by Ian Cannon
Paxxians and Lexxians from the twin Lyndo systems gyrated in groups. They were a sexual lot, dashing males and shapely females with bronze-colored skin hailing from deep in the Cabal. To the side, a pair of Golothan females sipped drinks, spying back at him. Ben had a homeworld in common with them, but he looked away with a congenial grin. Even an Ionian entrenched in its symbio-tank was present—an odd uni-gendered specie that breathed semi-solids in thick, lava-like gelatin staring out at the crowd from its tank.
Tawny held firm to Ben’s hand, urging him onto the floor. He was reticent, wincing against the trilling digi-tech, thrumming in a vortex of sound. He was way too sober yet to be caught shimmying on the dance floor. He resisted her, shook his head, content to stand off to the side while she gave him a show of oscillating hips, and snaking limbs, drawing her arms up through that shimmering, red hair. She was beginning to feel the light-bodied effect of her drink. It made Ben laugh at her. She giggled embarrassment and they stepped away.
At the bar, they ordered another round—his a Golothan ale served in a tall, narrow carafe that glowed, hers a Molta-Danoran wine. She sipped and said, “Let’s go up.” Ben knew what that meant. It meant up to the public gambling tables. He shook his head trying not to grin. It was a bad idea, but how could he ever say no to her?
So they proceeded to the gambling parlor one level up carrying their drinks with them, both laughing and sipping. Standing at the edge of the floor, they scanned a dozen tables abuzz with commotion. Intergalactic gamblers living on the edge. Dealers and boxmen flipped cards or placed bets, some initiating their 3-D hologram game elements. The place was raucous, being fed from the carnivorous frenzy from below.
Ben gave her an ominous look. She only grinned that devil’s way and nudged her chin toward the Bakka Faro. He knew it. Girl was a sucker for Bakka. The game was fast and rowdy, very energetic, requiring little in the way of study and patience. It wasn’t the five card games of his homeworld of Golotha. More like the chance and chit games of her more impulsive homeward of Raylon.
“Why do I feel like I’m going to regret this?” he said.
“Oh stop,” she snorted. “There’s no crying in Bakka, babe.”
The remark actually stung. He just laughed it off and said, “Thank you, wife.” Groaning, he led her to the table. There was a spot at the end for her, a spot at the opposite side for him, with several gamblers between them.
Ben made eye contact with the dealer announcing his presence. The guy was seasoned at his job, constantly sharking for cutthroats and cheaters. Despite the reverie at his table, he was as stoic as a statue. Ben exchanged a mutual nod with him. Ben was no cheater; would rather lose fair than win crooked. Tawny on the other hand… yeah, Ben had learned to keep an eye on that one. She had been trouble at the gambling tables in the past, occasionally prompting a hand-in-hand full-tilt ass hauling from one establishment or another, debris being tossed their way—like knives and shocker bombs and such. It made him tense. But he loved her too much to correct her nature. Besides, the girl was just too damn fun to deny.
Ben scanned his wrist chip across an eye-reader on the table and collected a flow of chits as they fed through. He stacked them with a seasoned notion at the table. He had to avoid elbows from his surrounding gamblers as they tossed coin or collected pay. The table was crowded.
Bakka Faro was a simple game. The dealer presented digital card insignias on the table surface and waited. The punters would make their bets by placing their chits on the insignias they hoped would stay hidden, then the dealer would start flipping cards. With each card flipped, one’s odds shrank. But the stakes grew. At the end, someone would win big—usually the house—and everyone else didn’t. With an onslaught of side betting accompanying each round, there was never any want for noise and energy. Ben took a big drink. A big one.
Let the betting begin.
The first round was lucky. He won on his original thousand yield bits. Chits were shoved toward him. He looked over at his wife across the table. She was frowning, looking glum.
Uh-oh. A loser.
Another round, another win. The punter to his right shook his hand on a job well done, celebrated with him. Ben was beginning to feel the night lengthen. Refusing to leave a heater, he was willing to stand there flipping chits as long as he could. Players came and went, most of them scuttling off like scolded Molosian dogs. But not Ben. Shoot, he was up almost three thousand yield bits before he knew it.
