by T. J. Berry
“To hell with this, Jen. Let’s just take the ship ourselves,” he said, standing.
Jenny gave him a look that could have cooled a booster rocket. They’d had ten years to steal the Jaggery out of evidence storage. If they hadn’t done it by now, they weren’t going to do it without his help. Even if they managed to get the ship into orbit, without unicorn horn, it was stuck within the Solar System. These days, the space around Earth was filthy with orbital pirates and low-level Reason officers looking for a way to get noticed. Without a working FTL drive, they’d be captured within hours.
“Cowboy Jim, are you telling me that you can’t make a dent in a room of two dozen spheres-and-tears creeps?” Jenny asked, tapping on her tablet and stopping the blast doors halfway down. Infiltrating the Blossom’s computer systems was one of the many reasons that Jenny was banned from the bar. Gary had rarely seen her without a tablet in her hand, tinkering with some snippet of code that she slid out of view as soon as she noticed someone looking.
Ricky stopped treasure-hunting long enough to yell at the servers to lower the doors manually. She also pointed to Gary.
“Get him in the back room, and get Jenny Perata out of my bar,” she said.
Jenny rolled toward the remnants of the game table. Her wheels crunched over wood and glass.
“I’m on my way out, Ricky. And if you had a single goddamn wheelchair accessible door, I’d be gone already. But… one thing before I go.”
She looked up at Gary.
He offered up one last prayer to Unamip to guide him. An itch formed on his scalp, close to where his horn should have been. He took it as a sign. He reached up and removed his hat.
“Fuck me,” said Ricky, looking at the ceiling in exasperation.
Embedded in a nest of short, curly hair was an excavated circle of pearlescent bone, like a sinkhole in Gary’s head. Only those closest to Gary noticed at first, then the realization passed through the room like a wave. Jaws set or slackened, depending on the person and their intent. Weapons, both human and Bala, emerged from belts and boots.
“Unicorn!” shouted a Reason officer, bringing the butt of his service weapon down on the shoulder of a server who happened to be standing between him and Gary. The only thing more valuable than a unicorn was the off-planet promotion a Reason grunt received after capturing one. The officer stepped over the server and shoved the barrel of his firearm firmly into Gary’s chest.
“By the authority of the Reason, this magical creature has been remanded into custody for resource harvesting. You will… oof.”
Jim barreled headfirst into the officer. He may have been stringy, but the man was like an overwound spring. The officer hit the floor and Jim began raining punches down on him.
Ricky flattened herself against the wall and used her ocular display to launch a barrage of throwing stars into the room. Jenny let go of Gary and ducked as far down into her chair as she could. Gary caught a star in the arm. It sank in with a pop, then fell to the floor. Silver blood soaked through the thin fabric of his shirt, attracting even more attention from the patrons fighting their way toward him.
“Lean over the back of your chair,” said Jenny, peeking out to see if the throwing stars had stopped. Gary wrenched himself to his feet with a gasp. He knelt on the seat of the chair and leaned over its high back. Jenny wheeled herself behind his legs.
“Kick up,” she said.
He lifted his legs into Jenny’s lap, probably leaving bruises on her thighs where his hooves dug in. She grabbed his ankles and pushed them above her head. Gravity did the rest. Four bites of singularity pie slid out of Gary’s open mouth onto the floor. They cracked the tile and sat there, attracting dust in little orbital patterns on the stone.
Jim left the first Reason officer and stepped up to a second, swinging a left hook and connecting with a fragile human jaw. The officer crumpled to the floor and Jim straddled him, landing punches with the ferocity of a man who had nothing to lose.
“Jim, clear a path out the back,” Jenny called, dropping Gary’s legs back to the floor. Gary stood up and stretched like a predator waking up after hibernation. The wound on his arm had already closed, the raw pink scar darkened by the second. The same thing was happening inside him as his body healed the damage from the pie. He stepped in front of Ricky, a full head taller now that he was no longer slouching in pain.
“My ship,” he said, holding out his hand as if she was going to give up the set of keys. A thick dwarven woman launched herself at Gary’s stump, dagger drawn. He reached out and slapped her out of the air with a thud.
