by M J Gauntlet
“Looks like you were right all along Stan, my friend,” Alfie said, half turning toward his comrade. “It appears that this one is deaf after all, and we will just have to…”
In mid-sentence, Alfie suddenly swung a ham sized fist, right roundhouse sucker punch, aimed at Zax’s abdomen.
Neither man had noticed Zax’s arm muscles tensing while his hands were clasped. By simply opening his clasped right hand, his left hand suddenly shot out with tremendous speed and force, as though propelled by a spring. Striking Alfie’s moving fist on the man’s inner wrist, Zax deflected the blow outwards, and way from his body to the right. Using the momentum of the counterblow, Zax spun and stepped into Alfie’s now exposed mid-section and delivered an elbow to his solar plexus, causing him to fold over in pain, gasping for air. This move had turned Zax so that he was now facing a stunned Stan. The sound of Alfie retching could be heard behind him. The entire exchange took less than three seconds.
Stan’s stunned expression quickly transformed into one of pure hatred, which was quickly replaced by a wicked grin. With a short little backwards hop, he moved just out range of those lightening quick hands.
“Shit Alfie, you alright?” Stan asked in a terse voice, trying to look around Zax. Only hearing the continued dry heaving from his partner as a reply, he focused again on Zax.
“It seems that our friend here knows a trick or two!” he said, in a nasty nasal voice. “Well let’s see if we can show him a thing or two of our own, eh?”
With that, Stan began to move in a slow crouching circle towards Zax’s left, holding his left hand in front of him almost fully extended, hand straight out, palm facing down, with his right hand held tightly to his side. Making a couple of quick feinting jabs with his outstretched left hand, Stan suddenly slashed up with his right hand aiming for Zax’s eyes. As Zax moved to block the blow, Stan quickly twisted his body, pivoting on his right leg, bringing his left leg up and around in a vicious roundhouse kick, aimed at Zax’s temple. But to his astonishment, his intended target neither tried to block the kick, nor backed away, instead ducking slightly, he stepped into the blow, absorbing the now diminished impact on his shoulder, and with a quick snap thrust, Zax hit his assailant at the apex of the ‘Y’ formed by his extended left leg and the supporting right leg that was anchored to the floor. Stan immediately yowled and collapsed in a heap, grasping his testicles.
Before Stan could recover, Zax sensed, rather than felt, a sharp kick aimed at his kidneys. The blow was slightly off, and instinct took over as Zax found himself rolling with the blow to absorb some of the impact. Zax then continued to roll and used his momentum to spring up into a standing position. In front of him was a wincing Alfie, staring at Zax with eyes of pure malevolence.
“You Laster piece of shit!” Alfie half screamed. “Me and Stan was just gonna rough you up a bit and take your bag, Grayson, but now I think you deserve a great deal of pain!”
With a snarl, Alfie reached into his jacket and pulled out a slim handled rod. Pressing a button at the rod’s base caused its rounded end to glow, as an incandescent blue ball appeared at its tip, slowly telescoping out to float about nine or ten centimeters from the handle. The space between the blue ball and the shiny handle appeared empty, until one saw tiny flashes of light as dust motes passed between the two. Zax knew that a thin strand of wire, no thicker than a molecule, was stretched between the ball and the base, held rigidly in place by bands of force generated by the blue contragrav ball.
This was a force blade. Anything passing through that innocent looking space was instantly and effortlessly severed. These wands could move through steel and plasticrete, just as easy as through bone and sinew. Having one in your possession guaranteed you a twenty T-year stretch on one of Bright’s desert colonies. But that is not what drew Zax’s immediate focus. Looking Stan straight in the eyes, Zax spoke to his assailants for the first time.
“I don’t remember telling you my name, Alfie,” he said coolly.
Alfie’s face fell for a second as he realized his slip, then it resumed its gap-toothed grin.
