by Skyler Grant
"We could ambush them first. No threat, no fuss," Kara said.
"Somebody has to do things right. Might as well be us," Taki said.
Mara said, "Launch me in that stealth shuttle of yours after we enter the atmosphere. I'll set down and if they have any snipers or heavy weapons up on those hills, they sure as hell won't when I'm done."
"I'll go with you," Tamara said.
Taki raised a brow. "You? In a fight?"
Jinx cleared her throat. "Tamara can hold her own."
Mara gave Tamara a thoughtful look and nodded. "I'm good with that and can use the support."
"If it is an ambush, things are going to get bloody for whoever is at the meet. You want me along there," Kara said.
"And you'll wear body armor this time. We're done patching holes in you," Tamara sternly told Quinn.
"I'm not the only one around here that gets shot," Quinn grumbled, but nodded and looked towards the others. "Jinx, I want you to stay on the ship, no putting yourself in the line of fire in your condition. Dela, I want you at the controls. If you see something coming at the Bliss that you don't think she can handle, or we get ourselves dead, you hit the sky and get out of here."
"I'll rig up some explosives. They try anything we'll have some surprises" Taki said.
It wasn't the most detailed of plans, but it played to their strengths. It would have to do. Dinner soon broke apart and everyone went their own way to get ready.
An hour later they hit atmosphere. Quinn took his time before landing. Sensors were being jammed—another bad sign—and lingering gave him a chance to at least visually inspect the meeting point.
Two armored transport vehicles were already on site and there was no sign of the ship they'd come from. Either they had an operation on the planet’s surface or they were taking extra care not to face an ambush too.
Quinn took another half hour before making the landing. It didn't just make them look more legitimately cautious, it gave Mara and Tamara time to get to the surface in the Tango.
Quinn stuck to his pistol. It was the weapon he was comfortable with. Armored padding beneath his clothes meant he could take a few shots before the weave gave out.
Kara as expected had raided her weapons collection. A dozen grenades hung from her belt and Quinn didn't quite know how she made three rifles work, but somehow she did.
The mate of a Yek was constantly turned on in their company, one of the more awkward bits of having Kara as a member of the Centauri. Normally it was just a bit awkward, like being a teenager again. Going into a tense, dangerous situation it was really weird.
3
The atmosphere was breathable, barely, although a high iron content gave the air a faint odor that reminded Quinn of blood. Having a cargo truck in the hold had proved useful in the past, so they'd kept one around and took it to the meet.
By the time they'd arrived six figures were waiting for them, including a weasel-looking man with a prominent nose. He’d originally given them the job. The five bearded and muscled sorts with him were obviously his backup.
Quinn kept a hand near his pistol as he stepped out of the truck, and Kara had one of her rifles lowered but towards the ground slightly.
"Nose. Wasn't sure you'd show up," Quinn said.
"Those colonists said you pulled it off. Just dove out of the sky right on top of them and flew away before they even had to fire a shot to help out. With flying like that, a man shouldn't have to take a job like this," Nose said.
"There we agree and you are welcome to throw in a bonus for my exceptional skills," Quinn said.
Nose spit off to the side, wrinkling his face is distaste. "Air here. Terrible. Just the two of you is it?"
"Might be more keeping watch in case things go south and you do something you shouldn't."
"Nah," Nose said with a shake of his head. "Weren't another soul left on that ship of yours. Just the two of you all on your lonesome. Throw down your guns and we'll let you walk away from this. Play nice, it might not even be in slave shackles."
"Nose, I'm just going to say this once. We're new around here, but that doesn't mean we don't have our teeth. We did good work for you and you're going to pay us what we're owed, and despite your ill intentions of the day we’ll maybe do business again with us picking the meeting spot," Quinn said.
Nose rolled his eyes. "Tough-guy act only works when you've got the muscle. You're more outnumbered than you know, Captain. Should have taken my offer. Boys? Keep the girl alive if you can."
