Slave World Read Free

what she’s up to these days. With her brilliant military record, the sky’s the limit. Whatever it is, I’m sure she’s not bored out of her mind, stuck on a planet full of delinquent perverts.

Neutral Trade World Darien IV,
    Johannesburg Port, docking bay 34
     
    The blinding arc from the ion welder, made erratic shadows of superheated light in the cramped maintenance compartment. It felt like my face and neck had been under a sandblaster for the last several hours, despite the welding shield attachment. I squinted up through dark goggles, shutting off the welder, lifting the respirator from my grimy, sweat-drenched face. The lingering haze of chemically tainted smoke made my nose burn with ozone razors. That’s just going to have to do for now. A possible death in space from a blown seam is better than a guaranteed one any day of the week. If the bounty hunter I slagged in town this morning had friends…
    Besides running into a bounty hunter, my ship’s artificial intelligence had decided to take a dump on me a few hours ago. I still couldn’t believe its brain had fried like that, those things were supposed to last forever. No, actually I could believe it, my luck was holding true to form, either bad or worse. It didn’t help my situation, that work had been especially slow lately. Everything I’d stashed away over the last year had been sucked up in the span of a week by a restock of supplies, parts and the equipment rental necessary to maintain the bottomless money pit I called home. I barely had enough cash on hand to purchase another AI, let alone make the repairs necessary to keep me flying, I hope. In addition to that, there was the exorbitant cost for the docking fees I had to pay, for a fraction of the time I actually needed. I really didn’t have a choice this time, I needed the relatively safe and modern dry-dock facility of a neutral trade world to overhaul the atmospheric drive of my ship, instead of half-assing it again on some backwater shit hole, like I tended to frequent, more often than not. Which reminds me , my landing permit expires in …
    I pulled up the sleeve on my stained and grungy flight suit, to reveal an out of date wrist-com that had seen better days. Less than an hour, shit! The Johannesburg port authority didn’t play games when it came to dealing with independent pilots like myself: you either left when you were supposed to, paid an ungodly extension fee, or let them take your ship. The last two weren’t an option, as far as I was concerned.
    “John, what’s the status on the AI, we’re almost out of time?” John was my decades old droid that I’d picked up cheap, a few years ago. I relied on him much more than I should, but I didn’t really have a choice. For the most part, he was nothing more than an highly advance automaton, following orders, acting within his strict programming guidelines, with only limited free thought or deductive reasoning, unlike his more advanced brothers, the AI. He was a decent enough co-pilot, and his electronics and astrogation programming were okay, but as much as I hated to admit it, I’d purchased him mainly to keep me company.
    “I have just finished the AI’s final formatting and integration into the ship’s mainframe Captain,” his somewhat synthesized voice replied. “But I’m afraid-”
    “Great! We’ll be lifting off in thirty-”
    “We may have a problem. The AI-”
    “What problem?” I painfully climbed out of the hole I’d been working in for the last two hours, trying to stretch away the stiffness. I pulled off my goggles with a huff, running a hand through my matted, butter-blonde hair in frustration. What the hell’s wrong now? Why couldn’t anything go right, for a change?
    “Captain, I was unable to purchase a new AI that would be satisfactory for your needs, with the money allotted. I found a used one, Mark, as it calls itself, but he has numerous personality quirks that you may find offensive. I’m sorry