Spin the Sky (18 page)

Turns out they were packing artillery heavier than Hathor singers. You could tell at a glance, they were much too big and armored for us to take on. We had one pulse cannon and it was no good for anything but scaring off the small fry looking to scavenge.

We scrambled our signal and steered clear of them. It wasn’t long before we came across a burnt-out hull of another tinker ship with their cargo bays broken open and bits of shattered bodies floating in the debris. That phony Hathor ship was luring tinker ships to their doom with a bogus distress signal. Then they would tear the doomed tinker apart, taking anything of value before they killed the crew.

We reported them at our next port of call and made sure to warn everyone we could, but I know that siren caught at least two more ships. Ships full of good people sent to a hellish end.

How did we stop them? We didn’t.

Why, son, nobody stopped them. They were too big and too well armed. Eventually they stopped lurking in the shipping lanes, but I never heard what happened to them.

Why would anybody do that? Set out to trick and murder innocent people just to take their stuff?

Well, as far as I can tell, some people are born bastards. I’m sorry, Miss Penelope, please excuse my language. I meant to say evil. Some people are evil. You need to stay away from them and hope they leave you alone. No, it’s not a nice story, is it? But it is true.

I’ve never been able to forget the captain of the siren ship. I’ve thought about him often and wondered how a man could lure people to their dooms with such a charming smile. It’s a weird story, I guess.

You want to know the weirdest part? I could swear I met that scavenger captain again. It was right here in this house last night.

His name was Uri Mach.

Yes, Miss Penelope, I could very well be mistaken. That is true.

I’m not saying I never forget a face, but that one I remember particularly. So you probably want to keep your eyes open and your exits clearly marked around that man. That’s all I’m saying. Now I got to go visit your grandfather today, Trevor, but I’ll be back tonight and I promise to think of a better story. It’s harder than you think.

Stories about your dad don’t have happy endings.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

C
esar plods out to his father’s cabin in the sultry morning heat, wondering what he’ll find when he gets there. He remembers that last time he saw his father, Larry Vaquero, a huge bear of a man.

They had been going at it hammers and tongs, yelling at each other on the front porch for hours. His father’s face was beet red. When Larry peeled back his lips to let loose a fresh wave of angry curses, his eyes got lost in his great bushy beard.

Larry Vaquero was used to getting his way. He’d bullied a miracle before Cesar was born by convincing Earther backers to fund this little ranching nirvana in the sky as an “agricultural experiment.” Since Ithaca turned out to be one of the most lucrative investments in farming the solar system has ever seen, Larry has been running Ithaca as his own private kingdom for decades.

Fortunately for Ithaca, Larry was a benevolent dictator. He opted to leave most of the governing to the people. He made sure things were peaceful, fair and run the way he thought they should be run. For the most part, though, he liked to let men make their own decisions. That is, until his own son stood up one day and said he was leaving.

Cesar knew why his dad was so mad that day.

Larry thought Ithaca was as close to heaven as a man could get. He couldn’t understand why anyone would want to see other places or try living a different way. So therefore, his son must be suffering some sort of mental breakdown and should be yelled at until he came to his senses. Larry felt strongly that yelling was an integral part of his paternal responsibilities.

“No son of mine will run off and get involved in some fool rebellion!” Larry bellowed when Cesar stormed into his room and started shoving clothes and food into a bag.

Larry Vaquero brought up Cesar’s duty to the ranch and his responsibilities to his wife and infant son for the millionth time. They’d been arguing so long that Cesar’s head ached and he couldn’t remember whether he was arguing to go or stay any more. In the end, it didn’t matter. If they were to have a chance at surviving out here when the Earthers started lobbing nukes, he had to fight.

What was the point of arguing about it?

And yet, it is fifteen years later and the argument still isn’t over. The shack Cesar stares at now is the decayed remnant of the little temporary cabin his parents moved into when they discovered Penelope was pregnant. They gave the young couple the main house and moved out here until the new ranch they ordered could be finished. When he left, they were just beginning to build. Judging from the ruins, though, it looked like that’s all they ever did.

Cesar absorbs this fact and makes the next logical conclusion. His Mom and Dad must have abandoned their retirement home after he left and moved back into the main ranch house with Penelope. Cesar felt guilty for disrupting their life. He is frustrated by that guilt. Because what can he do about it now?

