The Space Pirate 1 (2 page)

Charley stepped back, unsure what to do. She sat against the mound by the side of the house in a pile of greasy garbage. The cold had set in, causing Charley to shiver uncontrollably. Her linen shift was woefully inadequate for keeping out the cold. She sat in the filth for what seemed like an eternity, crying silent tears that her own mother would reduce her to this.

Unable to stay still any longer, she stood and took another look through the window. Anna looked fast asleep on the far side of the bed. Her heart stopped when she saw that the man was awake and sitting on the end of the bed playing with his wrist pad. Oh, what Charley would give for one of those! Rumor had it that those things could organize one’s life. They had maps, they had scanners, they had the Nex, godammit! News, entertainments, games, reference data. They were massively expensive on Abeyas. Only those with regular, steady incomes could maintain the subscription fees. Which was less than 1% of the population. Which meant this guy must’ve been high in Boss Pete’s command chain, perhaps even second in command.

Charley studied him with interest. He was dark, swarthy and generally repellent. He had hawk tattoos trailing down the arm Charley could see. Thick, powerful legs and what seemed to be a fairly sizable manhood.

Before she knew what she was doing, Charley tapped on the makeshift window. The man looked up sharply, saw Charley, grinned. What a fucking creep.

3

Still smiling like a wolf, the guy latched open the window and leaned on it casually.

“Feeling a little cold?” he asked. “Anna mentioned she’d lost a daughter today.”

Charley felt like punching him in the nuts. Instead, she thrust out her hand.

“Name’s Charley,” she said brightly. “Can you let me in for a while?”

The slimeball looked Charley up and down, checking out the goods. She felt self-conscious, shivering in the cold. She hoped her nipples weren’t standing to attention. Wasn’t likely, as she wore a tight, practical bra underneath her shift.

“Sure,” the man eventually said. “Name’s Matheson.”

Charley climbed through the small hole hungrily, desperate for warmth. Shutting the window behind her, she sat against the wall. Matheson looked back at the sleeping Anna with a bemused expression. Charley knew what the creep was thinking. In his tiny mind he’d just done her a favor, so now it was time for payment.

Charley looked up at the man with appraising eyes. This was gonna be a little gross but what could she do? To spend a night out on those mounds in nothing but a loose sand shift was to risk dangerous health problems. Charley had no option but to play this game. If Anna woke now she would risk losing more than her home. She had no doubt her mother would kill her on the spot.

Resigned to her immediate need for survival, Charley stood and pressed herself against Matheson’s hairy chest. She traced a finger through the springy hair, looking up at the man with wide, hungry eyes.

The big man had already hardened - he could feel him rise between her legs. She raised both arms so he could lift her shift over her head. Underneath she wore her underpants and bra. She stepped back so he could get a good look at her as she removed the bra slowly. Her breasts bounced free, just visible in the warm glow of the faint afterglow of the gas lamp in the corner.

She looked at her mother over Matheson’s shoulder. The older woman stirred but did not wake. She pushed Matheson gently onto the end of the tattered bed and pulled her underpants down. He gripped her buttocks as she straddled him. She rode him like a cowgirl until he was finished. Which wasn’t long.

Anna stirred and rolled over, her arm lazily reaching out for her man. Grinning stupidly, Matheson climbed next to her and waved for Charley to get the fuck out.

Frowning, Charley dressed and climbed back through the window, only this time she was carrying Matheson’s wrist pad.

Excitedly she scurried over the cold mounds, not stopping till she was on the edge of town. She sat on a mound and tried to activate the wrist pad. It asked for Matheson’s DNA signature. Furious, Charley the tossed the thing to the ground and stomped on it till it cracked.

So many of the best things in life were fucking locked away. It made her sick. Why couldn’t she be the best thief of all? What would she have to do to become one?

She had no idea what steps she would need to take. All she knew was that she was cold again and she had nothing in her pockets. Homeless and pathetic, like most of the scum on Abeyas. Homeless folk either went crazy or died. That much was known.

Still, she’d at least had some exercise and was less bone cold than she was before.

Playing with the activation light on the wrist band, Charley wiled away the early hours of the morning underneath a curling piece of tin. She was glad to see a pink tinge finally spread across the horizon. The town slowly came alive and shadowy figures could be seen in the dirty streets. A chamber pot was emptied barely yards away from where Charley cowered under her tin. The sun peered over the horizon and the night chill started to disappear. Wrinkling her nose at the smell of the discarded waste matter, Charley stretched her legs and wandered through the mounds, wondering what the day would bring. She was filled with anxiety because she knew there was no chance her mother would let her back into the family hovel. Even if Matheson kept quiet about their little tryst last night the look in Anna’s eyes when she watched her daughter leave had said it all. Charley was officially homeless, that much was obvious. What did that mean for her prospects? Well, she’d be selling her body in no time if last night was any indication. No. That’s not how she wanted things to be. She was more than a whore and she wanted this fucking town to know all about it.

Some of the figures in the streets and narrow trails were familiar to Charley. Her brothers were already at work, some of them meeting with gang members to discuss their strategies for the day, others moving silently on their own, depending on stealth and thievery to make their daily quota of credits. Doce and Trink were both skilled thieves and were more than capable of disappearing into little nooks and crannies around the town until they saw something worth stealing. As for the gangs, well they usually prowled on the edges of town and waited for visitors and strays with a few credits in their pockets. It was that or scavenge the wrecked starliner over in the dead wastes to the east of town. That particular hulk had been worked over for decades. It was doubtful there was any salvage left but every now and again new cache was found. The star liner was a creepy place, filled with the decaying corpses of all the passengers who had died when the ship was attacked by pirates.

It was also a dangerous place for a single scavenger to operate in. A team was usually needed to help with ropes and hand boosts. The starliner was far too advanced for a lone scavenger like Charley.

