Poor Man's Fight (2 page)

“Hey, hey, chill out. It’s okay,” Casey counseled. “Takashi, you gotta remember who we’re dealing with.”

“Well, I’ve just…
Casey, I’ve got my limits, and what Turtle’s doing…”

Casey
shook his head. “You know the only difference between Turtle and these rich fucks is that Turtle’s robbing them up front and with his hands, right? These assholes get you with their interest rates and their late payment penalties, but it’s still robbery.”

“Yeah, but it’s not like the ship’s officers are bankers,
Casey.”

“It’s
all the same
, Takashi,” Casey assured him. “They’re all the same machine. Otherwise we wouldn’t fight ‘em like this, yeah? They’re only getting what’s coming to ‘em. Hey, listen, I’ll go talk to Turtle. Carl, you wanna take Takashi here for a walk? Maybe find him something better to do?”

“Sure, boss. C’mon, Takashi,” Carl nodded, gesturing for him to follow.

Another pleading yelp split the silence as the two left. Lauren and Casey watched them go. “Hell of a thing,” Lauren shook her head. “Guy pitches in during a fight just like anyone else. Maybe more. Then something like this happens and he gets all jittery.”

“
Like he said, everyone’s got limits,” Casey said. “Just gotta keep reminding them about the cause. He’ll get used to this.”

Lauren
looked at him with a skeptical grin. “Not that many guys on our boat really need a cause,” she pointed out.

“No, but it works for the ones who do,”
Casey shrugged. “Most folks don’t like considering themselves bad guys. They wanna look in the mirror and see a good guy, no matter what they do. Just gotta make sure they feel some sense of justification is all.”

“That what you need?”

“Hey, I feel completely justified,” answered Casey. He pounded on the door and waited to be let in.

The scene in the office was nothing short of gruesome. Two men in ships’ uniforms sat tied up in chairs, facing one another. The older officer on
Casey’s left was gagged. The one on the right was similarly gagged, but in far worse shape. Looped around the top of his bloody head was a cord, wrapped around a small dowel at the back. A burly pirate with an open vest and no shirt stood behind him, occasionally twisting the dowel to tighten the cord. Each twist elicited a scream from the victim.

A third ship’s officer lay dead between them. A couple of other pirates sat on the desk and on the couch casually watching.

“We still having trouble sorting this out?” Casey asked Turtle.

“Huh?” asked Turtle. “Oh, I don’t actually know. Been awhile since I’ve asked again.”

Casey sighed. “Bunch’a savages in this crew,” he tutted, and then turned to the unharmed officer. “Okay, so you are the ship’s purser, right? I mean we didn’t do all this for a case of mistaken identity?”

The officer nodded his head vigorously. He tried to plead something through his gag.

Casey shushed him. “He can stop hurting people if you’ll just agree to unlock the ship’s cash accounts for us without any more trouble. All we want is the cash. Whether you live or die ain’t that important to us, so if you cooperate we can let you live. Okay?” Again, he was answered with an emphatic nod, but this time the purser tried to communicate something by meaningfully tilting his head and gesturing with his eyes.

“Yes, we can leave your friend here alone, too,”
Casey sighed. “Turtle. Ease off.”

“Guy’s fucked up anyway,” grunted Turtle.

Casey turned to him, rolling his eyes. “Do you understand why you’re putting the hurt on this guy,” he said, pointing to the bloody prisoner, “and not the guy with the answers? Do you understand that answer man here doesn’t want to see his buddies die and that’s why he’s gonna talk?”

Then it was Turtle’s turn to sigh. “I’m not a moron,
Casey.”

“Christ almighty,”
Casey grumbled, noticing a bleep from the holocom attached to his wrist. “Can you maybe not make such a show of enjoying this in front of the new guys, too? You know some of them get squeamish. Takashi almost puked out there.”

He tapped the holocom to open up a communications channel. A screen opened up to reveal the face of a balding man. “Jerry,”
Casey greeted him, “what’ve we got?”

