Salvager's Gold
by Selina Rosen

Clyde shuffled down the dock of the space station with three bags slung over one shoulder, the tools of his trade clutched in his other hand, and no joy in his soul. Another crappy day, another deflated dollar. It was cold this morning. Hell, it was always cold on the docks. After fifteen years he should have been used to it, but he still got chilled sometimes.

Fifteen years! He looked down at his expanded belly and grunted. "I suppose if they counted my age the way they count a tree's, they'd cut me in half and decide I was about 103," he mumbled to himself.

It didn't seem possible. Had he really been digging through the dumpsters and trash cans of this "satellite with an attitude" for that long? Fifteen years ago he'd been a young man with dreams. A salvager on a barge working under the command of Eric Rider, an icon of salvaging in their galaxy. Clyde was going places and doing things. He'd dreamed a young salvager's dream of one day commanding his own space barge and finding The Big Trash.

The Big Trash was the not-so-secret desire of every salvager. Out there in space, lost somewhere off the usual flight paths and away from the hyperspace highways, was a huge space station, the relic of a long-lost civilization. A salvager had seen it once, and had time to send back pictures and samples. But he didn't send back the coordinates, for the obvious reason that some other salvager would steal it from him. Unfortunately, his ship had been destroyed in a meteor shower, leaving no survivors and no hint of where The Big Trash was.

Every salvager worth his salt had been looking for it ever since. It was the stuff of which legends were made, except that The Big Trash was more than just legend — it was very real. Somewhere out there, hanging in space and ripe for the picking, was the biggest find in salvaging history, just waiting for some lucky salvager to find it, strip it, trash it, and ship it off as "pieces parts" to the far reaches of the galaxy.

But Clyde had given up his dreams of conquest, fame and fortune long ago, for the same reason that most young men did; he had fallen in love with a beautiful woman and settled down to have a family and a stable life. He took a stationary job in a stable space station, in his field of expertise. While it wasn't glamorous, and he was never going to get rich, at least it brought in a nice, steady income so that his family could live a nice, lower middle class existence.

It had seemed like such a good idea at the time. Now after fifteen years in a dead-end — and mostly disgusting — job, his beautiful love had turned into a screaming, obese, middle-aged harpy. The two children, one male and one female, were ungrateful, money-grubbing little leeches who talked to him as if he were lower than the filth he dug through daily to put food in their thankless mouths.

No matter how many times he tried to explain to the worthless little scumbags how important his job was, they just simply didn't get it. After all, space stations like the one they lived in depended on recycling even more than planet-bound societies. But the kids didn't listen, or they just didn't care.

Scientists and techs had tried for generations to make machines to do Clyde's job, but none had been successful. The first tries at developing mechanized recycling systems had been total disasters. Basically, the very first systems expected people to separate the trash themselves — into paper, plastic, metal and "other" — which, of course, none of them seemed intelligent enough to do. The problem seemed to be in their inability to figure out what went into the "other" slot.

The next attempts were designed to allow machines to separate the garbage, but paper got on plastic, stuck together with the "other," and jammed the machines up time and time again. After years of failure, the scientists and techs finally had to admit defeat. So when all was done and said, sentient beings could create space ships that flew at light speed, terraform planets, and travel in hyperspace, but they couldn't build a machine which could successfully separate the "other" out of the garbage.

Good thing, too, or salvagers like Clyde would be right out of a job. "What a shame that would be," he grunted as he set down his bags and his tools and opened a dumpster. He used the vacuum first, successfully sucking ninety percent of the "other" up and leaving the rest for him to pick through with his double tongs. The chant that played all day every day in his head was playing even now as he rested his rather hefty girth on the edge of the dumpster to reach a can in the very corner. It's a living. It's a living. It's a living, his inner voice chimed, making him want to slap the shit out of himself.

When he left that dumpster to move to the next he noticed that he had a nice stain of "other" across his jump suit just under his belly, and thought how good it was that he had given Ruth yet another thing to bitch about. He could hear her grating voice as if she were standing right there:

Clyde! What was it? Could you just not stand having even one pair of coveralls that weren't stained with some sort of awful gunk from the bowels of the station? I'm not going to be able to get this stain out. You know that, don't you? It's just going to be like this from now until they're ready for the recycle bin. Blah, blah, blah.

She wouldn't actually say blah, blah, blah — that was just the point at which he would turn his brain off, grab a beer out of the fridge, and launch his ass into his chair.

