by Chris Lowry
Grime covered everything, a gritty gray soot like substance that turned the once bright sheen of metal into a dull slap of drab color.
It covered the walls.
It painted the ceiling.
Everything was dulled by a layer of grit and grime, except for the center of the floor, scrubbed clean by the passage of a thousand footsteps.
"Do you know where to start in here?"
Tinker asked them both.
Bat stared at Mona Lisa, drilling holes in the back of her skull as she considered the question.
"I know," she said.
"Are you going to share?" Bat asked after a moment.
"I could tell you and you could leave me safe on the ship," she offered. "You could even stay with me and send him out alone."
She watched him consider it.
Watched a tug of war of emotions flit across his eyes. He worked hard to keep it an emotionless mask, but she knew from Buster to watch the skin around the eyes. Everyone had a tell, and Bat's poker face was one of the best she'd ever seen.
Just not enough to fool her.
He wanted to stay too.
Not with her, though if he did, she could turn that to her advantage.
No, this was something different.
Bat was scared.
Not a tremble in your boots kind of afraid, but fear none the less.
Mona Lisa almost said something.
She wanted to see his reaction to her noticing.
But she kept it quiet, another weapon to use in her arsenal when the time came.
"No one is staying behind," he told her.
She nodded.
Then Tinker had the door open and inside sounded like hell.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
"Is that an organ?"
"A pipe organ," said Tinker. "Been here forever."
The series of pipes was tucked in the corner of a cubby next to a hold that had been transformed into a makeshift bar.
Bat could tell it was a bar because there were two sixteen foot planks resting on wooden crates that separated a row of liquor stocked shelves from the rest of the crowded room.
It smelled of unwashed bodies and cheap alcohol, cologne and BO and the bubbling scent of sauerkraut that tainted the air.
"I'm hungry," Tinker said.
"We'll eat back at the ship."
"All I've got are stale MRE's back there."
Bat glanced around the room, eyes travelling over the traders, grifters, smugglers and assorted nationalities that ended up calling the space stations home.
"Drifters," he muttered.
He would know. He was something of one himself.
Mona Lisa overheard him, but didn't comment on it. Her eyes travelled around too. She would know someone in here, she was sure.
The question was, would that someone want to kill her, or help her?
Before she went to prison, she had a fuller figure and showed it off with as little of whatever was fashionable at the time as she could get away with without being called a hooker.
The cell life had stripped her of twenty pounds, the product that coiffed her hair and the makeup that created an iridescent look few could match or master.
But she was still attractive.
Still Mona Lisa O'Neal, paramour and paragon of one of the most notorious gangsters in the galaxy.
Someone was bound to recognize her.
She just didn't expect it when they did.
"The owner got this on earth," Tinker was saying as he displayed the organ with one hand.
"You bitch."
A girl's voice, rough from whiskey and maybe tears, came from behind them.
A slender hand with manicured nails grabbed Mona Lisa by the shoulder, ripped her around and punched her with a crack across the jaw.
The angle was weird.
The punch thrower was a short woman, barely five feet tall, with fiery red hair and apparently a violent disposition toward conflict resolution.
Bat stepped between the diminutive rager and Mona Lisa, partially to protect her and partially to keep her from retaliating.
They didn't need even more eyes on them.
The little woman lost her mind.
At least that was how it seemed to him.
He reached out a long thick arm to hold her back, and it was like tossing a Wolverine a steak bone.
She growled, whirled and lashed into him with sharp tipped nails and boot clad feet.
He tried to catch his breath, but she kicked him in the nuts and there was no more wind, only the stars and the sound of her voice screeching in a dog pitched wail.
Or maybe that was him.
He caught sight of Tinker wincing as he dropped to both knees, damaged bits clenched tightly between two hands.
Mona Lisa was on her own.
She should have run.
But someone sucker punched her. Her Irish heritage made her quick to temper and her Italian heritage made her ravenous for revenge.
Those two things that combined to make her ferociously beautiful also worked to make her a hot headed dealer of pain, suffering and retribution.
She kicked the girl in the stomach.
"You friggin dwarf," spittle flung from her mouth as she delivered a roundhouse punch. "You wanna mess with me."
Another kick.
"You wanna fuck with me?"
The third punch sent the girl crashing to the floor in a sobbing heap, quivering under a rain of jabs, hammer blows and boot drops.
Tinker grabbed her around the waist and hustled her away from the spreading pool of blood on the metal floor plates.
He bent over and scooped Bat up by the belt, and they staggered toward the door.
"We've got to move," he said.
"Too late," Bat gasped, both hands cradling the still tinder sections of his emasculation.
Tinker dropped Mona Lisa as she sputtered like a cat in a bathtub.
"Damn," he said.
She turned around and recognized someone she knew.
"Damn," she agreed. "This is not going to end well."
CHAPTER TWELVE
"Hello, ello, ello," said a one-eyed man with a wrinkled face as he stood in the doorway. "What have we here."