He looked over again. Tawny’s chits were all gone. She mouthed the word, “Sorry,” and gave him an exaggerated shrug. She was out of yield.
He nodded at her—It’s okay, sweetheart.
She was good at most anything she attempted. Not gambling. Ben felt sympathy for her. No matter how much she wanted to, she just couldn’t read a table, couldn’t feel the heat, sniff out the right time to bet. Her combat specialist’s impulses were always in kickass mode, always wanting to go in for a kill, never willing to seek out an unknown target. He always warned her gambling took patience. She didn’t have any. It was probably why she was known to cheat. It’s how she won. In combat mode, there was no cheating. There was only winning. Combat and Faro were two different things, as it turned out.
She sank back leaving the table, allowing another punter to take her place. Ben knew where she was headed. The bar. He’d meet her there soon enough. And she’d probably be three-sheets-to-the-wind.
A bump to the left nearly knocked his arm into his stacks of chits scattering them across the table. A new punter stepped up next to him. A tall guy. Ben ignored. Didn’t even bother looking at him. Why start trouble at a winning table?
The next round wasn’t bad. Ben found himself winning in the midrange. He’d take what he could get. A disgruntled voice to his left muttered, “Heh—way to go.” It was snarky, unfriendly.
Ben ignored.
Another round. Another win. Damn—he couldn’t lose!
That voice again: “Loser’s luck.”
Ben bit his bottom lip, took a big breath forcing patience, demanding against his own fortitude to ignore the guy, but making a deal with himself: This guy pipes up one more time, we’re having words.
The dealer ignited the next round of card insignias randomly across the playing surface. Ben spied them, feeling for the lucky combination. That one. That one. And… that one. He placed his chits. The playing started. Cards flipped. Voices raised. Side bets passed back and forth. The dealer made it half way through the deck. Ben’s picks were still alive. His heart started to pound. This one might be a big one. More cards. More luck. He rubbed his hands together. Strangers started betting on his luck. Another card. Three more. Two more. A final. Boom. Winner!
Everyone cheered around him winning money. They slapped him on the back. A few flipped gratuity chits at him. He rejoiced momentarily with them, then the table settled, began preparing another round.
A big, heavy hand whopped him across the back from the left. That voice said in its smarmy undertone, “Never be poor again, will ya.”
Ben shot him a glance and sneered, “There’s no crying in Bakka, bub!” Tawny’s words coming right out of his mouth. She was a terrible influence, always with the attitude check. And before Ben knew it, he stared directly up at the Orbin pistoleer he’d encountered earlier, made eye contact with, knew he was following him. He felt his breath catch in his throat.
The guy’s blue face was pitiless, no emotion, just an undercurrent of something ominous. He said, “Especially not with that new million yield.”
Ben’s blood chilled. There was only one way he knew about that. The Orbin contract. This guy was a bounty hunter; and he was there for him and Tawny. Ben played it off well, simply looked him dead in the big, gold eyes and said, “Buddy, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The guy turned square and faced him. Suddenly there was no Bakka Faro table, no crowd, no gaming. Just the two of them staring at each other, coldly. The Orbinii said, “I knew that is what you w
ould say.”
Ben smiled at him, laughed, then kicked him swiftly in the balls. He turned to run, but the Orbinii snatched the back of his scruff and slung him across the Bakka table. Chits and coin exploded. The punters howled in displeasure. Ben looked up and threw a blind punch hoping for traction only to have slap cuffs whipped around his hands. He was bound tight.
The Orbinii growled, “Where is your little female partner with the—”
WHOCK!
A bar stool smashed the back of his head knocking him on top of Ben. Ben kicked him away unconscious and Tawny stood before him, getting him to his feet.
“She’s right there, narse-hole!” Ben yelled.
“Let’s go!”
They scurried from the table and toward the stairs with Ben’s hands cuffed at his waist. Ben cried, “I got almost seven thousand yield on that table!”
They both stopped, looked back. There was a small riot at the table as everyone scurried for his winnings.
