to stop it. Also, when your wingmates catch up to you next, the least you can expect is to be kicked black and blue for running out on them, and maybe getting tarred and feathered and rolled around the docking bay in a barrel so everyone knows what you did. It hardly ever happens because it hardly ever needs to.

But everyone understands if you need to shake a little heat and get someone to pull a bogey off your back. That’s one thing we’re all glad to do for one another, ‘cos we know it’s a matter of when not if we’re going to need the same favour ourselves. And sometimes a trading convoy and a pirate rig will turn up in-system at the same time, and it turns out both sides know how to count after all, and you’ll get both teams sidling away from each other and, as it were, making sure they’re not the first to blink, or else a furball will be starting up and it won’t end while either side’s got one ship left able to shoot.

After I’d shot the gun out of Fat Hannah’s hand, and long before I’d decided whether I’d done it on purpose, there was dead quiet in the little eatery. The thin-faced man was the first to speak.

“Nobody move,” he said. “You’ve got a gun here in the hands of a scared kid that knows how to use it, and that’s how people get shot with nobody meaning it. Kid, ease your way over here nice and slow, and don’t point that thing at anyone unless they try to grab you. Don’t stand where I can reach you when you get here. The rest of you, don’t commit suicide.”

Everyone sat right where they were. Even Fat Hannah kept quiet, though she was wringing her hand like she had a sprain, while I did what the thin-faced man said. I stopped out of his reach and I saw why he’d said so – so I wouldn’t think I had to shoot him to be safe. He backed off into the street, if that’s not a word that’s too fancy for an open sewer, and I edged after him.

“I’m carrying too,” he called out. “Anyone who doesn’t show their face out here won’t have anything to worry about.” And then to me, a lot quieter, “Nor will we, if we don’t shoot anyone. Once we start, we’d need to shoot more than you or I have got loads for. So we ease our way out of here and bank on no-one being in a hurry to die.”

There was a cab – another word I had to pick up later – fifty metres up the alley, and the thin-faced man opened the door, beckoned me inside, then came in after me and snapped “Station-side. Sector office.” It didn’t mean a thing to me, but the cab lurched into movement without a moment’s delay, and if any of Fat Hannah’s neighbours planned on making something of it for her, we didn’t get to find out.

You can’t believe how different Station-side looked, sounded and smelled once you’d been in the shanty-town. The thin-faced man watched me and grinned at my expression. I didn’t mind one bit. Everything was so bright and clean, and so much light that I’d never seen anything like after sunset. If I had my mouth wide open everywhere we went, well, I had reason. By now I had the weapon on safety and put away again, which made us both a lot less tense.

“Agent Elus,” said the thin-faced man, “Galactic Cooperative Light Escort recruiting officer for the Northeast Octant, GalSector 1… and you haven’t the faintest idea what I just said, have you?”

His grin was infectious and I answered it with a similar one, or so I hoped. “No. Except the first bit was your name? Are you from Coriolis?”

“I came through the Coriolis Station on my way down – there isn’t any other way to get here,” Elus said, “but I’m from Aate, a little less than seven light-years over. But… you know what, let’s begin at the beginning, and not tonight.

“First off, did you mean to shoot that gun out of Fat Hannah’s hand or was that a pure fluke?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “But maybe I didn’t want to shoot her. She’d just fed me – and you shouldn’t shoot women.”

“That’s what a lot of people think, all over the Eight,” said Elus. He opened the cab door and showed something to the driver, and ushered me out. “My office. But anyway, be warned, not everyone thinks so – and also, you can’t always tell whether you’re shooting at a woman or a man anyway.”

“Well, anyway, I didn’t want her to shoot you either, because if you were telling the truth then you were doing me a favour, and even if you were lying, you shouldn’t shoot someone just for telling lies,” I pointed out.

“I kind of wish it was lies, but unfortunately, Fat Hannah’s guilty of everything I said. But we’ve got enough to pin on her now – ‘we’ meaning the police, not me, but we help each other. Still and all, I’m not sorry how things went down. I’ll tell you why. I’m guessing you made your way here to look for a job, maybe even get off this sad little apology for a colony world. And in that case, consider yourself talent-spotted – because it’s not every girl I meet that can shoot as fast and as straight as you.”

Good yarn. I'm enjoying this, keep it up.

When I first saw this thread, I thought it was a technical about a joystick that fell in the wrong forum. Silly me!

Cmdr Wyvern wrote:

Good yarn. I'm enjoying this, keep it up.

When I first saw this thread, I thought it was a technical about a joystick that fell in the wrong forum. Silly me!