“Smart one, ain’t cha? But I don’t see how that’s gonna matter since I’m gonna slice you into tiny bits,” he said, waving the blade in front of him. “You thought you were being slick with that little maneuver you tried on me back there, didn’t cha? Well it ain’t gonna work against this!” Alfie hissed, as he suddenly jabbed the force blade at Zax, then danced back quickly. Suddenly Alfie narrowed his eyes and a leer formed on his lips.
“It’s too bad I didn’t get a chance to try this on that hot little number from the bank. I bet I could have had some fun with her!”
Zax froze at the reference to Lauria and his eyes narrowed dangerously, as he blocked out everything else and focused his assailant’s face.
“So, it was you that has been dogging my trail all this time, and it was you who killed Lauria!” Zax growled, his mouth matching the Stan’s snarl.
“Naw, that tweren’t me, just an associate of mine, but I wish I had been there. I hear the bitch put up quite a fight, but I would have stopped her with my pretty blade here. She was a hot little number, and maybe me and Stan could have had some fun!” The last bit was said with relish as Alfie tensed, expecting Zax to react to his words. But Zax didn’t move a muscle, he just stood there with the stillness of a Steradian mountain neolion before the kill. Zax looked at Alfie with disgust…no…pity! Having seen that pitying look on the faces of other ‘victims’ was more than the thug could take, abruptly he immediately stopped moving and lunged at Zax’s midsection forcing Zax to take a quick step backwards, too late Zax figured out what Alfie had done. The man had been slowly maneuvering him so that he would trip over the still doubled up groaning form of Stan, now lying behind him.
With a yowl of triumph, Alfie slashed the deadly blade forward in a tight arching swing. But Zax, rather than trying to maintain his balance, allowed his fall to continue, and using the momentum it gave him, he whipped his right leg up towards the swinging blade! A millimeter sliver of his shoe was shaved off by the passing blade, as Zax’s boot moved on to strike Alfie on his exposed elbow and jarred the force blade from his grip. As Alfie scrambled to his feet, Zax watched as the still activated blade tumbled though the air, seemingly in slow motion, landing on the still prone Stan’s outstretched left hand, bisecting the thumb and part of his index finger before the blades fail-safe shut it off.
For an instant no one moved, then a high-pitched keen issued from the now grievously injured Stan, as he sat up and held his mutilated hand up to his face. Grasping the hand to his chest with his right hand, Stan struggled to gain his feet. Alfie stood frozen in place, horrified at what he had inadvertently done to his companion. Zax quickly rushed over to where the force blade, now inert, lay then picked it up and placed it in his jacket pocket.
“You better take your friend’s fingers and get him to the nearest hospital, if you want to save his hand,” Zax said solemnly. All emotion now drained from him.
“Fuck you, you bastard!” Alfie said vehemently, as he bent over, reached down, and picked up the bloody severed digits. “This ain’t over Laster! I’m gonna see that you get yours for this, just you wait and see. I’m gonna get the cops and see that they make you pay for attacking a First citizen! You’re gonna pay for what you did to Stan,” Alfie finished saying, as he put the severed fingers in his pocket.
“HEY! What’s going on down there?” A voice yelled from a distance down the passageway. A lone figure was trotting down towards them. “What’s going on down here? What are you fellas doing?”
“Mind your own business, skink! This here is a private party between us and this Laster!” Alfie yelled at the approaching figure.
“Oh yeah?” said, the oncoming man. “I don’t like the look of this. Maybe I should call the port authority guards!”
“Shut the fuck up Alfie, will ya? Juist grab the fucking bag and let’s get outta here!” Stan said weakly, while fumbling with a filthy
rag he had fished out of his pocket and was now using to staunch the flow of blood from his wounded hand. He was already shambling down the passage, handheld closely clinched against his body. He was leaving a trail of blood as he passed the oncoming good Samaritan.
