Under the Gun

by MisterFour

BOOK ONE= THE CREW

”Bou liubis, a cherta ne drazni.”

-Old Russian Proverb

”Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”

-Matthew 27:40

“”I think of this war as it really is, not as the people at home imagine, with a hoorah! and a roar. It is very serious, very grim…”

-Manfred von Richthofen

Part 1= ”Hyperbole”

Hey, what’s up? I’m Automatic and I am in the middle of something. Try to keep up, will ya?

I gotta hand it all to the man in gift wrapped iridium plasteel, that guy Dragon, head kahuna of Neechi, knows how to throw a party. I got all my gang stuffed into a freighter owned by the Star Pirates (what a dumb name), make that, used to belong to the Star Pirates. They don’t know we’re here, right? So here we are, like lobsters in a tank at a restaurant, and they let us Tach jump right to their base, hidden away in the corner pocket of the universe on this planetoid, just barely an atmosphere, and we jump out and bash out their relay, wham, bam, thank you, good bye and then the Star Pirates know the gig is up. I mean, I only got six guys, but they know that it’s too late, we’re on to them, and then Neechi receives the coordinates and come out of space, it folds and unfolds like a conjurer’s trick, and there’s their premier Capitol Warship, the WitchWyrm, all cannons and admantine hull gleaming, a brooding, gruesome monster aloft in the void, drop pods like copper eggs descending onto the planetoid’s surface, starships drifting away to gun their afterburners and engage the Star Pirate’s beleaguered forces.

Let the games begin, man.

My plan was thus, true believers…

Hit ‘em hard and hit ‘em fast. Beam the coordinates through the encrypted Tach gate (something Neechi did not know how to do, thanks to the sophistication of the Tach gate coding, how do you think I got the gig?) and smash their communications grid until Neechi arrived.

What if Neechi did not arrive?

Try to fly through the Tach gate and get away.

Yeah, right…

I maneuvered my Hammer…scratch that, you don’t maneuver a Hammer, you chuck the sucker through space like a brick and hope you don’t soak up too much fire, anyways, I moved…f*ck it…my Hammer swung into some Star Pirate Orions that had engaged our flank, odd shaped mothers, painted gold and red, with the mechanical skull icon on each side, and I let the first one eat some plasma, sliding and following up with a rail shot, pretty damn perfect, and he became fire and metal parts.

The other two buzzed me, strafing by and igniting my shields with las fire. I caught the WitchWyrm out of the corner of my cockpit, magnificent, it’s weapons fire painting the starry black scarlet with ordinance, the defensive stations around the planetoid’s perimeter reduced to cinders and scrap one by one from the Capitol Ship’s assault.

Oops, blast torps, one sec…

Ouch, close, where’d my shields go? Not so smug now, are you, Otto?

I gave the first Orion plasma and rail, watching it’s reactors ignite, pop, pieces of it plinking against my hull. Quick lat, slide, the whole machine vibrating with physics, transferring power into shields, here he comes, the las fire scorching my hull, and then firing plasma…

He flipped gracefully, but still caught a few, the shields reacting milky bright, the planetoid blue-white behind…

My rails were like fire-and-gold bolts, battering the Orion in half, they went in opposite directions, into space forever.

”Machine! Gimme some good news!?” I said.

”The perimeter is not yet neutralized.” She said.

”Ok, Sixers, form on my wing. Dead clients don’t pay.”

”Copy.” Machine said, her voice breaking up as the conflict escalated around us.

I moved quickly, rerouting power, wondering if the Star Pirate’s headquarters was getting’ stomped yet. I imagined the lances of the Neechi smashing into the Pirate’s mechyards, those 80 ton monstrosities tearing up the forces like Zeus putting the swat down on Typhonaeus, Dragon had been very sure of the plan, and I have to admit, no bad code in the program, there…

I could see Machine and Sorcerer, both in slate gray Orions, come up on my 4 and 8, respectively. They were packing blast torps, nasty nuke beasties, and I never really thought about their choice of ordinance until they decided to cover me-

Whoops. Explosion. Wow, pretty lights…

Sorcerer’s voice through a squelch of static.

”Otto? You alive, man?”

”Sec!” I said. Sorcerer can be such a mother when he is not being a motherf*cker…

”Pegs, wing, comin’ at us fast, like they do best.”

That was Dos, calm guy, doesn’t get all dramatic in a fight. He was in a Bora Cutlass, you can tell by the rails whacking into ships like the hand of some deity. Whammo. There goes one, now.

I had gotten smacked with a blast torp, hull fine but a little beaten, shields recuperating, there they were, two gold and black Pegasus interceptors bearing down on me, those Star Pirates liked speed, fragments of las fire on all sides, couldn’t see Dos anywhere, the space a satin black, with the violent and yellow blossom that was the distant Augustus nebula spreading all magnificent beyond the Star Pirate stations, the crescents of distant explosions, the haunting shadow of the WitchWyrm eclipsing space, stark obsidian with the sun behind, the pegs swooping in with a buzzing whirr, I’m twisting, keeping them in my sights, don’t want them shooting at my ass, then my plasma falling down on one, a flash of electric yellow and molten blue…boom…

Then an X of rails, Inferno and Dos teaming up on the remaining Interceptor. Bye, bye…

”Hey, Boss, I think the mop up is over, but the WitchWyrm needs some help, they want to do the bop on an incoming Dropship…”

Inferno’s voice brimmed with a self assurance that came from the vitamins he ate or somethin’. He was born to sound so confidant as to be arrogant to most. But he moved a Hammer around like he was born in the saddle. I fly them, and even I think their ugly. Like blocks of beaten iron, so un-aesthetic, ya know? But is you know what you are doing, you can be such a terror, despite the speed at which other ships can maneuver…

Did it really matter?

