by Sam Coulson
With that, Loid stepped forward to the door and pushed it open. Four well-armed Celestrial guards were standing just inside a small, well-lit entryway. There was a desk to the left, and the walls were lined with small cubbyholes with steel doors. I presumed they were for checking weapons.
“Shesuren, Eti’katc’kahn,” one of the Celestrials said reverently before switching to Common. “Welcome, it’s been awhile since we’ve seen you out this way old friend.”
“It’s been too long,” Loid replied. He took his pistols from his belt and handed them to one of the guards who turned and locked it in a steel storage cubby on the wall. “Far too long for me. I have a shipment of Kevarian Ale back on my ship. Are you in the market?”
“We’re always in the market for Kevarian.” The guard seemed pleased. “The usual price?”
“That’s what I was hoping,” Loid answered. “I had the landing crew unload it at the docks, it should be there for you to pick up at docking pad CX-23.”
“Such a pleasant surprise,” the guard answered as he pulled a tablet from his belt. “We will open a tab for you and your friend.”
“Please,” Loid said. “How is the Matron this evening?”
“She is well, I will notify her that you are here, I’m sure she will be pleased to see you.”
“We’d like that,” Loid smiled. “Now, if you will permit?”
“Your friend,” the Celestrial paused. “You vouch for him?”
“Of course,” Loid said. “There been trouble lately?”
The guard paused, looking at me from head to toe.
“No more than usual. Go ahead then. Enjoy.” The guard motioned for the others to step aside, allowing us to enter.
We passed through a narrow doorway into another short hallway. There was a slight humming sound coming from the walls.
“Scanners,” Loid commented. “If they detect any weapons they seal the doors, trapping you inside.”
“Efficient,” I said.
“Very,” Loid turned and flashed a smile. “Now, shall we?”
When he pushed open the next door the small scanning room was immediately flooded with music and lights.
Stepping into the Par’eth was like stepping into another world. Which, I found out, was precisely the intent. A purple-tinged sky was projected on the dome above us with multiple overlays, simulating six low-orbiting moons. I wasn’t sure if the sky was modeled after a real world, or if it was an artistic creation. Either way, the effect was stunning.
In the center of the dome was a circular bar where patrons of all races were standing around, drinking and chatting openly. A stream flowed around the bar, creating a self-contained circle that acted as a boundary. From the bar, patrons could cross one of a dozen decorative bridges and find private tables surrounded by lush foliage. Some tables were open to the air above, while others were protected by smaller cloudy domes that offered the diners more privacy. A number of uniformed Celestrial guards were positioned throughout the area, though if they were armed, I couldn’t see any weapons.
Beyond the bar on the far side of the dome was a dimly lit area. There were privacy domes here as well, but instead of tables, I saw round beds. As I watched, I saw a tall Celestrial male walk up to one of the beds. He was greeted by a slighter Celestrial wearing a flowing robe. Something exchanged hands, and then they stepped inside as the dome swept to a close.
“Helluva place,” Loid commented as he patted me on the back. “Come on, let’s get up to the bar. Hopefully the Matron will have time for us soon. In the meantime, let’s see what we can find out from the locals. Stay close.”
Loid and I walked down the main path that led from the entrance to the bar. I saw that a number of the patrons were wearing various uniforms. Off duty workers I guessed. I scanned each as we walked by, looking for four-pointed silver stars. I didn’t see any.
Loid nodded to the bartender and spoke rapidly. The bartender was a willowy Celestrial female with a jeweled piercing in her nose and starbursts tattooed on her temples. I was surprised to see that she had a shapely form similar to Earthborn women. In a moment she turned around and handed us two tall glasses.
Loid said something back to her and smiled. I lifted my glass and took a tentative sip. The first taste was bitter and with a floral air to it, as it slid to the back of my tongue the aftertaste was sweet and fruity.
“That’s not bad,” I said.
“Nope, not at all,” Loid said. “Don’t hit it too hard though, three of those and you will be crawling home.”
“Loid Burns,” a voice boomed behind us.
