Rikas Marauders

by M. D. Cooper

  A DANCE WITH DENNY

  STELLAR DATE: 07.02.8948 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: Merchant Docking Ring, Dekar Station

  REGION: Outer Rim of Parsons System, Nietzschean Empire

  Rika walked slowly through the warrens of Deck 741, one hundred levels down from Hal’s Hell, and just three away from her quarters. The wide corridor was crowded with other workers heading home or up to the docks to begin their shifts. Refugees, long-since turned to beggars, huddled along the bulkheads; the poor and unfortunate who had fled the fall of the Parsons System, only to make it to Dekar and no further.

  She felt pity for them, but not so much that she could afford to share any of her spare credits—were she to have such a thing. The war had taken everything from her, too. These beggars may think they lived in a hellish afterlife, but Rika knew that even their blighted existence was far more desirable than hers.

  An indicator flashed on her visual overlay reminding Rika that her internal batteries were down to ten percent. Back when they were new, the batteries could hold a charge for far longer, under a lot more strain—but now they were showing their age. Just a few hours of overtime, and she was running on her last joules.

  Maybe it would go better if I didn’t antagonize Hal so much, Rika thought, shaking her head with a rueful smile on her lips.

  A dozen meters down the corridor stood her favorite food stall—well, her favorite stall that served any food she could afford. Jessie, the owner, would also let her plug in for a quick charge while she ate.

  As Rika approached the stall, she saw a few members of Pinky’s gang further down the wide passageway, alternately mocking and extorting refugees and passersby.

  Rika did her best to ignore them, hoping they wouldn’t spot her. No small number of local gang leaders were constantly pressuring her to join their ranks. They promised parts and power, but little respect.

  “Long shift,” Jessie commented as Rika approached and leaned an elbow on the counter.

  Rika smiled at the pink-haired proprietor. The fact that Jessie never mentioned Rika’s mechanized body, and always looked her in the eyes—even before her surgery—was the other reason why Rika frequented her stand.

  “You too,” Rika replied. “You were here when I left for my shift this morning.”

  Jessie shrugged. “Yeah, Annie ditched me again today; said that she had some sort of ache or pain. I kinda don’t mind, though. She’s a shit worker, and if I don’t have to pay her ass, it’s a win for me.”

  “Yeah, she can’t flip a burger for the life of her,” Rika replied. “And now that I can eat burgers again, I hate having to settle for what she can produce.”

  “Never fear, Rika—your favorite mystery meat delight is coming right up. Maybe someday, both you and I can get off this shit station, and I’ll cook you up a real burger.”

  “I’d like that very much,” Rika said as she spooled out her charge cable and handed it to Jessie, who plugged it in behind the stand’s counter.

  Rika felt a sense of relief as her charge meter showed the power trickling back in. Running out of power in the warrens was one of her worst fears. She harbored no illusions about what would become of her should that happen down here.

  With power, she was one of the most formidable people on the station. Without it, she was scrap metal waiting to be picked clean.

  A memory of being racked for transport came back to her; how the military removed her limbs and left her helpless, little more than a piece of equipment stored on a shelf.

  She would never let that happen to her again.

  If there was one thing she was thankful to the Nietzscheans for, it was the removal of her compliance chip. Her future was grim, but at least she was in control of herself again.

  Jessie poured Rika a cup of black coffee, and she inhaled the aroma, savoring the eight ounces of joy that was waiting for her.

  “I still don’t know how you get coffee here,” Rika said after she took her first sip.

  “Everything comes through Dekar,” Jessie shrugged. “Just have to know the right people.”

  “Those have to be some people,” Rika chuckled. “Even Hal bitches that he can hardly get coffee.”

  “Well, I wasn’t always running a food stand down in the warrens,” Jessie replied with a sardonic laugh.

  “You’ve mentioned that before,” Rika said. “What was it that you used to do?”

  Jessie gave Rika a sad smile as she slid a plate holding a burger and fries onto the counter. “Maybe I’ll tell you sometime, Rika. Not today, but sometime.”

