A Princess Who Defied Kings

by J. Kirsch

  "That looked pleasant," Kav said, palming the fallen weapon. "I'll take this to Yoji." Yoji would just about have an aneurism. He supervised the club's day to day affairs, and would have to report the incident to the Crew Authority. From there they would hopefully follow up to find out which crime syndicate these two pieces of space trash worked for.

  But Damian couldn't get one image in particular out of his adrenaline-soaked brain.

  She looked terrified, like the last person in the universe who would play hero, he thought. He remembered a small nose and gold-green eyes enshrouded in a mass of dark, shoulder-length hair. Whoever she was, he didn't seem to remember ever seeing her before, and that both frustrated and intrigued him. He always repaid a debt.

  "Did you see the girl who smashed her whiskey bottle into that bug-head who was about to make chop suey out of me?" Damian asked.

  Gunther and Jenson shrugged. "Sorry, brother, we had a little outbreak of drunken cat-fighting on the dance floor. We didn't see you were in trouble until the crap had already hit the skids and run its course."

  Damian sighed, but he couldn't claim to be genuinely pissed. Nine out of ten times, it was the drunken partygoers on the dance floor or at the bar who got out of hand. It made sense that they'd been keeping a close eye there, and responding with overwhelming force. It was so seldom anything serious happened…you had to be stupid or very powerful to carry a weapon into a public place. The Haven's Crew Authority frowned on that…big time.

  First offense was temporary detention and psych evaluation. Second offense rated you 'excess organic waste' to be recycled into the maintenance systems or dropped down some forgotten shaft.

  A rustling movement caught his eye under the strobe light near the club's back exit, where Damian thought he saw a petite shape slip into the rearmost corridor of Sector G. Is that her? He burned on instinct and bolted for the swinging doors. Three seconds later he burst onto Starview Avenue, a corridor wide as a thoroughfare and teeming with throngs of colonists looking to get their entertainment fix.

  Damian saw flashes of dark hair and the back of a head. Not much to go by, but instinct kept urging that there was something familiar to it. One thing that made Damian an effective bouncer was his keen memory for bodies and faces. Once a dumbass got banned from the club, he didn't sneak back in no matter what disguise he wore, not on Damian's watch.

  The bouncer shoved his way through the crowd, aided by the exosuit which persuaded everyone to give way. Jenson wasn't far behind him, yelling that he was going to get himself in knee-deep excrement. He didn't have authorization to wear brawling gear outside of his work duties. All weapons in Beta Sector were strictly regulated.

  They can bite me, he thought. If he didn't catch this girl now he doubted he'd ever see her again. It killed him that he'd been saved by her random act of courage, and he'd be damned if he didn't at least see the look on her face and offer to repay her for what she'd done.

  He darted down two more corridors, flowing past well-lit storefronts and barreling through a moving 3D promo. An exquisitely beautiful woman turned to him, her holographic features shimmering as she spoke seduction.

  "In Pick Your Own Reality, no adventure is beyond your grasp. Come. Come. The hero inside you beckons." She smiled, her arm flung wide to indicate the apartment complex where some people would spend a day's creds to live out entire lives in time-dilated artificial worlds. A girl ran inside as the glass doors yawned open, and now Damian was sure. It was definitely her.

  Damian launched ahead with more haste than he'd intended. He hadn't intended to be moving so fast that he completely shattered the sliding doors before they could give way. Oops.

  He turned left and right, feeling strange to finally be here. Friends and acquaintances had gushed about the place. Anorax's Alter-Reality was every bit as real as anything The Haven could offer…only more so. There you could feel a breeze tickle the skin of your cheek. Here you could feel recycled air.

  The exosuit-buffed bouncer clearly intimidated the single employee on duty. He was young and pale-skinned, with a tall blade of hair marching down the middle of a shaved head and a tattoo running under his left eye.

  "Yo, brain-dead, any particular reason you feel the need to trash a perfectly fine entrance? Those creds coming right out of your account, fool." Damian was impressed with the kid's bravado, but it didn't fool him for a moment. The bouncer cornered the kid behind his desk and thrust his strength-enhanced hands to both sides, making fist-sized dents in the cheap countertop.