Loid’s hand instinctively went to his empty holster at the sound of his name. As we turned, I saw the largest human being I had ever seen. He had deep brown skin and light brown eyes. His head was shaved and his stubbled jaw line was sharp and forehead pronounced. Between his stubble, eyebrows, and lashes I was certain he wasn’t a Celestrial. He was possibly even Earthborn. He was wearing a tight-fitting jacket with light-green luminescent stripes down each sleeve, and a metallic band across his forehead resting on the tops of his ears. Given his size, I was pretty certain he could rip me limb from limb if he felt like it.
“That is you, you jackal!” The voice boomed.
“Cway!” Loid’s face lit up when he saw the giant. “You’re the last face I expected to see way out here, did the circuit finally kick you out?”
“Kick me out?! Bah, the circuit would be nothing without me,” the man smiled, fine lines curled up from the corner of his mouth. “Naw, I just met with some Celestrial engineers who came up with some new thruster tech. They want me to help endorse it back in the Protectorate and Collective. They are kitting out my ship now so I can give them a whirl.”
“Ah, a sellout then!” Loid smiled as he turned to me, it was the most relaxed I’d seen him since we left Tons. “Eli, this hulking piece of humanity is Cwaylyn Jones, one of the fastest racers in all the human systems.”
“He misspeaks, I’m the fastest racer in the human systems,” Cwaylyn responded. “I have a hangar full of gold medals to prove it. Just for that, Loid gets to buy me a drink.”
“Whatever you want,” Loid nodded to the bartender. “I have a tab started.”
“I bet you do,” Cwaylyn answered with a booming laugh. “The Matron still comping all of your drinks?”
“We have an arrangement,” Loid answered with a smile.
“Yeah, I bet you do,” Cwaylyn laughed harder.
“Eti’katc’kahn!” A short Celestrial separated from the crowd and clasped Loid on the shoulder.
Loid greeted the newcomer and began speaking rapidly.
“Eti’katc’kahn,” Cwaylyn turned to me, laughing. “Goofiest damn name I’ve ever heard. If the Skin-er, Celestrials ever decide to honor me I hope that they don’t call me something that stupid. But then again, the reason they even decided to give him a name in the first place is ridiculous enough, am I right?”
“Eti’katc-what does it mean?” I asked.
Cwaylyn raised one of his bushy eyebrows, “You don’t speak Celestrialese? And Loid hasn’t hooked you up with a ComBand?”
“A what?” I asked.
“ComBand,” Cwaylyn tapped the silver band across his forehead and laughed. “Or maybe he is trying to keep things from you, who knows. Here, just a second, bartender!”
He leaned across the bar and spoke to the bartender and tapped on his ComBand. She nodded, and a moment later pulled one from under the counter and handed it to him.
“Here you go,” Cwaylyn said as he glanced back at Loid who was still engaged in close conversation with the Celestrial. “Hold still. I put it on his tab, the Matron never charges him anyway.”
Cwaylyn took the half-circle band and pushed it against my forehead. It fit tightly around my head, spanning from the top of each ear. Cwaylyn smiled once more and tapped the side. I felt it warm up slightly as it turned on.
“Now, Eti’katc’kahn,” he said.
As he spoke
the ComBand came to life, there was a slight flash of light, and the words “Man with stone-crushing breasts” floated above Cwaylyn head.
I laughed.
“It’s a translation matrix that uses the same basic holographic projection technology as a heads-up display in a cockpit,” Cwaylyn explained. “If you focus your eyes on someone the sensors will tag them and begin translating what they say. It’s Celestrial tech, pretty clever.”
I moved my head from side to side and saw that the words “man with the stone-crushing breasts” stayed fixed in their position above Cwaylyn’s head as they slowly began to fade.
“How did he get that name?” I asked, still laughing.
