Margo Blank White issue 0

Issue #0 or How Margo Got her Ride.

 

“Violence is the last Refuge of the ignorant”

Margo Blank White Issue #0. Text to doc with better formatting plus comments

-April 1st 2024

“Violence is the last Refuge of the ignorant”

Margo Blank White Issue #0. 

-April 1st 2024

Margo Blank White is twenty-two. Old enough to any drink liquor, smoke anything that grows across the inner bodies, drink any rumored psychedelic broths from the outer stars, and shoot dead anyone should she let the government tell her. Her hair is long for the times, half stark white half baby pink, and usually decorated with a blue ribbon. She has run through her lottery winnings on fancy then cheap joys and trivialities. What was left after the body mods, the tattoos, the piercings and the fixings went to fast cars full of automated drivers to rip from the body and jettison into the void. The time was fun and fast but had to end. Margo slept for a few weeks on a friend’s couch and then woke up to announce a decision. Cycle 7, year one hundred and five, Terrasol 239, Earth, Margo’s lifelong friend Tri’s basement.

The basement is dark but still colorful. The lights inlaid along the upper edges of the room are all shielded by vivid, shifting traditional cloth tapestries and some of Tri’s old band A-shirts. It smells badly of many things that should have been consumed or burned long ago. Margo is a cocoon shaped pod of rolling blue fabric. It shifts once, twice, four more times and finally the girl clambers free of her suspended sleeping hole accompanied by a mess of tangled hair and crumpled papers.

“Tri, I’m going to enlist in the interstellar navy,” she yawns, crawling out of the basement, up and around the short stairs and landing to the kitchen still wrapped in heated covers pulsing lightly with electric warmth.

Tri is butchering and burning eggs and fried chicken, chewing on a spoon by the handle and squinting down at the popping grease. 

“Don’t do that.” He responds plainly.

Margo rolls into the kitchen much like a poorly mobile insect. One with not legs and merely a fat, undulating body to push along.

“They’ll just ship you off to bomb in rebel miner camps (or!’ he raises a finger ‘shoot them dead if they haven’t got the time to build you more bombs) on the far side of mars.”

“But!”
“But! Maybe you’ll get shot out and float away into the void or get pulled down and die in Jupiter’s storm. Fifteen hundred sailors a year die there.”

“BUT! I’m going to take the ship and ditch before they ship me out. Sell the thing for a start and-…Tri don’t you ever get tired of the burnt little crisp rock of a planet we’ve got here? What’s left on terra but a trading post for the rest of the system?”

Tri stares down at the eyes on the floor that stare right back. A sly, stupid smile rises out from the folds of blankets to accompany.

“Come on…” Tri groans.

“What?”
“They’ll shoot you dead in three seconds!” Tri laughs.

“You underestimate me. I have a plan! You can come with me if you like. I’ve got five, actually the number’s liable to change really, steps, but fuck the number, it doesn’t matter. You’ll see.”

Tri slides his lightly charred mess into a bowl and waits mere blinks to begin shoveling with his lightly bent, government issue spoon. Margo grimaces at the sight, the slop tumbling around and out of Tri’s mouth. 

“I don’t want to join the navy.”

Tri pauses a beat.

“I will not join the navy.”

“It’s just the starting point. It’s barely part one of the,” she counts quickly on her hands still beneath the covers, “ten step plan.”

“Ten?”
“I did some thinking, lay off me.”

Margo stands up and the mass of blankets falls off her. She wears a hoodie more than a handful of sizes too large and from a highschool she did not go to, that and tall thigh high rabbit socks with tiny satin ears, her favorites. Tri looks down at almost eight kilograms of bedding in his cramped kitchen’s doorway and then back up at Margo. He slurps down another welded mass of bacon and egg. He sniffs at her (and his mess) almost like a dog. Like the big shedding dog Margo slowly came to sort of love loudly sniffing its way across Tri’s living room floor. 

“First, I’ll join up, say I’m in it for the pension.” 

Tri grunts and nods. His face falls back down to his pressed cardboard trough.

“Play nice, or normal at least. Focus and scribble and squint real hard in all the academic portions of training. Hit my shots, not blow up the training ships…”

“Trying to get promoted?”

“Not really, I don’t want to stick too far out. Stand out maybe. A little bump in performance might get me a bigger gun or a faster ship. I don’t want to leave an impression though. Another seaman, rank indeterminate, don’t snicker at that word, rank indeterminate and motives blank.”

“White?”
“Yeah[ yeah], you’re hilarious.” Margo laughs like a flock of water fowl and Tri smiles at the sound.

“Then?”
“Then I want to get away. I don’t really want to be shipped out to fight rocks and sleep for a decade in transit.”
“So?”
“So, I run. Fly out under cover of darkness. Like a coward and the like. Then, I ‘lose an engine’ in the ensuing dog fight and plummet to my ‘demise’ by floating away ‘uncontrolled’ on the lunar gravity. Wait a few weeks or months on the dark side and then fly off for real, likely forgotten by the superiors.”

