A note in the ship’s log, in orbit above Port Sumeria, Earth #4

Assistant Chronicler Mary Westley reporting. I have been assigned the task of maintaining the Chronicler’s log by my superior, Silas Gont. We rejoined the rest of the artship caravan at approximately 0400 hours. We in the Sanguine Sojourner, along with four of the other ships in the caravan, will be docking in Port Sumeria as soon as our orbit brings us to it. Captain Ava expects this to transpire at approximately 1000 hours.

Our task list includes—

Okay I CANNOT do this anymore. I’m sorry Silas, I know the logs are supposed to be professional, but this is SO INCREDIBLY DULL.

Then again, I’m not sure if Silas will actually read this for a long time. He looked pretty drained after the encounter with the Scarship. We all were, but him especially. He’s got a pretty neurotic temperament, and I can tell he worries a lot. But I’m hoping that by taking over the log for a little while, I can lower the number of things he has to worry about! I’ll try to make this the end of my random rambling (for a while, at least) and I’ll update this throughout the day when I get the chance.

We made landfall in Port Sumeria after passing through some thick rainclouds, so our hull should be plenty clean after the scarship blasts! Silas and Captain Ava stayed behind to supervise repairs, Vedod went to restock our pantry, so that left me, Kal, and Sarge to go to the local haggling den. I had never been to one in such an informal setting, only to professional artifact sales hosted in rich collector’s homes or at the university. Kal gave me a spare rain jacket (men’s large—everyone else had jackets, so I’m not sure who it belonged to) and told me he was coming along to make sure I didn’t get my pocket picked, but I think he wanted to get out of the ship for a while. The Sojourner is pretty spacious for an artship, but it’s good to feel real gravity and breathe unfiltered air sometimes. On our way, we happened upon the crew of the Centennial Hawk, one of the other artships in the caravan we were following, and made some small talk. They were nice! Sarge didn’t say a word the whole time, but that’s not surprising.

When we headed toward a steel warehouse, I thought we might be taking a detour to pick up some new plants for Sarge to experiment on, but no! We found ourselves in a huge room that ran the length of the warehouse, with rows of tables set up like a convention or an impromptu marketplace and hundreds of artifacts! Everywhere I looked, there were artship crews (and other seedier looking characters) showing off the books, paintings, etchings, even baking recipes and knitting patterns. I clutched the bag of used artifacts and had to try really hard not to bounce up and down.

“Short story collection!” a woman in a draping boho dress called to us. “Critically acclaimed on Earth #76!”

“Ooh!” I hurried over and picked it up from her table. Lovely red leather binding, lightly worn pages. That made a tad suspicious, actually. If it hadn’t passed through many hands, how could I know it would be worth good amounts of inspiration energy?

“What’s that about?” Kal reached over me and flipped open the first page.

I pushed his hand away, letting the book fall shut. “Don’t look at it yet! That’ll lower the amount of inspiration energy you can create from it!”

“You’re interested in trading?” the woman asked. “What do you have?”

I set the red leather book down and opened our sack. “Uh, some poem clippings, two novels, an old book full of blackout poetry…”

The woman pursed her lips doubtfully. “What kind of novels?”

I took one out, a dime store thriller with dogeared corners and peeling plastic cover-protector. I’m pretty sure it was an ex-library copy. “This one was good for nearly a third of a canister!” I said. “It, uh… well, it wasn’t my thing, but it was still a mystery! Lots of snappy one-liners.”

She nodded, earrings clinking. “We can trade.”

We swapped books, and I tucked the new collection of short stories into the bag.

“Could have gotten more for that,” Kal said, twirling his ray pistol over his finger as we walked on.

I gasped and ran over to a sealed glass display with two truly ancient books propped up on plastic mounts, lit by non-UV LED pinlights. “Are those some original Dickens?”

“Good eye, little lady.” A rhino-sized man with chrome goggles leaned over the top of the display case, grinning down at me. “They can be yours for 30,000 credits.”

Sarge’s metal hand dropped onto my shoulder, and she yanked me away. “Just fuel, no collector items,” she said.

“Gotta learn to haggle,” Kal told me.

