Can't Shoot Straight Gang Returns

by Blaze Ward

  “So you and Mrs. Jones and a team hit the place and basically shut it down?” Rob asked. “Easy as that?”

  “Handsome, it’s never as easy as that,” Jorge laughed. “You look at pages eighty to one oh five, give or take, and you’ll see how messy it gets as we try things, fail, try more things, fail again, and then the boss monster has us trapped and we’re about to die. Really looking forward to the guitar solo that Longbow comes up with as we peak at that climax. He’s really good at that sort of thing.”

  “Well, I’ve got you some names,” Rob pulled out his pocket notebook, and honest-to-Creator paper and pencil thing he kept in his jacket to jot down notes like a real producer. “Five or six captains, including three Motherships, all the way up to a 3-Ring. I know the script calls for a 4-Ring, but there are only like ten or twelve of those in Corynthe, these days, and almost all of them are either based out of Petron or make regular runs there.”

  “We can fix that part in the filming,” Jorge decided. “The script was a little generic on that one, because we leave that to the Art Department when they make sets and costumes. Tell me about Wild Duck.”

  “Did a little research, and she’s a weird mix of raider and freighter,” Rob replied. “Seventeen slots with five gunship raiders like the script has on the surface, so he’s outnumbered there by seven. Eight Starfighters, so again outnumbered, but only by two. A dedicated cargo tug and three slots that normally haul standard, Aquitaine-style shipping containers. Captain Nakano and his Tactical Officer, Lilijana Kozel are the most colorful folks I’ve talked to.”

  “Who did you say he worked for?” Jorge asked

  “Don’t know as yet,” Rob said. “Kozel mentioned that they were on retainer to hassle an outfit known as Bergier. Who’s owns the base in the script?”

  “Not Bergier,” Jorge said. “I’d have to go back and look, because it’s too early in the morning right now. Lemme work some magic on the man, maybe with Mrs. Jones, to see if we can get him to change sides long enough for filming. Or at least have a second contract.”

  “Kozel seemed interested, so she might be an ally,” Rob said. “Oh, what does it mean: the very model of a modern major general?”

  He liked the way Jorge laughed. Deep and full, from his belly. That might be the first time he had ever seen that level of honest happiness out of the man.

  “It’s an ancient theater reference kid,” Jorge finally managed after he stopped giggling. “A pre-starflight musical. Who said it?”

  “Kozel, talking about Nakano, if I understood things,” Rob answered.

  “Okay, I gotta meet her now,” Jorge said. “She’s one of us, even if she doesn’t know it yet.”

  “No seducing her without a contract, Jorge,” Rob chided the man with a grin. “After she signs up as part of the production you can charm her all you want.”

  “Hey, kid, you know me,” Jorge tried to play wounded, but couldn’t keep a straight face.

  “You can get all the girlfriends you want around here, Jorge,” Rob snarked. “I want her in the cast. When you meet her, you’ll understand.”

  “Fine,” Jorge grumbled. “Set up a meeting. A public meeting over dinner, I suppose. Wouldn’t want the wrong tongues to wag.”

  Rob laughed. Jorge wandered to the window looked out, pausing to glance at Roxy’s open bedroom door.

  “Where’s she?”

  “Down at the pool, working on her tan,” Rob answered.

  “Ya know, I shouldn’t let her get within a light year of catching up,” Jorge noted. “And it’s probably a good thing we’re all underground here. She’s got no tan lines, so that would be one hell of a scandal, if she was outdoors. I presume tanning booths?”

  “You got it,” Rob said. “Stack of tokens on your nightstand.”

  “Okay, let me know if you need to find a slot in my busy schedule.” Jorge turned and walked back towards his room. “Otherwise, keep up the good work, kid.”

  Rob nodded at the man’s back, and then he was alone, studying his blueprints.

  Filming the inside scenes around here wouldn’t be all that bad. It was attack on a hostile base that would require a better Director of Photography.

