Smuggler Archive

Whoever downstarred this:

I don't mind the rating, but back up your opinion. If you can't spend 15 seconds explaining why you don't like something that took me a lot longer than that to write, you bring down the collective function of our male reproductive organs.

Working on it as we speak. Thanks for the encouragement!

Message Edited by JamesHighwest on 07-30-2004 02:54 PM

Ok, here's the not-so-much-anticipated sequel. They're fun to write, but they're killing my work productivity.



(Then)

I sealed the space side of the door, leaving me in the airlock proper. It reeked. I hoped to keep the smell out of the main ship, but really it wasn't a conscious thought so much as a habitual response. You learn early to manage air on a spaceship. If you don't manage well, you don't have to worry about it because you go to sleep and don't wake up. The thought of that never frightened me too much, because a painless, unconscious death always seemed the way to go. I guess it was the way to go if you weren't the guy cleaning up afterwards. I had only checked in on her before for a second, and it looked like I was going to be running cleanup on this one.
As I stood there staring at the escape pod, the stink didn't exactly go away, but it became a lot less important.
I listened for a while. I wasn't in a hurry, really. I settled down on my heels and waited for the gas scrubbers to finish a cycle. It was hard to hear over them, and if she was breathing, I wanted to hear it first. I didn't want to touch her and break the spell. It was like quantum hyperspace experiments; until I proved it one way or the other, she was both alive and dead. When you jumped into hyperspace, you were kinda in both places at once. But the second I touched her, she'd be just one thing forever. I didn't want to be the one that made her that way, but it was my fault either way.
I had knocked her out.
I stuffed her in that reeking little pod.
I used her as bait, like a piece of bantha-haunch.
I gave her enough drugs to let her kill herself.
I left her out there to die.
Whatever she ended up, I'd already made her that way. She was pale and her eyelids were blue. She hadn't moved since the door swung open. My hands shook, badly. I always had steady hands, even when I was high. It was not a good sign.
The scrubber cycled, and the air stopped moving. It was like the ship was holding its breath. I know I was.
I heard something. A breath maybe. I saw her chest rising and falling, slowly, almost imperceptibly. I started breathing again. The scrubber cycled again, trying vainly to clean some of the fetid air out of the lock. I dragged her out of the pod, but she didn't seem to notice; she stayed unconscious the whole time. I got her to what I guess was the lounge, and set her up on the table.
I patted her down, and found what I'd been looking for. 1 twist of sedative, with the end bitten roughly off. Looking closely, I could see some of the drug staining her lips. She must have been too 'dosed to get the last hit down. One shot would have numbed her. Two should have put her out for a day, three would have put her out forever. She'd hit two, but hesitated too long on the third. Had it to her lips, I guess, when she passed out. I didn't blame her. I don't know what I'd have done in the same situation.
Funny thing is, I've sold folks enough to kill themselves before. Hell, one time I sold a Wookiee enough to kill himself, then went to collect the balance and found him dead. I took what he owed me and a little extra for the trouble. Trust me, enough product to kill a Wookiee is a serious dosage. Selling it twice was pure profit. That didn't bother me, or at least it hadn't. Out there orbiting Dallet-2 however, things changed a little bit. There was me, the perpetual scoundrel, drunk, and addict. There was the girl, trying like hell to get away from someone or something long enough to figure out who she was. There was Spakta, the bitter (and now dead) Rodian Bounty Hunter. That was it, unless you counted the smarmy droid I'd managed to get atomized. I used one third of the sentient life around me to kill the other third, and almost gotten myself killed in the process. The girl probably knew, too. She'd trusted me enough to get her out there, and I made a tool out of her. I killed her, or I would have if she'd been ten seconds faster. Emperor's Balls, the _droid_ had more class than I did. At least the droid warned me, and died with a shred of dignity.
I didn't exactly die in orbit around Dallet-2. But I was born there though, if you catch my meaning.

