Stars & Empire 2: 10 More Galactic Tales (Stars & Empire Box Set Collection)

by Jay Allan

  “Right,” Shelby blinked. He hadn’t even read the names on the paper. “In exchange, they’ve agreed to turn over any personal arms.”

  Linigan rubbed his nose. “That would be nice. They’re not legal.”

  I made a face, trying to place his accent. He was white-skinned, but his words had the crispness of the British and the vowels of the Chinese—Hong Kong? Shelby glanced at Becky Morgan, the blunt, pudgy head of the Workers’ Alliance of Titan we’d met an hour before the conference, then made a “go on” gesture.

  Becky propped an elbow on the back of her chair. “Well, if it’s gonna be that easy, I don’t know why we waited two weeks to sit down.”

  To Linigan’s left, Go laughed like a cartoon dog. At the top floor of OA’s branch office, sunlight poured through the ceiling, so buttery and thick you could pretend it wasn’t -300 degrees outside the dome.

  “Next order of business,” Becky continued. “The press release. I think we both agree the riot was a cold lump of shit. If we’re gonna swallow the blame, you all need to take a couple bites, too.”

  “I get you,” Linigan said. “Run a draft by our people.”

  Becky pushed out her lower lip, nodding. “Can do.”

  I sat back in disbelief. I’d been led to believe OA were tyrants. Instead, Linigan acted like we were discussing where to go for drinks afterward.

  It was like that for the rest of the day. The accord slogged along for another ten hours, including breaks for lunch and water and bathrooms and, finally, a light dinner before the final remarks. The tactics OA showed in this initial skirmish could mirror their strategy for the battle over the constitution. If so, they were going to get their asses kicked. Linigan might look like a convict or a mining roughneck fresh off a skimmer hauling hydrogen back from Saturn, but he folded like a hinge, making concessions on everything from covering hospital expenses of the wounded to unsealing the domes where the riots had taken place. I couldn’t tell if it was real or an act. OA showed all signs of good faith, but I’d seen enough negotiations to know that sometimes the reason the other side leans in for a handshake is to get you in stabbing distance.

  When the meeting wrapped up at seven that evening, the angle of the cloud-filtered sunlight had barely changed. We shook hands with Linigan’s people, made noises about how pleasant the experience had been. As we waited for our ride outside the stone and glass elegance of the tower, I motioned Shelby from the small crowd.

  “I’m not a lawyer,” I said, “but I’ve been to enough divorces to know you just kicked some serious ass in there.”

  Shelby scratched her eyebrow. “I did, didn’t I?”

  “You don’t sound too thrilled.”

  She shrugged, tucking away her omni. “It was too easy.”

  “Rope a dope?”

  “I have no idea what that means.” She tapped her chin with her thumb. “What do your instincts say?”

  I shook my head. “Let’s talk about it over drinks.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know about that.”

  “We’ll all go. It’ll be like a bad joke. So an Earthling, a Martian, and a robot walk into a bar, and the bartender takes one look at them and says—”

  “Shut up,” she smiled. “Give me an hour.”

  Back at the hotel, I assembled the whole sick crew, even Vance, who always stopped talking whenever I walked into a room. Jia fell in behind us.

  “It’s okay,” I said over my shoulder. “We’re just going to a bar.”

  She laughed through her nose. “And alcohol makes people less dangerous?”

  “Look, I can beat you up. And Pete can beat me up. We’re covered.”

  Her black ponytail metronomed across her shoulders. “I know a place that serves $3 tequila shots.”

  I sucked my lower lip. “Ditch the rifle and change into something less bulletproof and it’s a deal.”

  She returned from her room in a sleeveless shirt striped the color of cleaned dirt and knee-length deep brown shorts. Freed from armors and uniforms, the muscles of her triceps and calves looked springy to the touch. Her shoes were flat-soled and covered; Shangri-la, like the domes of New Houston, was a walker’s town.