“I was back years ago,” Cwaylyn responded. “Before I got into the pro racing circuit Burns and I used to team up from time to time. We had a few scams and some good times. My favorite was taking a ship, rigging it up for speed, and then loading in some cargo to give it a false positive of illegal goods on a cargo scan. It’s pretty easy to do actually, most customs and flux point patrols focus on trying to make sure that their sensors don’t miss any illegal goods. They are so eager to detect something illegal, that it ain’t that hard to spoof their sensors to make them think I have a cargo hold full of weapons-grade uranium when it’s really industrial cotton swabs. Anyhow, I would run the blockade and lead the local fuzz on a chase, meanwhile Loid would slide right in behind me with the Tons loaded down with illegal plasma rifles and stims behind cargo shielding and nobody would give him a second glance.”
“Sounds effective,” I took another drink.
“Piles of coin my friend, piles of coin. Anyhow, we’d delivered a bunch of supplies for a Celestrial asteroid mining facility,” Cwaylyn continued. “We were drinking our wages when an alarm went out across the station that there had been a cave-in on the far side of the asteroid, and that a crew of a few dozen workers were trapped, stuck in their environmental suits and running out of air.”
He paused to order another drink, and then continued.
“Well, Loid saw that the young and shapely Celestrial woman who was running the operation, the one that’s now the Matron of this joint, was worried, and, well, you know Loid. That was all it took. He fired up Tons-o-Fun and went around the asteroid. Nobody is quite sure what he intended to do, but he was drunk enough that I was surprised he made it out of the docking bay. Well, anyway, he went in for a closer look and forgot to ease off the throttle and actually rammed his hull right into the rock, getting the Tons half stuck in the damned asteroid.”
I laughed, harder than I had meant to. The drink was potent.
“By luck or by fate, he had managed to punch a hole right in to where the miners were trapped without collapsing the whole thing. They thought it was another cave in, and they were all huddled waiting for death when the Ton’s bow came crashing into the cavern. All those poor saps saw when they turned on their flashlights was the nekid woman painted on Ton’s bow!”
“Oh lord,” Loid cut back into our conversation. “Not this again.”
“See,” Cwaylyn continued. “Since the miners all had their environmental suits on, they were alright. Though in another hour they would have been out of air, Loid managed to kick in the reverse thrusters to pull the Tons out and save the miners, completely by accident, and it all somehow made him famous among the Celestrials.”
“It was not an accident,” Loid answered flatly. “I scanned their location and was going in to save them.”
“Oh what a bucket of centi-hound piss,” Cwaylyn roared. “With the lead content in that rock your scanners couldn’t penetrate shit! So there you have it, the legend of Loid Burns, the man behind the stone-crushing breasts! The great Eti’katc’kahn!”
As I laughed, I saw Loid’s eyes shift from left to right. Several heads turned toward us at the sound of his name.
“Cway,” Loid took the big man by the arm. “A bit more discretion.”
“Or what little man?” Cwaylyn laughed stepped forward, chest bumping Loid back into the short, stout frame of a grumbling humanoid.
Loid said a quick apology, and looked over to me, “How many did he have?”
“Just two that I saw, but I think he’s been here a while,” I answered.
“Oh a bit, yes a bit,” Cwaylyn laughed for no apparent reason. “Don’t look so sour there Loidy! Loidy, heh, Loidy sounds like lady.”
More faces turned to look in our direction.
“We need to shut him up,” Loid pulled me close. “The man I was just talking to is an old friend. He says that there is a hit out on Ju-lin. They have a picture, detailed description, place of birth, everything. There is a contract is out for her.”
“A hit? Like to kill her?” I stumbled. “Who? How?”
Fear began to creep into my chest, constricting my breathing.
“Oh, what, plotting a scam without me eh?” Cwaylyn leaned into our conversation and whispered loudly. “Don’t leave me out! I’m in! I’m in! What are we doing?”
Loid rolled his eyes and handed Cwaylyn his half-finished drink. Cwaylyn took it, and with a drink in both hands, was quiet again.
“From what it sounds like, they have rough descriptions of us,” Loid said quickly. “I’m sure as hell glad that Ju-lin stayed back at the room, we would have never made it out of here if we’d brought her.”
“MineWorks,” I said. “It must be MineWorks. They would have full records on Ju-lin.”
“But not you?” Loid asked. “The thought crossed my mind, but you were a colonist too, they would have full records on you as well.”
