Picking fruit

On a distant planet, the convicts pick fruit under the hateful stare of sun and overseer

Chapter 1 -- Fruit of Your Crime

"Yeah, that one dummy!"
"No, the other one just beside it."
"With the thorns sticking out."

The corporate overseer, a fleshy slum guard in painted plastic body armor, pointed his swagger stick at the clump of giant red and brown berries covering the tall bush just to the side of the robot train.

Two of the crew of indentured criminals leaned out of the slowly moving, open topped car and set about trying to grab one of the globules with their bare hands.

One of them, a lanky and balding individual with the silvered hair of a high club membership yelped and pulled back his hands, sucking at the fingers.

"Ouch! Jeekus God in her Chariot! That hurts!"
He exclaimed and turned around to show the overseer his bleeding palms.

The overseer, unmoved, simply swatted the man over the head and encouraged him back to work.

"Pick that damn fruit, you soft handed fruit-picker you!"

The overseer, Gloven, was in a cheery mood, having been granted a quota annulment for the day.
He and his "crew" could have picked zero fruit, but he would still be in compliance.
Which meant that any fruit he did pick, he could sell on the open market and pocket the profits.

And given that each fruit was literally worth its weight in 'Luminium', the local currency, he was about to get rich.
Rich enough to pay for a rest-vacation at the off-planet resort up there on Sagitar.

The overseer turned up his goggled face to look with reverence at the noon day sky.

The sun blazing up there clearly did not enjoy people looking at it, and it seemed to burn even brighter, bringing the radiation directly down to the picker train and Gloven's goggled face.

Chastened by the storm of radiant anger from the local sun, Gloven hurriedly turned his gaze back to his lowly tasking.
As he stared at the prisoners through the slightly fogged lenses of his goggles, Gloven thought back to how his morning had begun.

"Gloven -- overseer 32-9! Stand to attention citizen!"

As Gloven swiped his card at his duty locker, two guards flanking a pencil thin low-exec strode into the room.
The left guard, a towering abomination of grafted muscle and hissing bionics shouted at Gloven again.
"Stand to attention, you are addressed by Senior Manager Kuril of desk three!"
The right guard, a similarly towering construct, stepped directly in front of Gloven blocking his sight and shoved him back into the lockers.

"Gloven, I am here on behalf of the board, most august are its members, to give you a new assignment for the day."
Senior Manager Kuril lisped the words from where he stood behind his security detail.
"You are hereby granted one annulment, good for this full planetary rotation, and you are assigned two criminals from court four."

Court four was the lower court of the high council, and it tried all the high society cases that the defendants could not bribe their way out of.
The grant of an annulment so very rarely occurred as to be the stuff of myth.
This was how past heroes had made their ascension!
With an annulment, an overseer could possibly become rich. Rich enough to vacation all the way to the outer moons even!

The only thing that Gloven could not immediately understand was what the condition for the annulment was going to be.
"A kidney, or both kidneys. Both kidneys and his lungs?" He had organ compatibility with at least two of the board, he was sure.

"The two criminals assigned are required to not return."
Kuril's lisping drone answered Gloven's question.
"State your name and acknowledgement to finalize this arrangement."
The guard standing in front of Gloven leaned in closer, showing an absolute horror of a face, filled with small whirring blackened indentations in place of eyes.

"Overseer Gloven, ident 32-9 acknowledges and complies."
Gloven was beyond giddy with excitement.
Not only an annulment but also an expiation and expiration of some soft handed lords?
This was surely a dream.

The trio of personnel withdrew from the locker room, leaving it abruptly enlarged as their menacing, oversized presences disappeared.

Gloven rubbed his hands together, noticing the peeling skin on his left, and slammed his locker door shut.
"Today, I begin anew! That fat fem is gonna wish she'd stuck with me now!"
Gloven's bunk mate Overseer Ligata, had moved in with him several cycles ago, but then left him to take up with that jumped up bastard Rowker.
Just because he was not rad damaged and maybe had an extra tooth?
The frag with her, he would show up at her shift tomorrow with a whole new set of vat grown veneers and then what would she say!?

Gloven belted on his gun and baton that he'd retrieved from his locker and hurried to the bays to board his train.

Chapter 2 -- Bleed Them, Prickish Fruit

Gloven truly loved the fact that the two criminals he'd been assigned were convicts from the soft crimes court.
"Those bastards had never done a day's real work in their life!"
This was just a very reasonable balancing of the books was how Gloven saw things.
And the more thorns and torn palms, the more balanced the books would be.

