by Ginger Booth
Kassidy herself waggled her head to enjoy the clacking of her beaded braids, her mane of lustrous black curls dulled with magenta and green, collected into cornrows going the perfect odd directions to highlight everything bony and severe in her features. She’d sacrificed several gorgeous outfits, ripping them apart and then knotting them together into the most ugly, butch look she could manage.
With a touch like a salute, she turned on her forehead camera and loosed her drones to hunt for the finest angles. Eli was stuck minding the bridge, and wanted to watch everything.
All six of this afternoon’s – tonight’s – guards spilled onto the catwalk to observe the ‘game.’
“Kill MO! Kill MO, kill MO!” she cried out, hammering a fist into the air. “Where are you, you cowards?”
Drifting through the hold in zero g, Abel and Ben, Sass and Clay took up the chant, catcalling for the MO crew to emerge and fight. Kassidy affixed her tether, then vaulted onto the railing. She screamed out an ululating cry of defiance. Clicking her generator to cancel out gravity to zero, she dove straight for the nearest guyline to do a fast spin, screeching.
By the time she cancelled her spin, the MO swine thundered out onto the catwalk, clomping their work boots across the steel grating. “Death to Thrive! Death to Thrive!”
Kassidy couldn’t help grinning at mousy little Seitz, his face contorted in ferocity, trying to act tough. But she quickly tamped the smile, and bared her teeth at Cortez, her head fresh-trimmed for the game, shaved right down to the skin for racing stripes on either side of her skull. The soldier smeared black grease paint across her cheeks and around her mouth for a ragged mustache and goatee.
“Bitch! Your ass is mine!” Kassidy shrieked at her.
“In your dreams, whore!” Cortez cried back. She paused at the railing to beat her chest like a gorilla and howl like a wolf. Wilder and Seitz tried their best to mimic her. Griffith skipped the railing, opting to launch from the aft staircase instead.
“Grudge match! Grudge match!” rang out from their captain.
Kassidy took in Sass’s outfit with misgiving. The younger three women consulted on making themselves repulsive. Sass went the other way, playing in a rose stretch corset over skin-tight black jeans and rose ballet flats, her cat-eyes makeup sexier than she usually wore to a bar to pick up guys. Clay was likewise decked out for show. Quite the hunk, actually.
“Unequal sides!” Wilder accused. He pivoted his whole body to point at Jules, then Kassidy. “Lose the retard, and the hellcat!”
“No way!” Abel returned. “Grudge match!” He led the chant again.
Kassidy jockeyed for position forward, facing off directly against Cortez. The two friends bared teeth in a snarl.
Their captor Martin called out, “This is how you get ready for bed?”
Sass countered, “This is how we make turncoats pay! You’ll be tired tonight, traitor!” The latter was aimed at Wilder, her counterpart in the starting line-up. Actually, it was more like vertical triangles bisecting the hold, with Jules and Seitz behind the lines guarding their goal hoops, each wielding a short plank as a bat to slam the ball away. Goalies were free to use gravity however they felt like it, and position themselves as they pleased. As the games got rougher, Kassidy withdrew her camera drones from service. Their new ball had its own gravity generator, when enabled. Copeland lovingly crafted its grav to set its own random direction and strength, usually weak with a distinct tendency toward the overhead.
“Jules, throw the ball!” Kassidy yelled. “I’m gonna make this traitor eat it!”
“You’re gonna eat worse than that, cow!” Cortez snarled.
Kassidy’s lip curled in dark glee. They weren’t entirely acting. She and Cortez had grown close this past week or so. Wilder and Jules, too, and Seitz with Copeland. When the crew heard the MO perverts wanted to jump sides to the pirates, they all wanted to smack them down hard.
“This ball?” Jules asked. She toddled up the slide, weaving side to side with the soccer ball. She carefully placed it on the slide, and it rolled down. She squealed running after it, caught and toed it gently into the air, then slam-kicked it straight at Wilder.
He took it full in the face while Sass pivoted her legs around and shoved them directly into his gut. She grabbed the ball before the impact shot him away.
Kassidy couldn’t care less. She dove at Cortez for her cat fight. “Dumping me for pirates, are you?”
