by Chris Lowry
He needn't bother.
Big Cindy was offended. It was evident in the set look on her face. In gritted teeth, and pulsing vein in her forehead.
Tinker had no way of knowing, but being a bodyguard for Su's business was not her first choice. She had wanted to be one of the workers.
But no one wanted her back.
Su had thought there was a certain sub segment of clients who would pay for the giant woman, even if it was only to be humiliated, hurt and abused by her.
But alas, no one wanted her.
So, house muscle was a second-choice career for the giant woman.
Being around so many wanted women, so many men willing to pay for it, and the deprivations she saw made the anger in her muscular belly simmer on the verge of boiling all the time.
Tinker fanned the flames of that rage just by being there.
She knew him from prior visits.
Remembered him from prior insults, though he was too drunk to recall more than the image of a female Sasquatch hauling him around.
He didn't even thank her for taking him back to his ship the last time he got drunk and passed out.
Big Cindy felt that rage creep up her cheek in a crimson blush. She heard the pounding of her heart in her ears.
And like a kettle reaching its boiling point, she bellowed a scream of rage, hurt and pain into the short unaccented walls of the foyer.
It scared Righty so much, he flinched, pulled the trigger on his blaster and shot Su.
Then Cindy charged.
She punched Tinker in an uppercut that sent him flailing into the empty bulkhead wall.
The giant woman grabbed Righty by his wrist and slung him into Lefty. They both went down in a tangle of limbs and curses. She quieted them with two stomps to the face, and then went to check on Su.
Tinker groaned as he pulled himself off the deck. The thin gown covering him was ripped in half, offering little in the way of protection or covering. He tried to adjust it to make do and watched as Cindy bent over the prone body of her Madame, put two meaty fingers to her neck, and bellowed again.
This one a noise of pain, loss and anguish.
She turned to glare at Tinker and just the sight of it made his chin hurt.
He clenched the credit chip even tighter and ran through the hatch before she could hit him again.
CHAPTER
It was easy to ignore the looks. He just refused to look back. The catcalls were harder, the groping harder still.
He had wondered if folks might think he was a crazy man running half naked through the crowded corridors of the hub on his way to the docking berth. If they thought he was insane, they weren't scared to acknowledge him with their whistles and pinches or slaps on the bottom.
But really rubbed him the wrong way is no one bothered to ask if he needed help.
A million people floating on a hub in Space and not one person offered assistance or even to reach out to the PROS, the Peace Resource Officers that patrolled the space stations between earth and Mars.
He made it to his ship and didn't bother to hide the code as he keyed in the sequence and fell through the hatch before it was open all the way. He locked it closed and plopped on the bench that ran the length of one wall in the back.
The Madame was dead. Some goons were knocked out, and even though he wasn't the guy they were looking for, he bet they would start now.
Unless Big Cindy killed them with the face stomps.
He sat up and tried to replay it in his mind. Did she kick them hard enough to kill, or just knock them out?
What if she was so angry at the loss of Su, she took it out on them?
Or worse, what if she thought it was Tinker's fault and she was stomping her way down the corridor now, hunting for his ship.
That thought galvanized him into action. He jumped up, slipped on a shirt that had dropped to the floor and crashed to the hull plates in an explosion of air.
Groaning, he climbed up again.
"Need to clean this place up," he rubbed his bruised shoulder as he made his way to the cockpit.
Three steps in, he realized that credit chip that had been clinched in his fist was knocked loose in the fall. He spent ten minutes searching through the pile of clothes, cast off containers of food, and empty liquor flasks looking for it, and finally found it on the bench where he had laid down before falling.
"Always the last place," he muttered and finally made it into the cockpit to collapse into the pilot's seat.
The cabin was tight, two chairs forward with a control console between them, a third seat folded from the wall behind the co-pilot's seat. If he had a navigator, that's where she would sit.
But he didn't need one, he thought.
He plugged in the credit chip to check the amount, and typed with one hand, fishing for a full flask with the other.
He found one, twisted off the cap and relaxed with a long gulp as the console pulled up the data on the chip.
There was money, enough for fuel and supplies to replace what he had left behind at Sue's House of Pleasure.
"Damn it," he sighed.
The trip there was a complete waste. Not only was he out the credits, but he got no pleasure from the visit.
What he walked away with was, well he wasn't sure.
Maybe he could blame the bruised shoulder on Big Cindy. Certainly, the bruised ego and the humiliating trip through the hub back to the NS-17.
But he'd rather have had the whole dip your wick experience.
"Damn it," he blew out his lips. "I really liked that place too."
Though his last couple of experiences there were sub-par, what with the whole getting drunk and passing out last time, and this time being party to a killing, he was sure the other visits were excellent.
The trouble was, he had been very busy smuggling, and trying to remember what happened at Sue's was sort of foggy. Had he everactually partaken of the pleasures of that particular palace?
