by S E Zbasnik
Taliesin tried to blink away the panic rising in his eyes but Orn snorted loudly, covering for the elf even if he was unaware of it, "Shit, jealous of what? A widdle warn lop running scared from everything in the big bad galaxy?"
Marek had no idea what a "widdle warn lop" was but he didn't care either, "You've only known her - what - three, maybe four years? I was married to that woman. A woman who would rather claw off her own face than talk about her secrets."
"I'd claw off your face if it'd get you to shut up," Orn said waving his gloved hand at him.
"The things I know that you don't know. The things I've seen of her, the parts I've seen of her, the ways I've had her..."
Orn gagged on his sucker, "Sweet shitter of the galaxy, stop. Blah, just stop even hinting at the Cap getting naked or doing things!"
Marek turned to the deadly silent elf. He didn't see the fingers tucked under the table curling into fists. Taliesin lifted his eyes and asked slowly, "You are insinuating that you and your wife have been conjugal numerous times?"
The human leaned back, savoring the rigid posture and glare of the elf. He knew he'd never win, but a sucker punch here and there was good enough, "In more ways than you can imagine," the elf didn't waver his eyes as Marek leaned in, "she can do things that'll set a man's loins on fire."
"Who can?"
Marek slammed back in his chair and glanced up guilty at Variel returning with four cups cradled in her arms. As she set the drinks down, she explained, "They were all out of carriers that didn't electrocute the person holding them."
"Ah," Marek said, hoping his emphatic understanding of space babble would hide the terror weeping into his trousers or the smirk on that bastard, sharp-ear's face.
"Who were you talking about?" Variel asked innocently, as if she hadn't heard the rest of the conversation.
"Oh, no one," Marek waved his hand, chasing away the conversation. Orn made more vomiting sounds as if he could no longer swallow his own saliva.
"Taliesin, your midnight tea. Orn this is the closet they had to pure glucose in a cup," Variel said passing her two crew mates their drinks. As she looked into her husband's eyes she tilted her head, "How can no one 'set a man's loins on fire'?" Her fingers drummed against his cup, the one Marek hoped to bury his voice into.
"Ah...um...well...you see."
"She took her shots and cleared it all up! Now, can we please stop talking about this?!" Orn shouted, trying to bury all memory of this discussion in a sugar coma.
"Here, Marek. I got you a hot chocolate. It seemed about the most adult thing you could handle," Variel grinned handing him the cup.
His fist balled beneath the table, but he wasn't about to say anything. Instead he smiled and accepted it, pouring most of the scalding water down his throat. The elf stirred his tea as if he were the bloody Queen of the Dulcens, his finger extended. Only the dwarf failed to notice the tension rising up from the table as he lapped around the lid of his cup of sugar water. The man had to be part insect the way he survived off nothing but sucrose.
"So," Variel said after everyone took long draws on their poison of choice, "Orn, how will we recognize our friend?"
"She'll find us," the dwarf said, for the first time glancing around at the patrons.
"I see, and do you have any idea what she looks like?"
"What? No! Of course not, that's an absurd accusation. I'm not on trial here!"
Variel blinked in the rapid fire declaration of guilt for something, though she was uncertain what, "Maybe you should switch to complex carbohydrates for now. Your left eye is twitching faster than your right."
"Right, sorry, it's just... She liked to use proxies, so we may not see her at all."
"So we're waiting for someone who we've never seen, who our only contact has never seen, and who more than likely has never seen our contact. I have one tiny question then, which of you geniuses thought it was wise for all of us to take up a four sided table?"
"Um," Orn muttered and then gestured to Taliesin, throwing his compatriot into the engine.
His narrow jaw dropped in shock then he stuttered, "As if you were not the one shouting 'Oh look, let's snag a table by that big gear! It is the best.'"
Variel hid her eye roll behind her cup as one of the complimentary bots walked away from the table beside them, this one in a green apron with a small H upon his forehead. He activated his smile servos and set a gleaming pot on the middle of the table. Without saying a word to anyone, he shuffled off back into the agitated crowd.