“How… do I do that?”

“Easy. You talk about how great your stuff is, then try to get them to swap it for as much of their stuff as you can. And act confident!”

“Right, okay.” I found a table with several movie discs and books in safety slip-covers and took out the blackout poetry book to show them. “Hey, you want… you should want to buy this! Because it’s good poetry! And it… it, uh, if you look inside, you can still kinda see the original story under the blackout marks, so it’s a book and a collection of poetry in the same, uh, book!”

The two women running that table exchanged glances. “We’ll give you this for it,” one said, sliding a canvas-bound book with lilacs printed on the spine.

“Ooh, okay, thanks!” We made the swap, and I tucked the new book into the bag.

Kal shook his head. “That was too fast. You’ve got to push it! Here, watch.” He snagged a cardboard-bound booklet of poems from our bag and slapped it down on the next table. “These took our ship to Earth #81 and back. Got anything to compare?”

A man in an engineer jumpsuit looked up from the detailed needlepoint embroidery he was working on. He flicked the booklet open with his needle. “Those are poems.”

“Yeah, and they took us to Earth #81 and back. You got a doily that can do that?”

I raised my hand, trying to get his attention. “Uh, Kal?”

He waved me off. “Well?”

The man stared at him, unimpressed. “There’s no way it did that much, but I’ll swap you for an 8x10 landscape.”

“Hey, this is worth at least three 8x10’s.”

“Kal, it didn’t make that much inspiration energy!” I whispered.

He shot me a look. “Three 8x10’s, no less.”

“No dice.” The man kicked his feet up on the table, leaning back with his embroidery.

“Come on, make me an offer.” Kal leaned his hands on the table.

“You trying to swindle me, and I ain’t taking the bait.” The man knotted off his ivy green thread and started in with a pretty pumpkin orange color. “You don’t like it, try someone else.”

I took the booklet of poetry back. “Sorry to bother you!” I said. “Kal, let’s go!”

“Hold on, we can…” He looked around. “Where’s Sarge?”

I spun around, scanning the crowd for her. She should have been easy to find, since she was probably the only woman over six feet tall in the room. (But then again, she’s almost a foot taller than me, so I couldn’t see over most people’s heads anyway.)

“Over there.” Kal pointed down a row, and eventually I spotted her. She was marching with a purpose, and people sidestepped out of her way to make a path. Did that mean she was making a scary face?

“What’s she doing?” I asked.

Kal sucked in a quiet gasp, and then he bolted after her, shoving people out of the way. I hugged the bag of books to my chest and hurried after him, dodging around the people he’d elbowed. “Sorry! So sorry! Sorry! Kal? Sarge?”

Kal passed Sarge and vaulted over a table, sending racks of music chips scattering to the floor like so many scrabble tiles. The weasely-looking man behind the table threw his hands over his face, and Kal grabbed his hands, yanked them down, and punched him in the nose. It made a surprisingly quiet wapf sound, and the man’s head bobbed while he blinked, disoriented. Sarge got there and lifted the man by his collar, shoving him against the wall with her metal arm. “You should be dead,” she said coolly.

“Sage!” the man croaked, grappling around her hand. “Pleasant surprise! Good to see you! How’s business? The boss misses you!”

“He is alive too?” she asked.

“Oh, heh, uh… Yeah, last I saw, but he wasn’t feeling too good. Might kick the bucket any day. No need to go see him yourself, he might not last long enough for you to get—”

Sage tossed him in the air like a softball, catching him on his throat. “Where is he?”

The weasely man choked, clawing at her hand in earnest. “Dock 7C! Don’t tell him I—”

Kal whirled around to storm off, and Sage dropped the weasely man to grab Kal by the back of his collar, pulling him up short. “Stop. Think.”

Kal twisted free, shooting her a dirty look, and sprinted away. Sage sighed and jogged after him, and I hurried after her, not wanting to be left behind. When we made it to the warehouse doors, it was raining again, and Kal was already far ahead. I splashed through puddles after Sarge, leaning over the bag of books so they would get wet, and fumbled in the pocket of my baggy rain jacket for the remote comm.