“You didn’t take off your hat within a minute,” said Ricky, her eyes frantically moving across her ocular display.
“There was no time limit on the third game,” said Gary. He was right. In her haste, Ricky had forgotten to add any caveats to the offer. A dozen Reason officers had witnessed the contract. While they had no love for Gary’s kind, they’d also lost enough to Ricky’s rigged games that they just might arrest her for voiding a contract. The Quag would not be a friendly place for the woman who’d made most of its current inmates destitute.
Ricky’s eyes stopped jerking back and forth. She blinked twice and Jenny’s tablet pinged.
“Fine. You have your ship back, Gary. But one thing.”
Jenny looked down at her screen. A grin spread across her face. A sight which Gary had learned was very bad for everyone in the vicinity.
“The new laws say Bala are prevented from owning property,” continued Ricky. “So I took the liberty of transferring the Jaggery to your good friend Jenny for safekeeping.”
Gary growled. A deep, rolling sound that never should have come from a human-shaped mouth. Ricky paled.
“Good luck getting out of here alive,” she said, reactivating her microphone. A line of servers clad in black riot gear filed into the room, forming an impenetrable line around Ricky.
“Lads, ladies, and lovers of every persuasion, we seem to have a unicorn in our midst. Anyone know the going rate for a liter of his healing blood? First person to bring me a chunk of him gets off this rock and might even make it to the Summit on time.”
Every creature in the room surged toward Gary.
CHAPTER FIVE
Bitter Blossom Brawl
Jenny’s entire body tensed as Gary took off his hat. She wasn’t afraid of a bar fight. Far from it; beating a few COs bloody would be good for her spirits, and for Jim’s as well. He’d been moping for months about her plan to add Gary to the team. She’d barely been able to coax him into eating. She couldn’t even tempt him with a grilled cheese made with real honest-to-goodness bread and cheese, not the crunchy freeze-dried garbage they packed on shuttle runs. No, it wasn’t the fight she was afraid of, but what came after when she had to get into that ship with Gary Cobalt by her side.
She’d locked that man up and dug into his head more times than she could count. He’d agreed to come along, but there was still a fair chance that he would take the opportunity to exact his revenge. But she had no choice but to trust him. It had been a lean bunch of years while Gary was locked up. With the Jaggery in evidence storage she and Jim had no access to a ship with a faster-than-light drive. Between them, they had barely scraped together enough cash to rent a cargo ship to shuttle between Earth and the handful of inhabited stations in its vicinity. The rental payments took up most of their profit each month, with a little left over for food and drink. Saving up for an FTL ship was impossible.
As the tenth anniversary of Gary’s arrest rolled around, Jenny realized how little they’d accomplished while he was away. Their grand plan to set up a hauling business on a planet outside of Reasonspace had amounted to nothing. They’d frittered away a decade of their lives delivering coffee and condoms to Reasoners. The plan was to convince Gary to let them join him on the Jaggery. It was beyond her wildest dreams that Ricky had deeded the ship directly to her. As long as she and Jim could get Gary out of the Bitter Blossom alive, they were on their way
. It seemed like Jenny’s luck was finally turning around.
She even had a brilliant hauling job lined up. A quasi-religious group called the Sisters of the Supersymmetrical Axion had contacted her a few weeks ago requesting her hauling services. A simple cargo run from Earth to Jaisalmer. The pay was astronomical; the only caveat was that they needed to have a functioning FTL drive to make the trip in time for the Century Summit. Gary’s FTL-powering horn was going to cinch the deal.
Trouble was, the bar patrons were also keen on snagging a bit of horn. They crowded around Gary and Jenny, landing a hail of blows that were mercifully blunted by the sheer drunkenness of the group. Gary picked a bite of singularity pie off the floor. He braced himself on Jenny’s armrest to lift it and tossed the filling overhand into the face of a Reason officer. It hit her cheek and her head jerked sideways. Blood sprayed from her mouth in a fine mist. She stepped back, clutching her cheek.
