by AZ Kelvin
The man groaned more in annoyance than pain and swung his pan-sized hand in a slap that would have knocked Gina to the deck. She slipped under the incoming attack and wheeled around behind her opponent. She grabbed a stool as she spun around again to face the man and swung with all her might. The metal frame of the base hit the man square in the side of the head knocking him out cold.
Cal landed in front of three thugs on the left who jumped up to join the fight, two of them pulling out stashed sidearms of their own. Cal hit them with a quick series of bright strobe flashes from his cybernetic eye, blinding the thugs for a brief moment. That was all the time he needed. He brought up his right leg and snapped his foot straight out to kick the middle-man in the face. The impact jacked the man’s jaw backward so hard it dropped him in his tracks. While his kick landed in the man’s face, Cal grabbed both gun hands of the other two men.
In a move almost too quick to follow, Cal brought his foot down from the middle-man’s face and stomped the right-hand man’s knee sideways until it hit the other leg. He swept the same leg upward and snap kicked the leg sideways to the left as he rolled his hips into the kick. Cal’s shinbone landed flush and hard against the left-hand man’s head just below the ear. The force of the kick folded the man’s head sideways and he went down in a heap. Cal used the butt of the handgun he stripped from the man to dislocate his associate’s elbow and then smashed him in the face with the gun to finish him off.
The three crewmates gathered together back-to-back in a rough triangle around the beaten girl. CJ and Gina pulled their Rellia K-13 sidearms, and Cal lifted both the guns he took from his opponents, as every thug in The Cold Shoulder circled them with so many weapon barrels pointed, CJ could barely see past them.
“Make a hole!” A man yelled out, even though there wasn’t much noise at the moment except the drip-splat of CJ’s blood hitting the floor. He walked ahead of a small group of heavily armed bodyguards dressed in full assault gear. The denizens of the bar couldn’t disappear fast enough as the squad of guards moved around the man with guns up and formed a perimeter around him. The four guards came forward with the man keeping their guns trained on CJ, Gina, and Cal. The man was dressed like the others, except he didn’t have headgear and was wearing a calf-length overcoat made from the same OnyxTec ballistic material the assault armor was made from. It had to be worth a small fortune.
“Be advishhed—anyone shhtill holding a gun in ten shhecondshh will be shhot.” The man had a slight wet sound as he spoke. A deep scar ran from a streak of grey hair down the side of his head like a lightning bolt breaking into several branches just below his ear; it continued on along his jaw and down his neck then disappeared under his shirt. When he spoke, his jaw never opened more than two or three centimeters wide.
“Will we also be shot if we lay them down?” CJ asked.
“That remainshh to be shheen.”
“They were beating the girl,” CJ added.
“Shhix, shheven, eight…,” The man raised his eyebrows and the guards steadied their aim.
“Okay! We’re putting them down.” CJ held one hand up and open, as he and the others put their weapons on the floor.
“Now, back off.” The man walked up closer to look at the men on the floor. He sighed out through his nose, frowned, and shook his head. He looked up at CJ’s group and studied them with cold calculating eyes.
“I’m Captain CJ—”
“I don’t give a shhit who you are.” The man cut him off abruptly in a voice so menacing it caused his guards to step up for a clear shot at CJ. “I know all I need to know.”
“They were beating the girl,” CJ tried to say again.
“I don’t care about shhome kid!” He screamed so hard spittle flew through his clenched teeth. “Who shhouldn’t effin’ be here in the firshht placshh!” The man pulled an incredibly unique piece of weaponry from the holster on his hip. “Why are you here?” He flipped the safety off and pointed the very impressive gun at Gina’s face.
“Wait! McCarthy! They came to see me,” Leland Stile called out, as he stood up from behind the bar where he took cover during the fight.
“Why?” he asked Leland while he still held his gun on Gina.
“They found my old man’s remains and came to tell me.”
McCarthy turned his head to look Leland in the eye, probably to counter any bullshit story. “You’re shhitin’ me. Really?”
