A Planet with No Name Read online

  “Crap,” he thought. “Here comes that Smith woman.”

  He turned to his partner in the back of the shop. “Hey! We’ve got company coming.”

  His partner stopped mucking out the horse stall and walked to the front of the shop. “Customer?”

  The farrier wrinkled his nose at the smell of bad sweat and horse manure surrounding his partner. “Nah, it’s that Smith woman.”

  “I wondered when she’d get around to visiting us. I figured she would. As you recall, we’ve had plenty of visitors warn us about her. I know we agree about not liking threats about whose business we should accept and who we should turn down, but our primary customers could drive more business away than this Smith woman can bring in.”

  The farrier shook his head. “I don’t want any more unpleasant visits from Buckner and Dee Halberd.”

  His partner laughed. “Don’t you worry about the Halberds. I mean, what kind of moron goes by Buckner when he could easily use Buck or Bucky. I mean, that’s just silly.”

  “Don’t you discount those snakes. Besides, there isn’t any profit in helping the Smith woman. Everybody knows she’s just about flat broke.”

  “A customer is a customer.”

  “Well, you just put your hard haggling hat on and don’t make any deals for magic beans.”

  Chapter Nine

  The livery stable looked exactly like what it was, a cross between a modern garage and a horse barn. A horse stood in a stall next to a floater on the lift. A pair of matching horses stood waiting to be shod while the farrier banged out a dent in the skirts of a hover truck. The farrier ignored her as she entered the building. Veronica was certain the man saw her.

  “Mrs. Smith, how can I help you?” the other man asked. He was a tall man, a long way over six feet tall. He was naked to the waist, tanned and well muscled. He could not have been more than a few years older. He leaned against a pitchfork causing his biceps to bulge.

  She had seen plenty of college athletes posing that way to impress the cheerleaders. It always made her laugh, but this time it was different. She looked up into his startlingly blue eyes.

  She said, “Well, I need help moving my field robot out of the road.”

  “I noticed that,” he said with a broad grin.

  He had an adorable smile. It was lopsided, but it gave his face character when he smiled.

  “I had a little visit from Buckner Halberd early this morning before you even got into town. He seemed to think it was his place to tell me about my health. He needed to tell me how it wouldn’t be good for my health to assist you on a hot day like this.” The man’s voice matched the smooth cadence of hammer blows from the farrier.

  “Old man Halberd was here? Before I even got into town?”

  The man nodded. “I thought it was right kind of him and his wife, Dee, to stop by with such concerns about my well being.”

  “So, you won’t help me move my field robot?”

  The man’s face filled with a genuine laugh, “I don’t know what gave you that idea. I didn’t give up a profitable government unemployment check to come all the way out here to let someone else tell me what to do, or for that matter, what not to do.” He stepped up to a hose and drenched himself with cold running water.

  Veronica sighed with relief. “You’re the first friendly person I’ve talked to today.”

  The man shook his head. “Easy up there, Mrs. Smith. I didn’t say I was a nice person. I just stated that I don’t take my orders from Buckner Halberd, his wife Dee, or anyone else. I do what I want when I want, and damn anybody that says differently.”

  Veronica blinked. “What do I say after that comment?” Dumfounded, she did not comment.

  “Seems to me that your field robot is only good for scrap metal. Before you say anything, I’ve already taken a long hard look at farm robots for sale on the local auction boards. With farms all across the south going belly-up, there’s more equipment for sale than people are buying. Robots in working condition are plentiful, but still not cheap. Yours doesn’t look like it’s in working condition anymore.”

  “No, he’s not. Did you happen to see any CPUs for sale on the auction boards?”

  “I heard that was your problem, so I did look. Don’t take my word for it now, but I didn’t find any worth buying. It’d be cheaper to buy a whole functioning unit. I’d say your bot is a total write off. It’s just scrap metal now.”

  Veronica shook her head.

  Before she could form a question, the man said, “And my partner and I are the only ones hereabouts who have any need for scrap metal. I’ll move your robot to save you from getting a load of fines from Eustace, but then I keep it and all its parts.”

  Her initial thought was to shout at him, but she kept her voice calm. “Keep him? Even with his processor gone, he’s worth more than all the other machines in this place.”

  “Not to me it ain’t, nor to anyone else between here and Landing City. And you don’t have the equipment to move it a hundred yards out of the street, much less a thousand miles to the big city, where someone might—and I emphasize might—be willing to scrap it out for parts.”

  “But, I…”

  She realized he was right. Cal was almost worthless to her. The robot may have parts and pieces that could be retrofit into some Rube Goldberg contraption, but nothing beyond that. She tried thinking of some exceptions to Cal’s uselessness—none came to mind.

  “I’ll consider your offer, but I need three things from him. First, I want all of the bullets from his body. I don’t know how many there are—”

  “Eight,” he interrupted. “I counted eight shots this morning.”

  “Okay, eight. Second, Cal has nineteen servos in his major joints. I want them all. And third, I want everything in his storage bins.”

  He looked thoughtful. “I don’t know about giving up those servos. They might come in handy with some future retrofit.”

