by M. D. Cooper
But one thing he hadn’t given enough consideration to was the fact that after spending seventy days alone with just eight other people on a fifty-meter pinnace, some relationships were bound to form.
Like the one between himself and Saris.
It was a risky thing, sleeping with a woman under your command; something that was rearing its head from time to time with Saris. She’d become a bit possessive, and he was going to have to have a chat with her or break it off…or both.
You’re too old to fall for the young, bright-eyed girl, he chided himself.
A part of him still felt guilty. His wife had died in the attack on Carthage two years ago, and though he knew she’d want him to be happy, he wondered what she’d think of him having a fling with one of his junior officers on a long trip.
Borden chuckled softly as he watched the system scan continue to update.
It was Rel’s turn to laugh.
“So what should we do?” Lieutenant Saris asked after a minute.
“Is our EM signature suitably changed?” Borden asked.
“Yes, sir,” Pars replied. “I registered us as a Kerry 17, a local build of ship that’s used for a lot of courier runs. So long as we get an external berth and no one aboard the station looks out a window and sees us, we should be in the clear.”
“Then let’s make for the Maltese Falcon at best speed,” Borden replied. “Time to figure out what that woman is up to, and why she needs five mechs to do it.”
“My money’s on a heist,” Pars replied with a laugh, earning him a sour look from Saris.
“Shut up, Corporal.”
“Shutting up, ma’am.”
FALCONS
STELLAR DATE: 12.23.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Karl’s Might, Maltese Falcon, Malta
REGION: Iberia System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
Alison checked her cloak one last time to make sure it was adequately covering her gun-arm. It looked good, so long as she kept it close to her body and didn’t swing it too much when she walked.
She’d detached the barrel, hanging it from a sling over her shoulder. It dangled down between her legs and she’d tried not to smirk at the image it created—but with a bit of a legs-spread walk, she was able to keep her thighs from hitting the barrel.
Sitting on a ledge that ran along the inner bulkhead of the small bay adjacent to the ship’s port-side airlock, she confirmed that the GNR’s barrel wouldn’t show then, either—so long as she didn’t slide back.
“It looks fine,” Alice said as she walked into the small hold, a hood pulled over her head and her hair flowing out around the sides, partially obscuring her face. Her look was topped off with decorative glasses that looked a bit ridiculous on the normally staid woman. “Nothing’s going to happen up here. We’re just going to meet a contact and see what he knows. If everything is on the up and up, then we’ll go downworld with the whole team and extract the president. Honestly, you can just leave your whole arm here.”
Alison did her best not to laugh in the Lieutenant Colonel’s face. Alice may be her commanding officer, but if the woman thought she was going to go out onto a Nietzschean space station without her gun-arm, she had another think coming.
To her credit, Alice seemed to take a cue from the expression Alison wore and waved a hand dismissively. “Or take it. Like I said, I don’t expect any trouble, either way.”
Alison had a hard time believing that. If the lieutenant colonel thought that they would just waltz on and off a station that was in enemy hands with no trouble, she was either lying or delusional.
“Will we take the ship down to the surface?” Alison asked, following the other woman out of the bay. “I can have Kor start looking for good surface ports.”
Alice glanced back at her, eyes narrowed. “I’d prefer if we kept comm traffic to a minimum.”
“Querying public databases for surface ports won’t stand out with a ship like this,” Alison countered.
“Fine,” Alice said as the inner airlock door opened.
Alison replied.
The outer airlock cycled open, and Alice stepped out into a circular bay that four other freighters were also snugged up against. Flits and haulers moved about, shifting cargo from stacks piled in the center of the bay to the various ships.
Alison suddenly wondered if they should have set aside some of the cargo in the ship’s holds for transfer onto the station—not that they had anyone to transfer it to.
Stars…I have no idea how this sneaky spy shit works.
Alice was striding purposefully across the bay, the logo for Karl’s Shipping appearing to shift back and forth on the back of the woman’s slightly too-large shipsuit.
Measuring her pace, Alison trailed a meter behind the lieutenant colonel, keeping her eyes peeled and feeling entirely naked without her helmet.
From what she could see, several of the other ships had armed guards, but Alice had said that it would take too long to get the proper permits to walk about the station with armor and weapons.
They were lucky that Fred had stuffed one of the Marauders’ cloaks in his pack, and that it was capable of masking a mech’s EM signature.
Kor had suggested that next time Fred should pack one for everyone, and the two had gotten into a shouting match about whose turn it had been to haul general gear.
