“Damn fucking right I do,” Bethany Anne said. “The fuckers.”
“I’m pretty sure I’ve blown up some dynasties like that.” Tanis gave a predatory grin, then glanced around the table and coughed. “Purely out of necessity. They were very, very bad.”
“Tell me about it. Some were better than others, though, with the Ormonds being one of the most open, cosmopolitan and down-to-earth families around. But for every relatively approachable person in the family, there was also a Dasha. Rane herself bucked the trend entirely, which was why I liked her so much.
“Anyway, I digress. So, this Dasha appears in the HUD shouting, ‘Oh, thank goodness you’re here. You must help us! We’re being attacked by a Nomad, and we don’t have a Magus on board. Please, help quickly,’ he yelled, nearly crying. I muted him, having gotten the gist of the issue and not really wanting to engage with him. Although most families were run by Magi, the majority of families like the Ormonds’ were made up of Riven—people who couldn’t use Magic, or normal humans, in other words. As I watch, there’s a flicker of Magic around the small ship and it suddenly pulls away from the Ormond vessel, but not before bloody firing at it a couple of times.
“I unmute the channel and Dasha is still going. ‘Oh, oh she’s gone, she’s, aaah, she fired at us. I think we’re okay, can you go after her? Who am I talking to? Who’s on that ship? It registers as a Solus Guild craft. Can you help?’ he said, going on and on. I muted him again and sent a simple text message back. ‘Sit tight, I’ll follow her.’ At the time, I thought something about him and the way he was acting was strange, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. As it turned out there was more to this than a simple hijacking, but that’s another story. Anyway, the Nomad ship Displaced and shoots off toward Sol itself, and I fired up my own Displacement Drive and gave chase.”
“A nomad, like a wanderer?” Terry asked.
“Feck, sorry. Okay, so I’m a Magi, and yes, we do pronounce it ‘Mah-Guy’ when it relates to someone like me. Within the Magi, there are two main groups: the Arcadians such as me, and the Nomads, who are the bad guys essentially. Of course it’s not always that black and white, but that will do for this story.
“Anyway, I shoot off after this Nomad. She was way ahead of me; well out of range of anything, really, but I had her on my scanners. She’s making for Earth itself, no doubt hoping I’d break off my pursuit before we made this too public, but I wasn’t going to let her out of my sights. She dropped out of Displacement close to Earth’s upper atmosphere and I did the same, but exit a tiny fraction of a second after her. Suddenly she was right there before me—I could see the ship right in front of me before it suddenly dived into the nighttime side of Earth.”
“After a quick look around I found the weapons controls of the Silver Fox and boosted after this Nomad girl, whoever she was. Part of me wondered if she was even a Nomad, because I wasn’t sure if I believed Dasha, and I only had his word to go on. I was wondering if I could disable her ship and get to the bottom of this when she fired at me.”
“I jinked the ship left and right, dodging the pulse cannons’ energy bolts before I decided I’d had enough and fired back. We played this game for a few more seconds before I ran out of space and three bolts slammed into me. Needless to say, I felt like messing about in a dogfight was getting me nowhere fast, so I ‘ported from the Silver Fox to her ship’s hull, using my Magic to anchor myself there. Just as I get there she attempted to fire up the Displacement Drive, and I could feel the Temporal Magic swelling inside the ship beneath me. I canceled it with a working of my own, but not without a slight jump forward in time of a couple of hours or so.”
“Using more of my Magic I ripped her ship in two, revealing the pilot. I knew her—it was a Nomad I’d encountered briefly before called Aevengel, a nasty piece of work who was living on borrowed time. She was a member of a group of Nomads called ‘the Dark Knights,’ who were run by their founder Yasmin. Anyway, I was not in a happy mood by that point and ripped into her with more of my Magic, tearing her Aegis down and ending her.”
“An Aegis?” Bethany Anne asked. “Like a shield?”
“A Magical shield all Magi can create, and the main line of defense we have against Magical attacks. Without one, there’d be little you could do to stop me ‘porting you into deep space or the middle of the sun.”
