The fixtures looked like they could have belonged in any well-designed kitchen: upper and lower cabinets, a countertop made out of an almost impervious material, and lighting under the upper cabinets.
All done in blacks and grays with dark-green countertops.
She reached into the second of the lower cabinets on that wall and pulled out a pair of M1911As. “Haven’t felt these in my palms in a while.”
She set them on the countertop and opened an upper cabinet, selecting two 50-round boxes of ammunition. “Damn, so few rounds in one of these. I’m spoiled.” She laid the boxes beside the guns and started opening upper cabinets until, in the third one, she found some holsters that would work for the old pistols.
She laid them on the countertop too.
“Hmmm.” She looked around the room. The cabinets lined two-thirds of the walls, not including the bulkhead with the door, and a large island had been built in the center for additional workspace.
The room was rather a large portion of the ship.
She walked over to the middle set of cabinets on the back wall and opened the top ones.
What she was looking for wasn’t inside.
Squatting, she opened the bottom cabinet and whistled. She grabbed the lip of a lower drawer and pulled it out. Sliding on frictionless bearings, a display rack of swords came into view.
“Eenie, meenie, miney, moe.” She reached out and grabbed a wakizashi. “You will be my friend tonight.” She stood and put it on the island.
“That will require cleaning,” ADAM stated.
“Where’s the problem with that?” she asked. “I’ve cleaned my swords hundreds of times.”
“You just griped about tossing a cloak into a self-cleaning and drying laundry machine to get the blood out of it. All you had to do was close the door.”
“I also had to push a button,” she retorted. “Might have chipped a fingernail.”
If an AI could be exasperated, ADAM was. “You can’t chip a fingernail by pushing a button!” There was a pause before his next calculation was complete. “Without intent, anyway.”
“Uh huh,” she agreed absently as she looked for a sheath. She pulled one out of a bottom shelf and went to the island, sheathing the sword and then setting it reverently back on the countertop. She stopped for a moment to look at the sword before walking over to the pistols and ammo boxes.
She pursed her lips, then headed to the drawers which held her Jean Dukes, pulling them and their holsters out. “Let’s not be stupid,” she said as she put them on the counter. “Well, twice.”
Ten minutes later she had her armor and helmet on. ADAM might have made a point about the futility of someone going up against her, but she was not going to find out the painful way that they did have something that could blow her damned fool head off.
The Kurtherians, TOM would say, were too important for this shit.
She, however, felt a need to have a place close enough to the Empire that she could get in, but still far enough away that the law was handled on planet.
One day she might want to come here and stay awhile. Even people on the fringes of society needed a place to call home.
People like her.
—
She walked toward one of the aft doors, leaving her cloak behind. She was clad in the dark-red armor which looked almost black.
Her helmet was full-face and painted to look like her, including fake hair coming out of the top. She would be able to breathe the atmosphere from inside her suit just fine.
She had, however, kept her gloves on, which gave her protection but left her fingertips free.
“Open the hatch,” she called to Shinigami.
She peered through the doorway, which was some six feet wide, down into the darkness of the city. ”Drop us down about even with the tall skyscraper over there to the left,” she commanded as the ship came out of the clouds. “It’s really pretty from up here,” she said. “I think I might go for a swim.”
She turned back to face the inside of the ship and spread her arms wide. Leaning back, she slowly fell out of the ship and sliced through the night toward a building below.
Two hundred feet above the building the antigrav kicked in and slowed her down tremendously, enough that she barely bent her legs when she hit the roof with the four pistols on her body. The M1911As were in holsters under her arms, the Jean Dukes rode her hips, and the sword’s hilt peeked over her shoulder.
She walked toward the roof’s edge. Below were plenty of aliens carousing throughout the night, then going back inside when they needed a higher oxygen content. For some of the aliens the air was breathable as it was.
“Where is our first contestant, ADAM?”
>> YukLeet. His main place is a bar. Two blocks over to your left. <<
Baba Yaga looked down the street. “The orange-ish sign or the green one?”
>>Green.<<
Baba Yaga took two running steps before leaping through the night, the antigrav reducing her weight so that she crossed the darkness above the lights some stories below to land on the roof of the building housing the bar.
Walking back to the edge of this roof, she looked down. “From the roof or from the front?” she murmured. ”Roof or front?”
There was a break in the crowd. “Front,” she said, and took a step off the roof. The three stories to the concrete went quickly. She didn’t cut much antigrav in, so she slammed into the street, and chips of stone went flying as her armored boots hit the surface.
The thirty or so aliens who were nearby turned to see the new alien in dark armor raise her white-haired head and turn toward YukLeet’s bar. She started walking toward the front door some ten steps away.
The bouncer was a fish-like alien whose head reminded Baba Yaga of a hammerhead shark’s, although he had two arms and two legs. “Why is everything bipedal?” she wondered to no one in particular.
At almost nine-feet tall he towered over her. “Stop!” He put up a hand and turned toward her. “Were you invited?”
Baba Yaga shook her head. “No.”
