I looked back at Bren in time to see his mouth working but without any words coming out. His eyes were round O’s of anger and fury. His hands balled into fists, and suddenly he was coming at me. I’m sure my sigh of exasperation was plainly audible. I meant for it to be.
Melanie gave Bren a side wise glance and a slow, apprising look, then said; “Go away Bren.” Just as calm as you please.
I knew that she had not been talking to me, of course, my name isn’t Bren, but I took the cue anyway and used that opportunity to beat a hasty retreat out of there and whatever madness inhabited the place. I felt rather than saw Melanie’s angry eyes following me as I left but I did not look back. The sensation was acute, but then I have always had the ability to sense such things, or maybe it was just the level of animosity behind the look that made it strong enough to feel. However such things worked, it was strong and I could feel it as if it were a physical presence.
“What the hell are you doing?” I heard Bren demand as I reached the corner of the corridor at the base of the staircase, not pausing as I went around it. A pleading tone had insinuated itself into his voice, but then I was gone up the stairs and did not hear whatever response Melanie had to make. Never a dull moment, I thought, grateful to be out of there.
I didn’t want to go back to the Bridge and have to look at Tanya’s smug, self-righteous face, though now I wondered if she hadn’t been correct, in fact, to bring this to a head immediately, as long as we were heading into dock. If it was going to boil over, then now was definitely the time for it to happen. If either of them wanted to leave me, they would be able to do so without any further problems erupting over the whole ordeal, though where this had all come from I still could not begin to fathom. It was just another of those great cosmic mysteries that simply went beyond human understanding.
I felt more like a captive, suddenly, than Captain. There was nowhere I could go to escape if I wanted to get away from the maniacs I called my crew (unless I wanted to lock myself away inside my own quarters), or at least not until we docked. Then I would disappear. For as long as I had credits to pay the docking fees, or until I had spent it all on the poker tables and drink, which could turn out to be a goodly long time, depending on what I got for the load of Trinium in my holds and my luck on the tables. I had to admit, also, that my luck on the card tables was often bolstered by a certain expertise at handling cards. Honest gambling is so, well, so much of a gamble that a man had to do what he could to eliminate the odds. Otherwise the odds always seemed to be stacked against you.
I found myself standing outside the hatch to my own quarters, Last Chance’s huge Master Suite, with conflicting thoughts running through my head. I should stay visible and be available to help ward of the inevitable fallout from Melanie’s strange behavior, but I just didn’t care enough to put forth the energy. If they were going to become problems, then I supposed it was best that they went now, rather than later. I would always be able to recruit new crew members from the Kievor Station, there were always just such misfits available, but Bren would not be that easy to replace. Melanie either, as far as that went.
“The hells with them!” I said loudly, as much for my own benefit as anyone who might be listening. There were no restrictions on shipboard communications and anyone could spy on anyone else if that was what they really wanted. I wouldn’t have been surprised if most of the crew wasn’t watching me via the little video monitor in the corridor here. Well let them watch. “Open.” I told my hatch.
It dilated open and I went in. It closed behind me. My suite was three large rooms and a private bath. It was a palace by normal standards. I sat at my real wood desk in the first room, my office, opened the bottommost right hand drawer and pulled out the bottle of Old Home sipping whiskey I always kept there. The last such bottle I possessed. I poured full the tumbler I always kept with the bottle and then threw in a splash of water from another bottle I kept for that purpose. The whiskey bottles always seemed to empty faster than the water, I have noticed. I took a long gulp of the nearly raw whiskey and wondered, not for the first time, who had thought to call this stuff sipping whiskey. Whoever sipped whiskey anyway?
I had been sparing this bottle of whiskey for a good long while now (the Katons had been unwilling to supply us with whiskey) so I drained my first glass with a certain amount of haste and then immediately refilled it again. The heat of the high proof liquor washing through my body seemed to release the tension within me and I felt myself really seem to relax, for the first time in a long time.
I might even go so far as to say I am an alcoholic, but booze is a small evil in a Universe filled with all sorts of much more terrible evils. Men used all kinds of drugs. Anything and everything the human mind could imagine had been conjured from the pharmaceutical laboratories of the major drug companies and I had been born and grown to adulthood amid the drug induced atrocities the lowest of humans could inflict one upon the other. That living hell I had witnessed around myself, that I had narrowly avoided myself, which I had vowed to escape, had been the motivating factor which had given me the wings I needed to escape that pit. To escape the miasma of the hopeless drug infected ghetto the government used to draw the line between the castes. I had determined early in life that I would not share the fate of those around me. What had baffled me the most was that it wasn’t clear to everyone else. That living like that was acceptable to most. In a way I could see the government’s point.
I had a bank of computer monitors built right into the wall above my desk, for surveillance or conference calls or for whatever reason the previous owner had wanted them. They came in handy now as I looked for Bren or Melanie, but neither was in evidence.
Tanya was on the Bridge, glued to the scan monitor screen, right where I knew she would be. She certainly didn’t appear to be showing any of the signs of Malacker’s disease, the name for the malady that caused perfectly healthy humans (healthy through rejuvenation) to lose their interest in living, and once lost, to slowly slide down into death, despite perfectly functioning youthful bodies. There was no known cure for this disease, no root genetic cause which could be pinpointed. Tanya had all the lust and desire for life as a newborn. A newborn with claws.
