“Hah! You could start a mail-order bride business,” Amanda joked.
“You didn’t do this with anyone else?” Bethany Anne said.
“No. Well, you could say Jimmy did that with me.” He ran a hand down his sleeve and pinched the flesh between his fingers. “Just not all the way. After a time, I had some second thoughts about Shannon.”
BOB set some peanuts down on the table, and several people reached forward to take a few. “You don’t strike me as the type.”
“Doubt makes cowards of us all. Shannon carried this guilt, which I tried to edit out when I copied her, but the person we got was all wrong. No drive. No passion. No finesse. That element of her character was inseparable from her effectiveness. And every time I brought her back from the dead—so to speak—I felt like I was resurrecting this sorrow. That I was taking her away from any peace she might have found in the afterlife.”
Bethany Anne nodded, apparently understanding, but then said aloud, “Holy shit, buddy! I’m a vampire, not a priest.”
“But you’re her type, so let me ask you something. How do I apologize to her?”
Bethany Anne took the bottle from Ibarra, eyed him and then the bottle, and drank straight from it.
She examined the bottle further and said, “I don’t think there’s enough in here to find the right answer. Saying sorry is not your issue. You want some absolution of your own. Why else are you spilling your guts to complete strangers in the galaxy’s weirdest bar?”
“I will blame strong drink if pressed, but you’re not wrong.”
“This guilt of hers—can you fix it with a copy of another person?” Ryck asked.
“Not in any way she’d accept.”
“And her life in espionage was the source of this guilt?” Ryck pressed.
“Roundabout way, yes.”
“Then her life is the problem,” Bethany Anne said. “As long as she’s got the chance to be Spy Shannon, she’ll have the guilt. She needs a clean break. Away from you and from any chance she’ll be called back to the spy game.”
“Huh.” He clasped his hands in his lap. “Any of you ever go to Thailand? You could buy fish that were trapped in a rice paddy and release them. Locals called it ‘making merit.’ Maybe I could do that with Shannon.”
“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter,” Bethany Anne said. “You let one Shannon go and you’ll just make another.”
“Which is exactly what happens in Thailand with those fish. They’re released and caught downstream just to be let go again. It feels good, but accomplishes nothing. Still…maybe I can find an out for her. If there is judgment for souls in the great beyond, at least I could point to one shining example in the grand total of it all.”
“I’m not a priest. Do I strike you as a priest?”
“A scary one, maybe,” Amanda commented to no one in particular.
“No, but you do strike me as thirsty. BOB! You have any Chez Azul tequila? None of that Reposado swill!”
Interlude
BOB reached under the bar and pulled out the first bottle it touched. It knew that it would be the Chez Azul, just as anything one of them asked for would materialize. Its curiosity had been programmed, but how the construct worked was accepted as normal. It just worked.
There was one human left: Admiral Tanis Richards. She had remained quieter than most while the stories were being told. BOB didn’t know if that was because she was more resistant to the compulsion it was still broadcasting throughout the construct, if she didn’t have a story to tell, or if she thought she was saving the best tale for last.
BOB hoped it was the latter of the three reasons.
“So, I think it’s your turn, Tanis,” Amanda said. “Hold on, let me get a refill. I’ll get one for you too while you think about what story to tell,’ she said, rising from her seat.
How I Stopped a Pirate Attack With a Nymphomaniac
By M. D. Cooper
Tanis looked around the table, examining the faces of these new friends. Well, ‘friends’ may have been jumping the gun, but certainly compatriots.
<’Drinking buddies’, Tanis. The phrase you’re searching for is ‘drinking buddies’,> Angela, the AI with whom Tanis shared her mind, supplied.
Tanis sent Angela a feeling of acknowledgment, and decided that perhaps it was her turn to launch into a tale. A decision aided by being last.
Tanis got the distinct sensation that Angela was tapping a finger to her chin. It went on for a few seconds, then the AI spoke.
Tanis gave a mental snort.
Angela made a sound in Tanis’s mind that was a combination of a sigh and a raspberry.
Tanis thought about it for a moment. It was a bit racy, but she didn’t think it would be a problem with this crowd.
Amanda returned to the table and sat down beside Tanis, sliding a drink over as she settled into her chair.
“What is it this time?” Tanis asked, eyeing the dark beverage.
“A little favorite from back home called ‘Guinness,’ same as Terry’s drinking. Not my personal favorite to be sure, but I think you’ll like it.”
Tanis shrugged. “Well, I’ll try anything once.”
A new voice came from Tanis, sounding as though it was coming from her chest. “Or twice, or—”
“Quiet, Angela, you’re scaring the locals,” Tanis interrupted.
“Who the fuck was that?” Bethany Anne asked.
“Hey, everyone, I’m Angela. I live in here with Tanis.”
“Hi Angela, what’s the craic?” Amanda asked. “Are you living in all those nano machines I see running around inside Tanis? ‘Cos that’s grand.”
“A person inside a person?” Cal asked. “Like Splurt inside your head?”
Tanis shuddered at the thought.
“How’s this, then?” Angela’s voice now came from the center of the table above a half-empty pitcher of beer.