I finally found it and pressed the speaking button. “Mary calling the Sojourner! Kal is running off somewhere, and Sarge just threatened somebody, and I think something crazy is happening but I don’t know what!”

The comm fuzzed with static, then clarified into Silas’s voice. “What do you mean, ‘running off somewhere’? Sarge threatened someone?”

“I don’t know, but they’re heading to dock 7C!” I said. I stopped, slipping and almost losing my balance. Even with the jacket, I was getting soaked. I took a second to work the book bag under the jacket and hug them in place, so at least they’d be mostly dry.

“Kal, what’s going on?” Captain Ava’s voice buzzed.

A low-ground hoverjeep whooshed past, making ripples in the puddles of the roadway. I looked both ways before running across. I’d lost track of both Kal and Sarge now, but I knew that turning right would eventually take me back to the Sojourner, while turning left would probably take me toward dock 7C.

“Boss Riggh. He’s still alive,” Kal panted into the comms. “He’s at dock 7C.”

The comms were silent for a few seconds, and I stood there under a lamppost, raining pattering on my hood.

“I’ll meet you there,” Captain Ava said. “Don’t make a move until I join you.”

“Right.”

My eyes widened. What was going on? Did this have something to do with Kal and Vedod’s conversation that I overheard? I decided to turn left and try to find dock 7C.

It took a lot of splashing, backtracking, making wrong turns, and losing track of where I was before I found myself on the right docking strip. But even then, I only found dock 7C because of the laser blasts. A blast shot into a puddle several feet ahead of me, a bolt of yellow that extinguished with a hiss and puff of steam, and I squeaked, ducking behind a security booth. Voices rang out, and I recognized one of them as Kal’s. He definitely sounded… angry. Maybe a little murdery.

The voices died down enough that I couldn’t hear them over the rain, and since no more laser blasts were going off, I peeked my head around the corner of the booth. The ship docked at 7C was twice the size of the Sojourner, chunky and tough, with a massive loading bay opened in the back. Blue-white fluorescents from inside the loading bay and red guiding lights dotting the ramp reflected across the pavement. Captain Ava and Kal crouched at the base of the ramp, their guns drawn, while Silas and Sarge hung back by some packing crates, just on the edge of the fluorescent-reflecting puddles.

I started to sneak around the booth’s corner, but then I thought that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to be sneaking where people had just been firing laser guns. Instead I switched my comm to private message and said to Silas, “I’m here at 7C, what should I do? Should I go back to the Sojourner?”

Across the dock, I saw him touch his earpiece. “Stay where you are. Don’t get in the middle of this,” he hissed.

“What’s going on?” I whispered.

His comms turned on and stayed on, and I could hear broken, fuzzy chunks of the conversation going on.

“This doesn’t have to be difficult,” Captain Ava said, her voice sounding distant.

“We have no bone to pick, me and ye,” called a scratchy male voice. I think it came from inside the loading bay.

“You don’t think so?” Kal shouted.

“I was blessed with good fortune that passed over yer associate,” the scratchy male voice said. “That’s hardly my fault.”

“I’ve got four shots that would say otherwise.”

“Kal,” Ava said. “Never reveal your shot limit to the man you want to shoot.”

“He should know what’s about to happen to him.”

“Kal…” Silas said warningly, his voice significantly louder and clearer than the others.

“Riggh, this doesn’t have to end in bloodshed,” Ava said. “We just want information. Last time we saw you, you were being gunned down by Heartless, yet here you stand.”

“And last time I saw ye, ye were flyin’ away and leaving us te the scarships’ tender mercies!”

“You brought in the scarships!” Kal said.

“A misunderstanding,” the scratchy-voiced man said. “Miss Sage can tell ye, the smuggling business can get dicey at times. That’s the game we play. And artships like yourselves aren’t the only ones after rare artifacts.”

“He’s not going to tell us anything.” Kal sprang to his feet and raised his gun, but someone inside the loading bay fired, the staticky sound of the shot echoing through the comms an instant after the krak sounded across the docks. Kal cried out and dropped his gun, holding his arm.