“Do you know anyone in here?”
“Personally?” she verified. “No.”
He made a movement with his body she assumed was a negative. “Then you do not have permission to open the door.”
Looking him up and down, she asked, “Well, do you have permission to open the door?”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
QBBS Meredith Reynolds, NS Squared
Tabitha walked through the back hallways, the ones which usually had few others in them. They placed her just about a thirty-second walk from her favorite bar and eatery.
The Never Submit, Never Surrender.
It was now owned and run by the Joneses. The previous couple, Pearl and J.D., had passed away about fifty years ago. The present owners were a pair of Weres whom Pearl had liked. They had taken over in her absence, and everything went forward.
She even heard the same bitching from time to time.
Tabitha entered and looked around the dimly lit space. With Weres as owners, they kept the illumination down so that those with light sensitivity could be comfortable in their place.
Hell, she noticed that since her last visit they had opened another side of the place.
They were growing.
She walked straight down the side, like she had hundreds of times before, to the last booth on the left.
The man sipping his beer there was wearing jeans and a shirt that was comfortable but about as fashionable as dirty motor oil.
“Move your Pricolici lard-ass over,” she told him, sitting down and pushing him sideways with her own. “Big badunkadunk, no?” She stopped a moment as he turned in her direction. “Prime badunkadunk moving in.”
Peter blinked a second before conceding the space and allowing Tabitha to sit next to him. “And why,” he asked, tipping his bottle toward the other side of the booth, “can’t you sit your phat ass on that bench?”
“FAT ass?” She turned t
o get a better angle to punch him from. “FAT ass?”
“I said p-h-a-t,” he replied. “I didn’t think you were deaf.”
“I’m not, you ass!” she huffed. “The only reason I haven’t given you the beatdown you deserve is that I am in shock!”
“Wait!” Peter put up a hand. “How are you spelling phat?”
“You have some cojones, even for a mental midget who grows into a big hairy mental midget. I spell it f-a-t.”
“I’m spelling it p-h-a-t,” he replied, “so it was a miscommunication, Ranger Two. Stop spraining your ankle jumping to a conclusion.”
Her eyes flitted left and right for a second while Peter took a sip of his drink. He allowed her a moment to look up the definition. “That word went out of use over two hundred years ago! Decades before we left.”
“Yeah, well, what did it mean originally?” Peter asked, eyeing her.
“Pretty hot and tempting,” she conceded. “So while you committed a major faux pas by using it at all, it was technically an accurate description of my badunkadunk.”
“Which, I might point out, is older than two hundred years,” he replied.
She eyed him. “My badunkadunk’s age is not in question, Mr. Peter.”
“I wasn’t talking about your ass, Tabitha,” Peter responded, wondering how the hell he had gotten into this conversation with her. “I was saying the word was over two hundred years old.”
She looked at him for a moment. “Oh.” She slid out, stepped to the other side of the booth, and slid in. She waved to the barman, making a ‘v’ with her fingers, and then pointed to her and Peter.
A few moments later the barman brought over two more beers and took the one Peter had just finished in a rush.
“Thank you.” He nodded to her and took a sip of the fresh bottle. “I’ll accept beers all night long, so don’t think I’m embarrassed to drink on your tab.”
“I’m just trying to wear you down,” she informed him. A moment later they both snorted.
Neither was going to get drunk anytime soon.
“For what?” he asked. “We’re leaving…what, tomorrow?”
“I think so. It’s up to Barnabas.”
Peter gave a noncommittal shrug.
“So tell me about it,” she said. “I came here to find you so you could talk it out.”
“I’m not really all that much into talking about Todd right now.”
“Fucker.” She looked at him. “You ever think maybe I need to talk about my losses?”
His eyes narrowed. “No,” he admitted. “I figure you have enough friends in the Tontos. Hell, Barnabas can read your mind and help you.”
She slid her bottle left, then right on the table. “Maybe he can, or maybe he is so old and has lived through so many lifetimes he doesn’t remember exactly what emotion really is.” She took a drink and set down her bottle before looking Peter in the eyes. “Don’t get me wrong… I love him to death, but occasionally he is too old, wise, and stubborn to understand me.”
Peter thought about it for a moment. “Thinks you are still a young girl?”
“Fuck, I am still a young girl, you jerkweed!” she exclaimed. She tried to kick his leg under the table, but was only successful in kicking the steel plate mounted under the seat.
Tabitha had kicked out the wood so many times in years past that the owners had applied steel plates to all of the booths in the bar.
Her face scrunched up in pain and she squelched a yell. “Oh, sweet mother frankfurter! You dick, you moved your leg!”
“And?” Peter smiled, his eyebrows raised. “What was I supposed to do?”
“Cushion my foot,” she replied, bending her toes up and down as her healing finally minimized the pain.
“Yeah, I don’t think so.” Peter shook his head. “Sorry, too many decades fighting to worry about your foot when I sense something coming at me.”
She reached down to make sure her toes were all straight before placing her foot back on the floor. “Good reflexes,” she admitted. “Now back to my favorite subject.”
