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Writing > Users > overmortal > 2008

Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

The Privateer Stories

by overmortal

IMPORTANT NOTE: This is a piece of a longer writing project. You can view the entire project here: The Privateer Stories

The following is a piece of writing submitted by overmortal on September 6, 2008
"David took a little risk with this one. He gave Snake the duty of being the initial blunderer (an honor usually given to the boss). This story didn't involve pirates or military, or even ship-to-ship combat. It was a far more sinister kind of opponent: irrational fear. I actually rank this among the top of his stories, both for its originality and exceptional humor. He also credited the boss with some top-shelf zingers, which I'll always cherish.

I once began to write a story entitled "If You Build A Better Mousetrap . . ." which, at first, I thought to be clever and unique, but it really turned out to be very closely related to Monkey Business, and so I left it on the cutting room floor. There's only so much to be said concerning two unlucky guys who fly about in space, and any additional repeating of ideas would grow old very, very quickly."

Monkey Business

The PRIVATEER Stories
"Monkey Business"
by David Dixon

Let’s see, must have been about a year or two ago, when the boss and I were flat broke; not, of course, that that’s any different from now or any other time, but that’s neither here nor there. Anyway, we were looking for some work on New Libya, a tropical planet. Why they named a tropical planet after a 20th Century African country that was desert is beyond me, but I’m no cartographer, I’m a privateer. Thus, as I said, I was broke.

However, the boss and I found what appeared to be at the time, a great deal. On the face of things, it didn’t really seem all that threatening. Of course, like blonde hair, women, and suntans, things were not what they seemed. We had been taking turns all day checking the local message boards from our ship’s computer that was hooked into the New Libya server and doing minor ship repair. The boss made the discovery, as I was back in the cargo hold barely squeezed through the maintenance hatch in the ceiling of the hold and into the all-too-narrow maintenance crawlspace, testing wires and breakers trying to find the short that kept restarting our number one engine’s coolant refresh cycle.

“Hey, Snake!” the boss, who flies our ship, a beat up Black Sun 490. “I found something for us; here’s what is says: ‘Cargo Run to the Planet Pleasure Resort-guaranteed profit of 1,500 credits per cargo unit shipped-limited transport needed-reply ASAP.’ Sound good?”

I tried to crawl backwards away from the circuit breaker I was currently testing and squeeze myself back out of the maintenance hatch. All I did was give myself a nasty scrape on my right arm. The sweat that was already pouring off my body in gallons made it sting. I swore.

“You know,” I called back exasperatedly, “even for a guy named Snake, there ain’t a whole lot of room up here.” I grunted again as I inched myself backwards and towards the hatch. “Ad sounds promising though; who took it out?”

I cut myself and swore again. The “crawlspace” as our Black Sun 490 sales literature termed it was only about a foot and a half tall and at most three feet wide. It was tight enough to give an anorexic midget claustrophobia. I heard the boss walk on the cargo bay beneath me and saw, barely, his flashlight shine up the hatch. “Tight up there, eh?” And then, “The ad was put out by an ‘Exotic Animals Corporation.’ I think we ought to check it out.”

I shrugged, or tried to, in the tight space. “Sounds good to me.

“And you really gotta’ lose some weight there Ace, I know you can’t fit in here now, but I’m not going back in this glorified ventilation duct again. I’ve drunk out of straws that were bigger around.” With that, I finally extricated myself from the crawlspace and dropped down the eight or so feet from the ceiling of the cargo bay to its floor.

My pilot, and co-owner with me of the rust bucket we call our ship/home/office, shined his flashlight up into the hatch again. He nodded slowly, as if he was just now realizing how tight it was up there. “Tight, huh?”

I stared at him and came to attention. I snapped to a mock salute. “Captain Obvious, Snake reporting for duty!”

The boss nodded and proffered a sarcastic smile. “I’ll tell you something obvious: I’ve had three mechanics and one Black Sun tech look this ship over in the past, and I couldn’t convince a single one of them to climb up there to do any work.”

“Yeah?” I cut in. “What’s so obvious then?”
The boss smiled a wide grin, obviously savoring what he was about to say. “It’s obvious,” he said, pausing after every word, “that . . . you’re . . . a . . . chump.”

I just shook my head, wiped the sweat off me as best I could, let myself out the large hatch between the cargo bay and the rest of the ship.

“Where are you going?” the boss called after me.

“To check on that ad you’ve been talking about, you retard.”

About an hour later, we had found the office of the “Exotic Animals Corporation” and had been escorted by a rather cute looking secretary into office of a mid level manager named Costas; Bill or George or something.

“I take it you two are here about the ad we placed requiring some transportation for the cargo to

Pleasure Planet resort?” he asked once we’d sat down across from him.

“Yeah,” the boss asked. “We’re interested, but we’ve got a few questions, of course.”

“Of course,” the man replied and raised his eyebrows as if to prompt us.

“First off,” I asked, “where exactly is the Pleasure Planet Restort; what system, what planet?”