“Oh, I get it. You’re her AI, right?" General Lysander said.
Angela laughed. “Not a chance…it’s the other way around. I’m the real brains of the operation. She’s my meat-suit transportation system.”
“I’ll have you know that I’m less than half real meat.” Tanis grinned. “Not good at all for eating.”
Angela laughed. “I think we’ve gotten off track. We came up with a story to tell.”
“Right. So we have,” Tanis nodded and took another sip from the drink Amanda had given her. It was thick, but surprisingly smooth and creamy while not overbearing. She raised her glass to the colonel—who raised his in turn—before continuing, “It took a bit to come up with something I haven’t told before, but I think I have one—”
“And by ‘she has one’, she means I thought of it,” Angela interjected.
“Yeah, well, it’s not like there’s much difference between us anymore,” Tanis said, and noted a few raised eyebrows around the table. “Anyway, this is about how I used a nymphomaniac to take out a ship full of pirates. It was way back in…one sec, looking up the Gregorian date…July fifteenth, 8927.”
“Not too long after we got shot forward in time, five thousand years, via a handy-dandy, supermassive stream of dark matter,” Angela added.
“Shite,” Amanda commented. “We’re only
just into the twenty-first century where I’m from!”
Tanis nodded. “Yeah, so that’s kinda important. I come from the forty-first century, back in humanity’s golden age. Things in the ninetieth century…well, they’ve fallen back a lot. Suffice to say, the tech we had was a lot like—” Tanis paused and winked at Amanda “—magic.”
She set both her hands on the table and rolled her shoulders, sending a passel of the latest bots that Earnest and Finaeus had devised into the table. For a second, the surface of the table seemed to waver before them, then it turned from wood to steel.
“Hah! Awesome,” Amanda said, a huge grin on her face as she watched the table.
Cal rapped a knuckle against the surface, and a metallic thunk came back.
“Space Magic!” he announced, nodding as if he were the universe’s foremost expert. “Right?”
Tanis winked. “No trick, no magic. Science.”
“Yep, there’s no Magic happening here. I’d know,” Amanda confirmed.
The table turned back into wood, and Tanis withdrew the bots from between its atoms.
“OK, so I was on a ship named Sabrina, and we’d stopped off at a system named Silstrand. It’s the capital of a pretty small alliance of systems; only thirteen at the time, if I recall. Anyway, I’d just recently become un-kidnapped and was trying to get to Bollam’s World—58 Eridani, if you use the old names—to meet up with the Intrepid, my ship.
“It should have been a nice quick trip, but the captain of Sabrina got captured when she saved my bacon, so I felt a bit indebted to her and her crew to help her out. Was a good thing, too. Sera—the captain—turned out to be the key to everything.”
BOB approached and set a plate down before Tanis. She drew in a deep breath, savoring the smell of the BLT before her.
“Stars, that smells perfect. Real bacon, too, unless I miss my guess.”
Tanis took a bite of the BLT and closed her eyes while she chewed. When she opened them, everyone was staring at her.
“Seriously?” Bethany Anne groaned and covered her eyes. It was like being with the guys. “Tell the story or eat, but not simultaneously, please.”
“OK, OK, I couldn’t resist. Life’s not worth living without a good BLT every now and then.” She set the sandwich down, making a mental promise to the meal that she wouldn’t tarry long. “Now, where was I?”
“Sera was the key to everything,” Amanda offered.
Tanis nodded. “Right. So we needed to rescue Sera. I had limited resources back then, having just been recently kidnapped and all. To get the weapons we needed for our ship, I traded some of my tech to a local arms dealer—the legal kind of arms dealer…mostly.
“S&H Armaments was their name, and my salesperson was this wizened little prune of a man named Smithers. I pushed him as much as I could, but in the end, two days was the best he could do on the upgrades for our ship.
“I was perfectly content to spend my time on the ship reviewing their databases—a lot had changed over five thousand years, and I had some catching up to do. Cheeky, however, wasn’t going to have any of that.”
“ ‘Cheeky?’ Seriously?” Amanda commented.
“Yeah. She was the pilot on Sabrina. Spunky little nymphomaniac who hated clothing. If she had to wear more than a bikini, she would whine incessantly. It wasn’t uncommon for her to just walk around naked—mind you, that made for a lot of fights when it came to the internal temperature in the ship. Thompson, the supercargo, liked to turn it down so that Cheeky’s—er…nevermind. Not the point of the story.
“Sounds pretty pointy to me.” Amanda giggled.
“What? Sounds like you were finally getting to the good part!” Ibarra turned up his hands in dismay.
Angela snorted, a rather strange sound to hear coming from a pitcher of beer. “Don’t worry, you’ll get your fill.”
“So I’m in my cabin, reviewing this little series of events called ‘the FTL Wars’, when Cheeky raps on my door. I open it to see her wearing a sheer shawl, bikini bottom, and a pair of spike heels. My first thought was that she had amorous intent, but it turned out she just wanted someone to head on-station with her. I can still remember the smell of her augmented pheromones. My nanotech could filter them out no problem, but that was a woman who smelled like one thing, and one thing only.”
