The Five Rules of Smuggling AND HOW TO BREAK THEM

The Five Rules of Smuggling AND HOW TO BREAK THEM 23 MINUTE READ

“DESIGNATION: CAPTAIN MOORE,” Rok asked. “QUERY: WHY ARE YOU SITTING. WITH YOUR EYES CLOSED?”

“M’praying,” Ennig mumbled, eyes screwed shut, knuckles white as he gripped the arms of his chair. “This is me, praying.”

“WHY?” Rok asked.

Ennig grimaced. “Because I’m figuring that the moment we try to come outta drill we’re gonna be smeared across about six different—”

“THIS VESSEL EXITED DRILL. EIGHTEEN MINUTES AGO,” Rok said. She leaned back from the ship controls as Ennig peeked an eye open. “THIS UNIT HAS BEEN. WAITING ON YOU.”

“What?” Ennig asked, hopping out of the co-pilot’s seat and keying the drillshields on the bridge windows to open. They slid upwards to reveal the star-speckled darkness and distant planets of system space. He grabbed Rok’s shoulder-plating and gave her a little shake. “Holy shit, Rok, that was smooth.”

“WELL. YES,” Rok said. She gestured to the controls with open hands. “WHILE YOU SLEPT. I CONTINUED SIMULATION TRAINING. UNTIL MY PERCENTAGE OF SUCCESSFUL DRILL AND PILOTING ROUTINES. WAS NINETY-EIGHT POINT SEVEN PERCENT.”

Ennig leaned on the console and looked out at the planets. Then he looked back at Rok with a tired but sincere smile. “Goddamn! I didn’t pull that kinda percentage until I was about twelve.”

“YOU KEEP SAYING THESE THINGS,” Rok said, perturbed. “WHICH CANNOT BE TRUE. ONLY MY ADVANCED PATTERN RECOGNITION SUITE ALLOWS THIS UNIT TO—”

“You know what this means?” Ennig asked. “This means I’ve gotta teach you the rest of the job.”

Rok stood from the captain’s chair with a groan from the metal supporting her. She looked down at the chair. One of the arms was crooked. She reached down and worked on fixing it as Ennig kept talking.

“The only thing that’s kept us going so far is the fact that you don’t need air, water, food, or pay,” Ennig said. He coughed. “Which, uh, thanks for that, by the way. But we’re broke. We’ve got to make some cash.”

“UNDERSTOOD,” Rok said, giving up on the arm of the chair and letting it hang. “WHAT IS. THE NEXT TASK. CAPTAIN MOORE? MANUFACTURE OF SALEABLE GOODS? HACKING FINANCIAL ACCOUNTS? BOARDING VEHICLES AND. REQUISITIONING THEIR CARGO?”

“No, no, and no fucking way,” Ennig replied. He sat down at the comms terminal and started typing. “No, we’re going to do a little… uh… cargo hauling. For… some guys.”

Rok applied human speech and facial recognition suites. “SO. WE ARE SMUGGLING.”

“Yep,” Ennig admitted, squinting at the screen. “I’m just checking the legally-gray listings on DregsList… Oh, here we go. ‘Need large cargo moved to the Pellew system… twenty-five thou up-front, rest on delivery… No questions asked, no bullets given—’ don’t worry, that’s just a standard expression in these ads.”

“IF YOU. SAY SO,” Rok said, dubious. Ennig clicked on something and wrote a quick note.

“Alright, I’ve sent a message saying we’re interested,” he said. “If they get back to us, we’re set for refueling and real groceries. If not, I’ll check out a few of these other ads, lower my standards a bit. In the meantime… guess you should learn the five most important rules about smuggling.”

Rok sat down in the co-pilot’s seat, which she had taken the time to reinforce. “FIVE… RULES?”

Ennig frowned a little in thought. “Well. Four rules that you need to know.”

1.) Don’t look at the cargo.

“Pleasure doing business, Rat… fuck,” Ennig said. He shook hands with the massive man standing on the loading ramp of This End Up, being very careful not to stare too long at the enormous flintlock laser pistol hanging on the front of his belt. Ennig turned and shook hands with the man next to him, a stockier man wearing a suit that looked like it’d been made out of sofa upholstery. “Mr. Bradford.”

“Same to you,” Mr. Bradford said. He pumped Ennig’s hand a few times before dropping it and peering over his shoulder. “Smart thing you’ve got going here, with the loading bot. Bet it makes things a lot easier for a solo operator like yourself.”