”Hu, you alive?”

His voice was calm, like Dos’s.

”I think we’re all here.”

”We’re too good to kill.” Inferno said.

”Hail, hail, the gang’s all here.” Machine added.

”Statistically speaking, we should have lost SOMEBODY…” Dos jumped in.

”I saw a quad plasma salvo bounce off Inferno’s ego…” Sorcerer put in his line.

”That was my c*ck.” Inferno quipped.

”Yeah, let’s take this show on the road. C’mon guys, business, war, the important stuff?” I had to be the big boss, sometimes.

”Automatic, you copy?”

Dragon’s voice was even, authoritative. Like the way Sorcerer could sound.

”Right-o, Dragon. How goes the punitive mission?”

”We appear to be winning, but that will mean little if we don’t stay on top of the ground war.”

I could see the ruins of the defensive platforms-gruesome, battered and rent asunder in the cold starred black.

”Ok, where are the bad guys?”

”We’re the bad guys…” Inferno’s two cents plinked onto the intercom.

”Shaddup Inferno, Dragon is giving us commands.”

”Uh…yes, well, there is a Dropship on course, intercepting your position, we need you to slow it down…”

”Roger, copy, come on Sixers, let’s get nuclear…”

The Dropship was closing, it’s guns already sending crimson bolts of disruptive energy into our wing. Ka-blam! Pretty ballsy of them to send it in with no protective fighters…pirates must’ve been desperate…

We closed in, it’s hull burnished gold in the interstellar sunlight, I knew that some twenty mechs were enclosed within it’s armored chassis, waiting.

I sent torps into the propulsion systems, las fire igniting my shields. I caught the flash of rails out of the corner of my eye, and could just discern Sorcerer and Hu hitting the Dropship’s other side.

Dos took a hit. I lost him from my radar.

”Dos!!?”

”Hey.” His voice was scratchy. ”I’m messed up, no systems, retreating…”

”Yeah, go for it, we’ll cover you.”

Las fire hit my ship, and I afterburned instinctively, to the rear of the megalith, it’s engines like burning brass, it was bring, sun-bright, I turned my eyes from it.

Dragon, on the comm..

”Automatic?”

”Yeah, just a sec.”

Hu flew past me, his ship sparking, and I afterburned, pulling shield energy into the burners, then up and over, the guns still blazing, Inferno up close and personal with the thing, and then our rails descending like gold/red cables onto the buzzing systems box, a cement colored dermoplast unit, and it went up with atomic force.

I think I told the wing to retreat, the dome of the Dropship left behind. I saw it, as I looked back, an orb of dermoplast and admantium, slowly rolling to a shuddering stop as the pilot engaged retrorockets uselessly, ion steam like silver foam, drifting in clouds about it…

My wing fell back, safe from the paralyzed Mech-carrier’s weapon’s fire…

Mission complete, pilgrims…

…

Part 2= ”Catalyst”

Aunt Aggie looked into the pot of soup she had made for the family. Joe, Oscar and Tolio were gathered around the table.

Try as I can, what precisely the Iscariot looked like always escapes me. I remember it from when I was young, and I only remember the outside of it once, a shadow against the naked burning face of the sun.

I remember the inside, especially where we lived, in Olsom Cellers. That’s where you lived when you were rust-poor.

Faddah was working late that night. It was just us, like always. Faddah-Dad, but I called him Faddah- would work late, like that. He had to. He was a space cargo trucker, and the work was dangerous, intermittent, and didn’t pay much.

Our home was deep down in the Iscariot…I remember walls the color of rusted iron, always leaking water or coolant or worse…there was a atmosphere problem, never knew why, but it could go steamy humid or bone numbing cold, depending on the orbit.

We were packed into the cube like rats. Three rooms, side by side. One bath. The rooms were small…Faddah and Aggie shared the one room, then the middle, where we ate, and then Joe, Oscar and Tolio. And me.

Aggie had gone begging to put that soup together. Shreds of cloned meat, some rat, cloned vegetables…and potatoes. Always potatoes, a vegetable that seemed remarkably suited to the environment. To this day I f*cking hate potatoes.

Joe and Tolio had snuck out and stolen some bread. Aggie turned a blind eye to it.

I remember the sodium burner above the table. It gave everything a garish shine…the drip of the sink…rat bites. Always rat bites. They crawled in from the drains.

Deeper down, in the sumpsters, they got as big as raccoons. One of my friends died from a bite, when I was small…

Aggie’s face had deep lines of concern, but cooking made her younger, somehow. I just remember her seeming to relax into a mode, the sweat beading on her forehead, the corners of her mouth smiling, somehow.

Oscar was just a baby. He cooed at the table and hit a plastic rattle with a clown face on the table.

Metal. Everything metal. And plastic. Even our clothes were plastic woven. Thick taxes prevented us from shopping in the upper levels, where one could purchase cloned cotton weeve.

”Bah bah bah bah bah.” Oscar said, cooing to himself.

Joe looked at me, squinting, his ugly mouth crooked.

Joe always hated me…I felt it. When I stared at a vid or Aggie, he would look at me sidelong, his mouth in a scowl.