“Good to know,” Bethany Anne said. She looked at Terry, who widened his eyes at her.
“So, while I’m floating there as her body and ship fall away, I worked my Magic once again, disintegrating her and the wreckage of her ship so it wouldn’t crash and hurt anyone else.”
“I looked around me, and using the still-active HUD in my helmet I located the crash site of my ship in the American desert below. I ‘ported down there, appearing in the early hours in a dry and dusty nighttime landscape. There was some grass about and some low bushes, but it was fairly desolate. Some of the thin metal that made up the hull of the Silver Fox lay on the ground beside me, and I could see more debris scattered around over a pretty large area. There was a ridge up ahead where I could see the main bulk of the ship, so I wandered over to the top and looked down at the scene before me.”
When it crashed, the ship had gouged a thirty-foot trench in the earth to the base of the ridge I was standing on, where it had finally come to a rest. More of the tinfoil-like hull was strewn over the area, and was being picked over by maybe ten or fifteen men. Some of them looked like locals but others wore black suits, and there was a US army truck approaching in the distance. Several of the people down there spotted me and shouted, pointing toward me. I must have looked a fright with my huge bulbous white helmet with its large slanted black lenses atop my thin white-clad frame. There was nothing I could do at that point, so I ducked out of sight and ‘ported away. I got word to the right people in the Magi community on Earth to initiate a cover-up, which they did, but it only worked for a bit. It left too many gaps in the narrative, so a version of the truth did eventually make its way out.
“If you haven’t guessed already, this happened in the year 1947 and I crashed in Roswell, New Mexico,” Amanda said with a smile. “Perhaps you’ve heard of it?”
“Where’s New Mexico?” Tanis asked.
“Oh, um, America? You’re from the future, right? Maybe look up the Roswell Incident in a history book or something.” Amanda shrugged.
“Heh. Well, it probably was aliens in my universe, if what happened to me is anything to go by,” Bethany Anne mused.
“So I was fine of course, but I had no idea that a whole conspiracy theory would spring from that little incident,” Amanda said. She worked her Magic once more and reverted to the jeans and camisole she’d arrived in.
Tanis laughed and leaned over to Amanda, whispering in her ear, “Ok, if you ever make it to my neck of the multiverse you have to wear that other thing. Trust me.”
Amanda winked. “Deal.”
Interlude
BOB scanned the rest of the humans. Bethany Anne and Amanda clearly were different. Cal had an organism on his shoulder. Admiral Tanis Richards was more machine than human, and strangely different at the subatomic level than anything he’d seen before.
There was also the issue of the nanobots Tanis had sent into the air. There were millions of them, but so far they hadn’t attempted to breach his body or any of the humans’. They appeared to just be watching, and so he would just monitor them.
At least the rest were within normal parameters as downloaded by the Collector, which he hoped would remain the case.
The drinks were getting low, so BOB prepared another round.
“That one was complete bullshit,” General Lysander said quietly to Colonel Walton.
“Maybe.” Amanda winked. “But that’s up to you to decide, and I’ll never say one way or the other.”
BOB had excellent hearing—and the table was replete with pickups.
“And yours wasn’t?” Terry Henry asked Ryck.
The genera
l shrugged and said louder, so the entire table could hear, “So what’s your claim to fame, Colonel?”
Terry Henry Walton Tells a No-Shitter
By Craig Martelle
“She didn’t kill me.” The tall, dark-haired man ventured, saluting Bethany Anne with his beer. Colonel Terry Henry Walton owed Bethany Anne his life, but that was in a different dimension.
It didn’t matter. His loyalty and dedication weren’t limited by time or space.
The general toasted her. “Mighty considerate of you.”
“You don’t want to piss off the Empress,” Terry said in a stage whisper.
“Empress?”
“I heard that!” Bethany Anne glared, and Ryck and Terry did double-takes when her eyes flashed red. “Take your ‘Empress’ bullshit and shove it up your ass sideways. Fucking boys’ clubs!”
