by Sara King
“All of them.”
Rabbit sighed and leaned back to stare at the ceiling.
“Not only are you the reason I lost my job with the Utopia, but I went to that damned POW camp because of you, too!” Howlen said, his voice becoming entirely too loud. Athenais thought it was funny that he was shaking. She yawned and checked her watch.
“So how long’s the shuttle ride?” she asked Rabbit.
“You ruined my life,” Tommy managed, obviously barely able to contain his rage. “Twice!”
Athenais looked at him again and sighed. “So you paid four years,” Athenais said. “Whoopty-do. I spent twenty-nine years in a Tercian work camp after the Rebellion.”
“They should’ve fried your ass!” Howlen cried. “You single-handedly kept the whole Rebellion on its feet.” The poor fool looked like his head was about to explode. “How could they not have executed you?”
Athenais showed him her teeth. “They tried. Then, when the first and second attempts failed publicly—and subsequently the third and fourth failed privately—they decided that frying me again would just make them look incompetent, so they sent me to Tercia and forgot about me.”
“They sent you to a colony?!” Howlen sputtered. There were veins sticking out in his neck. “They can’t kill you, so they sent you to a colony?” He obviously assumed it had been a lot more fun than it was.
“Maybe you’ve got a romanticized version of the colonies,” Athenais offered, “judging by what I saw in your room. So let me educate you a second. The colonies are harsh, dirty, unforgiving places to live. Every day, you’re wondering if you’re gonna be able to put enough food away for winter, or if you’re gonna end up starving come spring like the guy next door. And of the food we did raise, most of it we weren’t allowed to keep. Utopian tax and all that. Made for a lot of hungry people.”
Howlen was staring at her like she’d said they’d flown her to paradise and had half-naked men with palm fronds feed her mango slices while protecting her from the sun. “I would have given my commission to be sent to the colonies,” Howlen managed.
Athenais sighed. “Maybe you didn’t hear me. I raised meat for the Utopia under armed guard for fifty-two years. Cows, chickens, feerat, pigs… Just about anything that shits and stinks and tries to bite you for feeding it. Then we got an order for twenty live feerat for a new colony closer to the Second Quad and I got one of the damned things to eat me. Rubbed a dead one’s gonads all over myself so the stupid thing thought I was a competing male. I spent the next sixteen days inside that damned feerat, until it died from internal bleeding. You can imagine how surprised the ship’s cook was when he cut it open and I crawled out.”
Howlen’s eyes narrowed. “You’re lying. I used to raise feerat. Their stomachs can dissolve a skimmer engine. You would’ve died in there.”
“Never said I didn’t,” Athenais agreed.
Howlen narrowed his eyes at her and turned to look out the window of the ship. They spent the rest of the trip in silence. Rabbit tried several times to nervously strike up conversation, but the colonel simply ignored him.
About twenty minutes later, the shuttle landed in a tourist’s market and they were faced with the same pushy, cacophonic mass of vendors that had assaulted them in the hub.
Before Athenais could shoot something, however, Howlen started pushing his way through the crowd, leaving her and Rabbit to either follow or lose him entirely. Athenais was fully willing to let him get himself lost, but Rabbit dutifully fell in behind him like a sheep.
Sighing, Athenais wading into the screaming masses after them.
“There,” Howlen said once they were free of the shouting crowd and walking along a relatively deserted street out of sight of the landing-plaza, “Was that so hard?” He was out of breath, his normally combed-down hair in conspicuous disarray.
“You lost your wallet,” Athenais commented, smirking. Rabbit nodded.
Howlen slapped his side pocket, his eyes widening. Then his face reddened. Sputtering, he said, “Those disrespectful, uneducated… I had memchips in there! Of my family!”
“You’re not a colonel anymore,” Athenais said. “Without a uniform, this is the only thing they’re going to respect.” She touched the Phoenix. “Funny you don’t have one… I’m pretty sure I told you to grab one as we went by the armory.”
“He’s not carrying one!” Howlen snapped, jabbing a finger at Rabbit. “Why didn’t his wallet get stolen?”
“Rabbit’s just that good.”