  Veronica shook her head. “I have a hover truck and I might be able to cobble something together to tow my harvester. There isn’t any way to connect them right now.”

  The man nodded. “Good idea. I got a book around here that shows how to do that. Not that I’d try some of the things that book says.” He punched a few buttons on his data-patch, calling up a repair guide.

  Veronica captured a picture of the book’s title and author with her data-patch. I hope this book is buried somewhere in my library. Elias bought more farming books that we could ever hope to use.

  “I need those servos if I’m going to rig something up to harvest my potato crop. Besides, you said you only needed the scrap metal. Cal is a big robot. That’s a lot of scrap metal laying out there in the mud.”

  “All right, deal.” He stuck his hand out to seal the agreement.

  She shook his hand. Why do I feel like a young schoolgirl holding hands for the first time? His hands are rough from hard work but so gentle.

  He gave her hand an easy squeeze. “You find yourself a quiet place to sit. In the middle of the afternoon, the saloon should be quiet and a bit cooler than this place. It might not be a good thing to go there after all; last thing I knew Dillon and Maine Halberd were still there. Still, it’s your call.”

  She could not take her eyes off him as he turned and walked away. Hubba-hubba, look at that tight butt wrapped in those tight denim pants. Oh, my, even his shoulders ripple when he walks. Down girl! You’re too old to swoon over some man, no matter how handsome. She shook her head. Maybe it’s the heat or maybe I’ve been alone too long, after all, it has been a year. Maybe I’m too sexually charged today.

  Before long, the man returned with Cal swinging from hooks on his tow truck’s boom. He spoke to the farrier while Cal swung from the winch. Both men grabbed a handful of tools and approached Cal.

  Veronica popped open every storage bin on Cal’s metal body. She had several things stored, from the insignificant, such as a bottle of water and a few snack packs, to the most important items, lots of too
ls and specialized adapters for his hands and feet. Most of the adapters would be unacceptable as scrap metal as they were made of a hardened titanium ceramic blend. The farrier would not be able to melt the material or pound it into different shapes.

  She showed the men how to open up Cal’s body.

  Before too long, the men had nineteen servos in a pile at their feet. They managed to find only seven bullets, but two were small blobs of mangled metal barely resembling a bullet. They diligently looked for the eighth bullet, even tracing the hole, but found it nowhere. While they worked, the farrier remained silent while Veronica and the other man talked genially.

  She looked over the pile of stuff she collected from Cal. The servos were lighter than she feared, but bulky. Those, plus Cal’s specialized adapters, formed a pile much larger than she originally pictured in her head.

  “Gentlemen, I’m cash poor right at the moment. But, can I offer you trade for that old flitter in the back?”

  The man said, “What have you got to trade that’d be worth me giving up my old high school sweetheart?”

  “I have a potato crop that is ready to harvest. I can bring you a load of potatoes in a week. Or my cows had calves a couple of months ago, I can offer you a calf once they’re weaned.”

  The men looked at each other and shook their heads.

  The man said, “Well, I do have an idea. I’ll loan you—mind you, loan, not sell—my flitter for a week in exchange for sex. You spend the night at our place. Sex when, where, and with who we say.”

  Chapter Ten

  Sex was on Veronica’s mind during the last hour, but the blunt proposal stunned her. She might have consented if it was only him, but it was obvious he had more on his mind.

  Another person had already broken up her marriage. Elias’s betrayal still stung. Would she do the same for the loan of a flitter? She could not do that to this man’s wife. Nothing could make her do that to another woman.

  She said, “I think you should ask your wife first, sir.”

  Both men laughed. He said, “I am married and so’s my partner, but I’m not asking for me. I’m gay and we’re more than just business partners. My wife is his wife’s lover. It worked out well for the Pioneer Compact that way, and by-the-way, thanks for the distraction you and your husband provided. We were expecting a firestorm when word got out that we were two gay and lesbian couples switched up to fit the Compact rules. It seems everybody got all worked up about you and your husband and left us alone. Shame your husband didn’t come along. He would’ve made a right nice addition around here.”

  She asked, “If not for you then, who? You want me to work for you at Tiffany Eustace’s place?”

  The man replied, “Good heavens, no. I was just asking for our wives.”

  “No,” she said. She tried to say more, but all that came out was no.

  “Suit yourself, Mrs. Smith,” the man said. “Thanks for the scrap. If you think of something you want to trade, you come see me. That’s if the Halberds don’t run you off first.”

  She turned her back on them and looked at the pile of metal on the ground. It was bulky, but it did not look too heavy. She laid out her raincoat and piled everything on top. She fastened it closed, wrapped the ends up, and tied the arms to the shoulders. It was heavier than it looked but she wrestled it into place like a backpack. She shifted it around until whatever was poking her in the back quit poking her.

  She nodded to the men as she walked out the front of the livery stable. She looked up and down the street. It was the middle of the afternoon and there were only a few people about. No one looked in her direction except Sheriff Eustace. The man was leaning back in a chair in front of the jail. She ignored him.

