The bell rang once again for the start of the fight. The shorter fellow decided to take me on, while the tall blonde decided to fight Ariadne. I would have preferred it the other way simply because the blonde’s height would put me at a disadvantage and given the princess’ specialized fighting style, she would be more than enthusiastic to use the blonde’s height as leverage.
But, I surmised, the white-haired fighter’s energy and enthusiasm should make for a good fight.
Dodging the first few of his blows gave me feel for how he fought. The answer was ‘crudely and without any sort of strategy.’ While his technique was reminiscent of Trish Abercrombie, she actually knew how to fight, she simply let adrenaline take control. This guy was just a flaming idiot. His blows usually went wild as he failed to track or predict my movement and he exposed pretty much every weak point on his body for my attacks. It took a great deal of effort to hold back and not take advantage of his utterly obvious failings.
I dodged a few more of his attacks, landing a few punches simply to make it look like it was going to be an actual fight. I was hoping that toying with this rookie would irritate him into doing something useful, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He continued with his ineffectual tactics and it was actually me who got irritated. I finally stepped into and passed his guard, landing a solid punch to his stomach. Sometimes what people need is pain to make them fight back.
“Hit me, you ninny,” I whispered to the rookie as his eyes bulged in pain. All he did was gasp back at me and stumble a few steps away.
I sighed loudly and glanced toward Ariadne as the crowd cheered loudly. The tall blonde was standing up from what had probably been a nice flip, forcibly assisted by the princess. I knew the height would be Ariadne’s advantage. The blonde blinked slowly, blood seeping into her right eye from a bad gash on her forehead. She didn’t have too much fight left in her and the rules of the match stated that the first team to lose a fighter lost the bout.
It was going to have to be me who pulled us out of this one.
So I continued glancing toward Ariadne’s fight instead of keeping all of my attention on mine. My opponent couldn’t even take advantage of that as he almost toppled over at least twice trying to perform some sort of overly-complicated kick. Had it been executed by a master, it might even have been effective, but instead this idiot mostly ended up off-balance and tangled up in his own feet.
Besides, I’d said hit me, not kick me.
At least the punch to the stomach was making him react with a little more effort.
The crowd cheered again, and I looked back toward Ariadne fully for an instant, watching out of the corner of my eye as my opponent spotted his chance and charged toward me. It seemed to take an eternity for him to come within range of a punch, and longer than that for him to actually throw it. To his credit, it had a surprising amount of force. In fact, I wondered if I’d made a horrible, life-ending miscalculation as the blow struck my face and I didn’t even feel it when I hit the ground, dazed.
It didn’t take long for the referee to declare Ariadne and me the losers, and for the former to run over to me, screaming swearwords I couldn’t quite make out in my numb face.
“Are you okay?” she finally asked, and I understood. I didn’t nod, knowing how much that could hurt. Feeling was slowly returning to my face, and it sucked.
“Yeah,” I said, and the princess helped me up.
“How did you lose to that imbecile?” she exclaimed, gesturing wildly toward our defeaters, who were flexing and showing off to the yelling crowd.
I held up a hand as we made our way out of the fighting area, the crowd continuing the tradition of equal boos and cheers. Once outside the barn, I directed Ariadne toward Aether, who was busy paying out a lot of Piper’s money to everyone who’d bet that we’d lose, a logical conclusion given our incredible losing streak. Of course, I wasn’t happy about the idea that the crowd had thought we would lose to those two rookies, but that was irrelevant at this point. Ariadne and I would probably never fight again on Myrkheim but, with any luck, we wouldn’t have to.
“We’d like to collect our bets,” I told Aether thickly. He didn’t even wince as he reviewed his record book.
“What are you talking about?” Ariadne demanded. “We probably owe them a fortune—”
“I’m afraid I don’t have that kind of money on me; you will have to take this up with Piper. He excused himself temporarily before the fight ended, but he will call on you shortly,” Aether said, handing me an official statement of the amount Piper owed to Ariadne and me. I showed it to the princess, who gaped at me in a kind of horror and confusion. I tried not to grin, noting that would hurt my face.