Rabbit shrugged. “I used to pick pockets for a living.”
“Still do,” Athenais said.
“Oh please,” Rabbit said. “There is a difference between espionage and common thievery.”
“Kind of like the difference between a crimelord and a Buddhist monk, eh, Rabbit? Or a drug smuggler and a Zen master?”
Rabbit narrowed his eyes at her.
“Oh, wait.” Athenais tapped her chin. “I’ve got one. A pickpocket and an enlightened Haui-Haui soul-titan?”
Rabbit spread his hands innocently. “Is the water in a river different than the water in an ocean?”
“Yes,” Athenais said flatly. “One contains salt.”
Rabbit sighed and picked a piece of fluff off of his silken wardrobe.
Howlen, still digging through his empty pocket as if his wallet would somehow magically appear if he looked long enough, appeared stricken. “You think someone will turn it in?”
Athenais laughed. “On this planet?!” She gestured to the filthy, dusty houses and snorted. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Did you see who took it, at least?” Howlen asked, sounding desperate.
“Yeah, a toothy little rat,” Rabbit said, dusting the sleeves of his suit. “The one that offered you the snake kebob. Looked like he needed the money.” He frowned down at a smudge on his sleeve, then made a disgusted sound when he realized it was a stain.
“That duck-vendor,” Athenais told him. “Was flinging grease around trying to get our attention.”
“Damn,” Rabbit said. “That was a nice suit.” He sighed.
Howlen was staring at Rabbit, looking like he was going to asphyxiate. “You let him steal my wallet?”
Rabbit glanced up from the stain, sighing. “You got pampered by the Utopia, so we figured you needed a lesson in watching your assets.” He gestured at the colonel’s pocket. “How much you lose? I’ll give you half.”
Howlen took two steps forward and gripped Rabbit’s shirt with two meaty fists. “My life was in there! My parents, siblings—” He choked, red faced.
“Grow up,” Athenais said. “So what if the kid took a few memchips. You can still remember them.”
“No, he can’t, Attie,” Rabbit said, grimacing. “Gods, I didn’t realize… Why were you carrying them around with you? Don’t you have a vault somewhere?”
Howlen released him, trembling. “The Utopia confiscated it when they fired me.”
“So what if you don’t remember your parents?” Athenais growled, fed up with the colonel’s whiny bullshit. “You ask me, it’s a blessing.”
“Easy, Attie,” Rabbit warned.
“Why? He’s acting like the sniveling Utopian brat he is,” Athenais retorted. “It’s not our fault he didn’t back up his chips.”
Howlen turned on her and in that instant, her world exploded in a burst of jittery white lights. She hit the ground without even knowing she had fallen. Athenais tried to sit up, but the Colonel was on top of her, repeatedly slamming the butt of her Phoenix into her face. When Rabbit tried to pull him off, he pointed the gun at him. Rabbit backed away, hands up.
“Why does she deserve it?!” Howlen demanded, shifting so that the tip of the Phoenix’s barrel was resting against Athenais’s bloody nose. “Why’s she had the seven-thousand-year cakewalk?!”
“Careful, Tommy,” Rabbit said. “She didn’t know what she was saying.”
“She goddamn did too!” Howlen shouted. “She can’
t forget a damn thing! Her father was the Father of the Utopia, so she’s been the Daughter of Christ for the last seven millennia!” The colonel pushed the Phoenix further against her shattered nose, and Athenais grimaced against the pain. Lowering his voice dangerously, Tommy growled, “Let’s see if you can remember this, pirate. Jonin. Sixty-seven ninety.”
“Colonies were wiped out by suzait,” Rabbit replied.
“I’m asking her,” Tommy snapped. “Maybe she was there. Maybe she helped them kill my family. Maybe she brought them in on her Beetle!”
“She wouldn’t do that,” Rabbit said softly.
“How the hell would you know?!” Tommy snarled. “She’s fornicating with a goddamn alien!”
“Calm down, Tommy,” Rabbit said. “She wasn’t there. Were you, Attie?”
“You heard her,” Howlen said. “She escaped twenty-nine years after we won the war on Derkne. That gives her a whole year to collect some of her suzait friends and go to Jonin.”
