With Apologies to George Orwell

Blair brushed his fingers over the burnished metal of the loading bay ramp, then held them up, close to his eyes, and scowled at their crimson tips. The fine spray had coated the whole ramp in a red, viscous dew. Just off the ramp a man lay dead. A broad trail of congealing blood showed the way by which his body had been smeared onto the deck, ground into the floor with inhuman force.

„It must’a cracked his head open, when he came up the ramp.“, the foreman exclaimed. Blair found him unbearably helpful this morning. „That’s where all that spray is from. You crack a head open with enough force, the blood just flies out, like when you cut an orange. Then it must’a dragged him over here an’ just pounded him. Bet he was already dead then, though.“

„Probably, yeah.“

„So watcha gonna do about this mess?“

„We’re gonna find this thing and put it out of commission. You have a gun?“

The foreman shined an smug dullard’s grin at him. They both knew this would be ugly business.

It had been four Standard Years since Blair had transferred to Moulmein Station. He had never cared much for earth. His father had been a spacer, as had his father before him and his father and his father, and through generations of selective breeding, the weak bone structure of the space-faring folk now ran in the family like a curse, forever souring any prolonged stay on any Class M planet.

So Blair had taken to the stars again, this time as a security officer. His years on the „Bhurtpore “ had prepared him well. As he always said, anyone who could hold his own on an east arm mining ship could wrangle a few rowdy station traders with ease, and his comparatively heavy build and gnarled features were usually enough to scare the station dwellers into cooperation.

He let his eyes wander along the matte steel walls, to the vent covers, to the personnel exits, to the cargo lift platform. Finally he turned starboard to the massive airlock, and gazed listlessly through the bulkheads either side of it into the endless black void. It wasn’t fear that he felt, nor disgust, just a tired, flaccid kind of resignation.

“So…We’re gonna shoot us an elephant unit.”