The Star Pirate's Folly

Chapter 3: Swashbucklers

A wiry ex-privateer captain named Slack Dog stumbled into the hotel bar with his luggage early one morning and didn't leave. Normally Buttercup would have been back in the kitchen helping prep breakfast, but she was the only one around who knew the bar.

It didn't take her long to learn Slack Dog's story; the moment he sat down he began slurring on about his grand adventures and his startup deep-space exploration and adventuring company. What a nut. In just two hours she must have poured him a dozen drinks, and each time he ran out—

"Another," Slack Dog grunted, and pounded his empty mug down. He fished a black coin out of his pocket and rapped it repeatedly against the wooden bar while Buttercup refilled his mug. She waved away the coin—it was the third time he'd tried to pay with them. Everything was done in credits on the Core worlds.

"It's on your tab, sir," she reminded him. Old ex-captains always liked to be called sir. "Credits, remember."

"Ah, mm-hm," he said, completely ignoring her as he watched her fill the mug.

Buttercup poured until the pink foam just crested the lip. The deep red beverage, dubbed "lotus beer," was the local intoxication of choice, deriving its properties from a psychoactive fruit called the lotus which grew exclusively on Surface. Lotus beer gave a pleasant body buzz, mild euphoria, and a sense of relaxation. At high doses it induced naps. Slack Dog slid the mug in front of himself with bony fingers and slurped the sweet, fizzy bubbles from the top with a half-lidded look of bliss.

Hargrove had stocked up on lotus beer in preparation for the upcoming Fated Lovers Festival celebrating the approach of a pair of comets with boring official scientific names Buttercup couldn't remember. Everyone called them Orpheus and Eurydice.

Supposedly their trajectory indicated that the comet in the lead, Orpheus, would make it safely around Lux, their system's star; but Eurydice would at last, after hundreds of years following the same orbit as Orpheus, plow straight into the inferno and be absorbed by Lux.

Apparently it was just like some old story from Earth and everyone was raving about it.

"Used to be a privateer cap'n, y'know," Slack Dog mumbled. "The starship Wanderlust. She were a fickle ship, she were—"

"Yes, sir," Buttercup said, nodding. "You told me all about her."

"Oh, howbout that. Did I tell y'about Cap'n Slack Dog's Deep-Space—"

"—Adventuring Company, yes," she finished for him.

He belched and made a monosyllabic grunt of recognition, glancing over his shoulder at the entrance to the bar. Buttercup knew he'd been looking for someone all day, checking anyone who walked through the doors. There weren't many other guests up that early, so the only people he'd seen were other hotel employees.

"You want anything to eat?" she asked.

His eyes shot open wide, the whites stark against tributaries of spindly red veins.

"To eat? Yes. Food."

Slack Dog rummaged through his pocket for more of his odd black coins, and scattered them across the counter before Buttercup could protest again.

"Food please," he said.

Buttercup suppressed a sigh and tapped an order into the viewscreen in front of her, suspecting the highly intoxicated man didn't much care what he was served. She slid most of the coins back to Slack Dog, but left two for herself in absence of a tip; Slack Dog was apparently not used to the custom. She wondered from where the inky black coins might have come. They were all uniform in size and color, but they didn't seem to weigh enough, which puzzled her as she rolled them in her fingers. Around the edge of the coin was a thin silver band.