The Peacock Cloak

Dixie colony from Proxima-3.”
    “You know Doug Hempleman, Captain Jake?” asked Mrs Wu.
    “Never heard of him.”
    “He’s quite a guy,” Mr Wu said with a chuckle. “You should stay a few days, Captain, maybe check in to the Hilton, and hang out with Doug for a while. You two would get on like a house on fire.”
    “Check into the Hilton?” Jacob Stone gave a hollow laugh. “Check into that dump, when I can sleep for free in my own berth back on ship? That’s not how I got to be a millionaire, buddy.”
    Mr Wu raised his animatronic hands creakily in humorous surrender.
    “You’re the boss, Captain Jake, you’re the boss.”
    “Haven’t got much time for young guys who get themselves given a fancy F-class ship and think they’re it,” growled Jacob. “Still, guess I’ll check him out. It might fill up an hour. This guy play cards at all?”
    “Spent an hour or two last time playing the guys down at the Saloon. There he is now, look.”
    From the TV screen looked down a still picture of a pleasant and surprisingly normal-looking man in his early thirties.
    “Hmm,” said Jacob sourly. “Barely more than a kid. Think they’re it don’t they? Think they’re bloody it.”
    He shook his head.
    “What kind of a card player is he, anyway?” he asked after a time.
    “Pretty good, I heard,” said Mr Wu.
    “Pretty good? Just pretty good? Maybe I should teach him a lesson.”

    The two men met on Main Street, outside the Wild West Saloon. Inevitably, after months of solitude, they regarded each other at first with wariness and suspicion. But Hempleman quickly mastered this initial feeling and stepped forward with a pleasant smile and his hand extended in greeting.
    “Hi! Doug Hempleman. You must be Jacob!”
    His grip was firm and strong.
    “Yup,” said Jacob indifferently. “You a card player at all?”
    He looked Hempleman up and down with unconcealed dislike. The other captain was twenty years younger than him, strikingly good-looking, and very trim. He was one of those, Jacob saw at once, who worked out every day in the little gym which every starship company, by law, provided for its crew. An hour a day was recommended by the doctors, but Jacob had no time for the damned things.
    “Yes, sure,” said Hempleman. “I like a game of cards. Maybe a drink first though? What do you say?”
    Jacob shrugged, looked at his watch, and ungraciously assented, as if he was fitting Doug in reluctantly before a more rewarding engagement. They made their way to Clancy’s and ordered beers.
    “Nice to see you guys hooking up,” said rosy-cheeked Mick Clancy from behind his bar, lifting the chemically synthesised drinks from the dispenser and placing them in front of the two space captains. Like several of the denizens of New Vegas, Mick was in need of repair. Part of his right ear was missing, and only his left eye blinked.
    “Been at this game long?” Doug asked Jacob.
    “Thirty-two standard years,” Jacob said with grim pride. “Never more than three weeks planetside during that whole time.”
    “Jesus!” said Hempleman. “What kind of life is that? I’ve done this run three times – six years of my life – and this is the last. Then I’m buying my own little place by the sea in Prox-3 and giving up the starways for good. In eighteen months’ time it’ll be over, thank God. There’s a lovely woman waiting for me back on Prox – I met her last time I was home – and we’re going to get married as soon as I get back.”
    He fumbled in a pocket and handed a picture viewer to Jacob.
    “This is her,” he said, “this is my Helen. I can’t tell you how much I miss her!”
    Jacob let the viewer run through its sequence of images. Helen smiled, pulled a face, struck a mock-sexy pose, laughed. She did look lovely. She might not be quite as flawlessly pretty as some of the hundred thousand women whose images Jacob kept in his on-board entertainment system, but she was pretty all the same and she also looked funny and warm and kind. Unlike many of Jacob’s hundred thousand, she looked liked a real human being. Jacob shrugged and handed the viewer back.
    “Nothing but trouble, women, if you ask me,” said Jacob. “F and F, that’s my motto. Fuck ’em and forget ’em.”
    Doug looked at him appraisingly.
    “Not much time even for that, eh, Jake, if you never stay planetside for more than a few weeks? No, I wouldn’t be without my Helen, not for anything. Meeting her was like…