Read Online The Sheriff of Yrnameer by Michael Rubens - Free Book Online

what? I realize I don’t care that much who you are or what you’re running from. All I care about is that you honor Teg’s original agreement with us.”
    “Where—
urp
—is Teg?” asked Philip.
    “What’s the destination?” Cole asked Nora.
    She took a deep breath. “Yrnameer.”
    He stared blankly at her for a few moments.
    “I’m sorry, did you say—”
    “Yrnameer,” she repeated.
    Cole did some more blank staring. “You want to go to a
yrnameer?
There are no more yrnameers. The last yrnameer got a corporate sponsor, what, fifty years ago. Someone has taken all the Your Name Heres, and put their name there.”
    She shook her head. “We’re not talking about just any yrnameer. We’re talking about
the
Yrnameer. The very last unsponsored planet.”
    “Aw, c’mon. That place is a myth.”
    “No. It’s real,” she said.
    “Computer!” said Cole. “Define planet Yrnameer!”
    “Yrnameer is a mythical utopia, a planet said to exist in an unreachable location in space,” said the affectless voice of the computer.
    “A contraction of
your name here
, a
yrnameer
originally referred to—”
    “Thank you,” said Cole. He turned to Nora.
    “It’s real,” she repeated.
    “How would you know? If it exists—and I’m not saying that it does—they say you can’t even get there, that the bend calcs are too weird.”
    “We’ve both been there,” said Nora.
    “I don’t believe you.”
    “It’s true,” said Philip. “And you should see it. It’s so beautiful, so pure. There’s no other place like it.” His gaze was focused somewhere beyond Cole, beyond the confines of the cockpit. Off somewhere, thought Cole, playing in a meadow with bunnies and puppies and singing birds.
“Buurp,”
added Philip.
    “Listen, Cole,” said Nora, “it’s pretty obvious you need a place to hide. And there’s no better place than Yrnameer. And I’ll admit it: we can’t get there without you. It may not be a utopia, but at least there’s none of this,” she said distastefully, indicating the adsat that had been keeping pace with them, playing a beer commercial on its giant monitor.
    “I love this ad!” said Cole. “Look at the chimp! Ha ha ha!”
    Nora wasn’t laughing. Cole stopped.
    “What’s your answer, Cole?”
    “What’s the cargo?”
    She shook her head.
    “All right, what’s the fee?” he asked.
    “Forty thousand New Dollars.”
    Forty thousand NDs! That was
twice
what he’d ever been paid for a run.
    “Forty thousand NDs!” he said. “That’s
half what
I usually get for a run.”
    “It’s all we have,” said Nora. “Forty thousand New Dollars or nothing.”
    Cole suppressed his desire to cackle with glee, channeling it into the thoughtful expression of a professional evaluating a complicated internal balance sheet. “Hmm,” he said, to give the performance some weight.
    He was half hoping that she would toss in a hint of other unspecified but clearly alluring benefits, like she’d done with Teg.
    Farging Teg undoubtedly got that sort of thing all the time—at least that’s what he was always insinuating in that men’s magazine column of his, “Other Benefits with Teg.” Not that Cole would ever take advantage of an offer like that. Ever.
    “Would there be any, uh, other benefits?” he ventured hopefully.
    She stared at him.
    “The knowledge that you’ve contributed to a worthy cause,” she said.
    “Oh.”
    “So …,” she said.
    He sighed. “I can’t believe this place even exists,” he said.
    She held up a wee Zum Card.
    “Bendspace course calcs,” she said.
    He took the drive from her and considered it for a few moments, turning it over in his fingers. He looked up. She was observing him again with her quiet, intense gaze, and to his own surprise he felt a tiny, warm jolt in his tummy. He looked away, then held up the Zum Card. “We’re not gonna get broken with these, right?”
    “They’re valid calcs,” she said.
    Cole looked at