It began in New Bayou because New Bayou is just the kind of place for a thing like that. An old beat-up, down at the heels, new aristocracy, smugglers and pirates blended with poverty stricken backyard sailors, town; all mixed in a stinking and ugly near the polar cycle of a planet the size of the Earth moon in the middle of the 6DR85 system with a levee of eighteenth Earth century myth on one side and one of the most modern ports in the galaxy al lost into the brightness of a bright sun and tropical air and the decay of romance and exploitation.
It is not so much a solar prime planet as it is a kind of a multigalactic outpost for the rest of the union, stuck there inside the limits of the known galaxy. Secure in its own limits of extra-territorial immunity from the rest of the union.
TR3 shipyards on one side and on the other the beautiful twisted ironwork and a rat-shape rotten looking cockroach behaving alleys of the McCoy Quarter –unknown reasoning for the name. In the middle, the Byram Core with the mansions of the rich and the commercial malls of the prosperous. And then Anubis, Ogun and the other streets to connect the three pillows of New Bayou.
Very Earth-like in every one of the three places there is a cemetery where the past lives in its marble tombs, which is fine if all three of them didn’t lie on the toxic-waste riverside that surrounded the town and every time the flow overtook the sides the graves vanished under and eventually eroding into poisonous alloy.
That partly the way New Bayou is. But it is also the place where you meet someone like Rams Cromest or a girl like Sue Bloud who has nothing to do with this story, or a girl like Ingrid Chen, who does.
New Bayou is the place where you can be offered a share of a thousand-credit deal, as I was, and where you can turn up stone cold vacuum dead in the McCoy Quarter if a competitor has got the right price.
Perhaps it has something to do with its past. Earth people then Martians and then Andorians with the Earth people returning for a second round most of the eventually ending alloy in the toxic-waste river that surrounds the town. Oddly people forget that most of them were nothing more than crooks and remember something as tenuous as a faint smell of levanter lavishing them as heroes of the past. I suppose that’s why psychology and psychotherapy are sciences still thriving.
However, time and psychotherapy hadn’t had their way with Liam Lind yet. He wasn’t any hero romanticized figure then. He was just a hammered down defeated little thug who had never really recovered from the Security Unit, better known as Raven.
And he would never would, because that was the kind of guy he was. I met him at Broker’s place and he offered me a thousand credits. Broker’s used to be our joint in the old days. New Bayou used to be the hot port for metals and minerals then, at least in this side of the galaxy, and that special kind of fuel, cooked up in the underground factories of the McCoy Quarter and used by ships all thru the coast.
We used to have a small snake ship carrying full tanks with fuel and meet the ships in need in the leg of the nebula nearby. Later others improved both, delivery ships and posts. For a while Liam, me and Quiet Con rode the lead-off huts, the eyes of the vipers we use to call them, with our pockets full of credits to pay the flats, the Union’s cops, and a few rays in deferent sizes to take care of possible unprincipled pirates. I was, let’s say not the law obedience kid then, at the tail of the pirates ruling era and the second earth people coming, riding the fast ships, the fast women and the fast credits. I was the real thing back then.
Or at least I thought so.
Read all Blood Bayou chapters in order, HERE!
Thanos' Pulp Fiction 