He chuckled. “Its in the Planet Pleasure System on the Pleasure Planet; actually, the resort is the planet.” He must have noticed the boss’ and my bewildered expression, because he chuckled again and continued. “A private real estate group raised a ton of money, paid for their own exploration and then found a suitable planet outside federated space, claimed the planet, terraformed it, cleared the nav lanes, and set up the most luxurious, and I might add, expensive, resort currently in existence. Everything is legal; every pleasure, every vice is available; for a cost.”

I raised my eyebrows in appreciation and the boss whistled; it would take several enormous fortunes to do that kind of work. “So,” the boss asked, “since its outside of federated space but a recognized claim, Confed doesn’t have jurisdiction? Who’s the law; we don’t want to get jumped.”

Mr. Costas nodded. “Of course. There is no law, as such, its true, but because of that there’s no crime, either. The company that owns the planet does their own patrolling and enforcement; there aren’t any second chances or plea-bargains. I hear they’re quite ruthless, but I’ve never had a shipper say anything but great things about there. I get the feeling the Planet Pleasure Corporation is pretty hard on pirates and the like; they don’t like riffraff. Remember, the people that come to Planet Pleasure wear watches that are probably worth more than your ship.”

My partner snorted.

Mr. Costas looked alarmed. “I didn’t mean anything-but I’m serious-its just that-“

“No, don’t sweat it,” I replied. “He wasn’t taking offense to anything; most watches this side of a wrist sundial are worth more than our ship.”

Costas furrowed his brow quizically. “Uh, well, yes. Anyway, security is a non-issue, I assure you.”

I looked at the boss. “Doesn’t sound bad to me, but where exactly is it? The planet I mean.”

Mr. Costas smiled. “Six jumps past Perkins.”

“What?” the boss asked incredulously. “They couldn’t find anything closer than that?”

I shrugged. “They probably could, but given the pace of expansion of federated space, they probably realized the only way they could hold onto the system for any length of time was to put it way out there.”

Mr. Costas looked at me and nodded in surprise. “You’ve got a good head on you; not too many people pick up on that; pretty perceptive.”

I shrugged and shot a sidelong glance at the boss. “Well, somebody’s got to be around here.”

“Shut up,” the boss replied wryly. “So what’s the cargo?”

Mr. Costas smiled again. I was getting tired of his smiling. In my experience, people who are always smiling are almost always the sort who are trying to pull something over on the world. “Monkeys,” he replied.

“Monkeys?” the boss and I asked together.

“Yes,” he said. “Monkeys. They’re putting in a huge gaming preserve stocked to look like the jungle. They just need monkeys for the effect.”

“Payment?” I asked.

“I don’t know how big your ship is; that determines the payment. They’ll pay 1,500 credits a head for 20 or less, but 2,200 for more than twenty. The reason is that they’re wanting to get the preserve running as soon as they can, and, well, obviously, there aren’t a whole lot of monkeys running out that way every day.”

“How big are the cages?” the boss asked before I could get it out.

Costas stood up and motioned for us to follow him out of his office. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

As we followed him down the corridor, I pulled the boss a few steps behind Costas to talk to him privately. “How long will it take to get there? Six jumps, that’s a long friggin’ way.”

The boss nodded as we walked. “Yeah, I remember reading about that planet now; I’d forgotten. I read somewhere that it takes about a week or so once you jump out of Perkins, depending on your speed through the nav lanes, although they did say they were well cleared. I figure it’ll take us another five or six days to get to Perkins from here. All told, it’ll be almost a two week trip.”

We followed Costas through several doors, down a set of wide, well cleaned stairs, and finally through a set of swinging hospital style doors into a large, bright room with white tile floors and plastic walls. The room smelt faintly of cleaning chemicals. It was, I had to admit, the cleanest looking pet shop I’d ever been, even if it was, and it was, stacked from floor to ceiling with small wire cages, each holding a sleeping organ grinder monkey; you know, the kind that are like a foot or two tall.

There were a few aisles to walk between the stacks of cages and workers walking about in white scrubs with “Exotic Animals Corp” stenciled on them tended to the stacks.

I motioned to the crates. “They all right? I seem to remember monkeys in the movies being a little more active.”

Costas smiled his smile again. “Yes, they normally would be a little more active. They’ve been sedated for the trip.”

“Not a bad idea,” my boss mused, “I know a certain turret gunner that could use sedating every once in awhile.”

“Uh huh,” I agreed, “but unlike a certain someone I know, it takes more than a conversation with someone with an intellect over 65 to put me to sleep.”

The boss ignored me, as he is wont to to do on ocassion, and asked Costas another question. “How are these guys with payment; I mean, they will pay what they say, right?”

Mr. Costas smiled and nodded. “We’ve shipped them several different shipments of animals over the past two years or so. Never had a problem. They’ve always paid us on time and as stated in their contracts. They’ve already paid us for the 7k per animal anyway, and its standard in our contracts with our shippers that if the client doesn’t pay you, we’ll pay you and get it from them in litigation.”

I looked over the crates of sleeping monkeys and did a quick estimate. The monkeys were smaller than I expected and their cages even more so. They had a large water and food tank attached to the side of each cage with a mechanism on the side I guessed would distribute the right amount of food and water per day. I estimated we could haul between 25 and 30 cages in the cargo bay.