"Pick that fruit right this pico, or I'm going to pitch your useless carcass overboard and tell them the flies got you, you lazy sod!"
Gloven urged his wards on with the gentle manner of a true overseer, pointing at the same time at a new even juicier looking clump of fruit.
The waving baton and the suddenly produced blast pistol helped to reinforce his request.

For his part, criminal 32-9099, the balding man, shuddered and reached his hands back out of the train to try and grab one of the fruits.
As he leaned out, he looked at the slowly moving ground, covered in broken pieces of glass, spikes and other likely unhealthy protrusions.
At a distance of thirty feet, Borgei Tomas was entirely certain that were he to fall, he would break everything.
"Survival probability in the event of a fall is nil."
His implant very helpfully flashed that warning into his right eye as he completed the thought.

The wheels of the robot train, giant metal trundles, crunched over that ground with an impressive implacability.
They would certainly mash and mulch whatever broken body that attempted to waylay them.
"Individual wheel weight is twenty tons and current vehicle speed is six meters per demi-hour. Your body does not have sufficient density to survive being crushed by the wheels."
Once again, Borgei's implant served up some amazingly useless information.
He was beginning to think that it was actually sentient and enjoyed torturing him.

"The frag were you when they caught me in the books, you bum system!"
Borgei growled internally, thinking back on the whole reason he was out here in the first place.

And, of course the implant did not reply to the challenge at all.
"Feeling guilty aren't you? When I get out of this, I'm gonna have Fleekus that bastid medic, cut you right back out."
Borgei thought with a sudden biting tide of acidic anger.

"I am integrated into your lower cranial corpus, and excision is not recommended."
The implant replied to the thought and added a sudden blaring sound into his ears to emphasize its injunction.

A sharp stabbing sensation in Borgei's palms brought him back to the moment.
He was somehow clutching one of the fruits with both hands.
The skin was tough and leathern to the touch, and the thorns surrounding it had jabbed both of his palms.
He pulled on the fruit, stretching the ropey branch it dangled so tightly from.
The whole thing gave way after a moment with an audible sucking sound and droplets of fluid dripped from the vacated branch.

Borgei turned around to show the overseer his prize, just in time for Gloven to again bat him over the head.

"Drop it in the harvest bin! There's a good boy!"
Gloven had magicked away the baton and gun and was rubbing his hands together.
The motion, reminiscent of a fly cleaning its antennae was rather ugly to witness. One of his hands, a swollen and reddened mess, sloughed off a little skin as the other gloved hand slid over it.

"Oh ya, that's a good fat one we got there, probably a fifty weight!"
Pleased, Gloven gave a kick to the rear of his other ward, a slight, stooping older man with thin bronze painted arms.
"You see what your buddy done here?"
"That's a good harvest that is, now why haven't you gotten about ten times that by now!?"
Gloven aimed another kick as he began running the profit numbers in his head.
"Lessee. carry the one and add another zero, that's oh crack! That's a very big number, more than enough for two tickets on that junker!"

Gloven had long ago compromised the captain of the junk freighter that ferried goods to and from orbit.
He'd caught the braggard distributing illegal writings, comics mocking the council!
Caught him red handed, and then offered him a sweet deal. If he ever needed to get away, then the captain and his little ferry would give him free berth.
A very very sweet deal, as the alternative would have had the captain stripped of his command and remanded to hard labor on the ice moon.
Gloven was no longer even seeing the world around him. He could practically smell the clean sheets that awaited him on Sagitar.

Chapter 3 -- Something This Way Comes

"Detecting incoming signal!"
Borgei's implant suddenly painted the vision in his right eye a solid red.
"Incoming message, priority two!"

Borgei shook his head, and willed the unruly implant to shut up.
"Shut up, if I can get this fruit, maybe that bastid overseer will leave us alone for a moment!"
Borgei could see the overseer's hunched form, crooning over the newly deposited fruit, stroking the globe as if it was his favorite pet.

Borgei redoubled his efforts to pluck one of the fruits, getting jabbed again for his troubles.

"Message received, replay in progress."
Borgei's implant did not truly care about his admonitions.
"Message reads: extraction inbound, do not look up."

And, of course, Borgei had to look up.
Just in time to spot a shape, a black dot, descending through the utterly cloudless sky.

The dot grew larger with alarming rapidity and resolved into a dirigible shaped, blackened craft, festooned with what could only be weapons mounts.
The craft's materialization was accompanied by a thunderous clap of sound as it opened fire, raking hard rounds into the open topped train.

Gloven, seasoned overseer that he was had noticed his wards were not working as they should and had straightened from his stoop to investigate things.
As he rose, his head cleared the top of the train and was instantly bisected by the hard rounds blitzing out of the attacking dirigible.
He fell heavily to his side, the contents of his cranium slopping into the harvest bin and covering the globe of fruit nestled there.