“BEEP-BOOP,” Rok said as she stepped down to lift the last crate off the ramp and load it into the cargo bay proper. “THIS UNIT IS A LOADER BOT. THIS UNIT LOVES. LOADING.”

“Bit weird with the programming, though,” Ratfuck observed. Ennig winced and scratched the back of his neck.

“Yeah, so, I’ll shoot you a message once we drop out of drill,” Ennig said. “Final credit transfer can happen once you’ve verified delivery with your contact in Pellew.”

“Works for me,” Mr. Bradford said. He grinned to show off teeth that were more gold than enamel and tucked a credit chit into Ennig’s front shirt pocket. He gave it a little pat. “Safe flying, Mr. Moore.”

Ratfuck offered only a nod as he turned with Mr. Bradford and they picked their way back down the ramp to their groundcar. Ennig tossed off a lazy salute before heading into the cargo bay.

“Well, I didn’t have to arm wrestle a high-grav native spacer, so I’m calling that the easiest deal in recent memory,” he called as he punched the button to close the cargo bay doors. “How’s the load looking, Rok?”

“HUMAN,” she called back. Ennig stopped.

“What?”

He rounded a load of crates to find Rok standing over one with the lid up, her lamp shining down into it. He groaned aloud and scrubbed his hands over his face.

“Rok!” he shouted as he limped over. “What did I say about looking at cargo?”

“THIS UNIT. INTENDED TO PERFORM A CURSORY CHECK,” Rok explained, “TO ESTABLISH. WHETHER THE CARGO CONTAINED EXPLOSIVES. ELECTRONICS. OR OTHER SENSITIVE COMPONENTS WHICH WOULD WARRANT. EXTRA PRECAUTIONS IN FLIGHT AND HANDLING.”

“Yeah, okay, and if we weren’t doing something super illegal, that would be a great idea,” Ennig allowed. “But as it is, it’s best to just pretend you’re hauling water and call it a day. Now, what did you mean by ‘human’? What, illegal protein rations? Medicine or drugs? Something that just generally isn’t robot par…”

Ennig’s voice died as he joined Rok in staring down into the crate.

“NO,” Rok said. “I MEANT. ‘IT IS HUMAN BEINGS.’”

Two women, one man, and three children were loaded in the crate. Each was dressed in a plain tunic and folded into the fetal position, held there by layers of plasticized wrapping on their limbs. Masks covered their faces and a panel on the lid of the crate gave vital sign readouts. Chilled air pumped out into the cargo hold as Rok held it open.

“Oh, fuck me,” Ennig groaned.

“WHAT. RIGHT NOW?” Rok asked.

Ennig threw his hands up. “No, it’s an expression! Come on. We’ve got to figure out what to do now.”

2.) Get the job done, no matter what.

“Okay, so there’s no way we can complete this job,” Ennig began, sitting in the captain’s chair with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands. “This is just… no. My ship isn’t having any part of slavery.”

“THAT’S GOOD,” Rok observed. She swiveled a little in the co-pilot’s seat. “THIS UNIT IS NOT. A FAN.”

Ennig sat back and rubbed at his leg where the metal prosthetic met flesh. “Of course, they could just be migrants. Like, illegal migrants, who paid to be shipped where they wanted to go. There’s no way to know.”

“I THINK THERE IS,” Rok said. She gestured towards the back of the ship. “WE COULD. WAKE ONE UP.”

The woman coughed up greenish preservative fluids on the floor of the cargo bay in painful, racking heaves as she pushed herself away from Rok and Ennig on shaking arms. She shook her head over and over, apparently unable to speak or scream for the fluid in her throat. Once it was cleared, however, she started talking fast in a language Ennig couldn’t understand.

“Hey, uh, shit,” he sputtered. “English, you speak English?”

Rok’s light shifted. “LANGPACK RECOGNIZES: CANTONESE SETTLER DIALECT. VERSION SIX. PARSING… BEGINNING AMBIENT TRANSLATION MODE FOR. COMMPAD DEVICES.”

“What?” Ennig asked. The woman on the ground jumped a little before beginning her pleas again, this time, through the commpad jack in his ear, in crisp English.

“No, no, no,” she sobbed, “no, you cannot do this! We paid! We paid on time! Don’t hurt my son!”

Ennig looked at Rok, standing with plastic wrap stuck to her monoblade and hands, and then back at the woman. “Okay, so you’re definitely not a migrant.”

The woman winced and recoiled more as she looked up into Rok’s bright lamp. “No, please, don’t hurt us!”