“Nice,” said Jenny, remembering that particular officer from a cargo run in which an entire flat of tomato plants had “disappeared.” It had cost their entire food budget for the month to compensate the buyer for the missing seedlings. She never wanted to see a cup of reconstituted chicken broth again in her life.
Jenny wheeled herself between Gary and the onslaught of patrons, forcing them to climb over her to get to him. She felt under her blemmye robe for her patu – the club her elderly kuia had used to whack colonists away from her home a hundred years ago. It not only had sentimental value, but it was flat, easy to tuck into her chair, and made of wood, so didn’t trigger metal detectors. She was glad for the chance to pound it into the heads of the latest batch of imperialists. She brought it down on the head of a CO who was attempting to climb up onto her chair. He yelped and dropped onto the floor.
Lieutenant Cy pushed his way out of the tangle of bodies on his hands and knees, dragging himself up into Jenny’s lap. He climbed over her head and shoulders. She hit him as hard as she could, but Cy had drunk enough to be impervious to pain. He leapt onto Gary’s back like a jockey on a horse, digging at the horn stub with a fork and dripping a long line of saliva into Gary’s hair.
Gary pulled at Cy’s arm around his neck, but the desperate man hung on. Cy wriggled the fork into the tender spot where skull met horn. Jenny knew it was tender because long ago she’d dug bits of horn out of that exact spot herself. Gary had always screamed the loudest when her knife went that deep. Jenny told herself that the turning in her gut was regret over what had happened to Cheryl Ann and definitely nothing to do with her treatment of Gary. She backed her chair toward the remaining pie on the floor.
“Gary!” she shouted, lining up her patu next to a silver-flecked bite like a croquet mallet. He held out his hand and she smacked the pie as hard as she could. It was like hitting a brick wall. The force reverberated up her arm. She heard a crack from her club. The pie didn’t budge.
“Oh bollocks,” she said, running her thumbnail down a hairline fracture in the wood. This weapon had kept wankers at a distance for centuries, but it was having trouble holding together in the face of weird Bala magic. The spiral-tipped ferns carved deep into the wood had started to crack along their stems.
“You and me both, patu,” she muttered, slammed its tapered edge into the throat of a soldier taking aim at her with a firearm. He sputtered and fell back. She had this to say about the Bitter Blossom patrons: they certainly didn’t treat a woman in a wheelchair with kid gloves.
“Use the pie,” yelled Jenny.
Gary crawled over and cupped a piece between two hands. He reached over his head, found Lieutenant Cy’s ruddy face and shoved the pie into the largest hole. Cy let go of Gary and hit the floor, clutching his throat and coughing up a spray of blood as the pie tore down his esophagus. Gary stood up and watched over him, looking distressed. Leave it to Gary Cobalt to make it through a stint in the Quag with his strong moral core intact.
“Hey, the pie was coated in your blood,” said Jenny, whacking him on the rear with her patu. “He’ll be fine. Go.” Gary gave her a reproachful look that said he believed she was lying.
The broken-winged fairy Cinnabottom stepped into their path, mumbling in his Bala dialect. Gary reached out and dragged Cinnabottom closer, clamping a hand over his mouth, but this fairy was fully mature. He didn’t need to speak the words of the spell out loud for it to take effect. Gary staggered back and collapsed into Jenny’s lap.
“Don’t do this,” he gasped. The fairy raised his arms and Gary’s head wrenched sideways at an unnatural angle.
“Ugh, I can’t breathe,” said Jenny, trying to push him off. But unicorns were nearly as dense as singularity pie and she only succeeded in folding him over in her lap. She was also beginning to suspect that the strong urine smell was coming from his soggy pants.
“I have to get off this planet,” said Cinnabottom, holding his open palm over the horn crater. Gary’s neck stretched toward it. He strained against the spell and Jenny heard cracks and pops as his vertebrae separated. That fairy could have made a good living as a chiropractor with a little less murderous rage. Then again, she’d been treated by quite a few chiropractors in her day and murderous rage didn’t seem to be an absolute disqualifier.
