“Ahhhhhahhhh,” I moaned, cradling my nose. My eyes were watering beyond measure and I couldn’t quite make out the two people who were standing over me, although I could just see some vague and gaudy face tattoos. The guy with the right-side face tattoo lifted me up just enough to drag into the nearest alley. It was a mucky place, from what I could see, covered in tattoos, some of which were showing signs of infection. My captor then hoisted me up without gentleness and set me down in a chest-high trash bin filled with garbage from the neighboring buildings so he could look me in the face.
“Owww…” I whined, still holding my nose.
“You listen to me, you—” the right-side-face-tattoo guy got up close to my blurred eyes and called me something very insulting. “I want to know who sent you after me.”
My eyes were beginning to clear, although I could have sworn I was seeing double. Of course, the fact that they had sacrificed opposite halves of their faces in some extremely questionable fashion statements kept that theory at bay. I was basically looking at the same man, but with two different tattoos and two different facial expressions. The guy who was doing all the yelling had a right-side tattoo that read “LOVER” and the guy who looked a little green and shaky had the left-side tattoo reading “LOSER.”
Crappity crap.
“I’ll ask you one more time,” LOVER said. “Who sent you after me? The cops? The U.C.?”
“Neither, morel brain,” I said, sounding a bit hollow through my shattered nose. “I’m a skiptrace.”
“Oh really, like I would believe that,” LOVER yelled into my face. I didn’t flinch.
“I’m not certain I really care, Mr. Lee. It’s not like you’re the first one to not believe me,” I said plainly, sniffling somewhat.
LOVER laughed loudly. There was something about him that began to give me the creeps. I began to doubt the validity of Aristotle’s file on this guy. Even the most violent debtor was usually not quite so…unhinged. That added “mental instability” to their files and put them in a whole other class of ruffian. I glanced at the shaky Mr. LOSER and realized that, somehow, either the picture or the name in Aristotle’s file had gotten mixed up. LOSER was probably the debtor, LOVER was something a little less human.
“So which of you is Ottoman?” I asked, making no obvious move to stand.
“That would be me, you pig,” LOVER said, now waving around a very big knife as he paced back and forth, obviously trying to think.
“So who are you?” I asked LOSER, who had yet to speak anything. He was far from LOVER in demeanor, being mostly a deer-eyed fright who was shaking so much he could have been one of those little, neurotic dogs all the celebrities liked to own.
I wondered what drug he was addicted to.
“Oh me? I’m just Set or Setesh, if you are feeling fancy. Otto’s twin. Or clone. I’m really not sure anymore,” LOSER said, and, in a moment of stupidity, decided to introduce himself properly and shake my hand. I took it right as LOVER/Ottoman protested the action.
“Stop, you idiot!” Ottoman cried, right as I activated the shock device. Set seized up and fell to the ground. While LOVER had been busy yelling at me, I carefully removed one of the shock device’s pads, tucking it out of sight in my hand. Of course, I hadn’t expected LOSER to make it as easy as shaking my hand, but I wasn’t going to complain too loudly.
Of course, that meant I still had to deal with the obviously more violent twin/clone, but he also decided to make my job easy.
“What did you do to him?!” Ottoman screamed, looking at his unconscious twin/clone.
Now, the smart thing in this situation would be to throw a knife at me, from a distance. Instead, Ottoman charged, and I merely leaned to one side and let him stab the trash behind me while I slapped the second shock pad onto Ottoman’s neck. Unfortunately, I was still touching him when I activated the device. Electricity shot through my arm all the way to my shoulder and eked toward my core, bringing two or three times the amount of zing as when Sasha had demonstrated the device on just my arm. Thankfully, I didn’t lose consciousness like Ottoman did.
“Owww…” I moaned again.
The good news was that I didn’t have to carry both unconscious ruffians back to the Lilstar myself. After relieving them of all weapons — Ottoman had somewhere close to six knives shoved in various places on his person — I secured the two Lees to the walls of the alley with slats of epidermis I had scraped off other portions of the colony earlier and had been carrying around for such an occasion. The Lees wouldn’t be going anywhere without a really sharp knife. I then limped my way back to Jones’. Of course, Leopold and Ariadne were still out on their, well, date, but Ylva was there and, thankfully, not very busy as the late-night crowd began to thin.