All she could do was try and find a cool, shaded hole and wait for an opportunity. Of course, nothing ever happened at Sandflower Downs and credits were often earned through brute strength and violence. If Charley was to avoid becoming a cheap whore for Boss Pete’s garbage men, she would need to think of something quickly. Charley knew a hovel that was relatively quiet during the day. A place she could crawl under and watch the main street in relative security. She found her secret place, trying to ignore a worrying hole she saw in the ground. The size of a credit chip, the hole was likely a scorpion nest and her body was less than a yard away.

Perspiration already trickling down her forehead, Charley settled into position to watch the comings and goings in main street. A desert speeder cruised in around mid morning. It was Boss Pete’s personal vehicle but he wasn’t driving it today. One of his underlings stepped into the dust carrying a sack of supplies that were probably sourced from Zeba, the next town over. The man sauntered into a two-storey hovel with a red gas lamp hung outside the door. The whorehouse had its first customer for the day. About sixteen or seventeen girls worked that business. Many of them were Charley’s age or younger. The older women of the town had no prospects save for keeping house for whatever families they were able to hold together. Some kept a tighter ship than others. Charley watched the desert speeder in the street, She knew it would be DNA activated just as Matheson’s wrist pad had been. A bunch of youths ambled up to the vehicle and admired its smooth lines, leaning on the bonnet. Boss Pete’s man shouted from the upper level of the whorehouse.

“Away, you sons of bitches!” he called. “Away from there!”

The gangers moved away slowly, not wanting to appear cowed in any way. Of course, it was foolish to go up against any of Boss Pete’s men. That just earned you a bullet to the head. Charley felt a lurch when she saw that one of the gangers had a pistol holstered at his hip. The thing looked old, really old, and she doubted it was functional. Pistols and blasters that actually worked were rare in Sandflower Downs. It was rumored that Boss Pete himself carried twin pistols on each hip. It was said the pistols’ handles were carved from tarbor tusk. Real fancy like. Charley had only ever seen a gun fired once. A visiting water carrier had dispatched a lurking thief with a bullet to the chest. The kill had seemed so clean, so neat compared to the butchery often committed by the thugs of this town.

Charley looked at the old, scarred pistol with intense interest. What if it actually worked? Would she have some kind of inferred protection with one of those babies on her hip? The ganger was now standing barely yards away from Charley’s position. She was no master thief but all it would take was a quick, light-fingered move and the dude wouldn’t even know his weapon had been swiped. In the end, the opportunity took hold of Charley and she extended her arm. Little did she know that the decision would set in train a series of events that would change her life forever. She would often look back on this opportunity as the one that not only saved her life but made her the person she always wanted to be.

Feeling the inspiration of the moment she plucked the pistol from the holster and pulled it into the shade. The dolt’s holster was broken and hadn’t been fastened. Charley held her breath and only breathed out when the gangers walked away. She heard a soft scrabbling sound and turned to see a khaki scorpion emerge from the hole. Those things had lethal stings. With a lurch of fear Charley aimed the pistol and pulled the trigger. Click. The sound was soft but distinct. The scorpion went back into its hole but the gangers stopped in their tracks. Charley’s first thought was that the pistol must’ve been functional - the problem was it had no ammo. That was also a luxury item in Sandflower Downs. What was the point of ammo if there were no guns to be found?

The ganger Charley had stolen from worked his way back to her hovel. Every instinct screamed at her to escape out the back of the hovel space but something rooted Charley to the spot. The ganger stepped to where he’d been previously, dropping to a crouch to peer under the hovel.

“Bitch, you got my metal!” he exclaimed through a mouth of few teeth.

Charley grimaced and immediately began shimmying her way backwards under the hovel. She reached the open dirt out the back and broke into a sprint over the mounds. She careened her way through piles of toxic refuse as the gangers made chase. The sun was already reasonably high and had Charley drenched in sweat in no time at all.

Breathing hard, Charley tried losing the gangers around corners and through narrow alley ways. It was no use - the gangers were simply too fast. For starters, they wore heavy boots while Charley wore light desert shoes. Little more than slippers, they were no protection against the sharp edges of the corrugated iron fences she leaped over in a frantic effort to escape.

The gangers had made much ground by the time Charley made it to the edge of town. There was nowhere to hide. Breathless and exhausted, Charley turned to face her pursuers, tossing the pistol to the dirt.

“Take it,” she said between gasps. “I was only playing around.”

The ganger retrieved his pistol and sneered at her.

“Looks like we got some meat for breakfast, boys,” he snarled.

The gangers approached without stopping. Fear took hold of Charley and for the first time she realized she was in dire straits. She couldn’t call on any of her brothers - they had dispersed throughout the far side of town and wouldn’t be seen again til sundown. That was assuming they’d lift a finger to help her. These gangers, many of whom were younger than Charley, looked like vicious little motherfuckers.

All she could do was head further out into the arid salt pans and hope like hell that the gangers got too hot and bothered to continue.

4

Already feeling roasted by the sun, Charley made her way out over the hot, shimmering salt pan. On this side of town the salt pans stretched for miles. Right to the distant White Hills. Nothing but flat, crusty plain. Many a traveller had died on these pans only to be stripped naked by the denizens of Sandflower Downs.

Charley slowed to a walk, her body screaming at her to stop. At that moment she would’ve killed for a drink. The sun of Abeyas tended to leech bodily fluids in minutes. It was the hottest, driest heat in the galaxy. Well, the second hottest. She’d heard the desert planet of Oboyo was pretty hot. But none of that helped her now.

She dropped to her hands and knees, almost retching with dehydration. How long had she been walking for? Half an hour? Twenty minutes? The heat was quick to strike out here on the pans.