“Great haul so far in cargo and ships’ stores
,” answered the other man. “Passengers are mostly wealthy. Bunch of doctors and such, too. Splitting up the loot from this one’s gonna be like Christmas morning.”

“Christmas with a couple hundred psychos under the tree,”
Casey snorted, glancing at Turtle.

“
That’s a good point, actually,” said Lauren. “I’ve seen a pirate crew get
too
lucky on a strike before. That was a luxury liner, too, only half this one’s size. After two years of nothing but hits on bulk freighters and mining camps, everyone got crazy. Whole ship cracked under the weight of their own success before we even made it to a friendly port. Half of the crew didn’t live to spend their loot.”

Casey
nodded thoughtfully. Lauren was easily the most experienced among the crew. She was also easily one of the deadliest. “Anyone starts getting too starry-eyed, you take ‘em aside and have a talk with ‘em. The real money’s gonna come from the ship itself, though, assuming we didn’t fuck her up to bad. How’s the outlook on that?” he asked Jerry.

“We can keep her.
Wilson and the other snipes say the FTL generator will be back up in half an hour, maybe less. We can get a short jump out of her to at least get out of this system before a patrol finds us.”

“
Well, I’m not gonna fret too much about system patrols. How’s her armament?”

“That’s a kicker. Armaments are solid. She could’ve put up one hell of a fight if the captain hadn’t buckled like he did.
Maybe he figured his crew wasn’t up to it. Sturdy ship, though.”

The door opened again. Carl entered, grinn
ing from ear to ear. “Is that good news you’re gonna give me? We got some takers from the crew?”

“Seventeen,” answered
Carl. “Bunch of non-rates, couple electronics techs, a machinist and the junior astrogator. A couple of them are ex-Union fleet or system militia vets, too.”

Casey
shot a triumphant look at him. “Fuck your mixed metaphors bullshit,” he grinned. “Okay, grab a couple of solid guys and take ‘em to their quarters to get whatever of their shit they still want. Make sure they get grilled one at a time by whoever’s with ‘em on any ship’s secrets we might not know yet. VIP passengers, ship’s security, all that shit.”

“You want us to hold the rest?”
Carl asked.

“Just until we get the rest of our shit sorted. But make sure somebody from the guard detail knows the way down to the lifeboat decks so you can load ‘em up without it turning into a clusterfuck.”

“Jesus, Casey, you want to waste lifeboats on these sops?” sneered Lauren.

“Only a couple boats,”
Casey shrugged defensively. “I’m sure we can squeeze ‘em into two. Three at the most. They’ll just have to be friendly. Anyway, I said we’d leave them alive.”

“What about the rest of
the passengers?” Carl asked.

Casey
waved a dismissive hand. “Just make sure the ones we plan on ransoming don’t get too broken. Who gives a shit about the rest? It’s not like they’re gonna be able to tell anyone what happened to ‘em.”

Tanner
’s desperate run ended outside NorthStar’s district headquarters as he came to the mob of teenagers standing in a line. He nearly collapsed from fatigue, but his arrival brought him no relief from his stress. “Oh God,” Tanner he shuddered, his despair evident as he caught his breath, “they’re actually holding The Test on time this year.”

“Wow, did you run all the way her
e from the depot or something?” asked the classmate standing ahead of him in the line. Tanner bent over with his hands on his thighs dripping with sweat as he tried to slow down his breath. “You could’ve just called me. We’ve been waiting out here for ten minutes for them to let us in.”

“I
would’ve asked,” Tanner groaned, “but my test section started two spots ahead of yours. I’m supposed to be in there already. If you’re out here now, I’m at least fifty minutes late!”

Nathan blinked. That wasn’t like Tanner at all. The longer he looked at his breathless fellow senior, the more Nathan realized how out of sorts Tanner really was. “You look like shit,” he declared. “What happened?”

