Taze handed out rifles to everyone huddled inside the shuttle. The weapons felt cold to the touch, but Chiana held them carefully, as if they could suddenly heat up within her hands. She once burned her palm grabbing one of the shotguns out of Nerri's hands after he'd only just fired it, and she wasn't going to make that same mistake twice. Luckily she healed fast.
"We move fast. In and out," Nerri whispered, making sure to make eye contact with everyone. He winked at Chiana, but the four of them nodded together. Chiana had never seen Oona so terrified before. Personally she'd never felt more calm, and that kind of worried her.
"What are we looking for?" she asked. "Booze? Credits?"
Nerri checked their weapons twice, before he was distracted watching Taze disappear down the hatch.
"Credits, mostly," he answered absently. He gripped his gun.
Keldon spat on the floor and brushed aside his lick of hair. "Do I actually get to shoot one of these?"
The yellow-skinned youngster was older than Chiana, but she didn't feel safe with him holding a weapon in his hands for the first time. She hoped Nerri knew what he was doing letting him join their party, but Keldon was one of his mates, so she couldn't say anything. Nerri made him lower the gun.
"This isn't the fun part," he said to him, while leaning in for a kiss. Both of them were sweating. "The fun part comes later."
The heat blazed outside in the desert, creeping through the hull now all systems had been turned off. If they got sand stuck in their engines they might get in trouble at take-off, but then again there were a million other things that could go wrong. Keldon kept nudging Chiana, kept teasing her, making obscene gestures with his tongue, so she shoved him away. But it only made him laugh.
Oona was the youngest, another pickpocket like them Nerri had taken along for his never-ending joyride. She was one of his few acolytes Chiana had actually grown to like a lot, but she'd rather he stopped picking up these strays. They were better off alone, and she would never stop trying to tell him so.
Oona was nervous, and even though he didn't want to show it, so was Keldon. He finally stared down the hatch, waiting for something to happen. They couldn't make their move until Taze had completed refilling their fuel tank. They couldn't make much of a getaway without it.
"Is anyone keeping an eye on the traffic?" Chiana asked.
"You're right," Nerri said.
"Too much traffic and we can't risk robbing it," Chiana said. "Too little and it probably won't be worth the risk anyway."
Nerri clambered up to the front of the cabin and got up in order to peek past the viewscreen. Orange light filled the shuttle when he lifted up one of the blankets covering the screen. His eyes had to adjust to the blinding sunlight.
"One of them just took off," he said, and Chiana strained herself to hear the engines sputtering somewhere distant. "Two others are still waiting for departure. One of them's a frelling big sloop."
"Anything worth snurching in there?"
Chiana recognised the grin Nerri saved just for her, before it quickly vanished from his face. He had to be cool now. He was the boss. And her big brother.
"It's just a piece of dren," he said. "And you can tell the owner knows it too."
Keldon rubbed his eyes. They always looked red, as if he'd sniffed too much of the black powder.
"Is he going to be a problem?" he asked.
Chiana could tell how Nerri hesitated, and hoped the others didn't notice.
"We'll kill him if we have to," Nerri said, turning back, and all the light from the shuttle faded again.
Oona was fidgeting with her ammo cartridge, and when Chiana helped out, she smiled nervously.
"You sure do seem to be familiar with these rifles," she said.
"Yeah," Chiana said. "They saved my life more than once. And they didn't come cheap."
They were running out of ammo too, she remembered.
"Did you ever kill a man?" Oona asked, as Chiana nudged the cartridge back into place.
"No," she lied.
Four loud thuds pierced the silence inside the ship. It was Taze, pounding the side of the shuttle with his fist. It was the signal.
"Let's go let's go let's go!" Nerri yelled and so they wrapped their faces in their shawls and stormed out into the hot sunlight, guns blazing. Sand winds slapped them in the face with dry air. Grit hurt their eyes. The shop was dead ahead.
They could've been seen coming from the distance, kicking up dust on the landing strip, and she was right, for it wasn't long before there were bullets hitting the dirt at their feet. They got lucky, though, because the blasts kept missing them.
The shopkeeper was shooting rocks at them, feisty little pebbles shot in a wide spread just to keep them at bay. Tiny little bastards could cut right through their leather vests, but Chiana didn't notice the blue streak of blood running down her leg until she was already inside.
Taze kept the shopkeeper at bay, while Nerri lead Keldon to his front door. Together they put their weight behind it, shot the bolts and burst through the doors. The shopkeeper ducked behind the counter, reloading his shotgun. He turned red at the sight of the youngsters in leather with their Skorvian weapons. The man was Luxan, so he probably recognized the guns from their wars.