“Whoa, whoa, no, we’re not going to hurt you!” Ennig insisted, dropping to his knees and moving towards her with his hands up and empty. “We’re— well, we were supposed to be the delivery guys. But we’re not doing that now!”

It took the woman a long moment to process what he said. When she did, she unfolded from her defensive huddle and looked around. She looked up at Ennig in complete confusion. Rok crouched beside him and retracted her monoblade with a metal sliding sound and a crackle of plastic wrap.

“WHAT IS YOUR. DESIGNATION?” Rok asked, modulating her voice to the quietest Ennig had ever heard it. It was still loud enough to startle the woman again. Ennig made a soothing gesture and rephrased.

“What’s your name?” he asked. “Do you know?”

“Jung,” the woman said, stuttering a little. “J-jung Lao Fei. Where… am I?”

“YOU ARE ABOARD A SHIP. IN DRILLSPACE,” Rok said. “OUR CURRENT DESTINATION IS: PELLEW.”

Rok looked to Ennig guiltily as the woman folded in on herself again and sobbed. “No! Mr. Bradford said he would ship us to the mines in Pellew if we didn’t pay, but we did! We did pay!”

“And he sold you anyway,” Ennig guessed, with a sigh. He sat back from kneeling and rubbed at his knees. “Well, shit. Do you have a safe place you could go? Some other system?”

“All of us, we were migrants from Tian Mo, in the Gemma System,” Jung said. She wiped at her face as she explained. “We came to Revenant on promises of better paying jobs, sophisticated jobs, away from the farms at home. But when we got here the jobs were hard and mostly manual labor. We had to live in labor complexes owned by Mr. Bradford. He was always threatening us, and then…

“Everything was on fire,” she whispered, a vacant look of horror on her face. “We were all screaming, running. I tried to activate the biome rain system from a remote terminal but it was completely offline. They chased us down in the streets and knocked us unconscious. I was… my son!”

Jung pushed herself to stand and ran at the open crate. She pushed aside two of the packed people before letting out a relieved cry and lifting what appeared to be a five-year-old boy up. She cradled him in her arms and did her best to press him close without damaging the facemask maintaining his vitals. Crates of Tian Mo workers loomed all around. Ennig considered his options.

“I can’t change course in drill,” Ennig explained, “but we can quietly fuel up in Pellew and then drill back out to Gemma, if you know the route.”

“I do,” Jung said. She held her son close and gathered her composure. “I was trained as a systems engineer. I assisted our first captain in plotting to Revenant. But…”

She looked back at the stacks and stacks of crates in the hold, including the one she’d been in, still ajar at her side. Ennig shook his head.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We just don’t have the air, water, or food to wake everyone up. They’ll have to stay in stasis until we get to Tian Mo.”

Jung slumped a little. Then she looked back, this time at Rok.

“Just one,” she pleaded, holding out the child in her arms. “Just my son. He’s so young, and small. He wouldn’t use much. He could have my ration of food and water.”

Rok looked at Ennig. He winced at the dimness of her lamp, then at its disappointed, maybe upset, gray color. He pinched the bridge of his nose to ward off a headache.

“I can… cut air to some of the cabins,” he conceded. “We’ll just need to be careful. Wake him up.”

“Thank you!” Jung cried. She pressed her son to her chest again and shook his hand. “Thank you so much!”

Ennig endured the shaking and then the hand up she offered as he struggled to get back to his feet. He helped her initiating the wakeup sequence for her son, detaching the vitals mask, and getting the boy through the painful rejection of the preservative. Jung closed the crate they’d both been packed in with obvious regret. Then her focus was all on her son as he became aware of where he was and remembered what had happened. Ennig turned back to find Rok looking at him, lamp bright again and a pleased, peach color. He ducked his head and rubbed the back of his neck.

“Don’t make a scene,” he grumbled as he passed her on the way to prep a cabin.

3.) Take the credits you earned and run.

“Here,” Ennig said, offering Jung the credit chit from the front pocket of his vest. “There’s just a little left on it after the refueling and stuff, but it should be enough to help all of you get settled back in here.”

Jung accepted it with a slight frown, standing at the head of a crowd of shaky but relieved people. The rolling green hills of the agricultural colony Tian Mo stretched away behind them. To Ennig’s right, Rok threw Jung’s son, Dat Lao Fei, into the air.

“BEHOLD,” she said as she caught him with gentle hands before tossing him up again, “THE FIRST HUMAN TO ACHIEVE. SELF-PROPELLED FLIGHT. TRULY. WE ARE IN AN AGE OF MIRACLES.”

