Sapphire Dragonfly

Corky was still sobbing in the corner, clutching Mercer’s body as if he could will it back to life. Odessa and Felix were perched at the table, staring at their oil-stained hands and not moving.

Moss felt the collective grief and dread of his crew envelop him as he emerged from his quarters. His bloodshot gaze wandered from the covered body of his late pilot to the lance of metal jutting through the front of his ship. At least it’d been quick for Mercer.

“Captain,” said Felix, gruff at the best of times.

Odessa shuffled across the bench to give him a seat. He stayed standing, the scene of their crash replaying in his mind.

“Hard to believe Mercer’s gone,” said Odessa, wiping her hands to no avail.

“Not if you saw that rod of metal go through his face,” muttered Felix.

Moss swigged from the bottle they’d been passing around. He walked over to his second, but Corky might as well have been in a different galaxy.

“You tried, Corky,” he said. “Leave him.”

“He’s gone,” mumbled Corky.

“Let him rest,” said Moss. He sat beside the dead man, and waited for Corky to regain composure.

After a bout of sniffing, Corky lifted his head. He slipped his visor back over his sightless eyes, and a yellow band of light told Moss the man was ready to face the universe again. The gadget’s attention lingered on Mercer’s corpse, then focused on Moss.

“Where are we?” said Moss.

“Mercer said Marutan. As far as where we are on Marutan…” Corky shrugged. “I warned you there was a reason crews don’t come here.”

Cosmium was reason enough to risk it, Moss had told him. Hanging his head, he took another swig from the bottle, not really sure what he was drinking.

Cosmium – humanity’s key to the universe, the fuel of expansion, the most precious metal there was. When they’d discovered it, thousands of years ago, it must’ve been like discovering fire again. Now, here Moss was, another cos-chaser scavenging where the Interstellar Mining Corp wouldn’t go.

“There’s money to be made here,” said Moss. “I need you sharp.”

Corky sucked air through silver teeth. His visor hid half his face, but Moss had grown used to it years ago. He trusted his second to do what needed doing.

“I’ll go look at the engine,” muttered Corky.

Odessa rose to help him. As the ship’s chemist, her role included ensuring the cosmium core never became unstable. Moss didn’t understand the details, but he trusted it was more complex than it sounded.

He was left with Felix and the dead man.

“Is there going to be a problem, Felix?” he asked.

Felix grunted. “Three years we’ve been together, Moss. You promised none of us would get killed.”

Moss snorted in response. “You’re a child if you believed that. You know what line of work we’re in.”

The cold clenched around his prosthetic hand as he took another swig of the mystery drink. Deciding it would be best to deal with Felix sober, he set it down. The miner glared at him.

“Clean this shit up,” said Moss.

“And where are you going, boss?”

“Outside,” said Moss.

He patted Mercer’s shoulder one last time, then headed down the gangplank onto the surface of Marutan. Flat-topped mountains rose all around, all pitted and bearing spikes of cosmium ore. The purer stuff would come from caverns in the rock. He walked a short distance in the cold breeze, before stopping when the ground just fell away into a black pit.

He turned back towards his ship, his pride, the Sapphire Dragonfly. It’d been a classic even when he’d been a boy, becoming rarer and rarer as he’d grown. But, through sheer perseverance, he’d scraped together the funds for his dream.

Well, he had debts to repay. That didn’t seem to matter really.

A broken spike of cosmium stabbed straight through the cockpit of the Sapphire Dragonfly. The violent storm in the upper atmosphere must’ve launched it at them. Apart from that, one of the solar-wings had snapped off. The engine had been making strange noises ever since they crashed too. And God help them all if the cosmium core had been damaged.

Mercer had wanted a Greserian burial, shot into space among the asteroids his people had mined for centuries. Moss, being pragmatic, decided he’d have to settle with being dumped down one of these holes.

Well, they were far from the Greser Belt now. Far from anywhere. Moss’s mind pulled towards the distant memories of his childhood in an inconsequential seaside village on Farborr. No one ever left Farborr, they’d told him. A life of crabbing and fishing in the rockpools was all he had to look forward to.

