2184.01.07

Mining Base 262 (aka New Belize), Ganymede

“A fight!” Dad
shouted, pacing the length of the living room. “We raised you better than
this!”

“They started it!” Martin
replied.

“Not according to your principal!
Not even three months into the year and you’ve gotten yourself expelled!”

“They’re always laughing at me
and messing with me! I couldn’t take it anymore!”

“So tell a teacher or tell us!
Don’t start a fight with four boys! What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that none
of you seem to care!” said Martin. “What were you gonna do, talk to
them? You think that’s gonna make them stop?”

Now his Dad was really angry. “We
don’t care about you? Huh? That’s what you think?”

There was a long silence as father and
son glared at each other. The three other family members watched from the kitchen.

The man shook his head and pointed
towards the boy’s room. “Go, just go.”

Martin stood up from the couch. He
took the ice pack he was holding against his bruised jaw and threw it against
the floor. He stomped off to his room.

Martin lay on his bed, staring up at
the ceiling, filled with rage. The other boys had been teasing him, tripping
him, taunting him for years and always got away with it. The one time he fought
back, he got in trouble, and the other boys became “victims”.
True, he had sent two of them to the hospital with broken bones, but they
deserved it. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

Suddenly, there was a knock at the
window glass. It was a girl with a curly afro and a guy big enough to earn the nickname “Jupiter” in sixth grade. It was Lai and Danny. Martin grinned, jumped off his bed and
opened the window.

“How’d you guys get up here?” he asked
them, looking down to the ground from our twelve-story height. People walking
on the street below didn’t seem to take notice.

“How else?” asked Danny, balancing his
large weight on the window ledge. “We climbed.”

“You guys are crazy. Aren’t you afraid
that a fall will kill you?”

“Not really. Fifty-fifty,” Lai
replied. The gravity on Ganymede is a seventh of that on Earth. “And we’re no
crazier than you are—I know two hospital patients who can attest to that.”

“You guys heard? How?”

Martin’s two friends laughed.

“Come on,” said Lai, poking Martin’s swollen black eye.
He winced. “It’s a small base. Everybody knows.”

“Yeah,” said Danny, “it’s not too often that students
from the ‘holier-than-thou’ Christian school land in the hospital. If it was
our school, nobody would’ve noticed.”

“I hate that school. These stupid guys are always bugging
me. I never had to deal with that in public school.”

“Duh,” said Lai. “Back then you had
us. People knew that if they messed with you they’d get cut.”

“Cut, chopped to pieces, dumped in a crate of ore and shipped off to
Venus.”

“Whoa Danny, we ain’t pirates,” Lai said. “We’d treat their
bodies with respect and give them a solemn burial.”

“You two are hilarious,” Martin snarked. “Are you guys coming in or
what?”

“Nah,” said Danny. “We’ve got places to go.”

“Like where? The docks?”

“Bingo. Southern gate. Wanna come?”

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m already in enough trouble. Plus, the guards down
there already know my face.”

“It’s an Earth trading ship,” said Danny. “Titan Class.”

Martin swore. “For real?”

“Would I lie about something like that?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,”

“You know we aren’t going to see another ship like that for weeks,”
said Lai. “We really need the extra help. What do you say?”

Martin starred up into the fake, digitized blue sky of the domed base.
Then he smiled.

“Titan class, huh?”

The other two nodded.

“When does she come in?”

Danny checked his watch. “In two hours and a half.”

Martin patted Danny on the shoulder. “Then we don’t have much time, huh?
Let’s go make some money.”