Tevun-Krus #101 - The New Frontier

Last Frontier Saloon - Part 3: Gulch Rock

The man said nothing.

The iron meteorite in Jeff's stomach gained weight quickly. "Hi there!" he said in an attempt to break the silence between them. "I'm Jeff Smart. What takes you to these parts? Anything up?"

The eyebrows crept upwards, ever so slightly, a motion imitated by the corners of the mouth. The rest of the face remained frozen.

"Jeff Smart?" the mouth said, its corners twitching. "Not really smart, herding all alone, is it?"

Jeff gulped, hating the direction this conversation was taking, and hating all the lame jokes people made about his name.

"Sorry, man," the mouth continued, talking about a regret that found no reflection elsewhere in the face. "Ye know, I need them bots. And I can't have no wobblin' jaws to tell the tale of me taking them."

The head tilted by a few degrees. "They call me Loco, by the way, but that won't matter to ye."

A slight motion of the man's head told of a movement of his body elsewhere. A clicking sound carried over the channel—a sound as if from a fat, important button being pressed.

Jeff's radar screen showed an object leaving Loco's ship and accelerating towards him. Seconds later, his shuttle shook with a violent explosion.

~~

The lifepod drifted slowly through space, rotating about its axis roughly once every three breaths Jeff took. Breaths consuming valuable oxygen.

For the second time this day, his thoughts reached out to his dad. That crazy old man had killed himself with his smokes, but he had been nuts about safety. Lifepods were no standard equipment on miners' shuttles, but his dad had bought one. And now it had saved Jeff's life. Well, not saved, maybe, but extended it by the 24 hours its oxygen lasted.

When Loco's missile had struck the shuttle, Jeff had caught hold of the tin box that held his most important valuables. Then he had made a dive for the pod. The pod had disengaged from its rupturing mothership just in time.

As if in a trance, he had watched how the bandits had closed in. Three small ships, two of them conventional, utilitarian designs, while one had been sleek and black. They had rounded up the bots and led them off into the oblivion of space. Apparently, the bandits had been unaware of their victim in his slowly rotating lifepod.

The pod was tiny, basically a cylinder with a padded interior granting him barely enough room to move his arms.

He extended his hand to activate the emergency beacon. It would shout out his distress for anyone to hear. Hopefully, the bandits would ignore it. They did not strike him as the kind of people to take heed of such signals.

Now he had to wait, and he had to hope.

His shuttle was gone. His bots were gone. The only thing he had was the lifepod that held him and the tin box floating between himself and the wall opposite.

He caught hold of the box and opened its lid carefully. Its contents were all that remained of his past, apart from the memories lingering in his brain.

At the top of the box, there was a photograph of his dad and mom, with him a little boy between them. That was when they still had been a family. Their mother had left them a few months later, for some other guy—a herder, too, but with way more bots than they had had.

"Whenever I get to likin' someone, they ain't around long," his dad had said after she had left.

Jeff let go of the photograph, letting it hang in the air beside him. He retrieved the next item from the box.