Lucky Day in Hell: Act 1, Scene 3
Act One
Scene Three
The arms factory was deafening, not the gentle silence of the empty subway tunnels that made one think one had gone deaf, rather the opposite. Loud, clanging metal nonstop, clunking, banging, machinery creaking with the scream of efficiency. It was hot and stuffy and dangerous, and Brendan had the honour of stuffing bullets full of death powder, his fingers burnt and grated and covered in bandages. He had Joy strapped to his back where she napped, oblivious to the noise and clamour around her. Brendan was beginning to think Joy actually had gone deaf from spending the first few weeks of her life in an arms factory, but he pushed the thought as far back as he could for sanity's sake.
Carol worked across from him, checking his work. Not really checking anymore, after sixteen hours of work with only a stolen break to nurse a baby, she was just going through the actions. Much like himself. His stomach rumbled and he paused for a moment, closing his eyes and wishing he could sleep. Only four more hours 'til his daily pay- a quarter of a guilder and a bowl of black lentils. He only ate that once a day, and spent the rest taking care of Joy and Seamus. Joy hardly cost anything, and Seamus was stubborn enough to usually find his own way- usually through theft. His mother kept mostly to herself. So the little makeshift family lived better on their meagre collection of quarters than most others.
Brendan counted himself lucky, though a small part of him knew it was still slave labour.
He worried about Seamus. The kid was acting weird, beyond the weird of grieving for his parents. He had stabilized mostly after that, gotten on with his life for the most part. The last week he had taken to covering himself up, and not talking nearly as much as he did. Usually Brendan couldn't get him to shut up. As much as it pained Brendan to say it, Seamus worried him.
Brendan smiled faintly as he remembered the day twelve-year-old Seamus found a 'book of poetry' in the dump- Have you been to the desert have you walked with the dead/ There's a hundred thousand children being killed for their bread . He had gone around for a week talking in rhyme, usually something grim and dark and not nearly as clever.
Thank God that was over.
He felt something tugging on the rags of his 'trousers' and looked under the worktable to find a hesitant Seamus.
"What are you doing here?" He whispered- well, yelled quietly- over the din of the arms factory. "You can't risk sneaking in twice in one day."
"I need to talk to you," Seamus yelled back.
"It can't wait?"
"No, there'd be no time!" Seamus looked around cautiously and poked his hooded head out from under the work counter. "Are you going right to the ceilidh after work?"
"Yes," Like there was time to do anything else. Right after his meal he was going to get as drunk as possible as quickly as possible.
Something exploded farther down the line. Seamus disappeared back under the workcounter, skittishly. Brendan scrunched his eyes shut, shielding his face against the blast. When it had died down, and all that was left was the crying of the victims and the yelling of the their angry Nietzschean overlords, he carefully slung Joy from his back and cradled her.
She wasn't hurt, but she had felt the blast and she was crying. Her plastic-doll face was covered in soot, and tears streamed through it, her little balled up fists flailing at the air. Joy didn't make a sound, though, her cries coming through as strained gurgles and hiccups.
"Jesus," Brendan said softly, cradling his sister to him. He hazarded a look at Carol, who had not reacted as physically as the others, her stitched up face covered in the same soot and grime, staring woefully at the now smouldering explosion and the bodies being carried out.
"Brendan!" Seamus hissed again from under the workcounter. Brendan just kicked him because Uber guards were walking past again, occasionally stopping to threaten a slave worker.
"Get back to work, kludge!" One of them pushed Brendan sharply in the back, and he landed with his elbows on the worktable, just barely dropping baby Joy. Suppressing a burst of anger, refusing to stoop as low as his oppressors, he hazarded a small comforting smile at Carol and slipped under the workcounter, holding his sister close.
Seamus had pulled his hood up even further over his head, completely hiding his face. It was hot in the arms factory, the sort of stuffy, sweaty unbearable-ness that went with filling bullets all day. Brendan raised an eyebrow at his impressionable little cousin and asked him, again, what he wanted.
Seamus looked up at him from his hood shyly. "Is it okay if I bring a friend to the ceilidh?"
"Who?"
"Well...I met this girl."
"Oh my God, Shay..." Brendan couldn't count all the failed relationships his cousin had had with the girls around here, and the seriousness that Seamus attributed to them was nothing if not unhealthy.
"No, it's different, Brendan." He leaned in, with a childish whisper: "She's a *spacer*!"
"Jesus Christ, Shay, you do know you're out of your league, right?"
"Shut up, I don't mean it like that!" Seamus smiled, a little nervously, Brendan noticed. "She wants to hire us,"
Brendan's face immediately turned stony, and Seamus leaned back a bit. "For *what*?" He said sharply.