  "The girl who ran through here. Which way?"

  "You've signed up for all kinds of crazy, haven't you? Just forget I said anything. She went that way." The young man pointed and made a desperate shooing gesture.

  "Thanks." The apartment doors which Damian flitted past were probably locked, and he didn't want to barge into one random room after the next. But he was 99% sure that she hadn't gotten that far ahead of him. Unless she knew this place a hell of a lot better than he did, Damian thought he had a decent shot of catching up to her. He rounded another corridor. The black-painted walls and bluish lighting made it hard to see, and abruptly someone's legs were dropping right on top of him. Those same powerful legs rested on his shoulders and he felt a sharp object being thrust between the joints of his exosuit, ready to prick an artery.

  "So much as breathe funny and I will gut you," said a feminine voice.

  Not half bad. Damian froze. "Listen, I'm not here to hurt you. I actually wanted to thank you."

  "For what?"

  "For saving my life. Of course it's kind of ironic since you have a blade to my throat now. Maybe we could take the irony down a notch. How about you slowly remove that knife and get off of me, and we talk like two normal people?"

  "I didn't ask for your gratitude or your—"

  "Damian. Please call me Damian. Do you have a name too, or should I just call you 'Knife-girl'. Not that it doesn't have a nice ring to it, but—"

  "What do you want? Tell me that much and maybe I can see things your way," she replied.

  "You saved my life back there, and I want to know why."

  "You were just doing your job. Those scum rats deserved what they got. I was just at the right place, at the right time. There's no big mystery, Damian. Just go back to your life, and let me go back to mine."

  As she said it, the dark-haired girl slowly leapt backward. Graceful as an acrobat, she landed on her feet and carefully backed away. But Damian had already whirled and taken note of her disheveled looks. Her eyes appeared haunted…every bit as tired as they were fierce. She had bathed recently, which was good. The homeless didn't last long in Beta Sector. The android guards did regular sweeps to clean out the human dregs, and scent was their simplest and easiest criterion to categorize someone as—and it didn't exactly flow off the tongue—'excess organic material.'

  The girl's jacket was torn, though, and her body-suit pants were worn in at least half a dozen scrapes. A deep gash across her left shoulder told Damian that she'd probably collided with something inconvenient in her rush to flee the scene at the club. He noticed too, for the first time, how beautiful her face was, how her deeply bronzed skin set off the color of her eyes and a cute nose with very kissable lips.

  Damn it, Damian. Keep it in your pants. Don't be an ass. He noticed ruefully that the grime on her face looked like it had been accumulating, and this wasn't normal. Citizens were anal about hygiene. It would take one plague or virus to decimate entire sub-sectors and turn Beta Sector into a giant kill zone. From birth, children were indoctrinated in cleanliness, cleanliness, cleanliness. There was only one reason that a person would look the way she looked…

  "You need a place to stay?"

  "Me? No thanks. You hard of hearing, Damian? I said—"

  "I heard what you said," Damian grunted. He licked his lips and tried to act natural. How did you act natural around a homeless girl whose very existence was illegal? He could turn her in for a small fortune. Never have to wo
rk another day in his life.

  "Is that a 'No I don't need a place to stay' or a 'No I don't trust you farther than I can throw you?'" Damian asked.

  The girl brushed an unruly tendril of hair out of the way, her other hand fidgeting with the knife. She stared at him oddly. She seemed to be sizing him up, but it was more than that.

  "And if I did need a place to lick my wounds, what of it?"

  "Look…far be it from me to ask you about your business," Damian tried. Careful, dumbass. Don't spook her! "I could just give you the key-print to my place. I can stay with a friend. No harm, no foul. You don't even have to see me again. Just stay a couple days…stay the week if you need to. Come by the club and leave me a note when you're ready to move on. Is that simple enough?"

  "And just why would you do this for me?"

  "What part of 'You saved my sorry ass back there, and I always help those who help me' seems so unbelievable to you?" Damian replied, sighing as he clenched his fists and wanted to say a few more things about hard-headed members of a certain gender.

