Deuces Wild Boxed Set: Books 1-4: Beyond the Frontiers, Rampage, Labyrinth, Birthright

by Ell Leigh Clarke

  Grim poked his head out of the galley, offering a sullen, “You’re all so loud.” He was fanning smoke toward one of the ventilation ducts with a hand towel, the filtration system working overtime.

  Nickie rolled her eyes, but before she could complain Grim sighed and offered, “I’ll keep an eye on him while you finish whatever you were doing. He can help me clean up this mess.”

  With a distracted nod Nickie ushered the Skaine into the galley with Grim, and as she turned to head back to the airlock, she just barely caught him offering his name. She made a note of it. She would probably have to remember it later.

  In the meantime, there was a very angry merchant still waiting in the docking bay for her to make the second half of her payment and collect her delivery.

  Twenty minutes later, she was unboxing supplies as she sat on the floor in a storage closet. Her bank account was considerably less robust than it had been that morning.

  Let’s get out of here, she decided as she tore a box open, though she made no move to get up.

  I’m on it, Meredith assured her, and she set about bypassing the various pre-flight checks. The docking tube disengaged, along with the locks that held the ship in place. The floor hummed as the engine engaged, and within just a few minutes the ship was pulling out of the dock.

  Rebus Quadrant, Aboard the Penitent Granddaughter

  Nickie stretched, sitting back and arching her spine until it popped. She was still sitting on the floor in the closet and it looked as if she were sitting in a nest, considering the empty, torn-apart packaging surrounding her.

  In front of her sat four little house bots. Fully assembled but not yet activated, each was a different metallic color. They were neatly bullet-shaped, with several little arms recessed within their plating and an array of circular sensors around their tops and bottoms that looked like eyes.

  They were almost absurdly adorable, which made perfect sense for commercial bots designed for household use. They didn’t come any higher than Nickie’s knees in their powered-off state, and already she couldn’t help but think they looked like they were napping.

  She really needed a few other people on the ship. She was personifying the vacuum cleaners.

  Her ship was probably a little bigger than what they were designed for, but that was why there were four of them. They could help each other.

  With a slow sigh, Nickie patted one of them on its rounded top. What do you think, Meredith? Could we link them with your systems?

  It would be helpful to give them the schematics to the ship, Meredith acknowledged. Otherwise, you would have to hunt down the blueprints and upload them manually.

  Plus then you’ll have your own army of tiny robots, Nickie replied, grinning. You could sic them on anyone who tried to board the ship without permission.

  I’m not sure what a quartet of cleaner bots could do against an invading force, but I suppose you’re not wrong, Meredith acknowledged dryly.

  Nickie scoffed. You just need to have a sense of imagination about it, is all, she assured the EI, sitting back and leaning her weight on her hands. Let’s get these little guys started up. It’s a mess in here, so this should be as good a trial run for them as anything.

  You certainly didn’t make any efforts to be neat about unboxing them, Meredith remarked, but she did as she was requested regardless. She dug through the ship’s storage banks until she found the ship’s blueprints.

  Once one of them is properly set up it should communicate with the others, but for me to set it up you will need to turn one of them on, Meredith pointed out. I can’t use the wireless network if it’s inactive.

  Nickie flashed a thumbs-up to thin air and picked up the bot she had most recently assembled, still sitting in a clear space of the floor between her knees. She turned it this way and that, flipping it upside down and peering at it from every angle as she looked for an On switch.

  “I can do it,” she snapped aloud before Meredith even had a chance to offer any advice.

  She set it back down on the floor, squinted at it, and took note of how its rounded head was slightly raised above the rest of it. She curled one hand over the top of it and pressed down. The head lowered a few millimeters before popping back to its usual spot.

  It hummed quietly and played a merry little jingle as its sensors lit up, then rose a few centimeters off its base and spun in a cheery circle. It turned until the screen on its front was facing Nickie.

  Hello! Thank you for waking me up! Please select a network!