"Hello Ian," Mona Lisa sighed.
"Bon jour love," a smile crinkled his lined face but didn't touch his cold blue eyes. "Long time, no see."
He pointed to the silk patch that covered his left eye. Someone had embroidered the all seeing eye from the back of a US dollar bill onto the patch in brilliant green thread faded from time.
"It's good to see you," said Mona Lisa.
She adopted a pose that thrust one hip out and forward, pressed her magnificent chest in his direction.
"I wish I could say the same love," his accent was clipped, British cockney, but muted by a long stint at an international space hub. "Why've they got you all covered up? It's like a drape over the Mona Lisa. The original."
He winked.
"Just working for my passage," she said. "Part of the crew."
Ian's one blue eye traveled from the tip of her boot toes, up the flight suit and rested on her unornamented face.
He sneered.
"Not bloody likely, love."
Bat watched his hand snake toward a blade he carried on his belt.
Projectile weapons were not allowed on the space hub for the sheer likelihood they would punch through the body being shot and punch out a hole in the wall.
On earth, a bullet hole was an ornamentation, just a hole in metal, unless some poor unfortunate was on the other side of said metal when the bullet passed through.
Up here it was something different entirely.
A pin sized hole could create a vacuum strong enough to suck a two hundred pound man into the wall and slowly leak him through, like spewing guts into the frozen void of space.
Bullet holes would do the same, but much faster and with more victims until a repair crew could slap a patch up on the outside, or an enterp
rising soul fought down panic enough to put something solid against the puncture.
That's why security forces carried tasers.
"Friend of yours?" he asked Mona Lisa.
"Piss off," said Ian. "What concern is it of yours."
She shrugged.
Bat was a large man, but she had never seen him outside of interacting with female prisoners. Size didn't matter.
Ian was a known commodity.
He was mean. Tough. Tested. A small smuggling warlord with a reputation for cruelty, she knew was well earned.
And he had a knife.
Had lost his eye in a knife fight.
Scars across his knuckles and hands like a map of pale purple lines that criss-crossed in no discernible pattern.
"The lady is with me," said Bat.
"I know Mona Lisa," Ian answered in a voice as low as the guards. "And she ain't no lady."
He flicked open the knife in a fast snake like motion, the snick of the blade audible over the noise of the crowd gathered round to watch the conflict.
Bat tased him.
The blunt blocky taser was shaped like a thick gun and carried in a small holster on his waist, hidden by the folds of the coveralls. Hidden so well Mona Lisa hadn't known he had it. Neither did Tinker.
Which is why the pilot shrieked as two lines popped into the Brit standing next to him and sent him to the ground in a macabre dance.
His body skittered on the floor, feet tapping out a funky beat as his muscles contracted and convulsed.
Ian moaned. He groaned.
And Bat shot him with another couple thousand volts until he passed out in a puddle of piss and drool.
He detached the plastic deployed blasting cap and dropped the two wires onto the still twitching body.
"Anyone else want to talk about it?"
He addressed the crowd as he slapped a new charge into the barrel of the weapon.
No one else felt like talking.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“That was a bad idea," Mona Lisa said as she struggled to breath.
Bat hurried them down the crowded corridor, packed like a bazaar that wouldn't look out of place in China or the Middle East.
Noise chased them as vendors hawked their wares.
"Do you know who that was?"
"Guy with a knife."
"He owns this sector," Tinker watched over their shoulder as they hustled deeper into the bowels of the space station.
"We have to go through here to get back to my ship."
"We'll find a way," Bat bulled them through an aggressive row of stall keepers.
The volume of chatter rose to shrieks as the robed, turbaned and silk pajama wearing men cursed and yelled.
"They don't like you much," Mona Lisa huffed.
"I don't care."
"I don't like you very much either."
He shot her a look and didn't see the fist sail out from between two vendors and clock him across the cheek.
Bat dropped, cursing.
A large man shoved the vendors aside and stood astride the guard.
"Mr. Ian wants to see you," his gravelly voice rumbled.
Bat drew back his boot and launched an upward kick straight between the man's legs.
The mass of flesh plowed into the deck beside him, puking and mewling.
Bat used him to stand up and delivered a second kick across his jaw. The blow shut him up, but now they could hear more noise over the already eardrum bursting volume of the bazaar.
More shrieks, shouts and screams tracked the progress of someone chasing after them.
Several dozen someone’s by the sound of it.
"We need to get out of here."
"No shit," said Tinker, eyes popping in panic.
"I may know a place."
The two men looked over to her.
"It might not be safe," she said.
"Safer than this?"
He motioned toward the wall of noise bearing down on them.
She nodded, then shrugged.
"Lead the way," said Bat.
But he kept a hand on the butt of his taser just in case.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Back on earth, the world's tallest man came from the Mongolia region of China. Han Shu was eight foot eight inches and a legend among the locals.