He took another long sip as frustration set in.
Tinker tried to count up on one hand the number of times hethoughthe had been, but the number kept getting lost because he had been a couple of times just to drink. Or drank while he was there, since they offered and hedidn’t want to be a poor guest.
Another sip, and he gave up.
The pilot just decided that he was going to round up to one hundred, and say these last two times were a bust.
Who knows, maybe if he mentioned it when he went back, they'd toss him a freebie to make up for the two times he paid and came up empty.
"That would mean going back," he stared at the credit number on the screen.
He probably needed to go back, he reasoned. Let Big Cindy calm down, let her cool off, and he could get her side of what happened after he left.
And find out who the goons worked for, because whoever that was, he did not want to be on the wrong side of them.
As a smuggler, he took a lot of work from a lot of people, the gangs that controlled shipments in space. Not just the black market stuff that colonists paid extra to get, but the legit food and medical supplies. It all went through the fingers of the men who employed him, and since he was a freelance operator, any one of them could hire him.
Or not hire him, which would mean no food, no fuel and no loving.
That made him sad and he fought down a wave of self pity. It wasn't even his fault this happened, he wondered why the numbers on the screen were getting a little blurry. He was just out trying to have a good time and blow some of the money he earned with a good time, and Su dragged him into something.
Those guys couldn't have been looking for him because he was out in space.
They even said that.
Then they shot her.
Or somehow, she got shot.
And now he was sitting here with money on a card.
There were other pleasure houses, that he knew.
One in theJapanese sector he had always wanted to try.
He took tw
o long slugs to empty the flask, set it down on the floor and leaned up to do a careful hunt and peck on the keyboard since the screen was shimmering a little.
He keyed in a fuel order to fill up the NS-17 and watched the credit number slip down.
Then an embedded image popped up on the screen, a message coded into the credit chip.
It freaked him out a little because he didn't expect it, and he tried to catch up with what the picture of the woman was saying.
"You accepted my money, so our contract is sealed. You have a window to find my sister and help her get back to me."
"Contract?" he slurred.
He pressed some more buttons, but the image disappeared. He tried to jab it back into existence so he could ask some more questions, but the pecking on the keyboard turned into a banging on the hull.
It kept going when he stopped, and Tinker stared back into the cargo hold as the pounding echo sounded through his ship.
He made two swipes at the console to get the outside camera working, but missed both times.
Then he decided to go take a look for himself and probably yell at them for making so much noise.
What was their freaking rush?
CHAPTER
Big Cindy stood on the other side of the hatch as it folded open with the strange woman who stole into his session on one side of her. She glared at Tinker as he stood in the opening, then covered her nose and had to take a step back when the smell hit her.
“You got another dead body in there?” she gagged.
“I didn’t shoot Su,” he slurred back.
Big Cindy reached up and grabbed him by the tattered hospital gown and dragged him out of the ship.
“That’s still a tender subject with me,” she growled into his face.
“And you made me a tender subject,” he stood up as straight as he could and managed to make it look just shy of dignified.
Big Cindy’s eyes grew hard as tiny pieces of flint. Tinker decided to extend an olive branch.
“I was there, you know,” he said, trying to sound contrite and sad at the same time. “She didn’t deserve that. But those guys got what they deserve, you know what I mean.”
He turned to the woman and squinted.
“I just saw you on my console.”
“Then you agreed to the contract.”
“Look lady, I was just trying to get some fuel for my ship and-”
“You’re not going anywhere,” said Big Cindy.
“I’m not.”
“Those two guys were looking for her sister, and you agreed to find her, according to the data contract.”
“But that’s what I’m trying to tell you, I didn’t sign anything.”
“You took the credit from the account.”
“Yeah, but that was what you owed me for my coitus interruptus,” he smiled, pleased at himself for the clever turn of phrase.
“You think that’s funny?” Big Cindy was still growling.
He guessed she was funneling her grief into rage. Some people did that. Some turned to food. Some turned to drink.
“I don’t think it’s ha ha funny,” he said. “I think it sounds like an entertainment show. Some dating show where cameras go on dates with people. I saw something like that on Mars.”
“Well I’ve got video of you talking,” said Big Cindy. “And if I want, I can get video of you shooting those two guys that showed up at our front door.”
“I didn’t shoot them!” he said.
“You think that matters? Who are gangs going to believe? A drunk or what their eyes show them.”
“That’s blackmail.”
“That’s what we do,” said Jade. “And you entered a contract.”
Tinker muttered under his breath and grumbled.
“I’m not a bounty hunter,” he tried one last tact.
“Then go find one,” said Big Cindy. “If those two were looking for Jinx, then we need to hurry.”
“Jinx?”
“My sister,” said Jade.
“Jinx and Jade?”
She nodded.
