UNCLAIMED

Her dusty gun in hand she marched down the passageway leading to the lift, which made a godawful noise as it ground to a halt three levels down. Cold seeped through her red fuzzy slippers and Christmas-themed flannel PJs. She wriggled her toes. Cargo Hold 4 gleamed blood red on the rusted iron hatch. Maxine entered the hold and cautiously circled the twenty-feet-long by five-feet-wide cylinder. The thing resembled a giant silvery dildo. She adjusted her PJs and crept closer. Um.
Steam angrily hissed out of a hinge. With the gun pointed in front, she circled the pod once, twice then decided it wasn’t going to attack her. A frosted rectangle caught her attention. An access panel, maybe? Maxine used her sleeve to rub at it. She jumped back with a gasp.
There was a guy in there!
She checked again. “And cute, too.”
Steam continued to whistle out of the pod. After a cursory check, Maxine realized the seals could give anytime. The guy would asphyxiate within minutes if she didn’t get him out of there.
Hey, maybe he’s the ghost of Christmas past. Although she’d remember that face if it’d been in her past!
“Well,” she said, taking aim at the hissing hinge. “That’ll be my good action of the season.” She fired.
The projectile hit the hinge, popped it, which created a fog of steam as the pod split in half clean down the middle. Maxine arched her eyebrow as it blew open and swung outward. Talk about some quick release gizmo. She waited until the fog had cleared so she wouldn’t breathe in whatever kept the guy sedated and sanitized.
After a while she bent over the rim to examine her new payload. Not bad at all. Six-feet-something, at least two hundred—and all muscle too—closely cropped dark hair and a five o’clock shadow. But the guy could’ve used with a bit of fashion counseling. Even if this particular skintight suit sent her systems into super-nova mode, no one wore polymer anymore. Polymer? Come on.
An old-fashioned plastic sheet was stuck to the cover’s interior. Maxine carefully peeled it from the thermoplastic pane and brought it up close to her nose. She should’ve worn her glasses.
Oh, English, good. There was a date and a name. January 27th, Edmond Cabanesty.
She looked down at him. “You don’t look like an Edmond.”
There was something else too. A list. Squinting, she brought the plastic sheet even closer to read the fine print. Where’d she put her glasses again?
The word murder hit her brain first, then genocide, defection…
By the time she read the long list of offenses and the numbers beside each—the column said “sentence in years”—her heart was in her throat. Then at the very bottom of the sheet was a stamp bearing some official-looking logo with a bird on it and some stars with the word EXILE embossed beside a signature.
“Oh. Shit.”
Just her luck to respond to a distress signal sent by an exiled criminal’s pod. Great, just great.
He’s the Ghost of No More Christmas for You if I Wake Up, Lady!
She looked down into the pod again, noted the strong chin and stubble. He really did look like a crook now that she knew his history. Maxine tapped her foot. She should close the thing back and send him out.
Yeah, right, on Christmas day.
She couldn’t space him. His pod was broken and her old freighter had only one, which she had to keep in case of emergency…or for border patrol inspections.
Wait a...