  It was a long walk home and the pack already felt too heavy. She turned her face toward home and started walking.

  Veronica was not an athlete, but thankfully, she kept in good shape on Earth. One year on this nameless planet had toughened her up, though a twenty-mile hike carrying a heavy pack was not something she trained for. Certainly, she never prepared for such a long walk in fancy cowboy boots.

  She calculated the twenty miles in her head. It sounded like a long distance, but if she could maintain fifteen minutes per mile, it should only take her five hours to get home. That would get her there before it was fully dark. The sun would be a sitting on the horizon at that time, but it would be light enough to walk. Their new planet had thirty hour days, making for longer sunlight hours and consequently, longer nights.

  Even if she slowed down to three miles per hour, she would be home before it grew completely dark. It was not her habit to work from sunup to sundown. That was difficult to do even for the hardest worker. After a dozen hours of farm labor, she would quit, shower, and eat supper. She spent the rest of the evening deep in her books.

  Most of the other people who signed onto the Pioneer Compact brought entertainment systems with vast libraries of vids and vid games. She and Elias ignored that component of modern society. They preferred the written word, focusing primarily on non-fiction works. She had enough books to start her own public library for anyone wanting to read math books, chemistry books, and every other “-ology” book they could find. It was an excellent start for a future university library.

  The road north of town started out broad and smooth but had a tendency to get slimmer, smaller, and rougher the farther north she traveled. Most people living north of town flew above the road, never actually touching it. The local grasses did not fare well once stepped on. It took them a long time to bounce back. Without bugs, animals, or man, the plants had not developed the ability for rapid self-repair.

  Her land was at the end of the road but by the time it reached her place, it was the end of the path. Still, it was an easy road to follow as it ran parallel to the Cold Water River for the first two miles and then ran between the Left Fork and Right Fork streams. All the springs and creeks on her property meandered into the two streams flowing south into the Cold Water River and on through Peaceful Junction.

  The land north of her place was mountainous, rough, empty, and unclaimed. There was plentiful land for the few people who arrived on the first colony ship. That would change in four more years when the second wave of colonists would arrive with resupplies. Another hundred thousand people would go unnoticed in this large continent. Even a couple million people on a planet the size of Earth could spread out so far that any neighbor would be a day’s travel away.

  The majority of their settlers elected to live in Landing City, building apartments, working in tall office buildings, and riding buses to work and home again. People being what they were, she did not expect the second wave of colonists to be much different from the first. She was a city girl, born and bred, but she did not see the benefit of clustering together.

  With flitters and floaters, the average driver could travel a thousand miles from a farm like hers to Landing City in a couple of hours. She could have been home from Peaceful Junction in five minutes if she had a modern flitter or air car. She did have an old hover truck, but Cal had provided a smoother ride than the used farm truck.

  The longer she lived on her farm, the more she believed that the basic human design was for them to live in the open spaces, not jammed together one on top of another. Her history studies all but proved that the more nomadic the society, the more peaceful it was. Oh, there were exceptions of course, but Genghis Khan’s Mongol Hordes were not truly a nomadic society, nor were the Cossacks of the Russian Steppes. Her society theory was still a work in progress. No matter how hard she tried, she could not fit the Native American Apache into any semblance of peaceful nomadic form.

  The thought of Apaches caused her to look around, not that she was worried about her safety. The only animal on the planet that would harm her was human and she would be able to see any of those coming from a long way off. There were no lions, no tigers, no bears, and thankfully, no stobor. There were no mosquitoes, spiders, or scorpions, not even this close to the st
ream.

  Veronica walked on. Draining her water bottle, she stopped to refill it from the creek and look around. She did not have a way to gauge her progress other than measuring the time on her data-patch compared against local landmarks.

  Her data-patch had a built-in GPS, but the Pioneer Compact had not launched the Global Positioning System satellites yet. They decided to place weather and communications satellites in orbit first. She did not know what was causing the holdup. All of the satellites had been prebuilt on Earth. The spaceship shuttles were still operational though the colonists completely dismantled and repurposed the original colony ship. It should have been an easy task to take the satellites up and shove them out the shuttle door. Not that it mattered since she did not expect to get lost, GPS or no GPS. She could not get home any faster with the ability to track her progress.

  She thought the copse of trees to the east looked familiar, but she was not certain. Thinking she was still hours away, she picked up the pace and walked faster. Having to walk twenty miles in a civilization that developed space travel was an odd conundrum, but she enjoyed the walk—so far.

  It grew dark and Veronica slowed down.

  It grew darker and she slowed down, even more, guiding herself along the road by the sound of the stream. She pulled up a display on her data-patch, turned the brightness up to its weak maximum, and locked the screen into place near her feet. It did little more than allow her to dodge around a misplaced rock or rut.

  Their first moon breached the horizon, showering the landscape with reflected light, yet her pace slowed even further. Her boots hurt her feet. The straps of the modified backpack cut into her shoulders. Her hands were tired of swinging at the ends of her arms. She thought the land was relatively flat, but now she would swear in any court of law—if their new world had them—that every step was not just uphill, but up a steep incline.