In the end, Jenisa had stepped in and separated the two, but Alison knew that their patience was coming to an end. Alice must have known it as well, because even though the shouting had been audible across the whole ship, the lieutenant colonel had not mentioned it at all.
The two women walked out of the bay and down a long corridor that connected the bay to one of the station’s main concourses. From there, Alice summoned a station car. When the roofless automated conveyance arrived, they both settled into the seats and rode in silence the three kilometers to their meeting point.
Alice had given Alison the name of the destination, a diner called ‘The Silver Train’, which was frequented by crews of both interstellar freighters and local insystem rigs.
Alison didn’t know a lot about where freighter crews tended to congregate, but she had never expected it to be at a diner. In the vids, they were always gathering in dimly lit bars, playing games of chance and skill at grimy tables, while getting frisky with the help.
Much to her dismay, when they arrived, the location was nothing more than a regular diner sporting a long seating area and a bar
running along one side. Rather than alcohol, pots of coffee—in a dozen different flavors—sat behind the bar. Along with something that Alison thought was alcohol until she realized it was maple syrup.
“Oh yeah,” she said with a grin, all sorrow over not ending up in a seedy bar gone. “I’m getting a full stack and drenching it.”
“Keep it cool, Alison,” the lieutenant colonel said with a scowl.
“Sorry, but do you know the last time I had maple syrup? You’d have to put me down to keep me from ordering that.”
“Well, sit at the bar,” Alice directed. “I don’t want you getting your sticky machine hand all over everything.”
Alison resisted a strong urge to strangle the other woman, but didn’t say a word to her as she turned and gave the barstools a measuring look. They seemed sturdy enough, and several of the less-than-stock humans sitting on them hadn’t crashed to the floor.
She carefully settled onto one of the stools and hit the control to activate the menu, scanning it quickly before deciding on a full stack of blueberry pancakes with the ‘delicious golden’ maple syrup.
“You pick yet?” the woman behind the bar asked as she approached with a coffee cup in hand.
“My food?” Alison asked, taken aback by the woman’s abrupt statement.
“No, your next hair color. Yeah, your food. Coffee?”
“Ummm, sure,” Alison stammered as she glanced at the options arrayed behind the woman. “The Maltese Dark, I guess.”
“Good choice,” the woman grunted and filled the cup she’d set down on the counter.
“Cream?” Alison asked, eliciting a laugh from the woman.
“Not in my coffee. You want to drink watered down tit juice, you can go somewhere else.”
“Uhhh…kay. I’ll have a full stack of the blueberry pancakes topped with the golden maple.”
“Great,” the woman said as she turned away.
A man two seats down from Alison laughed and leant over to whisper, “Meg’s is the only spacer’s joint where the help is coarser than the clientele.”
“I heard that, Bart,” the woman said over her shoulder. “And I’m not the help.”
Bart laughed. “Well, Jill, if you named the place after yourself and not some fictitious ‘Meg’, I’d stop calling you my personal serving girl.”
Jill turned and waved a ladle at Bart. “I’d like to see you call me that. The only way I’m ‘serving’ you is after I chop you up and put you on a plate.”
“Ugh,” Alison grunted at the thought, though Bart seemed unperturbed.
“Yeah, well, what do you call it when you bring me food?” Bart countered. “I’d call that you ‘serving’ me.”
Jill turned away, but muttered loud enough for everyone nearby to hear, “I’ll serve you some spit in your next burger.”
Alison suddenly had an urge to cancel her order, but Bart smiled and shook his head. “She’d never do it. Jill talks a big game, but she’s really a softy. Best food on the Falcon, too.”
“OK,” Alison said, having forgotten what it was like to live as a civilian.
Granted, she’d been seventeen when she was conscripted a decade ago, so heading off to seedy diners wasn’t something she’d ever participated in before the war, and when she was enlisted…well, mechs didn’t get to go carouse with the locals. Following that, she did a stint as one of Stavros’s slaves with even less freedom.
Easy, Alison, it’s just some banter between civilians. They do this all the time. Shit, we do it in the Marauders, too.
Even though she told herself the civilian chatter was no different, it was. There was no concern for rank, no clear boundaries in what could be said to whom, and under what circumstances. Clearly, Jill was the owner, and Bart a customer. That they spoke to one another as equals—and rather crass equals, for that matter—didn’t fit into a paradigm that made sense to Alison.