“Yeah.” Leland shrugged and nodded his head. “And Borne’s goons were gettin’ out of hand. Again! This time they slammed Pene up against the column and all, poor kid.”
McCarthy turned back to CJ, who nodded himself. “Hmpf. Okay, shhtand down,” he told his guards, as he holstered his own weapon. “You lot be off my shhtashhion within the hour,” he growled at all three of them.
Gina knelt down next to the girl who sat up, appearing confused. “Hi, Penny, is that your name?”
“Yes, Pene. It’s really Penelope, but people call me Pene for short.” Pene absently wiped at the blood that flowed from her nose onto her lips and then smiled. “Who are you?”
“Hi, Pene, I’m Gina.” There were tears in her eyes as she looked into the injured young girl’s face. “Here honey, let me help with that.” Gina set her lips in an angry line, as she pulled the cuff of her shirtsleeve out from under her flight jacket to wipe the blood away. She explained what they did and how they’d ended up there to Pene.
“What’s going to happen to me?” Pene asked as she looked fearfully at McCarthy.
McCarthy did not appear to be a social creature by any means and obviously had no love, nor patience, for children. He turned to one of his lieutenants and coldly told him, “Air the kid out.”
*~*~*
Chapter Twelve
“No!” CJ, Gina, Cal, and Leland yelled out at once. They knew that “airing someone out” meant putting them in an airlock alive without an EV suit and exposing them to outer space. They were going to kill the girl.
“No, please!” Pene cried out.
“What? Are you serious? That’s murder!” CJ raged at the man.
“You can join her if you like,” McCarthy politely offered and turned to face them.
“You won’t touch her and live!” Gina growled and held Pene close to her while she glanced at their guns still laying on the floor. McCarthy’s men brought their weapons up in anticipation of confrontation.
“Hold on! Just hold on!” CJ tried to come up with something fast. “She can come with us—she can come with us!” He said to the surprise of everyone on both sides. He slowly stepped in between the guards and Gina, who still held onto Pene. “She is coming with us. She’s coming along. She’ll be outta your hair for good. Gone away. Okay? I mean, come on, air her out, really? She’s just a kid. Let us take her off your hands, huh?”
McCarthy seemed irritated at first, but then shrugged. “What do I care? One hour. Be gone or be dead! I’ll be watcshhing for your departshhure.” He and his team turned away and walked from The Cold Shoulder.
“Okay, I officially hate this place,” Cal said.
“Welcome to the crew, kid. I hope you can cook because that’s the only position I’ve got open,” CJ said to the young ragamuffin.
“Cook? Yes, I can cook, clean, anything that saves me from being aired out. My name is Pene, it’s short for Penelope, but everyone calls me Pene. What’s your name? Where—hey you’re bleeding.”
“Hi Pene, I’m CJ.” CJ had to laugh a little at the strength of Pene’s resilience and her nonchalance about almost being killed. He guessed being agreeable was one way of surviving in a hostile crowd. “And you’re bleeding, too. What do you say we go get ourselves cleaned up?”
“Here, come into the back room. Let me at least getcha a medkit. Just a sec,” Leland said, as he dug around in back of the kitchen and eventually came out with a first aid kit.
“Here, you’re going to need this for him.” Pene opened the kit and began unloading bandages. She handed Cal a pr
e-medicated wound patch and some med wrap for CJ’s head. Pene opened a nasal swab and ran it up and around both of her own nostrils like an MMA Pro Fighter. She squinted away the tears from her eyes and shook her head with a ‘yuck’ look on her face.
CJ watched with grim realization that Pene’s familiarity with medical supplies probably came from a frequent need to use them. By the look on Gina’s face, she was thinking the same thing.
“You’re a brave little girl, Pene,” Gina said with a gentle smile, as she took a med wipe and began to clean the blood from Pene’s face.
She looked at Gina and grinned from ear to ear. “Thank you, Gina, but I’m not so little anymore. I just turned thirteen last month.” A shadow passed over both her and Leland’s faces as Pene’s voice and smile faded away. “Can I really go with you? When can we leave? How do I know what to cook?” A thousand questions must have settled in Pene’s mind when she understood she was leaving The Cold Shoulder. Pene looked at Leland for a moment and gave the old man a long hug.
