Short Story – The Flower of the Scav

“The Flower of the Scav”
Finished on 02 August 2022

 

               A gaggle of pebble-sized asteroids that had been peacefully drifting for centuries suddenly fluttered in every which direction as the propulsion of an ivory spacecraft sputtered past them. Not long after, a midnight black one of about the same size trailed. The first craft made a sharp turn to the upper right, twisting as it dove up in the black vacuum surrounding Vega 6, a brilliantly red gas planet gleaming in the sunlight from the star far away. The second ship followed.

               Inside the tailing spacecraft, the assistant AI beeped. “Warning: the asteroid belt around Vega 6 is considered a hazard area. This spacecraft is not rated-”

               “I know, dammit, I know,” the Scavenger on the sticks grumbled, eyes never leaving the off-white spacecraft to his front.

               The AI didn’t stop speaking, “for space debris and asteroids that may appear.”

               “Gotdammit,” he groaned as he strengthened his clench on the joystick. “I get it, but we’ve got to do this.”

The Scav’s lips clenched as he winced, “Ah, fuck.” Tightening his muscles reminded him of the wound on his left bicep. He glanced down at it, noting that the blood had not stopped flowing from it.

Callously, his ship responded, “Hazard acceptance noted.”

The Scav rolled his eyes, glancing back up at the spacecraft to his front before deciding to do something about his wound. It wasn’t the worst hit he had ever taken. Glancing blows from blaster wounds typically weren’t too lethal, often cauterizing most of the area they hit. While it wasn’t as cauterized as he thought it would be when he got it, he could still use his arm fine, mostly. But if he didn’t do anything, he worried he would pass out from losing blood.

With one arm keeping the joystick under control at a time, he slipped off his black leather jacket, down to the dirty-white waffle henley underneath. With his good arm, he whipped out the knife from his shin-high boots and cut off the sleeve of his henley from above the wound, skilfully using his knees to keep the joystick in its place for a moment while he slipped off the bloody sleeve.

The ship he chased took a sharp turn around an asteroid much larger than them both. The Scav put the knife in his mouth like a pirate, returning both hands to the joystick to yank his craft in an evasive manoeuvre to follow. The loose items in his cockpit rattled as he pulled G’s. He followed the trail of the ship in front of him for about 20 seconds before he caught sight of it again, vectoring off towards another group of asteroids somewhat in the distance. The Scav twisted his ship around, pulled up, and followed.

After taking the knife from his mouth, the Scav wiped the sweat from his forehead and put the knife back into his boot, setting the sleeve on his lap while he reached back into the compartment behind him. His eyes stayed trained on the ship in front as he rummaged around, his fingers slipping and sliding around all the odds and ends in the little box. Batteries, no, cologne, no, duct tape, no, water bottle, no, deodorant, no. Where was it?

Finally, his sweaty fingertips found the half-full flask of some unknown middle-shelf gin he had picked up a day or two before. He ripped it out of the compartment, the lid slapping closed behind him. He twisted the cap of the flask with his teeth to get it loosened, then set it between his thighs, pinching the base still as he got the rest of the lid off with his free hand.

The Scav gave the flask a quick glance, nodded briefly to one side, and took a couple of sips. “Ah,” he exasperated as he pressed his knees up against the joystick to hold it steady. He held the sleeve of his henley off his lap and poured some gin on it, some slipping on his dark blue jeans beneath. Acceptable losses, he decided.

Twisting the cap back on with his free hand in the same manner he had put it on in the first place, the Scav tossed the bottle to the side compartment and began putting the gin-and-blood-soaked bandage around his wound. A tourniquet would be too restrictive, he reasoned, and he needed to use his arm. His breathing picked up as the burning alcohol touched the open cavity, but he did his hardest to not make a noise. The pain was easier for him when he knew it was coming.

Wrapping the sleeve around his arm a couple of times, he grabbed one end with his teeth and yanked on the other with his free hand, eyes reactively bulging from the pain. He hardly thought about it for more than a second, though, instead thinking, “What have I gotten myself into.”

Returning both hands to the joystick, the Scav kept his eyes trained on the cream-coloured craft in front, dancing his own craft around asteroids of all sizes to keep on him. The white ship was a little faster on the straightaways, but his ship could turn sharper. How fortunate was it, the Scav thought, that his adversary put himself in a situation where his ship would have a chance against him.

