Battleship Raider by Paul Tomlinson (book recommendations website .txt) 📗

state, I knew it was just a story. He had almost certainly never been close to a battleship and that oblong scar on his arm wasn’t a war wound, he’d probably burned himself stealing bread from an oven. That’s what I was thinking as I went to sleep that night in that dusty prison cell. But it wasn’t long until I came to change my mind.

Chapter Two

Desert architecture doesn’t vary much from planet to planet. Buildings are low with thick walls made of concrete or mud or whatever. They’re usually painted white to try and reflect the heat away. And roofs are either flat or made of heavy clay tiles. The buildings in Margotsville were all like this, including the prison. It was a squat two-storey structure with a yard at the back and a high wall around it, topped with coils of razor-wire. There were signs hung from the wire that warned of the danger of electrocution. I suspected that the fried rats and pigeons hanging from the wire were placed there to make us believe it was electrified, but that was a theory I wasn’t in a hurry to test.

A wooden watchtower stood at one corner of the yard, manned at all times by a guard with a rifle. In another corner was a raised platform with a big searchlight on it at, manned only after dark. The prison warden’s office looked out into the yard and there was a small section of the yard under his window marked off with white painted pebbles – a little garden filled with sickly-looking desert plants.

The yard itself was hard-packed dirt like the town’s roads. You probably couldn’t have dug your way out if you had a pneumatic drill or dynamite. The only way out was up and over the wall. Not that I was thinking of escape. Not at that moment. I wasn’t up to thinking much of anything.

I’d heard it said that you couldn’t get a hangover from alcohol distilled from fermented cactus. I can tell you now that this is a myth. That morning it felt like someone was driving a big spike into my skull and the sunlight hurt my eyes. Old Jack, sitting next to me, thought this was amusing. He seemed totally unaffected.

Being outside during the day was preferable to sitting in a cell trying to breathe the dry dead air. And the heat meant no one wanted to move, so we were unlikely to cause any problems for the guards. The assembled prisoners huddled in whatever part of the yard was currently in shadow, moving around during the course of the day as the sun arced through the sky. At midday everyone went inside for a meal and a siesta. There were only about a dozen prisoners in total.

It was a small prison but Maggotsville itself wasn’t much of a place. Other than Old Jack, my fellow inmates were a handful of locals: a kid on a drunk-driving charge who flew an airbike in through the mayor’s front window and out through the back where there wasn’t a window. A couple of vagrants there for the free food and water. And a man accused of scracking his neighbour’s goat, brought into custody for his own protection. That’s what Old Jack told me, though he may have had the story from an unreliable source. None of these men were real desperadoes. The closest we had to that were a couple of crooks that were straight out of a comic book.

The little one was Paulie Pickles, which was probably an alias. Or maybe his pappy had been an onion farmer. He looked like he’d spent a lot of time on high-gravity planets. It wasn’t just that he was short and squat, he looked like he’d been squashed. His head was a sideways oval and he had no neck. If his legs had been any shorter he’d have been able to scratch his toes without bending. Dark hair sprouted from every bit of his skin, sticking out like spines on a cactus. He was like a hedgehog that someone had sat on. Prickly described him in other ways too. His brow was set in a permanent scowl and his lips had only one setting – sneer. Paulie’s eyes were permanently shadowed and he always looked like he was up to no good. Maybe no one had told him that it was a bad idea for a crook to look like a crook. Though his career options must have been limited by his appearance. His high school counsellor had probably hinted that ‘children’s entertainer’ wasn’t really an option.

Paulie’s partner was Augie ‘The Axeman’ Allsop. Again, I’m thinking the name was a bit of a giveaway. Augie was the muscle and he obviously took this role literally. Even in the blistering heat he was over in a corner loading all the cast-iron weights he could find onto a single bar for lifting. His head was shaved smooth and shiny and he had a thick dark moustache. He pretended not to see me watching him and pulled off his shirt and stood flexing. I like a man who looks like a man, but that bulging muscles thing doesn’t really do it for me. He looked like an orange condom stuffed with walnuts. His tattoos had been done by someone who knew what they were doing – a talented artist or maybe a robot. There was a dragon with its wings spread across his chest – and there was enough space for them to be spread wide.

Augie was vain and he was watching us to make sure we were looking at him. But Paulie was watching us too and that made me uncomfortable.

“Something’s going on,” I said. “He’s watching us.”

“He’s been watching you ever since you got in here,” Jack said, nodding towards Augie and grinning. “I think he likes you.”

I nodded towards Paulie Pickles. “I don’t reckon much to yours.”

“I’ve had worse,” Jack said and cackled.

“Randall!” I looked up