“Goddammit, show some respect to someone and get your head taken off. Hold a door and get your hand slapped.” Terry was trying to make a point, and he thought the general appreciated it.
Bethany Anne gave the men the finger while wearing a thousand-dollar smirk on her face.
He shot back, “Get your own damn Coke next time!”
This time she chuckled.
Terry signaled to BOB to bring everyone another round.
BOB arrived and passed out the drinks, and Terry Henry remarked, “You look familiar.”
“No, sir. I just have one of those faces. I’m really nobody,” BOB told him.
“Bullshit! I know you from somewhere.” Terry Henry pointed a finger at him.
“I get that all the time, oddly enough,” BOB said
“You told us about starting a war. Did you ever kill someone for money, General?” Terry asked.
The general’s expression turned cold.
“Even if someone paid you to do what you’d do for free—bring justice to the universe? People like us, we have to do it. If you have the ability to act, you have the responsibility.” Terry looked at his beer, which was great. He’d spent a hundred and fifty years of trying to make his own beer and had all the recipes in his head, the benefit of an eidetic memory.
But brewing it was different. Terry sucked at it, so it was nice to finally enjoy a cold one made by professionals.
Everyone had their specialties. Terry looked from face to face trying to assess what the others were good at—besides making war. Terry’s wasn’t good at making beer, so he figured he should probably stick to war.
“My wife is a werewolf. I know, I know—you’re all jealous.” Terry snickered. “Charumati has that effect on me too. She was by my side, or maybe I was by hers. We never know. It didn’t matter who was in charge, only mattered that we won. Whatever we did we had to win, because we didn’t have the choice of anything but life or death. It seemed to follow us.”
“You’re married to a fuzzy? Cool. I’ve known a few in my time. Called a few of them friends, too,” Amanda said.
Terry took a long drink and looked at BOB.
“You were about to tell a story, Colonel,” BOB prompted.
“I used to like you.” Terry locked eyes with BOB before looking back at the others. “There we were…no shit,” Terry started in his most ominous voice.
The smirks around the table suggested that he continue before he got his ass beat.
“Nathan Lowell had a side job for us, but he only wanted Char and me to go, which seemed odd. We couldn’t bring any of the others—the pack, our family, none of them. I had to know why.
“‘Come on, Nathan! Come clean or we’re not doing it,’ I demanded.
“Nathan rubbed his chin as he looked from me to Char and back to me. I swiveled the monitor around so he could see that we were alone in our quarters on the War Axe, and he nodded.
“‘It’s a hit, and I don’t want the others to know because I don’t want anyone second-guessing the op.’ Nathan didn’t blink, just watched for our reaction.
“I was confused. ‘I don’t get it. Why do you think they would question this more than I’m going to? We’re beyond assassinations, aren’t we, Nathan?’ I shook my head and looked at Charumati, who seemed as confused as I was.
“‘We need Dex in the Federation. Their Cabinet of Ministers requires a unanimous vote, and there is one holdout. Their parliamentary procedures dictate that if someone dies in office pending votes will be taken with the remaining members only, so we need him out of the way and it has to look like an accident. I want you to join a Federation group that’s already on the planet providing technical support to the cabinet and answering their questions about Federation membership.’
“‘What are his reservations?’ I asked.
“‘Does that matter?’
“‘Abso-fucking-lutely that matters, Nathan. I’m not doing it! BA supported us being able to pick our jobs, and we’re not taking this one.’” I remember I had the monitor in both hands, ready to rip it from the desktop.
“‘Just go out there and take a look. I’m forwarding the video of the proceedings so you can see this minister’s objections. Judge for yourself,’ Nathan told me.
“I didn’t want to do it, but Nathan was giving us the choice. The decision to pull the trigger would rest with me and Char.
“Okay, we’ll go. Send us the files. Walton out.” My wife glared at me. “If we don’t go he’ll send someone else. I’d rather we go…change the parameters of the job to make it so we aren’t assassinating people for not wanting to join the Federation. Who wants to belong to that kind of fucked-up organization?