“Caution: approaching danger area,” alarmed the Scav’s ship. Ahead of both ships, the cloud of a nebula appeared and grew closer as the ships headed in its direction. Danger, the Scav knew. Tiny rocks made up those clouds, some smaller than a coin and others bigger than the ship. None you could see until the last second, all of which could wreak havoc on small ships like theirs.

“Surely he won’t,” murmured the Scav, realising that the pale ship could be planning on diving into the cloud. It could be a death sentence for both of them. At the very least, their ships would take some damage. No way of predicting how bad, or which instruments could be damaged.

For a second, he debated pulling off the chase. His ship, an older model, was even less likely to take those hits and make it through. Was it even worth it for him to continue? What did he have to prove by catching down the ivory ship, anyways?

Without any hesitation, the creamy ship sped right into the cloud, a ripple of dust pushing out from his entry point. The Scav snapped to the decision that catching that ship was more important than anything else, so he gritted his teeth and zoomed his ship into the cloud, trying his best to follow in the wake of the ivory ship to avoid damage.

Even with his precautions, the sound of rock flakes peppering the outside of his ship immediately began. The ship alarmed, “Warning: ship taking damage from external debris.” The Scav noticed the rocks left marks as they bounced off his front window. He hoped they could be wiped off and weren’t going to crack the glass.

“Come on, baby,” the Scav cheered as his ship went deeper and deeper into the cloud. No way of telling how much further it would go. All he had to go off was the rough wake of the ship he trailed. Hopefully it didn’t crash into anything too big, he wished, because he’d surely follow.

A red light started flashing across the dashboard. “Crash imminent! Crash imminent!” his ship alarmed. The Scav gasped, unable to see any larger asteroids through the dust he drove through. But he knew something was out there – something big. Otherwise, the sensors of the ship wouldn’t have picked it up.

In the split second he had to decide what to do, he realised the route in front of him would have triggered the sensors, so he reasoned whatever it was had to be directly ahead. He decided to take a gamble and pull up, into the uncleared part of the cloud not parted by the wake of the ivory ship and potentially towards right towards the object his ship picked up. 

So he wrenched his joystick back as much as he could while turning down the throttle of his engine so he didn’t veer too far off from the trail of the ivory ship. Even more rocks bounced against his cockpit window.

The Scav only had his mind to picture where he was in relation to the path he trailed, so he veered up for a few seconds before flicking the controls to turn back down to try and find the trail again.

But before he could, a crash from outside rocked his seat, vibrating with tremendous vigour and sending the ship into a mad spin. The Scav looked out his left window to see what had hit him and confirmed the worst – a rock the size of a helmet had hit the wing’s engine, tearing a hole through it, rendering it useless. It would cost a fortune to fix, but he didn’t care about that. Now with half the engine power he had before, the Scav only worried about how he would catch up to his slightly-quicker adversary.

Before he could work on that, the Scav needed to get his spiralling ship back under control, so he hit the switches on his dashboard sending compressed air across points on the wings to stabilise it while doing his best to increase any power to the remaining engine in the opposite direction of the spin. Rocks slammed against the side of his window. The Scav remembered that a big enough one would crack the glass and suck all the air from his cabin, killing him. A particularly rough crash echoed on his window, but the Scav was too focused on regaining control to assess it. 

By the grace of luck, the Scav found a way to get his ship back under control despite its damages. As another stoke of good fortune, his ship burst from the cloud into free, open space. The Scav took a deep breath, pulling air into every nook and cranny of his lungs, relieved that he had managed to cheat death yet again.

But as he did, he noticed a hairline crack had begun to form on his window. He ran across it with his fingertips. It was smooth on the inside, so only the outside layer had cracked. He reasoned it should hold for now.

“Why must I be like this,” lamented the Scav. A mere piece of reinforced glass had been the only barrier from him and violent death in the middle of space where nobody would find him for decades. Or longer, potentially. And now, that piece of glass was compromised.

He only gave himself a second before he started frantically searching for the ivory ship. Did it not make it out? The Scav worried that all the damage to his ship and his body would be for nothing if it didn’t.