“I was sold in a suzait meat-market, you stupid fool,” Athenais snapped up at him. “Nineteen years with somebody else at the controls—did you know the damn thing bred me so they could use my kids as more hosts? I don’t like those worms any more than you do. Hell, that’s why I didn’t want to come to this goddamn planet in the first place!”
Lips pressed together in a grim line, Howlen stepped off of her and handed the gun to Rabbit. “I’m gonna go find my wallet,” he snarled. At that, he turned and stalked off. Rabbit watched him go, then bent to help Athenais.
“Come on, Attie,” he said taking her hand. “We’d better go after him.”
“To hell with that,” Athenais muttered, wiping her face. Blood was draining down her lip and dripping onto her jacket. She grabbed her Phoenix and started walking in the other direction.
Rescuing Tommy
“You! Boy!” Tommy broke into a sprint as the toothy kid dropped his skewer of old snake meat and ran. He chased the kid down an alley, through a gutter, up a flight of stairs, over a roof, and back down into an alley. By the time the kid disappeared through a hole under a wall, Tommy was completely lost.
But more importantly, his memchips were on the other side of the wall.
Tommy got down on his hands and knees and peered through the hole in the wall. He could see shadows moving around in the darkness beyond. “Kid,” he said softly, “Please let me have my chips back. It’s my family albums. Only copies I’ve got. Please. Keep the money. I don’t care about the rest.”
The kid threw rocks at him and jeered.
Fury building, Tommy used a rickety escape ladder to climb atop the nearest roof, thinking to jump over the wall, but hesitated at the brink, realizing the drop would probably break his legs. Frustrated, Tommy scanned the maze of buildings, trying to determine where he was. He had to be close to the little rat’s lair. Perhaps he could alert the local authorities. He’d spent long hours working with the sheriff and his ‘flesher’ crew. Perhaps a favor, for old times’ sake…
Yet, if there was one course he had resoundingly failed in the Academy, it was Ground Navigation. Three-dimensional positioning made sense to him, but travel on a gravitational plane with directions based on landmarks and elevations instead of coordinates was incomprehensible. Tommy peered out over the jumble of buildings, beginning to feel the first tingles of fear replacing the anger from losing the chips.
“The hell you doin’ up here?” a man in the rooftop apartment behind him suddenly shouted, slamming a dust-door open to gesture rudely. “Get off my porch!”
Relieved for the help, Tommy said, “Some little brat pilfered my wallet. It had memchips in it. Ones that were very important to me. Maybe you could tell me how to—”
“I said git!” The man lobbed something small and white at him. An egg? When Tommy looked, the man was brandishing a frying-pan, looking like he was about to step outside and use it.
“I just need to know how to get to a main thoroughfare!” Tommy cried, backing towards the ladder.
“Now!” the man growled, hefting the pan. His muscular, tattooed arm bulged with the effort. “We don’t deal with flesher scum here.”
“But I’m not…” Tommy began. Then, unhappily, he realized that he probably looked just like the sheriff’s plainclothes detectives. What sort of civilian would actually chase down a pickpocket through the slums?
One who used to be a colonel in the Utopian S.O., Thomas thought miserably. Hands up, he backed off of the roof and slid back down the ladder.
Back on the ground, Tommy reluctantly decided to go in the direction of a break in the houses. He was working his way through the maze when three men caught him in the alley. The toothy boy was behind them, grinning. When Thomas’s eyes widened, the kid dangled the wallet between two fingers, taunting him.
“Oh thank God,” Thomas cried, taking a step towards the boy. “Please. Just give me back my chips, kid. I don’t care about the credits.”
He quickly forgot about his wallet, however, as the men rushed him and threw him backwards into the brick wall. One of them—the frying-pan man, Tommy realized with disgust—punched him in the solar plexus, driving the breath from his lungs in a radiating blast of agony. The man punched him again and Tommy’s legs crumpled from under him, unable to catch his breath. He fell on his side, with his cheek against the cold cobblestones. They surrounded him, kicking him, even the little kid. When they stopped, someone grabbed his hair and bashed his head into the stone and Tommy lost consciousness.
