Encounter: Safe Haven

Encounter: Safe Haven

Mikala Ash

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Copyright ©2014 Mikala Ash

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Safe Haven

Firstly, in my defense, I was five sheets to the wind. I'd been drinking battery acid for ten hours straight. Second; when I'm drunk I play to win, and third; I held a Royal Flush.

Given these parameters, what followed was beyond my conscious control.

My opponent, the last man standing in this station house rules, was a vacuum welder with a smart mouth and bad breath. We'd been needling each other for hours, and in the thrall of my own alcohol fueled belligerence I was going to kick his fat ass, or my name wasn't Dyson Paine.

"Well?" I demanded.

The hubbub around us died, and every eye in the bar turned in our direction. I may have offered my challenge a little louder than was prudent.

Welderman licked his lower lip, and perspiration bubbled across his forehead. He'd already thrown in his father's gem encrusted gold watch, and was clearly regretting it.

"Well?" I repeated.

"I got nothing else," he grumbled.

I reached over as if to sweep the pot towards me.

"Wait."

He extracted a grimy data card from an inside pocket of his filthy coveralls. "This is worth five thousand. Everything I've made in five years out here in this godforsaken hell."

I raised an eyebrow in what I intended to be a look of supreme indifference, but who knows what it actually looked like, as I was, as you will recall, quite drunk.

He threw the data card into the zero-g stasis pot, and called.

I laid them out, and that's when it all turned to crap. He only had a straight flush, so he was somewhat disappointed. His face contorted in fury -- he'd hoped I'd been bluffing -- and pulled a rivet gun from his utility belt.

I caught a rivet in the arm just as I launched myself across the table. Had I stayed put I would have copped it between the eyes. The only weapon I had -- a zero-g surveyor's stylus -- I embedded in his throat before he could fire a second shot.

What happened next is a little blurry, but I awoke to find myself floating in the cells, with a black eye and an egg sized lump on my cheekbone. My arm ached, and I noted it had been bandaged while I'd slept.

"You're lucky he lived." It was the Colonial Marshal. He opened the cell door, and threw a bundle at me.

"Huh?" I managed to catch it, and memories of a royal flush and a gem encrusted watch flooded back.

"Otherwise he couldn't have signed over the um package."

"What are you talking about?"

"He bet a contract card. The bar tapes confirmed the bet. I forced him to sign it over to you. Sorry about the mess, but he was bleeding pretty bad."

I looked at the card. It beeped.

"It's waiting for you down at the dock. It's been there for the last hour."

"What is it?"

The marshal laughed. "You better hurry."

I'd better explain something. You see, I'm not a bad guy. Okay, I'm rough around the edges, but I do have principles. I have to have; otherwise working in the asteroid belt, surrounded by the dregs of the solar system, would consume me. If I didn't have some sort of moral compass I'd end up like the welderman; lost beyond redemption. I believe in personal freedom, which is why I was surveying the interior of an asteroid named Haven, creating a home for the oppressed.

So what happened next was not my fault.

I found the dock master and showed him the data card. "I understand you have a package for me?"

He scowled as

Dettagli