Sure enough, the ivory ship popped out of the clouds itself, only crawling after clearly taking a good licking inside the clouds. Most of one wing was missing and it moved considerably slower, taking damage to the engines as well.

“Gotcha,” commented the Scav, lowering the nose of his ship and engaging his thruster. Despite only having one working engine left, the Scav’s ship had little problem catching right up to the pale ship.

He pulled aside it and beckoned to the pilot through their tinted glass. “It’s over,” yelled the Scav at his window. He knew there was no way the other pilot could hear him, but it made him feel better anyway.

Then began a lengthy and bizarre process of the Scav essentially escorting the battered ivory ship to its unknown destination. The Scav had no plan, no way of apprehending the pilot of the ivory ship while they flew, no idea where they were going. He just followed it, hoping something opportune would happen.

At one point, the power in the Scav's ship turned off. No warning from the ship, just lights-out as it drifted at the same speed through space. The Scav shot his eyes to the wing where one of the engines once was. Sparks arced across it, shorting the circuitry.

"Dammit, not now!" he shouted. But he knew his ship well enough to begin going through a troubleshooting process that just might work for him, starting by turning it off and on. No dice. Then he tried turning on the battery power only. The lights on his dash went on. Good, he thought. He needed those life support systems working. But when he tried the engine start-up, it coughed but remained off. He only had one more trick up his sleeve, but he felt confident in it working. He put the thrusters only a third of the way full to choke the system, cranked the power-on lever, and as soon as his remaining engine started coughing an initial blast of flames, he instantly turned the thrusters to their highest power. The ship rocketed forward, slightly ahead of the ivory ship before the Scav had enough control to return it to its normal speed. The Scav gasped in relief.

"SOS transmission received," the ship barked as if nothing had happened.

"How nice of you to join me again," the Scav quipped, flicking switches on the dash to check the life support systems. “But from where?”

"Now playing message," the ship continued. A transmission of only static proceeded to play for about ten seconds before shutting off. The Scav didn't react.

After about fifteen minutes, the silhouette of an old cargo ship appeared in the distance. The ivory ship beamed right towards it. The Scav grunted.

It didn’t take long for the cargo ship to get close enough for the Scav to examine it. Inscribed on its worn side right below the bridge of the ship in a hardly-legible murky green read "Emma’s Penance.” It looked abandoned, sitting in the middle of this rock formation for at least a couple of decades. But it was a big enough ship to become a hideaway for somebody who didn’t want to be noticed.

The Scav pressed his ship as close as he could to the side of his adversary’s in case it tried to enter the cargo ship somewhere small. Thankfully, as they got close enough, the entire back portion of the ship was agape, enough for at least three more ships about their size. The Ivory ship took a spot close to a door on the inside wall, with the Scav landing his ship to the side of it.

The red lights on the inside walls of the cargo ship flashed on and began spinning, and sure enough, the decrepit workship came to life as the bay door began to close behind them. The Scav winced as he grabbed a bulky pistol sitting in a holster on his thigh with the hand of his injured arm. The pale tips of his fingers throbbed, but he could push through.

After the bay doors closed, oxygen began hissing in from vents on the walls. As soon as that began, the Scav unhooked his safety harness and squatted in his seat, ready to spring out the second air had refilled the bay. He was unsure if the decrepit cargo ship still could fill the bay with enough air to be safe to exit, but he needed to get through the bay door as quickly as possible to chase the pilot of the ivory ship, so he forwent putting on his space suit. It could take would take too much precious time to put on, despite the grave risk not having one in a vacuum could pose.

A tense couple seconds passed before the red lights on the walls of the bay turned green. With a mighty roar in case this was the last time he would ever open the hatch of his cockpit, the Scav cranked the release with whatever strength he could find in his good arm and pushed the window up. The Scav inhaled a relieving breath of oxygen from the outside as he hopped out.

Across from him, the Scav saw his target flee from his own ship and make his way towards the bay door. The other pilot struggled as he moved, clenching his gut with one arm and flailing around his own blaster behind him with the other. His helmeted face hardly turned around as he limped, firing a short salvo of shots into the bay behind him, missing the Scav entirely. 

