He leans into the rain while his braces, hooked on one end to a door handle, hold him up. Some days he uses the ever-present rain of this place to make himself all film noir, and other times he is Michael Jackson riffing on Gene Kelly, and the choreography writes poetry with his feet.
They called this place Drench, and the whole ecosystem seemed to be about water. of course that mean that they were raping it for its resources, and that someone had a mad scheme about making a desert planet habitable because it had crystals they could farm for the laser engines. Drek thought that made no sense.
Parch could have been tended to by artificials, and no human would ever have had to set foot there. To conquer and to own was still the basic drive that fuelled the star-ships though. Eckert Tarn would stand on that platform of his and invoke all the worst capitalists of Old Earth, and it was laughable, as it always had been.
In space no one can hear you dream.
Drek was a dreamer – he’d play jazz in the mood-bars down Slowmo, near old Hunkerdown Town’s old industrial centre. How far out from the start were they here? He forgot sometimes.. How many generations separated him and the home world?
The Sucks wre out and about – vacuum heads and teleporters in their throats – they’d drink the world. Drek took his six shooter and punched fist sized holes through them with his home made slugs.
He went to his favourite mood-bar called Gray’s Jones, and pulled up to the bump-bar baby, and asked for a risky-whisky.
‘Raining?’
‘Sure is.’
‘Need warming up?’
‘Sure.’
‘Try the Junk Juice.’
‘OK.’