"Excuse me," Variel said, trying to catch its attention, "we didn't ask for this."
"Didn't you?"
Everyone stopped following the vanishing trail of the bot down to the gleaming bowl that could apparently talk. Despite living in a universe with artificial intelligences that could synch themselves into nearly any appliance one could think of, it was still unsettling when inanimate objects began talking back.
"Did we?" Marek asked the chrome surface that didn't shimmer, or display a screen image, or even have a face pop out and start mouthing along to its words. All in all, it was rather disappointing for a talking pot of coffee.
"Open the lid," the pot ordered.
"You first," Orn dared it, still glancing around for someone from his past.
"Open the lid, you brain-addled dead vein," the pot sighed.
"Well, it knows Orn," Variel said and lifted the lid off. Instead of brown sludge those who never set foot inside human space called coffee, a small microphone rested inside. She gathered it into her hands and set it down upon the table.
"Testing testing, one two three."
"Why'd we need to pull it out of the pot? It could already hear us just fine?" Marek asked as his wife bounced her finger against the thing.
"Yes, yes, please stop doing that!" the coffee pot whined. "You're transmitting fine."
"Where are you?" Taliesin asked, peering through a never ending crowd of early afternoon risers.
"Do you know the Rachid systems, the gas giant about to go nova?"
"No," the assassin said.
"Well, I'm nowhere near there. The point being we're not here to discuss my location, you're here to ask for a favor."
"A transaction of goods," Variel said. Favors were messy among not quite thieves.
"Yes, of course, a transaction. Captain Variel Tuffman, age 34...shaved a year off, then?"
"Three months," she said. At times, altering her birthday was one of the hardest changes to adhere tot.
"Owner of the repurposed Constellation Cruise, manned by Orn Lidoffad husband to your engineer Ferra of the same elven last name."
Marek scoffed at that, as if he hadn't also taken the respected name of Yates from his wife. But Orn only smiled in the face of tradition, "Given the choice between the dwarven rank, file and serial number to a frilly elven curl, you pick the elf one every time."
"The pot knows much," Taliesin said, probably the only non felon at the table.
"Yes, the pot does Mr. Cerabor. I must say Ms. Tuffman...Hm, sounds like a luggage brand, your false identity is of poor quality."
"Orn..." Variel glared at her pilot but he shook his hands up.
"He needn't give me more than the gist, you need someone deleted despite having an assassin within easy reach. No, it was quite simple discovering the fresh ident in your files. Attended an overcrowded school so no one would remember you, worked for a conglomerate company that would pass their faceless members from one sector of the galaxy to another on a whim, both your parents were killed in a common shuttle decompression accident. My condolences. When you then fell into an unexpected inheritance and purchased the ship with it. Very neat and tidy. I see someone even reserved a small personal journal you kept about knitting for five months."
It felt strange to have that life laid out, one she'd concocted by trolling back alleys and gravity-less corners to find the right falsifiers to bring Variel Tuffman to life. She'd never put much thought into any of it aside from act
ing a bit sad if she remembered the date of her bought parent's death. "So, how did you know it was false?"
"Simple, the dates," the pot's androgynous voice lilted at the reveal. "Age 20 you strike out on your own, age 25 you switch jobs, age 27 your parents are killed, and then at age 30 the inheritance. No one's life falls like some timeline jotted on a bucket list. Setbacks, injuries, you managed to avoid all that messy stuff and yet achieve nothing of significance. Any common member of the Troll continuum could have sniffed you out for what you were."
"Wonderful," Variel muttered to herself, thinking of how she'd have to strangle that goblin forger the next time she saw him.
"No, the real trick, the true challenge of my skills was determining who you were before...Knight-Captain Yates."
She grew stiff at the mention of her old name in a shop filled with gods knew who was listening, but it was Taliesin who dropped the lid back on top of the transmitter, softening its cackle. The clanging against the table drew them more attention than four people sitting around chatting to a coffee pot.