There had been a time when his life had been filled with adventure and promise. Now adventure was finding a really interesting piece of trash that wasn't too sticky, and the only promise he had was that tomorrow would be exactly the same as today. The docks would be cold, the trash would be sticky, his wife would be bitchy, his kids would be ungrateful, and no matter where he stuck his beer in the fridge it would always be just slightly colder than piss warm.

***

The hookers were huddled together at mid-dock trying to keep warm. No doubt they were expecting a fairly large ship to dock soon. Most of the hookers hung out in the dockside bars, but the more industrious — and desperate — ones braved the cold in their skimpy attire in the hopes of getting the best johns, or at least the horniest and therefore least particular ones.

"Hey, Clyde!" the hooker named Crystal yelled, waving at him wildly. "Got any good trash?"

Sometimes he did, and it was always a sure bet the hookers would give him more for it than the recycling center. And every once in a while, when a man had an ugly, bitchy wife who only put out once every three years, it was nice to be able to trade.

"Nope, sorry girls," he said.

Crystal winked at him. "Maybe tomorrow, stud."

Clyde grinned widely back. "With any luck," he said, walking past them and heading for the next dumpster. He'd fill his bags the rest of the way in this one and then head back for the recycling center.

He laid his stuff down, slung the bin open and glanced inside. "Aw, damn."

Crystal walked up behind him. "What is it, Clyde?"

"Another damn stiff." He turned to look at the too-thin hooker with the missing front teeth. "You ever get the feeling that you're just living the same day over and over again?"

***

Cadavers definitely fell into the "other" category in recycling, but you couldn't just suck them up in the vacuum. First, you had to call the station police and stand by the dumpster till they got there. Then you had to waste a bunch more time filling out some stupid screen form.

It happened at least once a week. They very rarely turned out to be station dwellers; mostly they were spacer scum. Maybe he'd been killed on a ship and the murderer had hidden the body, then pulled it out and got rid of it as soon as everyone else took off for the bars — or one of a hundred other decadences they could revel in on the space station.

But it was likely he'd ended up in that dumpster the more popular way. The spacers were always getting stupid drunk and getting into fights over everything from drinks to hookers, and sometimes — lots of times, actually — someone wound up dead. And no matter what sort of "foul play" made a body dead, they always wound up in a dumpster.

There wasn't much else you could do with a dead body on a space station. Open an airlock and you were on line. It wasn't like being planetside where you could take a body out of town, dig a hole and throw it in. In fact, a dumpster on a space station dock was more or less the space equivalent of a shallow grave in a wooded area.

While he was waiting for the cops he decided to go through the guy's pockets. They were empty, so he'd probably been rolled. But if he had, they'd forgotten to take the guy's watch, and it was a beaut. Clyde was sure the stiff would want him to have it. It had one of those spandex bands, and Clyde thought for a minute that he wasn't going to be able to get it over the guy's big-assed thumb since rigor mortis had set in with it sticking out at an odd angle. He got it off the corpse and on his own wrist safe and sound just as two Station Police Officers showed up on their little electric scooters.

Clyde watched the officers get off their scooters with an effort. It was a hell of a job to look rough and ready when you were riding around on something that could maybe hit fifteen miles per hour at top speed and forced you to sit in such a way that if you hit a bump your knees would slam into your chin. The things obviously hadn't been designed for comfort, although it was hard to say just what the idiot who designed them was thinking.

The much shorter of the two officers, a teal-blue alien with suction cups instead of hands, slapped his tentacles against the dirty cold metal of the dumpster and chinned himself to look in.

"Yep, he's dead, all right," he said.

"Any fool can see that, Spritz," his human female partner said with a sigh. Clyde had seen both of them before; the docks must be part of their patrol. No doubt they'd pissed some big shot off. The woman seemed as bored with her job as Clyde was with his. It was harder to tell what aliens were feeling; you had to take some sort of class to learn their different body languages, and he just didn't give a shit about the moods of your average squid-looking alien. He was sick to death of all that touchy-feely crap intellectuals kept spouting about treating everyone equally. The way Clyde figured it, he was at the bottom of the food chain; when and if equality trickled down to him, he'd think about sharing it with guys who sucked their dinner through their asses, noses or ears. Until then, they were all just damned aliens to him.

"You see anything?" the woman officer asked without enthusiasm.

"A dead guy in a dumpster," Clyde said with a shrug.

"Huh." She looked at the hookers. "Any of you see anything?"

They all just shrugged.

"Figures." She handed Clyde a computer screen and the little plastic doo-wop he could never remember the name of. "Here, fill this out."

