A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters - Martin Harry Greenberg [105]
I remember the yeti dragging Ned like a broken doll. I doubt he considers that accident so happy anymore. “You keep your daughters from killing him because he’s a desperate, unhappy man, or because he’s Uncanny?”
Bernie chews on his pipe stem. “Don’t know.”
“You’re an odd man yourself, Bernie.”
“You’ll get odd too, spending time with yeti.”
“Think I’ll be spending time with them?”
“Let’s put it this way. You know how they call me the Vermont Shaman. None of my girls can inherit the position. Needs a human.”
I blink. “Are you saying—”
He puts a hand on my shoulder and meets my eyes, smiling. “I’m saying I’m damn glad you moved to Vermont.”
INVASIVE SPECIES
Nina Kiriki Hoffman
My name is Random Delaney. I’m a vermin hunter, but I’m not allowed to use real bullets. Bullets and lasers are a little hard on spaceships, and that’s where I generally ply my trade. I have a lot of other cool ordnance, though, some of which I don’t understand. I was trained by a Skikka, and you know how those guys are, all about the mystery, you can never see behind the veil, yada yada ping pong. Some of the stuff I use, he didn’t even tell me what it was called, which makes it hard to reorder.
There’s a bunch of different ways to squik a ship. The best and easiest is the Total Body Squik. If the ship is between trips, you can do the job outside of atmosphere. If everyone’s cleared out and took all their junk with them, you gas the whole thing, sonic it to kill all the gas-resistant pests, wander through in your suit and shoot anything else that moves, then open up the doors and vent the atmosphere and everything else not tied down. After that, you scrub every surface with all-purpose pest-end and blast every crack and nook and do it all again.
This is my favorite method, because it’s sweet and simple and you get to totally explore a ship—systemworks and living areas and everything in between—at your leisure. I love alone time when I can snoop. People think they’ve taken everything, but there are stashes that maybe they forgot about, under panels, alongside cables, in conduits, tucked into workings and waste space. I find things. Sometimes not even solid things, but records and memories. It’s all treasure. I can swoof the solids out of the ship with a little beacon attached and pick them up later, if it’s worth the trip. The memories I store with my own.
Second easiest is to squik the ship while it’s in port, though atmosphere complicates things. So many things can survive in atmosphere, we constantly need new bug-stompers. And you have to watch the pesticides harder after you’re done with them.
Almost nobody wants the Total Body Squik. Often people discover they have pests while they can’t stop what they’re doing long enough for a decent all- wash. Most of my jobs involve pest hunting while people are in residence. Cuts down on the poison options a bunch, and requires more finesse, not one of my strong suits.
The Evander job looked simple. An in-system run, like most of my jobs—I’m planet-based for now, and maybe forever. I’d need hella big jobs to be able to afford my own runabout so I could go to where the work is, and a fortune would have to fall out of the sky before I could afford to system jump. While I’m waiting for that ship to come in, I get enough routine work to keep the four-year-old daughter in nutriblocks.
The only thing different about Evander was it was a luxury run. Big old cruise liner, ferrying rich people around the solar system while they gorge on great food and enjoy the zero-G pleasure rooms, low-G gyms, and all kinds of other entertainments. Never traveled on one of those before; most of my clients were small-time freighters and haulers and the cold- sleep ships that took workers from Terra to Luna, Mars, Titan, other local colonies, and the asteroid belt.
Evander’s chief engineer thought the ship had metal mites, so I geared up for that, but I also packed the rest of my armaments, and the most important equipment I own, my suit. Armor, personal climate, propulsion unit, weapons nest,