Tanis couldn’t help but grin at the memory. It had taken Cheeky a few tries to convince her to go onto the station, but eventually she’d succumbed. In the end it had been Cheeky’s insistence—and not the pheromones—that had made Tanis give in.
“I grabbed a jacket—I tend to go the opposite direction when it comes to clothing; layers are your friend—and a pulse pistol. Not sure if you folks have them, but a pulse weapon fires a non-lethal concussive wave through the air. Well, it’s non-lethal at range. Point-blank, you can turn a person’s brain to soup, or crush their heart.
“Once I was dressed and ready to roll, I joined Cheeky, and she led me off the ship and onto the station’s docking ring. ‘It’s not far, just half a klick away,’ Cheeky said in her bubbly voice. I swear, she was the happiest person I ever met. Life had dealt her a tough hand, but she never let it get her down. Mind you, she had more sex than some civilizations, so that might have been part of it, too.”
“Sounds like someone I’d like to meet.” Amanda winked.
“If you ever do, and feel the need for an impartial observer…” Cal held his arms out, presenting himself. “Just saying.”
“Damn, I think even Tabitha would be in awe.” Bethany Anne shook her head. “And I’ve got to totally steal that line… ‘More sex than some civilizations.’”
Tanis laughed, enjoying the comradery around the table. “Right, well, Silstrand was a great place for her to have a good time. Most folk there were law-abiding and honest. Really, though, I don’t know why I went out with her. I knew what she wanted to get up to, and I was happily married. Well over a hundred years, in fact, so I wasn’t planning to catch any tail. Granted, I’d been cooped up on ships for months at that point, so that was probably the bulk of my reasoning for going out.
“Half a klick was pretty close—the PetSil platform was over seventy klicks across, if memory serves. Rather than catch a dockcar or a maglev train, we walked down the docking ring. Cheeky kept up a steady stream of banter the whole way, ‘I can barely keep these stations straight anymore,’ she’d said. ‘Used to work a tug on one like this, though. Similar build. Anyway, there’s a spoke connecting to the main hub up ahead. It’s the third one in the section, so you know what that means.’
“Now, I had no idea what that meant. I didn’t even know why they bothered with hub-and-spoke stations in the ninetieth century, what with their fancy artificial gravity—the only tech better than what we had in the forty-second century, when I was from.
“So I asked, ‘The best burger joint?’ I could have used a burger. A BLT would have been better, but I always find that the lettuce and tomato are harder to get right than the meat. The PetSil mining platform was a long way from a planet, so that meant any meat had been frozen, or they were vat-growing it on-station. Burgers are best in a situation like that.
“Cheeky gave me this meaningful wink. ‘Well, it depends on your definition of burger. We’re definitely going to find some meat there.’ Like I said, I wasn’t really looking for that kind of entertainment, but she was so jazzed for it that I didn’t want to suggest we go somewhere more sedate.
“A few minutes later, we get to the junction where the spoke connecting to the station hub met the ring. And what did we find? A clothing store.
“Let me tell you, Cheeky was pissed. I think having anything other than a club or bordello there broke some sort of unwritten station-layout law. ‘What the core-damned stars is this?’ Cheeky was yelling and waving her arms while swearing at the stor
e from the middle of the concourse. I said something like, ‘You know, the station has a directory. I bet there’s a whole listing of strip clubs, or wherever we’re going.’
“Cheeky turned on me and raised her tiny little finger. I had to hide a smile. She was barely over one hundred and sixty centimeters, even in her heels. Back then, I was one hundred eighty-seven, so she could barely reach up to my face.”
“Somehow I think her arms were long enough to still lay a smack upside your head,” Angela countered.
Tanis shrugged. “Probably. She got taller later after she died. It was a long time ago, so I don’t remember properly. Anyway, we had to—stars forbid—ask for directions to the best night spot. Granted, it was still first shift on the station, so the best night spot wasn’t open yet. Neither was the second best, or the third…you get the picture.
“ ‘Well,’ Cheeky had said an hour later, while we sat on a pair of mostly clean stools in a bar halfway around the docking ring from Sabrina. ‘At least we’ll get to try a bit of the local booze.’
“I remember looking around at the locals—nothing you’d want to touch for too long, let alone get between the sheets with—and saying, ‘Well, we got some exercise, and we’ll see what their brews are.’
“Cheeky sucked on her lower lip and made eyes at me for a minute—”
“Seriously, Tanis,” Angela interrupted. “She wasn’t coming onto you that much.”
“Ang, I love you like myself—because you pretty much are myself—but trust me, you have no idea what pheromones like hers can do. She was sending them at me full force, and she could pump out enough to flatten an army.”
Angela didn’t respond, and Tanis continued. “We ordered a local beer, one the bartender recommended for a warm up, then some whiskey, then wine, then vodka, more whiskey…I forget the exact order. Cheeky was pretty sloshed, but I was just buzzed. I could have cleared the booze out with my nano if I’d wanted to, but it was nice to cut loose for a bit. I’d had a pretty rough few weeks, and despite our surroundings I was glad Cheeky had convinced me to come out with her.
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