Dat giggled and flapped his arms as he came back down. “Rok! Again!”

“I AM BUT A SERVANT. TO YOUR MAGICAL WHIMS,” Rok said as she tossed him.

“We really shouldn’t take this,” Jung said, looking down at the chit. “You will need it to get by.”

“We can always find more work,” he said. He gestured out at the hills. “You guys have gotta get homes, food, send messages to family. Consider it… well, consider it a partial refund, from Mr. Bradford.”

“We will never forget this, Ennig,” she said. She reached out and squeezed his upper arm. “You will always have a home on Tian Mo, should you need it.”

“With any of us,” added a man behind her. The others nodded or offered words of agreement. Ennig ducked his head and made his goodbyes as Rok set Dat down and turned to get the ship ready to fly out again.

“That’s alright,” Ennig said, “I’m a spacer. As long as I’ve got a ship, I’ve got a home. But I appreciate it. I really do.”

“Rok!” Dat yelled from where he leaned against his mother’s legs. He waved as she looked back at him. “I made a present for you! It’s in the kitchen! Love you! Bye!”

“Goodbye, Rok!” Jung called. “Thank you for all you’ve done, too. Please come back to visit sometime. Dat will miss you.”

“AND I HIM,” Rok said. She offered one last wave and a flash of Dat’s favorite shade of blue from her lamp before walking with Ennig back up the hill to the rough landing spot they’d put This End Up down on.

“We’re fucked the moment we drill back into Ratfuck’s contact network,” Ennig mumbled. “We can’t make a habit of this.”

“I WILL MAKE READY. FOR BATTLE,” Rok said.

4.) Don’t take anything personally.

“A frame, really?” Ennig asked around his cigarette. This End Up was fresh out of drill, drifting on autopilot towards a refueling station before their next jump. Rok, seated across the mess table from him, didn’t pause in precisely bending a corner angle into a piece of lightweight steel when she spoke.

“DAT CREATED FOR ME,” she said, shearing off an inch of excess steel with her monoblade, “THIS BEAUTIFUL ARTWORK. USING THE CONCENTRATED PIGMENT STICKS THIS UNIT DISTILLED FROM. VARIOUS SHIP MATERIALS. IT WOULD BE NEGLIGENT NOT TO PROPERLY DISPLAY IT.”

Ennig pulled the thick piece of shiplog backup paper across the table towards him and considered the rough illustration of Rok and Dat drawn on it in improvised crayon. They were fighting dinosaurs with laser guns while riding dinosaurs. “I mean, sure. Why not? It’s obviously a masterpiece.”

“YOUR SARCASM IS NOT APPRECIATED. CAPTAIN MOORE,” she said. “MANY EARLY CIVILIZATIONS PRODUCED ART. INFERIOR IN QUALITY TO DAT’S.”

“Okay, how do you know that?” Ennig said, leaning across the table towards her and gesturing with his cigarette. “You’re always randomly coming out with these facts about—”

This End Up’s warning sirens went off in a deafening blare of noise.

“Never fucking mind,” Ennig hissed as he disentangled himself from the bench and limped towards the bridge. “That’s the hostile proximity alarm. There’s a ship up our ass. It’s time.”

Rok stood and threw open a wall panel to expose a ship interface. “CAPTAIN MOORE. WOULD YOU LIKE THIS UNIT. TO ENGAGE THE HOSTILE WITH GUNNERY?”

“We won’t win a fight with ship weapons unless all they’re carrying is a slingshot,” Ennig groused, cigarette pinched in the corner of his mouth as he brought up a visual of the approaching ship on the captain’s screen. The name on the side read JUST BUSINESS. “I’m gonna take a wild guess and say it’s our friends Ratfuck and Mr. Bradford. Let ‘em board. I’ll get my gun.”

Ennig and Rok met Ratfuck and Mr. Bradford in the engine room as they exited the airlock. Ennig stood with his hands folded in front of him, the picture of courtesy, with an old style .357 Magnum tucked in the back of his pants. Rok didn’t bother concealing her massive laser rifle. Mr. Bradford smiled when he spotted them and swept his hand back into his suit pocket, revealing a holstered .44 under his arm. Ratfuck just caressed his laser flintlock.

“Well,” Mr. Bradford said, “here they are. Our contractors.”

