“Just like old times, right?” I asked.
“Just like old times,” Gonzales answered. “This way. We’re going to the market.”
“I thought this whole city was the black market.”
“In a metaphorical sense, not a literal one. If we want to actually buy something along the lines of what we need, there are actual markets to go to.”
“And what exactly is it that we need?”
“Well, I guess you’ll have to wait and find out, won’t you?”
“Yeah, you know how you were just complaining about Aja? You’re doing the exact same thing,” Bahn said, rubbing the stubble on his head. It seemed his hair didn’t grow very quickly at all, especially considering that I already had at least a knuckle’s worth of growth in the few weeks since we’d been ‘processed.’
“Well yeah, but like, with style.”
“If you say so,” Ciangi murmured. “But why don’t we get to actually going?”
Gonzales shrugged and started walking, leading us down a side street that was even less lit than the rest of the pathways.
It was an interesting sort of setup. Some of the streets were so narrow that two of us couldn’t stand shoulder to shoulder, and some of them were wide enough for hover-trucks and the like to move by without scraping their sides. Sometimes, the buildings were towering above us, looming like dark clouds, and sometimes they were hodge-podge shacks that looked like they were cobbled together with twine and debris from junked vessels.
We strolled along, Gonzales recalling the first time she had ever visited the place after a dare in college, but I got the feeling that none of us were really listening, choosing instead to take in all the sights, sounds, and perhaps more pervasive, the smells.
We cut through the city in winding, meandering paths, and only after fifteen minutes did I realize just how far we had been walking. I opened my mouth to ask Gonzales where the heck this literal market was within the metaphorical market, but before I could, Mimi stopped short.
“There is a large group approaching us very directly.”
Gonzales groaned. “Aw, are you serious?”
“I do not think that this is something I would joke about, and if I did, I believe it would be in poor taste.”
“Yeah, yeah. Get close, everyone. Normally, people just leave each other alone down here, but it we might be getting a welcome committee.”
“I am confused. Normally welcome committees are good things, yes?”
Gonzales didn’t respond. Instead, she turned in the direction that Mimi had originally pointed on let her hand rest over the gun strapped to her hip.
It was strange to see her standing so casually when I could see all the muscles in her back tensing, but I tried to take a nonchalant stance too.
…I didn’t think I was very good at it.
It didn’t take long for faces to emerge from the dark shadows of the alley, and they looked just as gaunt and dirty as one might expect. A man stepped forward from the center of the little group as it spread out to block the rest of the way, twirling what looked like a thermal knife in his hands.
“Why, hello there, friends,” he said, smiling wolfishly. I couldn’t help but feel like we had just walked into one of a dozen or so novels that I had read when I was younger where nefarious persons beset the heroes who wandered onto the wrong side of town. “What brings you here?”
“Oh, you know, the usual, looking to get supplies without having to worry about dodging cops, scanners, or feds.”
“Really? You don’t look like the type to have a ‘usual’ in this kind of place.”
“Haven’t you ever heard that looks can be deceiving?” Ciangi bit, clearly sounding irritated.
“That’s a good point. In that case, let’s skip the theatrics. One of my girls picked up some strange readings on one of our loot scanners. Some sort of space material, and as we all know, that’s quite valuable. So just hand it over and we’ll be on our way, and you can get to your little shopping trip.”
“Space material?” Gonzales echoed dubiously. “What are you even on a—”
“Me,” Mimi cut in, almost sounding amused. “Their scanners must have picked up on me.”
There was a quick moment of confusion as our unexpected new friends exchanged glances, and Bahn snickered. “What kind of ramshackle technology are you using where she came up as a small bit of space material?”
“Look,” the knife guy said. “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, but I’m extending this politeness as a courtesy.”
Gonzales snorted. “What, you’re saying you don’t believe us fine, upstanding gentlepeople?”
“I gotta admit, no, not par—”
“We do not have time for this!” Mimi snapped, reaching forward.
Except her arm very quickly became not so much an arm, shooting toward the man while expanding in width. By the time it reached him a second later, it was nearly as thick as him and a deep, oily green.
It was hard to comprehend everything that happened, but one moment, it was just a sort of long, grubby and gross limb, while the next, the end split right down the center, massive teeth erupting as it formed a dripping maw. One of the would-be thugs let out a yelp, but that was the only sound that escaped before Mimi’s new arm-thing bit down on knife-guy’s leg.
“Ah! What the hell! Get it off! Get it off!”
But Mimi didn’t let him go so easily. Instead, she jerked him upwards, where I heard a loud pop amidst the screams of his crew, then slam him back down to the ground.
Just when the scene was becoming a real madhouse, Mimi let him go. He let out a borderline amusing sort of cry, but she just stalked over to him. “Listen here, friend, I am very busy and I would like to get back to my family. You are delaying us. Go and seek medical help, and I will forget your name for the rest of time.
“But if anyone comes after us I will assume that you or your associates were a part of it, and I will have all the little aliens like me come and visit everyone you’ve ever known and loved. Understood?”
“Y-yes!”
