Starrunner’s fuselage smoked. I swayed on unsteady feet, struck by the heat wave. I closed the hatch, rolled up my sleeves, made the mistake of grazing the gleaming metal while keeping my balance. “Ouch, you fucking mother—” My wild curse fell on dead air. I shook out my hand.
A sandy lane disappeared around a bend between massive piles of twisted junk. Behind, a sandy streak where my smoking ship had skidded to an unceremonious halt. This looked like a vast human-made dump. Broken plastics, twisted metal, pipes, culverts, wires, charred wood, every bit of refuse I could imagine. An old dusty reek filled my nostrils, as if the cloud of slow decay had floated over here for generations. No rain had fallen here for what, decades? The dryness had ground decomposition to a halt. I reached out, touched a hank of metal, a lance-edged piece from the bumper of an old ground vehicle. The metal seemed little rusted for the time it had spent here.
The Veglos system and all the rest of the galaxy had gone to hell, but did I have to get marooned on a shit pile like this?
What were these giant mounds of garbage? Not just ass-wiping little dungcock heaps you see on the satellite, five and dime feeder worlds, but giant mounds. Miles of them. An ecological disaster. Not that it mattered much considering my plight on this forsaken world.
Sound to my left. A flicker of movement. I ducked behind a small heap of mangled wires and prosthetic robot parts, gripping my R4, my senses on high alert.
Two figures emerged, one tall, one short. They carried no weapons that I could see, only what looked like a Geiger counter held in the hands of the older, taller man. I blinked, shaking my head of the cobwebs.
“Billy,” the older one croaked in an excited voice, “looks as if we’ve found our pot of gold. The sounder has found our fortune.” His loose tan-brown desert rags drooped from neck to toe. “There, just like I said! A downed craft. Yahoo!” He slapped his thighs in glee, stabbed a finger of triumph at my ship, the place where she smoked and crackled.
The boy, no more than fifteen, jumped up and down like a sidekick, did a kind of jig like one of those crazy panhandlers I see back at Hoath.
“Careful, Billy,” the man warned. “This thing could be booby-trapped.” He pulled the teen away with a determined hand. He looked ready to cry.
I narrowed my brows. Whoever these halfwits were, I was at a low melting point with an itchy trigger. As the older fellow blinked and set down his metal detector on the hot sand, he gave my ship a careful inspection and reached within his rags, withdrew a tool of some sort to tinker with the outer hatch.
A small smile touched my lips. Good luck, pops, getting in that titanium-sealed—
My jaw dropped as the door slid open and the old man gave a victorious chuckle. The alarm sounded, a piercing intermittent klaxon whose lows and highs dripped with Molly’s anticlimactic warning,
“Intruder alert, intruder alert!”
I cringed. So did my guests who stared around wild-eyed, as if monsters were ready to eat their brains. The old man’s eyes kindled in desperation and he fiddled with the cowling trying to disable the alarm.
No luck. I gripped my R4, ready to blast these two desert rats. They’d invaded the one sacred place left to me in this big universe. Another voice called out a throaty drawl that made me pause.
“Back off, weasels! Mine first.” The figured motioned the narrow bore of her rifle at them. Youngish to middle age, bowlegged, dressed in worn leathers, goggles strapped tight as protective eyeware against the sun, she was a sight to behold, legs set wide in an aggressive stance.
The old man turned with care and put a restraining arm around Billy’s shoulder. Seemed the boy was keen on running out and getting himself shot. He snarled like a vicious animal, like some wolverine I’d seen on the nature holo-feed.
“Move,” she ordered, roaring in a harsher voice, motioning to where a charred single mangle of metal hung out of the smaller mountain of debris.
Grumbling, the two hurried to stand beside a crumpled space cruiser, clinging out of the pile like some squashed insect.
She padded toward the open ship with a slow saunter, and I blinked, getting my senses together, then crept after her, my blaster raised.
“Back away,” she growled. “I get first dibs on this crate, you bumpkins, then you can paw your way over it as much as you like. The grubs’ll be coming out soon. Yes, the crazy boys, and you know what that means.”
She leveled her sawed off black rod, a custom blaster, rigged with flamethrower and bayonet. Peeking into the entrance bay, she nodded in appreciation.
I frowned. What a filthy piece of work. Dirty as sin. Grime all over her skin and face and loose leather jacket and pants and shin-guards. Black, of all colors, in this stifling heat. Yet underneath the grime was a limber female, with lean muscles to boot.
Before she got the bright idea of staking out my ride, I stepped over and called out a pleasantry. “Okay, commander Tomboy, ease back real slow.”
She whirled, lifted her weapon, but misfired a round that whistled inches from my ear. I shot off a slug that nicked the bayonet’s end and made her think twice about another shot.
She held her hands up