"Are you quite finished overreacting?" the voice called from beneath its banishment. "We have the matters of the contract to discuss."
"You can do it from under there," Variel said, nodding to her assassin.
"Amateurs, fine. You wish for this knight who was surprisingly declared Missing in Action after being dead and buried for five years to be re-dead?"
"Yes," Variel said, impressed at how much the pot deduced on her own. "Can you do it?"
"Sunder the guarded databases of one of the human's more fearsome Crests and mess around without anyone noticing? Yes, I think I can."
Despite herself, Variel swelled a bit at the pot calling her old home a fearsome Crest. It was no Snake, but the Bears held their own in the war. Marek, a born Wolf who crossed into Bear country on a lark, frowned. They weren't technically old enemies the way Griffin and Jaguar fought but, well, the games could get a bit more combative than need be at times.
"This is when we discuss the terms of payment," the pot continued, not waiting for the others to pipe up.
"I'm strapped at the moment," Variel said trying to break into barter mode.
"I know the exact cent you have in your accounts, including the spare one in case this second life goes pear shaped," the pot mocked. "I do not want coin, gold, smooth rocks, or videos of cats playing insipid songs on harpsichords. What I require is unicorn."
"A unicorn? Seriously? Why stop there? How about a magic wand or a fluffy princess dress?" Orn said, laughing at the ridiculous request.
"Orn," Variel shook her head at her pilot, "it's a drug."
"A drug? Are you shitting me? Is it a gummy with a fairy dust flavor?"
"It was created as an MGC blocker for anyone exposed to lethal levels," Taliesin said, the only one there old enough to have been alive when it was still legal.
"Only it worked too well. It blocks or drains or scrubs all the MGC from your body. If you reach critical mass and get too close to a fueling station or other source your chest rips inside out and then explodes," Variel said a bit too matter of factly. Marek twisted up his face but didn't say anything.
"Why in ancestors red lava would anyone want to eat/inject/rub between their toes something that causes you to explode?"
"Before you're scraping your kidneys off someone's windshield," Variel said, "it gives an addictive high. Be a bit strange to keep paying thousands of dollars for a drug that didn't at least do that, really."
"Fine, pick on the ignorant," Orn said, feeling very ostracized as the only one sitting at the table who didn't attend GOAD as a child. "So, why's it called Unicorn?"
"In the last stages of the MGC breakdown a small series of boils form on the users forehead," Taliesin explained, holding his knuckles up to demonstrate. "They can build and mimic a horn."
"Also, you shit rainbows," Variel said, before returning to their pot of talking coffee, "Alright, so how much of this gummy drug do you want?"
The pot scoffed at the poor joke but answered back, "200 grams."
"What? That's fucking impossible," Variel shouted as she leaned into the transmitter.
"The fee is non-negotiable."
"Oh sure, how about you just ask for the jewels off the king of the goblin's eyes or the shroud of the space pope. Might as well aim big if you're reaching for the imaginary."
"I have full confidence one of you can come up with a solution. Now, if you will all look away from the table," the pot ordered. A small spark caught in the middle of the brushed metal surface burning up the tiny bits of wiring connecting the transmitter together until only charred gunk remained.
"Perfect, just great. Sure, I totally have enough drug lord connections to pull together that much 'Horn powder in, oh, a couple days. Comes with your purchase of a fraudulent passport and a visit to the Dwarven Sex planet!" Variel raged into the air.
The men there both did and didn't want to ask what she meant by the last part. Taliesin, despite his bloody work taking him into the darker side of life, never had much luck with the illegal substances side. Oh, there was the occasional dabble in this and that, gargoyle crystals being a particular lure for a few decades, but he was as clean as a choir boy. Orn's trip of choice involved pure sucrose straight into his veins. He even refused most pain meds when his stump flared up from the implant's heavy wear.
It was Marek who coughed softly into his fist as the others banged and gnashed their garments in frustration. "I," he coughed softly in case anyone was paying attention, "I may know someone who could, in theory, hook us up."
