Rikas Marauders
Page 131
“It looks fine,” Alice said as she walked into the small hold, a hood pulled over her head and her hair flowing out around the sides, partially obscuring her face. Her look was topped off with decorative glasses that looked a bit ridiculous on the normally staid woman. “Nothing’s going to happen up here. We’re just going to meet a contact and see what he knows. If everything is on the up and up, then we’ll go downworld with the whole team and extract the president. Honestly, you can just leave your whole arm here.”
Alison did her best not to laugh in the Lieutenant Colonel’s face. Alice may be her commanding officer, but if the woman thought she was going to go out onto a Nietzschean space station without her gun-arm, she had another think coming.
To her credit, Alice seemed to take a cue from the expression Alison wore and waved a hand dismissively. “Or take it. Like I said, I don’t expect any trouble, either way.”
Alison had a hard time believing that. If the lieutenant colonel thought that they would just waltz on and off a station that was in enemy hands with no trouble, she was either lying or delusional.
“Will we take the ship down to the surface?” Alison asked, following the other woman out of the bay. “I can have Kor start looking for good surface ports.”
Alice glanced back at her, eyes narrowed. “I’d prefer if we kept comm traffic to a minimum.”
“Querying public databases for surface ports won’t stand out with a ship like this,” Alison countered.
“Fine,” Alice said as the inner airlock door opened.
Alison replied.
The outer airlock cycled open, and Alice stepped out into a circular bay that four other freighters were also snugged up against. Flits and haulers moved about, shifting cargo from stacks piled in the center of the bay to the various ships.
Alison suddenly wondered if they should have set aside some of the cargo in the ship’s holds for transfer onto the station—not that they had anyone to transfer it to.
Stars…I have no idea how this sneaky spy shit works.
Alice was striding purposefully across the bay, the logo for Karl’s Shipping appearing to shift back and forth on the back of the woman’s slightly too-large shipsuit.
Measuring her pace, Alison trailed a meter behind the lieutenant colonel, keeping her eyes peeled and feeling entirely naked without her helmet.
From what she could see, several of the other ships had armed guards, but Alice had said that it would take too long to get the proper permits to walk about the station with armor and weapons.
They were lucky that Fred had stuffed one of the Marauders’ cloaks in his pack, and that it was capable of masking a mech’s EM signature.
Kor had suggested that next time Fred should pack one for everyone, and the two had gotten into a shouting match about whose turn it had been to haul general gear.
In the end, Jenisa had stepped in and separated the two, but Alison knew that their patience was coming to an end. Alice must have known it as well, because even though the shouting had been audible across the whole ship, the lieutenant colonel had not mentioned it at all.
The two women walked out of the bay and down a long corridor that connected the bay to one of the station’s main concourses. From there, Alice summoned a station car. When the roofless automated conveyance arrived, they both settled into the seats and rode in silence the three kilometers to their meeting point.
Alice had given Alison the name of the destination, a diner called ‘The Silver Train’, which was frequented by crews of both interstellar freighters and local insystem rigs.
Alison didn’t know a lot about where freighter crews tended to congregate, but she had never expected it to be at a diner. In the vids, they were always gathering in dimly lit bars, playing games of chance and skill at grimy tables, while getting frisky with the help.
Much to her dismay, when they arrived, the location was nothing more than a regular diner sporting a long seating area and a bar running along one side. Rather than alcohol, pots of coffee—in a dozen different flavors—sat behind the bar. Along with something that Alison thought was alcohol until she realized it was maple syrup.
“Oh yeah,” she said with a grin, all sorrow over not ending up in a seedy bar gone. “I’m getting a full stack and drenching it.”
“Keep it cool, Alison,” the lieutenant colonel said with a scowl.
“Sorry, but do you know the last time I had maple syrup? You’d have to put me down to keep me from ordering that.”
“Well, sit at the bar,” Alice directed. “I don’t want you getting your sticky machine hand all over everything.”
Alison resisted a strong urge to strangle the other woman, but didn’t say a word to her as she turned and gave the barstools a measuring look. They seemed sturdy enough, and several of the less-than-stock humans sitting on them hadn’t crashed to the floor.
She carefully settled onto one of the stools and hit the control to activate the menu, scanning it quickly before deciding on a full stack of blueberry pancakes with the ‘delicious golden’ maple syrup.
“You pick yet?” the woman behind the bar asked as she approached with a coffee cup in hand.
“My food?” Alison asked, taken aback by the woman’s abrupt statement.
“No, your next hair color. Yeah, your food. Coffee?”
“Ummm, sure,” Alison stammered as she glanced at the options arrayed behind the woman. “The Maltese Dark, I guess.”