Ava aimed her pistol at Boss Riggh and fired, and he leaped to the side. The white bolt burned a hole through his coat. Yellow, orange, and white laser bolts flurried back and forth, some from my crew and some from the people inside the ship, until Silas shouted, “Enough! Everyone stop shooting! Ava, cease fire!”

“Who’s the captain here?” she demanded, crouched below the edge of the ramp.

“Ava, as your friend, stop and think!”

Ava growled audibly, but then she called, “Hold your fire.”

Sarge lowered her rifle, and the shots from inside the ship died down, too.

“Kal, are you—” Silas started to ask, but then Kal leaped onto the ramp like he was going to rush inside, hugging his injured arm against his body and holding his pistol in his left hand. I heard the ka-chunk sound of Silas switching firing modes on his ray launcher, and he shot a broad purple knockout beam at Kal’s back. It struck him on the shoulder, and he pitched forward mid-stride and crumpled to the ramp, sliding down a few inches from the dampness.

Ava hopped onto the ramp and bent over him, and Silas whispered into the comms, “Mary, get him out of here. I can’t handle him and Ava at the same time. Get him out of here now.”

I sucked in a breath and sprinted over to the bay, my boots slapping over the wet pavement. Hiding behind a crate, Sarge held up a hand for me to stop, then waved for me to approach slowly. I stepped into the blue-white fluorescents and raised my free hand to show I was unarmed, still hugging the books under my jacket with the other arm. I’d never been near a shootout before, but it was oddly scary to be in the open.

Ava rolled Kal over, and he groaned and rolled his head. She shot a withering look at Silas. “We’re going to have words after this,” she said in a low voice.

Silas pressed his lips together and looked genuinely intimidated, but he didn’t apologize. “We’re getting Kal out of here!” he called toward the ship. “She’s just a girl! She’s getting him, and then she’s leaving!”

“Ye’d better, or we’ll riddle ye hides full of holes!” Boss Riggh shouted back. “If ye mean to kill me, at least approach me honestly! Are ye here to yell at me, kill me, or slow down the unloading?”

“Any of ‘em,” Kal mumbled under his breath, fighting to open his eyes. I squatted beside him and fumbled to get the book bag out of my jacket and onto my shoulder, then to get his arm across my shoulders so I could pull him to his feet. Ava stood over us, her hair slicked down with rain and her eyes drilling into Boss Riggh, who I could see peering around the edge of a crate. He had bushy chestnut eyebrows and sideburns and the biggest, squarest teeth I’ve ever seen.

He grinned those teeth at me and looked like a greedy cartoon pig. “What’s a little curly-headed girl like ye doin’ running with these disreputables?”

I was starting to wonder that myself.

With some struggle and a little slipping, I managed to get Kal upright. He was starting to recover from the knockout beam, so at least I didn’t have to drag him. I felt more like Dorothy helping a very heavy Scarecrow. We passed through the crates, leaving the others behind, made it to the end of the dock, and kept walking. The thumping of my heart slowed down a little, but not much. At least Kal and I weren’t near the fight, but who knew what was happening to the others.

Kal grumbled and mumbled to himself, and eventually he tried to slide his arm away. I gripped his wrist tighter. “You’re not going back!”

“You don’t know what that hull leech did,” he growled, and the tone of his voice scared me a little.

“We’re going back to the ship, and Captain Ava will handle it,” I said.

“Handle it? She’ll handle it, alright,” he mumbled.

The rain had let up a little, but we were still soaking wet. His short blondish was plastered to his head, and a wide patch of skin on his right arm was bubbly and red from the laser bolt, but he still had an expression that looked murder-y.

“Vedod can help bandage that,” I said. “Does it hurt a lot?”

“No.”

We did make it back to the ship. Vedod treated Kal’s laser burn. As I’m updating the log, it’s been about forty minutes, and the rest of the crew hasn’t come back yet. I’m scared and tired and I think I’m in over my head. Picking fights with smuggler bosses? I’m surprised port security hasn’t descended on us yet! Or maybe that’s where the rest of the crew are now, sitting in some damp little cell for firing on other porters. If I’m honest, I don’t know these people well yet, and I’m starting to wonder if coming along with them was a mistake.

I think I’m done keeping the log for now.