Manuel and Janice were in the theater watching a movie stored on a database Bren had hacked us from Katon. Thinking of the little drama being played out between Bren and Melanie now reminded me that an equally dramatic dispute would not be long in coming between the pair I now watched on my screen. If Manuel continued to refuse rejuvenation. And frankly, with the prohibitive cost of rejuvenation what it was, and with the little he made working for me, it was questionable whether he would ever be given such an opportunity as he had turned down again anyway. It had been a shocking moment for me to hear Manuel refuse the treatment, especially since it had been free.
I could survey both Bren’s or Melanie’s living quarters, but that was a step I was unwilling to take. It was really just none of my business. I really hoped Melanie had turned her lust loose on Bren, they have been lovers after all, even if only on and off, but it would relieve some of her immediate pressure until she could work through whatever it was which was ailing her. I didn’t want to find out they had not made up either, because I did not know how it would turn out if they did not.
I continued working on my whiskey until I couldn’t stand up straight, and then I stumbled to my bed, passing out as soon as my head hit the pillow.
CHAPTER 3
I woke up in time to return to my bank of computer monitors to watch Last Chance slide into a docking bay that could and had accommodated Battleships, cruise liners, and every other imaginable kind of space going vessel. I watched Tanya on another screen, but as always there was nothing to watch. She was competent and in control of the situation. She was always competent and in control of the situation, whatever that situation might be.
There was still no sign of either Bren or Melanie.
I dressed in my best combat gear. Material designe
d to deflect both a reptile’s teeth as well as a laser’s concentrated energy. I put steel toed shoes upon my feet and to top it off a real cowboy’s hat. I looked what I was, a rogue human with nothing to lose, so just fuck with me.
I strapped on my Kievor made blaster and tied its lower holster string around my thigh. Humans did not yet possess the technology to miniaturize such weapons, and reverse engineering would not work. Trying to open a piece of Kievor technology would get you fried, burned or exploded, and if you attempted it, when it did explode, you had no one to blame but yourself. The Kievors warned against tampering when they sold you their technology, so if then you did screw with it, and you got burned, and you would get burned, you had no one to blame but yourself. Kievor technology did not blow up accidentally. They were far too advanced for that. If it blew up, you were to blame.
I opened a new package of cigars, pulled out one of the fragrant tubes of fine, gourmet tobacco leaves, bit off the end, and stuck it in my mouth. Air scrubbers were expensive, so I couldn’t consider lighting it inside Last Chance, and now in a hurry I went to collect Tanya.
I wasn’t sober but I wasn’t stumbling drunk anymore either. Tanya noticed my state right away as I met her outside her quarters, coming from the Bridge after shutting down all Last Chance’s systems. She gave me a disgusted look.
“I see I’ll be babysitting.” She said.
“The day I need you to baby sit me is the day we start ordering our ice from hell.” I replied. “You just worry about yourself.”
“Don’t you think selling the Trinium should be your first point of business?” Tanya asked, no doubt thinking of her shopping trip, not that she would spend many of her own credits.
“No.” I said. “Bren or Melanie won’t leave until they’ve been paid and I can’t pay them until I sell the Trinium.”
Tanya laughed. “You’re like a little old woman. All games and intrigue and drama, but I don’t think either of them need your paltry puny last check. As a matter of fact, you’re the only one of us who always needs his next check or he’s bust.
“As a matter of fact,” Tanya added, “if you could learn to be a little wiser with your money you wouldn’t have to be getting us into so much trouble just to see yourself with another poke in your pocket. Another poke you’re only going to go and lose on the card tables anyway.”
“Keeps us busy.” I defended myself lamely, but I honestly did not think Tanya would be happy with a sedentary life. She was programmed, hard wired, to deal with stress. She’s a problem solver, and without ready problems that need solving, I think she would literally go crazy. She only glared at me now.
After glaring at me a moment she ordered her door open and went into her rooms. I followed behind, mostly out of curiosity, it had been a long time since I had been inside her quarters (I really never eaves-dropped). I followed her around the partition wall that blocked line of sight from the hall and got quite a surprise. Her whole first room was filled to capacity, wall to wall, with racks of clothing. I had known she had a lot of clothing, of course, she loved clothing as much as she loved jewelry, but I’d never realized just how much of it she really had.
“What do you think?” She asked, pulling out a little mini-skirt outfit from an overstuffed rack. The cloth covered hanger appeared to have more material than the dress she was showing me.
“But what are you going to wear?” I asked.
“Funny.” She said, and without another word she undid the inviso-seam of her ship’s suit and stepped out of it, letting it fall to the floor at her feet. For the second time that day, or within a twenty four hour period, at least, there were many worlds and the word day usually meant something entirely different on each and every one of them, I had a beautiful, nude woman standing before me. My resolve quailed!
