Splintered Reality - part Ten

At 20,000 tons and 650 feet long it was one big ship. The body of the ship, meant to carry cargo, looked for all the world as if a giant hand had taken one big can and smashed two smaller cans on each end, then stuck a shuttle on the front for the pilots. Piloting the thing was like trying to push a greased, drunken pig in a direction it didn’t want to go. It was also slow. So slow that many is the time that the owner felt like she might have to get out and push, just to get it to move at all.

But…

It was also free.

Gilda had won it in a card game. That was just before she and Rosa had been permanently banned from the New Vegas solar system. Gilda, in her naiveté, has always assumed it was for the drunken brawls that were a nightly occurrence. The previous owner, who was now selling donuts in a New Vegas greasy spoon, didn’t see it that way. All he knew is that his “baby” that was once his livelihood was plying the highways and byways of the galaxy, and it was doing it without him. All of which made him madder than a wet Trilaxian Prairie Chicken, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. Or so he thought.

At the moment, his “baby” was now being rather incautiously guided into a docking bay on the outer rim of Amarian space. As the ship was nearly in the docking bay, the back end fishtailed, slamming against the space doors of the bay, setting off a dozen screaming alarms throughout station. None of which could be heard in space, and if Gilda could hear them, she probably wouldn’t have cared anyway.

Inside the station the foreman felt a sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach, and it was more than just the entire dock area rocking. He knew who it was who had set the station rocking and he hated dealing with her. He swore, and frequently, that she did it on purpose. She had a knack, or sheer dumb luck, for being able to cause the most upset with minimal damage to the space doors. He tried to take the cost for the damage, however small, out of her payment once, but she had threatened to reach down his throat, grab his lower intestine and turn him inside out. He threatened to stop trading with her and she just laughed – and that was the problem. There was no one else to buy ore from and she knew it.

He wouldn’t have to deal with her if that fat old fool he worked for, Richard Sirrelli, hadn’t burned every bridge both before and after himself. Here they sat on the edge of Amarii space. Sirrelli was Minmatarian, and the average self respecting Amarii wouldn’t give him the time of day. Those who had no respect for themselves, or anyone else for that matter – the Amarii underworld would, but ore is one thing you couldn’t steal. At least not in the massive quantities needed to run this pig of a station that the foreman was forced to call home. The Minmatar wouldn’t deal with Sirrelli either, none of the tribes would. He had long ago forgotten who he was and where he came from. Richard Sirrelli had spent most of his life standing on the shoulders of other Minmatarians to get ahead. When he got there, he kicked every Minmatarian to the curb that had ever helped him. The foreman didn’t consider his boss an apple, he thought of Sirrelli as the whole orchard. But like the miner he was about to go down to the loading dock to meet, Richard Sirrelli was the only game in town. He was the only one who would hire someone with the foreman’s background.