Fighting for purchase on Kassidy’s face, Cortez screeched back, “Anyone’s a better lay than you are! Slut!”
Ben and Abel swung by above them to body-slam Griffith. As usual, he fouled himself on his tether and set to spinning around a hazard line. Below and to the left, Sass and Clay passed the ball playing keep-away from Wilder. They didn’t need to. Either one of them had a clear shot at the goal. But when Clay finally threw, poor Seitz wasn’t expecting it.
“Score!” team Thrive yelled in triumph.
“Not fair!” Wilder yelled back.
“No one cares!” Sass countered.
Cortez lunged at Kassidy while she was distracted. Locked in a grip, trying to scratch each other’s faces, they bounded off a bulkhead before Sass and Clay snatched them and pulled them apart.
“Clutzes!” Sass snarled at them. “Don’t break my trees! Listen up, all of you! Minus 20 points if you hurt my tree!”
“So that’s a rule?” Wilder hurled back, drifting upside-down and listed to the left. “Six to four is fine, but touch your tree and we lose?”
“You lose no matter what!” Sass spit at him. “Seitz, you useless sniveling coward! Serve the ball already!”
Kassidy was just getting ready to claw at Cortez again, as a shove from Clay sent her toward Seitz. She flipped around to kick his bat out of his hands.
“Kassidy, head’s up!” Ben called. She swiveled just in time to catch a pass and dunk it right through the goal.
“Twenty-zero, losers!” Sass yelled. “Kill MO! Kill MO!”
Several goals later, none of them by MO, Captain Lavelle stuck his head in. He hastily beat a retreat to the back corner by the med-bay. Martin must have told him he had to see this.
Kassidy, currently with Cortez’s skull in a head-lock, paused only for moment to see Sass pren for him. “So that’s her angle.”
Cortez leveraged Kassidy’s distraction to kick her clear across the hold into Ben. “You’re too ugly for a lesbian, Yang! I’m gonna grab me some prettier ass!”
All hands were nicely worn out for bed by half past midnight, Sagamore time. Thrive didn’t let MO score a single point. Griffith slept in the med bay to repair a slightly fractured wrist.
Sass flirted with Lavelle, but Kassidy was glad to see she retired to her cabin alone. Spin it out, girl. Play him!
“Good morning!” Sass greeted Pierre Lavelle with a warm smile. Martin and the goons insisted that her crew present themselves on the catwalk this morning, full of yawns from insomnia and jet lag. Kassidy and Jules hadn’t shown yet.
“Bonjour!” Lavelle returned. He remained in the hold below. “Today I show you Hell’s Bells. I am sure your engineers are eager to get started on those star drives, yes?”
“He certainly is!” Sass claimed with enthusiasm. “The engineer from MO. Mr. Seitz.” Sass pointed to her right. Seitz looked depressed but resigned to his fate. He often looked that way. “I’ll send along Mr. Griffith to help him, I think.”
“And Cortez!” Cortez demanded.
“Oh, how nice,” Sass agreed.
“Her engineer is in the bulkheads, Pierre,” the guard Martin tattled.
“Where he’ll be all day, I imagine,” Sass agreed. “We’re repairing and upgrading our ESD emitters while we’re safe between your guns. We expected to spend quite some time here waiting for the new star drives. It’ll be tight, to leave on your schedule.”
Pierre shrugged. “Fine. This is an upgrade over what Gossamer has?”
“I believe so?” She looked to Eli for confir
mation, who nodded.
“He’s also an engineer?”
“Eli is a botanist.”
That engaged the pirate’s sense of humor. “You have a botanist? Why?”
“I rent two cabins for my laboratory,” Eli defended. “Plus my own section of the engine room. The radiation shielding is excellent, as is the food.”
“He pays rent,” Sass cut him off.
“By all means, bring the botanist,” Pierre directed.
“I’ll go too,” Ben piped up.
“You will not,” Sass countermanded this. “You are needed on the Thrive. Report to Mr. Rocha on the bridge. Clay won’t be joining us today, I’m afraid, Pierre. He’s covering my shift on the bridge. Eli, let’s get those gifts ready!”