Clyde nodded and started scratching the doo-wop against the screen as the officers snapped pictures and took samples. A few minutes later the coroner's little electric wagon pulled up to take the body away. Two guys got out of it, went over to the dumpster and started pulling the dead guy out. He was a big guy, and it took them several tries.

"Hey, don't forget he's my salvage," Clyde said quickly. Cadavers didn't bring in much unless they weren't stiff yet, but he figured he ought to get something for his trouble besides the watch.

Everyone knew no one was going to find the murderer. Hell, in all probability he'd already skipped station and was millions of miles away by now. Why even bother to try? Clyde watched them go through the motions and realized their jobs weren't any worse or better than his. They'd take that body down to the morgue, run an autopsy to determine the cause of death, and then send the guy's clothes to one recycling center and his remains to another. They'd stick his picture down here on the docks and maybe someday someone would identify him. Then someone else could tell his family — if he had any — that he was dead.

In the end, those poor bastards would have nothing to show for a day's work but a healthy bunch of piles from riding around on the moron-designed scooters. At least Clyde had a kick-ass new watch.

***

Not that Clyde was a creature of habit, but on days when he found bodies in dumpsters he allowed himself an extra stop at Charlie's Bar, Porno Palace, and Corner Market. It was located on the far east side of the docks and on the way back to his living unit.

The bar was almost empty, it being about an hour before the evening crowd would start shuffling in. The bartender, a tall, thin human named Barney, put a shot glass in front of Clyde as soon as he sat down and filled it with a golden liquid.

"Well, it ain't Tuesday or Friday, so I'm guessing you found another body?" he said.

"Yeah, right, big fucker. Had a new watch." Clyde held up his arm with a grin.

Barney laughed. "You crazy sonabitch. Is it legal to strip the dead?"

Clyde shrugged. "I don't know, but he ain't usin' it. There has to be some plus to having the shittiest job on the station." He downed his drink and motioned for Barney to fill his glass again.

"Bad day?"

"Every day's a bad day, Barney. Some are just worse than others. I used to work with Eric Rider, you know. Back when he still used to captain his own ship."

Barney nodded — he'd already heard Clyde's life story a thousand times or so. But it was his job to keep the customers talking long enough to help empty their pockets of all that extra money they were always carrying around. "He's dead now isn't he?" he asked for the thousandth and one time, keeping the tradition going.

"Yeah, old sonabitch got too smart for himself. Last I heard some alien girl had wound up taking over his salvaging empire..."

From here Clyde would go spiraling down into the shithole that was his life. Who he used to be. What dreams he used to have. How his bitch of a wife had destroyed him and left him the husk of a man he was today. What he could have been. All that he wasn't. Blah, blah, blah. At some point Barney just tuned him out, humoring him every once in a while with an, "Oh," or a "Hum," or a, "You don't say?" The names and the places and the jobs changed, but every slob who walked in the bar basically had the same story. They wanted to be someone. They had gotten so close. Now they were nothing, no one loved them, and their lives were monotonous and meaningless.

In other words, their lives were all the same as Barney's. One day ran into another, and another, in a long successive line of nothingness off into oblivion, with him and everyone else wondering if perhaps, just perhaps, there wasn't meant to be more to life than this.

Maybe it was time he found a nice woman and settled down himself, start his own family to bitch about. There was a time when a man felt the need to fill the void in his life with something meaningful and permanent.  Maybe someone to spend his life with was just what he needed to add a little stability and meaning to his existence. Then again maybe he'd just buy that new sound system he'd had his eye on.

"Don't you think?" Clyde asked expectantly.

"Ah..." Barney coughed, caught off guard. "What...I missed that last little bit."

"Pseudo-intellectuals. Aren't you sick to death of them? They're always trying to make themselves look smarter by trying to make us look stupid. They've ruined everything, there isn't anything worth watching on TV anymore and books..." He broke off laughing. "Well, I probably would have liked reading if everything weren't so damn highbrow. They write this utter crap with no real plot and all these neurotic characters you couldn't like, and then look at you like you're an idiot when you just don't get it. All the time you just know they don't like it any better than you do. You ever notice that nothing's funny anymore?  Even the stuff that's supposed to be isn't.  All I want to do is flop in my chair, drink a piss warm beer and watch a little tube, but there's not a damn thing worth watching."

