Free Free-Wrench, no. 1 by Joseph R. Lallo Page B

that way
who’s probably staying up nights waiting for me to spend more’n a
few hours in town.”
    “Sure you do…” Lil jabbed.
    “If we’re going to make it where we need to
go, we’re going to need to find a way for Ms. Graus here to pull
her weight. So…”
    “Do we really need to go through this again ?” Gunner snapped suddenly.
    “Gunner…” the captain said sternly.
    “Let’s just pitch her over the side now. The
longer we wait, the harder it will be to do it when the time
comes.”
    “What?!” Nita cried, jumping to her feet.
    “Settle down, Nita,” Lil said, putting a hand
on Nita’s arm.
    “Settle down ?! He just threatened to
throw me overboard!”
    Her hand clamped down harder, and the other
revealed a cocked pistol. “Wasn’t a suggestion, Nita.”
    Across the table, Coop pulled a pistol of his
own, as did the captain. Gunner unholstered two things which might
have been pistols as well, though they seemed to have more optics
and barrels than could ever reasonably be called for.
    “Have a seat, Nita. I’ll explain what this is
about. Gunner, on deck for lookout, and we’ll discuss this little
outburst later.”
    An angry sneer on his face, Gunner eased the
hammers down on his weapons and stalked out the door. Nita looked
to Lil and Coop. They still had their weapons steady, and most
worrisome of all, their faces remained as chipper and friendly as
ever. As there were few other options, she lowered herself to her
seat.
    “Are you going to kill me?” Nita asked.
    “Not necessarily,” Lil said. “All depends on
how good of a job you do.”
    “Am I a prisoner?”
    “Of course not. You’re a greenhorn,” Coop
said.
    “Ms. Graus, what you need to understand is
this. You grew up in Caldera. I can’t speak for your upbringing,
save to say it had to be a darn sight better than ours. Things out
here… well, they’re rough. We run ourselves on a shoestring, and
not just because it’s all we can afford, because it’s all we can get. A bad bit of weather puts us more than a day behind,
and we start going hungry. A piece of equipment fails, and we can’t
be sure we’ll make it at all. What we have on board is enough fuel
and supplies to get five humans and Wink to the next port without
much room to wiggle. And what we have right now is one human too
many. I can get us through, all of us through, on what we’ve got,
but only just. And only if everything goes right that can go
right, and nothing at all goes wrong. That means if you show
yourself to be a liability in even the smallest way, you aren’t
just a nuisance, you’re a threat to our lives and our livelihoods.
I can’t allow that, not on my ship.”
    “How many times have you taken someone on
board like this?”
    “Oh, what is it now… seven? Including Nita
here?” Coop said.
    “No, no. It’s nine, right? There was that
couple who wanted to go from Westrim to Circa, and we got blown off
course,” Lil said.
    “Right, right. Nine then.”
    “And how many have made it?”
    “Well, there’s still just the five of us on
the crew,” Lil said. “Plus Wink. So it’s safe to say that none of
them turned out to be worth their salt as airmen.”
    “But I think… well, I guess it was… nine take
away…” Coop struggled with the math for a moment. “Cap’n, help me
out here.”
    “The last two people are the only ones we had
to take care of personally. One got himself killed, and the rest
got back to shore, at the very least. Gunner had to do the deed for
the ones that were more harm than good. He didn’t take it
well.”
    “But you did kill two people.”
    “We ain’t killed nobody. Them folks just
didn’t turn out to be handy enough to keep themselves alive,” Coop
said.
    “You people are monsters!”
    “We’re survivors. Sometimes being a monster
is what it takes,” Captain Mack said.
    “Why didn’t you tell me that if you
decided I wasn’t worth the risk you’d just kill me?”
    “Well, because