“Oh, screw it,” he said. It was easy come, easy go at Guilder’s Mix. They took off down the stairs.
Once they reached the bottom it seemed they’d escaped the party above. Down here, no one had seen the commotion. They weren’t running from trouble down here. They slowed down and headed for the crowd on the dance floor, blending in, Tawny in the lead holding Ben’s bound hands. She was hells-bent on the exit, bumping cantina goers out of her way. Her mind worked from point A to point B. Simple. Focused. They exited the dance floor losing the crowd behind them. Ben’s mind was more observant. He pulled her to a stop. She looked back, followed his gaze.
Another Orbinii. The female prostitute. She was at the entrance, and she looked angry. A hip-hugging holster was slung low with one hand on her pistol. She spotted them, locked eyes.
“Can’t go that way,” he said.
“I can take her.”
A second Orbin joined her, then a third, both males.
“There’s too many. We can lose them here,” Ben said. “Let’s go.” They faded back into the crowd.
Dancers bumped and shimmied as they reversed their direction. Even Tawny found it difficult to move freely. Intermittent light and dark made it hard to truly see. Sound deafened them toward danger.
A hand snatched Ben’s shoulder from behind. He turned and saw one of the Orbin males digging his way through the dance floor. Ben whipped the hand off him. But his hands were still cuffed, couldn’t punch back. Tawny sensed the motion, spun and came in low. She took the guy’s feet out from under him slamming him down and taking a swath of party-goers with him. People started screaming, some in surprise, others in euphoria. Tawny unleashed her weapon. The laser blast was hardly noticed above the music and strobe effect. She whirled her blaster back into its holster.
One Orbin pursuer—down.
Ben scanned the crowd. The other two Orbinii pursuers were tall, easy to see. They stood above the crowd moving around the periphery of the dance floor. “The exit!” he yelled. They headed that way, shoving, pushing, bumping.
They made it to the cocktail area. There was more room to operate. They sprinted to the neon-lit archway. Ben glanced back. They were spotted, like it or not. And they were being pursued. “Go, go!”
A figure appeared at the entrance seemingly from nowhere, wearing a full bio-suit and helmet. One moment he wasn’t there, the next he was. Tawny slid to a halt on her feet reaching for her weapon prepared to take him down, but he leapt high over them, flipped and came back down behind, separating them from the approaching Orbinii. A glowing lance emitted in his hands and he went into a combat artist’s flurry, the long wand hissing and streaming as it arced. The first Orbin went down holding a severed arm, screaming over the crowd. His gun (and hand) dropped to the floor.
Mystery guy swung low, fully around, perfectly seamless in his motion, taking the other Orbinii off her feet, her boots flying away in opposite directions. She fell, howling in pain. No feet.
A laser blast zipped across the entire courtyard just over everyone’s heads. Mystery guy was too quick. A hand-emitted force shield absorbed the blast as he summersaulted in mid air. From way across the space the first Orbinii stood sneering at them halfway down the stairs, gun raised. He’d recovered at the Bakka table and had come running down stairs. Big mistake. Now, he faced this unknown assailant from across the dim space.
Mystery guy sent a bolt from his glowing spear that traveled across the courtyard like a starshot and blew the Orbinii off his feet, dead as a doornail.
The place erupted into a mixture of terrified shock and crazed delight. Tawny and Ben made eye contact, shocked. Once everything settled, it was business as usual at Guilder’s Mix. It was someone else’s mess to clean up.
Mystery guy said, “We must leave,” through a helmeted mask, and walked powerfully back through the exit. Tawny and Ben shrugged and followed.
Chapter Nine
The trio moved around the main entertainment complex through the peripheral mall. It was lined with bars and pubs secondary to Guilder’s Mix, but no less active. At least here, they could be anonymous.
Ben eyed their new companion. He recognized him from before—the guy at the bar. He was midsized, rangy rather than muscular, and built for quickness. There were three wicked-looking knives sheathed across one thigh, a laser blaster on the other and his collapsed energy spear slung across one shoulder. He was an elusive sort, too, disappearing and reappearing seemingly at will.
