One Way Ticket on a Moonbound Train – James Edward O’Brien

Fabulosa used to watch Nanosuelta drift across the night sky and try to imagine what it was like down there. She’d try to spot Moms through the brindle of Nanosuelta’s algae-red oceans, tattered clouds, and tarnished gold landmasses –– far more romantic than squeezing herself into the corner of an abandoned freight car that smelled like a rest stop lavatory as she was now. The potato hooch made the very darkness spin.

An acidic tang needled the back of her throat. She tried to choke it down, but the vomit simply rerouted through her nostrils. It erupted like an aerosol of split pea soup.

She’d given herself away. A character carrying the psychic stink of middle management –– the type who’d sell his grandma down the river for a title promotion –– skidded through the boxcar’s double doors. He held a power washer as if it were a sawed-off shotgun. A maintenance crew avatar oscillated above his head. At least he wasn’t the police.

“You’re trespassing.” The spotlight on his power washer bathed Fabulosa in quivering blue light as the man tried to shake the fright out of his HAZMAT onesie and farmer’s waders. “Th-this is a livestock car––p-place’s crawling with contaminants. Y-you shouldn’t be here.”

He had the squat frame and squared-off features of an off-world contractor. Natives were raggedy, pulled-apart, some might even say fey –– on account of Point B’s artificially induced gravity. Extraterrestrials were brought in for muscle and grunt work.

“You a mule?” he asked.

Fab was packing the half dozen psychotropic implants she’d swiped from Pops –– quick money on the underground market, small potatoes compared to the cartel mules set up in economy class with sleeper cars and continental breakfast. Fabulosa lacked a clever retort. She settled for a psychic push.

It was a native parlor trick: a brief unraveling of an adversary’s psychic gestalt –– a mental sucker punch somewhere between temporary dementia and a night terror. The man triggered the power washer just as Fabulosa fired it off. He shrieked like a kid in a funhouse and dropped to his knees.

Now there’d be headaches, thought Fabulosa, questions –– headaches and questions she did not need. She needed to be unobtrusive if she was to pull this off. Fabulosa crouched beside him. She swiped the vamp stamp on her wrist across his clearance swatch, and duped his avatar. Name, rank, and serial number––the whole nine yards. His avatar fizzled; it’s liquid bronze aura filled the serrated diamond embedded in Fabulosa’s wrist.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Leave a Reply