by Allan Cole
Mahoney sighed. “He probably is, sir,” he said. “But he’s a soldier and has to learn to just suck it up. Besides, I’ll make it up to him later.”
The Emperor shrugged. “Well, ticked off or not, he’s just where we need him, and he’s the perfect choice to clean up this mess.”
“Yessir,” Mahoney said.
“Okay, Ian, with Sten we have a good start.” The Emperor said. “Talk to him and see what that nasty Mantis brain of his can come up with. Give him carte blanche to act as he sees fit.”
“Yes sir,” Mahoney said. “Right away, sir.”
He started to rise. The Emperor motioned for him to sit. He sat.
“One more things,” the Emperor said.
“Yes, your Highness?”
“That ship’s captain? The one the mutineers took hostage?”
Mahoney remembered. Grimaced. “Gregor, sir,” he said. “Captain Gregor.”
When he’d checked the files, he’d found that Gregor was one of the most incompetent morale killers in the Royal Navy. The only reason he’d had this job was because of the Imperium X boom in the Fringe Regions.
The Imperial Navy was so overstretched that even the dregs were swept up into positions of authority. And Gregor perfectly fit the definitions of dregs. With him as captain, no wonder the crew mutinied.
“Right, Gregor,” the Emperor said. “It seems he’s got a rich daddy who wants him back.”
After reading the file, Mahoney couldn’t understand why. Gregor was such a scrote it was hard to imagine him being the apple of any father’s eye. However, this rich daddy was one Lord Wichman, who built and owned exclusive resorts, casinos, and sporting facilities all over the Empire, along with countless other enterprises, ranging from a line of faux gourmet food items such as soya steak (an oxymoron if Mahoney ever heard one), to some very bad wine and liqueurs that had superb ratings from influential critics on the take.
Naturally, Wichman’s had a huge ego and plastered his name on enormous signs and banners on all his holdings.
Mahoney sighed. Sometimes sentient beings were beyond comprehension. However, Ian knew the Emperor had an even lower opinion of the man than he did. And if his boss deemed it necessity to free Gregor from the clutches of the mutineers, he obviously had very good reasons for it.
“And the amnesty, sir?” he asked. “Do we agree to that?”
The Emperor waved that away. “Sure, sure,” he said. “Tell young Sten he can definitely offer amnesty.”
CHAPTER FOUR
THE BEAUTY AND THE SCOTSMAN
A gritty wind scratched Sten’s faceplate as he peered up at the sign.
REC AREA 477
“Ah think some bampot musta’ made a wee mistake here, laddie,” Alex said.
Sten sighed. Unfortunately, the idiot in question was standing next to him.
“No mistake,” he said. “This is the place.”
Behind them, he heard the scrape of a gravcab lifting off. Sten turned, clumsy in his Hostile Atmosphere Suit, hoping against clotting hope he could hail it back. If he failed, it would be at least a day before they could get transport out of this wretched place.
Unfortunately, as he signaled, the gravcab was already over the blood red mountain peaks on to its next hire.
Sten shivered despite his heated HA suit. Or, maybe because of it. The wretched thing had been the only one left on the rack in his size. Imperial PX’s weren’t well supplied in this outback.
A cold wind flowed down from the peaks across an ancient seabed as red as the mountains. Deep carbon-black canyons cut across the land, with huge ebony boulders stacked crazily, one upon the other—left there when the seas boiled away long ago. The fact that MP914 was a working mining planet was underscored with some regularity. The land was pocked with enormous vents, charred like the bores of ancient gunpowder cannons. The purpose of those vents soon became apparent when the ground began to shake under them, and then a huge column of fire and smoke burst from the very bowels of the planet, boiling against azure skies.
Around them, the wind picked up glittering red sand and flung it against the rocks in booming scarlet waves.
“Hokay, hokay, laddie,” Alex said. “Ah don’t blame ya’ if yer thinkin’—‘away an boil yer heed, Alex Kilgour.’ But mebbe, jist mebbe, it’s nae as bad as it ’pears.”
