⚒️ Five Gallon Brain

by Joel Glover

Guillaume had on that silly hat. He was obsessed with Westerns: the old American ones, the Italian yellow wave, the Quebecois revival; had been since he was a boy. If a screen showed a big hat on a tough guy he was transfixed.

Bullets had gotten less deadly since the old days of the West, he said. Back then a bullet didn’t punch right through you. Non, mon ami, the slug wasn’t traveling fast enough. Instead it would hit you, bounce about, making all sorts of mess, then come to a rest somewhere in your scrambled insides. He had said it so many times that the rest of the crew of the Eugénie could repeat it word for word, and often did.

The guns the crew toted were a throwback to cowboys and cattle raids. You didn’t want to risk blasting a piece of depleted uranium through the carapace of a spaceship and experience explosive decompression. Instead, you used your tightly wound titanium spring to flick a sliver of soft metal—usually copper—right into the person whose possessions you were appropriating. 

Nice and safe— 

For the person holding the gun, anyway.

—Usually.

The stupid hat flew past Felix, a hole in its brim from the bullets being shot at them by the crew of the Acelina and Florence, which was the ship they were trying to ransack.

“My hat!”

If Guillame wasn’t substantially larger and more mean spirited, Felix would happily consider punching his brother in the face.

“What’s going on?” Trixie’s angry voice filled his earpiece.

“Sorry sweetie, a bit more resistance than we expected.” Felix took a moment to sling five bullets back down the corridor.

“Tell that halfwit brother of yours he’s making us look bad.”

“That halfwit is my husband,” Rosie added.

“He could be your former husband, if he gets a bullet in him,” Felix pointed out. Two copper slugs flattened themselves into coins by his head, and he pulled himself into a smaller ball. “How are the others getting on?”

“Hear for yourself,” his wife encouraged, adding him to the wider voice channel.

A chorus of excited whoops and yelps came across the network. Amadou’s reassuringly francophone accent joined with the alien sounds of the language the rest of The Babd’s crew used to keep their gossip amongst themselves. The whoops included the chatter of springs releasing and bullets hitting hard surfaces.

“This had better be worth it,” Felix complained.

“I’m going to need a new hat,” Guillame added.

“Get on with the job.” Mastodon rarely spoke during raids. She saw her role as purely supervisory. Maternal. If your mother was a brutal former corporate assassin turned pirate.

“Drone footage on the HUDs boys.” Finally. It had taken Rosie longer to get the penetration than expected.

The Eugénie’s onboard djinn plotted firing solutions.

“We don’t want to kill you, but we will.” 

“I’m happy to kill them.” Guillame wasn’t joking. He really loved that hat.

“Fuck you!” Whoever had the com on the Acelina and Florence was either deeply committed to keeping their insurance premiums low or highly offended by Guillame’s hat.

Felix could embrace the latter attitude. 

“He means it,” Felix added to the announcement. He dropped his pistol into its holster and pulled the tranq gun instead. “Let’s resolve this without any bloodshed. Give us what we want and we can all be on our way.”

“You’se lot are either deaf or stupid. Fuck off!” This demand was accompanied by another barrage of small arms fire. Felix dived back into cover, having been considering a dart towards Guillame’s spot.

“Trix, they aren’t listening to reason. Open them up.”

They had paired with The Babd for good reason. Loitering in a gravity well, their partners picked up the Acelina and Florence in transit, lurking behind them, emissions cloaked, weapons cased. The Babd was a black winged predator, quiet in flight, deadly up close. 

The Babd chased their prey right into the trap.

The Eugénie was a very different beast. Mastodon found her in a wrecker’s yard. Most of the freelancers and ships for hire came from that source; corporate ships long past their useful economic lives. The Draug, some called them. The Dead Who Refused To Lay Down and Die. 

Courier ships, shuttles, and racers, usually.

Not their Princess, though. 

The Eugénie was a wrecker. She was slow, ungainly, unwieldy. But she came equipped with tools which could open a ship up like a cheap MRE ration pack. 

The teeth of her cutting wheels bit into the carapace of the Acelina and Florence. The carapace started screaming; sharp synthetic diamonds grinding against semi-organic structures. Felix shoved a cylinder of foam into his mouth, stopping his teeth from vibrating each other and shattering. It did nothing for the noise.

Felix could hear, as if at some long remove, the complaints of The Babd’s crew as the Eugénie chewed on their prize. They had only opened up a ship once, but that time had been more than enough for Felix to know the rebreather he was carrying was more than a polite caution. He packed the seal around his nose and mouth, ready to pull the hood over his face.

“Enough, enough! Are you fucking mad?”

The sawing teeth wound down, filling the hull with a jackdaw chatter.

“Thank you for your cooperation, please place all weapons on the floor and assume a non-threatening posture. We will leave as quickly as possible.”

Trixie had spent time working in corporate relations of an altogether different kind. The false cheer and bonhomie of her announcement probably annoyed more of their victims than it soothed, but that was life in the black.

Felix picked up the hat from the floor, and perched it on his head at a jaunty angle. 

It suited him, he thought.