  Jia led the way to the next dome, a place of shabby yellow apartment cubes as regular as the samtown housing in Tukwila. She exchanged nods with two guards ambling past the tunnel mouth. Down the main avenue, stallkeepers struck down their collapsible storefronts with a careless speed you only get from constant practice. Others moved in to replace them at the choice locations on corners and outside bars, rigging up grills and frying stations that filled the street with the brackish smell of fried algae. Unlike Tukwila, most of the ground floors showed closed apartment drapes.

  I tapped Jia on her bare shoulder. “Your bosses frown on small businesses? They afraid of competition?”

  Her brow wrinkled. “Do you mean are they worried a taco shop might get too big and boot them off Titan?”

  “How do you find what you’re looking for when all your stores are carted around on some guy’s back?”

  “Mostly they come back to the same spot every day. OA’s rent is too high for many walk-in locations. I got three other women living in my two-room apartment.”

  “OA’s rent? Do they own the whole city?”

  She gave me a look like I’d just asked what food was. “Shangri-la doesn’t pull in the fat stacks they make sucking hydrogen out of Saturn, but it all adds to the bottom line.”

  Jia stopped in front of what would have been recognizable as a bar on any planet: big glass windows, dim interior, recessed front door, beer logos competing on banners and small neon signs. Sunlit, the inside was brighter than I expected, but there was a healthy crowd of laughing, bright-eyed youth and rather grimmer middle-aged men crowding the bar and brown vinyl booths.

  Back in my element, I wriggled up to the bar and ordered two rounds of shots for the whole table, including Baxter, and left dire instructions to keep them coming. When they arrived, Shelby eyed her two drinks like unfamiliar crustaceans.

  I bumped her shoulder. “It’s your victorious right to send those two sailors to Shelby Mayes’ Locker.”

  “We’ve still got the constitution to deal with.”

  “In three days! You afraid you’ll punch out another politician’s son? Good news, all they have here are executives.”

  She puffed her cheeks, tipped one back, and promptly chased it with the other. “To me.”

  “To us!” I said. Alcohol had started to get a bad rap in western society around the same time the hungry engines of the Industrial Revolution started gnawing off the hands of anyone who showed up to the factory plowed, but I’d spent too long in eras where children drank wine for breakfast to get caught up in the recent and hopefully temporary hysteria of sobriety. When the third round arrived, I banged my fist on the table like a Spartan sergeant.

  “Strange forces have brought us to a strange place.” I put enough bark of command into my voice to straighten their spines. “Shelby led the charge today, but we wouldn’t be here without the contributions of every one of you.” I raised my shot glass, spilling tequila down my wrist. “So drink to yourselves! Conquerers from beyond the stars!”

  “Yay!” Fay cheered in our ears.

  With the salt-and-gasoline tang of cheap tequila in my mouth, I immediately set to running it, shattering the ice between the disparate elements at our table by recapping the story of how Pete, Baxter, and I had beaten down two HemiCo thugs in the bathroom of a bar not that much different from this one. Soon even Baxter grinned, chawing over the day’s progress with Carrie, the gray-haired lawyer who looked straight out of Victorian-era Cape Cod. For the first time since my abrupt downward departure from that New York skyscraper, I felt easy, secure, certain that wherever we went from here, it would be in triumph.

  “How long have you been practicing kung fu?” Jia asked after I’d assaulted the crew with another barrage of shots.

  “Oh, a while now.”

 
“OA trains us with this hybrid style. Lots of disarming. By which I mean taking away weapons and also breaking arms.” She grinned, wrinkling her thick, straight nose. “They actually copyrighted it.”

  “Too bad Mr. Fu never thought of that one,” I said. “He’d have made Croesus look like Tiny Tim.”

  “Think you can show me some moves? The stuff they train us is effective, but I’ve always missed the tradition of the older styles.”

  I pretended to think about this, running my eyes down the trim muscles of her sleeveless shoulders. “I’m a little out of practice.”

  “Whatever.” She flashed a straight punch for my face. Instinctively, I countered with a sloppy pak sao, a slapping palm block that just managed to re-vector her strike over my shoulder. She grinned. “You don’t look like a guy who forgets easy.”

