by Clay Moore
The pit boss came, and he looked like a pit boss. He was about as wide as he was tall. No doubt his size was due to his musculature. He came over and looked at the wager and saw the number of cards burned from the shoe. So far, nothing seemed that wrong. He rapped his knuckles on the felt table.
Charlotte dealt two more cards to John while she got two cards as well. Her up card was a five. John picked up his two cards and immediately flipped over his blackjack. This was going a lot better than he thought it would. The deck was going his way making it a lot easier to convince people he was a card counter. After Charlotte gathered the cards, John put on $1000 wager. This was right at the maximum that the table displayed for wagering limits.
"Wagering a thousand," said Charlotte.
The pit boss came over. He looked at the wager and counted it in his head. Then he looked at the remaining cards in the shoe. There were less than half of the cards available for play. The pit boss rapped his knuckles on the felt table again and nodded his head. He went back to his position near the pit boss podium.
Charlotte dealt both hands. Her top card was an ace. She pointed out the wager for protecting his cards from a blackjack. It was called insurance, and like most insurance, it wasn't worth the money. John shook his head and picked up his two cards. He had another blackjack. Even if Charlotte had a blackjack that meant that no money would change hands. This was a no lose situation for John. He flipped over his blackjack. Charlotte flipped over her card, and it was a five. The dealer dropped once more. She took out three 500 credit chips. John picked up those three 500 credit chips and put them in the big pocket on the left-hand side. This was where he kept his magazines for his blaster.
John stood up and put his hand on the table. Now is the time for him to make his play to Charlotte.
"When do you get off, Charlotte?"
She looked at the clock on the wall, which was in complete violation of the rules of casino design. Never tell a gambler what time it is.
"I get off in 30 minutes."
"Perhaps we can get something to eat, or drink?"
"I already have a very powerful boyfriend."
"I bet he doesn't measure up to me." John forced the issue by stepping closer to Charlotte and grabbing her right wrist. He pressed her hand against his groin. After a few moments of resistance, there were lingering touches. Eventually, John released her wrist.
"I am not like your boyfriend. Where he fucks. I make love."
"You don't know what he is like. If you get a mad is likely to kill you."
"He would have to have something more than a pair of fists to kill me."
"He and his men have blasters. Can you fend off blasters?"
"I have dodged a few blasters in my day. What do you say?"
John touched her face with the back of his right hand. He gently stroked her face with his fingers at the end of his right side. She closed her eyes. It is evident that she enjoyed the touch.
That was when her boyfriend made his prominent appearance on the main floor. He gathered up a few of his security troops and confronted John.
"What are you doing with my girlfriend?"
"Showing her what it's really like to be with a real man. Not some trumped up small man with delusions of godhood."
In just about every martial arts system based on the old earth Oriental region, all fights can be solved with an air of conciliation. In the martial art that John follows there is no conciliation. If they are there to fight you, you have to fight them back. In this martial arts taught you how to throw a punch, throw in an elbow, throw a knee. It also taught you how to disarm people. Right now no one showed any weapons. The security guards did not have light weapons. They did have a billy club. In this day and age of people carrying smaller blasters, a billy club was not much of a gun. John knew that those guards contained a blaster of some sort. When the fight started, John would have to go after those blasters first.
"I say, you owe my girlfriend an apology."
"I will not apologize for two a trumped-up prostitute."
"How did you know she used to be a prostitute."
"Most showgirls who show skin attract men who have money and power. She had to give up a lot of money in presence do have a boyfriend like you."
That did it. Franco through a right haymaker hoping to catch John sleep. John ducked the blow and with his right foot knocked a blaster out of the hands of one of the security guards. The blaster fell about 7 m from the fight. Another security guard had his truncheon out. He took a big swing coming straight down with an overhead chop with that baton. John saw it coming. He took a step towards that security guard. It allowed him to block the blow by blocking the arm. John took the initiative and bent back the arm breaking it. The security guard screamed in pain. He turned away from the fight and ran away.
Franco forgot the first rule of a fight. You never let something distract you from that battle. He set a litany of scurrilous epithets the security guards way. This gave John a chance to provide him with two blows. John hit him in the stomach first, and then he hit him in the face. Franco was hurt, but not enough to render him unable to continue the fight.