• • •
We made it back to the Lilstar carefully and slowly, each step jarring my now-swollen face a bit more. It was a quiet trip, however, as Ariadne elected not to say anything to me. I wasn’t under the impression that she actually hated my guts, but she seemed to have more questions than she thought I could handle at the moment.
Once inside the Lilstar, I showered and placed a dermal patch over the massive bruise that was forming. The patch would infuse my damaged tissue with pluripotent-type cells based on the same biological technology found in Centauri saliva. A while ago we’d discovered that our closest neighbor had remarkable talent in healing minor scrapes and bruises by literally licking their wounds, depositing these stem cells which took the form of all the other cells around them, including skin, blood vessel walls, and even nerves. With their assistance, our genetic engineers worked to reproduce the effect with cells created from genetic facsimiles, setting up an unlimited and mostly less-gross supply of the pluripotent cells. These new facsimile cells could be used in everything from healing minor wounds of all creatures and humans to fixing cuts and scrapes on organic ships and buildings. Of course, the technology was shared with the Centauri for free; this was long before the U.C. became the world’s leading supplier of daylight robbery.
The patch wouldn’t work ridiculously fast, but with any luck I wouldn’t be completely purple by morning. I sat in the bathroom for a while simply resting. It smelled like cat pee but I didn’t mind as the mother cat and the kittens had decided to trust me enough to crawl up to me. The little speckled runt of a kitten even crawled into my lap.
For a long while I sat there, petting the kitten and feeling the swelling and bruising go down on my face. Of course, I had just conned an extremely well-powered and angry individual during an illegal fight and cost him a substantial amount of money while embarrassing him publicly. This was my debut fight as one of his champions and I, impossibly he probably thought, blew it completely. Now all that was left was to wait and see if he was going to be honorable and pay up his debt or if he was going to murder us slowly.
After a while, there was a knock on the door. I triggered the mechanism to open the iris and let Ariadne in. She didn’t say anything as she sat down opposite of me and checked my dermal patch.
“How’s it look?” I asked. She shrugged, plucking the kitten that was in my lap and putting it in her lap. It even started to purr. I gave the princess and her small, furry traitor a sour expression.
“You totally lost that fight on purpose,” she finally said, leaning back. I sighed.
“And won us a lot of money. Enough to restock the ship,” I reasoned. Ariane gave me a flat-browed stare.
“That’s not the point,” she clenched her jaw. For a moment, I waited for her to continue. I certainly wasn’t going to say anything that might wiggle my face without a good reason, including asking her what the point was.
I could live without knowing.
“You didn’t even tell me what you were doing,” she finally said, looking a little hurt.
“You didn’t tell me your original plan to make us money was to dive face-first into illegal fighting,” I huffed. One of the other kittens mewed in frustration as the paper wad I’d given them earlier was trapped on top of the water spout. I reached up, g
rabbed it, and returned it to the small one. She didn’t even thank me.
“If we’re going to make any sort of partnership work, we need to work on telling each other our plans,” Ariadne said without accusation. I nodded gently in agreement.
“We never actually declared any sort of partnership beyond sharing the skiptrace license,” I pointed out as I shrugged. After a minute, I stuck my hand out in offering. I was more than willing to have a partner for a while. Ariadne put her hand out, but hesitated before shaking mine.
“Are we going to make a pact to tell each other all plans that involve either the skiptracing or, at some future point, a parcel business?” she asked.
“But what if it’s a surprise?” I asked in a petty tone.
“What sort of surprise is going to come out of chasing down a bunch of criminals and shipping packages across the solar system?” Ariadne said, wrinkling her nose.
“Maybe I’m hunting some ruffian down for… your birthday and don’t want you to know?” I said, grasping at straws.