“…..”

“……”

Margo raises her eyebrows at Tri, Tri tosses his plate still wet with food to the counter.

“And?” he gives in.

“Well from there I’d have to get a pencil and paper. Do you have as much around?” Margo bats her hastily mascara-ed eyelashes a few times.

“You know I don’t.”

Two months later…

Tri struggles to turn over the engine of his beloved and heavily vandalized car. Many of Margo’s belongings are stuffed in the back bench, compressed and wrapped and enfolded tightly in a series of vacuum bags. Margo sits upfront, across a gap from Tri. She reads a well tended pocket novel and listens closely to the decade aged hover engine shudder and groan, trying to feign illness to get out of work. Tri pulls his finger back in curling frustration and mashes it again against the starting pad. The metal button flexes, the engine huffs and finally the car ascends straight up a few dozen meters. Margo and company and bags jolt like flipped bugs, but only the driver has time to adjust and avoid being tossed once more when the Ro-Shia takes off towards the sky.

Margo adjusts her shirt, jacket and bra straps, with a small pleased grunt and goes back to her book. Something with a zombie shuffling across the cover in a loop that ends with its head shot off by an old-fashioned arrow in tiny, electric, baroque splendor. Tri’s peripheral vision wanders to watch the loop play out a few more times beneath the cloudy book-skin. Distracted, he comes too close to the chassis of another aeromotorist and pulls up at the last moment, a breath before the horn whines and the other diver ducks for the treetops far below. 

“Tottering, half winged piece of SHIT!” lingers, cutting high up in the air long after the offending driver has scurried off.

The Ro-Shia keeps along poorly following the path projected inside the windshield. There is silence inside save for Tri’s cracked music piling out old speakers and Margo’s page turning. By now her cover displays some great Grendel or horror from the mind of a madman bearing down above the (presumed) hero with cruel fangs. A song ends, in the moments between the next beginning the friends speak briefly. Tri looks Margo up and down a few times, stopped at a busy section of air over a busy section of city. The air conditioner coughs and the two drive on over a city just past its golden years, thousands of ants dwindle on beneath them. Their chariot marks its place in spacetime now high above the musky ever present clouds and pinned against the ever brilliant sun. 

“I’m…” Tri starts as his car bends to his whim and begins the long descent from the clouds.

“Going to miss me?” Margo finally closes her novel. The cover images zap out of existence only to be replaced in an instant by the title of the book. ZOMBIES a là Death! (though in reality it is followed by an egregious and unnecessary amount of !). She smiles right past Tri, straight through any act or expression or clever mask as if she had never even heard of such things.

“Yeah,” Tri answers, clearing his throat. “Ten years doesn’t go by so fast…It’s hard to make school friends again when you dropped out and haven’t been in over half a decade.”

“Door’s still open to come with me-”

“I am not joining the navy! I’m not an imperialist, Margo!” Tri shouts an echo of himself everytime he has been suggested as such over the past eight weeks.

“I’ll pick you up once I break off,” Margo says calmly. She puts a hand on Tri’s knee. “You can spend the time saving up and training on your own. We can go see the system together.

Tri sighs and focuses all his attention back on his electric road. A little chunk of plastic tickers off the steering wheel and plunges for the car floor. Its journey hiccups when Tri descends suddenly. But eventually, slowly, surely, it fades from field of view. Margo opens her book again.

“I’ll visit you of course,” she doesn’t look up. “Did you think I’d forget about you? Even if you don’t come with, I’ll still come see you. Shit, if you don’t come with I’ll miss you so much I’ll have to.”

“Then I’ll see you later. We can leave it at that.”

Margo reads on. 

“How many pages in are you?”
“Just about sixty, but its absolutely full of illustrations so they go by a little fast.”

“Illustrations?”
“Yeah, electric stuff like the cover.” She taps the howling beast with an errant finger. Her suave blue nails clink against the book. “They all move and light up and do little dances when you read up to the part they’re covering.”

“That sounds distracting.”

“Tell me about it,” she laughs. 

Tri cracks a small smile and laughs quietly along with her.

The car descends in a puff of great stale air. It barely fills the parameters of the well aligned parking space, except that it is still a good ways in the air. The great painted beast of all colors rears its head up and down in rhythmic motion several times but it loses no altitude; gains no ground at all. It is a sure thing, stuck in flight. A loose wire or perhaps a grinding senile gear. Faulty landing pads liable to burst on contact? Any a reasonable guess and irrational cost. The beast stutters more and, for a moment, seems to break free of its curse, but only manages to lower a few centimeters at most. Another burst of mechanically processed air, and the passenger-side door raises.

“Good luck with this. I’ll call you first thing I can.” Margo speaks up to cover the orchestra of low whirrs and one lone clink of the levitation systems. She clutches her three bags close to her chest and stands too close to the edge of the car for Tri’s comfort.