You're showing your age there, my friend. Mine too (the title is a pun, of course) though I was never a member of the Sidewinder-owning classes. It was an Amstrad joystick for me and a horrible piece of kit it was too.

Cmdr Wyvern wrote:

Good yarn. I'm enjoying this, keep it up.

Seconded! We've got talent all over the place, of late..

Diziet Sma wrote:

Seconded! We've got talent all over the place, of late..

<nods> This is good, as the fiction section has been in the doldrums for a while.

(Well, you'll remember I chipped in before. But then I had to finish qualifying as a teacher, and start working as one, and there wasn't a lot of time for playing spacemen or writing about it, though I had a half-finished Hammond story kicking around in my head. Now it's the summer holidays though, and I've a little time to play again. . Here goes.)

The thing with being ignorant is you don’t realize how ignorant you are.

See, nowadays there’s a load of stuff I figure I’ll always be ignorant about, but I know enough to know what I don’t know, if that makes sense. Like, up in the snout of my Sidewinder there’s a laser, and I can talk fancy as you like about “coherent light”, but I know that deep down I don’t understand how there can be such a thing as a light that’s bright enough to burn holes in solid metal and it might as well be magic for all I can explain it. Same story with my ship’s drive, I can’t tell you why it is it’ll keep running practically for ever, and however much I read up on the theory I don’t come away any the wiser. But I know how to shoot things with a laser and I know how to use the drive to make my ship go faster and slower, and at least I can say “It’s a machine. I don’t know how it works, but I know someone who knows how to make ‘em and how to fix ‘em, an’ if I studied hard enough an’ learned stuff in the right order I’d be able to do that too.”

The day I took my first cab ride, I barely even grasped there was such a thing as a box on wheels you could get in and ride around in, though it was a little bit like a farm cart so far as that went. I figured “Agent Elus” was a man’s name, but I found out a while later that “Agent” was what he did, not who he was, same as “Coriolis” was a word for a kind of a thing up above the sky, not the name of the one I’d been able to see ever since I was little.

Agent Elus set about having me taught, for a start. Sometimes he’d come in and teach me himself, when he hadn’t nothing better to do, which wasn’t often. A lot of the time he had a machine do it – which made me jump first up, I’ll tell you for a true fact. Figure a clothes mangle or a well windlass was about as clever a machine as I was used to, and then you’ll maybe have an idea what it was like when Elus sat me down with a box that could talk to me, show me pictures, even answer questions.

It turned out that “ignorant” and “stupid” ain’t the same thing. There was so much I didn’t know, I didn’t even know it. Like there was a place some kilometres up where the air just stopped – not all at once, but over a distance – and above there was called “space” and no-one could live there, except they could with another machine to help them. Like “Coriolis” was a huge machine thousands of kilometres high, and it never fell down ‘cos it was too busy falling sideways, though it didn’t look like it on account of the whole planet was spinning sideways. Like the world itself was a big ball like a bowling ball ten thousand kilometres across, only ten thousand kilometres wasn’t even peanuts to the distance to the sun and the stars, which were all suns themselves.

There was a lot of lessons like that, but it wasn’t all sitting down and learning stuff from a machine, or even from Agent Elus. He fixed it up with me to go learn about how to drive a land machine, a “sand buggy” he called it, with a lady called Janeen, though she wasn’t that much older’n me. A sand buggy had four wheels, bigger and fatter than the cart wheels I’d been used to, made of some off-world stuff called “rubber” and pumped full of air, which seemed a lot like magic for a start but which sure worked well. The buggy had a kind of a yoke bar to hold onto and to make it go the way you wanted, and a couple of little levers you pushed with your feet to make it go faster or slow. Janeen got me to drive it round a big patch of sand they had next to the spaceport, slow at first until I got the way of it, then faster until I was pushing it as quick as it would go.

After a bit there got to be some other kids taking the same kind of training as I was. We didn’t talk much about where we’d come from or how we got here, but you can figure anyone who had a safe home and a good future was going to be staying put and not footslogging a thousand kilometres looking for men from the moon. There didn’t seem to be much need to ask for more of a story.

So I got to learning that there was a whole bunch of other worlds up there round a load of the lights in the sky, and a lot of ‘em were a nicer place to live than Qudira. I found out what a colony world was – how it meant my great-to-a-lot grandfolks came to this place hundreds of years ago to set up a new home – and I got to thinking things through about how the new home had turned out to be such a craphole.