  Rob wondered what kind of hazard pay they would have to offer someone to do it.

  Just how crazy were pirates?

  14

  Even more than twenty years later, Levi felt like a fraud signing copies of that old album. The one with a picture of an eighteen-year-old Levi Framingham under the word Longbow. He was long since past being that kid. But he still signed it for fans, like the Governor of this planet apparently was.

  Hell, he didn’t even look all that much like that kid anymore, after they had had to basically rebuild his cheekbones and jaw from old pictures. And Levi wore long-sleeve shirts most of the time. Light, so he could keep them pulled all the way down to his wrists. That hid most of the scars from the surgery that had rebuilt both of his hands.

  He held his hands up now and looked at them, alone in this car of the tram after two people had exited at the last stop. Five years until he could play his signature song again with the passion and intensity he had had the first time he recorded it.

  Five years in hospitals and rehab facilities, while his managers and company had bled him more or less dry with those crappy contracts and massive expenses.

  At least he came out of it with a second career. Or third, depending on how you wanted to look at it. Too much time in hospitals, so he had gone ahead and gotten fully certified as an Emergency Medical Intensive Care Technician. A paramedic, had he wanted to go down that path.

  He still did regular duty schedules to keep his certifications active. And ride-alongs, where nobody but a few even knew who he was.

  Jorge and Roxy kept him sane. Sane enough, anyway. Combat medic on a team of…Levi supposed they were all spies, if you wanted to get technical about it. Secret Agents? Mercenaries? Vigilantes, considering the sorts of situations when the Service called them in to do things.

  But he got to play guitar, and help people, and occasionally blow shit up, so life was pretty good.

  “Now approaching Edo Block,” a woman’s pleasant voice filled the car. “Exit the car to the right.”

  Levi rose and grabbed his case from under the seat. That, a gun, and his medkit, and he could pretty much go anywhere in the galaxy on ten minutes notice.

  The platform was empty, except for the Governor’s wife. Aoki.

  Tall in that way that Nihon descended colonies did, so roughly his height. Brown eyes that didn’t miss anything, however innocent and distracted she might play. Curvy and maybe four or five kilos heavier than when she’d been at eighteen, but still attractive. The way her black hair was just starting to streak into grays gave her a sexy librarian thing Levi approved of.

  Hopefully, he wasn’t supposed to allow this woman to literally seduce him on this mission. Not that she wasn’t a babe, but her husband was five miles of trouble all by himself.

  “Good morning,” she smiled at him as he emerged, apparently the only person for this station of the subway.

  Her opening hug was just a shade beyond professional, but Levi had a guitar case, so he could make it awkward enough and step back with an innocent smile.

  “So I understand you might have found some recording space?” Levi framed things in a professional setting.

  He could still get all the innocent groupies he wanted, just by playing a couple of local bars. The power of rock and roll. No need to get into trouble with the Governor’s wife.

  At least until the mission parameters changed.

  “This way,” she hooked her arm in his, on the side opposite the case, and led him down a corridor.

  This planet was just weird. They had the subway that went everywhere, but it was actually dug pretty deep, and all the buildings still went up, closer to the surface, rather than running just belowground and you went deeper when you got to your destination.

  But they were undergrou
nd, and that was good. He worked best on a semi-lit stage, or a quiet studio, without a lot of light.

  Mrs. Fukui took him into a random-looking place with a big foyer. Over to the right and into a handy elevator. This one was glass on most sides, overlooking the foyer as a vertical vault, so each floor was actually more of a mezzanine as they climbed.

  Cool. Weird, but still interesting. Plants everywhere, but that was to be expected. The locals were apparently treating this place like a space station, just one that was underground.

  Fifth floor. If his math was right, they were actually just below ground here, with airlock-like doors that you could use to get out onto the dusty, reddish surface, if you had a reason to.

  Down a hall, she rang a bell and a door buzzed, so she pushed it and they entered.

