“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 into 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.”
“Kill,” the Guild Master replied. “There will be no capturing that one.”
“We will pay three times the dead bounty, but that is up to your people.”
The Guild Master considered the stories. “Two groups. You will need to double the bounty for bringing her back dead, which means six times the value for bringing her back alive, and your person has to lead.”
Levelot, the First of the Seven, reached across the table to palm the agreement on the Guild Master’s tablet.
“Done,” she said.
Planet Devon, Inside the Bar of YukLeet
YukLeet was sitting at the bar enjoying a small alcoholic drink. Nothing that would mess him up, but enough so he was being sociable in his own bar.
No matter if one was a despot or a dictator, one must still play nice with one’s closest followers.
And pretty much anyone who was in his bar was, de facto, either a follower or a potential ally.
He was just about to take another sip of the expensive drink when the front door to the bar area exploded, wood shrapnel showering those inside with splinters. Many threw themselves away from the door and the body that crashed through three of his gambling tables.
YukLeet was about to yell for his bouncer when he recognized that the ramrod which had splintered his bar’s front door was his bouncer.
“Shit!” he grunted, and looked back at the door. A black alien with white hair walked through the now-very-open entrance as two weapons fired at her from the bar.
The alien barely moved when a kinetic round hit her in the side.
That fucking alien was wearing armor!
She pulled two pistols from under her arms and aimed them straight at YukLeet’s head. His eyes grew large and he was about to throw himself on the floor when his brains splattered against the bar’s mirror.
Three more times weapons were fired at the alien. “Keep that shit up,” the alien said as she walked into the room, “and I’ll fuck up your evening so bad the grandchildren of your neighbors will feel it.”
The shooting stopped.
Everyone in the place who hadn’t already run screaming watched as her feet crunched over busted-up furniture to reach YukLeet’s body. Bending down, she grabbed his shoulder and lifted his body to check his head damage. “Yup, terminated.”
She released the dead body, which slumped to the floor, and walked back to the door. The bouncer was shaking his head to clear it as she walked past him.
“The next time the Mistress of the Planet wishes to enter a place, you say yes!” she hissed.
She stopped at the door and looked back at the patrons in the room. “This is the penalty for thinking that politics is where you go to make yourself rich and powerful. This city—this planet in fact—is being cleaned up. If any of you want to have a similar visit from me” she pointed to YukLeet’s dead body, “just continue doing what he did.” She turned and walked out into the night.
Six more times Baba Yaga foun
d her targets. Six more times she killed with extreme prejudice. If there were any who supported the target, she warned them once before she killed them as well.
She was trying to keep this civil, or at least she thought she was.
“How the hell,” Baba Yaga whispered from a building across the street from the final target, “am I supposed to get into that fortress?”
“How about knocking?” ADAM asked over her suit’s headphones. “It worked so well at the bar.”
Baba Yaga snorted. “I’m fresh out of bouncers to throw through the door,” she answered, studying the solid stone building. “I’d really hate to pop into the Etheric and come out in a strange building where I could get a faceful of stone.”
“Do you have any options?” ADAM asked.
“None that I can see,” she answered as she looked up and down the street. “We could try to draw him out and hit him when the outer gates open.”
“I have hacked his inside video. There are at least fifty additional personnel inside, of which approximately twenty-two are guards. The rest look like staff and perhaps family,” ADAM countered.
“Fucking family,” she hissed. “I hate getting family involved. Why do these pricks always have families?”
“Because procreation is a natural desire for aliens of all species?” the AI answered.
Bethany Anne sighed and looked up into the darkness. “Shinigami, release a three-pound puck to take out the front door.”
“Done,” the ship’s EI answered. “When do you wish it to arrive?”
Baba Yaga put up her M1911As and locked them into their holsters, then pulled out her Jean Dukes. After popping her neck, she walked toward the main building some seventy-five yards away.
“Now would be good,” she told the EI, and two seconds later a massive concussion blew out the front gates of the fortress.
Baba Yaga went to sonar to see what was going on behind the smoke and dust that was billowing out of the compound. There were three bodies lying in an open area behind the doors.
One of them was small. Baba Yaga’s eyes narrowed as she strode through the street, somewhat covered in dust herself.
That was when her helmet HUD showed a rocket heading toward her.
12
QBBS Meredith Reynolds
Stephen walked into his personal sanctuary. In his quarters he had three rooms besides the master bedroom: a living room, a long dining room for larger parties, and his kitchen.
There was also a door which opened into a dark thirty-foot-long hallway. The walls were rough, but the floor was as smooth as polished glass.
Jennifer had taken one look at him and given him a hug. “I’ve no idea what to do for my liege,” he told her, his voice softly stirring her hair.
She held him for a few moments. “Tell her what you are thinking,” she replied. “Bethany Anne is in there somewhere. Speak to her, not Baba Yaga.”
He held the embrace for a few more minutes before kissing her forehead and stepping away, walking through his personal hallway to his sanctum in quiet contemplation.
Over the years Jennifer had finally realized that her man needed to feel isolated. It had been such a huge component of his life before Bethany Anne came that subconsciously he still sought it out in trying times.
So one year Jennifer had made a request of the Empress, explaining what she thought Stephen needed and why.