(Now)

I'm a drug dealer, among other things. I know my art. A doctor couldn't have brought her around quicker. He might have been able to do it without the side effects though.
"This..." she moved a hand weakly to her head. "Hurts. A lot." Well, she could talk, that's a sign of health.
"You were asleep for a long time. Give it a few minutes. Drink this." I handed her a shot of brandy while I spoke, diluted with some water. She got a sip down before she brought it back up.
"Booze? You idiot. Get me some water." She didn't seem happy about the booze. I would have liked the booze. I would have thought it was a kind gesture. I would have been grateful to my benefactor.
"Ok." I said. I can figure out when I'm being an idiot.
"What happened. Did you get Spakta?"
"Yeah, I lured him onto the ship, and then blew it up. I got on his ship and recovered you." Not that the recovery was my primary objective, but in my defense, the new me was still being born and some adjustment needed to occur. My hands were shaking worse, and I was chilled. Apparently being reborn wasn't healthy.
"You blew the ship up? How?"
"Overcharged the engines. Droid helped me." That was a bald lie. Spakta blew up the engines. The droid didn't do a thing except warn me, while I was busy screwing him over. Spakta had serious guts and a mean streak. I had half of that.
"Wow. So we're back on the High Tide?"
"Yeah, and you're safe now." I smiled. Ah, nobility. Perhaps I'd be rewarded.
"Safe. Gee, thanks. I'm sure you slugged me to keep me safe. And gave me the drugs to calm me down." Uh oh. So maybe she was a little more on the ball than I'd thought. Damn, I thought, she's got to have one hell of a ringing hangover too, and she put that together damn fast. Quicktalking her was obviously not going to work. Lying was obviously not going to work. What did I have left? By the Great Black Hole... all I had left was the truth. That's one scary prospect.
"I figured us both for dead. I left you a way out. It would have been better than Spakta." That was the truth, Spakta would have been pretty brutal.
"You used me. I was bait."
"Yes I did. Yes you were." I found the dignity to look ashamed. My face wasn't used to it, it kept twitching.
"I almost killed myself, you **edit**. I thought I was going to drift forever..." she started crying. I can only imagine what it would have been like, staring out into the big empty nothing of space, knowing you were going to be a permanent resident. She could have had hours, maybe even days on the pod if she'd rationed food, water, and air. She'd decided, almost, against it. People don't make those decisions lightly. I don't imagine they like being forced to make them either. What the hell was I supposed to say to her? Yes, I would have sold you to Spakta to stay alive? Yes, I would have sent your pod into the sun if I thought it would have bought me another hour? Yes, I would have done all these things.
Listen, I got a good look at something out there as I rounded the bright side of Dallet-2. Two somethings, actually, and they were both making me sick. And they were both probably going to kill me. The first was the sun. Big and bright, it cooked the living crap out of me. I lost my rad shielding somewhere around the apogee of my slingshot. The second was myself. Finding out you're a heartless **edit** isn't so cool, but realizing that inanimate objects are capable of possessing more decency than you... that's harrowing.
I just stared at her. Almost unconsciously, I tapped another stim. I'd been hitting them pretty hard. I kept staring, and she stared right back. Still crying, kinda. There was something cold and hard behind her eyes. I deserved every bit of it, I'm sure, but it was still chilling. I started to shake. The stim wasn't helping.
"I... You know what I am, " I said, "I'm sorry. I almost got you killed." It felt awfully wierd to be ashamed. It felt uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable.
She sat up, never breaking eye contact.
"You're a soulless **edit**."
"I was. I'm different now." Palpatine's Ass, I felt terrible. Something more than guilt was chewing me up.
"You're different now? Right. How?" Indignation, she had it in spades.
How was I different? I'd seen myself. I'd seen the sun. Oh no, the sun. My stomach lurched, I felt the nausea coming.
"I'm different for the same reason you're different than when you were in the pod. I'm dying."
I remember throwing up, almost. It seemed like a long way down to the floor, and for a little bit of it I was worried I'd beat the vomit to the floor and that it'd rain down on me once I got there. I know, in retrospect, that doesn't make any sense.