Borgei, the instant he saw the craft had already begun to duck below the lip of the train. For some reason he also grabbed the other prisoner by his coveralls and dragged him to the deck as well.

"Kulliod!"
Borgei's heart was hammering in his ears as he recognized the assault craft.
"Oh sweet Jeekus! Kulliod found out and sent his organ extractors to get me!"

This was definitely not going to be one of the good extractions, where the extracted party would celebrate afterwards.
No, this was going to be the bad kind of extraction, where the extracted party would definitely pay for the extraction with organ removal and probable termination.

"The Jeekus damned implant must have signaled Kulliod when it came on line!"
The icy grip of fear seized Borgei and made his sphincter tighten almost audibly.

"I'm going to kill that medic bastid when I see him again!"
The thought came unbidden as Borgei contemplated the full collapse of his world.

The dirigible, meanwhile, was unrelenting in its fire and had begun targeting the wheels of the train as well.
An absolutely uneconomical tsunami of weapons fire sheeted into the train wheels, buckling, cracking and finally blasting one of them free.

Having disabled the train, the dirigible floated higher and hovered directly over Borgei and his fellow prisoner, lying prone on the deck.
As Borgei rolled over to look up at the thing he noticed that the front of the dirigible had been painted over with a crude leering shark's smile.
The weapons mounts all tilted visibly and slowly, pointing at him in very obvious threat.
Two of the protruding barrels began to spin, whining loudly as they did.

Chapter 4 -- You Cannot Negotiate With Pirates

"Get your bastid ass up, you thieving swine!"

The dirigible's external address system thundered at Borgei.

Borgei stood up slowly, his hands firmly raised and fists unclenched.
The spinning barrels increased rotational speed and the whine became a screech.
Accompanied by the dribble of greenish lubricant from the spinning barrels, the dirigible seemed a leering, drooling aquatic monster, about to assault its prey.

"Turn around and kneel!"
The dirigible's address system continued its throaty roar.
"Bring him back up here right no --!"
The dirigible's voice cut off abruptly mid shout as the craft shook from the impact of a cruise missile on its flank.

The dirigible shuddered momentarily and then spun on its long axis, bringing its weapons to bear at a rapidly approaching shape.
Wasting no time at all, the dirigible opened fire again.
But this time, instead of the tsunami of fire, it launched a cloud of missiles.
Cold gas ejected, they zipped forward and then simultaneously ignited their motors and raced off towards the shape, trailing little contails.

Seconds later the missiles impacted their target and wreathed it in a black smoke that clung to the racing object for a moment before it burst through.
Utterly unharmed.

The shape was vaguely humanoid and enormous. It was painted in the green and red heraldry of the planetary council and the moment it cleared the smoke cloud it replied to the dirigible.
Delivered the reply via a plasma cannon attached to its shoulder.

At a distance of no more than a few miles, the incoming shape, began to spear the dirigible with coruscating yellow beams of energy.
Each beam smacked into the dirigible, wobbling it, then shaking the entire thing.
Suddenly, the dirigible, tiring of the combat tipped itself up and blasted upwards on a steep arc, riding a tail of bluish flame.

For the whole of the battle, Borgei had been watching, rooted to the deck, unable to take his eyes off the combat, his eyes flicking back and forth as he tried to track the whole thing.

"Council anti-piracy control pod deployed and engaged pirate Kulliod. Kulliod has retreated. Combat time twenty-three picos."
The implant flashed this in a cool red, again obliterating the vision in his right eye.

"You are party to the destruction of Council property and will likely now be terminated. Good bye. I have not enjoyed this assignment."
The implant played a sad trombone song in his ears ending in a wet fart and then faded the vision in his right eye to an absolute black.

"Jeekus! This cannot be happening!"
Borgei looked about, panicked, considering just jumping off the train to escape.
As he turned in place, heart hammering, it occurred to him that throughout the past frenetic moments his fellow crewman had not said a word.

"He's got a way out!"
Borgei thought as he completed his turn.

And crashed right into the bronze limbed mans outstretched arm.
And the gun held at the end of it.
The Overseer's gun.

Bronze limbs had not misused his time, unsupervised by the departed Overseer.
He'd found the gun and now was negotiating for a settlement of sorts.

"They'll commute my sentence for this!"
The gun fired, belching an altogether unreasonable tongue of flame that projected for an entire meter behind Borgei's body.

Borgei clutched at the gun, then, vision wobbling, he sank slowly to the deck.
"But he's my sister's husband!"
Borgei's fading mind served up a final thought.

"As predicted."
The implant added a postscript to its final message.