The boss motioned me over out of earshot of Costas. “Well, what do you think?” he asked. “That’s a good contract, good payment, and an easy job; when’s the last time we got that? A bit of a trip, but it isn’t that bad.”

I shrugged. “We’ve never had good contracts, good payment, and easy jobs . . . ever. But it sounds like a good deal to me. If its any kind of legitimate contract at all it will be better than the folks we usually work for. I say we go for it. Who know shipping and selling primates was such good business?”

“I sure didn’t,” the boss replied, “or I’d have pawned you off a long time ago.”

“Riiiiiigghhhhttt,” I replied, “if they weren’t so expensive, you could afford one . . . as a date . . . or a tutor.”

The boss ignored my insult again and walked off to talk to Costas. I sauntered over to a cage and looked at what was to be our cargo. The monkey lay asleep in his small cage, breathing slowly. I almost stuck my finger through a whole in the wire to touch him but had a thought: “Hey,” I whispered to a worker nearby, so as not to disturb my partner’s deliberations with Costas. “Hey, are these things safe; I mean, diseases and stuff, you know?”

The worker nodded-“Yes, they’ve been screened for anything, and they’re clean, but all the same, I wouldn’t be putting my finger in there. These are wild organ grinder monkeys, and they’ll bite the crap out of you if mess with them.”

I nodded and winced. Good to know, that.

“Snake!” the boss called. I turned to see what he wanted. He jerked his finger in the direction of the door. “Go tell the front desk where the ship is docked so they can send a truck to load these cages aboard, and I’ll handle signing everything here. We’ll leave as soon as we can, I guess.”

“Gotcha,” I said, and headed off towards the door, before I remembered something. “Hey, bossman, did you ever replace those water filters? We’ll need them to keep our water fresh for two weeks.”

The boss swore. “No, I forgot to do that, but I’ll-“

I waved him off. “Naw, don’t worry about it; I’ll make sure they-“

The boss cut me off-“Thanks a lot.”

“Make sure they’re still there for you to do when you get back,” I finished.

He sighed and glared at me. “Fine, fine, fine. Just get the ship ready to head out when I get back.”

I had a chuckle at his expense, pushed open the double doors and followed the signs to the front desk.

It took about an hour for the Exotic Animals truck to show up with two workers to help me load the cages aboard. We fit 28 monkeys inside, with a narrow aisle between the two walls of cages for the boss and I to slide between them to administer the sedative throughout the trip. According to the workers, all we had to do was put a syringe full of the sedative into a small valve designed for the purpose on the side of the water tank on each cage every two days. After that, I was assured, the monkeys would sleep blissfully until it was time to administer it again. I stacked the two glass tanks of sedative and the spare syringes carefully next to the internal cargo hatch door and made sure they wouldn’t fall.

I was fiddling with the ship’s main computer from my turret trying to filter the cargo hold’s air and our own quarters’ air separately when my pilot arrived. Our air filters weren’t the best, and I wasn’t going to smell monkey for two weeks if I could help it. I was down in the turret but I knew the boss had gotten back, because I heard the external cargo bay door hydraulically shut itself and heard him open the internal cargo bay door, above and slightly behind my turret hatch.

“Whatcha’ up to, Snake?” he asked.

“Trying to get the air to filter separately from the cargo bay and our part of the ship.”

“Good idea,” he replied. I saw him briefly as he stepped over the open turret hatch and climbed through the small opening to the cockpit. “Got it working yet?”

I shook my head. “Nope. I can’t figure out how to reroute it; I’m not sure the Black Sun is even equipped to do it.”

I heard him flick a few switches and tap away on a keyboard. “Oh, yeah, there it is. I think I know how to do it,” he said. He flicked a switch or two more and I heard the ship’s computer chime softly in response. The sound of the airflow from the ship’s life support system changed slightly, and a dialogue box appeared on my screen-“Separate Filtration Begun,” it announced.

I was impressed; usually my boss wasn’t nearly that handy. “I have to say,” I told him, “I’m impressed.”

He laughed. “With you, Snake, that isn’t hard. Why, its only yesterday you learned to walk upright, isn't it?”

“At least I’ve learned,” I retorted.

“Not very well,” he shot back, and then the ships’ engines roared to life. “Time to go.”

Four days into our voyage, disaster struck, as it always does with us.

The boss and I were plenty bored. We had spent most of our time redistributing the ship’s power, because our power usage was up several percent above normal. We didn’t usually keep the cargo bay pressurized and heated during flight as we did this time, so we had to reroute power from several other systems to cut down on our power usage. It was boring enough, but by the second day, we’d figured it all out and then we were left with nothing to do but set the ship on maximum speed during autopilot and read magazines we downloaded or thumb through copies of the same six or seven worn paperbacks we’d always had. We alternated checking on the monkeys every six hours or so, and alternated sleeping in the small space between the cargo bay hatch and my turret hatch.