  Rika picked up the burger and took a bite, enjoying the savory flavor as it hit her tongue.

  “Mmmm…tastes better every day,” Rika said.

  “You’re crazy,” Jessie laughed. “But I’ll take the compliment.”

  Rika swallowed her bite and picked up a fry. “Best oatmeal fries this side of Parsons, too,” she said before popping it into her mouth.

  As she ate, a loud bang sounded down the corridor, and she turned her head to see one of Pinky’s gang members holding a gun on a refugee. No one appeared to be harmed, so Rika surmised that the first shot must have been fired as a warning.

  “Fuckers,” Jessie swore. “Can’t rise to your feet around here without someone trying to push you back down.”

  “They bother you at all lately?” Rika asked.

  Jessie smiled broadly and shook her head. “Nope, not since you caved Begee’s face in last month. They give me hella dirty looks, but everyone knows that if they mess with me, they’re gonna get a visit from you.

  “Good,” Rika said around a mouthful of burger.

  “Not that I need it,” Jessie said with worried eyes. “I have enough connections that Pinky may mess with me, but she’s not going to do anything too stupid. You, on the other hand…your bleeding heart shows too often. One of these days, someone’s going to take advantage of that and cut it out.”

  Rika sighed. She did her best not to give a damn, but it didn’t always work. Jessie was right, though. One of these days, it was going to bite her in the ass.

  “I’ll have one of your fine cups of coffee, Jessie,” a voice said to Rika’s right, and she turned to see the sneering face of Denny, one of Pinky’s lieutenants.

  “Oh, hey, Rika. Thought you were just some dirty parts someone had dumped in front of Jessie’s stall…well, I guess I wasn’t really that wrong.”

  “Fuck off, Denny,” Rika growled.

  “Rika! I’m here to spend my hard-earned credit on some of Jessie’s fine brew. Best on the station, if you didn’t know.”

  Jessie gave Rika an imploring look, and then gave Denny a long-suffering one. “Payment up front, and you can have all the coffee you want,” Jessie bargained.

  Denny’s face adopted a wounded expression and he touched a hand to his chest. “Jessie! Are you calling me unscrupulous? You cut me deep, cut me to the quick!”

  “Yeah, I am,” Jessie said. “Credit.”

  Denny muttered something incomprehensible as he fished in his pocket for a hard chit. He finally pulled one out and slapped it on the counter.

  “Man of my word,” he said. “I’ll take a large.”

  Jessie turned to grab a cup, and Denny stared longingly at her ass.

  “See that, Rika? Jessie’s built all nice and proper. Not like your hard, carbon-fiber rear end. I bet she gives a good fuck, too—though I suppose you’d be good for something, now that you have lips again.”

  Rika took a bite of her burger and did her best to ignore Denny. She knew he was just trying to egg her on; he had checked her out on more than one occasion. Though there were augmented bones and muscles underneath her matte-grey skin, her ass didn’t look that far off from its original appearance. It wasn’t covered in skin, but that wasn’t so unusual.

  “No comment, Rika?” Denny smirked as Jessie wordlessly handed the gang member his coffee with one hand, and took the credit chit with her other.

  “You hear
something, Jessie?” Rika asked with a wink.

  “Yeah, some sort of dripping,” Jessie replied. “Like a leaky faucet, or something.”

  “A snot faucet, maybe,” Rika said with a laugh.

  “Watch yourself,” Denny cautioned, his voice dropping, and even managing to sound a bit menacing. “Pinky wants to play a long game with you; get you over to her side through slow persuasion. Me? I don’t see the appeal so much. Maybe I’ll just take you out of play right now.”

  Rika looked down at Denny, and slowly raised the remainder of her burger to her mouth, popping it in and chewing slowly.

  “Maybe you should try,” she said around a mouthful of food. “Then I can punch your mouth off the shit lump you call a face, and no one will have to listen to you anymore.”