Nerri jumped to the counter and put a gun to the shopkeeper's head before he had time to look up. Didn't matter how much he spat. They were going to take what they wanted anyway.
"Chiana, you okay?" Keldon asked, breathing heavily.
Her chest was heaving and her heart started to hurt. A dark blue stain started to form on her thigh. It became harder for her to stand. The pain proved it wasn't just a flesh wound. Shooting and knocking over the shop's cabinets made her feel better. Oona checked. She'd be okay.
"You want to lean on me?" Oona said.
"No, just open the registry. Get the credits."
She let the others rummage through the shop while she rested, and found a way to deal with the pain. This wasn't as much fun as she'd hoped it would be. The shopkeeper just looked terrified. His wife was probably hiding upstairs. If he even had a wife.
The door creaked.
"Got something?" Keldon asked Taze when he returned from the backroom, holding two bottles in his hands.
"Can't read it," Taze said.
"What?" Keldon said. "Don't you have translator microbes?"
He shook his head.
Chiana kept her eye and her gun focused squarely on the shopkeeper while Nerri examined the wares. He traced a finger across the glass to wipe away the dust. He didn't recognize the brand or the drink.
"Where did you find this?" Nerri asked Taze, and he pointed to the dark room in the back.
Keldon grabbed the two bottles and walked over to shove them into the shopkeeper's face. They were lucky there hadn't been any other customers.
"What the frell is this?" he demanded to know. The Luxan shook his dangling tentacles. "It's expensive, isn't it?"
Oona looked away in fear, but Chiana knew she would get used to the violence, just like she did.
They owned this place now, Chiana realized. They could do whatever they wanted. All was quiet down the landing strip, which meant none of the other pilots felt like risking their neck for some backwater gas station. The ships were quietly buzzing in the distance while the desert stretched around them. The sound of crickets was everywhere. The desert was so hot, she could see the air dance.
Keldon screamed. The Luxan had taken out a dagger and jabbed it down Keldon's neck. Chiana had never seen so much blood before.
Taze shot the man over and over, exploding, until the shopkeeper died with his back against the counter and his legs twitching against the dusty floorboards. Then silence and smoke.
The man died defending his shop, blood black as ink gushing from his gut, and pierced full of Skorvian stingers. Keldon died for a lousy bag of credits. It wasn't even enough to buy a second gallon of fuel.
"Take me back!" Keldon yelled. Hands pressed against his neck, drowning in blood. "Take me back!"
His face turned white., then blue. Then he shook and grabbed Chiana's hand, while blood filled his throat. He could barely squeeze her hand. He could barely see.
She didn't say a thing to him. Asshole died and there was nothing she could do about it.
The floor suddenly felt uneven. Oona dropped her rifle to clasp her hands in prayer, but Taze forced her to pick it up again. The Peacekeeper patrol was only a few clicks away, and the nearest Nebari outpost was lightyears away. Chiana didn't know where they were, but she had military bases and Nebari outposts memorized, in order to avoid them. Nerri taught her that. It would only take one message to get a standard raid party of 12 enforcers maybe three arns to get to where they were. No Skorvian weapon was a match for that.
Chiana drifted, wandering back to the door with blood trickling down her leg. All the while, Nerri was yelling. He deserved to.
"YOU ASSHOLE." he screamed, kicking the Luxan corpse, until Taze pulled him away. "YOU PIECE OF DREN."
Their eyes hurt mustering up tears in this intense dry heat.
"It's over," Taze said. The film of his eyes were almost transparant. The bright sunlight didn't hurt him. "We take what we can and leave him."
When Taze saw Oona crying he persisted. The dead Luxan twitched.
"No," Nerri said, finally, nurturing a heavy brow, and a heavy step. "We're taking him with us."
Chiana understood, and immediately followed orders.
"It's okay," she told Oona, taking her back to the shuttle. "Nerri will take care of it."
And suddenly, there was going to be a funeral today, instead of a celebration.
Realizing what had transpired within the boarded up remains of the cabin, the pilots that had stood by the wayside wondering who would finally come out on top after this raid, took to their ships, dusted off their engines and flew off, without as much as a thanks or a threat.
In their wake the sands were lifted into the air, as their giant ships disturbed the desert, and Chiana watched them as they cleared the horizon and then disappeared. Chiana and Oona fought the tiny typhoons to get back to their ship, and through the clearing they could see what the ships had left behind. Chiana peered at Oona through the small opening in her covers, and she nodded, because she saw him too. A silhouette painted against the blazing, rising waves of heat. A lone guard, clutching at his rifle, questioning whether he should risk his own life and fight the raiders, or surrender.