“Good-bye, Pene,” Leland said in a quiet voice. “I’m glad you’re gettin’ away from here. I think these’re good folks, better than you’ll ever find here in a hundred years. Quick now, you go pack up your stuff.”
Pene hung on for a moment longer. Leland didn’t appear to be the most compassionate man, but he seemed to care about the young girl.
“Take care of her. She’s a good kid, really.” Leland looked nothing like the crotchety old man who greeted them earlier. “Her folks’ve been gone a while now, more than a couple years. They took a bootlegger run, never did come back from it. Pene was thrown from their quarters after a month. She stays here now, sleeps in the kitchen. She deserves better. I hope she finds it with you folks.”
“She’ll be treated with dignity and respect, if that’s what you mean.” Gina glowered at him.
Leland looked down at the floor before he looked up at them again. “There’s somethin’ that probably you should know. Her thirteenth birthday was last month, you see and…” He had trouble continuing. “Borne and his thugs, they took her and—well you can guess the rest. She was a mess when I found her. I didn’t know what to do for her. But, you, you tracked me down just to tell me about my old man. Maybe you’re lookin’ for the same damned treasure he was, I don’t know. But the way you all jumped in without even knowin’ her, which shows me who you are inside, where it counts. She has worse than nothin’ here—just me and this cruddy old bar. Please, find a better place for her.”
“You have my word on it, Leland,” CJ said with a harsh look on his face. “And because of what you’ve done for her, I warn you now to leave this place. Because one day I will come back here, and when I do, I’m going to blow this worthless piece of shit station out of existence.”
“I don’t have anywhere to go, Captain Evermore.” Leland shook his head and frowned. “I stopped livin’ a long time ago. Death just hasn’t caught up, yet.”
“You’re not in the grave yet, Leland, and, whatever you do with this is your choice.” CJ fiddled with his datpad for a second and then scribbled some coordinates down on a drink doily and handed it to him. “We never finished our conversation earlier. These are coordinates of Stile’s Hideaway, your father’s hole-in-the-wall; in it, you will find a freight ship with thirty-two cargo containers and a long-range personal shuttle. It’s decades old, but it’s yours now.”
“What?” Leland asked in disbelief.
“At the end of a tunnel there is a cavern with a blown out wall. Sorry about that, by the way,” CJ said. “Beyond the wall is a chamber. At the end of the chamber is another wall, which is fake, and a lot more behind that. Use this radio frequency and sequence to open it. You can discover the rest for yourself.”
“Hold on, ‘the haunted wall’—the one in some planetoid on the edge of the Empire. That’s what you’re talkin’ about? That’s where my old man is, eh? That’s a load of crap is what that is! Wadda you think, that I’m some kind of idiot?” Leland looked about ready to call back McCarthy and his guards.
CJ reached in his jacket and pulled out a holographic picture pad with a slide show of Fulson Stile and his family. Leland powered up the screen under the light and his doubt vanished. He couldn’t believe his eyes as images from his youth slid past them. “You really found the old deadbeat. What happened to him?” he asked after a few moments went by.
“Med scan showed brain aneurysm, most likely. We found him slumped over a desk inside a habitat. It looked like he had been there a while. We wrapped him up as best we could and laid him out on his bed. We put up a marker for him. As I see it, all that stuff belongs to you, Leland.”
Leland took a second to mull things over. “I could have a freight ship and containers of my own. I could get Skiff up and runnin’ and have my own shuttle. Best of all, I could get away from this shit hole.” Leland seemed almost stunned by the sudden turn of events. “Did he think of Mom and me as he died, I wonder?” Leland was quiet for a minute. “He died chasing after his damned treasure.”
“He’s still out there,” CJ said in response.
“All these years I heard stories about that place. Thought it was a bunch of drunkard hogwash. Never in a million years would I have expected my old man was behind it all.” Leland shook his head slowly as he watched more images go by on the picture pad. “But, how do I get there? It’s not like the Imperial shuttles run out there.”