The Scav switched his blaster to his good arm and took aim. He could go for his torso, but aimed for his legs instead. Just as the other pilot had made it to the door, the Scav pulled the trigger, hitting his thigh. The other pilot yelled as he tripped through the door, his blaster sprawling on the ground ahead of him, far out of reach. The Scav seized the opportunity and dashed as fast as he could to the doorframe, trying to make it through before the man had a chance to close the bay door.

The other pilot struggled to spin himself around back towards the door’s controls as the Scav sprinted at him, an arm only reaching for the door's lever as the Scav burst through the doorframe.

A mighty kick from the Scav’s foot flung the man's hand away, his blaster pointing right at the other pilot’s head. The other pilot reactively crawled backwards.

"It's over," the Scav declared with a scowl as the other pilot propped himself against the wall behind him.

The other pilot grunted, a wound on his stomach irking him as much as the new one on his thigh was. The man garbled something the Scav couldn't understand through his helmet. But the Scav didn't care.

"Just hand it over," he ordered.

The other pilot, understanding he wasn't heard, began to take off his helmet. Smooth, sweaty, skin on the top of his exposed head glinted in the lame lighting of the hallway they had found themselves in.

"I said fuck you!" he yelled, angry blue eyes piercing right into his adversary.

The Scav sighed. "Come on, man! Since the ransom went south, I got shot, my ship lost an engine, and now I'm in the middle of gotdamn nowhere in this piece of shit cargo ship that could fall apart at any time. I’m looking for reasons to not blast you right now."

The wrinkles on the other pilot’s head tightened along with his lips. "Fine," he groaned, reaching into the pocket of his coat.

"No more funny business," the Scav declared, knowing anything could be in his pocket.

The other pilot removed his hand from his pocket to cover his mouth, hiding a smirk as he coughed. His hand soon went inside and reappeared from his jacket, revealing a black cube slightly bigger than his palm. He set it on the ground beside him rather delicately, grunting as he pushed it forward across the ground.

“Even if you’re with it, it will always be mine,” announced the other pilot.

“Right,” the Scav responded as he caught it underneath his foot. Keeping his eyes and blaster towards the man, he bent over and picked it up. Blood from the man's hand covered the outside of the perforated, plastic cube. He rubbed the top of it against his pants, then brought it up between his eyes and his blaster. A small window had revealed itself through the blood, revealing a modest, orange flower, sitting in a bed of dirt stabilised by the curious cube.

“You even didn’t take care of it! It needed more water and sun,” the Scav accused, eyeing the discolouration in the pedals. “How could you let something so precious slowly die while you’ve got your dirty shithooks responsible for it?”

"I did the best I could," the man claimed, blood beneath his mouth from coughing. “I really cared for that flower.”

“Clearly not!” An intense internal rage burned through The Scav’s eyes as they burrowed themselves deep into the other pilot. “It takes two seconds each day! If you really cared, you would have watered it and set it facing the sun.”

“I have a lot on my plate right now!” snarled the other pilot.

“Then why hold on to it if you can’t care for it?” the Scav rebutted, his grip tightening on his weapon.

The other pilot stared right back at the Scav with a disgruntled look of his own. But his look dropped, and he sighed. "It doesn't matter now, anyway. We're both dead. I'm bad, and your ship is fucked."

The Scav remembered the poor state of his ship. It would be a challenge to make it back in. "Then give me my money back," he demanded. "You won't need it, then."

The man sneered, unwilling to give the Scav anything more.

The Scav raised his blaster up, reminding the man he still had all the cards in his hands. "If you hadn't run off, I'd have probably given you it to begin with."

The man grunted. "Fine!" he screamed, jabbing a hand into another pocket. He yanked out a plastic bag, stuffed to the brim of cash. He threw it as hard as he could at the Scav, who caught it by his stomach with the hand carrying the flower. The Scav winced, remembering the wound on his bicep. He shoved cash and flower in his pants pocket.

"Now what, you gonna kill me?" the man questioned.

The Scav ignored him, keeping his blaster trained on the man as he walked over to the other pilot’s blaster laying on the floor. "I'm taking this, too," the Scav announced as he grabbed it off the floor.

"No!" the man growled, sweat dripping down from his barren head. 

"I'm not letting you shoot my ship as I leave," the Scav responded.