He attracted the attention of government officials in his teen years as a seven foot tall basketball prodigy. Word travelled up the chain of command to the communist leadership that Shu would be open to a trade.
Olympic Gold and glory to China in exchange for a seat on the shuttle and a small shop in the Chinese section of the space hub.
He continued to grow, broke records in the books of such things, brokered endorsements and contracts for his image and retired at the age of twenty eight to live out his fantasy as a spaceman.
His daughter was just under eight feet tall, and her son, with a man named Kim was the same height as his grandfather.
But Young Kim, the great grandson of the world's tallest man, grew up without the constraints of earth gravity and edged the needle at nine foot one.
Bat, Mona Lisa and Tinker were led into a hold converted to palatial living quarters, one of the few sections of the station where the literal giant could stand up straight.
"Mr. Kim," Mona Lisa greeted him.
He lounged in a cushioned chaise, four scantily clad women rubbing their fingertips over his skin, including one who kept her hand under his trousers in a slow undulating back and forth motion.
"Is she?" Tinker whispered.
"Yes," Bat answered.
"Don't be rude," Mona Lisa chastised them.
Then he stood up.
He folded himself up on long legs as tall as Mona Lisa. It was like watching an insect move, skinny limbs stretching as he rose.
He took a step forward, then another, scowling.
"Bring me my glasses," he snapped.
Tinker tried to ignore the protruding appendage that swayed under his loose shiny pajamas, stretching the fabric in a tent like fashion large enough for him to stand under.
Mona Lisa had it worse.
Everything was eye level and he was closer to her.
One of the concubines hopped off the large chaise and delivered the requested glasses.
“There are rules,” he said staring down at her. He was all long limbs and thin stretching and possibly High towering over them.
Everything about him was Giant. His neck was eight inches and narrow. And apple shaped head on top of a stick peering forward. Long 9 inch fingers a gift from his grandfather. A propensity to grip a basketball. Or someone's head.
“There Are Rules,” he said again.
As if she didn't hear him the first time. Mona Lisa nodded.
“I know..”
“You broke the rules.”
He wasn't much of a mister.
Bat thought he couldn't be more than twenty-five.
But a gang lord of this section of the station. A young prince of crime very used to getting his own way.
Bat thought the thin pajamas was part of an act period so throw people off put them on edge. The height the women massaging him half-naked on the lounge. Him standing waving his giant slice of manhood around all an act. Designs to give him an edge. Until someone realized it was an act.
Bat watched him.
Watched the act. He knew most big guys were weak at the knees, literally. A quick sideways chop and the galactic gangster would fold like a Redwood chopped by a lumberjack.
He knew that two of the guards were armed with short swords like Ninja's used to carry, and surprise, projectile weapons. A Glock 17 and a thicker Taurus.
These men lived dangerously.
Or like the giant, they were for show.
Either way, it was a problem. Kick the leader and the guards would swarm like hornets.
He could handle one, but in tandem they could do some real damage.
Bat planned it in his head, how he would do i
t.
Tinker should help. If he could. But the pilot didn't seem like he would be good in a fight.
He caught Bat staring and shrugged.
"Do you see the size of his junk?!" he mouthed the words.
Mona Lisa had an eyeful. Literally, she came to his waist which put her in a direct line of sight.
All for show, Bat thought. All to throw them off. But why?
"What is the rule?" Mr. Kim prompted.
His English was excellent. Tinged with the flavor of a hundred other nationalities that mingled on board the space hub.
"No rats," she answered.
Even up here, the gangs had a code. Especially up here. The code was clear. Don't talk to the authorities, stay loyal to your crew.
It was the same in prison.
"And did you rat?"
She kept quiet then, which was smart.
Mr. Kim looked tense. The excitement going on in the front of his pants had all but disappeared, much to the relief of Tinker and Mona Lisa.
Bat figured they had other things to worry about.
Worse things.
"There are rumors afloat," Mr. Kim continued. "Rumors of a lover's betrayal."
"Rumors are tricky things Mr. Kim," said Mona Lisa.
"I find the truth behind the rumors for more complicated than the simple gossip portrayed."
Mr. Kim motioned to a dark corner of the hold. A dozen men appeared. Bat tensed for combat. Or to die really, since there wasn't much he could do if they decided to kill them.
Maybe take out one. If they got close enough.
But the men carried a table and chairs to the middle of the room, and set it with an elegant tea service. Delicate porcelain cups were distributed around an ornate bronze pot, steam wafting off the water within.
"Join me for a drink."
He sat in the largest chair and still towered over them.
Mona Lisa took the seat closest to the giant, while Tinker and Bat sat in the other two.
One of the women from the divan hopped up and served Mr. Kim first, pouring the almost boiling water into the cups over loose tea leaves. She prepared tea for the others.
Mr. Kim waited until they had tiny little cups in front of them, then lifted his own for a toast.