Barney nodded, glad that Clyde had given him enough information that he could pretend that he'd been listening. "Problem is that even though there are more of us, money talks and bullshit walks and everything is geared towards the upper classes," the bartender added. "Other night some high tech comes down here slummin'. He puts some crap on the TV, has a couple of drinks, and he's watching this shit and laughing his ass off. I swear wasn't nothing funny on. Just some high-tech geek getting bitched at by his boss. Well some of the clientele they start bitchin' about the crap, want to watch a ball game. So I change the channel and this guy's all why'd you do that, and I tell him it's cause the show sucked, and surely to God wasn't worth getting his ass kicked over. Well he gets all puffed up like, guess he was feeling his drinks, and he says we're all too lowbrowed to get the humor. That we probably only really enjoyed toilet jokes and pratfalls. "

"What happened then?"

"A bunch of guys kicked his ass, loaded him into a set of magnetic boots, and hung him from the ceiling at which point we proved him right by laughing our asses off as we watched the scrawny geek try to get free. He was too weak to walk in them, so he wound up undoing the laces, which of course dumped him on his head on the floor. He stumbles to his feet and threatens to call the cops, proving that he ain't so smart after all and forcing those same guys to kick his ass again. Normally I try to stop a fight in the bar because it just makes a huge mess for me to clean up, but I figured this time it was worth it."

"What happened then?"

Barney shrugged. "Don't know. They carried him out of here and I haven't seen him since. Hell, when I saw you walk in I figured you'd found him, but since your stiff was big..."

Clyde laughed. "Thanks, Barney, I needed that. Well, I'd like to stay and get shit-faced drunk, but you better add up my tab so I can go or the old lady's gonna make my life a living hell. Not that she doesn't anyway, just that it'll be even louder." He swayed a little as he got out of his chair. "All I ever wanted was to find The Big Trash, ya know that, Barney?"

"Yeah, that woulda been great," Barney said. If Clyde wasn't bitching about pseudo-intellectuals ruining the entertainment industry, he was talking about The Big Trash. Barney wasn't really sure what The Big Trash was and wasn't sure that Clyde did. He took the guy's money and watched him leave, feeling no more sorry for him than he felt for himself.

***

"You're drunk!" Ruth screamed.

"You ever find a dead guy in a dumpster, Ruth?" Clyde yelled back as he opened the beer in his hand and flopped into his chair.

"I'm getting a little tired of that lame old excuse, Clyde, and would you look what you did to your coveralls? Could you just not stand to have even one pair without a stripe of filth across them?"

"Get off my back, woman!"

"What a lovely example you're setting for the kids," Ruth said.

Clyde's son walked in the room eating something. The wretched little bastard was always eating. "You smell like shit, Dad," he said.

"You watch your mouth!" Clyde yelled. Whether the boy actually respected him or not, he shut up, which was all Clyde really cared about. 

His daughter swept in the room whining that she wanted a new dress for some big dance they were having at school, and how she wished they lived someplace where there were more boys of her own species. How if Clyde had a better job they could afford to live on a planet somewhere, and she could have a new dress.

They all started talking at once, and Clyde sucked on his beer and tuned them all out. He turned on the TV. It sucked; some upper class idiot thought he could instill family values in the masses by slinging the "ideal" family in your face with a laugh track which told you when to laugh, except none of it was funny because none of them understood that real humor came from pain. None of these make-believe people worked real jobs or got their hands dirty. They didn't have a wife they had grown to hate or kids they couldn't stand, and who couldn't stand them either. Maybe he should just teleport himself into one of the mindless sitcoms, sit behind a desk all day, crack stupid jokes about his PC, and go home to his perfect wife and family whose biggest problem could be solved in thirty minutes or less.

There has to be some way out of this hell. There just has to be.

***

Barney no longer knew which sob story was actually his. It was close to closing time, and he was ticking the minutes off the clock, so he wasn't at all thrilled to see the two huge, slap-happy looking fellows walk in, obviously looking for someone who was ass-deep in trouble.

"Can I help you fellas?" Barney asked, moving close to where his laser was hidden under the counter.

They ignored him and headed for a Triasian guy at the end of the bar. When the strange-looking alien saw them heading his way, he stood up and started for the door at a run, ducking around the two big guys and out the door. They took off after him, and all Barney could think was that now he'd be able to close the bar and go home without a hassle.

They'd probably kill the poor fucker, which meant he wasn't going to be paying his tab, and the boss would be pissed. But on a positive note, when Clyde found the guy's body in a dumpster, he'd come in and spend a bunch more money, so that would even things out. Barney grabbed his laser from under the counter, shoved it in the top of his pants, put the money in the safe, and closed up the bar for the night.