“We took the liberty of scanning for our cargo,” Ratfuck said. He spat on the floor of the engine room. “Nothing. And Ms. Havoc in Pellew says she didn’t take delivery, on time or any other date.”

“It would seem you’ve sold our cargo on to someone else,” Mr. Bradford said. He squinted at Ennig before showing off his gilded teeth in a grin. “Or played the hero and let it go. Bleeding hearts.”

“Gentlemen,” Ennig greeted, nodding to each of them. “Discerning businessmen like you should know it’s a crime in Revenant, Pellew, and most other civilized systems to get involved in selling people. I might have done you a favor.”

“It’s not a crime to sell Expert Systems,” Mr. Bradford pointed out.

Ennig frowned. “What?”

“Our cargo manifests and ‘personnel’ lists don’t have humans on them,” Ratfuck said. “Legally, you were transporting Expert Systems.”

“THEY WERE HUMAN,” Rok said. “NOT MACHINE.”

“Oh, with some of these nifty armatures engineers are designing again, who really knows?” Mr. Bradford mused. He rubbed his chin. “But that’s all semantics. The reality of this situation is that you stole incredibly valuable and expensive cargo from us. In this system, that can be punished by death.”

Ennig tensed. Rok’s lamp shifted from white to a deep, warning red. Mr. Bradford raised a finger and gestured to her.

“But I think we can do this cleaner,” he said. “You know, while I was trying to figure out just who, exactly, thought they could swindle me, I came across something very interesting. A bounty on two fugitives out of Lux VII.”

“A human,” Ratfuck said, looking to Ennig. Then he turned his eyes to Rok. “And an AI.”

Ennig said nothing. Rok looked to him before fixing her lamp back on the two men in front of them. Mr. Bradford stepped forward and rubbed his hands together.

“See, you lost me a lot of money getting rid of the colony workers,” he said, “but I’ve crunched the numbers. With the bounty on just the robot’s head, I stand to make money on this little misadventure.”

Ratfuck stepped forward and looked Rok up and down, sizing her up for a fight. “You give us this one, and we’ll let you go. Forget this fuckup. Maybe even shunt some more work your way. God knows a discerning businessman like yourself, with a bounty on your head, no less, could use a little help.”

Rok extended her monoblade. Ratfuck smiled and cocked his flintlock.

“What do you say, Mr. Moore?” Mr. Bradford coaxed. “This all goes away, and all you have to do is hand over the tin can.”

Ennig drew and shot Mr. Bradford in the gut before he could unholster his massive piece. Rok put the monoblade through Ratfuck’s throat as he fumbled for a gun at his back. He slid off her blade to the floor in a puddle of blood that was almost black under the amber emergency lighting of the engine room. She finished Mr. Bradford as he gurgled and clutched his hands to his stomach.

“I say on my fucking ship I’m a captain, not a mister,” Ennig grumbled. “And she’s my first mate.”

5.) Don’t get close to your crew. There’s no honor among thieves. There’s no honor among smugglers, either. If they don’t die, they’ll only live to stab you in the back.

Rok walked onto the bridge with Dat’s framed artwork and Ratfuck’s flintlock while Ennig wrapped up plotting a course to Schiaparelli. He looked up and frowned as she spot-welded hooks to the walls of the bridge to hang them.

“Wait, aren’t we using that gun?” he asked. “It looks expensive, which probably means it’s powerful.”

“THAT IS A FLAWED CONCLUSION. TO DRAW,” Rok said as she hung it up. “MANY EXPENSIVE ITEMS. ARE COMPLETELY USELESS. FOR EXAMPLE: THIS ONE.”

Ennig dropped his digital divider caliper on the drillroute display and swiveled in his chair. “You’re kidding.”

“IT DOES NOT HAVE A CHAMBER. IN WHICH TO LOAD A LASER BATTERY OR A BULLET,” Rok said, turning the gun this way and that for him to see. “IT IS. PURELY DECORATIVE.”

“We almost got busted looking down the barrel of a fake gun,” Ennig said, letting out a bitter laugh and sinking his head in his hands. Rok hung Dat’s drawing in its heavy-duty frame and shook her head.

“NO. THE FORTY-FOUR CALIBER PISTOL CARRIED BY DESIGNATION: MR. BRADFORD. AND THE SAWED-OFF SHOTGUN. ON DESIGNATION: RATFUCK’S BACK. WERE VERY REAL. I HAVE PLACED THEM IN THE CARGO BAY ARMORY. FOR YOUR USE.”

“The ship?” Ennig asked, turning back to his course plotting.

