Stopover at the Backworlds' Edge Read online

  Stopover at the Backworlds’ Edge

  Backworlds, Book 2

  © 2012 M. Pax

  All rights reserved

  Cover by: edhgraphics / Graphic Artist Erin Dameron-Hill

  Editing by TypeWriteII

  An Untethered Realms World

  This ebook is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents are fictional. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons is entirely coincidental. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment, and may not be re-sold or given away without express written permission from the author.

  Sign up for my newsletter and get a free M. Pax ebook of your choice: mpaxauthor.com

  Stopover at the Backworlds’ Edge

  Backworlds, Book 2

  Chapter 1

  Incoming! The message vibrated through the floor, a low coo penetrating deep into Craze’s subhearing. The drone of an engine grew louder until the floor shook, reducing him to a speck in the galaxy’s workings. A reminder that liked to crop up twice daily when he wasn’t hibernating.

  He rolled onto his back. Orange lights joined the alert, blinking at a frenetic rate. They fringed the mishmash tavern and quit flickering when his foot kicked up at the switch on the wall. Through the plexiglass skylight he saw the telltale flash, a cough of cobalt disturbing the anemic blue sky. The brightness stung until moisture built up in his eyes and he sneezed. Ship!

  He inhaled deeply, canvassing the scents in the ventilation system, seeking something different. Something revealing today would be the day the portal finally brought fortune, the means of revenge, the goal he’d clung to since his pa kicked him off the Verkinn homeworld three years ago. Had it really been that long?

  “Damned Bast.” He spat. “Someday I’ll know wealth big enough to make you choke.”

  Craze’s shoulders shrugged, shaking off the dregs of a nine-day hibernation, and he cursed not being woken sooner. “Fo’wo’s be damned.” Nine days of not pouring a single drink wasn’t anybody’s definition of success and certainly not his. At this rate, Bast would die before Craze made the man woefully sorry. He groaned, wondering how destiny had landed him here... for the three thousandth time.

  Pardeep Station had been fourth on Captain Talos’s list of possible homes. Hole of dust as it was, it hadn’t been as bad as Danysovia, Lleteboor, and Foradil. Six months of hopping around dung heaps and worse, searching, Craze had agreed with his shipmates —Talos, Lepsi, Rainly, and Dactyl — that they’d find no better. Especially once a Foradillan showed him images of the two worlds left on the list of possibilities. Indisputable proof there was much worse out there.

  Yup, this dust ball was the best Craze and his friends could afford, once they got past the crusty, old caretaker — a war veteran still fighting the enemy in imaginary battles. When the old coot finally became convinced they weren’t Fo’wo spies, Craze negotiated homesteading fees for the lot of them.

  Purchased with what they’d been paid by the Backworld Assembled Authorities to chase after some smugglers, Craze acquired space for his tavern, a permanent docking berth for their ship, the Sequi, a trading post for Talos, the position of dock facilitator and assistant for Rainly and Dactyl, and mining permits and a land transport for Lepsi to take up prospecting. Lepsi had hoped to find some pocket of value on Pardeep Station, something to set up an export business for himself and Talos. It never came about.

  Craze built his bar at the base of the docking facility from scraps and unwanted materials, his friends helping him to get it together and make it presentable. In exchange, he assisted in setting up their new homes, although Craze couldn’t bring himself to call Pardeep and his tavern that. It settled more like a stepping stone in his heart. Someplace until something better came along. He’d been here two and a half years, and the moon hadn’t grown on him at all. In fact, he despised it more by the day.

  To make it all worse, Lepsi disappeared a year ago. He never came back from one of his explorations. No trace of him had been found anywhere, not even his transport, coloring each day since with a sorrowful ache.

  Mouth dryer than a dust pit, Craze ran his tongue around his gums, then stretched. He slipped on his boots and pushed himself off the mat laid out in the plexiglass foyer in front of his tavern door.

  Tugging his suspenders up and his sleeves down, he readied for customers and the influx of chips, bright sheeny chips, which could transport him off this backworld’s Backworld to a better port with greater opportunity. Someplace with trees and potential, someplace that wasn’t the last stop for one hundred fifteen light years.