“That is the lamest thing I have ever heard,” Ariadne said blankly. I nodded in acceptance.
“If it involves skiptracing or parceling, I will inform you of all my plans,” I finally said.
“So will I,” the princess said, satisfied. So we shook hands, to the protestation of the runt kitten, which Ariadne’s movement upset.
“We should go get grilled cheese at Jones’ to celebrate,” Ariadne said without shame.
“Oh really?” I asked. She nodded serenely.
I honestly hoped she and Leopold would get married.
And then I would be the weird sort-of aunt who takes all their freaking adorable kids for ride-a-longs to catch debtors and other minor ilk and lets them stay up way past their bedtimes reading cheap comics.
Before we could even get off the bathroom floor to head to Jones’, however, there was a loud and unforgiving knock at the Lilstar’s main hatch. I sighed warily, knowing who that probably was. It was time to figured out if we died here and now as failed fighters, or if we continued living as rich but still failed fighters.
The knocking continued as we made our way to the front of the ship. Ariadne opened the door with caution while I stood back near the pilot’s seat, shock device hidden out of the way and ready for use. The iris opened, revealing Piper who stood there front and center, flanked by two thugs and with Aether lurking in the background.
“I’ve come here to settle my debt,” Piper said stiffly. All of his charm seemed to have worn off and what was left was his rotting fish aura. It made me almost physically sick again.
“Is that what you are going to do?” I asked outright, imagining all the horrible ways he could kill us without leaving a trace. Botulism would probably be the most obvious way. He could hide some in an infection on the Lilstar’s door mechanism, leaving us trapped inside with the disease to die slowly and without any sort of concrete evidence to trace back to him. He could also use some sort of Centauri-made chemical agent not easily detected by the chem-sniffers on either the Lilstar or Myrkheim. Some of the new stuff was not only toxic but required specialized Centauri equipment to find and analyze.
I removed all of these thoughts from my head and focused on the problem at hand.
Piper leaned forward to enter the Lilstar, I made a gentle move for the shock device. He looked toward Ariadne almost kindly, the roses-and-leather smell returning.
“Your associate and I, m’lady, do not see eye to eye, which is a shame, really,” he said smoothly.
“To be quite frank, I don’t know why she hates you. But she is my business partner and if she feels that strongly, I don’t see a reason to associate with scum such as yourself,” Ariadne said easily and with equal charm. I almost blinked at her in surprise. It’s not that I didn’t assume Ariadne couldn’t be charming, it’s just that I had never witnessed it before. Flirty, yes; charming, no.
“I think you have insulted me long enough.“ Piper said, leaning closer. Ariadne stopped him by placing a gentle hand on his chest.
“No, I think you have insulted us, and our intelligence, long enough,” she said coyly, gently playing with his suit. “We beat you at your own game and embarrassed you publicly. It’ll take a while for your reputation in the fighting community to restore itself after we lost so badly.”
“I will recover,” Piper growled.
“Yeah, but then there is this thing about telling your wife how you lost all that money to a couple of sprites like us…” Ariadne let the end of the sentence hang unfinished while I watched the whole scene bemused and impressed.
Piper gave Ariadne a long and angry look. He almost seemed to be stuck between his evil nature and the elegant charm he’d learned to affect.
He eventually smiled and made it look easy.
“I will give you your money,” he said as he gestured toward Aether, who produced a small satchel of credits. He handed them to me with an almost satisfied expression. “In the good faith that I will never, ever see you two ever again.”
“Well, I can’t promise we won’t run into you at a U.C. UberMarket, but I can promise we won’t be fighting here anymore,” Ariadne said with a shrug. Piper briefly touched the brim of his hat and walked out of the Lilstar with all the dignity he had left. The Lilstar’s hatch closed silently.
“Holy crap, that worked,” Ariadne sighed loudly, turning to look at me with an anxious smile of relief.