The boss was flying the ship, because the area we were flying through was crowded with traffic. I was in my turret, drifting off to sleep, again. My watch beeped. I stirred, opened one eye, and checked it. It was my turn to check on the monkeys.

I climbed out of the turret and let myself into the cargo bay. The monkeys were all asleep, save three or four of them which looked about groggily.

One of them at the bottom of a stack of cages stared up at me and chirped softly. His eyes were wide and brown and he seemed to smile at me. I shook my head at him. “No, no,” I told him, checking my watch. “You’ve still got a few hours yet until I drug you again. I know you’d like some more sleepy juice, but I can’t give it to you yet. I’m sure the people at Planet Pleasure don’t want any stoner monkeys in their jungle.”

He chirped again. Against my better judgement, I bent down to look at him closer. He seemed to grin at me and pressed on of his little hands through the cage. “Hey there little fella,” I told him softly, “go back to sleep.” I cautiously touched his hand. He held my finger and I laughed at him. “Yeah, that’s right, its my finger,” I told him as his eyes widened. I stuck my finger through a hole in the wire and rubbed him under his chin. The monkey chirped at me again. And then it bit me.

Hard.

I shrieked like a little girl and yanked my finger out of the cage, knocking the monkey’s cage over and the several cages stacked on top of it down to the cargo bay floor with a crash. Four of them popped open and a few startled, drugged monkeys suddenly awoke to find themselves free. Most of them wandered stupidly around in the small aisle, still feeling the effects of the sedative, but the monkey that had bitten me was climbing up the other stacks of cages, screeching and hissing at me.

“Snake!” I heard the boss roar from the cockpit. “What did you do back there?”

I was too busy staring wide-eyed at the little devil that had bitten me; he now stood atop the stack of cages on the left side of the cargo bay, where he glared at me malevolently and bared his razor sharp fangs. He hissed and I jumped back, knocking over a dozen cages from in the stack behind me. More monkeys screeched their freedom cries.

“Boss!” I cried as I the organ grinder monkeys I had inadvertently freed began climbing all over the cargo hold. “Boss-help! Help! They’re everywhere! The little buggers are getting out!” One of them climbed up my leg and I looked down at it. I shook it off my leg and looked up, just in time to see the monkey that had bitten me jumping off his perch and right at my face. I swear, I nearly fainted. I yelled a blood-curdling scream of panic and hate and threw up my hands. He hit them, rebounded and knocked over a few more cages as he bounced of my arms. The cargo hold was now full of monkeys.

I felt the ship bank sharply to the right out of the busy nav lane and heard the boss swear. “I’m coming, Snake, just try not to get killed by a bunch of five pound monkeys before I can get back there to save you.”

I was a wreck by this point. What had, only a few minutes earlier, been a cute little organ grinder monkey was now a raging mutant monkey demon that I will always see in my dreams. It took the boss’s appearance in the cargo hold to shake me from my panic-induced paralysis.

He swore loudly as he climbed into the hold over several fallen cages. “Snake! Snake! What’s with you?” he said looking at me strangely. He grabbed me and pulled me an inch from his face. “GET THESE MONKEYS CLEANED UP OR YOU’RE GOING IN A CAGE WITH THEM!” he shouted at me.

“That monkey-it-he-look at my hand!” I protested, holding up my finger from which gushed blood from two distinct fang holes.

The boss narrowed his eyes and shook his head. “Snake,” he shouted above the bedlam of the half-drugged-yet-totally-liberated monkeys, “it’s a little bite; now get them!” With that, he grabbed one of the drugged primates by the scruff of the neck and tossed it into an empty cage and slammed the door shut.

Scared as I was by the little scruffy simian bundles of death, I was not about to be outdone by the boss. We’re competitive like that, and I was not going to let it be said to our friends, assuming we had any, that the boss was better at me than anything, unless it was getting shot down by the ladies. Of course, I’m not too sure that the title “Best-Monkey-Returner-To-Cage” is really something to brag about, but hey, when you’ve got as little to be proud about as the boss and I do, its something.

Galvanized into action, I grabbed two by the feet and chucked them into the nearest empty cages, cursing them, their monkey mothers, and anything else I could think of the whole time. As I was making sure the two cages were shut I heard a dull metallic thud and turned to see the boss laying flat on his back on the hold floor. He had tripped backwards over the two glass jugs of sedative.

I smiled at him cheerily. “What’s the matter; the monkeys got you too?”

He made an unrepeatable remark and gestured from the floor at the jugs of sedative. “Set those up there-“ he pointed to several stacks of cages at the far end of the hold that we hadn’t knocked down and whose monkeys were, for the most part, still asleep. In fact, most of the monkeys were asleep again. Even those that had escaped were now curled up on the cargo bay floor. I guess they weren’t used to moving around much, seeing as how they’d been sedated for quite some time.

Seeing this, I ignored the boss’s request and snatched an organ grinder off the floor and flung him into a cage. He only looked asleep. As soon as I touched him, he tried to run off, but I already had his tail and all he did was scratch and flail pointlessly as I got him back to his little prison home. Earlier in the trip I had felt sort of sorry for them, all locked up in their cages. Now I was about as sorry for them as I was for double axe murderers.