Which made no sense because we were half-brothers. Our mom had died having me, she gave birth to Joe years before, and his dad had died, murdered by dealers I found out later. Faddah had met mom, then I came, and then Aunt Aggie had moved in and Faddah and her had Oscar, then Joe.

Oscar always looked sullen, his face slack, almost. He had a piece of chalk, and occasionally put it in his mouth.

”Stop that.” Aggie said. She took the chalk from Oscar, and then brought the soup to the table.

We had no bowls. Instead, we all spooned from the soup.

Joe’s ugly scowled face beamed, almost.

”What’s in that, ma?”

Aggie looked at us all, proud. She could feed her family, and give them wonder.

”Pepper. It’s pepper. I found a cube that someone dropped…”

I taste pepper, sometimes, when I think of those walls, in that colony, long ago. It burns the roof of my mouth like red giants burn planets too close to them.

Pepper.

Rust…

…

I gave my report, in full, to Neechi command.

The rest of my company had retired to celebrate.

We were aboard the WitchWyrm, in orbit around the tan and green planetoid that was once the home of the Star Pirates. TNN reporting craft had come in like locusts, beaming results through encrypted tach channels across the galaxy, covering the ”the major coup against the Star Pirates by combined mercenary and Neechi fighters.”

That really nukes me. Mercenary. They couldn’t get my name right? The Sixers…how hard is that? Phuc.

But my stock had gone up (I’m a corporation…you can invest in me. I’m worth 154 credits a share…compared to Galspan’s 2345 credits a share) and my shareholder’s were pleased. High numbers this quarter, double what we made to date last year. We also had a combined interest approval rating that promised big dividends at the rate we were going.

The board room was all chrome and dermoplast…the table a gravitized disc of rose quartz, flecked in gold. I felt out of place, my rad-proof flight suit lined with wires and cables, covered in soot and rust stains. The collar was high on my neck. I just wanted to get the meeting over with and be with the crew.

It felt good to look at these guys, for some reason. They gave questioning glances to my rank, not realizing that the gold stencil bar code was meaningless…just an advertisement for nitrolite (you laugh, but that ad for nitrolite is an extra 50,000 credits annually, according to our contract).

I felt battered and proud and silly and sick with andrenaline, but I gave them all the specifics, and we watched the film report from the comm. panels all of our ships carried for such a thing.

I was told then that the leader of the Star Pirates, Oslovo, killed himself rather than be caught. He would have been convicted of criminal conspiracy as well as war crimes, probably would have gone to the disintegration chamber, so it’s just as well the sick phuc cut his throat open with a sharpened piece of iridium.

The Neechi officers wore crisp blue uniforms of the finest materials, medals and ranks in perfect order. They looked like officers in the vids, perfect complexions, sharp eyes like flint, stern, commanding features. They looked like they made more money than I did and slept in better beds and had better hookers. Their academy rings all gleamed in the light, the platinum burnished and flecked with obsidian.

I didn’t get to go to the flight academy.

Credits were transferred via tach gates in banque-galactique code and we were officially paid.

Dragon seemed impressed by my presentation.

He sat back, aloof, his uniform positively festooned with medals, indicators of rank, and assorted trophies. I sometimes believe looks get you where you end up, he looked regal and calm, like some sort of predatory bird, perched high above it all, surveying his domain, not missing a detail.

But then the presentation was over, and they were getting up, all of them, and I realized, by the way they smiled at each other and shared inside jokes, the silence of the business atmosphere now discarded, that I was a merc and they were what they were: clanners. Clanners in a big time clan, too.

Now I really wanted to be back with my crew.

I packed up my bronze coloured titanium palm top and checked my bank account.

Hell, yes.

I looked out into space, through the shielded dermoplast that kept us from all eating vacuum.

So vast, so utterly void and yet stirringly beautiful, like the cold face of a woman from across the room who is married to a multi-billionaire and you can never have her. But she is there, full of stars and suns, whole planets within those infinite veils. Standing this close to space, I always feel like I might fall through the dermoplast and just disappear into the galactic nothing. It is night that will never know day, forever.

Then I blink out of it, and I am no poet, I am Otto, of the Sixers, one of 5,837 merc groups in the galaxy. I am a space dog.

Dragon had said something to me.

”What? Sorry, I feel tired.”

”I said, Automatic, would you like to accompany me to the Main Hold? I want to show you a prize the Neechi have recently required.”

In person his voice had a dark lilt to it, accented, like those Earth Brit pilots a century ago might have sounded like. Formal, baroque.

”Yeah, sure. Got some coffee? I need to clear my head up…”

”Of course.”

We walked out of the room and into the cold corridors that were the interior of the WitchWyrm.

The only thing I like about the Neechi is the fact that they don’t get overly aesthetic about the interior of their ships.

Naw, I mean, they paid me, and they showed up for the fight, and they were professional enough to make up for my lack of it, but some clans got fruity really quick with their ships, like they were on some bisexual love cruise (which, don’t get me wrong, are great fun if you are high on methamphetamines and half way through college) but the Neechi used a blue steel gloss and oiled brass design that made you feel like you were in the darkened Victorian walkway of a Jules Verne submarine, the electric burners giving an eldritch glow to the smoke-dark corridors, comm. panels and sensor arrays glowing like wet neon…

Then I realized he was talking.

”…was a huge success. Far greater than our best estimates. Our investors are pleased.”

”Investors?”