“Gifts?” Pierre inquired.
“Trees, vegetables, this and that,” Sass said vaguely. “Ben, I ordered you to the bridge.” The kid was sneaking aft to berthing.
“Just helping Griffith pack!” Ben replied.
“Mr. Acosta,” Sass warned.
“Be right back, cap!”
Sass pursed her lips, then turned to Lavelle winningly. “Morale is imperfect this morning. May I suggest the day be kept quiet, and as close to normal as possible?” She looked pointedly at Martin and his goon squad.
“Two of the bitches are hiding, Pierre,” Martin countered.
Lavelle considered that, and shrugged it off. “A threat is only a threat until you make good on it, Martin, eh? Are these hiding women important members of the crew?”
“Kassidy – the one who bit Cortez’s ear last night? She’s another renter, does ‘reality’ video.” Sass provided air quotes. “The girl Jules is our cook. Ah, she’s excitable, and only 14,” she claimed.
The pirate recoiled. “Why would you bring a defective 14-year-old on ship?”
“She’s engaged to marry the first mate. When she’s old enough.” Sass didn’t dare glance at Abel. “She’s his dependent. She’s a good cook. But terribly afraid of your men.”
“Alright. Martin, you guys exit the galley when the kid cooks. Anyone touches her, they answer to me. Only 14. Merde. We leave in 10.”
That was 10 Sagamore minutes, so they hustled. Sass and Eli put together a grav carrier of gift scrubber trees and vegetables, and a sample collection box for Eli, and their pressure suits. A bored Pierre assured them the suits were unnecessary, but Sass insisted on bringing them anyway. Seitz, Griffith, and Cortez eventually emerged well-laden with tools and pressure suits. Ben skipped behind people to escape to the bridge.
Where Sass hoped Ben would spend a highly educational day learning white hat hacking from Clay Rocha, the best Mahina had to offer. If there was a way to get Gossamer’s tentacles out of Thrive’s computer systems, Clay was the man to do it. The small population of the moon boasted a pathetically finite supply of black hat hackers. But Clay teethed on their ilk for decades before leaving Earth. Maybe the Gossamer had a software criminal who could outwit Clay. Sass sincerely doubted it.
She joined Lavelle with her away team as a shuttle from Hell’s Bells latched onto her parking airlock. “These two baby trees are for your ship.” She pulled a matched set, olive and grapefruit, from the carrier. “We’ll just leave them here for now.”
“These trees smell wonderful,” the pirate replied, gazing up appreciatively at Sass’s larger specimens. “Did they take some damage when you were holed? They look…”
“A hostile botanist,” Sass explained. “The fruit taste awful, but high in vitamins.” The scrubber trees removed toxins from the air and concentrated them in the fruit for ease of waste disposal. “You’re welcome to eat one. I’ve already had mine today.” She plucked an unripe olive and handed it to him with a smile.
Curious, Pierre Lavelle bit into it. His whole face puckered in disgust, eyes tearing. The olive’s acid flavor was seasoned with heavy metals and volatile organics. “That’s truly awful.”
“Isn’t it? I can’t wait to see Hell’s Bells!” She linked arms with him and left the others to manage the grav sleds.
33
Aquaponics is a form of hydroponic agriculture where fish and plants form a closed nutrient loop. Humans harvest both.
Hell’s Bells wasn’t a spaceship. Rather it featured a collection of space platforms loosely tied together with shuttles, mining sleds, and partially dug into their nearby ring rock. Pierre Lavelle provided the tour guide commentary while their laconic hellbelly pilot stuck to operating the shuttle. Two of his armed guards accompanied them, since obviously Sass was sending her soldiers.
Sass was a puzzle to him. If he was reading this right, her crew split into several cliques – Mahina urb, Mahina settler, and loaners from Mahina Orbital sent to safeguard their investment in star drives, if not to protect the Thrive. Reading the ridiculous game last night, there was a complete schism between the normal Thrive crew and the MO guards. He supposed that was to be expected.
The difference in manner between the ‘urbs’ and the ‘settlers’ was also obvious. Urbs Sass and Clay surely treated their settler inferiors as subservient.