“My goodness, what happened to ye?” Ylva asked, hurriedly gathering a wet cloth for my nose. Having a completely sober patron stumble in with a bloody nose and a few odd muscle spasms from an electric shock was not something seen every day.
“I found my quarry,” I said with blood dripping down my entire hand. I tried not to get any on the nightclub’s floor, but that was impossible. Ylva rounded the bar, handing me a cloth to cover my nose and ushering me to one of the bar stools.
“Want me to straighten that a bit?” she asked, gesturing to the nose. I couldn’t see how crooked it was over how swollen it was. “It’ll hurt.”
I nodded anyway, and she leaned over the bar to give me a lemon slice to bite down on. She was a more than capable nurse, so I wondered why she was tending bar, but I didn’t want to ask and make my procedure even worse. So I just explained exactly how my nose got broken and the predicament I was now in.
While Ylva did a good job straightening my nose, it might’ve just been quicker and less painful to rip my entire face off, or so I believed. In no time, however, it was neatly bandaged with a layer of pluripotent cell patches underneath some medical tape.
“Ye may need a bit o’ plastic surgery to get this looking right again, but I did the best I could,” the barkeep warned me. I shrugged. It’s not like I hadn’t had my nose broken before, although never to this extent. I wondered how long I would have to save on a skiptrace’s bounties to afford surgery.
Eh, ponderings for another time.
The next step for me was to figure out what to do about transporting the Lees from the alley to the Lilstar. I looked toward the massive bouncers who were busy cleaning up and stacking tables and chairs.
“Think I could borrow your hunks to move my bounties?” I asked Ylva. “I’ll compensate them.”
“I dunno, let me ask them. Dara, Nakajima, feel like making a few extra credits?” Ylva called out to them. The two brawny men shrugged and ambled over.
“I need some help moving a couple of unconscious quarries for my skiptracing,” I said, pulling some credits out of my pocket. It was more than enough to pay both men to help. I waved it a bit in the air.
“Sure,” Dara, as his nametag identified, said. He and the other guy, who I presumed was Nakajima, looked like they could bench press small Boots, so I was secure with the idea that they could heft the twins/clones.
I led the two bouncers back to the alley and cut my two still-unconscious quarries free from the wall. I went ahead and switched out their Myrkheim bindings to epidermis from the Lilstar. Ariadne hadn’t been excited about the idea of me shaving off thin layers of the ship’s epidermis in different areas until I had enough to secure a person to the wall, but after I promised to take it from insensate areas like the floor, she acquiesced. There was just barely enough to bind both of their hands together. Since I presumed we were after one person, I didn’t think to get enough epidermis for two.
Dara and Nakajima carried the two Lees over their shoulders with ease, and in no time we’d made it back to the ship.
The Lilstar was going to be very cramped with five cats, two bounties, and two mostly lucky skiptraces who could barely afford to restock the ship enough for three people. I sighed as I handed Dara
and Nakajima their credits.
“Tell Ylva to send Ariadne back this way when she gets back from her date,” I said.
“Uh, for no extra cost, would you like one of us to stay here to make it a fair fight in case those two decide to wake up?” Dara’s baritone voice suggested. I looked at the two Lees, bound on either side of the threshold that divided the cockpit of the ship from the living space. I imagined the positions they were in, seated on the ground with arms stretched up over their heads, secured at the wrists to the ship’s walls, was going to be uncomfortable for long periods of time. I hadn’t decided if I felt like putting them in the bunks or not. The bouncer was right, however, numbers were not on my side, at least until Ariadne got here.
“Nah, I’ll pay whichever of you wants to stay,” I said. Dara nodded.
“Nakajima will be out here if you need him,” the bouncer said as he left. Nakajima took a seat in the airlock outside the Lilstar.