”Yes, Automatic. We are a corporation, and we operate in conjunction to other corporations for mutual profit. We are still humanitarian, however, and mercy missions make for good public relations…”

”Eh.”

”Not to worry, I own a large enough percentage of the stock to call the shots. We are still a clan, we just operate according to more economic ethics.”

”Supply and demand.”

”Yes.”

”So why f*ck up the Star Pirates? Why not strike a deal with them and make a profit off of an organized protection racket? The smuggling alone would have put you in gold bath tubs for life. You would have made money off the baronies, smaller corps and merchants, plus the less powerful clans…”

”Sound like an organized criminal conspiracy.”

”Cops are thugs, married women are prostitutes.”

”What-?”

”Uh, I mean, it all depends on how you look at it. Star Patrol don’t wanna have all the criminals disappear, they would go out of business, ya know…but there’s always a profit. Ya follow the profit.”

”Well…the line between being a pirate, a merc, and a clanner is blurry indeed. But regardless, the Star Pirates took human life, civilian human life, and endangered peaceful trade routes. So they were eliminated.”

”Yeah.”

”It’s quite a shame Star Patrol is on strike, otherwise we would not have been involved, and our energies could have gone to our current war with the Furnace Brigade. But the pay is appreciated.”

”Yeah.”

I felt rusted and lumbering in those corridors, marching with the Commander of Neechi past saluting officers and callow faced recruits so perfectly clean shaven ya’s think they were eleven years old. They were bleached and polished, free of so much as a mar. Here I was, my suit frayed and rad burned, the coils of my couplers in bad need of a resurfacing…

We left the soft warm dark of the WitchWyrm’s corridors for the harsh cold neon brightness of the Main Hangar. It was all hollow acoustics and machine echo, the voices of one hundred conversations rebounding off of ferroconcrete walls. White cotton shirted technicians mothered the Neechi star ships, checking arrays and reloading weaponry.

Some pilots were still close to their ships, swapping tales with other pilots. I realized that with Neechi spread out from here to Sol they probably only communicated through Ezboards, and now here they were, face to face for the first time in years.

Dragon seemed proud, and he had a right to be. I scratched at my neck, realizing I needed a shave (and a beer).

Twenty salutes later we were looking out into Space Dock, through a dermoplast window so big a Claymore could have barnstormed through it.

”There.” He said, gesturing towards the sphere of sea and land that was the Star Pirate’s former planetary stronghold. It had not been huge, as military installations went. No bigger than a small Earth town, most of the planet untamed wilderness. It would be populated by exodites and drifters in a week. On corporate loans, of course. Ain’t it funny how the world works?

”Yeah. Nice planet. I saw a desert planet once. I always wanted to pilot a mech, ya know? Go around and tear up the real estate…”

”No, that cruiser there.”

I looked at a ship, smaller than any of the Neechi’s, pitted by ordinance, with a face that was brooding and worn. It was a maverick design, a Frankenstein’s Creation of old and new tech- Madorian arrays, Gal weaponry, Bora reactors…it’s skin was unpainted, burnished, glowing chrome in the dying light of the Augustus Nebula.

”Yeah. Kind of tore up. Look’s tough. Ex-pirate, eh? Spoils of war, well done, Dragon.”

”Actually, quite some time ago Neechi downsized it’s operations long enough to refit many of our ships, so as to make for easy repair and maintenance. All of our bases are designed by Godcraft, and all of our cruisers, freighters, fighters and destroyers are manufactured by Gauzzi. This craft, being a conglomeration, would ill fit in with the rest of our ships. So it’s yours.”

The top of my head felt like it had flipped off. Holy f*ck.

”Holy f*ck. You mean that? Jesus, I don’t know what to say, I mean, our contract said nothing about spoils. Are you sure?”

Dragon seemed please that he was playing the benefactor. He beamed like a jinn granting a wish.

”Yes, quite. Neechi has no need for it. Additionally, our contract only called for you rendering their relay sensors ineffective, as well as beaming us the required coordinates for our assault. But you took out that Dropship, and if it had landed that could have blown the entire operation. This is your reward, thank you.”

Wow.

”Wow, thanks, this puts The Sixers in the big time bracket. We don’t have to hire Guild Freighters anymore to lug us around. Wow. Those things are easy to fly, I know that chassis design. Like a Claymore. Wow.”

He seemed amused at my gratitude.

”Make no mention of it. Let’s see the inside, shall we?”

It was what you expected in a carrier freighter/carrier. Not as polished and pristine as the insides of one of the Royal Guard’s ships, but it had everything you needed. There were GUI controls, redundant energy transmitters…and it was big enough to carry ten fighters.

I noticed a few las burns in the dermoplast, but didn’t ask Dragon about it.

Oh, it was no pleasure cruise ship, we weren’t going to be doing guided tours for the rich and self indulgent, but it was better than what military operations normally required, and that was good enough for me.

The Deimos batteries were the most current thing on the ship. It carried an unusual amount of cannons for a ship with a reactor grid that size. I wondered how much it taxed the systems…

”Damn, Dragon, this works. Damn fine…”

”We are still doing a few repairs, but I knew you would be impressed.”

He stood there, the starlight upon his features, looking over the computer’s mainframe. The wall behind him was cut by black emissions coupling, the color of old nickel. I sat in one of the ceramite chairs, my thumb digging into a quarter sized chunk that had been shot out of it.

He turned, the half-light making him look regal, as if he was the Emperor of Space or something. Like royalty.