  Nickie tugged it closer and tapped the buttons on the screen until it connected to the ship’s primary wireless network.

  All yours, Nickie announced, leaning back on her hands again. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched the progress of Meredith’s work scroll past, until the little bot dinged like a caffeinated microwave when the upload of the blueprint finished. Immediately, the bot’s various arms popped out of their casings as it started picking up the scattered pieces of trash. It trundled off in the direction of the nearest trash chute once its arms were full, and Nickie turned her attention to the other three bots. One by one she activated them and connected them to the network, but she left it up to the first bot to fill them in on what they were supposed to be doing.

  Soon enough, the three newly-activated bots were laden with trash and on their way to the chute, following the first one.

  Still sitting on the floor, Nickie watched them bustle away. She waited until the closet door slid closed again before she said to no one in particular, “Wow. Those are fucking adorable.”

  Back in her quarters, she found she had time before she had to get involved with serving Grim’s cuisine to the Skaine prisoners.

  Just enough time to relax and find out what pearls of wisdom Aunt Tabitha has in store for me, she thought to herself, slouching back onto the bed with her boots still on.

  She pulled up the file and began reading again.

  Chapter 7

  Tabitha

  Farha Station

  Hirotoshi and Tabitha were arguing good-naturedly when the other Tontos descended the gangway of the small ship.

  They had made the decision not to take Achronyx, thinking that their usual ship might be on the radar of Skaines everywhere. Where possible, they wanted to take enemies by surprise, and traveling on the Achronyx was like carrying a flashing neon sign: I’m Tabitha, and I’m here to fuck you up. Start running.

  Tabitha’s eyes narrowed. She couldn’t decide if she wanted to give them enough warning to start running, or just drop in on them and kill them.

  Probably the second. There were a lot of Skaines, and even though she would have a long life, it was going to take a while to kill them all.

  She looked over when the other Tontos joined them. “Hirotoshi and I are going to find a bar.” She considered. “Ryu, you come with us.”

  After all, while Hirotoshi was always dull—or so she said, mainly just to annoy him—Ryu could sometimes be persuaded to have some fun with her.

  The others exchanged glances, promising a future conversation, but they made sure that Tabitha and Hirotoshi didn’t see it.

  “We will stay on the ship in case of, umm…” Katsu considered how to put this tactfully, and gave Jun and Kouki a look. “In case we need to leave very quickly?” he suggested finally.

  “Or in case we need backup,” Tabitha added. She gave a self-satisfied smile. “After all, we don’t want anyone to know all our numbers up front.”

  “Kemosabe—” Hirotoshi began.

  “Nope. We’re doing this. Come on, Ryu.” Tabitha waved to the others and led Hirotoshi and Ryu across the landing bay toward the main part of Farha station.

  The three watched them go.

  “They are going to get in a fight,” Katsu predicted. “Do we take an over-under on how long it will take?”

  “I have a better idea,” Jun suggested. “We take a bet on which will get into a fight first. I will bet on Tabitha.”

  “That’s n
ot fair,” Kouki argued. “Everyone would bet on Tabitha.”

  “I will take Ryu,” Katsu countered. “It is highly likely that someone in a seedy bar will say something to provoke him.”

  “That leaves me with Hirotoshi,” Kouki complained.

  “You should have spoken up faster,” Jun told him solemnly. “Fortune favors the quick.”

  Kouki just shook his head. “What does the winner get?”

  “Haven’t you been paying attention?” Katsu asked him. “It isn’t the winner. It’s the loser. The loser gets to do a lot of push-ups. I think, in this case, perhaps…five hundred?”

  The other two considered and then nodded.

  “That is a good number,” Jun agreed.

  “It will take forever,” Kouki added. “But at least we won’t have Bethany Anne standing on our backs—in heels.”

  “Yes.” Katsu stared toward where the others had disappeared. “Tabitha is a merciful leader that way. Let’s go back to the ship before people notice us and carry word to whoever is in those bars. And let’s keep the ship warmed up anyway. Without Achronyx here to run everything, I want to make sure we can get away quickly if we need to.”

