Farmer Bruener Chapter upcoming and Kurtherian writing practice · 5:26am Jun 9th, 2020
Sometime tomorrow morning, I’m posting another chapter in Farmer Bruener Has Some Ponies, which I believe you will enjoy. After all, it has Blake Shelton in it, and everybody loves him. I’m also including a snippet of my non-pony story practice, since I’m messing around to see if I can write a story in the Kurtherian universe. It’s just doodling now, but who knows.
Catspaw
Here, kittie, kittie
It helped Svetlana to think of this as a hunt. Admittedly, prowling through the woods and pouncing on a prospective employee for her starship would probably not be an approved hiring process by any of the port bonding agencies, but after what the bastard purser had done, she had seriously considered exactly that for the firing process.
Far worse, she had that feeling at the nape of her neck again, like she was being watched through the telescopic sights of a rifle. That cold prickle was too familiar to be ignored, because every other time she had felt it, events proved her right. She had lost crew and friends over her career, more than she wanted, and every time had happened after getting that particular itch.
Even if the White Tiger was merely a freighter, the captain of a starship was not supposed to feel hunted. She was an apex predator, a tiger amongst prey. Svetlana did not feel very apex after everything that had happened over the last few days, but she was really wishing for the free time to allow a brisk chase with a bloody gazelle or goat at the end. If she had a tail more than her brief stub, she would have lashed it in frustration, but tails and spacesuits really did not go together at all, and for all the genetic modifications she had purchased, tails were far down on the list in the future.
The pursed-face Torcellian on the video call looked like he could use some surgical modifications to get the stick out of his ass. His disapproving expression was understandable to a degree because his bank held the lien on the White Tiger, and a ship without a functional crew did not make loan payments. In any event, the clerk was paying close attention to Svetlana’s problem, which could mean she had gotten an actual bank officer by accident, or maybe he was just a practiced liar with good hair. It was difficult to tell while she sat there and listened. Humans were poor judges of social status by alien grooming practices, particularly those who started their life with white hair and only rarely lost it. A bald Torcellian was just about as rare as a pink one, and just as socially unwelcome, so there was no possibility of one becoming a banker.
“And last but not least, we are most displeased at your treatment of our contract employee, Captain Svetlana,” he continued on what had been a stuffy and formal chastisement for her recent actions, but shut up rapidly when she growled back into the comset.
“Your contract employee was taking bribes to run illegal merchandise in my cargo,” she snapped. “If the port authority had caught on, they would have confiscated my ship, and you would be shit out of luck on your loan. He’s lucky I didn’t rip… Well, never mind that. He’s gone, and I need another purser. We both could use somebody who can add two numbers together and get the right answer, instead of whatever they can skim off the top. And I did get a cargo under contract before tossing his worthless ass off my ship.”
It just wasn’t fair to mention the previous purser had brought the shipping contract to her attention before she tossed him off the loading dock. Besides, she had not even broken his legs. Much.
“I see your signed contract,” said the banking clerk, looking down his thin nose at a display out of her immediate sight. “Well within the profitability range of our loan standards. So, you’re needing us to assign another purser to—”
“I need you to give me a list of potential candidates and I’ll select one this time. I’d just advertise locally, except there’s no end of disasters just waiting to be hired, and your banking institution does a good job on filtering out the ones who would never work out.”
Left unsaid was the sheer number of real criminals who would find a position on a starship to be a golden opportunity to work with larger gangs and steal the whole ship, instead of just slipping contraband into the cargo. At least this way she would have the delusion of control over the process. Plus, the bank financed all of the legal education of the candidates. Much like Svetlana felt at times, that left the contract employees just one step above slaves in chains for ten or twenty years, unless they ran away to a distant star cluster, which probably would have entirely different laws for them to learn, so…
“Acceptable,” said the clerk, still referencing some other screen. “Will you need a cargo specialist and medical/environment crewmember also, since yours seems to have followed the previous purser?”
“Eh…” The two crewmembers she had fired were responsible for effectively three positions, and most likely the bank was going to find some wet behind the ears lawyer they could squeeze into accepting the purser slot instead of a safe ground-bound position. That meant hiring two more crew to handle the environmental systems and the cargo position, unless she could limp along with shore-based cargo management for loading and unloading.
It was worth some thought, and Svetlana was having trouble thinking with the bitter face of the banker occupying her mind, so she accepted the list of potential candidates the clerk sent her and closed the call for now.
After some time browsing through the candidate files, she still had not generated any realistic thoughts. At least their evaluations were fairly honest, since the bank had little to gain by spiking their own investment and slipping a dud into the mix. Still, the candidates were fairly dull and bottom of the barrel, barely making it over the minimum scores to appear before the local judicial tribunals. There was just one of them who bothered her for some reason, and she was still puzzling over exactly why when there was a sharp knocking at her cabin door.
“Enter,” she snapped a little harder than she expected.
“With the captain’s permission,” intoned Staann, the loose ‘cover’ of the crew. He was a shorter than average Lethe with a darker green skin tone, and had a natural talent for just about anything mechanical, from helping Jack with the engines to taking the co-pilot seat during flight. “Captain Baxter seems to have heard about our disagreement with our previous purser and sent over a candidate. You were less than subtle,” he added, showing a few teeth in a rare smile.
