Part III – Junk

This is Part III of the serial space western The Ghosts of Blackmoon Rift. It is also available for download in RTF format here. Or click here for a complete listing of episodes. 

“Clear this table, citizens,” snapped the leader of the uniformed men. Egan Torr glanced around, and then realized with a shock that he was talking to them. “I said move!”

“No need to be so sharp there, friend,” said Crash, grabbing his mug and getting up from the bench. Miss Kitty and Egan Torr followed suit.

Ignoring him, the uniforms heaved their wounded friend up onto the table. The man’s eyes were closed, and his breath was coming in ragged gasps. His blue jacket was open and beneath it, strips of polymer adhesive had been wrapped around his torso in a hastily improvised bandage.

“You say Young Wallace did this?” Kitty asked one of the men.

“Yes ma’am. And let me tell you that when we lay hands on that varmint, he’ll be sorry for the day that he tangled with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Energy Weapons.”

Part III – Junk

Previously: Young archaeologist Egan Torr arrives in the frontier town of Ander’s Gap on a quest for a lost starship. After scout-ship pilot ‘Crash’ Zero rescues him from an unfriendly local, the two meet up with a young wrangler named Miss Kitty. She and Crash have no sooner agreed to help him get to a place called ‘Blackmoon’ when several federal agents burst into the bar with a man who’s been shot by Wallace, the owner of Blackmoon!

“And why is that?” she asked, casually.

Their leader, an officer by the extra stripe on his collar, laughed grimly. “Let’s see, gun-running, resisting arrest, assaulting an officer – he could spend a decade in deep freeze for those alone. But for making me camp out on the open mesa for three nights straight with my rifle for a pillow, and for shooting one of my officers – well, he should be grateful if he even makes it to the slammer.”

“You say you know this Wallace well?” Torr whispered to Miss Kitty.

“I don’t say well. Anyway, I ain’t seen him in a decade.” She wrinkled her nose thoughtfully. “Maybe two. But I’m telling you, he’d have to be in sore straights to come to such a pass.”

The man everyone referred to as Doc had shuffled over and was even now breathing whiskey fumes over the comatose patient. “Sir, are you competent to operate on this man?” asked the officer.

“Sure, sure,” Doc wheezed heavily. “A little liquor steadies my shaky old hands. Now who in tarnation applied this bandage? Anyone got a laser cutter? Help me get this thing off.” The patient moaned suddenly. “Get me a shot of whiskey!” snapped the doctor. One was brought, and he downed it. “Better bring another one for him,” he added.

“That’s enough for you, old sot,” said the officer. “Do your business.”

“Hey,” said Crash, laying a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Doc Ivey here knows what he’s doing. Just give him some space to work.”

“And who might you be?” sneered the officer, brushing away his hand.

“I’m Maxwell Zero,” said Crash expansively. “I captain the Scout-class bird Void Where Prohibited.”

“Ah. So that was your ship parked on our designated landing pad. You may be interested to learn that we had that pile of scrap impounded.”

For the first time, Egan Torr got to see Crash really lose his cool. His face went white, then flushed dark before finally blossoming into a highly ornamental shade of crimson. “What?” he exploded. “You can’t – you have no right to – if you’ve dared to lay so much as a finger on -”

Two uniformed heavies stepped between Crash and the officer. “Sounds like you’d better go sort that out, Captain,” said the officer. “I wouldn’t linger here, or I’ll have you thrown in the brig for assaulting an officer.”

Swearing fluently under his breath, Crash stormed across the bar and went out, slamming the door behind him. Miss Kitty nudged Egan Torr. “I reckon we better not linger here either, Professor. These boys are liable to arrest anyone who so much as looks at them sideways. Anyways, it smells like horse manure in here.” Torr nodded, and the two exited the saloon in a less dramatic manner.

“Do you know of anywhere I could change and clean up?” asked Torr when they were safely outside. “I’m afraid I may have stepped in something on my way here.”

“Didn’t that fool captain even let you wash up?” said Miss Kitty. “Well, you can come back to my place for the moment, if you promise not to try any funny business.”

Torr promised.

“Good. And while we’re there,” she added, “We can figure out how to get Crash’s ship out of impound.”

Egan Torr blinked, a habit of his when confused. Then he chuckled and said, “I’m sorry, for a moment there I thought you were suggesting we help Captain Zero get his ship out of the impound lot.”

“That’s exactly what I did say,” said Miss Kitty, a little shortly.

“What? You had him at gunpoint not a half hour ago! And he had you in similar straights shortly thereafter!”

“My daddy always said, ‘Let bygones be bygones.’”

