by Logan Jacobs
“All in a day’s work.” I smiled and shoved open the escape hatch.
As soon as it opened, the ladder extended automatically down to the ground. I half-slid down it, and when I reached the earth, I exhaled and looked for the best route to leave the scene. To my right, there were mostly empty ship docks, but the shipyard was swarming with people to my left.
There was no point trying to avoid the crowd. It would be easier to blend in with more people, for one thing, and besides, I needed to go deeper into the city to find Leon Cotranis. I headed toward the crowd and the shipyard exit.
I had successfully made it three ship-lengths away when I heard it.
“Halt or be shot,” a robotic voice said behind me.
So far, Thage was not my favorite city ever.
Chapter 6
I kept my hands at my sides so I wouldn’t seem suspicious, and then I turned around to face another Dominion soldier.
“Reports of shots fired,” the Dominion android said. “Citizen, did you witness any such reports?”
“No, sirree.” I whistled. “Shots fired, huh? Gee whiz. That’s bad. I hope you find whoever would do such a thing in this peaceful little--”
I was interrupted by a woman from a small ship beside us. She chucked a suitcase of clothes out the loading doors, and it busted open in the street at our feet. The man beside her shouted back, and I wanted to tell him he had already lost. After all, it was his clothes busted open in the street, not hers. The curses that they exchanged didn’t seem like they would let up anytime soon, so I turned my attention back to the android.
“Like I was saying, this peaceful little city deserves better than shots fired for no good reason. Good luck.”
“You heard no shots fired? It happened on this street.” The soldier sounded skeptical, for an android.
“Oh, I heard them, yes,” I said quickly. “You asked if I witnessed them, so you’ll have to understand my confusion.”
“Where did you hear them come from?”
I pointed to the grade 4 transport, now medical ship 4812. I placed my hand over my chest and leaned closer to the android.
“It’s just really terrible, you know,” I sighed. “Shots fired on a beautiful hot afternoon like this.”
The android raised its hand to its ear and relayed my message. As soon as they boarded Grith’s ship, they would see the sparking bodies, and enough of them should swarm it that I could make my escape in the chaos.
“Did you see anyone run away after the shots ceased?” the android asked again.
“I mean, everybody was running away. You know, from the gunfire.”
“Did you see anyone dressed in red?”
I shook my head.
“No red caps? No red jackets?”
“He means the ULF,” Honey Bee chimed softly. “They think the Unified Liberation Fighters are responsible.”
That was fantastic news for me. The Dominion was always eager to blame the ULF for any problems of violence in their territories, and I was happy to throw the blame on them too, if it threw the Dominion off my scent. After all, it wasn’t like the rebel red caps were innocent of violent tactics.
“You know, actually, I think I did see a couple red jackets,” I told the android. “I didn’t know they were important, but I think I saw them run off that way.”
I waved in the direction that I didn’t want to go.
The android gave a stiff nod and relayed my message again through his earpiece. While he waited for a response, I gave a little salute and turned to go. I made it almost a dozen steps before the android called after me again.
“I need your name, witness,” the Dominion soldier said.
“Leon Cotranis,” I lied, but I didn’t turn around.
“Remove glasses for confirmation scanning, Leon Cotranis,” the android continued.
I had to give the androids credit for one thing. They were persistent little fuckers. I glanced at the man and woman still arguing in front of the small ship next to us, and I looked ahead at the throng of people getting off the transport vessel just in front of me.
“It’s trying to scan our ocular region,” Honey Bee warned.
“I figured,” I muttered.
I wasn’t the only one with sunglasses on this sun-soaked planet, but mine were the best-looking. I shrugged. I couldn’t help that I had more style than the rest of these assholes, even if it meant my shades made me seem suspicious.
The android started to repeat the command. I didn’t stick around to hear it, and instead, I zagged to the right and disappeared into the crowd getting off the transport ship. I heard the android call something after me, but I doubted even the Dominion would fire into a crowd of its own citizens to stop me.
I also wasn’t about to slow down and find out. As soon as I was in the middle of the crowd, I matched my pace to blend into the rest of the walkers, grabbed an older woman’s luggage, and offered her my arm. She smiled and accepted the offer, and we walked together until we reached a passenger shuttle to take us out of the shipyard.
I glanced over my shoulder, but I didn’t see the android who had tried to stop me, but there was a cluster of dark blue back around Grith’s ship, and I guessed it was the Dominion reinforcements come to inspect the crime scene. Still, just in case the lone android decided to go lone ranger, I hopped on the passenger shuttle beside the older woman.
“If you don’t mind,” I told her with a grin.
She shook her head, and I realized we must not speak the same language. But some things were universal, so when she smiled, I figured I was golden. The passenger shuttle took on a few more people with their luggage, and then we were flying over the ground toward the shipyard exit.
The shipyard had been busy, but the city of Thage itself was swarming with activity. As soon as we crossed into the city, there was hardly any standing room. Most of the buildings were low right by the shipyard, so I could see past them all the way to the mountains. Even the mountains were the same orange-gold as the rest of the desert planet.
