“Docking collar Charlie,” I say. I reach over and flip on the homing light and energize the locking collar. Then I think of a little white lie. “Uh . . . Captain, I’m under strict quarantine, so please stay aboard. I’ll come to you.”
There’s a pause on the other side.
“Quarantine?” the pilot asks.
“No longer communicable,” I assure him—and I feel like I can hear him exhale in relief.
If he checks the colreg logs, he’ll see that I’m not exactly lying. I am under quarantine. What the logs won’t say is that it was a computer virus, and that the victim was my beacon. Strange the lengths I’ll go to in order to keep people away from me, considering how lonely I feel most of the time. I guess that’s the strange torment I suffer: dying for company, for someone to talk to, but it’s never the right someone who shows. And an unwelcome presence is far worse than miserable silence.
I head down three sets of ladders to the lock hub, the sling over my arm making the trip take longer than usual. Any weight on the ball of my left foot makes my ankle cry out, so I try to get my heel deep on the rungs, which just means repeatedly banging my shin. I considered going without gravity for a while, but one look at all the crap strewn everywhere and I imagine it floating and bouncing around. No thanks.
In fact, the wreck of my beacon comes into stark relief with the prospect of someone docking up. In addition to the stuff everywhere, I’ve got open access panels leading down into mechanical spaces and wires strung all over from my makeshift repairs. My walk suit is crumpled up in the middle of the docking module, and the door to the lifeboat is wide open. For a while there, I was wearing the suit all the time and sleeping in the lifeboat, but I stopped doing both those things after the shipwreck debris bombarding my beacon died down. Besides, I’m back to not sleeping much anyway.
I wait by the airlock for the pilot to secure his ship. Sniffing the air, I have this bad feeling that, despite the herculean effort from the air scrubbers and NASA’s PineFresh scenting system, the entire facility reeks of a college dorm room, midsummer, after an egg fight, with two dead skunks under a pile of soiled laundry. I breathe into my palm and sniff. Whatever olfactory sense I had died months ago. That’s good for me, bad for visitors.
A loud thump against the hull lets me know that the ship has arrived and that the pilot is a three on a scale of ten when it comes to jockeying a flight stick. If he’s making a living collecting bounties, that probably means he’s more of a terrestrial threat. More of a sleuth-and-taser kinda guy. This guess is vindicated once I’ve keyed my side of the airlock and he’s keyed his. The bounty hunter on the other side is straight out of one of those true-life holos where people repo your shit or haul you back to jail from some remote moon hideout.
His hair is in dreadlocks. His beard is long, and it’s knotted with bits of string so that it juts out in little clumps. There’s an unlit cigar between his teeth and mirrored shades wrapping his face. He’s got a bandana around his neck, another on his bicep, and one tied around each knee. His flightsuit is studded with bulging pockets, and even standing perfectly still, he jangles. I imagine he must keep the grav on his ship at a 0.7 to be able to stand all that nonsense. He has guns strapped everywhere, and an honest-to-goodness bandolier of large brass shells and grenades is draped across his chest like some warlord beauty contestant sash. What sounds vaguely like a dog yips somewhere from within the depths of his ship.
“Mitch,” the bounty hunter says, reaching out his hand with a jangle and clatter. “Mitch O’Shea.” We do that awkward arm-in-sling handshake where I extend my left hand, turn it sideways, and we go pinkie-to-thumb. He looks me up and down. “What happened to you?”
I realize I’m standing there in my boxers, barefoot, covered in bruises and duct tape. I dimly care.
“Gravity genset went on the fritz,” I say. “Started oscillating. Uncontrollably.”
The bounty hunter lowers his shades and narrows his eyes at me, almost like he has some truth-detecting superpower and is boring it into my brain. I glance up at the ceiling, and he glances with me. I glance down at the floor, and he does the same. We look up again. Then down.
“Yeah,” I say. “About like that.”
“No shit?”
I point to my slinged arm. “You ever hear it hurts worse to put a shoulder back in than it does to knock it out?”
He nods.
“Complete crap. Feels so good going back in. Like popping your knuckles. You should try it.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” He glances at my arm, at my attire, and then pushes his glasses back over his eyes. When he fishes a tablet from a pouch in the back of his flightsuit, I see that the small talk is over. Down to business. He holds the tablet out to me; it has a warrant displayed on the screen. I study a blurry image of a woman with short-cropped hair and an angry scowl. There’s all kinds of small text about what the government wants done with her and how much they’ll pay, but I just see the image. The tablet is taken back before I’m ready to let go of it.
“Have you seen her?” O’Shea asks.
“Nope,” I say.
“You sure?” he asks.
“Positive.”
O’Shea lowers his glasses and narrows his eyes at me again. I widen mine on purpose, throwing the blinds open, letting him really stare inside. Somewhere in his ship, an animal whimpers. If this guy could really see my thoughts, he’d probably be whimpering too.
The glasses go back up. I fight the urge to laugh out loud at this guy. There’s a chance, I realize, that all his gear came from a surplus store and he’s really new at this. Impossible to tell. In the army, rookies spent a lot of time charring their gear over trench fires and smearing their helmets with mud to fit in. The vets, meanwhile, spent their time trying to keep their shit maintained in order to stay alive. I sniff the air, looking for a scent of gun oil or WD-60 to get a handle on which sort of person Mitch O’Shea is. Unfortunately, due to the nature of my living quarters, my olfactory sense is stunted.
“Okay, well, I’ll need all ship scans for the last couple weeks,” O’Shea says. “Plus all radio logs.”
“Not many places to hide out here,” I say.
Mitch stares at me. At least, I assume he’s staring at me behind those glasses.
“There’s good reason to suspect this fugitive came through here,” he says. “I’ll also need to do some scans of my own, poke around a bit, but I want to warn you that this person is very dangerous—”
I say, “Ding-Dong,” cutting O’Shea off.
Well, a recording of my voice from two weeks ago does that. There’s another ship arriving in-system. I glance up the ladders, dreading the three-flight climb. It’s fifty-six rungs to the command level. Yes, I’ve been counting.
“Was that someone saying ‘ding-dong’?” O’Shea asks. He points his unlit cigar at the ceiling.
I clear my throat. Beacons aren’t meant for co-habitating. It feels like the NASA techs just left, and now I’ve got this guy seeing me in my briefs, nosing my dirty laundry, and hearing what I do to pass the time.
“You mind if I look out your canopy?” I ask. “Just to see who that is. It’s a long climb up with a busted wing.” I indicate the sling.
Mitch hesitates. Then he stands aside with a jingle and a jangle. “Don’t touch anything,” he says. “Cockpit’s this way.”
Yeah, toward the front of the ship, I nearly say sarcastically. From the bump he gave the locking collar, I’m pretty sure I’ve got more flight time than this bounty hunter does. But I keep it to myself and follow him toward the cockpit. We pass through what looks like a holding pen—gray bars run from floor to ceiling. There’s an animal in one of the pens, drinking out of a toilet.