”What are your plans now?”

”I am going to sleep and meet with the team after that, surprise them…I have been working out some business plans, some new stuff that will make us all rich in a few years…we’ll all take a break and plan our next job. Nothing too extreme.”

”You going to be planetside on Haglogg?”

”Yeah, the crew needs some earth under their feet. I don’t think any of ‘em are spacers. I was born in space, they weren’t…”

”I may be able to refer a future job for you…are you interested?”

”Eh? Yeah, ya gotta make money, ya know…”

”So why aren’t you in a clan?”

”It clashes with my drinking schedule.”

”No, really.”

I had my reasons.

”No reason, just not my style. This way I can see more of the universe. Excitement, adventure…”

We left the ship, whose name I was just now starting to mull over (Mijionar? Nah. Sixgun? Nah. Death-Octopus? Nah.) and went back to the crowded area that was the Main Hangar Bay. I could hear the sounds of welding mechanics in the distance, and the groaning of engines being tested and refitted.

”We should be at Cix station in 14 hours.”

”Excellent. Yeah, I am gonna sleep.”

”Dobriy vyecher, Otto. Za vashe zdaroveeye ee blagapaloocheeye.”

I felt a bolt of ice pound it’s way into my spine.

”What?”

He looked confused.

”I said that-”

I stepped forward a bit without intending to.

”No, I didn’t hear what you said.”

”I meant, I mean, do you speak Russian?”

I tried to calm down but that never works.

”No, no, I don’t speak that. I didn’t understand you.”

”Oh-” He said, blinking. ”-I had thought that-”

”What? You thought what?”

I backed up a bit, in my mind. Easy, Otto, this guy just gave you a carrier…

I turned away a little and tried to ameliorate things on account of my attitude.”

”Listen, Dragon, I am tired, I’m sorry, I didn’t get it. I mean, naw, I don’t speak Russian. Ha ha. It just threw me off a little.”

He still looked like he did not know what was going on, but he shook my hand and acted with a lot more aplomb than I would’ve.

”Sorry, Otto. I think I heard you were Russian somewhere…”

”Eh, forget about it. I should have been more educated. You take it easy, I am going to sleep before I embarrass myself further. Thank you again, I am in your debt.”

I shook his hand again and staggered past some rad-suited technicians messing with a jade green Phoenix bomber…Gal Span design, like some Behemoth of Space, loaded to the gills with ordinance. They spoke French to each other, joking about the battle. When you are alive, and nobody you knew personally died, it’s all a grand joke, maybe.

I looked at my scarred reflection in the mirrored steel of the inside of the elevator, seeing the exhaustion there.

The Neechi had great officer’s quarters. Even had running water and a lion-sized vid screen, with 3,000 channels.

I crashed, and dreamed of Russian winters and wolf haunted snow swept steppes of blue and white…

Part 3= ”Theory”

Faddah was an angry man.

The Iscariot was built eighty years from when I was young, by Spillark, Inc., before Spillark got bought out by Godcraft Industries.

Stations get built in weird increments; especially the way really big stations like Iscariot get built. Spacer technicians move in and build the preliminaries, then you move in workers and add to what you have created. It’s fundamental, and usually takes ten years after that date at which the base is first started to really finish.

Faddah’s own faddah had come over with the Russian workers to build the final stretch of the Iscariot. I find it ironic, now, that after granddad broke his ass to do outer space construction on the Seseki Towers Suites, he stuck around to raise a family.

There’s more, but I always felt Faddah hated me in some small way, hated everybody because the early builders, all Russian, had been screwed over by those megacorps, left behind and buried in the bowels of that station. He was cruel to ma and all of us, but I don’t hate him for it, he knew no other way, maybe. It was that ribbon of hate, wound through the bloodline, and sometimes he would come home out of his mind form the bar and blame us…

All of this is old news. Everyone has a cry story, even the people I do jobs for.

No one has a right to *. Everyone has a cry story.

Screw it.

…

Wanna know something sick?

I had a brother, not the youngest.

About two years ago he was killed.

Now, we weren’t too close, I hadn’t talked to him in quite some time. You lose track of things like that. The universe is too big, I guess. One day it’s all over, and you wonder what happened to the hours, mawkish, but true.

He was killed by some Madorian guy named Fontaine.

I heard about it later, it was just some alley fight or bar brawl…but my brother was a softy. He didn’t fight. He was the guy who smoothed things out, ya know? So I was told that it was some argument, that the Madorian officer pulled out a knife and got him right in the neck.

Stupid, just stupid. Senseless.

I had it all set up. Fontaine, while wanted in several systems, made a trip every year to some huge fencing tournament in Pleides. A big one, I’m told. Quite a deal in fencing circles.

I had a simple plan to take Fontaine out. Two fist long pegs, three-fourths an inch wide, drilled a hole in the middle of each, ran some piano wire through and made it about a yard. I had worked it out, running it around in my mind at the funeral, in all of those bars, at the bottom of a bottle…it kept me sane, that direction. I looped it around his neck, in my imagination, one thousand times.

”This is for Vinscenzi.” I would say. ”You will be in Hell, soon…”

Then some Iconian Knight officer named Argentum killed him.

I feel worthless, somehow. Like I failed in some way.

I even hate that man, the one who killed Comerca. I hate him, even though I owe him.

People are funny, somehow. We know we are wrong, but we know ourselves too much, somehow. I think in my head that I am a fool. I had not even talked to Vinscenzi for half a decade. But in my stomach I wanted to kill Fontaine, and I hate that IK pilot for taking that closure from me.

