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  “Well, uh, it’s unfortunate that I was running late for reasons beyond my knowledge - I'm never late, by the way - but, I can't risk my own livelihood. I choose Option Two.”

  A few silent seconds passed, as if it were processing my answer.

  “Scenario Two: Your vessel is being attacked by creatures of Interspace. Despite your best efforts, they have damaged a significant amount of your cargo. Do you continue evasion until you reach your destination, apologize for the reduced cargo, and take a deduction in pay to cover the company's losses? Or do you turn back and submit documentation to the Loss Prevention Department, thereby sticking the company with the loss?”

  I shot up straight in my chair. “Hey! I see what you're trying to do. This is nothing but a screening for dummies to see who'll be stupid enough to get suckered out of a paycheck!”

  The robotic voice ignored me. “Please answer the question,” it said.

  “Fine,” I said and cleared my throat. “Option Two.”

  “Scenario Three: Your spouse and offspring are trapped in two separate tanks. Each tank is gradually filling up with water. They will eventually drown. Whom do you save?”

  I scoffed. I was done with this moronic test. “For starters, I don't even have a wife and kid, so the question doesn't apply to me.”

  “Please answer the question.”

  “I dunno. The wife, I guess. You can always have more kids.”

  After another few seconds of processing, the voice said, “This concludes Reliant Shipping's Pre-Employment Psychological Examination. Please exit through the door behind you and have a pleasant day.”

  “Yeah, you can go space yourself, too,” I said as I walked out of the exam room. Sheesh, when did getting a job become so hard?

  Once I stepped out of the Reliant Shipping building, my PCD vibrated inside my jacket pocket. I pulled it out to see Jord, pinging me on instachat. I opened our conversation to talk to him on the main screen.

  Jord: My trigger finger is gettin itchy. Time to kill!

  Me: Are you spaced already?

  Jord: The hunting trip u idiot. And yes. Needed to blow off sum steam.

  Me: I'm not sure now. Got laid off from work. Need to find a job.

  Jord: Me too. Be at ur place soon with my gear.

  Me: Pick me up at industrial district. Forgot my digiwallet.

  Jord: K bud.

  So, Jord had been fired, too. I wondered why. Jord had worked in private security in high-crime areas downtown. It was hard to believe he would have gotten laid off, despite the crash. Things must have been really bad if a guy with his talent had been terminated.

  It didn't alleviate any of my anxiety. In fact, it made it worse.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Weak Spot

  A misty green haze hung over the vast wetlands that surrounded Ritan City. Scraggly, moss-strewn trees poked up out of the swamps. It was still cool out, as the sun had not yet risen. Insects buzzed about, fleeing from tiny predators that lurked in the reeds and ribbongrass. One landed on my neck and tried to get a little taste of me. I smacked it quickly, and felt a satisfying crunch under the palm of my hand. The air was filled with chirps, buzzes, clicks, and the occasional head-splitting screech from a nunu bird soaring overhead. Ah, the sounds of the great outdoors. I’d needed this.

  I peered through the infrared scope of my shotgun, down into an opening at the muddy bank of a pond just under seventy yards away. Any minute now, a vanar would come out of the water and scurry onto the bank. That's the moment I'd pull the trigger and blast a hole into it. Vanar were really smart and had excellent vision, but only during daylight hours. They couldn't see too well in the dark. So, once nighttime came, they’d head into their underwater burrows and sleep. If you wanted the element of surprise, you’d have to get into position while it was dark out, then pop them when they came out for breakfast. What a horrible way to die. I would have felt remorseful, but they tasted too good.

  My buddy, Jord, was lying next to me with a rifle. He was my backup, in case I missed the first shot. At least, that's what he told me. Usually, he started shooting regardless, whether I hit my mark or not. He had an unquenchable need to shoot things.

  Something stirred in the water. Concentric rings rippled outward, and a pair of black eyeballs peeked around from under the water. Through my infrared scope, the eyes appeared red-hot against the cool, black-and-blue pond.

  I nudged Jord. “You see it?” I whispered.

  “Yeah,” he whispered back. “Remember, always aim for the weak spot. Everything's got a weak spot. You remember where it is?”

  “Between the shoulder and chest.”

  “That's right. Oh, there she goes.”

  The eyes rose from the water, revealing the body they were attached to. It had a long, slender neck and snout with short, stubby legs. From the tip of its nose to its short tail were algae-caked, diamond-hard scales. The vanar scanned the area, arching its long neck in all directions. Luckily, vanar had no predators out in the wild. Unluckily for this one, however, we were there. And we were hungry.

  It stepped forward a few feet and stopped to look around some more, sniffing the air and snorting.

  “Not yet,” Jord whispered. “Let it get a little closer.”

  The vanar crept forward and lowered its head, snout to the earth. My finger rested on the trigger. I took a deep breath and held to steady my aim. I pulled the trigger. Boom! My shotgun thundered and sent a slug into the fleshy tissue between its shoulder and chest. Blue splattered against the reeds. Jord sent a follow-up shot into the other side. The vanar cried out in pain before slumping into the mud, lifeless. Jord let out a bellow that echoed into the swamp.