“It’ll be fine. Happens all the time, like I said. There’s a float in mechanic a few blocks from here it seems, too.”

“Bye, Tri!” 

“Bye Margo!”

“I’ll miss you!”
“Quit shouting at me and get out there already!”

Margo drops her bags first, one by one they fall the short distance and plop carefully to the pavement. Margo follows. She lands as if having jumped a great distance. 

“I’ll miss you too, Margo! So much.” Tri calls out, already pulling upward. “I’d stay and chat, but I think I saw a camera by the door! Goodbye! Goodluck, I really mean it-” The door closes and the Ro-Shia blinks away through the clouds. Tri mostly expects Margo to be shot dead trying to escape.

The first thing the navy did was cut Margo’s curls and bangs off and threw them in a can. They find the color, the split landscape of a fluffy coastal sunset, a problem as well; and both the hair “stylist” and overseeing officer comment on how they wish they could pull it out. But they have no magic vacuum and settle on waiting it out. Margo is tapped along with the rest of the line of shiny eyed, short haired recruits. Each wears a slim suit of navy blue denim and thick black boots with thick black laces. Most bear a name not their own embroidered above the heart. Their thick soles click and clack in unison to the barracks at the end of the hall. Without a tinge of emotion or flick of muscle they are commanded to sleep by a face on the wall. One could disobey the order, stay awake to enjoy the gray and undecorated emptiness of the room, but the exit/entrance already locked itself noisily after the final soldier entered. And, the only windows were far too small to pass through for anyone larger than a mouse. Nevermind that they’re all certainly bullet, oxygen and tamper proof as well.

Margo takes a seat on a bottom bed tucked away in a far corner. She looks down at the Smith  stitched into her military costume. The S is ever so slightly burned, and the tiny, curled, black ends split apart by whatever heat undid them provide enough texture to run fingers over for some form of entertainment. And so the time is passed in the dark. Listening to the recruits fall like split trees into creaking beds, the sound of a room breathing in beat, in unison. She curls up beneath the flimsy cotton blanket and tries to keep her hands away from her hair. When sleep eventually comes Margo has long since forgotten to remain awake. 

“Alright! You’re in the navy, you’re seamen now.” the imposing woman standing before Margo and her comrades barks. “You might think that makes you special, you might think you already were special…You might think seamen is a realllll funny word…”

Her tough boot heels click in rhythm with clinking, swaying medals like a fresco across her uniform. She is a woman seemingly built for the military. Tall and muscle bound, cut with sharp lines. Her eyes deep inset in her dark face are piercing, almost glowing when catching the light at certain angles, and cold. The contours of her face are adjusted just right so as to cast shadows that resemble war paints or eye black. At her hip, a massive laser-shot revolver. The kind that could leave a sizzling hole two inches wide through a grizzly bear. The fat long ellipse shape of the clip takes up nearly half the gun. It descends far down from where the chamber would on a typical slug throwing revolver. Ten rounds literally glowing with potential sit pretty in their perfectly sized chambers, ready to send their payload screaming out that massive, cruel sneer of a barrel.

“And so I say!” the woman’s voice snaps back into focus and Margo peels her eyes of the artillery. “If you are willing to die you must be willing to kill! And if you are willing to kill, you must be willing to die!” 

She raises her clenched fist to her medals in a gesture triumphant victory to end her mostly missed speech. The recruits who stand at the most attention immediately echo the gesture, the rest and Margo dart their eyes back and forth and try their best to replicate it. The woman up front laughs, a harsh sound like rocks splitting and crushing each other. Her hand lowers slowly, purposefully to her side, still clenched nearly tight enough to draw blood. Margo bites her teeth to stifle a giggle.

“You all have a way’s to go…Nothing but suck ups and fuck ups,” she sneers. “I cannot believe this sorry group.”

She locks eyes with Margo for a moment. There is a fire behind her eyes slowly eating its way out, and Margo begins to shift her feet uncomfortably. Seconds of silence slide by like minutes as Margo struggles to maintain eye contact.

“Colored hair like some sort of idol star…”

Margo pumps her fist at her side, strategically just out of the captain’s view. 

“That’s me..” she whispers.

The tough gaze slides down the line to the next poor soul.

“Some pissant who doesn’t know how to tie their own boots!”

The target bends down to frantically fasten their laces and escape the gaze but jolts back upright at the shout of: “Attention!” that rattles his bones and the slamming of shining, pointy heels onto his toes. He stands with one eye twitching, struggling to stay functional, and hands flexing in muted leathery pain. The captain clicks away over the sound of the pissant choking on air.

“Unshaven, unkempt slobs,” she gestures wide to a few columns and rows. To a few unshaven, unkempt slobs who stand about anticipating access to weaponry.

