coincidence

The first time I laid eyes on my new Captain, he was crashing his way out of a bar in Rookston, emptying his guns behind him through the broken window and shouting various guttural Anglo-Saxon curses. He landed with a practiced roll and was on his feet and barreling toward me within a matter of seconds. Forseeing crossfire, I quickly upended the café table I had been sitting at and got down behind it. Others around me chose to run, but the running man found my shelter most welcome, and hopped behind it. He peered above the rim and fired a few more shots, then turned to look at me while reloading. And so I found myself, for the first time, bunkered down shoulder-to-shoulder with Holmes Caban.
He grinned crookedly and introduced himself over the ricocheting of bullets. I gave him my name and he replied “Pleasure, I’m sure.”
His words jolted me, I felt a sudden thrill and almost instinctual wave of compassion for this stranger. The commotion in the street did not sound promising, and the squeal of police sirens (the same on every planet, seemingly) shocked me into action.
“Look” I said, “I have a place to go to ground. Cover me and then follow.”
He did not question me, and after a brief moment of thought --weighing his options, clearly a true space criminal--nodded. He spun and began to fire again, and I dodged out of cover and ran to the alleyway alongside the café. In a moment I heard pounding footsteps behind me, and after assuring myself that it was him I continued on my way. Twisting and turning on a strange route through the slums of Rookston, I made sure we’d lost the lawmen before coming to the room I had rented from a rundown Inn. A rather hopeless prospect in that heap of a town. Drifting, again. Space debris.
He settled into the room as if he owned the place, not asking the questions I was asking myself: why was I helping him? Why did I risk so much for a stranger, a criminal?
“Is it safe here?” he asked instead.
“Safe as anywhere. You in a lot of trouble?”
“Nah. None followed.”
“And those you were shooting at?”
“They had their business done.”
It was an old saying…not old, perhaps, but common. It placed him as a carrier, probably a small-time cargo transporter. Possibly a Runner. Someone I would know, because somewhere along the way they had become my people. If I had taken a different ship that day so long ago, a science vessel or a circus crew…but I chose pirates.
“No harm, then, giving aide to a fellow Runner” I replied. He sized me up for the third time since our meeting.
“Do I know you?”
“No.” There were few in the universe who had heard of me, though I’d been Running for more than a decade. This is another of those points of pride. Perhaps I have too many. His name sounded vaguely familiar, though I’d been out of the network for a while, stuck here in backwater Rookston.
“What do you do, then? Besides live in heaps, help strangers, and get into gunfights without breaking holster?”
I enjoyed the question. “By trade, I’m a navigator.”
His eyebrow raised, just one of them. “That so? I happen to know a bit of that myself, trade being my business. I’m Commodore Holmes Caban.”
“Commodore?” This man claimed some sort of fleet? Unlikely, but boasting is part of the Runner trade. I waited for him to explain, but he did not, and became one of five men I’ve ever met who did not immediately underestimate my intelligence.
“I recently purchased another ship here.”
“In this junkspot? Why?”
He shrugged. “Necessity.” He then spun for me the most marvelously foolish story, one I must later record for the sake of explaining the Runner lifestyle. It involved a deal, a trade, a load of valuable cargo, several double crosses, failed communication, and ended with a dramatic chase and his first mate leaving him behind. He wasn’t sure he’d ever see his ship or crew again. “Or the money from the cargo” he concluded bitterly. But his first mate, a woman named Ice, was supposedly loyal, it was just a matter of finding her again.
“When you’re lost, aren’t you supposed to stay put?” I asked. He looked at me carefully, then said “If I listened to that, Scout, I’d never have gone to space at all.”