I am a fool. An old fool.

…

I woke up late.

My dreams were of gossamer stars, velvet space, piss-yellow flames engulfing ships. I saw Capitol Ships foaming blood colored flames, in my dreams. Images of planets and suns, collapsing, the glaring neon of the hud, the nerve splicing klaxon of the missile lock warning. This is the audio elegiac a pilot is left with, I suppose.

I looked at the titanium colored walls. I turned on the vid screen, I activated the coffee machine, I downloaded a business channel on the stereo. I paced for a bit, organizing my thoughts…

I had a Capitol Ship. A cruiser.

Not a big one, mind you, but it could haul my entire crew, we could ship real cargo, we could smuggle things that could get us either rich or jailed for the rest of our lives. We were big time.

You have to understand that five years ago I lived out of my ship, a jade green Orion called the ”Pretty Baby.”

Now I had a Warhammer, a whole wing of pilots with decent equipment, and a Cruiser.

I sipped my coffee and watched a TNN reporter inform me and millions of business people across the universe that stock in nitrolite was falling down by a single credit. Some more news, mostly about a new clan that had been formed, they called themselves New Dawn, and had been instrumental in the success of a moon rebellion somewhere.

I sat at the foot of the bed, listening to the distant electric drone of the ship I was in, alone in the vacuum, bringing me back to Trilithon Station.

I had a bagel with cream cheese and lox, and blueberries and milk.

It struck me as funny that at the exact moment I was sitting there, as I came to the decision I had just put together in my brain the night before, I could have been anywhere in the galaxy, on any ship, going to any destination. I could have been anyone, I was generic and alone, even the coffee I sipped was clone to 100,000 across the firmament.

In that precise instant, although I was completely unaware of it, because I am a stupid yutz, sometimes, I was as happy as I was going to be for a while.

I had never heard of Joshua, or the Hollis Ring.

I had never heard of the Levitcher Rebbe or any Hassidic Jewish Luddites or the Lucero Corporation.

I hadn’t the slightest shred of logical evidence that Hugon was a moon that was completely without atmosphere that orbited the gas planet, Jupiter II.

I had certainly never heard of Thurio Muzgen.

I can’t blame everything now on that exact moment aboard that Neechi starship. There was no real precise instant the Fate was decided.

Blame on the black star, blame it on the fallen sky, blame it on the satellite, or the color of Earth water, or the manipulation by corporate scientists on the very molecules of the planet they had built for an eccentric millionaire, who would later have an epiphany because his wife was Jewish, and had died, and he was near dying, and so he performed one last act, a good deed, to somehow settle his life up until that point. And so he bought and gave away an entire planetoid, and became Cyrus or Nebuchadnezzar…

Lost, yet?

Don’t blame ya.

I envy your ignorance.

I wanna be where I was, again.

The vid screen had 3,000 available channels. It gave me so many facts and statistics about everything that I was left with nothing. It became a blur of silver static and frozen neon, reflecting upon me with no impact, numbing; invisible.

…

The Trilithon was a structure that always stood out from any other station I would ever see.

A great, vast cylinder, with grooves on the side, flickering lights of smoked green blinking across it, four miles wide, ten miles across, thirty levels, with administration being the top level.

Not too well policed, but not the hell-furnace I grew up in. This place was business, of all types, bring your guns and knives, but everyone around you is carrying, too, punk.

The constables here are polite, reasonable; a detective in a platinum colored longcoat shows up and makes requests, investigations, whatever he needs to do…and he is calm the whole while. But outside are helmeted, masked, cerramite armored gents with repeating gyrojet rifles, and while they are waiting outside, the detective shakes your hand, the ring he is wearing samples your DNA, and then sends the specifications to his friends outside. Now those gyrojet rockets are programmed to home in on your genetic code, and they are the size of a cigar and explode after they enter your body. Hiding behind a wall for cover does not help.

The cops don’t have much trouble, here…but it’s not like people call the cops, ya know…

Crime? Yeah, there’s crime. Show me a station that ain’t got it. That one, you say? Liar. All stations got ‘em. The ones that don’t are corporate controlled, and that’s the worst kind of crime. The kind you think are straight. Corporations take money, and governments are in on it, too.

Forget about it.

People absolutely freak about the Trilithon. Like, it’s not supposed to be that big. As if there is a limit to how big stations should be.

There’s plenty of room in space. That’s why they named it that. Otherwise, people would have talked about launching a man into the hall closet.

Ha!

The Trilithon has art museums and Zen rock gardens and restaurants. It has docks for ships beyond description, it has zoos and movie theatres. It has public schools and a downtown section. You look up and there is that metal cave ceiling, all aglow with construction, lights and commerce. The place is always night.

What else?

Casinos.

Two universities.

Four churches and a mosque.

A baseball park.

Malls. Big ones.

You get the point. Any more nouns and you’d stop reading.

So yeah the Trilithon is big. But it’s also, well, it’s hard to put. Ya see, I have seen movies by folks who have always lived on planets and never go into space. People who don’t go into space, in this day and age? So they don’t go, so they don’t know space. They show you a black expanse, with stars. Cute little white ones. And they twinkle. Aw, how f*ckin’ cute.