The boss grunted as he got off the floor and set the sedative out of the aisleway far enough to where we wouldn’t trip over it while conducting our little monkey rodeo.

It took about an hour for us to get the remaining monkeys back into their cages. Apparently curling up is just an old monkey trick to deceive humans into trying to grab them, because those little organ grinding buggers are pretty good at scampering away when you get close.

“I swear,” the boss said to me, as he shoved what appeared to be the last monkey into its cage, oozing aggravation from every pore in his body, “you have got to be the dumbest man alive. You’re supposed to be several steps above these cretins in the evolutionary chain, and yet, they outwit you and escape . . . while drugged.” He shook his head. “We’re in a spacecraft for Pete’s sake! A spaceship!” He leaned closer to me and gestured towards the bay walls as if you could see through them. “Mankind has discovered fire, built civilizations, developed governments, fought wars and finally conquered the stars, but wait! Here comes Snake, proving that it was all a bloody accident!” He finished up his speech by smacking me in the back of the head.

I would have come up with some snappy retort, but the fact that I had been outwitted by bunch of animals usually seen wearing junior size Shriner outfits giving out handshakes for a penny at planetary fairs had hit me pretty hard. I came back with all I could: “He bit me!”

The boss just ignored me and began restacking the cages. I looked at my finger; the bite didn’t seem so bad now, and it hardly even hurt. I felt more than a little stupid and wondered just how loudly I had screamed.

Until I saw it.

There was one cage, laying under three others, that was still empty. My blood ran cold. It was the cage of the monkey that had bitten me. Somehow, I just knew that even though we’d been throwing the critters into random cages, the monkey that had it out for me was still on the loose. I looked around the bay but didn’t see him.

“Uh, boss . . .” I said quietly.

“Huh?”

“There’s still one out,” I whispered, pointing at the empty cage.

“Why,” he asked through clenched teeth, “are you whispering?”

“It’s him,” I said. “Its him . . . He’s still out there . . .”

My intrepid pilot put his head in his hands. “You have gone off the deep end. Do I need to check the oxygen to nitrogen ratio in the air mixture? What’s the deal? Its one monkey; he’s probably at the far end of the bay curled up in a little ball . . . and what makes you so sure it’s the same one?”

“I know,” I said, “I know. It’s him; I’m telling you, that little fiend is still out there.”

The boss looked incredulously down the row of cages. “Out there? Out there? In case you haven’t noticed in the couple of years you’ve been aboard, this ship ain’t exactly roomy; there’s no ‘out there’ for him to be. Its like fifteen feet from here to the end of the cargo bay. You stack these cages up and I’ll go get that pint sized ape.”

I stacked the remaining cages where they went, with the empty cage for the evil monkey ringleader at the top. I couldn’t tell you then what I feared so much from one little organ grinder monkey, but I can tell you now: you’ll know shortly.

“Snake,” the boss called to me, “check and make sure he didn’t get out of the cargo hold. I don’t see him down here. He can’t have gone far, anyway, he’s drugged and there’s nowhere to go, obviously.”

“He isn’t drugged,” I replied as I exited the cargo bay. “I’m telling you, there’s something about that one; just be glad it was me and not you that checked, it could have been much worse,” I finished weakly. I closed the internal cargo bay hatch so that I wouldn’t have to hear his reply.

I poked my head cautiously down into my turret; no escaped organ grinder; then into the cockpit; no monkey there either.

I opened the cargo bay door and stuck my head in to tell the boss that the escaped monkey wasn’t in the crew compartment. He stood at the far end of the bay, craning his neck looking up at the ceiling above the stacks of cages. I craned my neck to see what he was looking at.

“Hey, man, he’s not in the crew compartment, where do you think-“ I saw what he was looking at and it answered my question.

He was staring intently at the open maintenance crawlspace. I had left the small hatch open when we were loading the cages aboard because I didn’t feel like getting the small stepladder out from its storage under a panel in the floor while we were trying to get the bay loaded. The opening was about a foot and a half short above the top of the stack of cages.

“I think,” my crew mate began.

“No you don’t,” I interrupted.

“I see,” the boss said wryly, “that you’re back to yourself; glad to see you’re over your harrowing near death experience at the hands of a berserk five hundred pound gorilla-“ he put his hand to his ear, feigning listening in an earpiece-“what’s that Cindy? Not a five hundred pound, but that’s right, a five pound gorilla.” He grinned sharkishly. “As I was saying before you interrupted me . . . I’m pretty sure he’s up there.” He pointed at the crawlspace. “Know what that means, Snake?”

“No.” I shook my head.

“You don’t? Let me explain. It means-“

”No, you dunce,” I interrupted again, “I know what you want, and forget it. Not in a million years. I hate going up there anyway and if you think I’m going up there in search of the monkey version of a cross between Ghengis Kahn and Harry Houdini, you’re out of your mind.”

