Free The Star Pirate's Folly by James Hanlon Page A

him. Gim gazed out the tall window that stretched across the living room as
the sun’s first rays peeked out from behind the planet. Surface, they called
it. Not much of a name, really. About as inventive as Earth. But it was the
name chosen by its discoverer decades before.
    Gim turned on his heel, making his way to the private
kitchen. He’d been leased by Governor Strump forty-seven hours ago as a
personal assistant. Before that he had served on a mining vessel for roughly
sixteen hundred hours, on reserve for some high risk zero gravity repair work.
    He hadn’t actually done anything but sit in storage; the
miners finished their contract early and returned him to Overlook Station for a
partial refund, where he was repackaged and kept in cold storage. After a few
days on the shelf he was requested for service by the Governor for a period of
no more than seven hundred hours. Once the lease was up he would have
approximately 62,436 lifetime hours of operational capacity left—a little over
seven years.
    The stovetop began heating itself as Gim walked into the
kitchen. He had set out two pans and a kettle for tea earlier in the morning.
On a shelf in the refrigerator were three venison spice sausages, two
yellow-speckled warbler eggs, and a crimson-skinned lotus fruit—all fresh
ingredients brought up from farms on Surface. He set the eggs on the counter,
dropped the sausages in their pan, and began to prepare the fragrant lotus
fruit while the sausages sizzled.
    The lotus looked similar to Earth’s avocado, except that its
skin was a dark mottled red and its stem sprouted aquamarine leaves. Gim
plucked the stem and dropped it in the food processor, which whirred to life
for a few seconds. He took a knife and deftly bisected the fruit vertically
along the large central seed, then peeled away both halves.
    The fleshy interior of the fruit matched the bright aqua
color of the leaves and glistened with moisture. It released a strong, sweet, melon-like
scent. The fat teardrop seed was nestled inside the fruit, shiny and dark red.
Gim popped it out and tossed it into the food processor, which eagerly obliged
him again with a momentary buzz.
    After setting the two halves face down on the counter, Gim
peeled off the skin, cut the fruit into wafer-thin slices, arranged them
artfully on a small plate, and put the dish inside a drawer in the refrigerator.
If he left the fruit out it would begin to brown before the rest of the meal
was ready. As he shut the fridge, the kettle started to boil. Time for tea.
    The heat died underneath the boiling kettle when he turned
the heating element off. Gim opened a drawer recessed beneath the counter and
plucked an empty teabag from it. The bags were made from the lotus plant’s
fibrous stalk and stems back on Surface. The fruit’s seed, leaves, and stem had
been reduced to grounds inside the food processor, and Gim carefully spooned
the fragrant mixture into the teabag. He cinched the string on top and tied it.
A purposeful product. Efficient.
    The leaves required only rudimentary preparation to make the
tea—no drying, no curing, no processing—making it an extremely profitable
export from Surface. Meanwhile its psychoactive primary ingredient ensured high
demand: the tea brewed from the seed, stem, and leaf of the lotus fruit induced
a warm, full-body, buzzing sensation, heightened mood, increased appetite, and
general contentment.
    Gim lifted the lid on the tiny teapot and poured in half the
water from the kettle before he dropped the bag in. The water swirled from
clear to a reddish-purple color, steaming as it filled the pot. Gim replaced
the lid and set the kettle down.
    Although he performed the process with mechanical precision,
Gim had never made the tea by himself before. It was one of the lessons he’d
been given by the Governor, who had taken the time to teach Gim between his
many video conferences.
    Strump claimed that the shoddy instructional files Gim could
have downloaded