He walked down the dock. A couple of big ships were moored, and there were drunk, rowdy spacers everywhere. His hand clasped around the laser just to be on the safe side. Giving the drunks a wide berth, he headed for home — a dump at the end of a bunch of half-lit corridors on the dock level. He was almost there when he heard a man's voice whispering from a service shaft.

"Help me! Please, please, help me!"

Barney damn near shit his pants. He pretended like he didn't hear, and started walking again. The last thing he needed was any trouble. He just wanted to go home and get some sleep.

"Please!" The guy carefully backed out of the shaft and was actually blocking his way now.

"I'm warning you — I'm armed," Barney said, backing up to keep the guy at a safe distance.

"They're going to kill me. Please hide me. I'll make it worth your while, I swear."

Barney wondered if the guy meant money or sex, and if he meant sex, if he meant with him, in which case he wasn't interested. He recognized him as being the alien fellow the big guys had chased out of the bar. "What did you do?" he asked suspiciously.

"I'll tell you everything... just…please?" There was a commotion at the end of the hall. "Please!"

Barney grabbed the ugly snake boy's arm, and together they ran to Barney's apartment. As the door slammed shut behind them, Barney could hear the big guys run past, and he started to breathe again.

"What the hell did you do?" he demanded again. "Are those guys Space Port Authority?" If they were, Barney realized, he'd just bought himself a shit load of trouble.

The man seemed reluctant to answer, so Barney pulled the laser out of his pants. He didn't have to spout any threats.

"They are not…Space Port…Authority. Could you give me…a second…to catch…my breath?"

Being Triasian, the guy looked like a green snake with hands and legs. Creepy looking and, Barney knew, not at all very well adapted to living in Earth standard atmosphere. He gave the alien a few seconds to catch his breath before he barked, "All right. Start talkin'!"

"I...if I tell you, your life will be in danger, too."

"Come on, Ugly, don't give me that shit. If that's the case, just helping you put my life in danger. Now, what the hell did you do? You tell me quick, or I swear I'll toss your ass outside and yell that you're down here."

"Morris...Morris Freen...he found it," the alien started excitedly.

"Found what exactly?" Barney asked, losing his patience.

"He found The Big Trash!"

The bartender blinked, remembering Clyde's words. "The—"

"Big Trash. It's salvager's gold, an old space station!"

"Huh." Barney tried to think. "So you're a salvager?"

The Triasian relaxed. "Yes, my name is Ted, and I am a salvager...as is Morris Freen. He's the best. He found it.  He found The Big Trash. It's even better than we were told. A huge, ancient space station made of a metal alloy that can actually repair itself. He sent me measurements, pictures, even samples of the metal. Everything but the coordinates. I was to meet him here at Gamma Station with my barge and my crew. He had the coordinates; I had the ship, the crew, and the equipment. We were to go to the Trash together, to split everything 50/50. I was supposed to meet him in your bar..."

"It isn't my bar — I just work there. If it was my bar, do you really think I'd live in a hovel like this?"

The Triasian peered around his hovel. "Oh it's not that bad — a little paint, a little wall paper—"

Barney cleared his throat. "You were saying."

"There is nothing more to tell. He didn't show up. Instead those two men...I didn't know them. They were big and mean looking, so I ran. Since they chased me, I'm sure they mean to kill me. I...I'm afraid someone else found out about The Big Trash. I'm worried about Morris."

***

"What the hell?" Clyde rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock on the wall. Barney and the snake guy pushed past him; the bartender hit the button that closed the door. "What the hell are you doing here in the middle of the night, Barney?"

"Who is it?" Ruth yelled from the bedroom.

"Some guys from work.  Go back to sleep," Clyde yelled back. "Freakin' dragon woman." He scratched the over-sized belly that his bathrobe barely covered. "What the hell do you want, Barney?"

"That corpse you found?"

"Yeah?"

"Well, did he look like this?" Barney asked, nudging the Triasian until he produced a picture.

Clyde sucked his teeth as he studied the pic. "Yeah, that's him. Except he looked more like this." He struck a grotesque, twisted pose. "Why?"

"I was afraid of this," the snake-like alien said, sliding into a chair. Clyde was glad it was Ruth's. He wasn't sure whether these things left a slime trail or not.

"What's going on?" he asked again.

Barney nodded at the snakey thing. "This is Ted — his buddy found it, Clyde, that shit you're always going on and on about. The dead guy was a salvager, and he found The Big Trash. Apparently enough shit to make us all filthy rich."