  It had been a while. Between the jetsetting marathon to incorporate NightVision Resources, the investigation and subsequent jailbreak from Mars, the recovery time in Hidey-Hole, where the only other inhabitants resembled naked basketballs, and the various weeks spent inside Fay—not nearly as prurient as it sounded—I hadn’t even had the time or opportunity for a reasonable masturbation schedule. Before that, I’d been on something of a sexual sabbatical which I’d been trying to break New Year’s Eve at the party in Wetta Tower. It was May by Earth reckoning, making it just under a year since my groin had been introduced to anything more interesting than my hand.

  A blip, really. I’d once gone 23 years without in a life as a monk in 19th century China. The glory of immortality is you know nothing but yourself will last forever, including unwilling abstinence, and if you go without it for long enough you start to forget what all the fuss is about, handling yourself every second or third day with a businesslike proficiency that shuts up the lonely little man between your legs.

  But sex, other than the biblical connotation, isn’t about what you know. You can rationalize you don’t need it until Christ Himself materializes to take you to a Reno whorehouse, but sit next to a person who boils your juices for long enough, and soon enough your chief goal becomes discovering whether the color of their real-life nipples matches the shade inside your mind.

  “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” I said. Jia’s head inclined sharply backwards. “Unless you’re worried OA will sue you for disclosing proprietary secrets.”

  “Fighting,” she clarified, then tugged her earlobe. “How about when we get back to the hotel? If we’re not too drunk.”

  We weren’t. Besides, drinking and fighting go together like chocolate and more chocolate. The company had her splitting a room with Tin, so we stumbled into mine, where I ran her through a few fundamental blocks. Despite her tequila-clumsied brain, she picked them up fast.

  “How about we try something more advanced?” I said.

  “Show me what you got.”

  “This is called chi sao. ‘Sticky hands.’ It teaches us to fight by touch.” I intertwined our arms and showed her how the blocks I’d just taught her formed the basis of the sensitivity drill. We rolled our arms back and forth, skin brushing skin, until she botched the rhythm and we fell apart, laughing.

  “My turn to show you something,” she said, her cheeks stretched in a grin, reddened by booze and exercise. “Grab the front of my shirt.”

  I grabbed her collar. She tap-punched my stomach just hard enough to bend me forward, took hold of my arm near the shoulder, inserted her hip under mine, then popped up under my center of gravity, sending me flying ass over eyeballs. I crashed on my back onto the bed. She’d kept her grip on my arm and used it as a guideline as she launched herself on top of me and mashed her lips into mine.

  We tugged, tussled, and flensed each other’s clothes off with an artlessness that would have shamed our martial instructors. Her pink-brown nipples disappeared under my palms. She ran her hands from my neck to my hips, then tightened her nails into my shoulder blades. I leaned my mouth against hers, her tongue sliding across my lips. She reached down to guide me in, and as the pressure gave way to welcome warmth, she arched her back against the mattress.

  It was probably less sexy than that. There had been a lot of tequila. Enough that her next words left me baffled.

  “You have to get out,” she whispered.

  “What’s wrong?” I pulled out. “It’s been a while, but I know what I’m doing.”

  She gripped me, wriggling her hips. Absently, I resumed business. She rolled her brown eyes to take in the room. “Out of this world.”

  I lowered my mouth to her ear. “What’s going on here?”

  “They’ll take your ship,” Jia whispered. Then louder, but repeating the rhythm and tones: “That’s great, oh shit!”

  I tangled my fingers into her dark hair. “How?”

  “Go,” she said. “Go harder. Go faster. Go.” She tightened around me. Her breath jagged as she rocked her hips, spasming. “Or you’ll die,” she whispered, then shouted a rhyme. “Oral time!”

  I wasn’t one to argue. Afterwards, lying in the darkness, I touched the curve of her jaw. “Why are you doing this?”

  “It’s the right thing to do.” She grinned, panting between her teeth. “Besides, you looked fun.”

  I stretched out beside her. “Thanks for breaking it to me so easy.”

  “Easy?” She raised up on an elbow. Faster than a rattler, she crushed a pillow over my face. “Nothing about me is easy.”

  I wrestled for breath. The post-coital glow was already fading. Shelby was right. The peace accord had been too easy. I had the feeling I was about to find out why.