Which made sense, if the two of them owned the ship. Were they married? Was she trying to make Clay jealous, by hanging on his arm like this? More importantly, were they too rebels against the hegemony of their city against the more numerous and unfortunate settlers?
“The volatiles factory,” he pointed out to the lovely blonde crowding his elbow. “Anything that out-gases poisons has its own processing facility away from the habitation modules.”
“Excellent design,” she purred. “And all of this product is sold to Sagamore, none to Mahina?”
“It isn’t sold at all,” Pierre growled. “We need biologics from Sagamore. All our output, the most valuable products in the damned Pono system, held hostage for a few measly containers of organics a couple times a year. If they were ‘sold,’ we would get a fair price in return. We’d be rich. Instead we are paid by volume, not even by weight. Equal volume of dry foodstuffs and nutrients for the most precious refined metals in the Aloha system.”
The MO crew looked duly impressed by this. Mercenaries, Pierre thought with contempt. Criminals from MO. But he supposed they’d be useful. Engineers usually were, but this Seitz looked too young to know much.
“May I ask, dear lady, how old you are? You and your crew all seem so young.”
“You may!” Sass replied in delight. “I celebrated a birthday on the way here. My one hundredth.”
He laughed. “Here we are, Hell’s Bells. The main platform.”
“It isn’t actually mobile, is it?” Sass inquired. “I mean, with all its bits and pieces, and so many operations on the asteroid.”
“With difficulty,” he replied. “We anticipate this rock and its neighborhood to produce for another fifty years or so. High concentrations of metals, posarium, helmeticum, aribaricum, potassium.”
Eli was the one who looked startled and impressed this time, the other urb, the botanist. Pierre wondered what he really was. No one needed a botanist in space – ludicrous.
“OK, I recognized one of those,” Sass confessed. “Potassium. The plants need that.”
“All plants, yes,” Pierre agreed. “And Sagamore doesn’t have any. Well, it had enough for the original colony. But from the start, Sagamore always knew it needed to mine the rings for the essentials. The other elements I mentioned are crucial to our pharmaceutical industry, and star drives.”
“So Sagamore has a great many star drives,” Sass mused. “Which one was the pharmaceutical compound?”
“Posarium,” Eli murmured.
“Quite a market for all of them on Mahina, wouldn’t you say, Eli?” Sass urged.
The scientist nodded, eyebrows raised. “Game changing. Interesting about the potassium, though. Terrible constraint for the colony.”
Pierre frowned. That concern would make sense for a botanist, valuing the mundane potassium over the fabulously rare star drive components. He still didn’t buy it
.
“Have pharmaceuticals greatly advanced on Sagamore since its founding?” Sass inquired. “I’m not sure I know of any great advances on Mahina. Eli?”
The ‘scientist’ shook his head and looked away. He’s lying. Then so is she. Hm.
The clanging and thumping came to an end, and the airlock pinged a green light. “After you, madame, monsieur.”
He ended up helping Eli jimmy the silly grav carrier through the airlock, while Sass stepped into the docking area alone first, looking around with interest.
Sass wrinkled her nose and gazed around the docking bay. Wafts of salt and fish reminded her of the broad Hudson fjord of her childhood. It hadn’t occurred to her they might use salt water in their aquaponics. Perhaps the smell was a fresh water seaweed?
The docks, if not clean, were not disgusting, merely industrially grubby, and swabbed lackadaisically. One of the lacking daisies was right over there, in fact. She stepped closer, under guise of clearing the doorway for the grav carriers. If she wasn’t mistaken, that man was stoned off his gourd. Pot or…?
He swatted at something invisible and started arguing with himself. More likely recreational hallucinogenics.
Eli and the MO’s finished negotiating passage through the bottleneck, and put hands to wrinkled noses in distaste.
Pierre laughed at them.
Sass grinned right along. “Eli, did I tell you? Sagamore agriculture is aquaponic-based. The smell is fish. And – seaweed? Paired with rice paddies.”
“Of course seaweed,” Lavelle agreed. “And rice. Wheat flour for our bread, alas, also comes from Sagamore.”