“My dear Miss Kitty,” said Torr, “Surely I’m not to believe that you have some feelings for this -”

“Don’t even think it!” snapped Kitty, and set off walking away from The Space Bar at a brisk pace. Torr bit his tongue and tried to keep up. Neither of them noticed when the front door of that storied establishment opened, and a mysterious figure in a long blue coat slipped out and into the shadows.

Miss Kitty’s place turned out not to lie along the main drag, or even a couple blocks back among the bunkhouses and tenements. She led Egan Torr down winding alleys, past power plants and automated factories, out to the very edge of the little town where a narrow lane separated permafoam structures from the wall of the dome. Litter cluttered their path, and stray cats prowled around crates stacked against the walls. Torr was alarmed to discover that the skin of the dome wasn’t metal or concrete, but instead some kind of thick fabric. Evidently it kept the air in, but Torr couldn’t imagine it keeping anything out.

“This colony is shielded by nothing but canvas?” he asked Miss Kitty incredulously. “Surely that’s suicide! You need plastisteel! Permacrete! Vat-grown crystal! Neutronium alloys! Something a bit more rigid than – cloth! What if a meteor were to hit?”

“Oh, we don’t worry about that too much,” said Miss Kitty. “Folks say old Ander Anderson just threw up a couple of tents when he first landed here. Didn’t plan on stayin’ long. But then a bunch of other folks came and the tents got bigger and they added more of them. Eventually people started puttin’ up buildings under the tents and I reckon that’s about the time it became the town of Ander’s Gap.”

“Anyways,” she added, “there’s a whole system of automated lasers that protects most of the dome. Got a couple of blind spots, of course. But we have Julian for that.”

“Who is Julian?” asked Torr.

“Come along and see.”

They found Julian a short distance down the lane. He turned out to be a boy, aged nine, ensconced in a steel alcove that projected into the side of the dome. He was surrounded by monitors displaying views of open space, and he had an elaborate control harness in his hand. Occasionally, the boy would lean forward toward the monitors and mash two red buttons beneath each of his thumbs. When he did so, he emitted a pew-pew! sound at a high pitch. There would be a brief flare on one of the monitors, and then all would be peaceful once more.

“Julian gets what the auto-lasers miss,” said Miss Kitty. “His mother pays him a quarter for every rock he shoots down. Jules, say hello to Dr. Torr. He’s an archaeologist.”

“Cool!” said Julian enthusiastically. “You ever dig up any Engineer mummies?” he asked Torr.

“Not yet, I’m afraid,” said Torr.

“Aww,” said Julian, and losing interest, he went back to his monitors.

Miss Kitty’s place turned out to be a couple of rooms constructed from plywood on the top of a more permanent structure. The back didn’t even have a proper wall, but was simply wedged up against the curve of the dome, with her bed beneath. Torr shuddered to imagine her sleeping right there, with bare inches of fabric between herself and hard vacuum.

“The shower’s in there, and you can clean your boots off, too,” said Kitty, tossing him a towel.

When Torr had installed himself behind the plastic privacy membrane, he found himself baffled.

“It’s a suicide shower,” she said, when he had explained his dilemma. “That box up by the head is a little micro-fission reactor. You just push the rods in to start it heating. The important thing is not to get any water in there, or it could set off an uncontrolled chain reaction, and you just don’t want that.”

Torr took the shortest shower of his life.

When he had finished, he went to work scrubbing his shoes.

“We’d best find you some attire that’s a bit more fit for the likes of Ander’s Gap,” Kitty said through the curtain. “Some boots at the very least. We can get some on our way over to the Port Authority.”

“I really find this whole scheme highly unwise,” said Torr. “Look, while I certainly owe Captain Zero a debt of gratitude for taking me under his wing this afternoon, his behavior has lead me to believe that he would be a most unsafe pilot. There must be others here who are competent enough to transport me to Blackmoon. Perhaps someone a little less… rash.”

“Look Professor, you want to go anywhere else in known space, fine. Get another pilot. But Blackmoon is out in a bad part of the Badlands. You’ll find very few that will chance flying out there in any case, let alone when the Feds are having a shootout with one of the locals.”

“You said you knew Wallace.”

“I thought I did, sure. But not ain’t a body that’s seen him in ages besides those Feds, and he shot at them.”

“Tax time can certainly be stressful,” said Torr. Miss Kitty snorted.