"Ah, fuck you, man," the other pilot cried out.

The Scav backed up towards the door. "You didn’t care for it."

"It’s mine! I can do whatever I want to it!" he squealed back.

"You never deserved it to begin with."

The other pilot continued blabbering behind the Scav, who cranked the lever in the hallway, dashing through the door before it began closing behind him. He pulled another lever on the inside of the bay. The speaker system announced, "Bay decompression beginning in: two minutes."

The Scav debated using the other pilot’s ship because his was so damaged. But the ivory ship was in even worse shape, with a tremendous hole across the cockpit and the engines having been battered hard in the nebula, in addition to a full wing missing. So he ran towards his ship, hopping in and closing the cockpit shut.

"Fuck," the Scav gasped, noting a new blaster mark on his cockpit window from when the man had blindly fired back. He threw the blasters on the console next to him, digging in the back through his box of trinkets behind him for his tape. 

“Bay decompression override: complete. Beginning decompression now,” the loudspeaker outside reverberated.

The Scav’s eyes widened as the green lights on the side of the bay switched red and began to spin. “That son of a bitch started it early!” he exclaimed before gasping. “The flower!”

In the last seconds before the bay outside of his ship decompressed, the Scav pulled the flower out of his pocket and put it into a special air-tight container next to him designed for this exact situation. He cranked the lid of it shut and looked at the dainty orange pedals as he took a full breath in, hoping the material his window was composed of still had the strength to keep the void of space from pulling the air out of his ship and suffocating him. “At least you’ll make it,” the Scav whispered.

Air whooshed around his ship as it was forced into the vents in the bay. His window shook, but thankfully, it held. Even so, he didn't trust it for holding for the entire journey back. So he reached behind him into the compartment and swiftly procured the tape, and began desperately attempting to tape the part of the window hit by the blaster in case it didn’t hold. He taped far more than he should have around it, hoping it would be enough. After he was content, he glanced at the crack on the other side of his window from the nebula. “Might as well reinforce that, too,” he thought, putting some precautionary tape on the inside of it.

He knew he needed to get out of the cargo bay in case the other pilot tried anything else. So he began flicking all the necessary switches to start the ship. Again, the engines wouldn't start, so he used his trick to get it going. It didn’t work. 

“Come on, baby,” he encouraged, glancing up into the bay, looking for the other pilot. He tried his trick again and got it going the second time around. The Scav lifted his ship from the bay floor and had just spun it around before catching the bay door open out of the corner of his eye. He peeked over, the other pilot emerging in a spacesuit with a large blaster.

“Oh, fuck no,” commented the Scav as he set his remaining thruster on full, jolting the ship forward. Blaster rays soon zoomed around his craft as he escaped the cargo ship before making a sharp turn up, avoiding the other pilot’s reckless fire.

“Not today,” commented the Scav after slipping through another desperate attempt by the other pilot to take him out.

As his ship began cruising through space, the Scav began the painstaking process of putting on his spacesuit while inside his vehicle. He scraped his bandaged arm on the outside of the spacesuit, remembering his wound from earlier.

It sparked an assessment of everything he'd just done. Some of his fingers were losing their feelings. His arm hurt. His bandage reeked of blood and booze. Speaking of open cavities, the one where his engine used to be had become a liability to his ship’s the electronic systems. it might not make it. But let’s say it did. That money he got back from the other Scav was his saving from the past few months, but even if he sold the other pilot’s blaster, it still probably wouldn’t be enough to cover all the damage to his ship. Accounting for all of that, this entire journey had cost him dearly.

The Scav leaned over the side of his seat to look through the transparent cover of the air-tight container. A light-blue light emanated from inside, shining right on the innocent flower. The only thing that mattered to him, though, was that he got it back.

“You deserve a little care,” he told the flower through the glass. So he pulled his arms back out from the inside his spacesuit, procuring the bottle of water from the compartment behind him, and opened the air-tight container. He reached down inside and grabbed the flower, carefully wiping the remaining blood off its container with his shirt before opening the compartment where it could be accessed from.

The tainted pedals hardly showed their ordinarily sunset orange colouring, worn from not being taken care of. Still, though, they were as beautiful as ever in the Scav’s eyes. He carefully took the nozzle of his water bottle and dropped a tiny bit of water inside its container. “There you go,” he remarked. “The closer you get to nothing, the more alive you can become.” 