“Oh, no I’m not. You’re going up there, because unless I’m very mistaken, you’re the only reason that little glorified jungle snack is up in the maintenance area anyway. You let him out, and you’re going to get him. I’m getting the stepladder. Lets get him down quickly; I don’t like hanging out next to nav lanes. It’s a busy route, but the way we’re just sitting here it won’t be long before some pirate comes by and thinks we’re easy pickings.” With that, he stooped to the floor and began prying open the panel to get to the stepladder.

I was keenly aware that I had very little ground to stand on, seeing as how this was all my fault, and though I was free to protest as loudly as I wanted, it’s sort of unspoken ship’s rules that if its your fault we got into it, you’ve got to be the one to get us out. Of course, usually it’s the bosses fault we’re in whatever trouble we’re in, so I’m usually a fan of the system, but this time it sure came back to bite me.

The boss got the stepladder out and in a few minutes we had moved the cages out of the way enough for me to climb up the ladder and reach the hatch. I looked into it with a sense of dread is almost impossible to describe. I was sweating already from just the thought of climbing back into that claustrophobia inducing duct, and the fact that there was some sort of simian satan up there awaiting me like some dark lord in his dungeon didn’t make it any more appealing.

I climbed to the top of the ladder and then hesitated before trying to squeeze myself back into the opening. I looked down at the boss, hoping he’d relent.

“Well?” he queried, gesturing to the hatch.

“Fine, fine, fine,” I muttered to him, “but when I die up here and start stinking, you know you’re going to have to be the one to climb up here and pull me out.”

“Start stinking?” he asked. “Start? Just get up there and get that thing out of there.”

I poked my head through the hatch. It was dark, except for a few red and green indicator lights twenty or so feet up the crawlspace. “Light,” I called. “I need a light. I can’t see anything up here.”

The boss pressed his flashlight into my hand. I turned it on and scraped my arm into the duct beside my head. I shined the light into the murk and saw no monkey. I knew that further up the crawlspace, about twenty-two feet, there were two small four foot passages that branched off to the left and right; left led to the crew ventilation system filters; right led to circuit breakers that one could use in an emergency to purge the reactor coolant. How you would ever get to them in a emergency is something the designers of the Black Sun 490 apparently never considered. Something I definitely considered though, was that evil creature up inside our ship pulling things like coolant purge master switches and the like.

I still wasn’t sure which bothered me more though: that evil organ grinder pulling switches in the maintenance area, or the thought of me trapped alone in a three by one foot space with a psychotic homicidal zoo animal.

“Get up there already,” came my pilot’s disembodied voice from cargo hold below me.

“I’m going, I’m going; you’re lucky you’re too fat to get up here.” I banged my shoulder hard on the edge of the hatch getting in. I swore. It was the same one I had banged when I was getting out a few days ago. It took some wiggling and wrangling, but I managed to hold my breath and make myself thin enough to squeeze my torso and arms into the crawlspace.

I scraped my left knee trying to get the rest of my body inside and then scratched the skin off my right shin on the opening. “Crap. I hate my life,” I called down to the boss.

He laughed. “Yeah? Well, maybe your little primate friend up there can end it for you; to hear you tell it, he nearly bit you in half the last time you ran into him.”

I ignored his laughter and shined the light ahead of me and moved, slowly, down the crawlspace. I could only move half of my body at a time: one shoulder first, until I was nearly wedged completely in place, and then scrape my other shoulder along the opposite side of the crawlspace. It wasn’t exactly a smooth wall either; the sadistic designers loved to place little ledges and switches and grates everywhere. They had worked hard to make it the most difficult, uncomfortable place ever created. It must have been a committee that designed it; no one person could have done it on their own.

As angry as I would like to have been at the designers, unfortunately I had even bigger concerns. Namely, what exactly was I supposed to do up here once I found the monkey? Just as I was pondering this question, it was answered for me. I had only crawled about five feet when I heard scratching on metal ahead of me. I froze. I heard a chirp; before it had sounded so innocent and cuddly; now it struck terror in my heart. The little cretin stuck his head out from the left passage. The light reflected off his eyes; golden orbs of hate and malice. He bared his little fangs and hissed.

I raced backwards down the tunnel. My head banged off the ceiling and my chin hit the floor at least twice. “He’s here! He’s here! I’m getting out!” I yelled as I worked my way back shoulder after shoulder as fast as I could. I moved faster than I think I’ve ever moved before. I didn’t care that I was bruising and cutting myself; all that concerned me was the presence of a deranged two foot monkey in a one foot hole.

The boss was yelling something up at me, but I couldn’t hear him above my own gasps for breath, my incoherent yelling at the slowly advancing monkey, and the monkey’s awful screeching. I swear, I hear it in my nightmares.

I almost fell out of the hatch, but luckily, in a matter of speaking, the hole caught my chest. It did keep me from falling eight feet to the floor but it also took about two layers of skin off of me from my navel to my neck. I slid out, and then down to the cargo bay floor where I scampered away from the hole, half expecting to see the malevolent monkey coming after me, eyes glowing.