“Good choice,” the woman grunted and filled the cup she’d set down on the counter.
“Cream?” Alison asked, eliciting a laugh from the woman.
“Not in my coffee. You want to drink watered down tit juice, you can go somewhere else.”
“Uhhh…kay. I’ll have a full stack of the blueberry pancakes topped with the golden maple.”
“Great,” the woman said as she turned away.
A man two seats down from Alison laughed and leant over to whisper, “Meg’s is the only spacer’s joint where the help is coarser than the clientele.”
“I heard that, Bart,” the woman said over her shoulder. “And I’m not the help.”
Bart laughed. “Well, Jill, if you named the place after yourself and not some fictitious ‘Meg’, I’d stop calling you my personal serving girl.”
Jill turned and waved a ladle at Bart. “I’d like to see you call me that. The only way I’m ‘serving’ you is after I chop you up and put you on a plate.”
“Ugh,” Alison grunted at the thought, though Bart seemed unperturbed.
“Yeah, well, what do you call it when you bring me food?” Bart countered. “I’d call that you ‘serving’ me.”
Jill turned away, but muttered loud enough for everyone nearby to hear, “I’ll serve you some spit in your next burger.”
Alison suddenly had an urge to cancel her order, but Bart smiled and shook his head. “She’d never do it. Jill talks a big game, but she’s really a softy. Best food on the Falcon, too.”
“OK,” Alison said, having forgotten what it was like to live as a civilian.
Granted, she’d been seventeen when she was conscripted a decade ago, so heading off to seedy diners wasn’t something she’d ever participated in before the war, and when she was enlisted…well, mechs didn’t get to go carouse with the locals. Following that, she did a stint as one of Stavros’s slaves wi
th even less freedom.
Easy, Alison, it’s just some banter between civilians. They do this all the time. Shit, we do it in the Marauders, too.
Even though she told herself the civilian chatter was no different, it was. There was no concern for rank, no clear boundaries in what could be said to whom, and under what circumstances. Clearly, Jill was the owner, and Bart a customer. That they spoke to one another as equals—and rather crass equals, for that matter—didn’t fit into a paradigm that made sense to Alison.
She took a sip of her coffee while desperately trying to remember how to navigate society as a civilian. The problem was that she hadn’t had a great childhood; it was mostly spent living in refugee camps with her mother and sister. Things there weren’t that different than in the military. There was a hierarchy, consisting mostly of gangs. Once you recognized the colors, it was easy enough to tell who was who.
The coffee turned out to be decent, but not so good that Alison couldn’t have used some cream. Not that she was going to risk Jill’s ire and push for some.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Alice ordering and hoped that maybe the establishment’s surly owner would actually spit in the lieutenant colonel’s food. It only seemed right.
Before long, her pancakes arrived, and she was just tucking into them when a man entered the diner and surveyed the room before ambling over to Alice’s table.
With her augmented, SMI-4 hearing, Alison was able to listen in on the conversation, which turned out to mostly be niceties and discussions of trade routes and shipments.
She assumed that most of the conversation must be taking place over the Link—easily evidenced by the awkward pauses that occurred in their verbal conversation.
As they chatted, a quartet of women entered the diner. Two sat at a table, and the other two settled at the bar on Alison’s left.
She’d seen a variety of people on station that had unique looks, and these four didn’t seem to stand out at first, mostly because of the long hooded cloaks they wore. But as Alison flipped through a few vision modes, trying to get a better look at the newcomers, she could tell they were heavily modded.
Then one pulled her hood back, revealing a hairless, jet-black head. Her eyes were entirely yellow, as were her unsmiling lips.
Their bodies were giving off a variety of EM signatures, and Alison came to the conclusion that their skin was made of some sort of polymer capable of color change and probably bioluminescence.
Barely visible on the forehead of the one that had pushed her hood back was a convoluted symbol that appeared to be some sort of snake…or maybe snakes…twisting about and eating its own tail.
“Ah, crap,” Bart muttered and rose from his stool, tossing a few credit chits onto the counter.
Jill turned and glanced at him, and he gestured at the four women who had just entered on his way out.
“Oh, hey now,” she said to the newcomers with a grim smile. “I don’t want any trouble. I’ll serve you what you want, but please, don’t make any problems.”
“No problems,” the woman who’d pulled her hood back said in a voice that invoked a feeling of oily silk in Alison’s mind. “We just want to have some coffee.”
“Any preference?” Jill asked, her voice carefully moderated.
“Of course,” the woman leaned forward on her elbows, a long yellow tongue sliding out of her lips as she spoke. “Your blackest brew.”