Some places up there, they said, were run like businesses, or had a whole-world government where everyone had a say in what the laws would be. Some were run by a kind of committee, or even one tough guy and his hangers-on, and some worlds were split up into big countries with their own government, or maybe had a bunch of tough guys ruling a few hundred square kilometres each.

And down at the bottom was us. No-one ran a damned thing, and every time someone started to make it better, someone else bust it up again.

Cody wrote:

the fiction section has been in the doldrums for a while.

I blame Drew.. he raised the bar quite high, and set a tough act to follow, all in one fell swoop, with Elite: Reclamation..

(and I mean that in the nicest possible way, of course.. write on, Drew!)

(If I see a bar that's set too high for me, I'll just have to walk under it.)

Whenever I meet someone who thinks anarchy is good, I want to beat the stupid out of them with a lead pipe.

There are kids that live on some world that’s too rich for their own good that get to thinking how unfair it is that folks want to stop them doing what they want. There are some folks that are old enough to know better that think that human beings should be let alone to do as they want, when they want, and somehow everything will work out just fine. If it was up to me, I’d ship ‘em off to Qudira with ten hectares and a mule, an’ if they were in any state to do so, they’d be begging to be let off again before a season was gone.

Agent Elus sat down with us kids one time and we talked it all through. All of us – and I said, most of us weren’t sharing much of a story and didn’t need to – knew darned well what it meant to live in a place with no government. We hardly guessed what it was like to live in any of the other places, but we knew why everyone we ever heard of was stuck like a cow in a mud-hole. It was because as soon as anyone had anything worth taking, someone came along and took it, and there wasn’t a thing anyone could do about it.

Oh, sometimes a bunch of farmers would get together and try to stand up to them, but they had damn little to fight with, and if they did get their hands on any weapons, then after the bandits had rolled right over them anyway, they’d take the weapons along with them for next time.

GalCop did its best to stop things getting worse, but GalCop had problems of its own. Seems like half the galaxy was caught up in the same kind of mess – planet by planet was doing OK for itself, but when you looked at the bigger picture, the only forces that were trying to keep the whole thing running along were up against the same problems Qudira had. There wasn’t a galaxy government, the strong planets had all they could do to keep their own places running, and there was a lot of folks more than willing to just take whatever they could.

We picked up this kind of stuff along of learning to work machines of one kind or another. Vehicles mostly, but plenty else besides – I even learned to do a little engineering of my own, much good may it do me if ever my Sidewinder packs up on me somewhere out between the systems, but it felt good to pick up a skill like that – and also weapons of one sort or another. There was long guns and shotguns as well as the kind I owned, all to help us learn to pick up a target near or far away, quick enough to get a shot in while it would do the most good. I was good with all of them, as it turned out, especially with the long guns and far-away targets. Agent Elus watched, smiled and nodded, and made notes.

What felt real good, though, was feeling like we could make a difference. We wanted to know how we could help our own world, for a start, ‘cos it was no accident it was such a hell-hole. People worked hard to keep it that way. There were the Mister Bigs pulling the strings, and their puppets went all the way down to the Fat Hannahs and beyond.

When my old-timer dropped me a hint about kids being taken off to Coriolis and never seen again, he was too near the truth by half. The reason, as I was picking up on, was money. A few human beings – or some other species from some worlds not even all that far away – packed up in a cargo barrel can be shipped off to the back end of the galaxy, or even just a star system over, and if the market’s right at the time you can make real money on the deal. The crazy pills and the like can net you even more – or else they can be used to get kids into the slave barrels in the first place or the kind of deal Agent Elus sketched out in Fat Hannah’s. I asked him one time what he meant by “do anything, no matter what your momma told you,” and he just grinned.

“You’re old enough to figure it out,” he said. “Engage your brain.”

“You mean… say it was me, and I needed that stuff, I might even…” I finished the sentence, but I ain’t going to now.

“That’s about the least of what you’d do.”

“But… well, surely I wouldn’t…” I said, mentioning something someone once told me real bad girls might do.

“By the second day, you’d be more than willing. And after the first couple of times, you’d think nothing of it if it meant getting your next yellow rock – and you’d still not have hit bottom.”

It takes a lot to make me blush, but right there and then I was glad nobody else was there. “Do people ever…?”

“End of the third day, you’d make like you enjoyed it if that’s what the customer wanted. ‘Course, you might be in competition with the boys for that, so it’d be a case of whoever looked the most eager.”

So sometimes, when we’ve been hit by a pirate convoy, and I figure what might already be in a Python’s holds if he’s willing to blow up an honest trader for plunder, I don’t find it hard to run my laser down his spine until he blows. That, mind you, is without even figuring how the guns get into the hands of the bandits – which is the third leg of how they keep a place like Qudira down in the mud.