“VESSEL DESIGNATION: JUST BUSINESS. IS SET TO FLY INTO. THIS SYSTEM’S SUN. IN APPROXIMATELY SIX HOURS,” Rok said. “IT IS ALSO NOW. EXPERIENCING A RUNAWAY HEAT VENTING PROBLEM. TO DETER WOULD-BE SCAVENGERS. AND TO AID DESIGNATION: MR. BRADFORD AND DESIGNATION: RATFUCK IN THEIR. EVENTUAL CREMATION.”

Ennig laughed. “I would ask where you come up with that shit, but I don’t think I want to know.”

“THE UNFAIRNESS OF LIFE. ENRICHES MY WORLDVIEW AND OBSERVATIONS,” Rok said. She took a seat in the copilot’s chair and went to work double-checking his planned route. Ennig produced a crooked smile as he lit a cigarette and looked at his own screen. He hummed a tune before singing a little, in a scratchy baritone.

“With cutlass and gun, o we fought for hours three. Blow high! Blow low! And so sailed we,” he sang, quietly. “The ship it was their coffin, and their grave it was the sea.”

“WHAT. WAS THAT?” Rok asked. Her lamp brightened in interest. Ennig cleared his throat and waved his hand dismissively.

“Something I learned as a kid,” he said. He seemed embarrassed. “People were always singing around me, back on my home planet and on my first ship. ‘Fire Down Below,’ ‘What Do You Do with a Drunken Spacer,’ ‘Jolly Sailor Bold,’ etcetera. Y’know. Songs and stuff.”

“I DO NOT KNOW—” Rok made quotes with her manipulation claws. “—‘SONGS AND STUFF.’ TELL ME ABOUT THEM.”

“I don’t know how much I can tell you that would be useful,” Ennig said, scratching the back of his head. “You can’t sing, can you?”

“THE SHIP IT WAS THEIR COFFIN. AND THEIR GRAVE IT WAS THE SEA,” Rok sang back to him, very loudly but perfectly on-key. Ennig blinked. To his confused look, she said, “ALL AI MOUNTED IN ARMATURES. CAN TUNE THEIR VOICE MODULES TO EMULATE SINGING. ENNIG.”

“Oh,” he said, pretending that had been obvious, “duh. Sorry. And what happened to ‘Designation: Captain Moore’?”

“YOU SAID. I WAS YOUR FIRST MATE,” Rok pointed out. “I HAVE CONDUCTED RESEARCH. ON THIS POSITION. IT WOULD SEEM. HISTORICALLY. MY DUTIES INCLUDE CLEANING UP YOUR MESSES. KILLING IN YOUR NAME. PUTTING DOWN MUTINIES. AND THEN DISPARAGING YOU. I HAD THREE OUT OF FOUR TASKS IN HAND.”

Ennig laughed so hard he almost inhaled his cigarette. He put it out in the ashtray on his console while banging on his chest with a fist. Smoke puffed out of his nose as he coughed.

“Okay,” he gasped, grinning, “okay, let’s see what you can pick up.”

He taught her, first and foremost, all the dirtiest songs he knew. Rok was too delighted with the new information and skill to begrudge him his near-hysterical laughter at hearing an AI deliver loud renditions of “Friggin’ in the Riggin’” and “The Spaceport Church.” Then he moved on to anything else he could remember enough of the tune and lyrics to. Rok turned out to make a formidable backup vocalist on the choruses. They were almost at the edge of the system on the way to their next destination, a backwater planet looking for someone to haul roughly two thousand chickens as payment to the firm that ran their terraforming, by the time he started scraping the bottom of the barrel.

“Huh,” he said, throat scratchy and voice low from wearing it out, as he lit a fresh cigarette. “I think I might be out of songs.”

“DISAPPOINTING,” Rok said. “I LIKED. ‘MARRIED TO A MERMAID.’”

“You would. It’s weirdly cheerful for a sea shanty,” he observed. He kicked back in his chair and smoked a little as he thought. “I thought there was one, seemed appropriate… oh, right.”

“With her pistols loaded she went aboard, and by her side hung a glittering sword. In her belt two daggers, well-armed for war, was this female smuggler,” he sang, looking out at the stars dotting the blackness of space, “was this female smuggler, who never feared a scar.”

When he looked back at Rok, her lamp was the same pleased, peach color as before.

“Don’t make a scene,” he mumbled, fighting a smile, as he initiated the preliminary drill procedures.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AUG 2016 | REHOSTED 2/27/2024