Tanner didn’t answer right away, still breathing hard as he wiped the sweat from his face. He straightened up to re-tie his sweaty brown ponytail when he made another frightful discovery. “Oh God, the line’s moving. I’m fucked.”

Indeed, gaps opened in the line as bored, distracted and nervous students noticed in small groups that the three-story building’s doors opened once more. Some dressed in body-length micro-smartweave clothes that regulated their temperature and moisture. Others embraced
the blazing sun and arid breeze with little clothing and generous applications of protective skin treatments. The wealthier ones, like Nathan, underwent expensive melanin adjustments to address that problem.

Tanner
could afford no such options. Normally he dressed in loose, light clothes and used a lot of cheap but effective sunscreen. Today he didn’t even have that much. He wore track shorts that needed to be washed, the first loose shirt he could find, and an awful lot of his own sweat.

“How the hell did you of all people wind up fifty minutes late to The Test?” asked Nathan.

“I couldn’t sleep,” explained Tanner, “and then I kept looking at the clock thinking about how much sleep I was missing, and the more I stressed about that the harder it was to sleep, so finally I threw a pillow over the clock. When it went off I was so out of it I didn’t even recognize the alarm.” Tanner caught his reflection in a window. He had the deep tan common in the city of Geronimo, but even so he was in for a sunburn.

“Well, you can calm down now,” shrugged Nathan. “You’ve made it. Look, you lost time, but worrying about it now won’t do you any good. Just write it off.”

“I’m not ready for this at all,” groaned Tanner.

“Oh bullshit. You tutored me. You tutored half the class. You haven’t gotten a bad grade on a test since Mrs. Berry when we were little kids, and that was just ‘cause she hated you
for always correcting her when she was wrong.”

“I didn’t tutor half the class.”

“Hey!” Nathan called out to the seniors in line ahead of him. “How many of you have had Tanner help you in school?”

Heads turned. Hands went up
all along the line, which included students from more than one school. Nathan turned back to look at Tanner in triumph. “Come on. Don’t worry about this. You’re practically the valedictorian.”

“
Heather Verde’s the valedictorian.”

“Yeah, and poor
Heather’s always a bundle of nerves like you are now. She threw up all over the podium at her senior thesis defense panel. Don’t be Heather. Settle down and let go of the stress or it’ll just get worse.”

Tanner scowled. “How is telling me that supposed to make me feel any better?”

The line moved steadily. Tanner’s shoulders sagged. He felt like beating his head against the nearest wall. He had hardly slept. He hadn’t eaten or showered, let alone taken any time to collect his thoughts. Before him loomed The Test, or as the illuminated window over the door read, The Union Academic Investment Evaluation.

His stomach turned. His legs, weak though they were, carried him toward the inevitable.

A pair of test proctors guarded the door, checking the identities of the arriving students on holographic screens projected by computers on their wrists. Tanner couldn’t hear the process until the moment was on him. Nathan turned to check in with the proctor on the right. The woman on the left looked at Tanner expectantly.

“Name?” she said, her face set in obvious disapproval. Clearly, she knew an unprepared student when she saw one. She stood straight, her businesslike clothing and calm, mature demeanor contrasting against the sweat-drenched boy before her.

“Tanner Malone,” he sighed. The woman’s holocom beeped. Tanner blinked with a bit of surprise. “Is that thing reading a voice print already?”

“Do you have your identification?”

“No,” Tanner stammered, “but if that thing just read my voice print, do you still need it?” His tone was helpful. Polite. Utterly unappreciated.

The woman’s scowl deepened. “What school do you attend?”

“NorthStar Educational 772.”

She didn’t look up from her screen as he answered. “Age?”

“Eighteen point five.”

“What was the subject of your senior thesis?”

“Xenobiology and ecology.”

“You
’re fifty-six minutes late. This will significantly impact your score.” She looked up at him sternly before he could speak. “You may not enter the testing facility with any belongings other than your clothing and any necessary, documented medication. Do you have anything to leave here?”