“You all make me weep for the future of this planet. You expect to defend our lives, the sanctity of our freedom like this?” She bellows, “Rebels will give you no time to shave and tie your shoes! And bugs will not wait for you to tie your boots up before snipping your feet off at the ankles and ripping out your kneck!” She laughs again, the same grating laugh. “If you want your head blown off because you chose a homing beacon for a hairstyle, be my guest.”

A shorter recruit somewhere down the line grumbles something tightly under his breath at just the wrong moment, between a breath and the start of a new shouted sentence. Situated perfectly in the gap of quiet the whole room seemed to hear him and go rigid. Margo didn’t hear anything more than a small mumbling, but she got the gist. 

“-eem bitch” echoes around the dark, plain entirely undecorated room. A cloud, presumably, passes in front of the already grayed sunlight and the only window in the roof, a sunlight, goes dark. Only the buzzing and grimy artificial lights bolted to the walls remain.

The captain’s eyes, one real and one electric as Margo now notices as they slide past her towards the offender, trace the air. She stares down a few sailors, watching them creak like the boards of a rotting old-world boat. They waver like grass in the breeze, all subtly blowing away from a densely sweating compatriot. The soldiers blow even farther away as the captain pushes through them to take hold of the little worm in her pointed talons. She lifts him a bit off the ground, then a bit more and bracks her head off his forehead. He falls to the ground and rolls around trying to stand back up.

“That’s about as much as I can hit you,” the captain grunts. She steps back and dusts her hands. Her long long green nails crackle like popping logs in a fire. “You aren’t dogs, you’re soldiers. Act accordingly and you won’t get beaten like a canid. Maybe you can even get paid like a seaman. Do you read me‽” 

The cold shooting range is silent again. The captain repeats herself louder and all the recruits shout a boisterous YES as one.

“Then let’s get shooting!”

She throws her arms wide and turns to present the firing terminals. The sailors shuffle past her, eager to participate but anxious to pass or even near the captain who eyes them like an observant hen as they pass. 

“They always love this part…” she adds to herself.

The firing interface is big, blocky and resembles the top half of a metal elephant’s skull without the tusks. On the other side, behind a slightly flexible but thick layer of shell proof glass sits the chunky gun usually attached to navy star ships. Beyond that, a line of ballistic jellied target dummies all lined up bearing dummy arms. The goal is clear. So clear that some soldiers have already begun blowing off fat, jiggling chunks of enemy combatant down range. Each shooter is sequestered in their own training booth, their own perfect simulation of a Gincha-22XB gunner’s nook. They curl comfortably in the heavily padded orb and the hatch closes to seal them in like an ammonite snug in sheet rock. Even the ears are held steady and padded, so as to avoid damage. The Utahraptor anti-ground gatling laser is more than loud enough to blow out both the gunner and target’s ear drums (not that the target could care).

Margo slides her hands carefully into the “tusk” holes of the “skull” and laments the loss of the real animal before she ever met one. Her delicate fingers wrap the trigger and squeeze tight. A tremendous but near silent CRACK shakes every bone in her body and knocks loose every muscle. She panics.

“Christ! Mars! Fuck!” She gasps, nearly out of air. The world seems to shake as the dozens and dozens of students to her right and left continue opening fire.

She pulls her hands free and counts each finger and tests that there are still bones in them. She looks up and down range and finds that she has only managed to put a smoking dent in the floor before the actual target. Reluctantly, she slides her hands back into the gun and takes tighter grip of the raised triggers inside. Margo holds tight, imaging her hands clamping in a closed circle like those of industrial bending robots, and fires again. 

The left hand of her target pulls in on itself for a fraction of a moment and then explodes giving way for a small stream of red corn syrup to drip from the stump. CRACK CRACK CRACK, the same play repeats itself farther up the arm and halfway up the left thigh. In under ten minutes, every once proud standing jelly soldier sits, so harshly lit against their concrete execution wall, as a lightly aqueous pile of jelly and burnt syrup. Margo feels the hatch door lift gently away from her shoulders and a hand, not pointed and spiky and angry, but tough, wide and gentle, pat her. She wheels around, squirms over herself and the Ñ9,000 chair to take a look. She is greeted by a soft, warm smiling face barely shaded by 5 o’clock shadow, backlit by a strong parental authority,

“Hi?” says Margo.

The smile says hi back and its hand offers an up out of the nook.

“Are we done? Where’s the captain?”

“Oh, somewhere off down the line helping some poor sod whose…gun..exploded their forearms off. Hey, you’re alright though!”

Margo accepts the lift and slides free of her military grade padded cell like a sword out of muck. 

“I’m Deltoi, by the way, a captain as well for what it’s worth.”

Margo finds herself still holding Deltoi’s hand, and so she shakes it then twiddles her fingers about theirs and bumps it with a closed fist. Deltoi laughs a little.

“I like that, I like that. You are?” they chuckle, wiping their finger tips against their thigh.

