[Author's note: please rate & please leave comments! I like constructive criticism and need to hear blunt truths in order to improve as a writer. The Jin Dui itself s a creative project featuring an original ship and original crew; most of the crew members are characters owned by other participants in our collaborative project. All Jin Dui artwork and fics are posted to http://jin-dui.swartzer.com; more art and fics from other participants are in the works.]

March 18, 2514 / Dock Bluff, New Hope Mining Camp, Deadwood /Blue Sun Cluster

Van Hooven’s men arrived with their guns in the dim light before dawn, and by sunrise, the line of applicants who stood on the trail winding down Dock Bluff stretched nearly to the base of the tall hill, undeterred by the half-frozen mud and the lazy drift of snow from a cold, grey sky.

“Bloody buddha,” Cooper swore under her breath, taking a long look at that sight. “There’s got to be near 200 of ‘m.”

“Lots of desperate men and women looking to get offworld,” Ito muttered to her. “Most of them won’t have resumes or references. You’ll have to run them through sims on the ship’s boards to separate the liars from the real spacers.”

Cooper had already known that, of course -- but it was one thing to know it in the abstract, and another altogether to see it shivering in the cold outside your hull. Cooper cast another misgiving glance at that line before she turned back to the comm board beside the cargo bay’s airlock hatch.

“We’re about ready to open the doors,” she said into the all-ship. “Grab your wrench and get down here.”

She heard Hoss’s groan before she cut the connection. The mention of the wrench was a long-standing code between them. Hoss was a marshmallow at heart, but as big and broad as he was, and with his menacing sleevesof tattoos, he looked like a bruiser -- and that impression never failed to register when he carried a big ship-breakers wrench, or length of pipe. Trouble never linge