“Baxter’s still planetside? I thought he was scheduled to leave soon.” Svetlana tried not to add any other sharp observation due to the person she could see outside of the half-open door. Baxter was a fairly good friend, even if they never had much time together over the last few years. He had sold out to Universal Export and captained a medium freighter on a predictable schedule, complete with medical insurance and a retirement plan, while she was struggling to make ends meet and put away something every month. It seemed unfair, but at least she controlled her life. “If Baxter’s bringing over a candidate is for the legal position—”
“Cargo specialist, actually.” Staann shrugged, which was not a Lethe gesture, but one that he had picked up over the last few years from her. “Captain Baxter’s not here, but the guy says he’d vouch for him.”
“I don’t really need a cargo wrangler, I need a second environmental systems technician and somebody who can take care of all those damned flowers we’re loading,” she huffed.
“Boganvillian Orchids,” said a quiet voice from the ship’s corridor. “And I’m qualified on environmental systems, as well as vacuum procedures, chemical and biological handling, cargo weight and balance, and food preparation. Oh, and some medical procedures.”
Showing how much the short engineer understood his boss, Staann slid the door open the rest of the way, allowed the tall Torcellian inside, then made himself scarce.
It took a second look for Svetlana to realize the tall prospective crewman was actually human, mostly because Torcellians never tended to the pinkish-brown color of unmodified skin exposed to various sunlights of different systems. Torcellians with an unfavorable mutation were pink-pink with the regular shock of platinum blonde hair and slender build of their kind, but relegated to living on the fringes of their society and facing constant derision from their more proper superiors. This human was easily mistaken for one at a distance, but up close she could see the slightly different skeletal frame and joints, as well as the earthy scent that differentiated humans from the Torcellian’s sharper odor.
The candidate had obviously seen a few mods also, or else he just fell slightly out of the normal human range. To be honest, his white hair was the most disconcerting since the fad for humans over the last few decades was for vibrant colors and dramatic hairstyles to set themselves apart from the sea of aliens around them. Svetlana had considered herself fairly unique in that regard, since one of the feline attributes she had purchased over the last few years was a fine coat of snow-white hairs. She wasn’t jealous of his look. Just… disturbed.
The man took two slow steps forward and quietly placed a sheet of paper with an attached data chip on her table with a click, then just stood there with a neutral expression while she read the short but succinct introduction letter from Baxter.
“So, Mister Saxifraga—”
“Please call me Dud, Captain Svetlana,” said the man rather quickly, in a voice that barely rose above a whisper. “Saxifraga is merely a label I wear while traveling this life. Captain Baxter said I was to defer to your preferences in any regard, including names, and to give you his documents without commenting.”
The memory chip was a featureless square of plastic about the size of a credit coin, with Baxter’s scribbled ‘Dud vid - PRIVATE!’ across the top. She tapped it against the table, then looked back at the slender man, so young she expected to see fuzz on his cheeks. “Did he say anything else?”
“No, Captain. Just to give you the chip and wait outside while you watched it. He was very insistent that I not listen to him record, so I presume it is a private message. If you will excuse me.”
The man stood up, bowed once, and strode briskly out of the stateroom, followed by his cat.
That was another thing that Svetlana distrusted. There was no end of exotic pets across the expanse of human habitation, even out in the Fringe Worlds. She had even seen a shoulder dragon once, somewhat of a cross between a parrot and a lizard with a vocabulary of nearly a hundred words, some of which were not profanity. There was a weird combination of chemicals in the human genotype that wanted something fuzzy or pretty to pet and care for, no matter how impractical. She suspected some of the spacers she had picked up after a night of drinking were less interested in the sex than the petting and scratching.
Dud’s cat was dog-sized, and not the cute little dog that sits in your lap and begs for tidbits. The big comes-up-to-your-waist kind of cat that Svetlana swore was watching her from between narrowed eyelids when it was ‘sleeping’ on the floor just now, like a puddle of living darkness with two glowing gold spots for eyes. It may have been pretending to be as innocent and harmless as its owner, or maybe it was just a fat housecat, but even at its huge size, it had certain kitten-like proportions that indicated a far larger destination weight at maturity.
“Let’s see what Baxter has to say about our young man,” muttered Svetlana. She thumbed the square piece of plastic into the secure viewer, then hesitated a moment before reaching over and flicking the master switch that shut down White Tiger’s transmitter and turned on a subsonic generator. It would ‘buzz’ the hull enough to disrupt any listening devices pointed in their direction without being too terribly obvious about her need for privacy. Paranoia or not, being figuratively stabbed in the back by a crooked purser and medical officer at the same time had given her fair reason to be wearing her sidearm even while in port.
Hey, if I write this and do it *well* enough to publish, I could make a few dollars off it. More likely I'll doodle on it for another year. It's fun.
That is fun. And I don't even know anything about the wider universe it's set in.
Also, yay for more Farmer Bruener!
Tldr
5281102
Ah, well good luck and have fun, then. :)
Intriguing! And well done!
I'd read that. I'd buy it on Kindle too if it ended up being available in Australia.
Also, you didn't just tease with Farmer Bruener, wooo!
I still think about this doodle from time to time. Enough to come back to this blog every now and again... Liked it well enough, I suppose ;)
5554697 Oh, I'm still working on it from time to time.
Thank you so much for sharing an extra little bit of what you've done so far, I'm super glad you've given me another glimpse! Nice to know this little project continues on.