  Levi might have just died and gone to heaven. Or hell, if the devil really was into rock and roll, like his dad had always warned him.

  Guitars and basses on two walls. At least a dozen of each. Couple of drum sets. Keyboards. Other instruments, depending on your needs.

  Whatever your needs.

  Tall, spare skeleton of a woman rose from a table in the corner and studied them as they approached. Dusky skin way darker than Levi’s or Aoki’s, but not all the way down to African Diaspora. Long hair pulled back out of her face.

  She wasn’t homely, but nothing you’d write home about. More or less regular features with brown eyes and a hint of cheekbones.

  “Longbow, huh?” she stuck out a hand to shake, which also broke Levi free from Aoki’s grasp.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “Aoki says you got all sorts of needs?”

  “Maybe,” he shrugged. “I’m supposed to be doing a soundtrack to a movie, but they haven’t even started filming yet, so I’ve got no rough cuts, or even dailies to work from. Just a script and folks I’ve worked with before.”

  “We can always jam while you’re waiting,” the tall woman offered.

  “We could,” Longbow offered. “What do you play?”

  “Everything,” she grinned at him. “What do you need?”

  “Studio band, if we’re going to jam,” he challenged her. “I’ll assume you’ve heard my one album. I’d like to test some people out, so maybe I’ll be able to have a full kit behind me and play a few gigs around town.”

  “Ten songs is a pretty short set,” the woman observed. “What else can we play?”

  Levi turned to Aoki, just in time to catch her face turn to innocent surprise, but he wasn’t fooled. It smelled like a setup, but the good kind.

  “I heard a rumor about a lyricist looking for some help,” Levi said, taking in the long woman’s demeanor. “Maybe we could throw in some classics with our jams, on our way to looking at working up some new songs?”

  Might as well throw the gauntlet down right now. These people were apparently willing to fall all over themselves to seduce him. He could be seduced with music.

  And maybe tall, gawky musicians, if she was any good. The woman smiled now and that seemed to change her entire being, from angry punk to musician. Lit up the whole room.

  “I might have some things then,” she said, holding out her hand again. “Naomi.”

  “Levi” he smiled back at her. “Let’s you and me go jam for a while while we sort things out?”

  She turned towards an inner doorway and stretched those long legs.

  Levi turned to Aoki with a conspiratorial grin.

  “Don’t you tell anyone until we’re ready to either record them or play a gig in public,” he ordered her with a smile.

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” she answered.

  Levi figured she’d be writing up full reports on everything for her husband, but that was fine. He was the Trojan horse on this mission, which was just silly. Usually, it was Jorge or Roxy.

  Now he just had to work up the enthusiasm to actually record a second album, after a couple of decades of excuses.

  15

  Rob had arranged things to be a little low key, but still interesting. Quick buffet dinner for about thirty folks, back at the hotel where he was staying, with a lot of standing around, a polite string quartet, and lots of gossip.

  Nigel was off doing god-knows what aboard the ship, allowing Raef the time to come into town without worrying about someone breaking in and doing anything. Longbow had more or less moved downtown, staying out for days and apparently crashing on someone’s couch, like he was a broke teenager again.

  So Rob was entertaining. Well, technically Jorge and Mrs. Jones were having a meet and greet with potential investors and interested parties, but that just meant he was responsible for all the technical details with the hotel and the caterers. The job of a producer, when you got right down to it.

  The Governor was here, along with his wife and his First Officer. Nakano and Kozel off Wild Duck, currently getting ready to go do something in a few days, but everyone was being very tight-lipped. A few bankers. A handful of shipping magnates, what there was at least on a planet this small. They were all pretty small fry, as things like that went, but the cover story was good enough to bring them in.

  Only one other captain had made the cut with Rob so far, of the three dozen folks he had chatted up. Probably could end up using half a dozen, but so many of them were almost interchangeable visually as characters, at least from a physical standpoint.