“The other part of it is,” she said, and here she lowered her voice, “Folks seen strange things out in that corner of space. Back when I was growing up there, the kids all said that moon was haunted. And I figure maybe it’s true. People see unexplained lights all the time out there, ships that don’t show up on radar, all kinds of stuff that don’t make sense. And some folks that spend too much time alone out there… they don’t come back right in the head. Like our Mr. Wallace, maybe. The point is,” she continued in more ordinary tones, “We need a pilot who’s good and who’s a little crazy, and that’s Crash.”

Egan Torr scrubbed his shoes in contemplative silence for a minute or two. “Miss Kitty,” he said at last, “It may be a little presumptive of me, but I would really like – that is, I’d appreciate – well, I think it would be a big help to me if you would come with me. I need some local expertise for my dig, and I have been most impressed with you. That is, with your knowledge of the territory. And I’d pay you well,” he added.

Miss Kitty yanked the plastic curtain aside. Torr hurriedly pulled his towel up higher around his waist. She tossed his jumpsuit, newly cleaned, in his face.

“You men are all fools alike,” she said. “‘Course I’m coming with you.” She yanked the curtain back shut. Torr began to dress.

“Well, thank you,” he said to the plastic membrane. There was no response.

When Torr finished cleaning up, he suddenly felt exhausted. Miss Kitty, on the other hand, had somehow managed to freshen up a little while he was in the shower and looked charged up and raring to go.

“I’m gonna go out and see what the lay of the land is,” she said. “See if I can find Crash, figure out how to get his ship back. You got some credits for the towing fees?” Torr nodded wearily. “Alright then. You just rest yourself here a spell.” She gestured toward the mattress beneath the bulging dome wall. “I’ll be back before you can say ‘hootenanny’.”

Torr, having been left with no clear idea of how long she would be gone, decided that it would be best to remain alert in such unsafe quarters. Still, he thought it would be all right to rest for a minute on the mattress tucked up against the fabric of the dome, providing he did not fall asleep.

He lay down and tried to keep himself awake by determining how many times he had faced death that day. Certainly somewhat more than two, he thought, but then it occurred to him that in addition to lawless ruffians, headstrong cyborgs, and trigger-happy cowgirls, that he was inside a cloth dome that was being protected from stray projectiles by a nine-year-old boy. As he lay there trying to calculate his odds of survival over the next forty-eight hours, he fell asleep.

Torr’s dreams were troubled ones. He was being chased by a giant man with a chrome-plated pooper-scooper over an icosidodecahedron made of jet black rock. “My name is Wallace!” the man roared. “You’ll never get off this rock alive!” Then, at the last moment, he was rescued by government agents; but they immediately placed him under arrest.

“You’ll have to take off your pants, sir,” one of them said.

“But I can’t face the Council in my astrobriefs!” he protested.

“You’re never going to see the Council!” said the man, and laughed at him. Then he took Torr by the shoulders. Torr knew that he was going to be cast into the black hole which he felt certain was just behind him, though he had never seen it.

The man began to shake him, yelling, “Professor! Professor!” into his face.

Egan Torr came awake with a jerk. “Professor!” said Miss Kitty. “Wake up! It’s time to go.” Torr looked about him. It was dark out.

“Were you able to retrieve Crash’s spacecraft?” he asked groggily.

“That’s what we’re going to do now,” said Miss Kitty. “Get your stuff. I got you some boots.”

Torr couldn’t understand why she was in such a hurry, but he did as he was told. The boots contracted around his feet with a hiss until they fit snugly. He was secretly pleased to find that the boots had little silver spurs.

Shortly afterwards, Torr found himself being hurried along through the warm dark of the dome’s artificial night. “Aren’t the impound offices likely to be closed by now?” he asked.

“I sure hope so,” said Miss Kitty.

It took Torr a few moments to what Kitty had just said. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Is there some problem getting the spacecraft out? I have funds – grant money.”

“I’m afraid there’s been what they call complications,” said Miss Kitty. “Green ain’t gonna do the trick here. Ah, there’s Crash.” The one-eyed pilot stepped out of the shadows.

“Excellent, you’re both here,” said Crash, rubbing his hands together. “Now we can get started. They’ve got the Void Where Prohibited locked down inside. We need to infiltrate the facility and break her out.”

“What facility?” asked Torr, looking around.

“Right this way,” said Crash.

They rounded a corner and found themselves facing a long chain-link fence. Above the coils of razor wire that topped it rose the sullen profiles of derelict rockets and burnt out boosters. This, however, was not what arrested Egan Torr’s attention. Of more immediate interest was a floodlit sign on the fence, which read, in bold lettering:

HONEST DAN’S SCRAP AND IMPOUND LOT

Beneath it, in smaller print ran:

DANIEL BLACK, PROPRIETOR

To Be Continued…

(Part IV is here.)