Space is big, REALLY BIG. But you see things, get it? Amaranthine clouds of distant nebulae, silver and milky blurred crescents of distant galaxies, The vivid black against black of dark matter, the dotted and rock speckled mystery that were asteroid fields, remains perhaps, of planets long ago. The blue, emerald, violet and copper orbs that are planets, and it’s all around.

I wanna big glass ship I can see through, and I will fly way out there, and be surrounded, and feel like God, space above and below and all sides. Emperor of the great big universe.

You can see that from the Trilithon. For those of you who have lived on planets, and you go way up into you’re cute little mountains and think space is so clear, your wrong. It’s here, in the stations and in the starships and where I work and breathe, not on some planet, buried under atmosphere, crushed by oxygen.

That’s it.

…

We had all taken a shuttle in from WitchWyrm. I had a Neechi pilot drop my new ship off at the Trilithon. None of us had said a word in the shuttle. We never did. After combat, unless we lost someone, no one ever said anything to each other. It was just exhaustion. Combat exhaustion. We would celebrate, but later. For now, we just all took quick looks at each other and departed our different ways for other places to get our heads on straight.

What’s wrong? Oh, it’s been ten pages and you want an action sequence. I almost forgot.

I grabbed Esprezzio by the collar and in one swift move broke all his front teeth with a cue ball. CRACK!

He went over backwards, almost taking me with him, and I gave him another before I let go and he dropped…

How’d I get here?

I lit a cigarette and stood on the wet gloss of the street in front of Moe’s, the glare of distant businesses lighting my way, the ground choked with trash, old electrics and discarded nitrolite cans. I kicked a beer bottle, checked a leather wallet lying on the ground for money, and made a phone call.

That being done, I entered Moe’s with a clean resolve, although my conscience certainly did not follow suit.

I wore my best Sixer’s flight jacket, a shiv and my best blank look. I just kept my eyes mean. That’s the key, you’re not a tough guy, you’re not an easy mark, but you can f*ck it up with the best of ‘em.

I shoulda been an actor.

Moe’s was ten black pool tables, overhead ruby quartz sodium burners, the downtown smog of cigarette smoke and hashish, and the cold comfort and numbing promise of the bar.

Chrome, plastic and blued steel, that was the bar.

You dropped in just recently, but let the record state Esprezzio had left us to hang. People are f*cking dumb. They make deals with mercenaries and don’t follow through, hoping mercs like me will die and they don’t gotta pay us. Ha ha! We’re mercenaries, don’t they get it?

Esprezzio was with two mooks, probably hired muscle.

He looked at me like I was the second comin’ of Christ, and he was an atheist, and it was time to pay up.

”Esprezzio, where was our rockets?”

I owe it to him, he played it as cool as Siberian December.

”Otto, I owe you a drink and an explanation.”

He was wearin’ a steel colored suit, alligator boots and red tint contacts. Had black spiky hair, probably thought he was the frikkin’ devil. What a punk.

”Rockets, punk. Fifty plasma deals, Bora make, with 6/66 marks. Where were they? I had to pay up, big time, and you said you’d have them at our last jump point. I paid you large, and what happened?”

”I couldn’t get them. Cops grabbed it. Sorry.”

One of the mooks grew a voice.

”Hey, this is our game.”

Some music came on. Something with heavy bass and synth, pulsing like jungle drums, with a voodoo organ back beat.

”Ok, Esprezzio, you know the drill. Twenty five large, plus five for making us sweat.”

He looked side to side like I was some nerd at a party, embarrassing Mr. Popular.

”I do not have the money now, Otto. I will have it next week.”

The mooks began to shift.

And I got it. They were with him. He took my money and got muscle.

I should have called Inferno, but my blood was up and there was no backing down, so-

I smiled, touching my tongue to the roof of my mouth, knowin’ what I know, that I had pair of brass knuckles and a shiv, and-

”Esprezzio, I am going to ask one more time, and then it’s nuclear war. So, pretty please, my money?”

He took a step forward, as did the mooks, one of ‘em was a big curly haired guy in a mining guild uniform, the other had a crew cut and veteran tattoos.

”Otto, you are embarrassing yourself. I will pay you when it is convenient. You are a filthy mercenary, and you should know your place. You are a bottom feeder, and I will summon you when I-”

I grabbed Esprezzio by the collar and in one swift move broke all his front teeth with a cue ball. CRACK!

He went over backwards, almost taking me with him, and I gave him another before I let go and he dropped…

There was the demented drunken carnival glare of red and blue, his teeth like white pearls on the crusted floor, the mook whipped the pool cue around and opened my head.

There was stars and the other swarmed me, I went down a bit, covering up, the other trying to bring the cue to bear-

Then I had the brass knuckles. I swung up, feelin’ it connect, mining guild uniform going back with a roar of pain, then tattoo boy whipped the damn cue around like a God-damned Shao-lin monk and I backed up, blood on my head, on the back of my neck, I had the shiv, the knuckles in my left, tattoo boy moved forward, there was a blur-

-and I ducked almost under the pool table, hearing the thing stick clatter above me, people were screaming, the bouncers were on their way, and I brought the knife up across his face and made his plastic surgeon a rich man. Then I gave him a swat with the knuckles, and his face looked like a mask of blood, the rooms spinnin’ from all my adrenaline, I felt weightless, I kicked Esprezzio for making my team sweat it out when we realized we had no rockets, and then the bouncers landed on me and the cops that I had called earlier landed on all of us.

…

An hour later they had me in the back of a hover car.

”Your are a damned meshuggenner, you know that, Otto?”