Kara got a shot off before any of Nose's muscle, the force of the round from the massive rifle sending the man spinning with a massive hole in his shoulder to crash on the rocky ground.
Quinn had his pistol out and snapped a shot off at Nose.
A sniper round hit one of the guards in the face, exploding his skull. Fire from some sort of energy rifle began to smash one of the armored vehicles.
Quinn had the breath knocked out of him as a round took him in the stomach, driving him stumbling onto his back. There was the sound of an explosion, one close, and then several more in the distance.
Quinn pushed himself back up, snapping off a shot at one of the guards still on his feet and raising a rifle towards Kara.
The last guard tried to take cover behind one of the armored vehicles. A mistake he discovered quickly enough as Kara crouched and fired, blowing one of his feet off and dropping the man hard. He took a bullet in the head a moment later.
Only Nose was still standing and he'd dropped his gun. Quinn stepped forward and delivered an uppercut that crunched bone and cartilage, sending Nose sprawling with that most prominent feature of his face gushing blood.
One of the armored vehicles was streaming smoke. Kara advanced on the other, firing off several shots as she moved, each round hitting the armor in the same place and finally penetrating it as she got near. Grabbing one of the grenades from her waist she flicked the pin and shoved it through the hole before pulling back. Another muffled thud and the vehicle shook.
"We're clear and only a little battered. Five down and our contact still alive," Quinn said through his wristcomm.
"Clear now. We'd missed a sniper up here, sorry, Kara. Three down," Mara said.
"Clear at the ship. Taki took a bad hit, but Jinx is with her. Six down," Dela said.
Fourteen dead over a four hundred and eighty credit remaining balance. Of course, it was about more than that. The ship would have fetched them a tempting bonus, plus whatever the crew would have brought at a slave market.
"They've got a ship or a base somewhere. See if you can find it, Mara. We need to know if more disagreeable folk will come looking for revenge," Quinn said, as he walked over to Nose.
He’d crawled over to one of the vehicles, his back against the tire.
"You broke my fucking nose," Nose said.
"I offered you a chance to do things right. I was very business-like. Wasn't I, Kara?" Quinn asked, as he knelt beside Nose.
"Model of professionalism, stud," Kara said. She was busy stripping the bodies of the fallen of anything valuable and loading it onto the truck. Weapons mostly that could be sold later.
Quinn noticed now the wound in her side, already closed. That must have been the sniper shot Mara mentioned. Kara was a fast healer. In a human the wound would have broken a few ribs. Quinn knew that Yek had their important organs protected by a series of armored internal shells.
"You going to kill me?" Nose asked.
"Well, that is the question, isn't it? I mean, me? I'm normally a forgiving man. But you betrayed a deal, tried to steal my ship, probably wanted to sell my wives into slavery," Quinn said.
"And we hold grudges," Kara said helpfully. "Stud, if you want someone to do the torturing to death, I'm ready. I love the torturing to death bit."
"You know what they say. Happy wives, happy life. I've got an awful lot of reasons to kill you and not a one so far to let you walk away," Quinn told Nose conversationally.
"Full six h
undred. We'll call the original deposit a bonus," Nose said.
"Kara? You think your life is worth six hundred?" Quinn asked.
"I'd call that an absolutely insulting valuation. I'm real angry about it," Kara said, yanking an armored vest off a corpse and adding it to the pile, only pausing to kick Nose along the way.
"Eight hundred. It's all I have, all we got for the job. Yours," Nose said.
"Hand over the money. No tricks now," Quinn said.
Nose tossed over a pouch. Quinn counted out the content, eight hundred and five.
"No ship, no base. They must have gotten dropped off," Mara reported over the comm.
"That right, Nose?" Quinn asked.
"They're in orbit. Just preparing to set down," Nose said.
They weren't. A sensor jammer must have been one of the vehicles, but there hadn't been one in orbit. Quinn had gotten a sweep around the planet coming in.
"Man is lying to me. What did we say we were going to do, if he lied to me?" Quinn said.