  “Nice shot, Sai!” Jord smacked me on the back. “She's a big sucker, too!”

  “I've been practicing at the range between jobs,” I said.

  “C'mon, let's bring her back to camp.”

  We holstered our weapons and dragged the giant vanar through the reeds back to our camp. Well, she was giant to me. Probably not so much to Jord, who was nearly seven feet tall - two feet taller than the average Anuran. Jord was a Tresedi - the toughest survivors in the galaxy. They had red skin made rough and leathery from the harsh sun on their homeworld, and their bodies were corded with lean muscle, though some of Jord’s skin had been replaced with cybernetic parts. His arm, face, and leg on one side of his body had been disfigured back when he’d fought in the AI War.

  We reached our camp in about an hour and tossed the vanar aside. I ignited the campfire and watched Jord begin skinning our kill. He unsheathed his long, curved Tresedi hunting knife and descaled it. One by one, he dug the blade into the flesh and popped off each scale. It was enthralling, like watching a craftsman carve a wooden chair. What a badass.

  The orange-yellow sun rose and turned the dark sky a beautiful, marshy green. The boggy gas trapped in the heat and made me sweaty, so I took off my jacket. Jord finished the descaling and started filleting the oily, bloody meat. He threw me two steaks. “Here, cook these up,” he said.

  I slapped the two vanar steaks in a pan sitting over the fire. They sizzled in the crackling oil. How I loved the peppery smell of vanar meat. “How do you want yours?”

  “Blue in the middle.”

  “Rare, good choice.”

  After a few minutes on each side, the steaks had a satisfying brown char. I plopped them onto two tin plates and garnished them with a pinch of crispy ribbongrass. We both plopped down into the moist dirt around the fire and ate our fresh harvest.

  When we finished eating our breakfast, Jord popped the question. “So, you lost your job?”

  I nodded. “Liberty Freight went under after the crash. I can't believe it, Jord-o. I go out on a job for a week, only to come back and find myself emptying my locker.”

  He shook his head and started picking meat out of his teeth. “That's rough.”

  “You said you lost yours, too?”

  “Yeah. They fired me for using excessive
force.”

  “Excessive force?” I asked, holding back a laugh. I couldn’t wait to hear this story.

  “Know that bank downtown?” he began. “I was working front-door security. Asshole ghosty comes in, demanding shit like he owns the place. So, I did my job and reminded him who owns the place.”

  “What'd you do?” I knew there was more to it.

  “I might have smacked him around a bit. I barely hit the guy. Not my fault he's a bleeder. He deserved it.”

  “Yeah, you're probably right,” I agreed.

  “What's next for you?”

  I had to be honest with him. Jord was my best friend. Truthfully, my only friend. “I interviewed at Reliant Shipping. Just waiting for them to call me back.”

  “How good do you think your chances are?”

  “Truthfully, not so good. I’m going to keep trying the shipping market though. So, what are you going to do now? Find another security firm?”

  Jord was silent and uncertain. It was unlike him. He looked up, then out into the distance, then back to the campfire. “I can't do this anymore, Sai.”

  “What're you talking about? We don't have to go hunting anymore. We can do something else, you know.”

  “Not that, bud.” He pointed at the domed buildings of Ritan City. “I mean, that. Holding down a normal job. Staying in one place for years at a time. I'm bored as hell. I miss the action. Aren't you bored?”

  Was I? I suppose so. I hadn’t enjoyed getting kicked to the curb, but I had to keep myself afloat. I couldn't afford to do anything else. Too many people got burned trying to make something of themselves. Commercial shipping was what I knew. It's all I knew.

  “No,” I lied. “I like what I do. It's safe. Secure. Well… not anymore.”

  “Aren't you tired of slaving for others?" he asked and poked at the campfire with a stick. Tiny, orange embers flickered into the air. “Don't you want to fly your own ship? Work for yourself?”

  “Yeah. But…”

  “So, why don't we go into business together, huh? Freelance stuff. Me and you. I'll do the shooting; you do the piloting. What do you say?”

  That was all too much. What was I supposed to say? Did he know he sounded like a madman? I was a wage slave. A peon. I didn't have the brains to run a business. “I don't know, Jord. I can't.”

  Jord scoffed. “Why not? Look how we took down that vanar. How we hunt. We're a good team, Sai. Your dad's the CEO of the second-largest energy company in Ritan City. You have success in your blood.”

  “I'm not like my dad. And I'm not like you. You fought in the Hanza Conflict, the AI War, and a whole slew of other battles. You're a hundred years old and still move like a warrior.”

  “And you're a great pilot. It takes a huge set of gonads to fly through Interspace all the time. That's why I think we can do this. I know we can!”

  “Just drop it,” I said. “Let's go home.”