“Margo, sir..? Sorry, I-”

“Sir is fine.”

“Margo Blank White, sir.”

Deltoi laughs again, heartily from the chest. They lay their hand kindly on Margo’s shoulder and grip it slightly.

“Are you a vanity plate, Margo?”

“No, sir. My father left my middle name blank when I was born. The nurse came in to ask what it was and he, tired and a little deluded, responded ‘It’s blank?’ which the nurse took for clarification and not a question. And, my last name just happens to be White, sir.”

“Margo is a bit of an old fashioned name, as well, no?”

“I suppose, sir. I believe a great grandmother of mine had the name.”

CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK

Deltoi bends their neck round the dividing wall and scowls. They look back smiling again, eyes wide and beaming with some deeply indiscernible, but to some degree gleeful, emotion.

“Will you excuse me, Ms. White. It seems a recruit is still training. I should go stop that.”

Deltoi leaves Margo with a smile and friendly pat. They turn and rush off to deal with the crowd of soldiers cheering and squabbling for a peak over top of a gun station a ways away. Margo falls in with the other large half of the recruits inspecting the malfunctioning simulation. The shouty captain has left with a few medics and the possible corpse. Margo waves at one of the unshaven, unkempt slobs who waves her over. She almost bounds, almost skips to go make conversation and find some pass time. But after a few steps she takes proper note of the scene.

More than enough blood pools around the inner border of thick black boots. Specks flicker like oil paints against the sheer leather canvases. The violating nook is scorched on the inside. The once light cream of the gripping chair cracked and singed to an ashy chocolate, all stemming from a literal smoking gun still sizzling and sparking and humming in nasally protest.

“What happened?” Margo asks as she steps carefully into the circle.

“Backfire,” replies the slob. “At least that’s my guess. Everyone else was shooting, and if the captain saw anything she was too busy rushing the screaming kid out to tell us about it.”

“She probably know about as much as us,” a girl about Margo’s age adds nodding from across the pool. “The hatches were all closed, so…”

“I heard it,” 

“Even through all the sound proofing?” Margo asks.

A dozen heads on owlish swivels turn on her. Eyes cluck and flitter. They stare and a few weirdly shake their jaws as if failing to speak. The slob coughs and breaks the spell.

“Even through it all…yeah. It was loud, loud as creation.” He pauses a beat to cough and peruse the air about him. “I think a few other, uh, seamen in abutting pods heard it too. The captain had an audience of wide eyes peering out of pods after the killing shot went off, when she came to check.”

The captain suddenly blares over hidden speakers and demands the room empty. The day carries on as normal. The next drill and meal and chore and lecture will be attended. By the next day, the scorched and lightly puddled gunner pod will be replaced. But the next day Margo is sweating from the last truly hot day of spring, coughing up the longest run of her life over a seaman uniform deemed too unfit. The brilliant red is tarnished! Horror! And not even the consuming base of her issued pants can hide the stains Margo has sped. She is yelled at, talked in all directions for nearly half an hour. She did, in fact, not know that the scarlet leather stood as painted blood from dozens of thousands of sailors slain in the cold (as represented by the black pants). A little mess hall beer stain on the sleeve, some smudging around the back and the ghost of a patch of grass up the legs, apparent disgraces to another generation thrown to the same old wolves. She spends three hours cleaning every cell of dyed T-leather across her flight jacket’s exterior. Even then she is made to sew and darn and repair the thing until it is in a better state than she ever found it in.

“And fifty squats, while you’re at it,” O’Malor chuckles dryly without even looking at Margo. She is looking over the glimmering jacket and trying to find another spot to complain about so the work can be repeated. No such luck. “Here,” she throws the surprisingly hefty, skinny jacket back at Margo. 

Margo squats once, twice, a few more. Her legs are already numb and wobbling from the day’s run. All her fellow recruits, slightly fewer than before, are relaxing comfortably after their lunch, allowing their legs to grow back. She squats again and whimpers a little.

“Three,” O’Malor counts on Margo’s sixth.

“That’s not-” Margo speaks up through stiff breaths to counter.

“It is around here, soldier. Four.”
That night she falls into the deepest sleep of her life and dreams a strange murky vision. Lying still as a board in her rigid military bed her face contorts back and forth all night. She watches from a massive, heavily populated port as she, in her spiffy starcruiser uniform, walks up the gang plank of and then departs upon a Ming dynasty junk. She looks down to see who she is if not the woman departing for unclouded skies and finds she is a cat atop a portside fish mongers stand. A somalian cat, streamlined and red with big spade ears. The woman on the boat looks back to shore and seems to wave right at the cat. A beautiful heirloom piece around her wrist twinkles in the light then slips and tumbles into the crisp sea below. The sun evaporates into the water, and the cat’s life goes on peacefully; claws to patter down the cobble street, dragging a good feast.