Moss sat at the edge of the pit, spitting into the blackness. How far he’d come. And yet the triumph evaporated as soon as he reached for it. Years now, he’d been pushing the Sapphire Dragonfly to the fringes of colonised space. It always would’ve ended like this.

Without the debt tethered to him, he’d be a wealthy man. Without his previous imprisonment, he’d probably be at a desk serving the Interstellar Mining Corp. Without…

So easy it was for hypotheticals and missed forks in the road to ambush him. He flexed his prosthetic hand, letting the cheap metal fingertips click together. So many choices could’ve led him away from this lonely planet at the edge of space.

Scuffing boots turned him from the edge. Odessa crouched beside him, stained hands wringing.

“Core’s leaking,” she said. “We need some pure to replace what we’ve lost. Felix can weld the seals back together. The engine’s a little dinged, but it can survive a journey to Axiport.”

Moss ran a hand through his greying hair. He’d learnt to hide his nerves better than the young chemist. When he’d found her, she’d been a prodigy fresh from the IMC’s training programme. It’d been his selfish vendetta against the IMC that’d made him lure her to a life of crime.

“No one blames you for Mercer,” said Odessa.

“Then why do you feel the need to tell me that?” He spat into the pit again. “Felix is…”

“He runs his mouth,” said Odessa, a scared child trying to keep her family from fighting. “You know how he gets. The stress…”

“Maybe he wants my job,” muttered Moss.

Odessa wrung her hands again. “If the core can’t be patched?”

“We send out a distress beacon and hope,” said Moss. “But if the IMC comes, all of us will be locked away for a few years. You’ll never work as a chemist again.”

“I knew the risks,” said Odessa. But she hadn’t. She’d been desperate for money, with jobs in short supply and sharks breathing down her neck for what she’d borrowed.

Moss had caught her with the same bait that’d caught him. He watched her trudge back to the ship, to the toxic puddles of molten cosmium that would be corroding the floor of the core-room.

Felix slouched on the gangplank. He shouted something at Odessa as she passed him, but the chemist ignored him. Sneering, he sauntered down towards Moss, who prepared for another argument.

“I want a pay rise,” said Felix, standing behind him, bottle in one hand as the other clenched and unclenched.

“Now?” said Moss.

Felix drank deep. “Three years, boss! Three years I’ve been with you. Other crews, you know, I hear them at Axiport, talking about they make hundreds of thousands in a single year. What’ve I got to show for three years, eh?”

“Don’t forget who got you out of your contract with Salker,” snarled Moss. “Ungrateful little bastard. I’m the only reason you still have breath in your lungs. Consider the past three years your reward.”

As he perched at the edge of the pit, the tension in his muscles grew. It would be easy for his miner to boot him over into the long fall. Corky would probably kill him for it. But then they’d be trapped here. Without Felix’s knowledge of mining, the core would starve.

Salker’s mine: another life Moss had ripped into his orbit. His old miner had walked away, and Moss had descended on Salker looking for a deal. He’d found one in the first tavern he’d walked into. There’d been a hunch-shouldered, broad-chested man with a flat nose and brutal face sulking in the corner over his contract and his pay. There’d been an incident with some lost money, the man was accused, and Moss and Corky had intervened.

“We need to find some pure,” said Moss. “Get your gear and climb down this hole here. I reckon there’s a reservoir at the bottom. Easier than getting Ode to melt down some of this ore.”

For a moment, Felix didn’t move. Moss still anticipated an attack. Felix was a man of unpredictable tempers.

“Yes, boss.” The bottle sailed over head, dropping down into the pit, as Felix stomped back to the Sapphire Dragonfly.

Alone, Moss put his face in his hands. All the lives he could’ve had flashed through his mind, all stemming from those rockpools on Farborr he’d been so eager to leave behind. He could’ve inherited his father’s fishery. A pleasant little cottage by the sea. Married Jenna Hansel. Children scampering around him, growing into their own lives of rockpool fishing.

No. Moss looked out over the grey planet he’d found himself on. A simple life, with petty worries and meaningless choices – that’d never been for him.

So, even as he dreaded the core’s rupturing, and thousands more added onto his debt, he grinned to himself. Wherever the currents of the universe dragged him, it beat dying regretful by the shores of a Farborr fishing village. Mercer would’ve agreed.