Buckle showed Samantha to his cabin and left her locked inside. He returned to his crew to discover Oka and Lam had declared a détente and shared a case of beer while waiting for him. Buckle strolled out of the cargo bay with a swagger in his step and it didn’t take long for either to guess what kind of deal had been struck. Lam leapt off the case, hand out for shaking, and met the skipper at the loading ramp. Oka stayed put and slumped with disappointment as she chewed the inside of her cheek, head shaking.
“Hell yes, skip,” Lam said. He rocked from his toes to his heels like an excited boy. He punched Buckle’s shoulder. “She ready yet for another go?”
“Sorry, Marty,” Buckle said. “She only wants me.” He beamed with the pride of a man just asked to dance by the most beautiful woman in the room, crossing his arms in triumph. Lam stopped rocking and his face fell.
“Oh, come on. You didn’t even want her at first.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Buckle said. “If she wants me, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Are you going to take her to Athena City?” Oka asked.
Buckle dismissed her with a wave and a laugh. “I figure I can drop her in Sarajito and she’ll never know the difference.”
Oka stood, exhausted and a little bit sad. She stuffed her hands into her coveralls and approached in no great hurry. “You don’t think she wants out of the system?”
“I don’t think she even knows what a system is,” Buckle said. “Anyway, she wants off the planet and that’s what I’ll do.”
“So you’ll feed her?” asked Oka.
“Yeah.”
“Out of your share?”
“Fine, yeah. Out of my share.” Something went out of Buckle’s attitude and he seemed smaller, fatter, somehow rat-like because of it. He swiveled on his heel and stomped back up the loading ramp, his exasperated steps ringing like dull bells through the thick steel. At the mouth of the bay he paused and shouted, “I don’t see what the big deal is. She’ll only be around two or three fucking days.”
Samantha sat in Buckle’s cabin on his tiny bunk kneading her hands as she waited for hours. The ship was almost silent, except for a constant hum of electricity through unseen conduits and a half-sized refrigerator Buckle also used for a bedside table. A digital clock was embedded in the bulkhead above the door and its numbers glowed in red as they ticked ever upward in a lackadaisical fashion.
There was not much room in the cabin; economy defined. One wall sported a series of tiny cabinets, each requiring a twist of the handle to open. At the end of the row was a gap before the far wall where the toilet sat. It was stainless steel but that had not prevented it from acquiring a dull sheen after years of unenthusiastic cleaning. Above the toilet was a sink and a mirror, caked with years of spit and toothpaste splatter.
On the right side stretched the bunk with space left for a desk and a chair Samantha had to squeeze to sit behind. The desk faced the inner hull, collecting small beads of moisture that formed and rolled down and formed small pools on the steel floor. The cabin had a general wetness and smelled of mildew and rust.
There was nothing that interested Samantha in the cabinets, stuffed as they were with men’s clothes. The desk was no better, its drawers empty or littered with papers she could not decipher. She found herself amidst the most technology she had ever seen and yet she paced the small room in boredom. Had it only been boredom though, she might have been fine. Samantha was accustomed to not speaking for hours on end. It was fear that gave it an edge.
She was a three-day walk from home. After Jacob checked her sister’s house and discovered her still missing, his next place to search would be the landing site. It was only a day’s ride.
Samantha expected nothing from the captain. She was trading herself to him for a ride to Athena City but there was no reason to believe he would fight. When Jacob came looking, Samantha was sure he would find her.
Beneath the fear of Jacob, Samantha also experienced something new, something worse. She chewed at her hangnails, whatever it was go away but it wouldn’t. The shame of escaping alone was more than she belived it could be. She caught her reflection in Buckle’s mirror and shied away from the image, preferring to look at anything else. The cabin’s head and its years of encrusted filth was better.
The toilet should have been gunmetal gray but instead it was streaked with shades of sickening yellow, red, and black where mold had taken hold. It was revolting enough to make her gag and she covered her mouth and nose with a hand to block as many senses as possible.
Samantha searched the cabinets a second time for cleaning supplies, anything resembling a mop and bucket or scrub brush, but the closest was a small drawer of rags with faded patterns. She wet one in the low-pressure sink and drew it over the mirror, removing a layer of grime. She worked the rag into the corners and fetched out the hair trimmings lodged into the mirror’s frame. The work kept her mind busy, her thoughts and fears receding to a more comfortable place. The more the task saw progress, the more it powered her enthusiasm, and she moved from the mirror to the sink then onto the toilet. When she was done, the entire head sparkled like it had when the Calculus had been christened at the Rayo factory.
“Something’s different,” Buckle said. He tapped his lip in thought. Samantha struggled to sit up from the bed where she slept until awoken by Buckle’s noisy entrance. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “I’ll figure it out.”
Samantha watched with sleepy eyes.
“Okay,” he said. “What did you do?” Samantha pointed toward the head. “No shit,” Buckle said. A grin appeared within the thicket of his beard. “Very nice. I’ve been meaning to do that for, well… for a while anyway.”
Samantha let down her hair and it fell in cascades over her shoulders to the middle of her back. She still wore her blue dress but it sat crooked from the recent nap.
Buckle watched, sucking in his lower lip and letting it out as if caught in a loop. He shook off his trance and inspected Samantha’s work. He ran a finger along the mirror and the edge of the sink. It remained clean. Samantha’s rag hung from the edge, drying in the still cabin air, and Buckle picked it up, horror washing over his face.