Three days later Stephen had been sent on a mission to the planet Yoll for two weeks to support Kael-ven, and Jennifer had been told to pack up. She needed to step out while the additions to their home were made.
When Stephen came back, Jennifer had placed flower petals on the floor to lead him to the new door, through the hallway beyond, and into the room behind the metal door at the end.
The petals stopped at the door. Inside, where Stephen had expected to find her, he instead found a note which read:
There are men who know war, and there are men who know peace. There are men who know that peace sometimes comes through war, but need a place to gather themselves in times of crisis. This is your sanctum. I will keep it for you, and know that every time you come out I will be waiting for you.
Each time he came out, she was either in the house or she had lit a candle in the living room and left a love note with information as to where she was.
Either physically or emotionally, she was always waiting for him.
This time she had sent him to his sanctum to ponder his heart.
And his next steps.
Inside his room was a table which had space for two chairs. The top was glass, which he used as a large tablet to gather information when he wanted access to the computers or the EIs or AIs in the system.
Sometimes the glass remained dark and Stephen would work on art, typically the calligraphy he had practiced centuries before.
The first time he had created a love letter to Jennifer she ruined it with her tears as she sat on the couch.
Even now the tear-stained parchment hung, framed, in their washroom.
He considered what he might say to the woman to whom he owed everything.
He smiled as he remembered telling Gabrielle of the woman for the first time: Bethany Anne, who had boxed his ears and called him a fucking moron.
He had never once regretted giving his allegiance to the young woman. He wondered how he could have failed her so completely.
He sighed and walked to a wooden dresser as tall as he and about a foot deep. It had twelve drawers with different parchment types on the bottom, and eighteen drawers for inks from plants all over the system.
Then there were another twelve drawers of pens and nibs.
He had purchased fourteen through the decades from three humans who had brought them through the gate from Earth.
He pulled out the drawer on the top right and lifted a dark onyx pen. Closing that drawer, he went down three rows and left two columns to find his nibs and grabbed two of those.
Down one row and another two columns to the left he pulled out ink. Finally, three rows down he opened a drawer which held parchment, but it wasn’t quite right. Closing that drawer, he opened the one to the right and selected five pieces before he closed it and walked to his table.
After setting up his pen he opened the ink and laid down a plate and sponge.
“Meredith, would you drop the lights to twenty percent?”
“Certainly, Stephen,” she replied and the hidden lights in the ceiling decreased their intensity.
He dipped his instrument and started to write.
My dearest Queen, my dearest friend,
It is with a heavy heart that I seek to understand how I have failed you in this moment of your greatest need.
Time is a two-edged sword for those of us who live long. It can help us gain perspective, provides options to attain great wealth, and allows us to see generational projects through to their completion.
Then it slices us open to bleed our patience dry, overwhelming our capabilities to provide protection and safety to those closest and dearest without simultaneously dissolving compassion.
We are left with the raw desire to accomplish the final solution, believing the end always justifies the means.
And the person who started with good intentions is now the personification of the punishment they seek to deliver, without the kindness which initially tempered their judgments and their actions.
Leaving in the end the essence of what you believed you must do, and never allowing yourself to come back.
The means become your only solution, and that is your new identity.
Whether you choose to return to us, my Queen, or stay as the avatar, know that I am, and will always be, your man to command and direct.
He signed it with the swirls and marks as he had used five hundred years in the past.
Stephen Nacht, brother to Michael, honor bound to Bethany Anne Nacht.
“Meredith?” He spoke softly in the dim room.
“Yes?”
&
nbsp; “Please make a digital copy of this document and send it to TOM and ADAM. Have them read it and choose when it would be best to deliver it to my Queen.”
“I will, Stephen,” she replied.
He sat there rereading his note, but eventually he sighed, cleaned up his calligraphy equipment, and placed it all back in its proper places.
He looked from the simple bed in the corner to the bookcase with a few treasured books he had been able to acquire over the years and chewed his lip. “Lights off, Meredith,” he said aloud as he opened the heavy metal door. The lights in his room dimmed, but the lights along the hall floor glowed enough to show him the way.
This time when he left his sanctum he found both the lit candle and Jennifer resting on the couch next to it.
She was her own letter, letting him know whose heart she cherished.
He walked into their bedroom and pulled the sheets down on their bed before returning to the living room.
He had never deserved her, but he always used his pitiful efforts to show his appreciation. He knelt next to her, sliding his arms under her body and picking her up slowly.
He carried her gently through the living room and moved quietly to their bed, where he laid her tenderly down on her side.
Bending over, he kissed her once again on the forehead and reached up to move the hair off her face, then pulled the sheets up to her shoulders.
She was a little warm-natured, but still preferred the soft weight of the sheet as she slept.
Moments later the home’s lights went down and he slid in from the other side.
She rolled over and snuggled up, placing her head on his chest.
Stephen, however, couldn’t sleep. He wondered where his liege was, and if Bethany Anne would come back to them.
Or would she have done something so heinous that she couldn’t live with herself?
Planet Devon
The lights around the buildings made it easy to see. The available darkness made the chemical fire of the missile erupting out of the back very easy to see as well.
Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Set Three: Books 15-21, Never Submit, Never Surrender, Forever Defend, Might Makes Right, Ahead Full, Capture Death, Life Goes On (Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Sets Book 3) Page 127