Author : Nik Gregory
The mess hall bustled around Harris; it was like a flock of vultures who had just found an
overturned meat truck. Possession yields not only extended onto property but onto food too, woe
betide anyone who gets the last muffin.
“All I’m saying is there’s something therapeutic about blowing up an
asteroid,” stated Harris, feeling his point needed no justification.
“Spreading atomic waste throughout the entire cosmos is not what I call a therapeutic
activity,” retorted Mila. She came from one of the nameless countries affected by the mass
crawl into nuclear arms – it wasn’t nameless, just no one knew how to
pronounce it except for Mila.
“Honey, we take the green pills for the bio’s, yellow ones for the chems, blue ones
for the millisieverts and the red ones for the gammas,” said Hank; he sat scratching his
sun burnt nose with the end of his spoon. “So I call bull on that.”
She conceded defeat and flickered a smile of someone half her age, “Well on that, we just
got twenty moles and five scarabs in a courier this morning.”
“Twenty moles?” asked Hank.
“Yeah.”
“Shit, what do they expect us to blow up with that?”
Harris hit his head against the table, “We’re supposed to mine them, after all we are
miners.”
“But how else are we supposed to split an asteroid down the fault lines? You can’t
stick a prybar between two faults of nickel and push when they’re a million metric
tonnes.” Hank pulled a cigar out of his breast pocket and tapped it on the table. “So
Mila, what are you doing this evening?”
“I have a date with Guy Mitchells,” came her answer with an extra coy smile on the
side.
“Oh, sorry,” said Harris in a mocking tone. “Are all the Walkers taken
now?”
“I sure as fuck ain’t,” muttered Hank before sticking the cigar in his mouth.
“No, just they come from a small genetic pool.” She gestured toward Ed and Ted, a
pair of non-related identical twins – their genetic line had stayed separate
for over two millennia yet they ended up with identical fashion, beards and even the same scar
gouged over their right eye.
“Okay that’s a valid point.”
“Hell yeah it is, we Walkers ain’t exactly a pretty bunch,” stated Hank to a
puff of smoke, his stubbly chin seemingly more prominent through the haze.
“That’s why I picked a land lover.” She looked down the line to see Guy
approach, his shoulders slenderer than hers and every other Walker.
He leant over, kissed her gently on the cheek and grabbed her muffin, “Thanks babe!”
Harris muttered, “Noob,” along with Hank.
“Oh, ‘hon’, one sec,” started Mila. She right hooked Guy,
sending him toppling to the coarse regolith based concrete as she swiped back her muffin.
Mila’s attention drifted to the two guys and she said clemently, “What, it was the
last one!”
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