Variel uncovered her eyes from below her exasperated hands and glared at the man she took into her home, "You can do what?!"
"What?" he glared back at the accusations from a wife he never tried to impress. Shame was an odd sensation in his mouth, like his hot chocolate went sour.
"You're telling me you brought Unicorn into my house?!"
"And how often were you in your house?!" Marek shouted back, five years worth of bubbling rage finally spilling over the pot, "Once, maybe twice a month at best."
"I was out saving the galaxy," she said, an ancient idiom bubbling into a fight it didn't belong.
"Oh, I can see how much you're saving it right now," he said gesturing to the denizens trying to stay out of the couple's fight -- at least until they could boot up their PALM's to record it.
Variel jumped across the table, elbowing around Orn to get her face dangerously close to Marek's, "You little shit, you turd in the sewers of the galaxy, you've done nothing and you'll do nothing. When you die, the Raven lady won't even notice."
"Ookay," Orn said, trying to wrestle his captain away from a possible assault charge, "While I'd love for you to keep listing Mister Sewer Turd's faults, we really need to examine the large picture here."
Variel shot daggers into Marek's own vengefully green eyes, but she slunk back. "You're right."
"Wait, wait, say that again. I didn't have my camera rolling," Orn said, pulling out his PALM.
"All right, Marek, find us these contacts."
CHAPTER SEVEN
It would be improper to call the face bounding around the dishwashing station broad. Appears as if it was flattened with a frying pan then rolled through a pasta maker was more accurate. The nose needed another screen by itself. "I ain't got a thing to say to you."
"Listen, Karten..." Marek started and had been unable to finish this entire conversation.
"No, no, no, nos. I know who you are, you squawking canary. You'll sing off to that Knight wife of yours and turn us all in."
"She's dead," Variel said cutting into their private conversation she watched with a cool eye -- as well as Marek's other five calls. This was quickly turning into an exercise in futility.
The face, disturbingly light by dwarven standards from too much illegal chemical exposure, blended in with the blonde woodwork of the cabinets. It appeared as if a tongue lashed out of the wood and a pair of white eyes rolled skyward
at the woman sitting just off screen. "That so? Doesn't change nothing. You still got ties, Igun. The kind of ties that make smart people nervous."
"And yet you answered his call," Variel said, massaging her forehead.
"Karten, I swear it wasn't me. I'd never do anything so stupid as to turn the corps on you." Marek pleaded the same case five times prior and got five very expletive laden hangups. With one he got as far as "Hey, it's..." before the gnome shrieked and threw down the her PALM to kill the call.
Variel banged her fist against the table, "That's it!" She strode towards the image projected out of Marek's hand and glared into it. Her scar flamed in the flickering light as she slipped on a command mask saved for rare occasions, "You will give me the details of a Unicorn dealer and you will do it now, or his Knight wife will come to your home and get it from you by any means necessary." She pounded her fist into the butcher block below, knocking a chef's knife into the sink, "Do you understand?"
The dwarf junkie nodded briskly, his false beard slipping off his ears in the panic. The Corps had no fury like a captain scorned. "Right, I...Marek, can...is it okay if I talk to Marek instead? You just...I mean, I'm sure you're very nice in your day to day life, but right now my insides are trying to climb inside each other and...."
Variel waved her hand and walked back, leaving her husband to whisper into his hand, "You know a guy?"
"That's a shit ton of corn you suddenly need. Ain't barely anyone moving that much by themselves."
"Do you know someone?" Marek continued.
"And anyone with that much stuff is gonna be wanting lots of convincing from the middle man. Monetary convincing..."
Marek leaned back, blinking slowly, before calling out, "Oh dearest!"
"Umai! I can put you into contact with Umai!" the dwarf shouted out as Variel weaved back into the screen. "But he ain't gonna come cheap."
"I know," Marek said, dreading that coming conversation with the misses, "send me the details, on the old channel."
"The fanboard for that singing fish group? They shut that down ages ago."
"The Corps found it?"