John turned to the next threat which was a security guard who shifted from his billy club to a blaster. John did not want to take his blaster out because that would mean he would have to do something a little earlier than he wanted to. He sidled over to that security guard in snap kicked the blaster pistol out of his hand. John punched that security guard twice in the stomach, and that was enough for that security guard. There was a difference between fighting untrained people, in fighting highly trained people. Inexperienced people you just have to wave your blaster around in their intimidated. With a highly trained person if you waved your pistol about you are likely to lose it.
John pays too much attention to that security guard. Franco positioned himself behind John and hit him with his ham-fisted hands. John knew how to ride most blows. If you got a surprise on him, you might be able to get a strike. This is what happened here. The blast drove him down to one knee. John knew that he was beaten. He had to make an exit. JOHN reached up under his suit coat. He grabbed the handle of his new 11.5 mm blaster. From the kneeling position, he shot once-twice-three times. Three security guards fell dead with holes in their chests. The shock froze all of the other combatants. This gave John the opportunity to run out of the casino through the central portal.
He did not hear anybody follow him. Franco probably chalks that up to a victory for him. He did not count the fact that five of his security guards were out of the business. Nor did he take it to the fact that the only person who was allowed to fire a weapon was John. Everyone else who tried to get a weapon out was prevented by John.
John had to stop at the second block. He put the blaster back into its holster under his left arm. The punch that Franco gave him in the back must've done some damage. John could feel the punch swelling. He figured that he had internal bleeding. JOHN needed to get to a doctor quick. He did not trust the doctors that lived on Snake Eyes. He did, however, imagine the Autodoc. The problem was that his Autodoc was on the Eagle. That was too far to walk, and he did not believe a cabbie to get them to the Starport in time. That meant that John had to go to the station house.
At the station house, there was an Autodoc. They even bragged that they had the latest Autodoc possible, the Gemec 9050. That is where he headed. By the time he got to the door of the station-house, he was delirious. He knocked and then he lost consciousness.
John woke to an oddly familiar smell. It was a combination of urine, sweat, antiseptic, and anesthesia. He opened his eyes and saw the very general structure of an Autodoc. It was like a metal rib cage that went the whole length of the body. The ribs of the Autodoc contained all of the tools that it needed to perform all procedures. The Autodoc could prescribe and diagnose.
Now that John awoke from the anesthesia the Autodoc removed all of the tubes that kept him alive. The ribs of the Autodoc convulsed outward. The Auto
doc lifted towards the roof allowing John to roll off the bed. It didn't matter what he had done in the Autodoc it always made him feel tired. The two "nurses" helped him into the recovery room. John felt like he was over all of the problems that he had, but a good night sleep was the order of the day. He slipped into the bed in the recovery room and went to sleep.
John awoke to see Franky's bearded face. The blonde hair on the top of his head went all the way down to his beard. He had in his hand John's 11.5 mm blaster pistol. Frankie was twirling it like some holo star.
"You might want to take the magazine out and the ready round."
"You don't have to worry I went ahead and save your blaster. The thing is I don't remember this model of a blaster being distributed."
"I found this in Faraway."
"Is this why I suddenly get these boxes of 11.5 mm blaster pistol ammunition. What's this name to Hendrick's arms?"
"I guess the gunsmith realized he had enough orders to actually create a factory. If he comes up with similar things, we might see smaller submachine blasters."
"When do you think that they will start distributing this weapon." Frankie hefted the blaster to indicate what he was talking about.
"It's supposed to be a general issue to all agents. I would imagine that as soon as Mr. Hendrick makes enough blasters that they will be issued."
"How does it perform in combat?"
"My original 11.5 mm blaster was simply a 9 mm scaled up. Even the round was scaled up. Firing that weapon was like being hit by a horse. Firing the issue blaster is like being hit by a flyweight boxer who is at the end of his energy."
Frankie smiled for a moment. "How does the blast work?"
"It works like you expect it to. You may have a range of 50 m with this blaster. With my original blaster, I had a range of over 200 m."
"That means if we are in open air combat we still need to use the submachine blasters. Those have an effective range of 150 m. When they come, I'll issue them to the boys. It'll be nice to have something capable of significant damage than the pea shooters they were sending us."
"That sounds like a tactic."
"If what you wanted to do was to stir up thing, you managed to do that quite well. What constitutes the news channel here had a lot of speculation as to what happened inside the Dragon. They had lurid shots of several men with holes in their chests."
"Did they have a picture of me?"
"This is the odd thing about Snake Eyes. Even though this dustup happened in their casino they're not going to give any imagery to the police. They know that once they give something to the police, the media, such as it is, will get a hold of it. All they did was report a man in a gray suit came into the casino and started to shoot it up."