I was silent a moment.
“What are you hiding now?” Loid hissed, incensed that we had kept yet another secret. “I’m really tired of this ‘don’t tell Loid until someone is about to start shooting at us’ thing.”
As he said it, there was a high pitched squeal behind me followed by a flash of light just over my left shoulder. I flinched and looked up to see a smoking hole in the pagoda behind Loid, the blast had narrowly missed his head.
Cwaylyn dove over both of us, pulling us to the ground as a second shot sizzled through the air where Loid’s head had been.
“Are you kidding me right now?” Loid yelled as he pulled himself back to his feet.
Cwaylyn turned on all fours, and threw himself in the direction of the shooter. There was a crushing hit and another high pitched squeal.
“I got you, ya villain!” Cwaylyn howled as the crowd closed in around him.
“You okay?” Loid offered a hand to pull me to my feet.
“Yeah,” I said. “What was that?”
“I got him!” Cwaylyn got back to his feet, lifting a wiggling and screaming sack in his left hand. A makeshift laser pistol was in his right hand, he snapped it in two.
“Got her you mean?” Loid said, stepping forward as he straightened his jacket
In the dim light of the bar I looked up and saw the familiar face of the young Noonan, Tolo, who had led us to Joof’s shop.
The crowd stepped back as the security staff closed in.
“Murderers!” I read the scrolling words above her head as she squealed. “You killed my Joof! Right there in her shop!”
“Killed your Joof?” Cwaylyn shook her vigorously. “What the hell is a Joof?”
Loid and I exchanged quick glances.
“Joof’s dead?” Loid asked in surprise, his face was turning white.
“You killed her!” Tolo screeched and pointed to Loid as she dangled from Cwaylyn’s grip. “Snuck back in because she wouldn’t tell you what you wanted!”
The crowd stepped back further as four security guards closed in.
“We didn’t kill anyone,” I answered.
“When did she die?” Loid asked.
“Within an hour after you left,” Tolo was convulsing now in some kind of fit. “I left to get dinner and you came back, she was, oh! You killed my Joof.”
“Oh that’s not good,” Loid muttered.
“Now listen li
ttle mole-person,” Cwaylyn said, swung Tolo around to face him. “My buddy Eti’katc’kahn didn’t kill nobody, well, not today at least. At least if he says he didn’t do it, he didn’t do it.” Cwaylyn swayed a little as he held the Noonan dangling above the floor. “Now that you mention it, I’m not certain myself. Loidy did you kill a Joof?”
“Remind me to find a new drinking buddy,” Loid sighed.
“Mr. Jones,” one of the uniformed guards said in flawless common. “Please set the Noonan down.”
“Like hell,” Tolo squealed again as Cwaylyn shook her vigorously. “This thing tried to shoot my friend!”
“Mr. Jones, we are aware of that. She smuggled a laser weapon into the Par’eth, an offence we take very, very seriously.” The Celestrial responded. “Which makes her our responsibility to deal with.”
“Oh, right. Yeah.” Cwaylyn dropped Tolo on the floor unceremoniously. “Here, take this little blast cannon she had too, as evidence or whatnot. Some kind of plastic I think. I busted it up.”
The Celestrial said something as he took the remains of Tolo’s laser cannon while two other guards stepped forward and quickly grabbed Tolo by each arm, taking her away.
“We apologize,” the Celestrial bowed low. “We are ashamed of this intrusion into the sanctuary of the Par’eth. A round of drinks on the bar, compliments of the house.”
“Well now,” Cwaylyn patted the guard on the back. “Good thing too, I dropped mine!”
“Sirs,” soft voice called. Loid and I turned to see a female Celestrial, with smooth, young skin wearing a softly flowing dress and a light green veil. “The Matron will see you now, please, come with me.”
“Of course,” Loid answered.
We turned to follow her
“Hey boys, where are you heading?” Cwaylyn lunged forward to catch us. “The party’s just warming up!”
“Cway, thanks for the help, but we got it from here,” Loid answered, and then waved for the barkeepers attention. “My free round to Mr. Jones here!”