Sten turned back to consider: The scene before them looked nothing like what they had been led to expect.
The other bumpot in this equation was the Leave Clerk. Corporal McKenna—she of the flowing blond hair, the curvaceous body, the flashing eyes—had beguiled Alex as she painted an exotic word-picture of the wonders that awaited them at Rec Area 477.
Sten had never seen Kilgour so enamored. Doting on every word that spilled from McKenna’s lovely Scottish lips. Corporal McKenna played them a vid of a sparkling white Grecian palace, spread over several kilometers, floating gloriously on the “wine-dark” sands of Mining Planet 914.
She explained that the benevolent mining companies—whose motto was “Morale Comes First”—spared no expense when it came to entertaining the miners, contractors, and many other trades and professions it took to keep the Imperium X flowing to the Eternal Emperor’s vast storage centers.
The rec area on MP914 was only one of many such entertainment centers throughout this economically vital mining region.
But Corporal McKenna, who could pour it on like a Gaelic poet, insisted Rec Area 477, was the most wonderful of all. Offering the strongest drinks, the most delicious food, as well as the most glamorous and eager joygirls and joyboys.
“Best of all,” she had said, “its spirited gambling—with the best odds—is beyond compare.”
The beautiful McKenna had been so eloquent, so enthusiastic, that the thought niggled at the back of Sten’s brain that maybe the corporal had a commissioning deal with the entertainment center.
Alex would have none of it. “Oh, my puir, puir laddie,” he’d said in a brief moment when they were left alone to confer. “Ah’m ashamed ay ye. Sech a suspicious mind. Hoo can ye doubt sech a brammer lass, with only our best interests at heart?”
“Think you’re going to score with her, don’t you?” Sten teased.
“Weel, Ah would nae rule it out, laddie,” he’d answered. “Me mum al’ays said Ah was a braw figure ay a cheil.”
Alex was a heavy worlder—as wide as he was tall and all of it dense muscle. But as for presenting a “braw figure”—well, only a loving mother could have described his less than Grecian form as such.
However, Alex was Sten’s best friend. A friend who had saved his life countless times, and so who was Sten to spoil his friend’s chances with the lovely Corporal McKenna?
But as he examined the place where they were supposed to spend the next e-week, he realized just how apt the saying was that, “no good deed ever goes unpunished.”
There was no palace. Natch. Instead, Sten and Alex were standing before the ruins of what Sten thought had once been an in-system passenger ship, with a bulbous nose and stubby winglets.
No doubt some bright mining company Veep had wrangled a bonus for pimping the money-saving idea: instead of scrapping the worn out wreck, they could plunk it down on one of the Fringe Region’s mining planets. In this case, MP914.
A little repurposing here and there, and they’d soon have a wondrous gambling hall for their workers. And they could churn their employees’ wages back into the company coffers many times over.
As the cold sandy wind rattled and scratched against his HA suit, Sten thought that if Hell was cold instead of hot, it must look a lot like good old MP914.
After the ground tremors subsided, Alex said, “Dae ye suppose a body coods gie a wee narcobeer around here, laddie?”
“If we can’t at least get that,” Sten said, “I’m going to personally strangle your girlfrie
nd at the Leave Office.”
“She’s nae me bird,” Alex protested.
Sten couldn’t help but laugh. “Oh, so she stood you up after all, huh?” he said. “You never let on.”
Alex sniffed. “A gentleman ne’er tells,” he said.
“Especially when there is nothing to tell,” Sten said.
Alex snorted. “Ah’m thirsty,” he said, and he took Sten’s arm in a steely grip and powered him up the ramp to the forbidding entrance of Rec Area 477.
CHAPTER FIVE
HELL ON WARP DRIVE
Sten and Alex paused long enough for a credit scan to establish their limits, got a medium grade score, and then were escorted into the airlock foyer. There they doffed their HA suits, submitted to a fairly heavy duty weapons scan, and were finally cleared.
Sten had to smile to himself, thinking of the deadly little blade hidden in a fleshy sheath in his arm. Sten had built it from a rare crystal grown in the poisonous atmosphere his fellow Vulcan slaves called Hellworld. Harder and more durable than just about any other known substance, it had a blade one molecule thick.