  Jord dumped water onto the fire. The flames hissed as they extinguished. Steam rose into the air and mixed with the haze. “I'm not staying on Anura. I'm going to find work offworld. I have to get out of here.”

  “You're not staying?”

  Jord chuckled, then slung his rifle and pack over his shoulders. “Tresedi don't stay anywhere. We're nomads. C'mon, grab your stuff.”

  We loaded our gear and leftover vanar meat onto our all-terrain buggy rental without saying another word. Water splashing, the engine revving, and the tires chopping through mud were the only sounds on our way back to Ritan City. Nothing else could be said.

  Jord was leaving Anura. How stupid had I been to think someone like him would have wanted to stay there? How stupid had he been to think I would have left? And starting our own business? He’d gotten too many blows to the head in all those wars if he thought I would have agreed to that.

  After we returned the buggy to the rental shop, we stood together in silence at a tiny, dingy tram station. Not many people traveled to this side of town, and even fewer cared about it. Distant sounds of the downtown area echoed and drifted in the humid air. Jord waited for the green tram, while I waited for the blue.

  My PCD vibrated. Reliant Shipping Employment Services was calling. I answered.

  That sexy, automated voice told me I hadn’t gotten the job. “Better luck next time,” she told me.

  I punched the red “end call” button so hard, the screen cracked. Those assholes didn't know what they were missing out on.

  Jord shifted his weight to his cybernetic leg and coughed. He wasn't an idiot; he knew who called me. Probably heard the entire thing with his cybernetic ear.

  Deep down in my heart, I knew I wouldn't see him again - at least, not for years. Unless he never came back. Tresedi were drifters by nature. Nothing pinned them down, not even family. So, I forced myself to say something, anything, to get him to stay.

  I cleared my throat. “You know, I think you ought to reconsider leaving. There are Anuran military contracting companies that hire foreigners.”

  He looked down at me. I could feel that red, cybernetic eye scanning my face. “I'm going my own way, Sai. I'm not working for anyone but myself from now on. I thought someone who just got laid off would understand that.”

  “It was the crash that caused me to lose my job, not my boss.”

  “And yet, you're going to keep trying the same old shit, over and over. How many more times are you willing to hear ‘Better luck next time’?”

  “As many times as it takes!” I yelled.

  He shook his head at me.

  "What?"

  “You're the stubbornest Anuran I ever met,” he said.

  The green tram hovered to our station and came to a halt. The doors whined as they slid open and revealed an empty cabin. Jord stepped up to the turnstiles, then stopped and turned around.

  "You told me something once that I'll never forget. We were at the bar one night, piss-drunk on algae beer, philosophizing about doing everything you wanted before you died. When I said there wasn't enough time do everything you wanted, you looked at me cross-eyed and said, ‘Jord, time flies. That's why I'm a pilot. You gotta grab the flightstick and steer.’ What'd you mean by that?"

  “As if I was sober enough to know what I meant,” I said.

  “Well, I like to think you were trying to say, ‘go for your dreams’. So, that's what I'm doing.” He paid the entrance fee, went through the turnstiles, and entered the tram cabin. “I'll let you know when I'm heading offworld. Good luck on the job hunt, Sai.”"

  The doors slid shut, and the green tram zoomed off to another district. I slumped onto a rusted metal bench, pondering my drunken statement. One word kept popping into the front of my mind. Hypocrite. I was the embodiment of that word, and I would continue to be until the day I died.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  An Alternative Career Option

  A knock came at the door while I was arguing with the landlord about the air conditioning. My gonads had not ceased to be moist with sweat since the power had been out. Since the argument was going around in circles, I hung up on him. That high-pitched squawking voice of his made me feel like I had taken a pneumatic nail gun to my head. All those phone calls were becoming quite the nuisance lately.

  More knocking. I scurried to the door and opened it. To my surprise, it was my parents. Damn it, they knew. It was time to play it cool.

  My mother, Yulina, blessed by the Pantheon, was aging gracefully and still had those pretty golden eyes. She embraced me with one great hug, and I felt my sweaty forehead press into her scarlet blouse. My dad, however, the great Sar, looked older since I’d saw him last. Purple liver spots dotted the top of his head, and wrinkles carved their way around his violet eyes and tight-lipped mouth. Life as the CEO of Anura's second-largest energy company had aged him hard.

  I offered them seats at my minuscule, glass dining table, which they gladly accepted. Their old-timer knees and ankles got sore, after all. My mother revealed she had brought me a wedge of aged bog cheese and
a bottle of reedberry wine. How thoughtful of her. Pure delicacy, that stuff. Mom was one of those fancy, fine-dining restaurateurs and owned her own cheese farm.

  We exchanged simple pleasantries and engaged in idle chatter for a moment before it became dead silent. I felt my father's eyeballs on me from across the table, but I was too afraid to meet them. What I'd have given for a little liquid courage right then, but it wasn’t even past lunchtime.

  “What brings you two by?” I asked, sitting across from them in a relaxed position, shoulders and neck loose - but I covered my jittery fingers by clasping them together.