  Jun waved to where the three of them had disappeared. “Tabitha can deal with whatever fights they get into,” he argued as he followed Katsu up the gangway.

  “Normally, I would agree with you,” Katsu replied, “but recently Kemosabe has not been very discerning. Right now she is motivated more by revenge than Justice.”

  “I worry,” Kouki chimed in. He looked at the docking bay. “I wish we could help her.”

  “We are helping her,” Katsu replied. “There is nothing that will take her grief away. It must be felt, lived, and survived. We are here with her while she grieves, just as she is with us while we grieve.”

  The three were silent as they made their way to the bridge. Though they had made it a point not to show their grief openly, that did not mean they were not grieving.

  Shin’s loss had hit them all deeply.

  Despite their centuries and the friends they had lost over the years, the Tontos felt each death keenly.

  Katsu wondered if Shin’s death had hit them harder because he was the first to be lost away from Earth. He could not be buried at any of the locations in Japan he had liked best.

  His ashes would not return to the dust of his home planet.

  In some ways, Shin’s death had made it clearer than anything else that they were never returning to their home.

  Katsu shook his head slightly and took a seat in the captain’s chair.

  Shin had been given a chance at redemption and had died a good death, serving honorable ends. No one could ask for more. Katsu refused to mourn as though the worst had occurred.

  If he had been younger, however…yes. He would be angry at the whole universe for Shin’s death.

  Meanwhile, Tabitha was striding through the space station with her long coat swinging behind her. She kept her arms loose, ready to grab her Jean Dukes if she needed them, and the look on her face told the aliens around her to just try pulling something.

  She hoped they did.

  Anything to distract her from the aching void that never seemed far from swallowing her. The others had tried to be there for her, but all of them were so restrained in their grief and so elegant in their responses that she was embarrassed to tell them how she felt.

  She was sure Hirotoshi had never cried until he was covered in snot. Tabitha’s lip crinkled up in the corner just a tiny bit. That was fucking funny!

  She had spent a lot of nights in her room sobbing into a pillow and punching things, and then she had realized that not only was it not bringing Shin back, none of it was helping to avenge him.

  That was why she was here. The Skaines didn’t care who they hurt or killed. She’d already been determined to stop them, and now…

  Her gloves were off.

  They found a bar pretty quickly. Barnabas was fond of saying that it was the one constant all over the universe: no matter where you were, there was always somewhere to get a drink. Tabitha had used that wisdom more often than she expected.

  Now she would use it to hunt snitches.

  They swept through the doors, and Tabitha decided to go to the bar first. Some places got picky if you just took a table.

  She flashed a bit of money, cash picked up in her travels. She didn’t want to just blow in somewhere and show a bunch of Etheric Empire coins. That wasn’t the sort of attention she wanted…yet.

  “Hi,” she said to the bartender. It was tall and slender, whatever kind of alien it was, and its blue head bent curiously toward her. “Drinks for my two friends and me?”

  “Of course.” Its voice echoed vaguely. “You understand, kind patron, that no guarantees are made regarding our drinks’ toxicity and your physiology?”

  “Yes, yes, “Tabitha agreed, tapping the coins on the bar. “What would you recommend?”

  “Ah. For legal reasons, kind patron—”

  “I get it.” Tabitha rolled her eyes. “You can’t recommend anything because it all might be toxic. You know, most places would just recommend the most expensive thing on the menu and be done with it.”

  “Kind patron, I assure you that your friend would never attempt to cheat you.”

  “An honest salesman?” Tabitha damn near wanted to roll her eyes. Was the universe just fucking with her? She looked at Hirotoshi and Ryu. “What are the odds?”

  “Very slim, Kemosabe.” Hirotoshi’s face was his trademark deadpan. “One might call it miraculous.”