His suit was far more than a vacuum bio-suit. With a complex piece of machinery at his back, two main tubes looping into a breather apparatus and a pressure/density activator at his side, this was a complete atmosphere processor. Very compact, highly technological, it allowed for a full range of motion and seemed remarkably light.
This guy wasn’t the average cargo runner.
Ben tried to guess his species—perhaps one of the water dwellers of Dionesse. Their planet was a big ball of oxygen and hydrogen combined as liquid. They couldn’t exist beyond their endless water vistas. But the temperature regulator on his suit said otherwise. It kept the suit’s internal atmosphere at a full three hundred degrees, nearly hot enough to boil the fish-skinned Dionessians.
He wasn’t Ionian, either. They breathed semi-solids and required full incubation tanks for travel. Nor was he Tadonian. They breathed toxic fumes and lived in an acidic environment, but not at three hundred degrees.
Ben glanced over his shoulder at Tawny who was clearly trying to determine the same thing. What was this guy?
When he spoke, his voice came from a mechanized sound regulator giving him a sinister, robotic quality. It was buried deep inside a hermetically sealed helm with a full face plate and visor, which was a perfect mirror-black. “They were Orbin bounty squad. From Orbin moon, O’rae. They have been tracking you.”
“You’re not Orbinii,” Tawny said.
“No, I am not.”
“Who are you?” Ben said.
A light blinked on his pack. A tiny buzzer sounded. It was a suit reading showing low-limit. The guy checked a control panel on his wrist. “Come. We find a place. Must recharge.”
It suddenly made sense. Ben nodded with certainty. The gage was on an atmosphere-to-dioxide conversion unit. This stranger was from Karbatt Krutt, one of the independent planets. It was two planets in one, the western hemisphere flushed in perpetual darkness, its carbon black surface etched with rivers of lava visible from orbit, always raining sulfuric acids. The other half was a lush brown and green world with mountain ranges and forestry. Each hemisphere had evolved uniquely intelligent life, the Krutt and the Karbatt. Ben couldn’t remember which was which?
He’d never met one before. He looked at him with interest.
“You’re a Karbatt.”
The guy half turned as if to face him and said, “No. I am Krutt.”
To misidentify one as the other was an insult.
“Ah,” Ben said. “Apologies.”
“Not necessary. Come.”
The
y found a diner bustling with comers and goers. They weaved through a crowd toward the one empty booth in the restaurant and sat, Ben and Tawny to one side, their new companion to the other.
The Krutt placed a wireless energy transfer apparatus to an outlet in the wall and immediately, his suit began collecting power. He was recharging.
“Do you have a name?” Ben asked.
The Krutt said, “No.”
“You don’t have a name?”
“My name is No.”
“Ah,” he said amicably. “How did you know they were tracking us?”
“It is what they do. They are… how do you say?”
Tawny and Ben both said simultaneously, “Bounty hunters?”
“Hunt bounty, yes.”
“So it’s true,” Ben said looking daunted. “The Orbin Royal Council has put a bounty on our heads.”
“I believe this, yes.”
“Why?”
“I do not know.” The Krutt leaned forward. “Do you know?”
Tawny and Ben glanced at each other. The answer was clear in their eyes. They had private information about the Menuit-B operation. The Orbinii wanted it back at any cost. Tawny said, “Could be any number of reasons.”
Ben said, “How do you know about the bounty?”
“I know the Orbinii bounty squad. Was once among them. No longer.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Friends are, how should I say…”
Tawny and Ben said simultaneously, “Fickle?”
“Yes, this is that. Fickle.”
“Is that why you’re here?” Ben asked.
The Krutt nodded his head morphing Ben’s reflection in the visor. “Yes. I have… things.”
“Revenge.”
“Yes, this,” the Krutt said.
Tawny shook her head curiously, and said, “We haven’t seen any Orbinii assignment come through the black market bounty forum contracting for us.”
The Krutt nodded. “Orbinii like to be private. Not want anyone know. Not use the forum. Too public. No private.”