  It took more time to track down Rip’s friend than it did to forge the ID. Fourteen minutes to fake the card, including its holostamp; another 42 to upload Baxter’s info to the local databanks. He paid most of the money he’d taken from the dead company man and they were ready to go.

  Untangling themselves from Rip was more involved: he talked nonstop, swaying, insisting they head back to the bar. Baxter begged off, citing the upcoming trip and the lateness of the hour. They exchanged web info and shook hands for a good long time, and then Baxter left Rip in his friend’s doorway, watching them go.

  “I think he was a crazy person,” Arthur said when they stepped into the elevator.

  “He’s not crazy.”

  “He sure was eager to help us. Help you.”

  “He was just being friendly. Don’t you know anything about people?”

  “If the police catch them with that equipment, they’ll be sent to jail for a lot of years.”

  “Oh, quiet down and call up the flight schedules,” Baxter said, toying with the plastic smartcard in his pocket. “Get us some directions while you’re at it.”

  Surprisingly, Arthur did as he was told, logging himself into the public wireless. Two flights a day to the orbital, he said. The first left at 9:05 AM MMT. In just a few hours, they’d be on their way!

  15

  We’d put men and women on every halfway interesting gravity-bearing rock in the Solar System, but we still hadn’t invented a decent hangover cure. I bumped into Shelby the next afternoon as I quested through the lobby for a drinkable cup of coffee.

  She eyed my puffy face. “Have a good night?”

  “And I’m paying for it now.” I filled a mug and returned to my lair. With no hard info of any kind, I didn’t know how to break Jia’s news to her, and talking to her at all filled me with a perverse guilt, as if I were a straying boyfriend instead of a man she’d firmly rebuffed.

  I was not by nature a cheater. When I was involved, I looked but didn’t touch, even in times and places where men openly walked the streets on the arms of their mistresses (or, famously in Greece, misterses) or legally maintained whole flocks of wives. In the first few hundred years, I’d strayed from a partner just once, as a teenager in Nineveh, and had been so mangled with shame about betraying my betrothed for an hour of pleasure that I began to yell at her over the smallest mistakes and imaginary offenses. Only after her fami
ly called off the wedding did I put together what a moron I’d become.

  Later, as a slave, I fled Babylon and my two wards in mid-March. Demostrate was supposed to be in Syracuse until she left for a trip in “the summer,” giving me somewhere between two and five months to catch up with her. I was promised passage on a Sicily-bound trireme in exchange for rowing duties, but our ship was immediately detoured by new business, diverting us first to the shores of Egypt and then to Utica, where we waited and waited on a shipment of ivory until, in despair, I began to consider swimming the two hundred remaining miles to Syracuse.

  We arrived in port simmering under the full swing of August, two years since the Persians had captured me on the shores of Thermopylae. I slept in the streets of Syracuse that night, waking early to drink from a sculpted fountain until my stomach bulged like a pregnant cow’s. I had no friends in the hustling, sunny, elegant city, just a secondhand report from a letter that was already half a year old.

  For all I knew Demostrate had set sail weeks ago—or would cruise off tomorrow. I didn’t care how I looked sprinting from shop to shop in my raggedy rower’s wraps, my brown skin tanned darker yet by months on the sea, or how I sounded barking Demostrate’s name at every man and woman who sold cloth or food or wine or anything else my lost wife might ever have bought. Some tolerated my ravings, others threw me out. I must have looked crazy. I was acting like it, so from a practical view, maybe I was.

  Night fell and I continued to roam the hard dirt streets, as if she’d be skipping along alone at midnight. With sunrise and the return of respectable people, I cleaned up best I could in another fountain and started off again. Syracuse seemed as big as Babylon. Slender white columns. Leaves carved over doorways and into cornices. And everywhere men in white wraps.

  Near dusk, a baker and his two sons chucked me out into the street. Instead of getting up and heading on like I had a dozen times before, I sat in the packed dirt, head humming with fatigue, and decided to go down to the bay to finish the drowning I hadn’t quite completed in the straits off Euboea.