  Tabitha looked around the bar until she saw someone with vaguely similar coloring to a human’s. She had learned over her travels that people who were colored like humans tended to have the physical properties and resistances.

  It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best indicator so far.

  “Three of what he’s having.” She nodded her head at the patron.

  “At once, kind patron. That will be…what currency are you using? Ah, yes—716 edru.”

  “Here.” Tabitha slid the cash across the counter. She had no idea what sort of cash was generally used in this system, but edru were weighted metal, easily verified, and so were easy to acquire and get rid of again.

  “Where should we sit?” Hirotoshi asked as the bartender gave them their drinks.

  The alien waved at the tables. “Anywhere you wish, kind patron.”

  “Thank you.” Hirotoshi led the way purposefully through the bar. “If I had to hear it say ‘kind patron’ once more, I was going to do it violence.”

  Tabitha exchanged a grin with Ryu. Hirotoshi liked to pretend he didn’t have any sort of temper, but they had seen it enough to be amused when it came out.

  Tabitha took care to make herself visible. She knew all eyes were on them as the strange new aliens in this sector, but she wanted to make doubly sure that people saw her. She let the coat swing open at times so people could see flashes of the Jean Dukes, and she moved with the same predatory grace as Ryu and Hirotoshi.

  “Now what, Kemosabe?” Ryu asked when they were seated. “How does one—how did you put it?—hunt snitches?”

  Hirotoshi gave a sniff and looked off in the distance as he sipped his drink. His nose wrinkled slightly. “This is wretched.”

  “How could you possibly besmirch this?” Tabitha lifted her glass. “This is a specialty of Farha Station, and I will have you know—” She cut off her diatribe by taking a large swallow…and her face scrunched before she spat it all over the table. She reached for a cloth to toss on the mess as she looked at what was left in her glass. “Oh, my God, that’s the worst. That’s so bad. Sonofa…” She brought it up to her nose. “Is this donkey piss?”

  Hirotoshi, who hadn’t touched his drink, calmly answered, “I don’t think they have donkeys out here.”

  “Oh, God, it could be anything.” Tabitha was wiping her tongue on her palm.

  He shook his head and sighed. “Kemosabe, I assure you tha
t your nanites will—”

  “No, it’s that I have to live, knowing I’ve drunk this. The memory is too much.” She gave a full body shudder. “Urgh. Hurk. Yech.” She eyed the cloth, wondering if she had cooties from touching it.

  Hirotoshi shook his head, and a tall alien staggered over him and shoved him to the floor. There was a blare of alien language, too quick for their implants to interpret.

  “What did he say?” Ryu asked Tabitha in an undertone.

  Tabitha played back the audio with the translation. “He says…he doesn’t like Hirotoshi’s face.”

  Ryu turned to his friend. “Well, who does, really?” he asked whimsically.

  Hirotoshi stood. He didn’t look as upset as Ryu knew him to be. His chest was rising and falling a bit more emphatically, and the two of them could see the tension around his nose.

  Which for Hirotoshi, meant he looked furious, but he nodded stiffly to the alien and sat down once again.

  “He did that on purpose.” Hirotoshi shrugged.

  The alien pushed Hirotoshi’s shoulder, and this time everyone’s implants caught what he said.

  “Your face offends me,” he argued again.

  Tabitha looked at them. “Seriously, is this a scene from Star Wars?”

  Ryu snapped his fingers. “I thought I’d seen this before.”

  Hirotoshi’s long-suffering gaze rolled across the two of them.

  Hirotoshi stood up and looked at the alien.

  Tabitha nodded. “Notice how he hasn’t spilled his drink yet?”

  Ryu looked at his glass, his lips pressed together. “That should be rectified, shortly if he doesn’t want to find a new reason to wish for death.”

  Hirotoshi, one eyebrow raised, placed the glass on the table. He adjusted his cuffs and coat slightly and stared the alien down.

  “I did not mean to upset you,” he replied. “I apologize, and hope you will forgive me for any offense.”