For some reason, the boss thought all this was hilarious. He was leaning up against the cages laughing like a loon. “I have never seen somebody so scared of a friggin’ animal,” he managed to say between his guffaws. “Especially somebody who fancies himself a rough ‘n tough privateer! You’re one step above a pirate, Snake, and . . . it’s a monkey! A monkey, man!”

My heart was beating too fast to talk. As I got up, I noticed my hands were shaking. I’m telling you, you laugh at me, but you weren’t there. I clasped my hands behind me so the boss wouldn’t see. “I’m out, Ace. You get him down if you want to, but I’m not going back up there.” I exited the bay, closed the hatch, climbed down into my turret, closed the turret hatch, and then set the magnetic seal.

I heard the cargo hatch open above me and heard the boss step onto the turret hatch, still laughing. He closed the cargo hatch and took his place back in the cockpit.

“So, Snake,” he said over the intercom, “what’re we gonna’ do? It’s what, ten more days until planetfall? You want to leave him up there?

“Personally, I think he’ll come down when he gets hungry. I mean, he’s got to eat more than usual since he isn’t sedated.”

“I don’t think he’ll come down except to kill us,” I responded, as evenly as possible.

“Look,” my friend in the cockpit said, “it’s just an organ grinder monkey. It’s not a supernatural alien from the twelfth dimension or anything.” As he talked, I felt the ship accelerate and bank left, back into the normally traveled nav lane. “Get a grip. In fact, its time to sedate them again.”

“Yeah, so?” I replied from my turret. “It’s your turn this time, pal; have fun.”

“And who’s supposed to fly?”

“Um, let me see,” I countered, “the autopilot? I mean, that’s what its there for.”

I heard him sigh as he left the cockpit for the cargo hold.

About ten minutes later, I heard the door reopen and the boss’s worried voice: “Snake? What did you do with the sedative?”

I opened my turret hatch and stood halfway out of it. The boss was leaning in cargo bay doorframe. “What are you talking about? You set them out of the way somewhere. I haven’t touched them.” A uneasy feeling was grabbed my gut. “Why?”

“They’re not in there anymore. I looked all over and the little buggers are starting to wake up.” As proof, I heard a few chirps from the hold. “We need that sedative, Snake.”

“He’s got it. That little hellspawn monkey has it. I don’t know how, or why, or what he’ll do with it, but he’s got it,” I answered, confident that indeed, we, who had dealt with pirates, riffraff, corrupt cops, good cops, the military, private armies, double-crossing thieves, and even a few women in our time, were going to be done in by an ordinary organ grinder monkey with a god complex.

The boss sat down just inside the cargo bay. “That’s impossible. I mean-how-when? What in the world would he-he’s a monkey! I mean, he can’t know whats in those things.”

I just shook my head. “I told you, man. He’s the bloody Adolf Hitler of monkeys. He’s downright evil. Those eyes . . .” I trailed off, thinking of the glowing orbs in the ventilation shaft.

The boss glared at me. “You’re starting to creep me out. Now, instead of being your usual fountain of worthless nonsense, how about helping me solve this.”

I mimicked him: “Maybe he’ll come down when he’s hungry. It’s just a monkey.”

He ignored me and continued. “He must have those bottles up there in the-“

“No,” I interrupted. “I’m not going up there, not for ten times what I’d pay to have on holovid what that one chick said to you on Paris V after you asked her to dance with you. And that’s a lot.”

He scowled at me. “You, Jupiter’s Warriors boy, shut it. And if you ever mention that incident to anyone, I’m going to tell them about the time you crapped yourself facing a two foot tall cute little furry exotic pet. This is the gods paying you back for ragging on me about that whole Paris V thing. And, I might remind you, you’re stupid insults aren’t helping us figure out how to get that sedative back.”

I shrugged. “Who needs the sedative? We’ll just close the bay door and leave the monkey’s be. It’ll smell bad with them flinging poop around and stuff since they’re up, but its separate filtration, and they’ll be plenty of cash to have someone clean out the bay after this mission anyway. They’ve got food and water and you can hardly hear them through the doors anyway.”

Famous last words. Seven days later, life was miserable. We could hardly stand it anymore. While its true that you can’t hear one or two monkeys through the bay door, when all thirty odd of them are up and screeching, you can hear them quite well. Even my bit about the separate filtration wasn’t quite true. It seems our friend the escapee liked doing his business in the ventilation ductwork nearest the crew compartment, after the air had already been filtered. The ship had an overall smell of animal in it, one which we just couldn’t seem to get used to.

Every time I tried to go to sleep, I heard the screeching little devils and saw his golden eyes. Once, I finally did get to sleep, about three jumps past Perkins. I had a dream; in it, I heard my hatch open and above me stood the monkey. I reached for the combat knife I always kept in my belt. It wasn’t there and when I looked up, the monkey had it in his right hand, and the boss’s severed head in his left. Yeah, I probably need a psychiatrist, but, hey, we can’t exactly spare money for nonessentials like mental health.

The intercom crackled. “Last nav beacon here, Snake. From here its just a simple autopilot run for about-“ there was a pause while the boss checked his watch-“46 hours.”