She took a sip of her coffee while desperately trying to remember how to navigate society as a civilian. The problem was that she hadn’t had a great childhood; it was mostly spent living in refugee camps with her mother and sister. Things there weren’t that different than in the military. There was a hierarchy, consisting mostly of gangs. Once you recognized the colors, it was easy enough to tell who was who.
The coffee turned out to be decent, but not so good that Alison couldn’t have used some cream. Not that she was going to risk Jill’s ire and push for some.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Alice ordering and hoped that maybe the establishment’s surly owner would actually spit in the lieutenant colonel’s food. It only seemed right.
Before long, her pancakes arrived, and she was just tucking into them when a man entered the diner and surveyed the room before ambling over to Alice’s table.
With her augmented, SMI-4 hearing, Alison was able to listen in on the conversation, which turned out to mostly be niceties and discussions of trade routes and shipments.
She assumed that most of the conversation must be taking place over the Link—easily evidenced by the awkward pauses that occurred in their verbal conversation.
As they chatted, a quartet of women entered the diner. Two sat at a table, and the other two settled at the bar on Alison’s left.
She’d seen a variety of people on station that had unique looks, and these four didn’t seem to stand out at first, mostly because of the long hooded cloaks they wore. But as Alison flipped through a few vision modes, trying to get a better look at the newcomers, she could tell they were heavily modded.
Then one pulled her hood back, revealing a hairless, jet-black head. Her eyes were entirely yellow, as were her unsmiling lips.
Their bodies were giving off a variety of EM signatures, and Alison came to the conclusion that their skin was made of some sort of polymer capable of color change and probably bioluminescence.
Barely visible on the forehead of the one that had pushed her hood back was a convoluted symbol that appeared to be some sort of snake…or maybe snakes…twisting about and eating its own tail.
“Ah, crap,” Bart muttered and rose from his stool, tossing a few credit chits onto the counter.
Jill turned and glanced at him, and he gestured at the four women who had just entered on his way out.
“Oh, hey now,” she said to the newcomers with a grim smile. “I don’t want any trouble. I’ll serve you what you want, but please, don’t make any problems.”
“No problems,” the woman who’d pulled her hood back said in a voice that invoked a feeling of oily silk in Alison’s mind. “We just want to have some coffee.”
“Any preference?” Jill asked, her voice carefully moderated.
“Of course,” the woman leaned forward on her elbows, a long yellow tongue sliding out of her lips as she spoke. “Your blackest brew.”
Uh…sounds like a fight to me, she thought to herself, while wondering if the lieutenant colonel had learned such brilliant strategies at OCS, or if she’d picked them up from her favorite vids.
Alison sent back an affirmative response, and then turned back to her pancakes. She folded one of the delicious slices of heaven over and then cut it in half, stuffing first one piece, and then the other in her mouth.
Yes, Your High-and-Mightiness, Alison thought to herself as she turned and dropped her fork on the floor.
“Aw, shit,” she muttered, and bent over to retrieve the utensil, using the opportunity to grab the hem of her cloak and pull it up over her gun-arm.
When she rose, Alison slid off her stool and took a single step, which placed her behind the two women sitting at the bar next to her. She grabbed one’s head with her hand and slammed it down into her coffee cup, while repeating a somewhat less graceful version of the action with her other arm.
The woman on the left managed to shift enough that her head avoided the mug, but the one on the right took the ceramic cup right in the forehead.
“I don’t like your attitude,” Alison said as she stepped back. “I think you and your other two friends should leave.”
The woman who had pulled her hood back turned, blood running down her forehead, and sneered at Alison.
Crap…she does not look intimidated at all.
“Oh you’re gonna get it, bitch.”
Yellow lights began to flow across her face, twisting around her head and converging on the ruined emblem on her forehead. With a single deft move, she pulled off her cloak, revealing her body to be just like her face: jet black and covered in the yellow lights tracing their way across her skin.
“Oh hey! Can you take this outside?” Jill called out as she ran into the back.
Neither woman replied as compartments in the black and yellow woman’s thighs opened up, and she drew out a pair of pistols—or began to, at least.
Alison wasn’t going to wait for the thug to arm herself, and triggered her own cloak’s release, causing it to split in two and fall to the floor.
“You wanna play this game?” Alison asked, pulling her GNR’s barrel free from its sling.
As they’d faced off, the second of the black-skinned women had risen, also freeing herself of her cloak, though Alison noted that the two in the booth hadn’t moved yet.