Starship-Killer on the Loom

They killed the starship-killer; I’m just lucky they didn’t kill me too.

Warband ships are funny like that. They’ll throw you down and cut you up on the steel floor, smash the ship-killer drive, grind it under their boots, and kick the shrapnel in your eyes. They’ll lock you up and make you grovel for your life and in the end they let you live.

Well, sort of.

Those steel-boot thugs dropped me along with all the other garbage and waste on the closest planetoid and didn’t look back. Alone, with the debris and the rubble of a dozen scrapped and pulverized ships, they were probably expecting I’d waste away in time.

But not all ship moles are born in the bellies of their ships. I for one was born a farmhand on a moon where we saw a passing vessel as often as we were blue. We worked that land for all it could give and I’d work my tiny shard of space all the same.

It had next to nothing to give with frost-wracked air and acid-ridden soil. But with some of my ever-depleting luck, I found an overhang that protected a strip of land from the murderous rain. It hid a struggling sanctuary of sickly moss, sour berries, and minuscule, withering blue flowers. The moss I could eat and grew quickly with a little care. The berries, with their puckering sweetness, were a treat to myself on the particularly bad days. But the blue flowers were the real project. Their thin stems were akin to linen, like the patch that grew around grandmother’s barn.

She’d shown me how to dry them, how to rake them across the spikes, how to spin them into thread, and weave it on a loom. Here I could do the same in the starlight that blared between storms over the rocks that jutted in spines out of the terrain with a fiddly rock-weighted spindle on a loom of knotted wood from which I whittled out the pegs.

My fingers bled and bled until my hands grew thick with callouses. But as they thickened, my body grew thinner from my meals off the cliff cavern wall. I worked long days with weary joints and heavy eyes, spinning yard after yard in between resurrecting a Frankenstein radio from the pile of rubble they dumped me with.. But in time, marked only by strikes on the rock wall, I had many spools of alien-linen thread and the bleep-bleep of a radio signal.

I sent out my distress call and for a long, cold day I trekked out in search of a suitable dye. The thread was an earthy white so what I needed was rich and dark. Luckily, this life-hating planet had a vast field dusted with ash and slicked with tar. I shoveled as much of the muck as I could carry back to my hideaway into my weakening arms.

I warped my loom from my home-away-from-homespun thread and I began weaving. Not just weaving, but coding.

You see, not all homesteaders keep to the farms they were born on. I for one took a liking to speaking the language of the machines: ones and zeroes, yeses and nos, whites and blacks. White thread interwoven with black, inch by inch, bit by bit, I rewrote my starship-killing code.

I read it back a foot or so as I went, thinking through the execution of every line. Unable to test, to run, to debug, it would have to work the very first time. The nights wore on long and the fabric grew longer as I toiled to the uninterrupted bleep of the radio. I saw ships speed overhead once in a while in the night sky before disappearing into oblivion. But a mere three days after the weaving was done, a rusty bucket of a lander at last responded to my quiet call.

A rogue, merchant trader- the cowboys of the stars- met me at my crack in the planet when dawn’s light sifted through the bitter rain.

“Well met, cousin. You need a lift out of here?”

I nodded, “And a warm meal if you have one to spare.”

“If you can make yourself useful you’ve welcome to tag along until we make port. Say, that’s a mighty interesting scarf you have there. You wouldn’t be willing to part with it, would ya? I’d pay you good.”

“No can do, friend. But I’ll tell you what: you take me along to the Ringrift and I’ll pay you what this thing’s really worth.”

The rogue cocked his brow, “You know Ringrift’s contested skies, right?”

I smiled, “I know. Trust me: it’ll be worth your while.”

For what it was worth, they took my word and I rode that lucky streak to the edge of the system where I had stowed away the first time. At that spaceport I found a shrouded, red haired figure who, with a nod, took that scarf in exchange for a bag of cash which I shared with my roguish friend. I was long gone when news flashed through the verse of the flagship streaking a ribbon of smoke across the sky, killing that thing for good.

As I sat planetside, searching for my next ride, a wanted poster graced every door and window. It brandished a friendly, ginger face, last seen in a black and white scarf. A hand ripped the poster down and stuffed it in a bag, lined with a familiar fabric.

“There you are,” said the brandished face in the flesh, “Let’s get out of here.”