“Good. Now go, before I decide to take two years’ worth of transgressions against me out on your fleshy, breakable body.”
They scrambled off, a couple of them coming to help their leader hobble away, and we waited until they were completely out of our sight before continuing.
“Huh, if I didn’t know you better, Mimi, I would have thought you were serious,” Gonzales joked.
“I was.” We paused for a minute, her answer surprising even me. She noticed that we stopped and looked over her shoulder at us. “I believe I am at the end of my patience, and I would very much like to go home. So, let’s hurry this up, yes?”
Gonzales flashed me a look of surprise. “Uh, sure. Whatever you say.”
We started walking again, this time much more quietly as we went along.
It took just as long to go the rest of the way to the market, and when we finally reached it, I was surprised to see that it looked exactly like what one might imagine if one was thinking about an open-air bizarre. There were stalls lining what looked like a couple blocks, with the occasional shack to break them up. I saw all sorts of wares hanging up, from food to cloth to tech, and to be honest, it was a bit overwhelming.
“At last!” Gonzales said, clapping her hands. “I want you guys to find everything you might need to make a sort of gallant last meal. Me, I’m gonna go see what kind of batteries and dischargers they have here.”
“Wait, you want us to split up?”
I agreed with Eske’s dubious tone. Good things hadn’t exactly happened the last time we were all apart.
But Gonzales just waved us off. “Don’t worry, it’s safe here. Anybody who would want to start anything would have to deal with a whole bunch of pissed-off sellers for making them lose out on sales.”
I wanted to go after her, to insist that we all stay together and do whatever it was we needed to do, but she had already disappeared in the crowd.
Giving the others a look, I shrugged, and we all headed toward whichever stall smelled best.
Last meal, huh? I hoped it was more of a last supper before the new age, and less like warriors having a feast before battle because they knew they wouldn’t make it till the morning.
But why did I have a feeling that it was more the latter?
“So, what’d ya’ll get?” Gonzales asked as we got onto the ship, each of us laden with our own packs. Curious that she hadn’t asked us back when she had paid for all of it with credits from an account that I had no idea how she got access to, but I guess she just trusted us that much.
Either that or she was in a rush. I wasn’t really sure which, actually.
“Food,” Ciangi answered bluntly. She still was very obviously perturbed about Gonzales ditching us, but the weapons engineer just glossed right over it, not even breaking stride as she headed toward the cafeteria.
“Oh, great. That will go over well. Everyone loves food.”
We followed her and I decided to be the one to extend the olive branch. “I got some mulberries for a cobbler, and then some steaks that were apparently really good cuts.”
“I can’t believe that these are actual ingredients from Earth, and not created through a food synthesizer.”
“Yeah, you can get all sorts of things from the black market that just aren’t done anywhere else.”
“Remind me again why this stuff is illegal?” Eske asked, biting into an apple and making happy sounds.
“It’s not approved by the Universal Health Commission. Non-synthesized food just has too much of a risk of parasites or other food-borne illnesses.”
“And by that, you mean less than a one percent chance?”
“About,” Gonzales answered. “Agriculture came a long way from the stone age, but then we exhausted most of the Earth’s resources and had to turn to combining certain elements and nutrients into sustenance.”
We reached the cafeteria and she led us to the back, where I saw what looked like the most bare-bones and yet high-tech kitchen I had ever seen.
“Which is why we’re gonna hand cook this meal together for everyone. It’ll be a real party, ya know?”
“Whoa,” I murmured, taking it all in. “Why is this even on this ship?”
“In case the synthesizer goes out,” Eske answered, pushing her goggles up out of habit. “They wanted to make sure that they’d be able to cook food from raw ingredients and not starve.”
“Huh, I guess they really did think of everything, didn’t they?” Ciangi grumbled, looking slightly less churlish.
“Yeah, except for a shapeshifting alien and her crew coming in and stealing their biggest warship away,” Eske said, her smirk evident in her tone. “Twice.”
“Yeah, after the first time, they really had no excuse not to see that coming.”
“There we are!” Gonzales cried, dumping out one of her bags on the table, causing food to tumble out. “Bantering just like old time. Come on, let’s get to cooking before our new guests arrive!”
We exchanged looks but went to work anyway. Mimi, for never having cooked in her life on account of the whole not eating the same food we did, was actually pretty helpful. She listened to all of us as we asked for various things to make our random assortment of dishes and was the only one who could reach into the ovens without being burned. Apparently, despite all their oversight, the government had forgotten to include any sort of heat-retardant tool to grab anything hotter than room temperature.
I was working very studiously on my pie. I hadn’t cooked it since I was a kid, when the synthesizers had gone out at the colony, but I remembered my parents being surprised and liking it. They had taken it around to all our immediate neighbors, telling how their son made food out of raw ingredients from the storeroom. It had been then that I thought I’d seen a brief flicker of pride in their eyes that I would turn out to be useful after all, but then the synthesizer was fixed three days later and after long enough, no one remembered my food anymore.