I waited patiently for Ariadne to return, which didn’t happen for another few hours. I tried talking to Nakajima, but the man only grunted or replied in yeses and nos. So I re-checked the ship’s supplies, calculated how much we needed with an extra passenger, and fed the cats. Of course, thinking about the cats made me have to go visit the cats. I opened up the bathroom’s iris carefully, but not carefully enough, as one of the kittens decided to make a break for it and dashed out of the bathroom before I could catch him.
“No!” I yelled, chasing after the little furball as he bounded through the living space and over to the unconscious Set. I feared what would happen if the poor thing became lost on the station. One cat wasn’t necessarily going to upset the whole ecosystem but he would still have a bounty on his wee head. I rounded the corner and made it into the cockpit to see Nakajima in the ship’s threshold, gently cradling the small kitten, who protested loudly at being caught.
“Sorry, he escaped,” I muttered. The bouncer nodded, stroking the little feline’s head.
Nakajima looked into my ship with big, brown — but scrutinizing — eyes.
“That is a Birdsong-class ship, yes?” he said.
“I dunno,” I shrugged. I’m sure Ariadne had mentioned it.
“Yes,” he said, nodding, keeping his attention largely on the kitten who was gnawing his finger with all the power it could muster. The bouncer didn’t even wince; in fact, he made little, amused faces at the kitten. At one point he literally cooed at it. “It’s made for two people and you have four and…cats?”
“Five cats…” I muttered again.
“Are you trying to find a home for the cats?” he asked, looking up at me. I felt a smile creeping up on my face.
“They can’t live on the colony,” I said.
“I live on a ship docked not far from here. Technically I am not on the colony,” he said, tone laden with hinting.
“Do I have any guarantee you will give these guys a proper life?” I challenged, but was in reality definitely willing to entertain the idea of letting him have them. He seemed to be gentle and caring toward the kitten in his hand and had even managed to calm it from its near-rage mentality to a content, almost sleepy demeanor. I suppose, if the kitten was that comfortable with him, he must be good with cats.
“I already have four. They’re the reason I didn’t sell my ship in the first place,” Nakajima said.
“Well, come back tomorrow. I need to make sure Ariadne isn’t attached to any of them,” I said, although I also had to make sure I wasn’t attached. The little runt that was still in the bathroom seemed to hold a piece of my heart.
Nakajima nodded and, reluctantly, gave me back the kitten, who mewed in protest.
I returned the kitten back to a grateful mother as I heard Ariadne’s voice come into the airlock.
“Hi, I’m back—holy crap, Marcie, what did you do?” Ariadne’s tone went from singsong to demanding in almost no time as she entered the ship and got a good look at my face. I tried not to scream when she touched the puffy skin around my nose curiously.
“I ran into somebody’s elbow,” I said plainly, fighting back the reflex tears that had started after the princess’ prodding.
“Your nose is all—” Ariadne started, twisting back to look at our quarry. Of course, Dara had probably alerted her to their existence and capture like I’d told him to do. “Which one of these idiots did that to you?”
“Why?” I asked suspiciously.
“I dunno I kinda wanted to kiss him,” Ariadne crinkled her nose sarcastically.
I made a gagging motion.
“Are we really going to transport both of these?” the princess asked, gesturing generically to the Lees.
“That was what I was thinking. Technically I have no idea which one is the debtor.” I shrugged helplessly. “Plus I found an adopter for the cats.”
“Oh,” Ariadne said a little sadly.
“I mean, they would be much happier with this guy. He already has four cats of his own,” I reasoned. Ariadne nodded.
“Of course. It’s not like we could keep all of them on the ship,” the princess said. There was a moment of silence. She finally looked at me with an almost conniving expression.
“The little speckled runt?” she asked.
“I’ve already named him Albert,” I confessed. She gave me a wry sort of grin.
“It’s settled. We’ll keep Albert. But the ship is still overstuffed,” Ariadne said.
“Nakajima?” I moved to stick my head out the airlock.
“Yes?” the bouncer asked.
“How would you like to have four more cats and babysit a fifth?” I asked. “We’ll pay you for upkeep until we can take him back.”
“That sounds good,” Nakajima said with a ghost of a smile.