I glanced in the opposite direction and saw that eventually, the low buildings gave rise to skyscrapers, but there must have been a city ordinance against the use of any color besides desert orange-gold. The skyscrapers just looked like extensions of the desert mountains.
On every side of me, people shoved their way past each other wherever they needed to go, and food vendors used loudspeakers to advertise their goods over the roar of the mob. I wrinkled my nose. The savory spices of the food were almost enough to drown out the smell of garbage in the air, but not quite.
Still, it was a perfect place to lose a tail, so I helped the older woman off the shuttle with her luggage, and she headed out into the crowd. I saw her elbow one man who got in her way and step on another man’s toes when he didn’t get out of her path fast enough. Thage looked to be every man and woman for themselves.
I rolled my eyes behind my shielding glasses. If Grith wanted the Skyhawk so badly, he could have been a little more specific about where Leon Cotranis had last been spotted. Somewhere in the whole metropolis of Thage wasn’t exactly helpful for a city this big.
But there was one place I could always count on for information in a big city, and that was the steam rooms. I hadn’t been to a planet yet that didn’t have steam rooms in their big cities, so I doubted Thage would be an exception. I hadn’t showered on my way to Ineocca since water was too precious to waste on the ship, and I could use a little refresh before I tracked down Leon.
Besides, the best way to find someone in a big city was to go to wherever the gossip was, and steam rooms had that in spades.
The passenger shuttle was automated, so I didn’t even have to kick out a driver. I just hopped into the front of the craft and looked around the control panel. After a few quick keystrokes, I disabled the automation and took control of the shuttle for myself. I wasn’t about to push my way through the crowd when I could just ride over them.
I let Honey Bee scan the dir
ectory of locations in the shuttle’s computer system. When she found it, the coordinates of the closest steam rooms popped up on the screen, so I set the course and took off above the crowd.
The steam rooms were in a slightly less crowded part of the city but only because it was a more expensive area of town. The richer some folks were, the less they wanted to dirty their feet on the same roads us commoners walked. That was fine with me, since it also meant less police presence, so I powered down the shuttle in a parking spot right out in front, and headed inside.
The first thing I smelled was the sweet steam from the sauna rooms and the fainter scent of clean linens. I smiled at the attendant who looked bored out of her skull.
“Shower, steam, or both?” she sighed.
“How busy are you today?” I asked. I needed to go wherever the most gossip would be.
“Showers are pretty full.” She shrugged. “It’s too hot for most people to want steam.”
I nodded. Showers would be better anyway, since my shielding glasses wouldn’t have to work as hard to release the extra heat from my skull.
“Shower, then,” I told the attendant. “And a locker for my things.”
The only bad thing about steam rooms was that I couldn’t bring my weapons with me, not even to the showers, so I’d have to play carefully while I was here.
“Come this way,” the attendant ordered as she showed me to the locker room and gave me a pre-loaded lock for my compartment.
As soon as she was gone, I reconfigured the lock to the combination Honey Bee told me was most secure. I stashed my clothes, cash, and weapons in the locker and activated the alarm on the lock. When I wrapped a clean towel around my waist, I headed to the showers.
I passed two women coming out of the showers, and they both smiled at me. I gave them both a cheeky salute but kept going. The shower room opened out in front of me like a tropical paradise. Blue and silver tiles shimmered every way I turned, and water poured down from spouts in the ceiling like waterfalls all along both sides of the long room. The middle of the room was studded with countless soaking tubs. I exhaled, and so did the vents in my shielding glasses. The showers were warm, but they were cooler than the actual steam rooms would have been.
“We gonna be okay there, Honey Bee?” I asked quietly.
“If we don’t take too long,” she responded.
I forced myself to focus as I moved toward an empty stretch of waterfall. The showers were almost exclusively populated by women today, and it was hard to remember I was there for a reason. The light reflected off the blue and silver tiles onto their bodies, and the water sliding off their bare skin damn near glowed.
No one in the showers gave too much thought to the man with the shielding glasses on. As long as nobody tried to bring weapons past the lockers, the steam rooms had a very look-the-other-way attitude.
I was having a hard time looking any way but at the blue-haired woman in the soaking tub in front of me. Some other women in the showers were more shy and had on small swimsuits in the roomful of strangers. But this blue-haired woman wore nothing at all, and her damp hair fell down the slope of her bare breasts like liquid jhozium.
She was on the arm of some big-faced asshole in the tub, and an almost as sexy dark-haired woman was on his other arm. I’d seen enough crime bosses in my day to know that he might have the information I was looking for. I just needed to get him to talk.
I showered quickly, grabbed my towel, used it to dry off my sunglasses, and then wrapped it around my waist. When my shades were dry, the vents hissed to release their extra steam and then fell quiet again. Then I sat on a bench two tubs away from the blue-haired woman and looked up at her again.
She smiled. I saw her whisper something to the two other people in the tub with her. The man beside her looked unhappy, but she just glared at him and stood up out of the tub, and the woman on the man’s other arm cozied up closer to him.