For just a second, the Scav’s scowl lifted into a subtle, yet content grin as he rotated the flower in his hand. Void of any other problems going on in the universe at that time, he had found himself to be completely encapsulated by the little flower, as if everything else had ceased to be an issue.

Unfortunately for the Scav, the ship’s power shut off again, darkening the cockpit and making the Scav jump. He instinctively shoved the flower back into the airtight container, locking it shut first before hastily finishing putting on his spacesuit.

As soon as he got it on, he began his trick to get his ship started. One try, nothing. Two tries, nothing. Three tries, nothing.

“Come on…” he remarked. Four tries, nothing. Five, six, seven, eight. “Oh no…” He tried about a five or six more times before he stopped. Maybe if he gave it a couple of seconds to rest, it would turn back on. That could work, right?

But the Scav’s luck took a turn for the worse. His ship had been heading towards Vega 6 to circumvent the nebula. When the ship’s engines died, it left his ship heading in a crash course right towards the brilliantly red gas giant. If he couldn’t get the engine started soon, his ship would burn up in the atmosphere. Or if it somehow survived, he'd be crushed under the pressure of the gas giant’s immense gravity.

The Scav smashed the dashboard of his ship with his fists. Some of the tape holding on the window came loose, sucking air from the cockpit. “Not now!” he begged as it wooshed around him. He tried starting it again. Nothing. “Not after all of this!” 

The Scav kept trying it and trying it, his time slowly ticking away. After another half dozen or so more tries, he again slammed his fist on the dashboard. He flicked all the switches off, all the life support systems down, everything. For a couple tense seconds, he sat in the completely dark ship before frantically trying everything he could to get it going one last time. “I’ve got to get you out of here!”

 

A smooth, summer breeze rolled in through the window, gently pushing the sterile, white curtains. A crimson sunset beamed in through the screen, shining right on a table next to the bed. On the table laid a couple of letters and a vase, which contained a tiny, apricot-coloured flower. A picture of a man and a woman, smiling ear-to-ear in front of a black car leaned on the vase. Behind the table was a monitor, beeping steadily while hooked up with several different wires to a few computers about the room. A few tubes lead the bed, the man in the photo with a cast wrapped around his bicep as he laid in a deep, uninterrupted slumber. 

In the corner of the room in a red chair sat a young woman, the other person in the photo, reading a book. Most of the letters on the table were addressed by her as well.

Suddenly, the monitor flatlined, a piercing buzz now emanating from it. The girl’s eyes sprang up from her book and she threw it to the side as she rushed to the side of the bed. “Nurse! Nurse!” she yelled, gripping the good arm of the man with both hands.

A flock of medical personnel stormed into the room, some bumping her as they gathered around. They began their tasks trying to stabilize the situation, with one doctor ordering, “AED! And be careful of the arm!” A nurse grabbed the defibrillator as others took apart the man’s outfit, exposing his chest. They strapped the device to him, and someone yelled, “clear!”

The shock jolted the man’s body upward with his casted arm hardly budging. But he remained in his slumber, the machine’s constant buzz still droning in the background. “Again!” ordered the doctor. The woman’s eyes remained wide.

For a second time, the defibrillator sent a jolt through the man, but he remained limp. “Keep at it,” the doctor commanded. Again, nothing. Another time, nothing. With each passing shock, the bags under the woman’s eyes sank more and more.

“It’s not looking good,” the doctor commented to an orderly after about a dozen tries, too close to the woman for her to not hear. “We should probably call it.”

A lifeless pale crept over the woman’s face as she heard this. “This can’t be it,” she gasped. “It just can’t!” Desperate, she looked back at the man’s face for any sign of life. 

But his eyes were moving. Like during an intense dream, they beamed in every which direction underneath his eyelids. Her heart just couldn’t accept that somebody wasn’t trying inside the quasi-lifeless body in front of her. Instinctively, she reached out and slapped the unconscious man across the face. “Come on!” she urged.

The woman snapped a pointer finger at the orderlies operating the defibrillator. “Again!” she commanded. The nurses looked at each other briefly and shrugged before zapping the man one last time.