"That sounds like a gang member. Blame everyone else but himself. Will this make trouble for you?"
"No, most of the people here, around the station house, owe us pretty big. I use the Autodoc on them whenever they needed it. Didn't even charge them."
"Do they know that you are Eridani?"
"Some of my men are native Eridani and can't seem to shake their accent. I've asked for more men who have a more neutral accent. It appears there's a run on those in the intelligence community."
"People are always in demand in the intelligence community. The one thing he takes his intelligence, and that is in short supply."
John coughed a little bit and spat out a bit of blood into a cup next to his hospital bed. At least the blood was not bright red indicating an arterial Nick that the Autodoc missed. That would've been unlikely. Thorough is the one thing the Autodoc is. Humans get tired and think about things they are going to do after the operation. The Autodoc does not think. It doesn't have an AI like many people are claiming. According to the Data systems people, the Autodoc has an expert system. The only thing that came even close to artificial intelligence in the Autodoc was the diagnosis system. Here, it had to make decisions based on scant knowledge. An expert system only makes decisions when it has all of the facts. In artificial intelligence could make the logical leap needed to complete a diagnosis.
Nevertheless, he found himself hightailing it off of a planet, because it's Luddite citizens don't understand the difference. In many ways, the AI Concorde stifled innovation. He realized why the worlds of the Concorde did what they did. The genetic robots came in with the ability to think faster and better than most humans. When the planets understood what genetic robots really were, they realized the genetic robots contained artificial intelligence. It didn't matter that this was a biologic project. All they followed was that the genetic robots could have the kind of knowledge that the maker wanted it to have. Produce enough of the super soldiers, and you could take over any world within the human sphere. There was no telling what they could do to an alien army because they had not yet run into an actual exotic species capable or FTL flight. Among the humans, there was that deep fear that they would run into a vastly superior alien race. Personally, John believed that any alien race they found would be entirely destroyed by now. Humans still haven't gotten over the potential to kill one another completely.
The station S nurse administered a sedative. It affected John right away. His eyelids felt heavy. He stifled a yawn.
John woke up from his enforced sleep feeling a whole lot better and raring punch
Some gang members face. If one wanted to make one's introduction to a member of the underbelly of Snake Eyes, one had to do the impossible. One of the reasons for John going in and deliberately provoking the gang that owned the Dragon was to get the gang out in the open.
By the end of the day today he expected to be in control of the Dragon. There was going to be a lot of blood and lives taken. It was possible for one man to do this. He just had to jump from place to place, roll on the floor and hit every person with one shot. That may seem an impossible job. But the job was no ordinary agent. He was a retired Marine who kept up his proficiency with blaster pistols and even blaster rifles.
The station chief had sent his men over to get all of John's possessions from the room. They also check them out of that place. Then while no one was looking one of them entered the office behind the check-in desk and used his sleaze tools on the computer there. Within moments he had deleted the John was even at this hotel. It was so easy to move John out of his hotel room because he didn't take his suits out of the steamer trunk. There was no need for that to happen because the chest was large enough to hold the suit's pants with one fold. They had brought his trunk to the recovery room.
John sat up in bed. There was some residual pain – no it was more like an ache. He took off the hospital pajamas and checked his body in the full-length mirror on the door into the recovery area. He could hardly see the incision scars. Since he was not hit with any knives just fists, there would be no scars from that visible. Even the bruises from the contusions were nearly faded.
He nodded his head at his image in the mirror. That was the only problem with a single mirror was that he could only see one side at a time. He could not even really understand his backside in that mere. He believed however that his condition on the front should be his condition in the back. There should be fading bruises from the beating and minimal scarring from the Autodoc.
The door suddenly opened, and a Secret Service nurse entered the room. Since Vivana's death, John had lived a sort of public life. It seemed that people were coming into his private room without knocking. However, this was a recovery room, and there were places from more than one patient. So, she was well within her rights to enter the room without knocking.
"Mr. Hardesty, I'm sorry. I didn't know that you are up and about."
"You are not here when I was put into the Autodoc?"
"No, sir. I'm just the recovery nurse. I'm not certified to assist the Autodoc. I'd like to one day."
"You're going to have to get used two sites like this." With a wave of his hand, he indicated his attribute.
"That's what the charge nurse said. Then she s
ent me and to give you a glass of water."