"You're shitting me," Clyde scoffed. "You guys want a beer?"

Ted shook his head, and Barney just glared at him.

Shrugging, Clyde went in the kitchen and came out with one for himself. He glanced at the Triasian, who looked like someone had just taken a dump on his dinner plate; even though Clyde hadn't had the alien body language training, he figured the thing was sad. "Was he a friend of yours?"

"Yes, but worse than that, he died before he gave me the coordinates," Ted mourned. "I have no idea where The Big Trash is."

"That probably won't keep those two big guys from killing you," Barney pointed out helpfully.

"That does suck for ya," Clyde admitted, trying to think. Barney wasn't the type to come barging into his place at three in the morning for nothing, and the snake-thing obviously thought his dead buddy's story was genuine. A faint ember of hope came to life in Clyde's salvager's heart. "Look, you guys aren't just yankin' my chain or something? That dead guy really found the Big Trash?"

"No, man, we ain't just yankin' your damn chain," Barney snapped. "I was hoping that maybe he had a piece of paper or something on him that you might've taken. Knowing how you're always stripping the dead of stuff they ain't using any more anyway—"

"Shee-it! Wait here." Clyde clumped off to his bedroom and came back with the watch, heading to the kitchen counter where the light was best. "God damn!" he squealed, jumping off the floor.

"Clyde!" Trailing a soiled red bathrobe that had seen better days, Ruth stomped into the kitchen. "What on earth is all this noise—" She shrank when she saw Ted.

Clyde barely glanced at her. "Nothing for you to worry about, woman, just go back to bed."

For once she didn't give him any grief. She wasn't crazy about aliens either, and she'd never made any bones about how she felt about the Triasians.

Once she'd stomped back into the bedroom, Clyde lumbered over to Barney. "This is it. It's a star map to The Big Trash. The numbers must be the coordinates." He showed it to the Triasian, who smiled, something that could turn a strong man's stomach if he looked too hard. "Do you know where this is?"

"No, but with the coordinates my ship's computer can locate it." The smile left his face, and he frowned again. "Not that it will do us any good now."

"Why the hell not?" Clyde asked, really excited for the first time in years and hoping that his heart could hold up to the extra work, and that neither of these guys noticed his stiffy. "You've got a ship, we've got the data. I say we blow this popsicle stand."

"Well, dumbass, someone murdered the dead guy to get this information, and there are two big guys trying to pick off our friend here," Barney reminded him.

"I'm afraid I won't live to see my ship again," Ted said forlornly.

"God, not only are you a disgusting, smelly-looking piece of shit, but you also whine more than my grandma." Clyde looked at Ted with utter disgust, thumbing over his shoulder at Barney. "Him I can understand — he ain't one of us. But you're a salvager — think like one. Hell, this is is the mother lode of trash! It's more than worth fighting for. Besides, this ain't no problem at all, if you come at it the right way—"

***

The two big guys watched the docks. They hadn't found Ted, but he had to come back to his ship sometime.  When he did, they'd grab him, and by God he'd talk. They had screwed up with Morris bigtime — they hadn't thought he would be that hard to break, and had accidentally broken him before he could give them the coordinates for The Big Trash. The boss was gonna be pissed. They wouldn't make the same mistake with Ted, mainly because they couldn't afford another screw-up. They'd practice restraint and patience, and only kill the snake-looking piece of shit when they knew where The Big Trash was.

A fat guy was coming their way pushing a recycling bin. A nobody, just some space station salvager. "Morning, boys," he said.

They grunted back, ignoring him as he turned and started up the ramp into Ted's ship. Nothing strange about a salvager taking salvage into a salvaging ship.

And then the gangway started to close, the station umbilicals retracting from the ship with ear-grating whines.

One big guy was slightly faster on the uptake, and went for the weapon on his hip before realizing that his bullet would bounce right off the armored hull and riccochet God knows where. The firing of an unlicensed weapon would also summon station security, and that was a world of shit he didn't particularly want to explore.

Sighing, he turned to the other one. "So, you want to try and explain this one to Drewcilla? Or do we make a run for it and hope she doesn't find us?"

"Do I look like a moron? Let's jump ship and head for another galaxy," the other answered.

***

Ted and Barney climbed out of the recycling bin, and Ted immediately started barking orders to the crew. In minutes they were spacebound and Clyde was rid of his wife and kids and on the way to fulfilling his dream of finding The Big Trash.

It hadn't turned out to be such a bad day after all.