"Shoot off something he won't miss too much. Like a finger, toe, his dick?" Kara said.
"You never said that!" Nose said hastily, pushing himself harder back against the wheel.
"No? Did I say that?" Quinn asked Kara.
"You did, if it means I get to shoot something off him."
"Honest, you didn't," Nose said.
"Fair enough, I guess. But I have now. Lie to me again and I let my lovely wife go with her instincts. When are they coming back for you?"
"Sixteen hours. They had a delivery to make," Nose said, stumbling over the words in trying to get them out fast.
"Now Nose, I know you're a little distracted, but you need to listen to me. Like I said, we're new here, and rightly speaking you should die for what you've done, but I don't like to kill any man once he's thrown down his gun. And we already spilled a lot of blood today," Quinn said.
Kara said cheerfully, "I'm all for it, though. Sixteen hours is a lot of time. We don’t want to be guarding him all that time."
"We're not going to do that. We're going to leave him chained up in one of those vehicles. We'll even leave a bottle of water and a med patch," Quinn said.
"And why would we do a fool thing like that?" Kara asked, no longer playing a part now, there was a dangerous glint of disapproval in her eye.
"Field of bodies doesn't tell anyone anything and we're leaving a message with Nose here. We do good work, we get what we're owed, and if you screw us over we screw you over harder," Quinn said.
"Bosses aren't going to like that. You don't mess with the families," Nose said.
"And you don't mess with mine," Quinn said. "You had the cash in your pocket, Nose, I know what that means. They gave you what you needed to screw us over, but they left the call to you. This many dead? It’s coming back on somebody and that somebody is in front of me. Doubt I'm doing you a kindness."
"I can lock him up. I'm good to break a few bones too, right?" Kara asked.
"Make that certain I'm not doing you a kindness. Make it quick, Kara. I want us out of this system in two hours," Quinn said.
4
It was Kara's night in Quinn's bed and nothing stoked the alien's sex drive quite like a good fight. Quinn lost track somewhere in the middle of things, but he thought they wound up going six rounds. By the time they were done he was fairly sure he'd dislocated a shoulder, and a knee, and would be sporting a lot of bruises come morning. Kara was strong, strong enough Quinn was thinking of reinforcing some of the furnishings in his quarters.
Dela had taken night shift in the pilot's seat and brought Bliss to Cenerex.
It was an ugly world, good for agriculture but ninety percent of the surface was some sort of swampland. The landing platforms of the spaceport, spindly legged constructions rising out of the mud and the muck, wouldn't accommodate larger ships. They looked like they might tip over at any moment, and some had.
Everyone gathered in the cargo bay before heading out. Most had some sort of plans and were casually dressed accordingly. Mara was completely unrecognizable in an outfit of mud-stained greens and grays that obscured her beauty and made her indistinguishable from the locals.
"Nose would’ve talked, so no doubt we just pissed off somebody somewhere, and I don't want anybody leaving the ship without a transponder. Good if we know where everyone is headed too, just in case," Quinn said.
Melody was passing out transponders. They didn't look like much, tiny black rectangles with a recessed button. Silent until triggered, they'd send out a powerful distress call and location data to the ship.
"I'm going to find the local arms dealer and see if we can do some trading for what we got," Kara said.
"Got a plan for that? We don't know anyone here?" Taki asked.
"I'm a Yek. Anyone that trades in guns for a living is going to find me."
Quinn thought that was probably true. While he'd never encountered one of Kara's people before, he'd since learned they had a reputation.
"I'm going to be hitting the bars and looking for new work," Quinn said.
"I've got a client," Tamara said. She was certainly making no attempt to look like a local, a black and green strappy dress of the latest in Core fashion.
"Someone needs a lawyer here?" Taki asked.
"People need lawyers everywhere and I'm one of the best. Just a consultation, a local wants me to review their work and see if they might have missed anything," Tamara said.
"We getting a cut of that?" Quinn asked.