  Rolling up the thickly woven filaments he used as a bed, he tucked it under the salvaged bar spliced together from discarded walls, doors, and the bodies of land vehicles. It was topped by a counter poured from a resin he’d formed and sanded until it gleamed without blemish. Despite the discordance of the materials, a rich and mellow style had distilled and the tavern sparkled clean with everything in its place.

  Behind the bar, he poked between the tapped kegs of mead and malt to find the means to contact the other residents of Pardeep Station, to make sure they’d seen the ship coming through the Lepper. Not many Backworlders – those bioengineered to take advantage of the scraggly planets the galaxy offered as less than ideal habitats – scrimped by here. Pardeep Station was rough and not fully formed, uninspiring and lacking in imagination, impersonating a stain.

  Craze hit the summons to his neighbors, an icon on his tab – a thin flexible data device the size of a card. “Lepper opened. Ship headin’ in,” he yelled out to those who earned a living off travelers as much as he did.

  His courtesy to his friends done, he shut off the connection and sauntered past five tables of different shapes coated in thick beige polymer. Returning to the plexiglass door in the vestibule, he waited on the approaching ship, wondering what kind of business to anticipate. What class of vessel would come out of the portal ripped into space by the Lepper System? How many people would be on board? A massive transport filled with the very rich kind of folks was what he dreamed of, knowing full well that was unlikely, as those kind rarely came to a place like Pardeep Station.

  He shouldered into the door’s heavily scratched surface, which jerked open with a scraping noise after a shove and a kick. The air bit on the inside of Craze’s outspread nostrils, the sharp twang making him rub at the side of his nose.

  The roar of approaching engines jostled the loose, gravelly soil, the granules jumping and skittering, sending up a dust storm of supergene proportion. His black eyes squinted through the commotion, making out a more densely packed column of dirt mingling with the ship’s wake, adding to the coming tempest.

  The intensifying frenzy of dust sent a tremor of trepidation through him. Logic told him the darkening cloud was one of his fellow Pardeepans coming in to make a few sheeny chips off the tourists, yet his emotions ran rampant, sensing portent, perhaps for no other reason than it was more interesting to think so than not.

  Craze filled the doorframe he leaned against with muscle and height. The splayed placement of his cheeks, eyes, flat nose, and prominent mouth allowed him to live comfortably on hot worlds rife with organics choking the air. His ability to hibernate let him survive in places with extreme seasons, seasonal being the key. The yearly changes on Pardeep went from cold to bitter. Craze made do, though, like the other hardy souls who worked on this orbiting lump of arid rock.

  His charcoal waves neatly rebraided themselves into a single plait, then lay still. The living hair gave him some popularity with females and saved him time grooming. Beyond that he’d never figured out what purpose that particular modification to his genes served. Catching insects maybe?

&nb
sp; Pardeep’s dust-laden air tasted of chalk and tin, coating his tongue and thick lips. The incoming vessel swooped lower, gliding toward the docks rising twenty stories above his tavern. The bronze-hued edifice glinted in the sunlight, otherwise the facility blended in with the soil. It was the only blip of civilization on Pardeep, and Craze would hardly call it that. Maybe if the incoming spacecraft brought more settlers he might.

  The ship, as large as an interstellar-class freighter, cast a great shadow which darkened the landscape and his view of the world. Shaped like a dumbbell and colored in rust patches, the hull of the spacecraft clung to a brittle and aged patina, showing little promise of fulfilling his ambitions for prosperity, but there at the tail blazoned a crisp logo. Freshly repainted, a circle half blue and half green dominated the aft panels, rekindling a little hope for something more than the arrival of destitute derelicts. A vessel like that could hold up to a half thousand folks.

  Craze’s pulse quickened. That was a lot of chips. Chips he desperately wanted to add to his coffers. “C’mon!” He pumped his fist at the sky, then forced himself to settle down. The incoming ship could easily hold a half thousand cobwebs and crumbs instead.