With a motion of his arm and a flick of his wrist he could cut a throat or slice through a beam of forged steel as easily as the proverbial hot knife cleaves through newly congealed milk fat.
Once they were cleared, another airlock opened to reveal thick double doors. They pushed through, only to be hit with a veritable tsunami of sound—a thunderous cacophony of screaming, shouting beings scrambling desperately to jam in as much clotting fun as possible in a very short time. When their leave was over, it would be back to another contracted E-year in the Imperium X mines of MP914.
Gambling bots pimped the odds in so many languages it was as if someone had tipped over the legendary Tower of Babel and all the words had spilled out. Pleasure-room shills piped up here and there, boasting of their fleshy wares.
Yes, cheenas, there was truly something for every being’s pleasure on offer here. No matter if you were endowed with two legs, eight legs, tentacles, or claws. No matter what sexuality, or combination of sexualities you were born with. No matter how sexually sophisticated you were, there was not one act or position illustrated in the Kumasutra for All Beings that could not be performed here.
Satisfaction guaranteed.
Meanwhile, promo machines added to the adrenaline-charged atmosphere, hooting and hollering and grinding their gears, while trumpeting the news of the latest BIG WINNERS.
Beings from all over the Empire packed the gigantic hall, milling about in mass confusion and supercharged excitement. If it weren’t for the brawny security bots that roamed the floor, chaos would have soon shown its ugly face.
Sten was so overwhelmed by it all that he staggered.
“Steady, young Sten,” Alex said. And he felt Kilgour’s big hand on his elbow. With his other hand he snatched a drink off a barbot tray and delivered it to Sten, who gingerly tested it.
“Stregg, by God,” he croaked.
He chugged it down and felt the fiery liquid burn away the confusion.
Stregg was the belly-and-brain burning drink that the Bhor chieftain, Otho, had introduced him to when his minions joined forces with Sten’s Mantis team to topple the religious zealots ruling the Wolf Worlds.
Alex fetched him another, and he inhaled that as well. By a Bhor father’s frozen buttocks, it was good. And by a Bhor mother’s icy beard, the world about him began to make some sense. Just as it made sense that he had been so disoriented in the first place. After all, he and Alex—along with Ida and Doc—had been TDY’d to convoy escort duty for many months now, with no other company, and no apparent end to their Fringe Region tour within official, or unofficial, sight.
Sometimes they felt that perhaps the great victory they had won in the Lupus Cluster had been pyrrhic to the extreme. And instead of honors and awards they’d been condemned to endless patrols and boring scouting missions for the Imperium X space-trains.
As time dripped endlessly by, Sten had even began to feel betrayed by Mahoney, his supposed mentor, who’d rescued him from a short and miserable life as a slave laborer on Vulcan—the factory world of his birth.
But had he really been rescued? Or had Mahoney merely used him to foil Baron Thoresen’s conspiracy against the Eternal Emperor, before feeding Sten into the Imperial military’s always hungry maw?
True, Mahoney had engineered Sten’s career as a member of the super elite Mantis Section, turning him into a skilled saboteur, assassin, and general all around disrupter of the Order of Things.
So what had happened?
Why were his skills and the skills of his shipmates and fellow Mantis operatives being squandered in such a manner?
Amid all this lonely tedium, the self doubt grew. And he was starting to feel downright mutinous when suddenly their ship, the Storm, had staged a bit of mechanical and technical mutiny of its own.
The little Bulkeley class attack boat was overdue on every maintenance schedule deemed necessary by her manufacturers and Sten and the others had done all they could to keep her running and operational.
Then things got so bad that their superiors had grudgingly approved minimal repair and refurbishment work. Their tight-fisted bosses had consoled their bureaucratic selves by ordering the team to bleed off some of their overdue leave.
The idea of vacationing in a region many light years from any civilized fun was ludicrous. But orders were orders and there was nothing to be done about it except whine and complain, the right of soldiers everywhere and everywhen.