I was just rolling out the top crust using Mimi’s shifted arm as a rolling pin, when I heard some familiar voices and some unfamiliar ones calling out from the other side of the wall.
“Hulloooo! We have a mission success here and I believe our orders were to return here upon completion.” I was pretty sure that was Babel’s automated voice, pumped higher in volume and with a slightly sassier tone than usual.
I peeked out of the kitchen door as Gonzales rushed to the entrance, face flushed with excitement. “Hey! Glad you could join us! Uh, we’re not quite ready yet. You got everyone on your list?”
“Of course we did,” the demolition man interrupted. “If we hadn’t, we would not be here.”
Babel held up a finger however, as if interrupting. “I should add that we got everyone on our list who is currently alive and planet-side. Gonzales, meet Avery, James, and Min-ho.”
The three people standing behind the folks I knew stepped forward, and they couldn’t be more different. One was a tall, slender man with piercing eyes, one was the tallest and most muscular woman I had ever seen, with long, flaxen hair past her backside, complicated braids hidden within the copper-brown waves, and the third looked like an everyday middle-aged woman, complete with scuffed shoes and black hair in a bun.
“Oh, fantastic to meet you,” Gonzales said, offering her hand. “I’ve heard so much of all of your work.”
It was the muscle-bound woman who stepped forward first, her large hand dwarfing Gonzales’s as she bent over so they were almost face to face. “And I think it’s a shame that I ‘ave not ‘eard of yours, ma chere.”
The woman who I was guessing was Min-ho giggled, but Gonzales just smirked with her usual charm. “Don’t worry. During dinner, I’m sure everyone will be glad to tell you exactly what they think of me.”
She laughed, a surprisingly loud bellow, and stepped back. There was a bit more conversation, but I needed to finish my pie.
As I worked and finally put the last of the food in the oven, more and more people came in. By the time half of our number had returned, I figured our crew had about doubled in size. I didn’t think that I had been around this many humans since I was on the space station where I had received my certification. It was loud, very loud, and there was a type of energy that grated on my nerves, but it was also…nice.
None of us were alone anymore. It wasn’t us against everything. We had allies, experts, people who didn’t have to fly by the seat of their pants while hoping they didn’t do something that ended up killing all of their friends. It was an adjustment, but a welcome one.
Although I would still be very happy when we returned home.
Another group came in, much less boisterously than the first couple, and I quickly realized that what we had was not enough. Maybe if Gonzales had told us a bit more about what we were expecting, we could have prepared properly. I felt my anxiety build at the thought but a quick look out the door revealed Ciangi, Bahn, and Eske programming various thing into the processors.
Ah. I should have known. Sure, maybe we didn’t always plan the best, but we were pretty good at compensating when we could.
My pie had about twenty minutes left—I was always terrible at judging cooking times—as we began to haul food out to the masses. I saw what had to be ex-soldiers, obvious criminal types, young teenagers, and even old men and women. For being anywhere from fifty to seventy of us, there certainly was a wide variety.
I supposed that was what we needed—demolitions experts, thieves, strategists, hackers, and the like. We would be bringing a force that no one ever had before, and the coup was going to have one heck of a time dealing with it.
We managed to get all the food out onto two big tables for everyone to come peruse as they wanted. I could see the hungry look across many of their faces, and I wondered how many of these people the coup or the government had done so dirty. Unlike me, they didn’t have a shapeshifting alien friend and another world to run off to. All th
ey had was what they could take with their two hands on this planet.
That wasn’t exactly fair, and that bothered me.
They started to line up, but as they did, Gonzales gabbed a chair then stood on it, her hands raised as she tried to catch their attention.
“Hey, guys! Hey now, y’all!” It took several seconds for them to realize that she was there and quiet down, but she waited until all eyes were on her. “I know the folks who brought you here told you that the stakes were high. That we’re going up against a corrupt movement within our own government and cutting off the snake’s head.
“Some of you are familiar with this coup, as we call it. Some of you have lost everything—your homes, your families, your reputations, and some of you have only heard of it in whispers. But let me tell you that what they will do if they seize full control of the Earth Gov will be so much worse.
“This last meal is a thank you, and an offering. We all know that it’s impossible for everyone to make it through this next fight, and if you’re not ready to make that sacrifice, then eat and show yourselves to the door. We will not keep you here. We will not judge you, but if you choose to fill your plate and stay, then in a day’s time, we will be marching down the door of the biggest base they have and making them pay for all the lies they have told. All the blood they have spilled.
“Tomorrow, we cut their puppet strings and return our world to the true federation it once was!”
Her speech was certainly thrilling, and she threw her fist into the air at the end. The men and women before her all cheered, and pride began to swell in my chest.
“I think Gonzales just might have outgrown our little clan of misfits,” Ciangi murmured, admiration in her tone but tears pricking at the corner of her eyes.
I knew what she meant, and I threw an arm around her shoulder. “She may have a bigger part to play in Earth’s future than we do, but we’re always going to be her family.”
Mimic: The Space Shifter Chronicles Boxed Set (Books 1 - 9) Page 55