Uh…sounds like a fight to me, she thought to herself, while wondering if the lieutenant colonel had learned such brilliant strategies at OCS, or if she’d picked them up from her favorite vids.
Alison sent back an affirmative response, and then turned back to her pancakes. She folded one of the delicious slices of heaven over and then cut it in half, stuffing first one piece, and then the other in her mouth.
Yes, Your High-and-Mightiness, Alison thought to herself as she turned and dropped her fork on the floor.
“Aw, shit,” she muttered, and bent over to retrieve the utensil, using the opportunity to grab the hem of her cloak and pull it up over her gun-arm.
When she rose, Alison slid off her stool and took a single step, which placed her behind the two women sitting at the bar next to her. She grabbed one’s head with her hand and slammed it down into her coffee cup, while repeating a somewhat less graceful version of the action with her other arm.
The woman on the left managed to shift enough that her head avoided the mug, but the one on the right took the ceramic cup right in the forehead.
“I don’t like your attitude,” Alison said as she stepped back. “I think you and your other two friends should leave.”
The woman who had pulled her hood back turned, blood running down her forehead, and sneered at Alison.
Crap…she does not look intimidated at all.
“Oh you’re gonna get it, bitch.”
Yellow lights began to flow across her face, twisting around her head and converging on the ruined emblem on her forehead. With a single deft move, she pulled off her cloak, revealing her body to be just like her face: jet black and covered in the yellow lights tracing their way across her skin.
“Oh hey! Can you take this outside?” Jill called out as she ran into the back.
Neither woman replied as compartments in the black and yellow woman’s thighs opened up, and she drew out a pair of pistols—or began to, at least.
Alison wasn’t going to wait for the thug to arm herself, and triggered her own cloak’s release, causing it to split in two and fall to the floor.
“You wanna play this game?” Alison asked, pulling her GNR’s barrel free from its sling.
As they’d faced off, the second of the black-skinned women had risen, also freeing herself of her cloak, though Alison noted that the two in the booth hadn’t moved yet.
Then she saw that Alice had a pistol trained on them.
Huh…she’s not completely useless, after all.
“A mech?” the first of the women said, hands not quite on the grips of her pistols as she shook her head in disbelief. “This should be fun.”
Alison gripped her GNR’s barrel like a club. So long as none of her opponents had reinforced armor beneath their skin, they wouldn’t damage the barrel—she hoped.
“You have a strange definition of fun. This isn’t a fight you can win. Take your friends and go. Last warning.”
“Please?” Jill called out from the kitchen doorway, where she was peering around the corner. “Can you not destroy my diner?”
Alison didn’t spare the owner a look. This wasn’t the sort of situation that would diffuse over the risk of a little property damage.
No one in the diner moved, save for a few of the patrons who were backing away into the corners. Then the first woman reached for her pistols, and Alison swung her GNR’s barrel.
It hit her adversary’s left hand, the crunch of bones clearly audible in the quiet room, but that didn’t slow the woman from drawing her other weapon and firing from the hip at Alison.
It was a projectile round, and it hit the SMI-4 in
the stomach, easily deflected by her flow armor skin.
The woman barely had time to look surprised before Alison swung her barrel around and into her enemy’s other wrist, breaking it as well. She cried out in pain, and fell to her knees, just in time for Alison to realize that the other black-skinned woman was aiming a pistol at her head.
Ducking to the side and narrowly avoiding a series of rounds, Alison jabbed her GNR’s barrel at the woman, who also ducked at the exact same moment.
The end of the barrel—which had been originally directed at the woman’s stomach—hit her right in the throat, and with the might of a mech’s arm behind it, proceeded to push through the woman’s throat.
Alison wrenched her gun’s barrel free, and a spray of blood shot out, dousing her left leg. Not bothering to worry about a bit of gore, she drove a knee into the first attacker’s face ensuring that she wouldn’t try anything further.
Looking up, she saw that the final two women were still in the booth, mouths hanging open, staring in horror at their two comrades, one of which was bleeding to death on the floor, while the other writhed in pain.
“You want a piece—” Alison began, when her gaze alighted on the booth where Alice and the contact had been.
Alison found that to be highly unlikely, but at that very moment, rounds tore through the diner’s windows, shredding the booth where Alice and her contact had been sitting.
Before she could even make a move toward the door, the two remaining women had their weapons drawn and aimed at her head.
“Oh, hell no,” she muttered and took two long strides before diving through one of the windows and back onto the concourse.
A hundred meters away, she spotted a light hauler with a chaingun sticking out of the back. It pivoted toward her, and opened fire as she raced across the concourse to duck behind a thick balustrade. She frantically reattached her GNR’s barrel, and initiated a cleaning cycle that used jets of plasma to burn away any obstructions in the end.