“Char said, ‘No one. Nathan isn’t telling us the whole story, so I guess it’s up to us.’”
“Wait a minute!” Bethany Anne declared. “My Nathan did that to you?”
Terry smiled at her and held his hands out in the universal don’t-kill-anyone gesture. “There’s more to the story.”
“Who don’t you control in your universe?” Ryck asked.
“All of them. None of them. And fuck-all else.” Bethany Anne smiled devilishly.
Tanis chuckled. “Universal control is overrated.”
Ryck shrugged. “You were saying, Colonel?”
“So we land on this planet where the main cities are pretty sweet. It would have been a great liberty port for my folks, but I didn’t have them with me. We could have torn that place up. In my mind it needed a little life injected into it…
“Looks like a decent place,” Char says as we prepare to meet the Federation contingent, but I wasn’t sure. The place was too clean, so I figured they were hiding something.
“This group of fucking cheesedick needle-nosed pencil-pushing pantywaists shows up and starts whining and Char fires them all on the spot!”
“Fuck no!” BA exclaimed. “Where is she, by the way?”
“Shopping for shoes, I think, with Cordelia.”
Bethany Anne sighed. “Like mother, like daughter. I should probably join them.”
“Wait, I’m almost done with my story.” Terry didn’t know why it stung that BA would leave in the middle of his no-shitter, but it did. He must have been growing soft in his old age.
“So Char fires them all, then heads straight for the cabinet chambers, throws a couple guards out of the way, and bursts in. I’m not sure what the cabinet expected, but that wasn’t it. I’ve still got my Jean Dukes Special strapped to my leg and I’m fidgeting with the dial, rolling it from one to eleven and back again.”
“It goes to eleven?” Ryck asked, raising one eyebrow.
“It does!” Terry said proudly.
“It does,” Bethany Anne echoed, but there was a bit of pain in her eyes as she thought back to a few events. “Does it ever!”
“Char leans over the table and smiles graciously at each of the cabinet members, male and female alike, her purple eyes sparkling like they do. She stops when she gets to the lone dissenting voice and stares him down. ‘Tell us the truth’, she says in her softest voice. ‘Why don’t you want to join the Federation?’
“
The Dexters have a thing for purple, we found out. That ball-slapping knucklehead looks her in the eye and says, ‘Because if we vote to join I’ll be out of a job.’ Can you believe that?”
Terry’s beer had gotten warm, which irked him something fierce. “Anyone need a refill?” Everyone tapped their drinks.
He grabbed the best beer in the house, a classic Guinness, and loaded up a stein for his fellow Marine. BOB returned to the table with refills for the others.
“The remaining ministers launch two full broadsides into the guy, and Char jumps onto the table and yells at them all to shut up. I haven’t ever seen anything like it. I actually back up a little. I don’t want to find myself in the impact crater she is creating.
“Then she screams at them, ‘You will be busier than you’ve ever been before, and you’ll not only have your job but I promise you’ll get a twenty percent pay raise. What other issues are preventing you from voting yes?’
“’Twenty percent?’ the Minister asks. ‘Twenty-five, and you have a deal!’ HOLY FUCK! I think Char’s head is going to explode. She jumps down and grabs him by the throat and says, ‘If I kill you it’ll be zero, and Dex will be in the Federation regardless. The offer is now fifteen percent.’ She still has this meathead by the throat when he starts nodding, and he almost chokes himself on Char’s hand. She lets go and says, ‘I can’t hear you.’ ‘YES!’ he screams. The head cabinet minister calls for a vote, and it’s formalized right there.
“Char leans close to the guy’s ear. ‘Don’t be such a douchebag,’ she tells him. Next time do your homework before you act the fool. And I hope you understand that I’m going to pay that fifteen percent out of my own pocket because I didn’t want to kill you. I’m paying that because it suits me, not because of you, fuckstick.”
Terry took a sip of his dark beer. Guinness—the perfect beverage across all galaxies.
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