With a start Zax realized that his rucksack, containing all his possessions, the original target of the two thugs, was now at the feet of Alfie. Before he could move, Alfie snatched up the bag and started to run after his wounded partner. Zax got to his feet and scrambled after them, but just then the man approaching down the tubeway finally reached the scene and tried to grab the bag from the fleeing thief, but his foot hit a pool of Stan’s blood and he slipped and stumbled into the oncoming Zax. They both went down in a heap. Before either of them could regain their footing, both Alfie and the injured Stan reached the end of the tubeway and disappeared.
“Shit!” Zax cursed.
“Oh! I am sorry young man. I tried to stop them, but all I have succeeded in doing was to get in your way. Are you alright?” the ordinary looking stranger said, with a look of concern on his face. The man tried to get to his feet, only to slip again on the blood slick flooring. As he was lifting him up, Zax noticed for the first time, that the man was tattooed. Not the hand tats that he was used to, but he seemed to be tatted all over his body. At least the parts Zax could see, and they were morph tats! Morphies were very expensive and extremely painful to endure.
“Yeah, yeah…I guess so,” Zax said, in disgust at losing his possessions, while helping the man to his feet. “It’s just that everything I owned was in that bag.”
“Oh no! I am sorry. Don’t tell me that your ticket and eunit vouchers were in it also?”
“No, thank God. I have those in my pockets, but all my clothes and tools, along with a small holo I had of my dad were in that rucksack. Save for the holo of my dad, there was nothing in there I couldn’t replace, I guess,” Zax replied, with a mournful sigh.
“Oh well, at least you are ok. Look, do you want me to summon the authorities or something? You should at least file a report,” he said concernedly.
“No…no, never mind. My flight is due to lift soon and if I get the port authority involved, they will undoubtedly detain me and cause me to miss it.”
“Well, ok. I guess you know what is best, but I think I should at least go down to the main terminal to see if those two are still around with your belongings.” Turning, the odd-looking man began to walk back the way he had come and waved back at Zax. “Well good luck to you, young sir. I hope at least the rest of your journey is a smooth one.” Waving back at the man, Zax looked up and saw the far gate light was blinking. It looked like the Windjammer was going to dock earlier than expected. Zax walked to the gate and sat down in the chairs nearest the boarding podium.
As Zax vanished from his sight, M’Lak burst into a sprint following the trail of blood leading down the deserted tubeway. Approximately twenty meters from the tubeway’s exit, he caught up with the two fugitives Alfie and Stan.
“You are fucking idiots! You were supposed to rob him, not kill him. At least not yet. You have made a fucking mess of everything! Is everyone one on this accursed fucking planet morons!” M’Lak almost screamed at the two men.
“Look, can we do this later? We got what you wanted, alright?” Alfie said defensively. “I have to get Stan here to a hospital quick, so they can do something about his fingers.”
“No! We will settle this now. What happened to him was your fault. What were you thinking pulling out a force blade? I could only disable the image recorders at that end of the terminal. If I hadn’t tripped him at the end, you both would have probably been in jail and I would have lost the rucksack. Quickly, give it to me!” M’Lak said, holding out his hands.
It was the rucksack that had allowed M’Lak’s imaging scanning program to eventually find his target. He remembered that Grayson was seldom without a bag over his shoulders. This fact allowed him to filter out all images of persons with similar height and build who were without the ubiquitous bag. The program took longer than expected because he had not allowed for Zaxxion’s use of an image scrambler.
“Here, just take the fucking thing!” Alfie hissed, slinging the rucksack at M’Lak in a fit of pique. “It’s been more trouble than it was worth! Why didn’t you just shoot the fucking guy when you had the chance, then we could have avoided all this mess?”
“Because Tragi dung for brains, I had to make sure that he was carrying what I was looking for, you idiot!” M’Lak bent down to pick up the rucksack, without ever taking his eyes from the two men. After a quick inspection of its contents, he turned back to the now apologetic thieves.
“Look mister, we did what you wanted, ok? All we want now is for you to give us our final payment, so we can get to the hospital, alright?”