  The girl fidgeted with the knife again. She bit her lip as every muscle tensed. Seconds ticked by, too damn many, until her body relaxed. She returned the knife to the hidden sheath underneath her jacket and put both hands on hips.

  "Slide me the key-print. Then turn around, go back the way you came. Tell your friends at the club that you weren't able to catch me. Deal?"

  Damian nodded, suppressing the urge to grin like an idiot. It felt good to be doing her a kindness, repaying the debt. So why was his pulse tap-dancing? Why did it feel like he'd won the lottery to join the elites in Crew Sector? The young bouncer wasn't sure, but his subconscious seemed to know something the rest of his body didn't.

  This won't be the last time we'll meet.

  Chapter 2

  Somewhere in Beta Sector an apartment hummed to life as Damian and Jenson awoke to the gentle, cascading whoosh of a waterfall.

  "This is your new alarm, seriously? Absolutely. Pathetically. Lame." Damian groaned himself awake, but Jenson didn't even flinch.

  "Really? You're going to fault a guy for having originality in his tastes and changing it up? Don't be a hater, dude. Shut up and make us some breakfast. If you're going to be a guest, at least make yourself a useful one."

  Jenson padded bare-chested and barefoot through the bedroom to the stand-up shower stall, closing its glass door behind him. It fogged up almost immediately as steam hugged the ceiling. Damian heard a sigh of contentment from his co-worker as the water sprayed for all of 60 seconds – half of what the water system would allow during any 24-hour period.

  As Damian brushed his teeth in the sink which was wedged tightly between the shower stall and the wall, his mind wandered. It had been one week since his agreement with the mystery girl. Through sheer force of will he had kept away from his own apartment, letting her stay at his place to the point where he had nearly worn out his welcome at Jenson's.

  Jenson could be an ass, but he had Damian's back. They'd fought their way out of their share of scuffles in the past year at the club. Prevented more than a few concussions that way. Twin Galaxies attracted its share of scum and other types for whom scum seemed a generous compliment, and it didn't help that the club's owner was a major underworld figure. But the upside of it was that the bouncers were like a brotherhood. Often they carried themselves more like an elite security force than the young, testosterone-filled bruisers they were underneath.

  "Look, my friend, I get that you have an eye for Mystery Girl. But is simply giving her the key-print to your apartment really the way to show it? That girl has one word written all over her, and it starts with a capital T."

  Damian slammed his hand on the stall's surface. "None of that. I already violated her trust by telling you about her. You could at least be a little charitable."

  Jenson stepped out of the shower, toweling off before putting on his gray-black body-suit. "You're misunderstanding. That's my whole point. The girl needs help, not another handout. If you check up on her, she'll know you actually care. And if you do it sooner rather than later, you'll actually have a chance in hell that she'll still be there, and that you can do something to help her before she gets herself killed."

  Damian threw some biotech-improved bread slices in the toaster and turned on the coffeemaker on top of the fake marble counter. He drummed his fingers impatiently. "So…let me see if I understand you. You think she's Trouble, but that I should be like a moth heading towards the flame?" He didn't mention the other objection which loomed like a 900-pound mutant in the room.

  The girl's an illegal. I can get exiled from the sector just for harboring her. More importantly, I could get a hefty reward for reporting her at the nearest Bot Station. So why haven't I?

  Jenson was his friend, but Jenson was also a total sap. It made sense for the romantic pea-brain to think Damian could somehow save the girl. But what could he realistically do? It was easy enough to visit a lower sector, but all of the sectors underneath Beta were vicious. And Alpha? That was like praying for rain in a tunnel. Which left one option.

  "I haven't exactly been reciting poetry, Jenson. I've been doing some research."

  Jenson leaned on the counter beside him, swiping two mugs and pouring two helpings with a grace that disgusted Damian this early in the morning.

  "Damian, I've been patient. I know you've been going 'out' each morning after work. Have I said a peep about it? No. But now I'm getting impatient. So spill…what so-called research?"

  When Damian sullenly took a sip of coffee and refused to meet his friend's gaze, Jenson bumped him in the shoulder. "Fine, I'll sweeten the pot. I have a secret of my own, and it's pretty heavy. You tell me your secret, I show you mine."

