Call Me Moss – 13 – He’s HOW Far Away?

“Twenty thousand light years… give or take,” I said.

We had just gotten our twenty-fifth contestant from our improv game show “Are There Fates Worse Than Death?” — which is to say we’d collected twenty-five occupied life support pods that Ettienne Dorn wanted for… reasons.

These were all bad people, mind you, and I’m not even talking about the wishy washy “for a given value of bad” kind of way. We checked their records and found they were not only repeat offenders with a number of murders attributed to them, they’d been incarcerated more than once, only to be let off on technicalities, bribes, or overcrowding on prison ships.

We were all lined up to head to Sol and meet this Ettienne when I realized I had a minor case of undiagnosed dyslexia.

It wasn’t Sol he was at, it was Los… a system out in Colonia, which is, as I’d just said, twenty thousand light years away.

The Back Bacon Express can jump thirty at a go.

Reese smacked her forehead at the news. “I am not going to Colonia!”

“Why not? It’ll be fun.”

“With a bunch of meat popsicles to be towed to Doctor Frankenstein? No chance!”

I tried to be reasonable. “Look, I don’t intend to hang out with them any more than you do. I have a plan!”

“Oh really.” She said, with a degree of faith in my abilities normally reserved for my parents…. don’t ask.

“Look, there are fleet carriers going out to Colonia all the time. I already found one for us. We dock, unload, rent a cabin, hang out in the bar, and chill until we get there. Think of it as a paid vacation.”

Now Reese looked like I might be onto something. “Okay, I can live with that. Where is it?”

I smiled and brought up the info on the fleet carrier, the system it was in, and its amenities. She was even more impressed… Then she frowned.

“Uh, boss?”

“Yeah?”

“This ship left six hours ago.”

I checked the time stamp, got angry, got depressed, accepted.

Reese sighed. “So… we’re stuck with a bunch of really bad people on ice in our cargo hold until….?”

I shook my head. “I honestly have no idea. You know what? Forget it. We’ll make do in the bubble. Let’s offload the trash and I’ll set out feelers for our next job.”

“You know this is a pretty lax law and order system,” Reese said. “We’ll probably be fighting them again by next week.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You proposing they ‘accidentally’ get dropped in the cargo recycler?”

She shrugged. “Accidents happen.”

And they had happened before. I believe in second chances, but by the time you’re on your fifth or six, you probably aren’t going to change.

“Not opposed to the idea, but there’re worth close to a million if we turn them in.”

“Our accounts are pretty flush at the moment,” Reese countered.

I thought about it and pulled out a credit chit. “What say we flip for it?”

They were, after all, very VERY bad people.

“Call Me Moss” is not set in the Get Lost universe, per se, but the game that inspired my love of the genre: Elite Dangerous (which is where the screenshots come from). Writing little bits like this is just one way I get in the right mindset for the next big adventure in my world. Consider this Moss as being from an alternate universe 😉