Margo sits perched like a tall swamp bird on the thin window sill outside her barracks. She is tired, she is lean, her hair is turning brown again in the roots and her muscles ache whenever they move. Regardless, her smile shines upwards, strangely knowingly, toward Luna. The window stands behind her kept barely open with a knotted military fatigue. She is almost motionless, closed eyes and breathing almost as slow as the dead. A few weeks have passed, and her hair has grown maybe a centimeter if she is exaggerating. She hopes Tri is well and exhales long and gentle. From a stash pocket cut into the breast of her overcoat Margo reveals a small leather notebook which she bites at the corner of absent mindedly. A withered, choppy pencil follows right to the mouth and soon Margo hast to whittle away at its point again. The combat knife almost slips from her hand into the void of trees below, but luckily it only cuts a tiny slit across a few fingers.

“Ditzy ditzy…” Margo clucks to herself in the dark in her mother’s voice. She imagines it echoing across the empty training grounds, the guard lines, out into the street and up into the late night traffic, burning like the last spark of a candle.

She writes a few poems, a handful of haikus and continues the middle of a strange short story, then snaps shut her notebook and turns to begin the long slow climb back through the window and into her unhelpfully creaky bunk bed. Though now the window is wide open and the knotted cloth has been tossed aside. Margo’s heart drops and the slightly scruffy face of Deltoi fades into existence just behind the window frame. They are barely visible, eyes, possible smile, and any real detail lost to the gnawing gray. Margo’s knife feels suddenly very, very heavy and soon finds itself head down in a muddy grave a dozen stories below.

“Captain!” Margo gasps. She covers her mouth when she remembers the other sailors sleeping not so far away. 

“Hello Margo,” Deloti smiles. “Lovely job balancing there, your physical test results didn’t mention such bodily control.”

“I’m sorry, captain, I didn’t mean to sneak out. It won’t happen again, sir.”

“Deltoi,” Deltoi chimes. He leans on the window sill and knit their hands. “Don’t get too skittish, you might fall. It’s ok, you weren’t smoking out here and you’ve been doing well recently in your engineering and flying courses. Third fastest time to reassemble a ship engine. Second fastest average flying speed. Minus a few dings on the wings and exteriors that is…” The first hint of autumn floats by to rustle through the soldiers and their hair and make cold the tips of their fingers. Luna above smiles down on the pair and Deltoi smiles right back, letting the gentle moonlight fall on his face as if it was going to bring a tan. “I’ll let you cruise by on this one.”

“Thank you, Deltoi.”

“The knife you’ll have to pay up for.” He clears his throat. “Though I won’t tell O’Malor.” The shouty captain. “It’s a nice night, no?”

Margo nests back down again. Her shoulders relax. 

“Very.”

Deltoi doesn’t miss a beat.

“Who are you imagining in that moon?” They point at Her hanging a little lower in the sky. Just beginning to dip into the haze billowing out from the city. As bright as ever.

Margo misses a few.

“My friend. He never wasn’t there for me. One of those.” She adjusts her position and pinches her right eye oddly, hoping that and the dark will hide the wildly embarrassing single tear. 

“He really didn’t want me to come.” She clears her throat.

“And why did you?”

Margo stays silent, lacking any answerable answer.

“I don’t think you wanted you to come.”

Margo stays silent a little longer.

“You’re too smart to fall for the usual old recruitment tricks, I can tell. Do you want to kill, Margo? Do you want glory? Do you want to see the solar system or did you just want money?”

“Sir?”

Deltoi looks to Margo and smiles warmly and peacefully.

“Why.”

“I, I wanted to see the stars,” she says

Deltoid turns and walks away back into the dark room. Their LShot revolver glimmers in the moonlight for a brief second, and then Deltoi is gone. Somewhere near the door to the hall, just far enough that it hasn’t triggered to open yet, his aurispiece dings and he assures the small voice in one even smaller that all will be dealt with. Margo turns away. The bright, fake light from the hallway flashes out the window like a silent gunshot as Detoi leaves, a few recruits teetering on either end of sleep groan at it. Margo exhales long again, something dull red and slinky taps across higher sills. When she has her own massive shining Lshot on her hip, she will make her break. For now, she shivers a little and pulls something to smoke from her breast pocket. 

She gets to fire one not too long later. Basic ground training for should the seamen ever be stranded planet side or transferred to a more boots down branch of service. Before they are allowed to even load the thing, O’Malor’s lot are made to practice holserting, and quick drawing, and adjusting the minute details of the gun. The numbers are thinning. The flock is being shaved down ever so slowly. A few dead, a few discharged for stupid fist fights over food or indecent behavior; most found unqualified and sentenced to infantry. The training facilities weren’t equipped for as many recruits as had started out with Margo, anyway. Now, the tight, sterile rooms were a little more compact. Like the walls knew not to expect everyone to make it. More, smaller cameras fill the ceilings up. Their glazed eyes watching, stalking, waiting for Margo to pull the trigger. Waiting to see if she hits, if she misses. If she makes it to the next slightly smaller lesson on cold fusion engines. Click

WHAPtzitzzzz…

The fat oval clip, thicker than her hand any way you measured it, slithers like a snake as the puffy cartridges shuffle their next brother up to the firing pin and the spent round is puffed the clip frontward. Only blanks for now, Thick white blanks shaped like two early lunar landers balancing on each others’ crowns. Margo pulls the hammer halfway down with a skinny, unpainted thumb and O’Malor snaps into position behind her like a carefully schemed chess piece. 