“Jade and Jinx? Are you twins?” He let his mind conjure up images of what twins working in a pleasure house could do and how much that would cost him.
Then he tried to calculate how many runs it would take for him to buy a night like that, but the numbers got mixed up in his head and gave him a headache.
“We’re twins,” Jade said as she watched him.
As if she could read his mind, and was disturbed by what she saw on his face.
“So, I go find somebody that looks like you.”
“Yes.”
“Unless she died her hair,” Big Cindy said and pointed to her pink Mohawk. “I wasn’t born with this.”
“Are you hiding from someone too?”
It was like poking a bear with a sharp stick.
Big Cindy lunged and lifted him up against the side of his ship, her hot breath billowing over him as she whispered in a low voice.
“I’m not hiding from nobody.”
He tried to pull her hands away from the shredded gown, and when that didn’t work, he rubbed them in gentle circular motions. He had read on the net somewhere that that movement calmed animals down and the giant woman trying to press him through the hull of his ship looked a lot like an animal right now.
“It’s okay,” he tried to sooth her. “We’re all hiding from something.”
Wrong thing to say.
She shook him like a giant cat holding a tiny mouse and bounced him off the metal plating a couple of times.
“Oww,” he said.
“Don’t kill him,” Jade put her hands on Cindy’s arm.
“Thank you,” Tinker said.
“Yet.”
“Hey!”
“We still need him.”
Big Cindy dropped the pilot and took a step back. She was still close enough to kick him in the face, if she wanted, so Tinker decided to put some more room between them.
He’d seen the damage she could do with the boots she wore.
“Let’s not kill anyone else, okay,” he said. “I’ll do what I can to help.”
That seemed to satisfy Jade and mollify Big Cindy, and that was all he needed. Just some space to get away from them, get back in his ship and get gone on another run.
He had enough fuel being delivered to reach a couple of the space stations dotting the galaxy between earth and Mars, and someone somewhere had cargo they wanted moved without too many others noticing.
He edged toward the hatch on his ship.
“Our contract?” Jade said as she watched him twitch.
“What about it?”
“It’s got a death clause in it.”
“What’s that? Like a dangerous cat?”
“If you don’t live up to your terms, you die.”
He almost said by who?
Or by whom, but his mind vapor locked trying to get it right and by the time he figured it out, Jade was talking again and he had to let it go.
“If you don’t go find my sister and bring her back here safe, we’re hiring a couple of hit men to find you.”
There it was. That simple.
He almost blustered about the places he could hide.
There were thousands of places he could spend months docked on. He could sell his ship and meld into the mass of humanity that lived in Musk, the colony on Mars.
Get a regular job, live a regular life.
But he realized that if he did that, he’d have to always be looking over his shoulder, and that’s how you run into things.
He didn’t want to bump into anything, so he decided to just do the damn job and get it over with.
“What are you looking at?” Jade snapped as he stared at her without blinking. “Are you having a medical problem?”
“I’m taking a mental snapshot of your face,” he said. “You said she was your twin, right?”
“Right.”
“Alright then. Just hold still and let me lock i
t down.”
He kept staring.
“You know, if you took off your clothes it might help me get a better image of what I’m looking for,” he said after a few moments.
Big Cindy took a swing, but there was no heart behind it. The punch hardly knocked him off his feet.
By the time he got up, they were walking away.
“Hey!” he called after them. “Any ideas on where I should start this hunt?”
“Musk,” Jade called back. “She always had a thing for Sue One.”
CHAPTER
The fuel arrived shortly after the two women left and he got clearance for takeoff from traffic control. The Space Hub was busy with the coming and going of merchant vessels, and some recreational cruisers, though those were very limited.
Then there were dozens of smaller freighters like his ship. It was long and sleek, with a bulbous body and a narrow head. The engines took up most of the rear compartment, and he did most of the work on them himself.
Part of being a pilot was keeping the ship running. At least when you couldn’t afford to pay someone else to do it. As such, some things he had to learn to live without.
Like a working shower in his quarters.
He set the ship on auto-pilot using an integrated computer system he had installed himself that connected all the components of the ship. The guy he bought the program from said to be careful with it, and described a dozen firewalls and redundancies to prevent an unauthorized takeover of the ship, but so far, no one had been close enough or lucky enough to try.
Tinker made his way through the cargo hold and opened the door to his quarters. They were cramped and spartan. A narrow cot on one wall, a desk on the other with a private lavatory off to the side.
His pride and joy perched on the bed.
A copper cylinder with tubbing that ran in a pigtail corkscrew from the top and ended in a giant gallon container. There were eight more lined up on the floor next to it.
He walked over, turned a spigot and dripped the collection from last night’s batch into the jar. When it was full, he turned off the spigot and locked down the gallon container, replacing it with a fresh empty.
Then he checked the other components, adding mash and yeast into the giant pot, and checking the heating element that made the magic happen.