"Personal, not ship or family business. If you want to talk about shares of such, I'm open to the discussion so long as it applies to everyone."
It was generous of her, actually. Nobody else on the ship had skills nearly as valuable as hers. It made Quinn suspicious, and he'd quickly come to appreciate Tamara's keen instincts for coming out ahead. That she was loyal to the family he didn't question, the whole thing had been her idea after all, but that didn't mean she didn't have an angle.
"I like that idea," Jinx said.
"Twenty percent to the family fund?" Tamara asked.
It was an account Tamara managed. Quinn had control of the ship fund.
"Twelve and a half to the family and the same to the ship," Quinn said.
Tamara's lips quirked into a smile. The lawyer in Tamara never smiled unless she meant to. Quinn was pretty sure he'd just given her exactly what she wanted. He was damned if he could see how.
"Done!" Tamara said brightly.
"I'm taking Jinx and we're going to try buying us some kind of meat that isn't fish, and to fill the rest of our provisions," Taki said.
"Here?" Kara asked with a grimace. "We're going to get some kind of frog, I just know it."
"Snake," Dela said with a yawn. "Major staple of the local diet. They grow big enough here to eat people whole. Just pop out of the water and swallow up a farmer and are on their way. I was reading up on the place last night. Anyways, if I go out, it’s just for a drink, I'm exhausted."
"I'm simply getting a read of the environment," Mara said.
"I'd really like to know just what it is you do," Quinn said.
Mara grinned. "I'm really not going to tell you. Sorry, I insist on my secrets."
"I could take a few guesses. And you've not been very respectful of mine," Tamara said with a steady look.
Mara met her gaze. "You're a threat and they deserved that warning. I expect, if you think I'm the same, you'll do what you think is best."
Dela yawned again. "Is it wrong I kind of want her to join the family just to see who gouges the other’s eyes out first?"
It was one of the odder things of their relationship. Tamara and Mara were at each other’s throats a lot, yet there was no stronger advocate for getting Mara into the Centauri. Quinn had decided that Tamara just valued competence that much, even when it challenged her own agenda, and she wanted it around.
"Bare-handed? She might have me. The muscular programming is first-rate," Mara said.
"Yo
u flatter me, dear. Mine was never meant to make me a killer," Tamara said.
"Neither was mine," Mara said coldly.
Melody finished passing out the transponders and put the tray away. "If I step out at all it’s just going to see the local mechanics. We picked up some damage and I want to get that thruster working before we lift."
"Sounds good. Stay safe everyone," Quinn said, as the gathering broke up and they headed out.
The air outside was hot, humid, and smelled so heavily of rot it would make you nauseous if you inhaled too deeply. The locals were used to it, but several visitors leaving the docks were wearing breathing masks.
Despite the miserable environment, it was a busy port. The organics growing there were useful in a lot of medications, and vendors were set up along the walkway into the city and offering samples and prices.
With a war breaking out there were probably worse trade items than medical herbs, but unfortunately everybody knew that. What was a steal if you beat the crowd became a world of shrinking margins when everybody knew. Still, most were taking their chance.
Quinn followed the smaller flow of crew heading into the city.
The buildings had a uniform look, bricks made from the local mud and forming structures that tended to be round with large oval doorways. After the cargo trade came the businesses catering to those visiting from the stars.
Sad, dilapidated drug dens and brothels, most advertising their services with garish signs and supposedly tempting prices.
Quinn eventually found a bar, "The Swamp Hole”, which was getting more traffic than most and he followed the crowd inside. A singer on stage belted out notes, a pretty young woman in green and gray who had a little talent. Quinn hadn't come for the music.
In the back room he found it, a commerce board—a holographic display with contract opportunities. They all looked legitimate, which was a shame because the pay for them was insulting. Transporting three tons of cargo to a neighboring system for fifty credits would barely pay for fuel. Passengers wanting to go still further for only a hundred—that wouldn't pay for the fuel either, although if you happened to pick up some cargo headed in the same direction you might be able to cobble together a profitable run.