  As the spacecraft approached, the squall of dust sped closer, rising ever higher, somersaulting and churning, turning darker and blacker, reaching up to devour the docks, the bar, and Craze whole. He backed inside the plexiglass vestibule and slammed the door, unable to peel his sight away from the storm roaring at him like a wall.

  He gulped, cursing the Pardeepan twit creating the monsoon. “Nobody’ll be able to take more than three steps from the docks, dumbass.”

  When his words consciously sank in, Craze’s lips parted with a smack. “Oh!” He didn’t want people wandering about, perhaps tempted into taking one of Pauder’s idiotic tours. Nope, he wanted them in his bar and staying put.

  The entryway had the only windows in the tavern. As the swarm of dust raced toward him, he was glad of it. He braced himself for the onslaught and ground his teeth. Pebbles scoured the exterior of his place and sliced fresh scratches into the door. Then came a series of explosions, close and thunderous.

  Boom. Boom. Boom.

  Shit.

  Craze closed his ears and ducked.

  Chapter 2

  On his knees, Craze retreated farther into his tavern, heading past the jumble of beige-coated tables to duck behind the counter. “Damn you, you Backworld reject.”

  Now he knew who added to the uproar out there. The old fool Pauder, who believed the war hadn’t ended. Craze needed to get Pauder to stop before the tourists veered away, opting for the next stop along the Lepper system.

  He chanced leaving his cover, inching his way back to the door, cracking it open to shout through the slit. “If you scare off business, old man, I’ll come huntin’ you.”

  Another volley of gunfire boomed, followed by twangs of ordnance bouncing off the hull of the docking ship. Craze glanced up, because only a well-armored spacecraft could ward off what Pauder threw at it, and they were rare.

  Craze could make out the faint illumination of a protective shield and heavy-duty rivets securing armored plates. Weapons bays ran down the ship’s belly. Not a freighter or transport, it was made for war. He’d never seen a battleship before, and rubbed at the back of his neck. The trickle of uneasiness from earlier intensified.

  “Get them. Get the Fo’wo’s.” Pauder’s tones rattled with fury, punctuated by four more shots.

  Craze rolled his eyes. “The war’s over! You damned coot.” He sure hoped so, hoped those weapons bays didn’t become something to worry about.

  In a skull-hugging helmet of thick fabric, goggles, and a gas mask, Pauder jumped down from his all-terrainer jacked up high on treads which churned up more dust than the incoming ship. The old man’s dark skin shone, the moisture produced by a hide comprised of bony shields and rings. His sharp fingers, engineered for hunting, gripped the trigger and leveled the bazooka at Craze. “I see yar piss-ass ship, vermit. Die like a Fo’wo ‘n scream for me.” He cackled in an unforgiving manner, then lowered the barrel as big as Craze’s head. “Oh, it’s ya.”

  Craze crossed his arms over his keg-shaped chest. “Yup, me, not a natu-bred Fo’wo. Not that it matters. The war’s been over sixty years now.”

  Those old injuries didn’t do Pauder any favors, he’d been blown apart and put back together too many times to have all his sanity. Another problem, his kind lived too long. What passed three generations ago for most, played like yesterday in his recollection. And he’d struggle through another century or more before letting Pardeep put the tired issue to rest.

  A taloned finger shook under Craze’s nose. “’N the good guys lost, son. Look at this hellhole.”

  Craze couldn’t argue.

  “That decoration on the hull ain’t no decoration, Mr. Barkeep. It’s trouble. Plague-inciting, warmongering trouble. The symbol’s covert ops of the Foreworlds. Fo’wo’s is here, come ta erase ya from existence. I’ll be waiting back there.” Pauder pointed at a storage closet against the back wall smack in the center of the shelves of booze. “When they come in ‘n is about ta let yar brain matter loose onta the floor, I’ll jump out right then ta spring ya from their clutches. Bam. Bam. Baaam!”

  “No shootin’ a bazooka in my bar,” Craze said. “I don’t care if the ship is Fo’wo’s. But it isn’t. Maybe a new passenger line from somebody who got a great deal on that ship, or some hotshot mercenaries. Maybe even Fo’wo pirate scum, but not an enemy army. No way.”