CJ thought of the loot they found in Fulson’s cave. If the information they got from Fulson’s journal led them to even a tenth of what was listed there, it was worth a fortune, as well. The least he could do would be to help the guy’s son out. CJ grabbed another drink doily, wrote a name down, and handed it to Leland. “Can you get to Trydden?”
“Yeah, that’s easy enough,” Leland replied with a questioning look on his face. Trydden was a huge hub of commerce and trade for both open- and black-market goods.
“Go to Grathe City, when you get there, look this guy up. He’ll have a surveyor ship reserved under your name.” CJ gathered himself up to leave, as Pene came bounding back down the hallway.
“Captain Evermore, why are you doin’ this?” Leland asked.
“Don’t know, really. Just kinda funny that way, I guess,” CJ half smiled, as he answered. “It works out for both of us.”
“Well, sir, the universe could use more funny people like you.”
“Thank you, Leland, the best of luck to you.” CJ and Leland shook hands and Pene threw one more hug around Leland.
“Leland…” Pene seemed to struggle with what she wanted to say.
“Don’t worry, child,” he reassured her. “I got a feelin’ I’ll be leavin’ too.”
“Stellar! You’re coming with us?” Pene asked with a smile.
“No, Pene, there’s somethin’ that I need to do for my father,” Leland said. “But, the universe isn’t big enough for us not see each other again, someday.”
“Oh, well, good-bye Leland. Thank you for, well you know, everything,” she said, looking a little disappointed. She hugged him one last time and smiled up at him with teary eyes, then went and stood by Gina.
“Captain, thanks for stickin’ up for Pene, and for tellin’ me about my old man. I don’t know much of his treasure huntin’ days. I was too young. Just because we live longer nowadays doesn’t mean we remember things any better. But I do remember one thing. He said ‘it would be the Find of the Century and that we’d be richer than we could imagine.’ Maybe it was just a father’s story to his son, but then again…” Leland finished off with a shrug.
CJ nodded and gave a short wave. “You never know.” CJ finished the sentence; then he and his team, now upgraded to a quantity of four, headed back to Moonshadow. Cal walked close to CJ, as Gina and Pene talked together just ahead of them.
“Did you get a look at McCarthy’s gun, Cap?” Cal asked quietly, as he looked over at CJ to gauge the captain’s reaction to the question.
“Yes!” CJ said intently,
but just as quietly as Cal. “That was badass! I’ve never seen a design like that.”
“I have, Cap, back on CB.” Cal used the short version of Cantankerous Base. “That was red plasma technology.”
CJ looked at him as they continued down the corridor, “Red plasma? That’s—”
Cal nodded. “Blood Stars.”
“In Marlacuer space? Are you sure?”
“Positive. No other design like it.”
CJ was quiet for a short while, and then he put his hand on Cal’s shoulder as they came to the shuttle bay hatch, “Keep this between us for now.”
“Aye, aye, Cap.”
Gina threw a questioning look at CJ as they came to the shuttle. CJ realized Pene, who said she’d always dreamed of being a pilot, had developed an instant rapport with Gina and he indicated she should continue to build on it.
“Pene, hon, sit here, right behind me,” Gina said, as she patted the headrest of the seat just behind the pilot seat.
“Okay.” Pene sat down and started to strap herself in. She looked up at the three strangers who had plucked her from danger in a place that was never quite home to begin with. She seemed to struggle with keeping a pleasant demeanor, but a look of uncertainty and fear crept their way in. Her eyes rimmed and then flowed with tears and her bottom lip trembled uncontrollably. “Are you really the good guys?”
“We will never hurt you, Pene, not ever,” Gina said as she knelt in front of the seat and hugged her. Pene returned the hug warmly. “You’ll be safe with us, hon.”
“Don’t worry, Pene,” CJ said with a smile, “don’t we look like good guys?”
Pene sniffed once, peeked around CJ and up at Cal with his scarred head, gold-hooped ear nubbin, and shiny silver cyber eyeball.