(Later)

Stars are important. No stars, no life. Simple as that. Stars are a gigantic nuclear reaction, releasing energy on a scale that boggles the mind. Even the sober mind. That energy comes out in almost every shape and flavor. Some long, luxurious wavelengths, some short, hyper ones. Most of them we can't even see, our eyes were never equipped to witness their awesome power. Energy is the root of everything, really. It's almost blasphemous (if you're a religious kind of crazy) to think of observing the whole of it at once. We, sentients, were never really designed to be looking at lots of the pretty non-colors that stars make. Our collective atmosphere absorb, deflect, and deny most of the bad ones. Gamma rays, X-rays. The kind of stuff that punches through buildings, it's got a lot of energy in it. Energy is life, when it all comes down to it. It feeds the plants that feed the fish that feed the bigger fish... and so forth, unless you're a Mon Calmari, then you'd need some other nouns. Energy starts it all. For me though, energy was about to finish it all.
I had spent somewhere less than an hour sunbathing without my rad shielding. The sensors in my pod had been cooked, and I took that as a bad sign. I had the equivalent of a sunburn on every part of my body, including my internal organs. That kind of thing usually killed you. Spacers know that. We learn about maintaining our atmosphere and our shielding before we ever learn about navigation, or hyperspace. Radiation sickness is an unflattering way to join the Force. There are drugs, of course, to minimize the effect. If you caught a small enough dose, if you were healthy enough, if you were lucky as sin, the drugs were to try to help your body survive a massive slough of newly-dead tissue and genetic damage. If you caught a large dose, were already sickly, or had bad luck, your crew just gave you a couple twists of sedative and showed you how to work the airlock controls with one hand. From the inside.

The woman, she's a better person than I am. After our first meeting, which was largely about sex and drugs, I wouldn't have called her 'classy' by any stretch. But in terms of humanity, strength of character and sheer fortitude, she's got me beat. Let me tell you what I would have done, if she'd gotten microwaved and I'd been the one responsible for her care. I'd have gotten her good and drunk, and explained things to her. I'd have shot her one dose of the spaceburn drugs, and seen if they did anything. If she didn't turn around, I'd have overdosed her on H4B and given her to space, breathing or not. Wouldn't have been mercy exactly either, just convenience. Now let me tell you what she did.
She dragged her hungover body, much abused by the cramped pod and my drugs, off the galley table. She hauled my sorry ass up on to it, and got me rolled over so I didn't choke to death on my own vomit. She got me stripped and tied me down, and gave me three courses of anti-rad. Three's significant, I guess, because it's the same dosage I'd given her of sedative. Three courses might have killed me, if I'd been healthy. It also might have killed me anyway, if she'd just stood back and watched. She didn't just stand back and watch. She kept icing me down to help kill the fever. She kept applying bacta-bandages when my skin started to come off. She was no slouch, and she worked like a dog to keep me alive. I don't know why.

I was in and out for a while. Later on I'd find out it was ten days. I was more out than in, even when I was pretty well healed.
"Where are we?"
"For the millionth time, We're above Dallet-2." She seemed tired. I didn't remember her name. There were some big holes in my memory regarding how I ended up in a ship's berth above some place called Dallet-2, too. I got filled in on most of those.
"Who are you again?" I asked, I guess it was kind of insulting. It turned out to be about the fortieth time I'd asked.
"Petra. Your nurse. Your partner in crime. Remember?"
"Petra, yeah. Dallet. Damn, I remember." Remembering you're a scumbag isn't all that much fun.
"So, who are you this time?"
"Huh?" I was the patient here, I should have been asking the questions. That was a wierd one too.
"You've given me like 5 names over the past three days. You figured out which one you want to be yet?"
Now that, that was one damned good question. Who the hell was I?
"I guess you can just call me Dallet."
"The name suits you. You gonna lounge all day, or get us home?" Of course I was going to get us home. Home. Wherever that was.
"Petra, I'm sorry about that pod bit." I was, really. It was only just beginning to sink in, that she'd been keeping me alive. She gave me the wierdest look. Not mean exactly, but not nice. Just... hard. Like she was holding out hope that I had an ounce of human integrity, but she knew damned well I didn't.
"I know, Dallet. You've been saying it in your sleep for a week."