  Rodderick Kedzierski, however, was not beige, in any sense of the word. He had long, curly hair with auburn at the ends and a mask of gray underneath as it had finally decided that the season was autumn. He was tall and lanky, having a little height on the Governor, but weighed probably what Rob did.

  But the man was hard. Tough. Mean looking, whether you met him in a bar or on the street. Those stony, gray eyes peered out at you from a face covered with scars and tattoos he had accumulated in crashes, fights, and drunker dares. Rumor said they pretty much covered his whole body, proving just how lucky and tough the man was.

  A few semi-friends had shared stories of the man’s past. The several marriages that never lasted. The challenges when people though he wasn’t charismatic enough to hold his place in the pack hierarchy.

  Kedzierski smiled at Rob as he entered the room. The man was dressed in that standard, black uniform the Captains went for, just about the opposite of what Nakano wore every day, making the two of them anchor both ends of the spectrum for colorful fashion tonight.

  If this was a really a casting call, Rob would have found an acting coach to teach Kedzierski how to handle all the details needed to make him the villain of the piece. The man just exuded badass all over the place like pheromones. And yet his ship, Queen of the Borders wasn’t a combat craft, at least as the pirates would have rated it.

  She was a 1-Ring mothership, but really the vessel was a massively overgunned cargo transport, even for around here. Her ring was three armed tugs, like pocket gunships rather than Starfighters, and three cargo boxes. As near as Rob could tell, the three Type-3 beams and six Type-1 beams she had as firepower rated her as the second most dangerous hull out there, behind only the new Kali-ma class 4-Rings that the queen of Corynthe was building in Aquitaine yards. Even Wild Duck wasn’t as tough a ship, but she had a flight wing that made up for it.

  Queen of the Borders was a porcupine flying in deep space. Best left alone, if you had the sense the Creator gave a goose. Not that many pirates had understood that at first, but there’d been enough bloody noses given out, in orbit as well as in bars, that Kedzierski and the Queen got a wide berth today.

  “Captain,” Rob made a point of walking over the greet the man. “Welcome and glad you could make it.”

  Kedzierski didn’t look as thought he felt out of place, but many of the bankers and businessmen in the room looked askance at him. Might as well let them know that the man was a favored guest. Knowing Jorge, he was up to something, having explicitly included the man on the invite list.

  Kedzierski nodded and shook his hand, but he wasn’
t necessarily one for small talk, so Rob aimed him at the buffet and the open bar with a smile.

  Rob smelled Roxy drift up behind him. There weren’t that many women in the room, and none of them had that perfume except her.

  “It’s fun,” she murmured as she stepped to his side and turned him to watch the crowd circulating. “Not often you see Jorge bounce off a woman so badly.”

  It was not. More interestingly, it was Kozel that was proving impenetrable.

  Jorge was being his charming self. Captain Nakano was certainly charmed and laughing at some story, but Lilijana Kozel looked almost bored.

  Briefly, Rob wondered if she even liked boys. That might explain things. Except she saw him watching and her eyes lit up. She quickly backed a step to extract herself from the conversation with the men with a polite excuse and walked this way.

  “Oh, dear,” Roxy chuckled. “Jorge will never forgive you.”

  Before he could say anything, Mrs. Jones stepped away and expertly caught herself up with a group of ladies representing the local theater scene, some from the university and another who had a semi-pro troupe. That left Rob standing alone by the front door.

  And Lilijana Kozel was making a bee line for him.

  She still gave Rob the impression of a tall woman who had been squished a foot, with all the extra mass pulled sideways. She had shoulders and hips and thighs, but a narrow waist and nice chest. And yes, she could do more weights on a hip sled or bench than he could. Hell, Roxy was the only person Rob knew who might give Kozel competition in the gym.

  She had a glass of something mostly empty as she stepped close.

  “I need more,” she held it out like a bouquet of flowers, smiling up at him.

  Almost daring him to do or say something. Rob was used to women finding him attractive, but Kozel had not given off those waves before tonight.