  As she spoke, a small voice was wailing in her mind, reminding her that she only had fifteen percent charge, and that a fight in the warrens was not what she needed right now; but another part of her just wanted to do the universe a favor, and wipe the stain that was Denny from existence.

  “Fuck you, Rika!” Denny shouted as he took a step back and pointed a ballistic pistol at her. “I’m sick of your superior attitude. You’re shit, just like the rest of us, and you can still bleed and die.”

  While Denny pontificated, Rika reached down and unplugged the charge cord from her side, then took a step away from Jessie’s stand.

  Denny kept the weapon trained on her head, while Rika kept one eye on his trigger finger and the other on his feet as he twisted to track her.

  After a minute, Denny seemed to reach a decision. His brow furrowed an instant before he pulled the trigger. It was all the tell Rika needed—she jerked to the side, and the projectile flew through the air where her head had been.

  Her arm shot out, and her steel fist slammed down on Denny’s right wrist, shattering the bones within.

  The gangster screamed and dropped his gun, but his look was not one of defeat; more like pained joy.

  Rika turned to see seven more members of Pinky’s gang approaching—each one of them armed, and all appearing to be spoiling for a fight.

  “Gonna get it now, bitch,” Denny hissed as he dove to the side of the corridor.

  Rika dropped as well, reaching for Denny’s discarded pistol as a hail of bullets and pulse rifle blasts flew overhead. She scampered behind a pillar and double-checked her body’s readout.

  She had been hit in the side and the leg by three ballistic projectiles, but none had done any damage. The low caliber weapons the gang employed wouldn’t be able to penetrate the artificial skin covering her body. But without the plating on her cyborg limbs—taken by the Nietzscheans at the end of the war—a lucky shot could wreck a knee or an elbow joint.

  “You sure you want to do this?” she called. “It’s gonna get messy.”

  “Fucking kill her!” Denny shouted before anyone had a chance to respond—not that Rika expected any of the gang members to argue for clemency.

  Rika knew that the pillar would only protect her for another minute before the attackers surrounded her. The corridor offered little cover, which meant that her best defense was a strong offense. One that involved taking a better weapon than the pistol she now held.

  She peered around the pillar and quickly scanned the corridor with her eyes, wishing that she had just one of the drones she used to carry back in the war.

  Three goons on the right, which meant the other four were on the left. She jerked her head back as a round struck the pillar, just three centimeters from her eye.

  She responded by reaching her arm around the pillar and firing back at the approaching attackers, her visual overlay providing targets based on the gang members’ most recent positions.

  Two separate screams let her know that her predictive algorithms were working just as well as ever. She estimated that her enemies were within two meters on the left side. Rika took a steadying breath, dropped to a crouch, and then leapt out around the left side of the pillar, kicking at the legs of the closest attacker while firing into the torso of another.

  The pistol got off two shots before it jammed, and Rika threw it aside as several shots struck her chest. She saw that the shooter was one of the gangsters on the right side of the pillar.

  She leapt to her feet, grabbed the man she had shot, and flung his body at two of the attackers, then delivered a roundhouse kick to another guy, shattering his ribs and probably his spine with her three-clawed foot.

  A spray of bullets hit the bulkhead nearby, and Rika threw herself at the shooter, breaking the woman’s neck with a well-aimed blow.

  The rest of the fight passed in a blur, and less than a minute later, Denny’s accomplices were either dead or drawing their final breaths.

  Rika cast her eyes about, searching for Denny—the piece of shit who had started this, who had brought out the killer in her.

  As she looked for him, Rika realized that the corridor was nearly empty. The refugees and other passersby had cleared out to avoid getting caught in the crossfire.

  A wave of sorrow hit her with the realization that her months of careful control—when she had thought that she was improving, becoming human again—had really just been a thin veneer over the vicious machine that still lay underneath.

  The sound of shuffling feet reached her ears, and she turned to see Denny sliding out from behind a pillar several meters away, still cradling his shattered wrist. His wide eyes stared at her with fear, and she saw tear streaks down his dirty cheeks.