I got up to the cockpit, still naked. I wasn't hiding anything from her, she'd seen me in a pretty dismal state already. Walking was unusually difficult. I was weak as a newborn baby (a human baby, some species are born mean, and ready to eat their siblings). I was also (I'd find out later) 40 lbs lighter than I had been just two weeks before. I hadn't had all that much extra skin to spare, but the sickness demanded a price. Muscles could be rebuilt. Felt wierd then though.
"What's our position, computer?"
"Two planetary diameters above Dallet-2. Geostationary."
"Good, " I said, "what's our status?"
'Largely nominal. One weapon damaged requiring extravehicular repair."
"That'll keep, I'm not going outside again."
"It would be inadvisable, considering your condition."
Great, I thought. The computer knows my 'condition'. At least I didn't have Rodian hardware, they seemed to be the brunt of jokes. At least I still _had_ hardware, radiation poisoning can do some terrible things.
"Petra told you about that?"
"She required dosage assistance."
"Ah. Thanks for the help." I could be magnanimous, it was a machine after all.
"You are welcome. She needed help tailoring the dosage to you while you were being detoxified."
"Yeah, thanks. Er, huh? Detoxed?" Detoxified... a word an addict never likes to hear!
"You were quite addicted to drugs."
"I still am!"
"Not physically, you are not. Your system has been flushed. You have been sober for more than a week."
"Ugh. I can fix that. Wonder where my stims went..."
"I kept telemetry data on them until they entered the atmosphere."
"She didn't!"
"She did, the airlock."
Oh, that heartless **edit**. I swear I heard her chuckling. Wonder when she decided to toss them... before or after she decided I'd live.
"Computer, prepare a hyperspace jump. We're going to Corellia. Use the station as your basis point."
"Acknowledged. Will need to adjust orbit to bring the station on the planet into view."
"Nah, it should be..." It should have been right there, right below us, it wasn't. Either we weren't above Dallet-2 anymore, or we weren't above the same spot anymore. Not too troubling, I guess. This computer seemed to be a lot smarter than the last one. He'd let me know.
"Why did Petra move us? I had us right above the station."
"Petra did not order the move." The computer answered without inflection. The station rolled lazily past the horizon to come to rest below us.
"Why'd we move then?"
"I recieved new navigational data from the planet."
"Oh? What the hell, the station? What'd they want?"
"Not the station. A remote transmitter."
My blood ran cold, and I sat down hard. If I'd had more energy, my hands would have been shaking again. I hit the cabin-call button on the console.
"Petra, " I said calmly, "strap in. We're leaving."
"Computer?"
"Yes?"
"When did you receive the new navigational instructions?"
"Ninety-one minutes ago."
"Ah. And how's that hyperspace plot coming?"
"Nearly complete, sir."
"Good. And what were your instructions before? The remote ones I mean."
"I was to move to stationary orbit and await pod redock. ETA 2 hours."
"What pod?"
"Why, my pod sir."
"Crap. Make that hyperspace jump."
"Acknowledged."

(In hyperspace)

"How do you know it was him?" She asked, but she didn't seem as nervous as when I first told her. She was handling it a hell of a lot better than me.
"Has to be, only he would know the codes." I said, and it was the truth.
"But you said you blew him up!" There was that, yes.
"I exaggerated."
"Huh?"
"I thought he blew himself up."
"You told me you overcharged the engines!"
"Well, he did. I thought."
"You are really not very good at this lifestyle, you know that?"
"Yes. Thank you." What more could be said?
"Geez. I wonder where he learned that trick, it was pretty clever. Blow up the ship to cover your ejection."
"Hah!" I said triumphantly. "He livepodded me, he just did it a lot slower. I taught him that trick."
She gave me a withering glare.
"Hey, what's your worry Petra, we escaped. He's stuck on Dallet, probably has no way of making hyperspace. We'll hop around a bit, and lay low."
"Maybe."
"No maybe about it, we'll disguise ourselves. We don't look anything like we did."
"That's for damned sure." She grabbed my hand when she said it, and it was almost comforting.

Message Edited by FrankLee on 08-06-2004 01:16 AM

I love Gibson.

I'm trying to go for some of Glen Cook's style of narrative dialog. It's a little wierder to write than normal descriptive prose, but it seems to flow and move a lot quicker when you're done.

Thanks for the feedback!

I wrote them in my work email editor as a sticky note. If the formatting sucks, it's because of that. I think my work email's pretty solid, and I mailed myself copies to another account.

I did lose a bunch of sw stories a few years ago though that way, so it's a solid concern.

A bump for shameless self-promotion. Also, a buddy of mine wants to write a spinoff story told from the bh's ship's computer point-of-view. I have wierd friends, what can I say?

I'm planning on writing some onplanet adventures of a more smugglish nature, but also make them closer to SWG... I just have to figure out how to make anything we do in SWG sound like a plausible smuggler activity.

That was an awesome story!

I stayed up 'till 5:00 AM to finish, that's how much I liked it.