  Damian inhaled the toast, barely tasting it in the midst of this intriguing development. Could this be the same "Always-By-The-Book Jenson" that everyone at the club relentlessly teased? If Jenson had secrets, then two-headed mutants were sexy love magnets. Secrets?? The hell he did.

  But Damian found himself humoring his good friend. He shrugged. "All right, you want in…fine. I've done a little digging on what it would take to get her fake identity papers to live in Beta."

  Jenson's eyes widened. "Dude, people in that line of work lead only one kind of life, and they tend to be three things: ugly, brutish, and short. You'd have to go at least...at least Inner Fringe Sector for that stuff. The syn bosses will send their guys to Beta to put the heat on someone, but they don't do business here in Beta Sector. You know that. You're more likely to get yourself killed than to actually meet anyone down there who's acting in good faith!" Jenson was almost shouting.

  The criminal syndicates could rot for all Damian cared. He still owed this girl a debt and there was something more to it, though Damian didn't feel like examining his own motivations too deeply. He felt what he felt, reasonableness be damned.

  "You'd be surprised what an enterprising, curious person can find out with a little persistence."

  Jenson groaned. "Have you been talking to those gen-freaks again?"

  "The proper term is 'genetic freak' or 'alt,' and the answer is yes," Damian growled. "They've already given me directions to a place where we can do the swap. They've even made an approach on my behalf. I've proven that I can pay. All I need to do now is give them the signal."

  Jenson sighed, rubbing the stubble on his chin. "I'm listening."

  After Damian outlined his plan, Jenson nodded in all the right places, but he sighed twice as often. At last Jenson ran a hand over his buzzed hair and shook his head. "You're lucky that I'm almost as crazy as you are. I'll go with you, on one condition. Get cleaned up first...then I'll show you my secret."

  Damian hopped in the shower for his 60 seconds, scrubbing ruthlessly with shampoo and soap before toweling off in record time. He shrugged into another gray-black body-suit as his friend wagged a 'come here' finger at him.

  A minute or so later Damian's jaw had dropped away. So much for the friend
I thought I knew. Damian was looking at a long folded-out work table that Jenson had hastily erected in the living area. It opened onto the adjoining kitchen, completing the second half of the apartment next to the bedroom. Damian's friend had pulled from the kitchen pantry not food…but two full exosuits. They looked horrendous. The metallic overlays had been bashed and dented into oblivion, then retrofitted and resurfaced.

  "What the…" Damian honestly didn't know what to say.

  "I'd like you to meet 'Vuldemort' and 'Dumbledoor.'"

  "Where'd you come up with names like that?"

  "They were noble politicians back on Earth. I heard a couple of guys at the club talking about them. Anyway…pay attention." Damian knew that most of the history of Earth was just a memory, or a memory of a memory of memory, but he didn't bother trying to correct his friend.

  The two exosuits were about the same size, but examining Vuldemort more closely, Damian saw a tiny pinprick which shimmered on the underside of the breast-piece.

  "Bleed me dry. Is this what I think it is?" Damian hissed.

  "Yep, this baby's a reworked B-grade exosuit, courtesy of parts salvaged by yours truly. I can dumpster dive with the best of them. Oh, and yes, that blue sparkly is a force field converter crystal. Anything tries to invade your personal space, it's getting repelled in a major way."

  "How did you get it?" Damian asked in awe.

  Jenson chuckled. "Don't get too excited. A friend's neighbor passed away. You know how it goes…sometimes deaths take a while to get reported, and people on my friend's housing block tend to keep to themselves. He happened to mention it and I may or may not have used one of these B-grade retrofits to creatively 'open' the door. Knew I didn't have much time to take anything, so I nabbed the only really valuable thing I laid eyes on. It was tucked away between the cooker and the spice rack if you can believe it."

  Damian wanted to swear, but instead he gave his close friend a stare of newfound respect. "I can't believe the same guy who won't shave the price of a single drink for a sexy girl in the club has the balls to break into an apartment and steal something worth more than our annual salaries combined. Who the heck are you?"