  “Get out of here,” Rika said wearily. “Tell Pinky I don’t want to see her dicks down here anymore.”

  Denny nodded manically and then turned and ran.

  Rika let out a long breath and took a step; that’s when she realized that the fight had not been entirely one-sided. An actuator in her left knee had been hit by a bullet at some point, and she had limited motion in the limb.

  She would have to pick up a new one from a nearby mod-shop. They wouldn’t have one with the right specs for her, but she should be able to retrofit one of their civilian models.

  Rika hobbled back to Jessie’s booth and leaned heavily on the counter.

  “I think I’ll need another coffee,” she said.

  No response came, and she realized that Jessie was nowhere to be seen. The stall was small, so Rika leaned over the counter and peered into the corners around the stove, table, and chill-unit.

  Her breath caught, and a choked gasp escaped her throat when she finally caught sight of Jessie.

  The stall owner had hidden underneath the front counter, and a stray shot had passed through the thin walls of her stall. The wound on her forehead was small, but the back of Jessie’s skull was a tangled mass of blood, pink hair, and grey matter.

  Rika turned aside and threw up; spewing out her burger and coffee, followed by whatever else was left from her lunch earlier in the day.

  She tried to hold back the tears, but it was impossible. She collapsed to the ground, sobbing uncontrollably.

  Which is where the station security found her eleven long minutes later.

  P-COG

  STELLAR DATE: 07.09.8948 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: Combat Information Center, MSS Foe Hammer

  REGION: Interstellar Space, near the Praesepe Cluster

  David eased back into his seat in the Foe Hammer’s CIC and set his coffee pouch in the pocket on the side of his chair. If there was one thing that the Marauders had over the military, it was that the Old Man let people drink coffee at their posts.

  Not that coffee was the only thing better than the Genevian Armed Forces—but it certainly ranked high on the list, as far as David was concerned.

  He pulled up the logs he was reviewing and gave them a visual scan, looking for patterns that may not be apparent to others. He spotted a few interesting alignments in timing, data size, and destinations.

  Probably nothing nefarious, but still worth checking, he thought before pushing them into one of his analysis matrices.r />
  As a P-Cog, or Pattern Recognition Specialist, David’s job was to look for things others missed. Even though a dozen other humans and AIs had been over these logs, there was always a gem nestled in them for a P-Cog to pick up.

  It was his special gift from the Genevian Armed Forces during the war with the Nietzscheans. Some draftees— conscripts, if he was being honest—got the real shit mods, like the mechs; especially the K1 models. But other poor saps, like himself, got their heads jammed full of upgrades that served other purposes.

  David’s upgrades were dedicated to spotting patterns and ferreting out connections between seemingly unrelated things.

  Massive NSAI grids usually performed tasks like that, but some wiz in the GAF’s R&D division decided to capitalize on the one thing that humans had in spades over NSAI: intuition.

  David had known all his life that he had good intuition. He could talk his way out of almost anything, and spot good and bad deals a mile away. It had made him a great contract negotiator before the war, and his services were always in high demand.

  When he was drafted, the aptitude tests had picked up on his abilities, and he was shipped off to a lab filled with a lot of unfriendly-looking folks in gleaming white coats.

  That was when the poking and prodding inside his brain had begun. Thankfully he remembered little of it; though there had been lucid moments. Moments punctuated by fear, terror, and agony.

  In the end, he had come out packing a lot of extra hardware between his ears. Enough that his skull needed passive cooling—which accounted for his lack of hair and the addition of cooling fins on his head.

  The adaptation had earned him the nickname ‘Sharkie’ in the military—even though he’d never seen a shark with seven fins.

  After the war, David had attempted to return to his prior work, but because of the mech-conscript program, most Genevians assumed that any GAF-modded person was a criminal conscript, not a draftee.

  Few people would hire him, and those who did wanted to use him to hide criminal activity—not seek out wrongdoing.