Kaylee’s Lament

Chapter Twenty-One

Wendell hadn’t had this much excitement in . . . well, never. Nothing even came close. It was like some tawdry popular adventure show, gone horribly awry.

First that disgusting-looking Captain Kuan, and her disreputable crew, showing up with their ancient, rusting hulk, and their big, nasty-looking guns. Then the even more disgusting one-eyed, toothless Milo Morgan shows up with four security officers and a copy of a dubious-looking complaint ordering the binding by law of the crew for larceny – hardly surprising, in his opinion. That was exciting enough (in a morbid kind of way). Morgan’s ID and papers did match the owner’s name on the ship’s manifest, and the crew seemed to know him. But to have your own brother bound by law? That didn’t seem right, even according to the chaotic standards of what must pass for morality on the Rim.

What was worse, there was now some doubt about the disposition of the cargo. As the agreement had been originally been with the Pear Blossom division of the company, could he really count on Morgan fulfilling it? As owner of the company he was legally bound to honor the contract, but Wendell didn’t get the feeling that Morgan was too awfully concerned with legalities. Between the eyepatch and that horrible lisping, sucking mouth, he looked more than half pirate himself.

And then he had brought all those men with him, allegedly his new “crew”. Wendell actually recognized a few of them as dockyard bums, and a few others he had seen on the station’s police blotter. Now they were walking around his dock with guns – lots of guns. They intimidated the stevedores into working faster – clearly a violation of their union contract, one that would certainly come up at the next management relations meeting. And they grinned a lot. Wendell hated those grins. They looked . . . feral.

All things considered, he preferred Kuan. Sure, she had been crude, smelly, and hideous to look at, but she had been reasonably civil and mor