Cesar approaches the decaying shack with the same level of care he would use approaching a lion’s den. He steels himself for a frail and weak man on death’s door. Probably with a cane, barely able to creep around, blind and deaf.

Cesar envisions himself leaning over the old man’s deathbed and begging forgiveness. His father will clasp Cesar’s hands, forgive him and say a whole bunch of nice things about him before gently passing away with a smile on his lips. Cesar promises himself he won’t cry.

It isn’t manly.

“Jesus H Christ on a hotplate, boy! You gonna stand out there using up perfectly good oxygen or you gonna come inside and make yourself useful?” a querulous voice calls from the shack. “My God, you look like hell. I told you not to go. Guess it only took, what? Fifteen years for you to realize I was right? You always was slow.”

Cesar sighs. That is his dad in there all right.

“Damn, Dad, you sure turned into a slob in the last decade, didn’t you?” Cesar shouts back, picking his way through the various piles of rusting old equipment in the yard.

A great shaggy head pops into view, squinting through the right eye because the left one doesn’t work. Just then, a strong whiff of the astringent smell of ethanol slaps Cesar across the face.

“Oh, wow,” Cesar says, stopping in his tracks and waving his hands in a futile attempt to waft the smell away from his nose. “You trying to embalm yourself before you die, you crazy old coot?”

Old Larry Vaquero erupts from the door, propelled by a stream of epithets so foul that to repeat them would no doubt cause the very page they were printed on to smolder. It doesn’t faze Cesar. He’s heard it all before. He actually finds the litany of profanity oddly reassuring.

Cesar watches his father limp energetically towards him and finds the old man’s appearance less than reassuring. His father drags his left leg and the left arm dangles uselessly by his side. His dad’s face is oddly tilted—the corner of his left eye and the left side of his mouth seem to drag downward. Not that any of that slows the old bear down.

His dad stops right in front of his face and shouts, “You took your sweet ass time getting home, son.”

Cesar takes a step back. A lazy smile spreads across his face, “Well, it sure looks like reports of your death are greatly exaggerated, aren’t they?”

Larry Vaquero grins. “Ah, she likes to tell all the fancypants at her parties that I’m gonna pop off at any minute. Keeps them from getting ideas about bumping me off or forcing her to do something she doesn’t want to do. And it gives me an excuse not to go up there on Fridays! When you get to be my age, you shouldn’t have to wear pants if you don’t want to.”

After dropping that bit of wisdom, the old man pulls Cesar into a fierce hug. Then he grabs Cesar by the shirt and starts dragging him back to the shack.

Cesar allows himself to be dragged, eyeing what appears to be blankets wrapped around his father’s lower half. Cesar hopes this piece of clothing is sturdier than it looks. He really doesn’t want to see his father without pants today.

Inside, the shack looks like a mad scientist’s lab with beakers on burners and tubing running amok. As his dad pushes him into the one chair in the place, Cesar realized what is going on in here.

“So you finally did it? Told the rest of humanity to take a hike and set up a still so you could drink tequila all day?” hoots Cesar.

If he had a dollar for every time his dad swore that Cesar would eventually drive him to this particular state of affairs, he’d be the richest man in the colonies. Cesar felt you had to admire bullheadedness on that scale.

“I certainly admire your sheer cussedness, Dad.”

Larry Vaquero grins proudly while handing his son a dented tin cup full of liquor. “It’s pretty good too and I’m not just saying that because I drink it morning, noon, and night.”

Cesar takes a gulp.

“I think it burnt all the hair out of my nose,” he gasps when his vision clears.

His dad claps him on the back and cackles, “That’s how you know it’s good, son.”

While Cesar coughs a few times, his dad pulls up a large box and sits on it, greedily looking at his son. The box clinks with the unmistakable sound of full tequila bottles, but Cesar can’t be bothered with those types of details just now.

Cesar opens his mouth to ask a million questions when Larry Vaquero gives a loud whistle and smacks his own knee cheerfully. “Well here you are at last! You haven’t told them up at the big house, have you? Hoo boy! I took one look at you and I knew who their mysterious stranger was. Bah. Oh my Lord, that woman is gonna gut you when she finds out! Be sure to let me know before you do it so I can get a front row seat, ok?”

Cesar raises his eyes to the ceiling. He briefly entertains an unfilial wish. Couldn’t the stroke have slowed his father’s wits a little bit?