"I..." Brendan could see the colour drain from Seamus' already chalky face. Poor kid still had his head up in the clouds. Jesus, if Brendan could get him on a spaceship off of Earth, he would in an instant, but...Seamus had to learn sometime that he was stuck here like the rest of them, and to make the most of that. "It's...she needs to find a Niet, Kabo..Goy...something. She said he operated the arms factory."
Brendan knew him. He was a big asshole up in petro-chem who took a particular pleasure in terrorizing children, particularily children who didn't even work in his factory. Brendan didn't say anything, though, and he didn't let his face betray his reaction, either. "And?"
"And..well...I don't know. She wants to buy something or steal something I guess. Maybe kill him?"
"Or, she might want to strike up a deal with him that involved buying a bunch of us kludges for petro-chem experiments," Brendan's voice has a sharper edge than he had meant to put into it. Seamus's face fell.
"But..." Seamus closed his eyes for a minute. "She's going to give me a thousand thrones just for getting you to meet her. Imagine what she'd pay just for you to tell here where this guy is!"
Brendan still didn't answer.
"Plus, she's a spacer, she could-"
"Don't even think that, Shay!" Brendan was really worried now. "I...don't go around making up daydreams about every alien spacer who lands here. Unless the High Guard came back one day, they're not here to save us," His cousin's face fell again, and Brendan regretted having to say that.
"But I wa...." Seamus trailed off, looking almost as lost and forlorn as the day he'd shown up at Brendan's, half naked, shaking, and covered in his parents' blood. "At least meet her," he recovered, a little angrily. "Please, Brendan? I'll get her and take her to the ceilidh, it's not like we'll be outnumbered. You can decide for yourself. If you say no, I'll drop it forever." He did his best to look sincere.
Brendan sighed, gently rubbing Joy's now still back, where she had managed to fall asleep on his chest. "Fine," he muttered. "But don't you be getting your hopes up." He suppressed a smile when Seamus leaned forward and hugged him fiercely, trying to avoid Joy.
-- Anything was better than this.
Beka sat in the silent cockpit, her feet up on the console, her newly-cleaned hair braided behind her head. She felt, possibly, worse than she ever had before. What, exactly, had gone wrong?
She remembered when she had first met Bobby, on a supply run for a safe, legit office company from one drift to another. There was a party in some hole in the wall somewhere, they were both tripped out, had a fling, it was fun. He started tagging along on runs, occasionally finding them jobs, that was fun, too. She started, maybe, seeing things in him that weren't there. He would say something that normally she would find infuriating but she chose to delete it from memory for the sake of staying with him. It got to a point where she couldn't remember a time without him.
They started picking up weird, freaky runs that reminded her a little too much of her childhood. It became dangerous. They'd be an hour late on a jump and Bobby would freak out at her.
She had gotten back to the Maru today after talking to that poor kid, to find Bobby reading through the flexis of her journal.
"What the hell are you doing?" She had yelled, and he had looked up at her with paranoid, rapid eyes. And they fought.
Fought like they always fought now- yelling, curse words that they themselves found particularly offensive, they throw stuff, he hit her, she hit back, and they cried.
Eventually Bobby crashed out in the mess hall and Beka stormed off, hiding her weepy eyes, to brood. She wanted him to stop. But she didn't know how to tell him.
Beka should have known when they took this mission, it was different than the others. There was something off about it. That their employer wanted to obtain weapons spec from an enemy, that wasn't new. That their employer was Nietzschean, that turned Beka off somewhat. That the mission required their going to Earth, that turned her off completely.
So she and Bobby had fought about that, too, and in the end he had his way, like he always did. Like all her men always did. And here she was too afriad of loosing him to force him to drop this one mission, just this one.
And here she was.
There was a light smattering of dirt and stones on the side of the ship. She looked up from her brooding, alert, suspicious. It came again.
"What the hell," She said, grabbing a loose pipe and walking to open the hatchway.
Seamus stood there, his hood pulled up, handfuls of rocks and gravel, grinning like an idiot.
"Jesus, it's you," Beka said ruefully.
"It's your lucky day!" Seamus called, obviously pleased with himself.
"Yeah, a lucky day in hell," She looked around. "Where's your friend?"
Seamus blinked. "Well, not here. I'm bringing you to meet him."
Beka sighed. She really wasn't up to the prospect of seeing more of Earth.
"You didn't think I was going to bring him out here alone, did you?" Seamus smiled. "Come on. We're going to a party."
Beka didn't respond. A party...didn't sound so bad.
"You better not be screwing with me, kid." She warned.
"I'm not!" Seamus' face fell again. "Really, boss, you can trust me. Come on. They're waiting."
Beka regarded Seamus' face, and he smiled again. Maybe she could trust him.
"...do you want me to bring something to drink?"
Onward to Act 1, Scene 4!
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