“You?” Peter asked, a smile on his face.
“See?” She pointed to him. “You get me.”
“I see a woman who is masking her pain behind a façade,” Peter replied, understanding a bit more of what made this woman tick.
“Don’t psychoanalyze me unless you have something meaty to go along with it,” she retorted.
He raised an eyebrow.
Her face started to turn red and she rolled her eyes. “I walked into that one.”
“I imagine you slide into them all the time.”
“I’m usually better at verbal sparring,” Tabitha contended.
“Why did you come here?” Peter asked, his grin from a moment before fading. “Did you come here to talk about Todd?”
“Yes…and no,” Tabitha admitted. “Look, my first loss still hurts. I know you have lost people before, but Todd was your best friend.” She looked down at her beer as Peter studied her face. She looked up after a couple of moments, leaning to her left to look down the walkway past the booths before drawing back in. “Sorry, just making sure no one was there.”
“Because?” Peter asked.
“Because living after death sucks,” Tabitha answered. “I’m fucking fortunate that none of the other Tontos died.”
“Or you,” Peter added.
“Fuck me.” She sighed, flicking her eyes up to see Peter’s reaction, but he was studying her face. She leaned against the booth’s back. “I occasionally cry myself to sleep thinking about him.”
“Were you close?” Peter asked, his voice low.
She ran a hand through her hair and pulled it back out of her face. “Not physically, but I loved all my Tontos.” She looked to his eyes. “We always took it to the man, you know? We got out of everything together. No matter what, none of us got hurt bad until…”
“Todd,” Peter replied softly. When Tabitha looked up, he was staring into his beer. “The other deaths hurt, but they weren’t Todd. He and I have clowned around since Earth. He and I ran the teams. I had the Guardians, he had the Marines, and we were going to run them until we both grew old and passed away.”
There were a few moments of silence in the booth, the clinking of glasses a distant note to let them know they were still part of humanity.
“Then?” she asked him, her voice soft and caressing.
“Then the bastard went and jumped on a Gott Verdammt grenade that should have killed me, not him,” Peter admitted, a tear in his eye and one tracking down his face.
Tabitha slid out of her seat and stepped to his side, sitting down next to him. She didn’t have to tell him to move over. He’d already slid toward the wall.
She reached over with her left hand and pulled his head down to rest on her shoulder, her right hand hiding his eyes as she played with his hair.
His shoulders started shaking, releasing the pain a little at a time.
This pain, she had learned, didn’t go away with one cry, or two, or even ten. It was like a raging river in the beginning, and you had to constantly release the pressure the dam was holding.
In time the river subsided and you had a gentle stream, but time still caused the emotions to back up higher and higher until the dam had to release the emotions someway, somehow occasionally.
Finally the emotional pain became a very small creek that might take only a random tear to release.
But it never went away.
Tabitha let Peter release his pain. She just held him quietly and absently stroked his hair, sharing a tear with him for Todd and what he had meant to Peter, and for her own memory of him.
Shared pain was lessened.
Sometime later, their beers warm, their hearts spent and vulnerable, Peter broke the silence.
“I don’t think I have anything left for tears,” Peter mumbled into her arm, “but I’m willing to stay here.”
She looked down at his head, realizing she had tucked it right i
nto her breast.
She bit her lip. Lord, this is a bad idea! she thought to herself as she slid a bit out of the booth and reached over to grab his hand and pull him out.
He slid with her, a question on his face. There was no one in the place at the moment, for which she was grateful.
“What happens tonight,” she told him, “stays with tonight.”
She pulled him toward the door, a smile starting to play on her lips as she stiff-armed through it and pulled him out of NS Squared.
Peter chuckled. “Depends on if I impress you enough!” he said from behind her.
They arrived at the opening of her little back-alley path and she turned around with a smile on her face. Before Peter knew what was going on, she had grabbed his waist and thrown him over her shoulder. She started running down the hallway.
“HEY!” he shouted in surprise.
Both cracked up in an emotional release, then she heard him say something about a well-matched pair as he grabbed her ass and squeezed.
She let out a squeal and yelled over her shoulder, “You’d better have the stamina of an ox!”
“Pricolici!” he yelled back, laughing because the shorter woman was challenged by carrying his taller body.
Tabitha’s eyes shot open when he bit her badunkadunk.
Unnamed Mercenary Planet
The Leath female looked across the table at the Guild Master. The bar they were sitting in was a part of Guild Headquarters, so security was high.
“I would think your people would want a chance to kill the Witch,” she said.
“You would think your people would know how to do it!” the Guild Master shot back. “The Empress doesn’t quit, but she obviously doesn’t give a shit about continuing to attack us if we stop attacking her.”
The robed Leath stopped and paid attention to the Guild Master, boring into his mind for a moment.
“Do we have a problem?” the Guild Master asked, shaking his head to clear it.
“What if one of our own leads the attack?” the Leath representative asked. “We supply the money and the guns. There is already a significant price on the head of the Witch for whoever can capture or kill her.”
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