“I can’t believe you gave her the ship, Rabbit,” Athenais muttered, casting a dark look at her friend. “And then you let her keep it afterward. What were you thinking?”
Rabbit sighed. “It was the only way I could get her to help me.”
“That’s a lie and you know it,” Athenais snapped. “She was washing dishes, for chrissakes! She would’ve given her right ear to fly that bird. You could’ve put her on contract. You could’ve—”
“I figured the girl deserved a break,” Rabbit interrupted, “after what you put her through.”
“What I put her through?!” Athenais stopped and stared at her friend, utterly flabbergasted. Obviously, the wiry twerp had no idea how much trouble the snoopy little airhead had caused for her in two years of sneaking around, sifting through other people’s belongings, and generally being an insubordinate pain in the ass. When she found herself able to speak again, Athenais shoved a finger at Rabbit’s chest and growled, “If she hadn’t opened her mouth, I wouldn’t be wandering on Odan wondering when the flesh merchants are gonna jump out of the alley and snag us. My crew would still be alive. You ever think about that, Rabbit?”
“Kids make mistakes. How old is she? A couple hundred?”
“Not even.”
“Well there you go. Still a child.”
“She’s thirty-four. Plenty of time to figure out how to keep her mouth shut.”
“You know why you don’t like her?” Rabbit snapped suddenly. He spun to face her, his gray eyes uncharacteristically scathing.
“Because she’s a nosy little twit?” Athenais suggested.
Rabbit’s eyes narrowed. “Because she’s just like you, only younger and prettier.”
The idea was so ridiculous that Athenais didn’t even bother responding. Laughing, she turned back to the alley and started moving again. “Just help me find this market.”
“She’s better at flying and you just can’t stand that,” Rabbit insisted, falling in beside her.
“The guy said it was around here somewhere,” Athenais said, frowning at the neglected buildings.
“You know what her only problem is?” Rabbit demanded.
Athenais rolled her eyes. “I’m sure you’re about to tell me.”
“Her only problem is, underneath all that genius, she’s insecure. She’s starving for a few friends. That’s why she digs through your stuff. She wants a friend.”
Athenais chuckled. “Oh, that’s the way to make friends, right there. Just d
ig through their underwear drawer a bit, try a few things on for size…”
Rabbit wasn’t to be derailed in his idiotic train of thought. “That’s why she took that suzait in, you know. He was the only one on the ship who didn’t treat her like a cadet.”
Athenais groaned. “Just help me find this market, okay? I don’t care about Fairy.”
“Her name’s Dallas.”
“Whatever. Just help me.”
“The next street,” Rabbit said. “It’s got the statue of the goat, just like he described.”
“Thank you.” Athenais turned down the street, trying to stay ahead of Rabbit so he didn’t have an opportunity to spout more mushy nonsense at her.
The street wrapped around a sturdy brick building and came to a dead end at a huge set of double doors. The green paint was peeling on them, showing a layer of gray underneath. As soon as Athenais approached the door, two well-armed guards stepped in front of them.
“This is private property, sorry,” the woman on the left said, touching her flesh-seeker.
“I’m sure it is,” Athenais said, peering up at the building behind them.
“We’re looking for some rare items,” Rabbit said, casually stepping between them. “We heard you might be the place.”
The man looked the two of them up and down. He snorted, apparently not liking what he saw. “No tourists,” he said. “Serious buyers only.”
Athenais reached for her gun, but Rabbit stopped her with a hand on her arm.
“I assure you,” Rabbit said, smiling that sinister drug-dealer-cutpurse-crimeboss smile of his. “We can pay.”
The woman motioned to Athenais’s bloody nose. “Maybe you could’ve before you got robbed. Now git.”
Athenais stepped past Rabbit and showed them her weapon, still in its holster. “This is a J-29 Phoenix quick-charge pistol. It’s worth about a million credits. If we’d been robbed, they would’ve taken it.” She let her coat slide back over her belt and waited.
“Then where’d you take the beating?” the woman sneered. “The guy who used to own the gun?”
Athenais narrowed her eyes. “That’s none of your business, bitch.”