He was too far away. That was it, really. What had he been doing, taking a piss? He should've been here, Chiana thought. He should've been here getting killed. Maybe he could've made a difference. Maybe he couldn't have. But out there, in the desert, what good was he to anyone? He just stood there.
What was he guarding? Those fuel tanks must've been buried pretty deep, so only proper criminals could get to them, if they wanted to.
"Let him go," Oona said. "Just another guy that doesn't want to die for a crappy job."
"Yeah..." Chiana said, watching Nerri and Taze carry the body of Keldon into the clearing.
Now with the shopkeeper dead, the pumps would soon follow, and this lousy guard would be out of this crappy job anyway. Maybe they did him a favour. In the end, they were no different from the other ships, as they took off and left him behind to sort out their mess, and clean all the blood.
Keldon had stopped bleeding by the time he reached the ship. He'd left a path of red drops, anything that wasn't absorbed by his drenched clothing, all the way up to the hatch. It turned out the body armour he had been wearing underneath his clothes had done him no good. It seemed such a waste, so before they buried him they took it, stripped him and then buttoned up his shirt again, out of respect for the dead. Then they rummaged through his pockets and found coins of various sizes, none of which Chiana recognized.
Nerri piloted the ship.
"What do you think we should do?" his voice came from the end of the ship. The craft shook in transit.
Chiana liked the coins, but didn't care to look at the body too much. The neck had become this festering red orifice. It didn't feel real. There was a hole there that didn't belong. And Keldon's face had turned really pale, his expression devoid of meaning. She didn't like it. She didn't like it at all.
The first time she saw a dead body she cried. The entire journey there she'd been told the truth, and that she was going to see a dead body, but she didn't expect to find herself in the smallest of rooms all of a sudden. Just her and death. In death, Peacekeepers just slowly turn yellow. Nebari turned the slightest blue. Then she wondered what colour a dead Luxan would take on, once death had completely set in. The stiffness and the cold. Then she remembered the embalming. Nerri told her about that. In this heat the Luxan's body probably wouldn't last long. And as for Keldon...
"Did Keldon have a home?" Chiana asked, turning her head towards the cabin at the front.
Taze put on the body armour, to see if it fit him. There were blood stains on the collar.
"No," Nerri said, remembering.
Chiana clambered up towards the cabin, stumbling across the metal ledge in the floor, and dropped herself into the co-pilot's seat to stare at her brother. He stared out in front of him, distracted by his instruments. Even though he looked calm, Chiana knew; she had never seen him so angry before.
"It was Phelos, right?" Chiana said, curious. "That's where we picked him up."
"It's not where he's from," Nerri said, almost begrudgingly.
"Then where?"
"I don't know. He never talked about his family. He was just a scavenger..."
"Like us."
"I think he was an orphan."
Chiana understood.
"So where do we take the body?"
Chiana wondered where she would like to be buried, when the time came. She wanted to be buried somewhere busy, somewhere fun, like close to a carnival or a nightclub. Somewhere where music would always keep playing.
It's strange how sometimes the answers come before you ask the question. She thought to herself who would probably die first, her of Nerri, and instinctively she found herself picturing herself standing over Nerri's grave. A patch of dirt with a tombstone. And flowers. The youngest always die last, she figured. Was she wrong?
And when Nerri would die, she'd be all alone. Chiana shook her head, trying to rid her head of these thoughts. Maybe if she ignored them long enough they would go away.
Then she had to hold on to her seat as Nerri quickly banked to the left, and Chiana could see through the view portal the blue sky being pushed back up by the rising ground beneath them. Nerri piloted the ship back towards the planet, and touched down on the other side of the desert continent, with a shovel and a plan.
At first, the logs simply crackled. It had been hard enough to gather as much wood as they did in these barren grounds, enough to encumber the body with, and then they had to watch Nerri press the muzzle of his rifle into the wood, and achieve nothing. He burned round marks into the branches as the weapon heated up. When Taze offered to do it, Nerri declined, saying he was being cautious not to overload it, and blow them all up in the process. That would've been a way to go. Kneeled beside the pile, with his back turned to them, he was softly blowing on the dead grass, hoping to kindle a flame.
Oona played with a coin while the fire grew, rolling it over and over between thumb and index finger, glittering in the flames. Chiana felt like the only one that wasn't simply there waiting for it all to end. None of them really knew Keldon, but that didn't matter, because they should be here. Nerri loved him.
He stood closest to the fire and she took his hand, then put her arms around him and held him tight as the warmth of the fire touched their skin.
A soft chill seemed to rise from the land when the sun slowly touched the horizon. Dark blue turned to crimson red and orange. Chiana's favourite colours.