Gary reached out, begging Cinnabottom to stop. The fairy, engrossed in spellcasting, did not notice the hand’s proximity to the remaining unbroken wing draped at his side. Jenny did though, and she pushed hard to wheel Gary the last few inches to his target. Gary’s fingers closed around the gossamer webbing stretched between the wing’s chitinous ribs. Jenny slid her chair backward and Gary pulled; together they caused a sound like thick cardboard tearing, then a snap like the bone of a cooked chicken. The wing came off in Gary’s hand, twitching.
Cinnabottom screamed out a curse and the artificial lights winked out, leaving them all bathed in the yellow glow from the windows. The fairy collapsed at Gary’s feet. Jenny gripped her wheels and pushed as hard as she could toward the back of the room, Gary’s head lolling grotesquely over her shoulder. It was slow going, but at least fewer people were able to land their blows accurately in the dark. A silhouetted figure stepped in front of her chair and put a shiny-toed boot on her footrest to stop her from rolling forward.
“This creature has been placed under arrest.”
Jenny looked up to see the officer who had spent the morning downing Gravitas at the bar. He was a tall pink guy whose close shave had speckled his cheeks with tiny cuts. This close, she could finally see the insignia and name tape on his jacket. Colonel Wenck. She should have figured. He carried himself like someone ranked high enough that protocol no longer mattered.
“I’ve come to collect the fuel source,” said Wenck, looking a little off balance. Gravitas went right to your head. Literally.
“He’s my fuel source. The ship is mine,” said Jenny, jerking her chair to the left to throw him off it.
“This resource belongs to the Reason,” he said.
The bloody Reason was always confiscating everything of value and leaving the rest of the galaxy with the leftovers. Under Gary’s ass, Jenny tapped out a message on her tablet, hoping the intended recipient would open and read one of her messages for the first time in ten years. She grasped her patu, ready to seize any opening that presented itself.
Cinnabottom ignored the Reason officer and clamped his mouth down on Gary’s pant leg, biting through fabric and flesh with the sharp bits of his remaining teeth. Gary lifted his head, wobbling it around like a baby on the separated vertebrae that were still pulling themselves back into position. He slapped Cinnabottom away, but not before the fairy got a mouthful of his blood. Cinnabottom grinned up from the floor, silver dripping down his chin. Damp baby wing nubbins unfurled out of his back. Tiny, but whole.
Ricky yelled from behind her protective phalanx of servers, “You can’t confiscate property from inside my bar. We have an arrangement.”
The officer used his eyes to flick on his transcript recorder. No one bothered to implant grun
ts with ocular displays, but a colonel would have full access to all Reason technology. He was about to make an official announcement. Jenny turned her head so that his camera wouldn’t pick her face out of the crowd. She didn’t think she had any outstanding warrants, but it was never smart to let the camera catch you.
“All Reason-based arrangements with this establishment are null and void. Regulation 56 of the Reason Regulatory Code was enacted at daybreak today. Humans like you,” he sneered at Ricky, “are no longer permitted to own property. Let the records show that the Reason has subsumed the Bitter Blossom into its collective holdings and Mr Richard Xiaowen Tang has thirty minutes to vacate the property with his personal belongings.”
Ricky’s face froze in an expression of disbelief. She clutched the fabric of her dress and balled it up in her fists. Her servers looked back and forth between her and Colonel Wenck, unsure of what to do next. One of them touched her shoulder. She blinked and seemed to come back to herself, smiling calmly at the server and patting his arm.
“I’ll be fine. Keep your job for as long as you can, kid. Save up and get off this planet.” Ricky stepped toward the officer, her eyes flicking furiously. She was probably moving money out of Blossom accounts and into her own before the Reason locked it all down. That’s what Jenny would have done.
“I’ll go quietly. Just give me five minutes to pack a bag. A woman’s gotta have her shoes, you know.” Ricky darted into the back room.
In the Bitter Blossom, now under Reason control, all bets were off. COs that had a moment ago been brawling each other to get near Gary, instead lined up near Colonel Wenck to plead their case for a transfer. The job of bar manager had just opened up, which was far more preferable than guarding prisoners. The few Bala in the room slunk off toward the windows and doors, ducking under the half-lowered blast shields before their bodies could be claimed and confiscated.