“How did you know about his wife?” I asked in amazement. The only way I knew about her was from Aether, but Ariadne hadn’t been around for that conversation.
“He has her picture in his wallet. I happened to see it when he was going over the rules of the fight earlier,” she said, plopping down in the copilot’s seat heavily.
“Yeah, but how did you know she scares him?” I asked.
“The picture has a few knife marks in it,” Ariadne shrugged. I broke out into a wide, wide grin.
Ten
In the end we did make it to Jones’ for celebratory grilled cheese when it opened the next day. Of course, we couldn’t really discuss with either Leopold or Ylva exactly what we were celebrating, given the fact that it involved coming out under the thumb of a ruthless tyrant of the underground illegal fighting community, so we kept our outward cheering down to a minimum and our glasses filled with just water.
“You ladies look cheerful tonight.” Leopold said after working his way across the somewhat packed dance floor to visit us, the only two people at the bar.
“We have officially restocked the ship and can now continue with our skiptracing.” Ariadne said, raising her glass in a mock toast.
“Ah, well, that calls for a celebration! Have you ladies ever been up to Johanna’s Park at this time of night? They usually have live bands. I would be happy to take you, if you have a few hours to spare,” Leopold said smoothly and with a toothy grin. I felt honored to be included, but definitely not about to spoil this perfectly lovely idea for a first date of the most perfect couple this modern era had ever seen.
“Oh, I think I’ll stay here for now,” I said politely, nudging Ariadne gently. “But you two should definitely go enjoy yourselves.”
For a second, Ariadne and Leopold just looked at each other, blushing, as if they’d just realized their buffer was gone. Suddenly it was just the two of them, actually going somewhere together without either me or Ylva lurking in the background. For a second I was afraid that I’d made my exit too quickly and neither of them was actually ready to communicate one-on-one. But Leopold finally grinned and ducked his head a little and shrugged. Ariadne mirrored him, batting her big eyelashes.
They were so stinking cute.
“Sure,” Ariadne finally managed to croak out.
“Do you have everything under control here, Miss Ylva?” Leopold asked, turning to the barkeep, who nodded vigorously and with a smile.
“Then let us depart,” Leopold said, offering his hand to Ariadne. The princess flashed me one quick look bef
ore taking the offered hand and following Leopold out of Jones’.
Ylva and I waited a full minute after they’d left before bursting out into good-natured laughter.
• • •
I lurked around Jones’ without anything to do for a few hours, chatting with Ylva and eating a healthy portion of the massive lavender ice cream sundae I’d ordered. After a while, however, I decided that Leopold and Ariadne would still be out for a long time and I could get a head start on tracking down Ottoman Lee. My advertisement hadn’t produced any noticeable results, although a few people came with tips that he’d been seen around some very poor parts of the colony under a different name. Overall, though, I took the reports with a grain of salt as they tended to argue over what tattoo the man actually had. Some said he had a ‘lover’ tattoo and some said it was ‘loser,’ although they did all agree that it was on the face.
I finally made my way out of the bar and began to make plans to check some of the areas the reports agreed on. That didn’t mean he was still in that area, however. In fact, after seeing his face on the advertisement, he might’ve even skipped town altogether, which would make things extremely difficult. I’d have to basically start all over again, although I hadn’t actually made it that far anyway. It was like starting back at square one from square one and a half.
Of course, all that planning lasted until he broke my nose.
Me, glancing down at the somewhat-sizable sum of credits in my hand while plotting out my plan of attack, failed to recognize my quarry, who just so happened to be walking by in the opposite direction. Apparently, he somehow knew who I was, namely the skiptrace that had been trying to hunt him down for the past few weeks, because his elbow came up and smashed the cartilage of my foremost facial feature to almost flush with the rest of my face. To make matters worse, I fell backwards onto the colony’s falsebone floor, landing first on my keister and second on my head, sending out bright shards of pain from my bottom to my top.
Set'em Up Page 14