Molly thumbed the landing gear down and grabbed the radio. The town ahead stirred with plenty of activity despite the early hour. Headlights moved through the city streets, each pair kicking up a plume of dust that streaked off and thinned in the breeze.

Molly squeezed the mic. “GN-290 Parsona to . . .” she read the stable’s info from the nav screen, “. . . Pete’s Hideaway. Come in.”

She pulled into a hover and waited for a reply.

“Pete’s Hideaway, here. Come back.”

“Yeah, this is the Gordon Class ship hovering east of you. The two-ninety. We’re looking for a place to stay, over.”

“Roger and welcome, you picked the right place. Anywhere you like. Those small huts with lotsa room around them are the heads. Over.”

Molly laughed. “Thanks for the heads-up. Parsona out.”

She hung up the mic and brought the ship down between two other craft a little nicer than her own. The thrusters sent up a puff of dust, blocking out the view through the windshield. Molly moved the Wadi to the back of her seat and crawled over the control console to go check in at the stable office. As she crossed the cargo bay, she felt a sudden surge of giddiness, a rare crack in her two weeks of loneliness and dour moods. She could feel it as she lowered the cargo ramp into the cloud of swirling dust outside: today was going to be her lucky day.

ѻѻѻѻ

“How many nights you need her stabled?” the man behind the counter asked. A patch on his coveralls said “Pete,” but it looked like a logo rather than a nametag. Molly pegged his age at sixty, but knowing Lok, it was probably a rough forty. They had skipped introductions, so she decided to think of him as Possibly Pete until she discovered otherwise.

“I’m not sure how long we’ll be here, to be honest.” Molly eyed the voting machine on his counter, the ‘L’ nearly worn off. “Should I pay as I go?”

“Yup, that’ll work. Just need you to fill out them papers. She need water?” Probably Pete bent down over the counter and squinted through a grime-streaked window in the general direction of Parsona. Like the pane of glass, Pete had a sheen of grease on him, almost like it oozed straight from his pores. Even his long hair, which fell out of a backward cap in stringy clumps, seemed coated in something foul.

“She need water?” he asked again, giving Molly a curious glance.

“Uh, no, but thanks. We filled up in Cramerton.”

“Cramerton? They got water out there?” Potentially Pete slapped the counter. “Don’t that beat all!”

Molly laughed politely, but wasn’t sure it was a joke. On her mental to-do list, she added dropping another iodine tablet into the freshwater tank, just in case Possibly Pete’s sense of humor wasn’t intentionally dry.

“There you go,” she said, handing back a form with mostly made-up information. She had checked the “Liberty” box under political affilia-tion to match his voting machine.