(If I see a bar that's set too high for me, I'll just have to walk under it.)

This ought to get sigged

(Needs to get back to actually playing the game so that Mara's story can continue!)

(Not really much by way of a humorous aside this time)

Once you’ve seen your homeworld from space, there’s no going back.

Again, ‘cos it’s so easy to forget I sometimes forget it myself, I’d spent my whole life thinking maybe the valley we lived in and the volcanoes smoking up the horizon was all there was. Anyone who’s had a flatscreen or a computer about the place all their life will know at least what shape their whole planet is, and maybe a whole lot about who lives where on their own world. In plenty of places they’ll know all about space travel and what comes through the Coriolis station, who their neighbours are in the next system over. On the higher-tech worlds, as I learned later, you can still be real young and know that there are eight sectors in the Galaxy and how GalCop rates ‘em all according to how they’re run and what they do to make a living. Then you start to understand how things are shipped from place to place – and how they have to be, to keep the whole show moving.

There’s a smallish patch of land, near the ground station – twenty-thirty kilometres out from it, maybe, and probably no further – where they’re really straining everything to get Qudira on the up and up. They get some fancy goods in from off world, computers and smart machines, to try to modernise the farming and so on, and the goods they can freight out pays for what comes in and means it can be built on later. If they can keep that going for long enough, maybe Qudira might be a better place to live.

Sad part is, though, that here like everywhere else they’ve still to look out for the ruiners – the ones who don’t care what kind of a future Qudira might have tomorrow if they can score themselves some loot today. And the pirate gangs that hang around in the system are just fine with this, ‘cos the less Qudira can do about policing its own space, the more they can pillage whoever comes in with the expensive stuff. As below, so above, you might say.

Of course, figuring what I said about ignorance a little while ago, you can guess a lot of the bandits planet-side don’t even twig this, and the space pirates sure aren’t in any hurry to tell them. Happy to slip a trader through with a few tons of guns they can slip past customs, for sure, and get them sold on to the ground bandits for ready cash and keeping the cycle going – yeah, they’ll do that. And that’s how innocent families get to be dead, and, thanks to karma, how someone like me gets to be in space looking out for what she can do to break the cycle.

It wasn’t until we’d been several months in training that Agent Elus took us off-world for the first time. We’d had all sorts of exercises to sharpen our balance, our aim, our sense of direction, and as much as we could learn about piloting skills as we could learn while still ground-bound. Some worlds had air vehicles we coulda tried out, Agent Elus said, but we didn’t have the base facilities to keep ‘em airworthy on Qudira. So on four wheels, three or two, over rocks or over sand, we learned what we could that way. Some of it – like how to pick yourself out of the dust when you’d stacked your sand-buggy trying for more speed than was smart right then and there, and not mind the pain or even the broken arm too much – taught us guts, I guess, but wouldn’t be much use to us in a spacecraft. In a Sidewinder, or anything similar, you mainly don’t get hurt. You either get dead, or you come back fully fit with barely even a scorch.

Still, like I say, one day Agent Elus got us all packed into a shuttle that was bound for orbit. We were crammed into the cargo hold along with twenty-nine standard cargo canisters, or TeeCees as I heard they were called, standing room only but at least with something to hold onto. The ride was smoother than I expected, but we’d been warned that some of us were going to barf when we felt free fall for the first time.

There wasn’t too much of that – the shuttle’s drive was on nearly all of the way up – but a few of us tossed our cookies when the ship had to wait to dock. There wasn’t a viewport in the hold, obviously, but there was a flatscreen hooked up to the shuttle’s forward view so we got a good look at the Coriolis station for the first time. That, even allowing for the pictures we’d been shown before, was about enough to blow your mind.

It’s almost beyond belief that anything made with hands can be so big, so regular, so obviously heavy but hanging there in space with nothing holding it up, and spinning slowly but non-stop, at least until we got close in and the shuttle started rotating too. But even the view of the Coriolis station paled when I got my first look at Qudira from a few thousand klicks up in space. The whole world looks small and precious from up there, and if you peer real close you can see the line between light and dark creeping across the world and you realize that from up here you can see someone’s day and someone else’s night at the same time.

You even forget about the volcanoes and the storms, never mind what people are doing to each other down there. All you know is that there’s this big, beautiful and somehow fragile thing, almost so close you could touch it.

I knew then and there that what I most wanted to do was find a way to stop the whole planet hurting, and whatever we were being trained for was going to make it possible.