Ida and Doc had elected to stay with the Storm.
Ida holed up with a like-minded geek she met at a spaceport bar and the two were off gaming the Imperial commodities markets.
Doc’s idea of a forced good time was to blow his budget on a supply of vintage plasma, then repair to his cabin for a good and bloody drunk, while composing epic Blyrchynaus poetry.
Alex had different ideas. In no uncertain terms, he let it be known just how tired he was of cramming his heavy-worlder’s body into the miniscule living space allotted aboard the Storm.
Sergeant Alex Kilgour, late of the planet New Edinburgh, wanted out, by God! He yearned to mingle with other beings. Eat something other than Dry Pack Meals. Quaff a brew or three. Dance with some bonny lassies.
In short, he said, “Ah want to party!”
The problem, Sten had argued, was the only places in reach were on the rough and tumble mining worlds, where fortunes were being made and lost grubbing for Imperium X on some of the most inhospitable worlds in the empire.
“Probably end up on the floor every night,” Sten grumbled, “from drink and fisticuffs.”
In the end, Sten had relented and they’d been conned by a pretty blonde with flashing eyes and a short tartan kilt to choose Rec Area 477 as their playground.
And now, as he looked about at the mad scene, he was sorry as sorry could be.
But just as he was about to turn to his friend and beg that they call the whole clotting thing off, another barbot tray rolled past and he reflexively scooped up a mug while Kilgour liberated another.
“What the clot,” Sten said. “I’ve gotten drunk in worse drakh holes than this.”
Kilgour roared laughter, crashed his mug against Sten’s, and they both drained their glasses and started moving through the crowd.
A couple of barbot trays later they began making woozy sense of their surroundings, pausing here and there to take a chance at a Chuckaluck bot, or a roll of the holo-dice.
A largish Ceph was the boss dealer at one table that featured an ancient retro game of Blackjim. The table was shaped like a quarter moon and the Ceph held forth in the slot—four pairs of tentacles dealing rectangular pieces of plas decorated with numbers and pictures.
Two big eyes, perched above a long sharp beak, kept careful watch on the players while she dealt t
he cards and kept up a patter.
“There’s a royal for ya, cheena. Chance another? No? Where’s yer scrote, cheena? Where’s yer scrote?”
A few more trays later and they were starting to really admire the long-legged Joygirls ankling through the crowd.
“This is all right,” he shouted at Alex, as he snagged another drink.
Kilgour cupped a hand to his ear. “What?”
Sten shouted louder. “This is all right!”
Alex shook his head and shouted back: “Ah cannae hear a wuid yer sayin’, me wee mucker. Yoo’ll hae tae spick looder.”
Sten laughed, shook his head helplessly, and motioned for Alex to continue deeper into gaming hall. But then a chilling snarl brought him up short. Immediately followed by a hate-charged odor that made his hair stand on end.
Both the snarl and the odor were frighteningly familiar.
He stepped back, pulling Alex with him, as an ugly little man carrying a large wire cage pushed past them. Sten saw a flash of green scales, a gleam of fangs and claws, and then the man was carrying the cage into a tented room.
Alex leaned close to ask: “What’s ’at all aboo, laddie? An’ what manner ay beest is ’at? Looks a bit loch a wee T-Rex.”
Before Sten could reply, someone in the crowd shouted, “Xypaca fight! Xypaca fight!” Immediately the cry was taken up—“Xypaca, Xypaca, Xypaca”—and a section of the crowd broke off and surged toward tent.
Sten and Alex were momentarily caught up in the craziness, but Kilgour put his heavy-worlder shoulder to it and they broke free. They found themselves in a corner partially shielded from the craziness by a large narcobeer fountain.
“What the clot is a Xypaca?” Alex asked. “An’ what are they fightin’ abit?”
“They’re horrible little scrotes,” Sten said. “Twenty centimeters high, or so. But they’ll take on anything up to a hundred times their own size. Hate everything, especially each other. When they meet—unless it’s the mating season—they’ll immediately try to kill each other.”