“Smart shooting, bubblegum,” she grunts. “What say you to a little extra training with one of those? Make yourself a little more, little less useless? You’ve made it this far. Don’t settle for infantry with aim…at least better than average. We’ll make a lieutenant out of you soon enough. ” O’Malor lifts her tablet and flicks her eyes up and side to side  to scroll through information. She curls her face like a woman trying to hide from a bad smell by remaining facially inert. “Your cuffs could are a little too dirt for a lieutenant…boots too.” She leans over and spits down onto Margo’s toes.

Margo pulls her foot back in a snap and quickly readjusts her posture. She does not look up at the captain, but takes a cloth stuffed down her sleeve and some polish from her jacket’s many surprisingly deep pockets to clean off the scandalous ends of her coat arms. The motions are swift and precise. Mess gone, sheen in place. She looks back up to O’Malor and salutes.

“You must have been reading up on seamen etiquette,” O’Malor half sneers. “I’d applaud your efforts. Keep flying straight…I’ll be watching either way.”

Then she walks off, glances back once with the same sneer,

A month later in the dead of night Margo rolls silently off her bed and patters away, keenly poised on the borders of her feet. She has practice being this silent, each movement is planned off a thousand movements a thousand stealthy nights in the past. Her only give away is the occasional click of her jacket’s zipper against its teeth. Nothing on her but the clothes on her back, not even anything in her pockets, her scanning, cold eyes give her all she needs. She follows the map she cannot see toward the red ARMORY where she takes an Lshot she had stashed the day before after finding it unattended for a split second. Then past the violet WC and yellow, softly glowing, barely labelled EXIT. Her march across the air strip follows the rhythm of a lone petal at midnight. But she is three hours and a half ahead of midnight, because she accidentally fell asleep for a little while, and she is not alone, as a small somali cat from origins unknown hops out of a bush to follow her. 

The HANGAR entrance gives after enough persuasion, bringing Margo to the ground with it. The crash is loud, it echoes all the way across the vast airstrip, back up the stairs Margo slipped down, and up to the ears of the shadow using the still unseen map to follow the lone seaman. Looking up from the dust and door on the ground, there it is, Margo’s ride. The very first Utahraptor in line; a big folded titanium and silica parrot with all the colors to boot and a massive, shiny, expensive load of military weapons locked up in the belly. She sets herself down at the port side door to try and fool the locking systems and the shadow begins its own lonely, stalking journey across the silent tarmac. The cat, watches Margo from suddenly high above in the rafters.

The lock is tough, military grade no surprise. Her thumbs and fingers twiddle nimbly across and through the projected display, flicking digits and prickly characters into line. The hydraulic locks hiss lovingly at her touch and strain to creak open the void-tight door. Something clicks behind her, the cat meows, barely audible from above.

Margo whirls around, summoning her new gun from its tight holster as fast as a scorpion stings. She levels the barrel at the noise and finds it nose to nose with Deltoi, halfway up the boarding ramp holding a gun of their own at their side. Margo tilts her head to the left and the door to her escape slides away into itself.

The two hold eye contact for several seconds without words. 

“Deltoi,” says Margo first, calmly and without reservation.

“Margo,” says Deltoi. “What are you doing?” they continue. 

“Making a break for it.”

“Right.”

Deltoi tries to look over the cave entrance bearing down upon him, up towards Margo, but she follows his nose with her armament, keeping the view the same. 

“You realise you’re aiming at a commanding official, don’t you, Ms. Blank White?” Deltoi’s voice does not waver a flick.

Margo doesn’t respond, only takes one upward reverse step towards the portal. Deltoi Matches the altitude adjustment. 

“You know the penalty for shooting me? For treason against your planet?”

Another shuffling step, another that follows. 

“Execution by cosmic annihilation, White.”

Deltoi raises his right arm by a fraction and silently half cocks his L shot. Margo takes notice of the tiny movements and half cocks her own blaster in turn. She smiles the vapid smile one flashes a foodhole door greeter, then fully cocks the weapon. Deltoi can only hear the distinct sound of the hammer falling into place.

“Be reasonable, Margo, for anything’s sake be reasonable,” they spit through their teeth. “Be veeeeeery careful, and constantly for that matter, too. But be REASONABLE, Margo.”