“You have both served me adequately and have suffered in my service, so I was inclined to be far more generous than our original contract. My only concern when I contacted you for this job, was would you be able to keep a confidence. But after your verbal slip back there which alerted Zaxxion that you were, in fact, hired to assault him, I now realize that your verbosity makes you a liability.” Reaching into his cloak, M’Lak withdrew a silver pulse needler. “It is not your fault really, but mine. I should have never expected you to be honorable, it is just not in you.”
The soft crackle of the gun’s discharge was lost by the sound of a descending shuttle.
Zax moved to the empty lounge area at the far end of the terminal and looked through the plasticine viewing bubble that was adjacent to the gate’s closed portal. Looking up, he could see the huge, shiny, spherical bulk of a shuttle descending on contragrav assisted ion rockets. Although the shuttle was over a hundred meters away, its sheer expansiveness made it appear that it was just outside of the boarding gates. This was just the cargo shuttle, however, Zax was impressed at its sleek design and polished surface. Currently its passenger gangplank was sealed shut, but the cargo hatch was open. A huge contragrav conveyor belt was protruding from the open hatchway, like some grotesque tongue, as it belched out metric tons of materials from the ship’s belly.
I could probably fit all of Last Town in that maw! Zax thought.
This would be the first time he had ever been into space and he should have been excited, but he felt unmoved. Too much had happened to him within too short a time, for this moment to have its proper impact on his psyche. Subconsciously, his hand drifted towards the bulge in his armpit. The itch had long since subsided, but it felt to him as though he was carrying a kilogram of weight beneath each arm.
One of the last things he did before going to the spaceport was to seek out and find a reputable plastic surgeon. Zax had her create a skin flap beneath each arm. By simply grafting some pseudo skin below and across the armpit, she created a small pocket, just large enough to hold the data discs in one and the odd sphere in the other.
Checking his coat pocket, he fingered the thin semi- transparent plasticine sheet that was his ticket and next to it, he felt the bogus ID card Lieutenant Fuller had given him. Zax also made a copy of the section with his father’s image from the data cube from the safety deposit box. It was that image; the thieves had stolen in the rucksack. Zax fervently hoped that what his father said about traders honoring their debts was true and not just the ramblings of a Blitzo addict.
Zax finally realized, once he boarded the Windjammer, there was no coming back. Even though life on Bright was not exactly paradise, it was the only home he had known. It wasn’t easy leaving everything he knew behind. He could only hope that the Rapture would maintain her schedule and had not been diverted, as trade ships so often were. If it turned out that she was not where he expected her to be, then he could be in serious trouble. Most frontier worlds did not take kindly to illegal immigration, Imperial citizen or not. If he could not access his Imperial Bank trust fund, then he could be stuck on a Plato work farm for a very long time.
“Why hello there, young man. I s
ee I caught you just in time,” a voice suddenly said behind him.
Zax whirled around with a start. He had been so absorbed in his thoughts that he failed to hear that someone had come up behind him. Reflectively, he had taken a defensive stance, then relaxed, as he saw it was the tattooed man who had come to his aid previously.
“Hey relax! It is just me,” M’Lak said, moving his hands in a calming motion.
Letting out a pent-up breath, Zax gave an embarrassed smile. “Sorry, I guess I’m still a little on edge. Good to see you again. What brings you back this way? Or are you scheduled to take passage on this tradership also?”
“Oh no, I was just looking for you. I have something for you,” M’Lak replied. As the man raised his right hand, Zax’s eyes went wide in surprise as he saw the rucksack and collapsed floater he was holding.
“Wow!” Zax exclaimed. “Where did you find that?” Don’t tell me you confronted those two thugs on my account!”
“No…no…nothing like that! I’m not that brave. I just thought that, since it was sorta my fault that they got away, the least I could do was to follow them out of the terminal, just to see what they might be up to, you know what I mean? Well anyway, about ten meters or so outside the terminal, I saw this rucksack just lying on the tarmac. I figure they were too concerned about getting to the hospital to worry about the pack. I simply picked it up and came looking for you, hoping you hadn’t already boarded. I hope everything is still there.