He sighs and wishes being a good guy wasn’t so difficult. “It’s complicated, Dad.”

“Bah,” says his father. “You say:
‘Hey toots, we’re married! Hey kid, I’m your dad!’
What’s so hard about that?”

He has to admit the old guy had a point.

Cesar holds up his palms. “What can I say? Penelope had a shotgun pointed at me. I panicked.”

The old man roars with laughter. He bends over and thumps his good leg. Wiping a tear from his drooping left eye, he wheezes, “Oh that girl has gumption, I tell you. Woo! You’re a lucky man. Stupid, but lucky.”

Taking a breath to calm himself, Larry adds, “I’ll be honest. When you first turned up with Penelope, I wasn’t impressed. She was just a tiny little thing, scared of her own shadow and throwing up all over the place before she got her space legs. But little Penelope sure has grown on me.”

Cesar does the only thing reasonable at that point. He drains his tin cup and gets up to help himself to some more.

“So, what’s going on up there with those parties? Is everything really all right?” Cesar asks his dad.

What Cesar really wants to do is sit and listen to stories about Trevor, but he has to make sure they are both safe first. He also needs to know if Penelope has a man somewhere and what the deal with that Wilhelm character is, but he isn’t at all anxious to try asking his dad about that. Penelope
said
she hadn’t kissed a man since her husband, but would have she been totally honest with the homeless stranger she thinks him to be?

Larry follows Cesar into the kitchen area, identifiable only by the large stacks of dirty dishes. “You hungry? Lupe brings me big tubs of her food. I never can eat it all.”

Cesar isn’t and says so, but that doesn’t stop Larry from heating up enough food for three lunches. It is barely ten in the morning. As Cesar makes a show of eating, Larry leans back against a stack of boxes and begins to talk.

“Well, your wife throws these parties every week and they all talk politics. For a while, I thought she’d lose her head. Get talked into some crazy quest like you did and want to go charging off, never to be seen again. But, no. She really does see those parties as her way of keeping the peace here.”

Larry snorts with disgust. “She’s as bullheaded as you. She thinks she can solve things by talking them out just like you thought you could solve things by shooting it out. You two idiots are a match, that’s for sure. Like two freaks in a pod.”

Cesar grins and forks another bite of enchiladas into his mouth. “But Lupe calls them her suitors.”

“Well, that’s a little true,” allows Larry, helping himself to a tortilla off of Cesar’s plate. “Some of them do have designs on her and who wouldn’t? She’s young, rich, and smokin’ hot. I’d try to get a piece of that action if I were a little younger too. What? It’s true, you moron. But don’t worry. She puts them in their place. Sometimes she tells them she can’t sell because I won’t allow it. Me looking like a wreck makes them think I might go at any time and they shouldn’t push her. Why risk riling up the neighborhood if I die off next week and they can buy it up fair and square? She’s a sneaky one, that girl.”

“Guess she had to be, out here all by herself,” growls Cesar, ducking his head.

Larry pats Cesar on his head like he is a truculent toddler and says, “She tells people that she can’t remarry because she’s waiting for you to come home, you know.”

Cesar laughs, “Oh, I’m pretty sure that’s another lie.”

“Well, maybe a little bit,” allows Larry. “But maybe it’s a little true too. It’s better than nothing.”

“Huh,” replies Cesar, trying to think how to ask his next question. “So she’s been here the whole time? Alone?”

Old Larry hoots loudly, “Well if you cared about that, maybe you should have dropped by once in a while!”

Cesar snaps back, “You both made it pretty clear you didn’t want to see me again. And that was before what I did with the starship!”

He jumps to his feet and drains his tin cup again, thinking wildly that he should leave.

“Oho, my boy,” Larry cries, staggering to his feet and putting a hand on Cesar’s arm anxiously. “Don’t get in a snit. You knew when you finally came home, we’d be a little annoyed that you took so long. And dropping that uranium-filled mining ship on Mexico… Well, kid, not your brightest moment, but you got the job done and we’d be silly to bawl at you for saving all our lives now. Oh, but your wife is gonna kill you about five times when you finally tell her. Fortunately for both of us, she doesn’t seem interested in getting another man. Focus on the important thing here, kid. Sit down and talk to your old father. I’ve, well… I’ve missed you.”