Click 

Deltoi screams. One high cracking note that carries on long enough to realize it’s still playing. All he sees is piercing blinding light a half a mile thick. They stumble back down the boarding stairs still madly blind and crashing like junkyard cymbals as Margo jutters upward, ejecting her spent round in Deltoid’s direction, to slam her ride’s door shut, just as the mewing, red feline dashes in behind her. A few beats later the thrusters start to rumble and Detloi scrambles up to his feet, alive.

The ship is already slowly raising up on its invisible landing gear of ionized atoms by the time his watery pin of vision returns. Before Deltoi is even balanced, the small rear thrusters have started to buzz and spin and heat blue-hot and whir a tinny sound like an incredibly displeased team of hornets. Deltoi takes one tentative, poorly centered step forward and accidentally kicks the ejected round. The Utahraptor vanishes out the barely lowered raised hangar door and kicks off upward into the dark sky, leaving only a faint daffodil sheen across the air it sliced.

Deltoi picks up the still hot laser funnel from the oily plastic-brick floor. A thick thing, three thumbs of his wide, it is wrapped in a now partially contact burnt white label. A white label, it was a blank. Deltoi drops the tubby round and falls back to his ass to make sure there is no hole in his head. He thinks to call in the incident, but two little lights take off from the farthest opposite end of the airstrip in Blank White’s direction. 

Up a hundred thousand miles in the air, the fugitive pilot watches two blazingly fast blips fall in on her planet side radar. Navy sentinels watching the skies around base come to take down the escapee. This is nothing unexpected, Margo would be an idiot not to see as much coming. She continues her straight shot for the ring of lunar gravity marked on her view port and pushes an inneall fós ag gearán ever harder to outpace her tails. But it is no use, the sentinels simply have faster ships. She pierces the exosphere, a screaming flaming blur she cannot hear cannot name and cannot see. If she can reach Luna’s gravity in time, even just the outer fingertips, her fool engine failure should be convincing enough…If not, she would lose them on the dark side. If she can keep them this distance for just two minutes longer, the pull will be significant enough and-Her main thrust is hit. Hit and down for real. She will no longer be pretending to be going down, she is really, truly smoking. The sentinels, whichever hit the shot unclear, halt their acceleration.

“DAMN!” she shouts, pulling up and stabilizing a little as the lunar gravity barely graces the tip of her bird. 

She wobbles there for a minute, unable to go in either direction. Eventually what must comes and Margo’s ride goes burning back towards home with Oink (as she hastily decided to name the cat for a sound it made) and her in freefall. The sentinels watch the decent motionlessly. Their fat orb-ish pitch black bodies watching before a mosaic of stars. Terra’s pull leans her toward the wild zones. The entirely ecological, undisturbed half of her face set up a few decades ago in order to try and fail to curb environmental catastrophe. The nature in there is stuck under a haze like the rest of the world, and has not grown any kinder for it. Still sparking and fuming now under that haze, just after crashing through a tree canopy and just before smashing into nothingness on the ground Margo wrests control of the ionized atom sheath beneath the ship and slams much calmer into a mossy scummed over marsh.

She spends many dozens of night talking over many dozens of topics with Oink and the wilderness. She receives no response but spills endlessly into both attentive receivers. By day she tinkers with the tools accompanying her ship to fix what she can. The raptor also contains emergency rations and equipment, general stock, and significant generative machinery all only moderately unusable from the crash landing. Her days are calm and peaceful, only occasionally interrupted by easily scared or rarely friendly creatures. The first device she manages to fix is a book printer, and so the rest flows quite steadily from then on. The second is the speaker system and so progress comes even smoother  still.

After a little under four months no roaming sentinels or navy scouts have passed starside the area for weeks and all necessary systems seem operational. She takes off with no ceremony, only being extremely cautious and certain of Oink’s presence on board. Unable to return home yet for fear of court martial she turns thruster to star and heads for something out in the empty.

Margo turns herself parallel with the floor and ceiling, closes her eyes and lets the momentum take her to the end of the hall. Cello swells lead Margo’s feet tapping and swinging in the minty, fresh synthetic Ertha-tized! air. She can hear Oink adjusting to the microgravity like a dancer adjusting to but a different colored spotlight. In a far offset closet of the ship or perhaps in between the walls he paws and jumps along and leaves many padded echoes down the halls. Margo has already etched her name, a few potential but rejected call signs (PtchBlck, 1707-7017, C/R/SS, TriGuy), the date and her cat’s name in the supporting beams along the hall ceilings. She runs her hands tenderly up her legs, torso, face and into her hair, still short but dancing all the same as the raptor, its captain, one cat, and a few dozen thousand Ñ worth of guns set course for The Sea of Tranquility.

I am your starry night-watcher,

Knuckle dragging toad from an unmet body.

You tell me we share the same stars, 

And, you hope, the same love.

I share your hope, starman.

But your world is too bare now.