“Did you clean with this?”
Samantha nodded.
“My favorite fucking t-shirt…” He turned it over finding new holes ripped into the fabric by Samantha’s zeal. He glanced between the sparkling head and his ruined shirt, weighing whether the cost was worth it. “Hell,” he said. “You didn’t know…” Buckle sat next to her on the bunk and pointed at himself. “Jonas,” he said.
“Samantha,” she replied.
There was something in her blue eyes that made Buckle feel guilty and he avoided them as best he could. Remembering the tone of Oka’s words made him shiver and he hung his head like a repentant asking for absolution.
“Look,” he said. The percussion of the word was like a backfire from a car and he was shocked by the volume of his own voice. He began again, softer.
“Look, this whole thing is new to me. I mean, I haven’t made this kind of trade before.”
Samantha said nothing but nodded.
“People think we do this all the time,” he continued. “Shippers, I mean. It’s just… it’s just that it’s been a long time for me and, you know…”
Samantha nodded and Buckle grinned. He wasn’t a man of words and any kind of speech was difficult, an explanation of his emotions even more so. Samantha’s face was kind and accepting and Buckle found it easy to talk to her. She reacted at the right moments and smiled when he needed it. But his grin faded with the realization that she didn’t understand a word he said.
“Yeah…”
Buckle was up and dressed by the time Samantha opened her bleary eyes. Her dress lay on the floor, tossed there after he unpinned and removed it. She was wrapped up under a scratchy wool blanket, topless from the waist up. Buckle glanced at the girl still snug in his bed and excused himself with a silent nod and a double-quick step.
He stumbled through the steel halls of the Calculus, his mind still numb with sleep but beginning to roil as it awoke. The deck of the ship alternated between solid steel plating and waffle-grating depending upon the required frequency of access to the components below and his footsteps switched between rubber squeaks and heavy clanking. The sound reverberated through the otherwise silent passageway. Neither the hiss of the life-support systems nor the pulmonary rhythms of the ion-plasma engine were there to distract him.
In the cargo bay, the large, round ramp door button glowed green with the breathable atmosphere on the other side. Buckle slammed his fist against it. A one-second klaxon buzzed through the bay and the door’s hydraulic arms hissed as the ramp descended onto the wet ground outside.
The sky outside was heavy with looming rain clouds and a drizzle soaked what magazines and books had been left out the night before. The pressure cases collected pools of water that occasionally spilled onto the dirt only to start again.
Buckle stomped down the ramp and through the weeds, searching for pebbles between the blades of wild grass. The drizzle wet his salt-and-pepper hair, weighing it down and giving him a caveman appearance. With a fistful of stones, he began throwing them at random targets in the near distance–a felled tree, a tall bush, a large rock peeking above the brush. Most fell short of their target but the sport distracted him from both his complaining stomach and anxious mind.
Buckle played through several more handfuls until his arm began to ache. He ran his hands through his hair, squeezing out a small bucket’s worth of rain, and turned toward the ship. Oka leaned against the hatchway at the top of the ramp, smoking a cigarette and watching.
He joined her and held out a hand that Oka filled with a cigarette from her chrome case. She lit him with a matching windproof lighter. The flame spit as water fell from Buckle’s beard but the cigarette caught and he inhaled with closed eyes in appreciating silence. After two puffs he caught Oka’s curious look.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Tough night with your little sex toy?”
“Christ, Ayame,” he said, sighing. “If she had money, I would have taken it, but she didn’t, yeah?”
“Hey, I hear you.”
Buckle smirked. Oka dashed out her cigarette, tossing the butt onto the ground below, and lit another.
“We didn’t have sex,” he said.
“No?”
“No.”
“Conscience finally get you?” she asked. Oka leaned against the hatchway, looking out toward the dark horizon. Her face showed no emotion or judgment but Buckle felt it all the same.
“She cleaned my cabin,” he said.
“Do a good job?”
“Yeah, actually. The head hasn’t looked that clean since, well… since ever,” he said with a laugh. Buckle dropped his cigarette to the deck and rubbed it out with his shoe. Oka offered another and he accepted. “She used my favorite shirt to do it, but you know…”
“You think she might be willing to clean the whole boat?”
Buckle eyed her for a long, suspicious minute before responding. “Why?”
“Just thinking,” Oka said. Her cigarette perched in the corner of her mouth, the smoke curling up under her nose and into a squinting eye. Oka shoved her hands deep into her coverall pockets. “You aren’t the cleanest man alive. Martin’s a pig. And I hate picking up after the two of you.”
“Sounds about right.”
“Cleaning the barkey from top to bottom should be worth something…”
“Like, say, a fare to Sarajito,” Buckle said. “Is that what you’re hinting at?”
“Like I said, I’m just thinking here.”
“Hon, there’s something you have to understand.” His voice pleaded for understanding. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been with a woman.”
“Come on, skip.”
“And with our run of luck,” he continued, slower but like a bulldozer intent on its destination. “It’s going to be a while yet.”
“You know that’s bullshit,” she said. “You know this, right?”
Buckle sighed, nodding. He sat on the deck in a puddle formed by his dripping clothes and stared out at the open field. Oka flicked her cigarette outside and lit another. She glanced at her skipper, his posture like that of a broken man, and rested a hand on his shoulder, patting twice for support.
This post uses art generated by GPT Image 2 based on prompts created by Claude based on the story above.