  Medals hung around Pauder’s neck – three bronze and two silver – casting light on the underside of his prominent chin. He thrust the bronze award he most prized at Craze, shouting his years of heroism without words. “Yar so damned ignorant, it hurts my teeth. Oh, the enemy is wily, Craze. Wilier than ya can ever imagine. There’s no truce. Not in their minds. Not until we all dead.” He crammed himself into the storage closet and slammed the door. Muffled words flitted past Craze’s flat, indistinct ears. “We should have some sort of signal.”

  “Like, come out of the closet?”

  The door flew open, rattling the bottles shelved on either side in a precise pattern of size, shape, and color. Blue with blue. Short to tall. The coot jumped out waving the bazooka at the tavern’s corners, teetering off balance until he compensated for the head injury he refused to acknowledge. Perhaps the root of his problems. “Where they at, son? Where they at?”

  Craze rubbed his meaty palms over his face, his eyes itching from the kicked-up dust. “Get back in the damned closet, you rejected pile of gene splicin’.”

  Just in time. The tavern shook and a siren blared. Pardeep’s docks joined with the incoming ship, snagging it fast to a berth above, announced by loud grates jarring Craze’s hair then his lips. He stood with his legs wide and knees loose. The crocks and bottles rattled, but nothing fell or cracked.

  When the quaking ended, Craze took his place behind the counter and powered on all the lights. “Time for business.”

  Lit up as if for a celebration, the horseshoe of a bar glowed. The top glittered, reflecting the shine. The bottles lined up on the mirrored shelves gleamed, glistening with promises of exotic tastes and altered moods. Above the bar a rack hung, holding rows of crocks and bowls, canisters of ingredients, and blue bulbs reclaimed from scrapped ships. The bulbs dangled from the edges, a cascade of ambient radiance, casting blue dots on the counter. A sign topped the rack, protruding up toward the ceiling in a bold proclamation. Illuminated in yellow and orange, it read, “Craze’s Tavern.”

  To draw in the folks disembarking, Craze unlatched an enclosure under the bar and fished around inside for a handful of ricklits. The plump insects screamed, “Rrrrickl’t, rrrickl’t.” Bright yellow with iridescent blue spots, the bugs thrashed their squat bodies around in his wide palms, antennae kicking in the air. Craze threw all but one into a roaster.

  The roaster sat in a cubby surrounded by an elaborate air flow system. Craze switc
hed on the cooker and the fans. Within thirty seconds the delicious odor of baking ricklits kicked out all other smells in his place. Irresistible. His mouth watered. When his stomach bucked in a loud plea, he popped the one ricklit he’d left out between his lips, biting down on the tasty head, eating it raw, enjoying the crunch and burst of cream. Flavored much like perfectly deep-fried chicken, a customer had once said.

  Chewing on the bit of protein, Craze tied on his apron. His rugged hands, which had put many wayward patrons out the door, washed the covers and sip spouts. Soon after, the jar parts got a rudimentary rinse in the basin of disinfecting gel. The yellow wasn’t the right shade of yellow, long past its prime, dingy and faded, glopping like gravel because of all the grit stuck in it. Gently, he set each cleaned crock on a rack on the bar top, lining them up for the incoming customers.

  The door scraped open. In walked one person. She stretched like the first rays of a moonrise, not looking anything like a Fo’wo or a covert agent. On her heels followed an entourage of breezy shadows, which closed in on her, dimming her and her silver light.

  Craze rubbed at his eyes, wondering what had gone wrong with his vision. Did her shadow just move? Where was everybody else? He had enough tables to seat three hundred, stools at the counter to accommodate another two dozen, and could cram in more for those willing to stand, especially if Pauder didn’t hang around to police things.

  “That big, old ship just for you?” he asked.

  The shadows cleared, finding walls and corners to cling to. Silver shimmered over the visitor’s hair and skin, flowing like her kaleidoscope dress. The tinkling pitter-patter of falling glass beads followed her onto the bar stool in front of Craze. She perched delicately on the round cushion upholstered in a weary red. Donning a forlorn smile, she spread her empty hands. “Drink for a thirsty traveler? It’s been a long journey from Bofeld. You know it?”