Tanya was riper than Melanie. Her breasts were larger, her musculature fuller, her stance more confident. There was none of the passivity Melanie had shown. For a moment she stood before me, as if daring me, somehow, to push the envelope, but then that moment was gone, and with a strange look, almost longing I thought, she dressed herself in her skimpy outfit. It hardly hid anything.
Still she found places to hide the series of flat little throwing knives and other little pieces of metal accouterments, some whose purpose I recognized, others which I did not but suspected were electronic lock picks, carrying embedded programs right inside the metal of the picks themselves, and hid them all about her. On her hip she installed a laser pistol of human manufacture. A powerful one. She possessed Kievor weaponry but never carried those while actually on a Kievor ship. She put black calf high boots on her feet but didn’t add any weaponry to those. I knew the reason for that was that the boots were pre-loaded, stuffed to capacity with every manner of weapon and gadget you might imagine. I’d seen the boots in action before!
A little black purse, that matched the boots, topped off the ensemble/disguise. And it was a disguise. She looked like one of the innumerable spoiled little rich girls out spending daddy’s credits on a lark and a whim, especially with the overlarge laser pistol strapped to her hip, a weapon that looked much too unwieldy for such a small, helpless society girl, as if it were there only for show and not an integral part of the woman who wore it. A mistake which has gotten a good many dead. Tanya was the last person you would ever want to underestimate, but nearly every man she met did. One look and the hustlers were at her side, but it never turned out the way they hoped. It never turned out the way they imagined it would.
The purse, I knew also, contained a small field nullifier for disabling alarms. A field nullifier was not something you would want to get caught with on any of the human worlds. There was only one use for a field nullifier and that was to break and enter secured dwellings. It meant an immediate death sentence. Kill, rob or rape anyone you wanted in the ghetto, but take your crime spree to the taxpayers and you would see yourself dancing on the end of a short rope.
Theft was Tanya’s bread and butter. If there was one overriding factor which made Tanya stay with me and Last Chance, it was the opportunities it presented her with to ply her trade. Where else, and I do literally mean just where in the hell else, could she ply such a vicious, murderous occupation right under her own Captain’s nose, and get away with it?
The only small thing I’ve wondered is why she hasn’t bought her own ship. With her own ship she could pursue her trade full time, with no hindrances or hiccups in her operations. She could certainly afford it, if she wished. The jewelry she has stashed in her quarters would be worth millions and millions of credits on the open market, less on the black, but when a good ship could be gotten for a half million, there could be no other explanation other than that she just did not wish to. Either did not wish to or would not part with any of her jewels. I wasn’t sure which. In any case, I have never asked her this question probably because I have feared that it simply has not occurred to her.
Tanya struck a pose when she had finished, knee cocked at a rakish angle, hands on hips, head turned and chin in the air. I couldn’t help but to admire her. Look, yes. Touch, never!
“Well, you look innocent.” I said.
“You must have misplaced you halo,” Tanya said, “because I don’t see it glowing around your head!”
“I’m a secret operative.”
“So you’re still in the closet?”
“No.” I snarled, not that snarling got me anywhere with her. “That isn’t what I meant.”
“Oh so you’ve come out of the closet.”
“No closets, Tanya!”
“I can’t tell.”
I did not know what that was supposed to mean but felt that this was one of those times when not asking was the best option. I said instead; “Obviously we all needed this break.”
“And you had better be planning on us staying a while!” Tanya said, ignoring what it was I had been saying. “That means spending your own credits frugally!” She added, in case I hadn’t understood the implications of
what she had been saying.
“For once I agree with you.” I agreed with her.
“Shall we?” I asked, holding out my arm to her like she was royalty. In a way she very much is. She is queen of all she surveys. She smiled and took my arm and together we walked down through Last Chance to the lower level air lock in the midsection cargo hold (Last Chance has two but the second was primarily for ship to ship docking in space, not for dry docking, like we had here.)
The inner door of the airlock cycled open at my command and at the last moment Coto appeared out of nowhere and raced up to us, chittering at me as if I had meant to leave him on purpose. Still arm in arm Tanya and I entered the airlock, with Coto close on our heels. I could smell a fruity perfume on Tanya over my own whiskey breath even before the hatch irised closed. Her feminine smell was heady once we were closed in and waiting. I was sure hoping Cheryl wasn’t too pissed at me because with the way the women around me were bombarding me with their femininity I knew it couldn’t be long before I broke. There is only so much a man can be expected to withstand before caving, and I felt I had already been pushed to the brink.
The air lock re-pressurized to match exterior atmospheric pressure and opened to release us. Just a matter of a few seconds. Kievor technology was advanced light years beyond our own and their AI had sensed the cycling of our air lock and a platform of their trans-metal ship material was awaiting us, having butted itself up to our air lock deck level with nearly no seam showing. As if Last Chance were now actually a part of the Kievor Trade Station and not a separate ship. We walked out onto the platform, which was now a solid seeming fixture of the docking bay (but in reality no part of the Kievor Trade Station could be called solid, when the trans-metal could and did change shape at the Kievor’s will). I ordered the air lock closed and as it closed the platform we stood upon began melting into the deck of the dock.
Chronicles of a Space Mercenary Page 7