“I don’t know if I can take this for another 46 hours, ace. Lets just hit the cargo purge button and blast ‘em all out into deep space. “We’ll see how they screech in hard vacuum.” A thought struck me and I grinned: “Space monkeys.”

“I’ve thought about it, honestly,” the boss replied. “Thing is, Costas had me sign the contract so fast I didn’t really read it all. But, as you know, I’ve had nothing but time on my hands, and this awful smell, of course. It seems that these little furry hate balls are insured. We flush ‘em and we owe Pleasure Planet 8.5k a head.”

I whistled. “That’s steep. Probably worth them sending a bounty hunter or two after us. That sucks. I was kind of looking forward to hearing that whoosh of the cargo bay doors opening and the bay depressurizing and sucking all those little horrors into the void.” I was smiling just thinking about it.

“Yeah,” the boss mused, “Screeeeeeeechhwhooooooooshhhh-silence. That’d be nice.”

I smelled something strange. I sniffed again. I couldn’t recognize it; it wasn’t monkey, but it wasn’t nice either. It had a strange chemical odor to it. I poked my head out of the hatch.

“Hey, ace, you smell that?” I called to the boss through the open cockpit hatch.

“Yeah, yeah I do,” he replied. “Wonder what it-holy crap!” I heard him start and try to move in the small cockpit. I climbed out of the turret and leaned halfway inside the cockpit. Immediately, I saw what had startled him.

Leaking from the vent directly above and to the right of his seat was a steady stream of yellow liquid. Whatever it was, it was also the source of the smell.

“That better not be what I think it is,” my boss/pilot said. “If that’s monkey piss, I’m going to beat the ever living crap out of that monkey and then you,” he finished.

I leaned forward to sniff the stuff. And fell promptly backwards, as the world spun wildly. I hit the floor hard, but didn’t feel anything. Wow, a detached part of my mind thought, this is kind of nice.

“No,” I heard my voice saying, from somewhere far away. “This isn’t monkey piss . . . I’m pretty sure the-the-the-whatever it is up in there broke the sedative bottle . . . try to-try to call-oh boy.” The world spun, went black and white, and then the floor faded away beneath me and I fell upwards towards the ceiling, which was now an ugly shade of green. I vaguely remember the boss making a garbled mayday call and seeing him slump strangely over his center console.

I woke up in a bed, a real bed. I opened my eyes and felt all awake at once. The ceiling above me was beautiful crystal glass and looked upward towards a pair of suns. The glass was polarized so the light wasn’t too bright, and it refracted brilliant rays depending on which way I turned my head.

“Nice to see you’re up, sir,” came a female voice from beside me. I turned and saw the hottest looking nurse I’ve ever seen. She looked like she’d just walked out of a holovid. “We gave you some hithamine-plax shots about two days ago, but we didn’t want to overdo it. If you come out too fast, sometimes it can be quite painful, and we hear at the Pleasure Planet infirmary are always wary of that.” The nurse smiled and my heart melted. No pain here, no sir.

“Your friend woke up an hour ago, and he said you had to leave as soon as you woke up. The effects should be quite gone by now. The hithamine was to counter the effects of the sedative and the plax was to make sure you slept through the painful period, but plax has very few after effects; you’re free to leave, just like your friend asked. I’m Molly, by the way, and have a nice stay.” She got up. I watched every step she took out of the room. I really really didn’t want to leave.

I slid out of bed, put on my clothes which were freshly washed, pressed, and sitting on a dresser not too far from my bed. I don’t’ think I’ve ever had my clothes pressed before or since. I looked around as I got dressed. The hospital room was the most extravagant I’d ever seen. Real wood paneling, state of the art electronics for business and entertainment were tucked away behind ornate carvings and paintings, and the room was fully furnished with hospital bed, a dresser, three antique chairs, an ornate table, and a full length mirror.

I stretched and mulled over the fact that this was the fanciest place I’d ever slept in, and with a beautiful woman by my side no less, and I didn’t remember a thing. Well, that’s life for a privateer I guess.

I stepped out my door and found the boss trying to make small talk with Molly. She seemed relieved that I showed up and took the boss’s distraction as a good time to make her exit. She disappeared around the corner and the boss looked distinctly unhappy. “Well, I see the sleep hasn’t dulled your edge,” I said heartily, “still got the touch, I see.”

I felt better and more rested than I had in years, at least until the boss’s next words: “Well, I hope I still have the touch, because right now it’s about all we’ve got. That nice little sleep we had, I hope you liked it. A bed in this joint runs 15k a night, apiece. All told, we’re looking at a monkey-induced nap that just cost us 60 grand. Plus the 900 credit towing and rescue fee, and we’re looking at a total profit of 700 credits.”

I no longer felt good at all. “What!?” I sputtered. “Sixty grand!? Is that legal? I mean-“

The boss cut me off. “We’re not in federated space, remember. Everything’s legal here. So legal in fact, that they’ve already deducted everything from what they would’ve paid us. Now c’mon, we’ve got a cargo bay to clean.”

I swore and sauntered off after him, vowing that if I ever saw another monkey again, I’d have his brains for breakfast.

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