The blue-haired woman strode over to me, and I let my gaze wander over her bare skin. A perk of always wearing sunglasses.
“See something you like?” she asked. She sat down beside me on the bench.
“Oh, I see all sorts of things I like.” I grinned as my eyes drifted down from her nipples, to her taut stomach, and then settled on the shaved lips of her pussy. “Like the prettiest woman in here deciding to come sit next to me.”
“I saw you staring,” she confided, even though there was no way she could actually see my eyes past my sunglasses. “I just thought you should know, I’m spoken for.”
“And you came all the way over here just to tell me that?” I angled myself on the bench to get a better look at her. “Seems like a mighty big trip just to tell me you’re not available.”
“Baj doesn’t take kindly to his women being looked at,” she said as she leaned closer to me.
“Maybe he should pick uglier women to take baths with,” I snickered. “Instead of the most beautiful creature I have ever seen.”
“Baj loves having the best,” she purred.
“Well, maybe Baj should realize what century we’re in,” I answered. “Looks to me like you’re the one calling the shots, anyway.”
“Smart man.” The blue-haired woman smiled. “He likes to think he runs his little world, but he knows better than to stand in my way when I see something I want.”
“And I take it you see something you want,” I grinned.
She bit the edge of her lip and nodded.
“You’re not going to disappoint me, are you?” she asked.
“I’ve never had any complaints.”
“Because you wouldn’t want to disappoint me,” she said seriously.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said, just as serious. “But let me ask you a question first, if you don’t mind. Seeing as how we’re friends now and all.”
“I wouldn’t say friends exactly, but go ahead.”
Her face was close enough to mine that I felt her breath against my lips. My body shouted at me to ignore Grith’s mission and forget all about this Leon asshole, but my chip chimed a little warning in my head. We were on a timeline, so I had better get down to business before I lost all focus.
“You and Baj wouldn’t happen to know anything about who I should see if I wanted to move something off-world, would you?” I asked. My fingers rubbed against the soft skin of her arm.
“We may know a little something,” she said, and then she leaned in a bit more and nibbled at my ear.
Honey Bee chimed another warning, and I wanted to break my own skull for the interruption.
“I’ve heard Leon Cotranis is the man to see,” I said quickly.
The blue-haired woman jolted back from me, and her eyes flashed with anger.
“Leon Cotranis is a two-bit, two-faced, scum-eating, cheating sack of shit,” she snarled.
“So, I take it he’s not the man to see?” I joked.
She glared at me.
“Hey, no problem,” I said and raised my hands. “Just tell me how to avoid him, and I’ll do my business elsewhere. I’d never do anything to disappoint you, remember?”
“If you have something to move off-world, you see Baj,” the blue-haired woman told me. “Or even someone else, as long as it’s not Leon. Real business in Thage is done here, not in some low-rent saloon across town.”
Another warning chimed inside my skull, and I almost snarled at Honey Bee to be quiet. We had a deadline, sure, but we still had a little extra time to play with.
“Got it, no Leon,” I told her. “No sacks of shit, no low-rent saloons. You better tell me the names of some, or I won’t know to avoid them.”
“If you can’t recognize a low-rent saloon when you see one, I’m not even sure why you’re here.” She sighed. “Sorry, that wasn’t fair. There’s only one saloon that still lets that two-faced shitbag drink there. So just avoid the Petty Talon, and you shouldn’t run into him.”
“Will do.” I stood up without my towel and let her get a good look.
“To the locker rooms,” I answered. “Aren’t you coming?”
She stood up and followed me with a smile. Sure, there would be plenty of women after the mission, but there was also one right here, right now, and she was ready to go. As soon as we reached a private stall in the locker room, I picked her up by the hips and shut the door behind us.
She purred against my ear. As she wrapped her legs around my waist, I held her up against the wall and let her pry my lips apart with her eager tongue. My hand gripped her blue hair and tugged her head back to expose her throat, and I ran my tongue across her soft skin until I could feel she was ready.
She didn’t need much time. I thrust myself inside her, and she moaned in my ear. I moved slowly, so she felt every inch of me, and her legs quivered where they were wrapped around my waist.
“Just… a little…”
The blue-haired woman didn’t finish her request. She was too busy coming. As soon as she was done, I gave her a final thrust to finish myself before I carried her over to the lounge chair in the corner of the private stall. I set her down and gave her a little salute.
“It’s been a pleasure,” I said with a grin. I opened the door and strolled back to my locker to get my clothes.
“You don’t have to just run out of here,” the blue-haired woman called after me.
“Sorry, beautiful,” I sighed. “I got places to go, people to see.”
“Fine.” She glared at me. “I got mine, so do whatever you want.”
“I usually do.” I slipped on the last of my clothes, restrapped the weapons to my body, and found that all my money was exactly where I had left it. I moved toward the exit.
“You’re an asshole, you know that?” the blue-haired woman told me, but I heard the smile in her voice.
