the story as noted.

There were eight wranglers assigned per two thousand head of cattle and we worked in six hour shifts of four guys. I say “guys” because my shift was four guys, but there were plenty of women working the pens and even one whole shift of ladies a few decks up. I write it now because I don’t want you thinking of me a macho or sexist, but it did just happen that deck eight, shift B, my shift, was four guys and, hell, there are some days I would have sure liked a smart woman in there to break up that pissing contest.

Eight wranglers per two thousand head of cattle, meant sixteen wranglers per deck, across twelve decks of one massive space freighter. Nearly fifty thousand space cows, tended by nearly two hundred cowboys (and girls) and another fifty flight crew. It stunk. It was noisy. And only a few of those passengers actually knew where we were going to begin with.

Hari and Felix and I always ate together, but Mitch mostly kept to himself during our breaks.

I couldn’t fault him. I was always more willing to put up with Hari’s bullshit and Felix had a kind of blinder on for anything that was going on around him. But Mitch was one of those quiet guys. Still, deep waters, they call it. I don’t know if it was smarts or anger or maybe a bit of both. I suspect he had bluffed his way onto the ship, taking the last job he ever would have chosen just to get of Earth, but now that he was here he either didn’t want to get found out or had decided he should have stayed behind after all. That was my theory anyhow. Hari just called him “a stuck up asshole” and egged him on through mouthfuls of lunch ration. Whatever it was, it was snowballing towards something messy, eventually, between those two.

It didn’t surprise me at all when Hari’s open contempt for Mitch turned from passive hostility into active agression.

Perhaps aggression is the wrong word, though my generation certainly grew up understanding that pranks, bullying and even joke-making at the expense of a targeted individual were a kind of aggression that so-called enlightened folks tended to turn their noses up at.

None of us could be called enlightened, though I sensed an inherent cruelty in Hari’s overly simplistic high jinks in a way I couldn’t articulate then and even struggle a bit with now. It was dumb-fuckery at it’s peak, and Mitch caught the blunt trauma to his person and his pride.

What I’m saying, I suppose, is that I’m not innocent in the events that followed out of those next few days between the four of us in shift 8B because I did nothing to stop it, but I’ve worked through a bit of personal absolution in the time since knowing that I was simply to dumb and weak to stop it even if I had known better.

Have I mentioned the cows?

There were thousands of them on this ship alone.

Part of your brain must be churning away on this idea right now, pondering why unlike any good science fiction story humanity loaded up thousands of cows onto a half dozen space freighters and shipped them off into the waiting universe as we fled a dying Earth. Why live cows? Why not thousands of cow embryos or some kind of magic genetic synthesis thingamajig that would solve all our problems of food supply at the other end of the galaxy? Why live cows?

When push came to shove and every resource of the failing planet was thrown unflinchingly at escape, it turned out to be the easiest solution. Big cargo transport ships, refuge class heavy cruisers, with loads of fuel and loads of space and the lowest tech, get the hell out of dodge approach that humanity could muster.

Live cows were ready and — well, they went.

If I could have told you anything about the economics of spaceflight before I got aboard a refuge class heavy cruiser full of cows I would not have been the one shovelling the cow shit. Folks with that kind of brains were more useful in the front of the ship than in the cargo holds.

But I’m a quick study, and aboard an ark the practicalities of shifting live weight off the planet then into the vast and unknown universe became increasingly apparent as the weeks wore on. Years of cheap science fiction schlock on the stream had given me the false impression of the distances involved.

Warp nine. Light speed. Hyper jump.

These were bullshit terms, and I knew bull shit.

These ships would slowly accelerate away from the dying Earth, leave it behind for a distant destination, and when we ultimately reached our full speed at some point we’d cruise for a while before spinning backwards and reverse thrusting to a reasonable approach speed. In my mind — and in the mind of my fellow wranglers — this was a few months or maybe a year worth of travel.

No.

The walls talk.

And the slow, methodical thought that grew into my lunkhead brain, the knowledge that I’d be centuries dead before there was ever any hope of reaching the halfway turnaround, didn’t help the growing unrest in the cargo holds of this particular refuge class heavy cruiser.

That day had not seemed in any way unusual as it began. Those kinds of days never do. You get up, wash your face, brush your teeth, scarf down some rations for breakfast, and get to work. If anything ever seemed unusual at that point, then go back to bed. Those kinds of days sneak up on you. Those kinds of days are lurking in the nooks and crannies of ordinary days, waiting for a bit of the universe to unfold and spring it out in the recirculated air like a mote of angry dust flung from a bunched up bed sheet.

I got up. I washed my face. I brushed my teeth, and I scarfed down a ration pack number fourteen, eggs and an oat bar with a side of black coffee.

Then I followed the other three guys to work, down the wrangler lift to deck eight to relieve the A shift. Not unusual in any way whatsoever.

Change, some say, can come in many forms. Sometimes change is slow and methodical, passing over us like a shift in the season, a bit cooler each day until short pants weather turns to long pants weather, and you need to replace your brimmed sun hat for a wool toque.

Aboard a space freighter there was no such thing as slow change. When the night came, the lights flipped off with a switch. The air circulation fans stopped or started again in a moments notice. And bad things popped out of corners, blindsiding you in a flash from an unseen place at the edge of your perception.

Slow change can be just as deadly, but when things change for the worse in barely the span of a heartbeat that’s the worst.

Hari wasn’t so much clever, as he was wiley.

To me, it’s that being clever implies a sort of chaotic neutrality into a situation involving pranks, antics or gags pulled on a target. At the heart of it there is nothing malicious, not really, besides a joke at someone’s expense. That’s something I could abide by, even if it wasn’t in my personal nature to pull stunts like that.

But Hari wasn’t clever. He had a mean streak, and one might have almost called it downright evil. I mean, in the grand scheme of this big old universe through which we found ourselves cruising in a space freighter was he the meanest thing around? No. But inside this little ship, the tricks he had thought up to play on Mitch were leaning towards wicked.