• • •
With Nakajima sticking around a bit longer waiting for us to relinquish the kittens to him, Ariadne and I were free to begin planning our departure from Myrkheim and the return trip to Earth. While Ariadne began prepping the ship and announcing our departure to the colony’s ship control, I went back to buy the extra supplies we would need to support ourselves and our quarries.
While out, I also took the time to send a solar-system-spanning communique to Aristotle, hoping it could allay any fears he might have that we were goofing off with his license. The communique would take about a full day and a half to get from Myrkheim to Dinium, Earth, time which included bouncing around a few communication processing stations before finally being sent to Aristotle’s office in the form of a phone call. Of course, I sent the communication with the notion that the somewhat delicate radio-wave based transmissions would avoid being scattered in all directions by any odd pocket of gas that happened to stray into its path. The fact that long-distance communication existed through the nebulous pea soup that engulfed the system was an amazing feat of engineering, but there was always a high chance of something failing. I just hoped this particular message made it through.
It was always good to assure your new employers that you were not slacking off.
This message also explained that we had caught Ottoman within the required month, although we would be bringing him back about a week late. I prided myself on the legal loophole I’d discovered and hoped it would convince Aristotle not to fire us the instant we stepped foot inside his office again. I also mentioned the addition of Set, hoping that would convince Aristotle of Ariadne and my abilities to capture the human realm’s most wanted.
Of course, I could always fall back on becoming Myrkheim’s foremost animal control officer.
I returned with the supplies shortly to hear a great deal of noise as the mother cat and four of her kittens mewed from a box seated next to Nakajima. The bouncer did get up long enough to help me move the new supplies into the Lilstar, but promptly went back to the cats, leaving me to sort and organize while Ariadne ducked into the ship’s bowels to check for any infections or irritations that might have occurred while we were docked.
After I stuffed the closet as fu
ll as it could get, I began to unload the rest of the supplies onto one of the bunks — Ariadne’s of course. We’d just have to take shifts, unless one of us felt like sleeping on the floor eerily close to the Lees. It would be better to have at least one of us awake at all times, anyway.
I shoved any doubts I might’ve had about the safety of having four people all in the same, small, two-person spacecraft for the two weeks it would take to get back to Earth.
“All set!” Ariadne finally called. I turned to the still-open hatch.
“Thank Mr. Jones for us,” I said, slapping the promised extra credit into Nakajima’s hand. Included in it was an invitation for Leopold Jones to send letters to Miss Ariadne King whenever she and her partner, Marcie, made it back to Earth with their quarry. It included the Lilstar’s radio callsign, although it was very difficult to contact a ship in flight, and the information for the transmission station nearest to Aristotle’s office. The cat-owning bouncer nodded understandingly after reading the note. I gave him a wink goodbye and stepped through to the Lilstar, closing the hatch behind me.
“Strapped in?” I asked, moving toward the bunk area. Set was still unconscious, but Ottoman was glaring from around his mouth gag, still a little loopy, if I was reading his unsteady expression right. I nudged Set slightly with my shoe and he moaned just a little. Still alive, thankfully.
I muttered at nothing in particular before moving to the copilot’s seat. Ariadne was just getting clearance to undock as I buckled my seatbelt.
I cast an irritating glance toward our captives. Ottoman’s scowl never changed in pitch, so I assumed he was comfortable.
Ariadne made a low growl in frustration.
“What was that for?” I asked, giving her a strange look.
“I forgot to give Leopold my number,” Ariadne said as the Lilstar let go of Myrkheim. I hid a sly smile.
“Maybe you should call him,” I said easily.
“I don’t know, he is awfully busy being a proprietor,” the princess said, looking downcast.
“He took you on a freaking date! I don’t care how busy his business is,” I said, pulling out a pen and notebook. If we were going to cram four people — two of which were immobile and potentially murderous ruffians — into a two-person craft, there would need to be rules and a set schedule. It was a more or less long trip back to Earth and our captives would need food, water, and to use the facilities more than once throughout the two weeks of travel. While I considered making a stopover at a station or Meropis-C, I didn’t think it was worth the risk. Ariadne and I would undoubtedly want to take time outside the ship during those stopovers, leaving only one of us to handle the predictable escape attempts made by our two captives.
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