My head was a helmet of pain.

”F*ck him, I had that bastard steal those rockets for me fair and square, and he ditched out, took the money and spent it on narcotics, I know it. Jesus, it’s getting to where you can’t trust a crook anymore.”

They had a good laugh and handed me more coagulants and painkillers.

Mirosky, the cop I had called, looked at me with big watery blue eyes. He had thick wrist and a thicker neck, a cop from the old school, fifth generation in a family of them.

”You gotta slow down, Otto. You are thirty, remember?”

I gave them both five large for their service, and they dropped me off.

I try to co-opt when it comes to law enforcement. It’s so much easier, and such good business.

Everything was cool. Everything.

Tomorrow, I would tell the team we were big time, with our own cruiser. No more lean times for us.

Later, I held a cold beer against my aching skull and made some calls, stayin’ one step ahead of Esprezzio.

Just business.

Dragon gave me a call, before I got home.

More work.

Part IV= ”Catalyst”

Oh, yeah, I never mentioned the planet that Trilithon orbits, Baalbek.

How should I say it? What poetry come to mind?

Ah, the words that rise from the depths of my wisdom, here they are, emerging…

F*ck that place. I hate planets. Starbases have air conditioning and planets have pollen that give me allergies. Besides, I have never had good luck there.

So f*ck it. No adjectives for that place. Look it up yourself.

…

Vinscenzi was born after Oscar, by a year.

I remember first looking upon his face, cooing at the light of the sodium burners, above.

Faddah, like I said before, was an angry man, prone to fits of just pure rage, but I don’t think he was a bad man. He was a man of his environment, a cargoman, one of the thousands aboard the station we grew up on. It was tough, bonecracking work, working outside the station, attached to rocks or ships, then inside the vast storage houses in the station. Sometimes he would leave for jobs, and Aggie seemed to dread that, as if someday he would not return. But he always did.

Faddah was not a bad man, he was just a man who was not very good.

He looked like a tractor. Big, broad, with a paunch from beers and the heavy protein diet all cargomen got from the companies. Bald, his hands huge and clumsy, he walked with a slouch, he seemed to have little neck, just a mass of muscle.

His face was dour, always dour, and his eyes were black, almost beady, but I don’t like that word. He was not dull, he was just compulsive, with little patience outside of his job. He seemed to trudge through life, all imagination gone, his joy had become drink, long ago, and he saw no reason to change that.

Faddah beat a man, once, because the man had caught me lifting his watch. I had come home, my eyes black, Joe and Oscar in tow (Tolio had died a few months earlier of a fever that killed him is only two days, while Faddah had begged his bosses for the medicine that might save him. A lazy clerk kept forgetting to make the order, and three days after Tolio died, it finally arrived.), and Faddah had seen the marks.

”What’s at for?” he looked at me, his big face starting to scowl.

Joe put in his piece.

”He tried to lift a watch, Faddah. Man catch him and punch.”

”Z’at so? Huh? You do nothing? You and the lump, there, watch Ottavious get hit? You no help?”

Fadddah’s Russian accent would become more pronounced as he lost his temper. His face would become pale, not rosy when he was in a good mood.

Joe was in the light in a way he did not intend to be.

”But…Faddah, Otto…”

”I DON’T CARE! You don’ get it? We are family, eh? Not like some bastards who do not’ting. You always take care of family!!! So he get hit, you do not’ting!? Eh!?”

My head was a big block of clay, the pain like a hand grabbing at me with talons. Every noise seemed muffled, except for my father’s voice. As if my head was underwater.

Vinscenzi had stopped cooing, watching the whole drama with unconcerned, baby interest. He turned his little head, big eyes regarding me, eyebrows slightly arched.

Then Faddah was stomping down the corridors I had grown up in, I was crying, almost, but he just dragged me, his hand engulfing my own small one, and then we were upon the station depot center, where a great deal of traffic came through, to other ships, different parts of the station. Back then it was all gray green, with walls of lockers, huge screens of advertisements and station news comms, the floor that same rusted metal surface that our room seemed carved from.

Throngs of people, then the station trains. Huge things, the color of coal, with mirrored windows, the distant shadows of people behind it.

I had run here, earlier, and then, goaded by Joe, had tried to grab the watch as the man had set it down beside him. I did not even realize at the time why I was doing it.

The man was still there, a military man, it seemed. His uniform was a deep, rich brown, like chocolate.

The man seemed calm, aloof. I remember thinking maybe I should not say anything, just follow Faddah for a few hours around the sweat and stick of the corridors, but I knew he would be a volcano all night, so-

”Zat him?”

I had been staring, paralyzed with fear, I guess. Behind all of us was a fountain, and a church, with stained glass pictures of Jesus and cherubs. Above, vast and away, the glint of machinery.

Faddah had pulled me alongside him. People drifted past us. Other cargomen, personnel, vendors wearing paper aprons, whores with smeared make up…

”YOU! With the fists??? Hit my boy!?”

The crowd parted around us. I remember being embarrassed and afraid. Everyone seemed like giants, looking down upon me. I wanted to sink into the floor and disappear.

The military man wore tags, of sorts. I remember thinking, what if he had a gun? But of course no one did, where we lived.

His voice was crisp, almost British.

”Your boy should mind his mitts. Keep to his toys, not other’s items.”

”So? You hit him!?”

”Good dose of manners, sir. Perhaps he has none at home. Next time, I’ll keep his ears, like they do in other, less forgiving stations.”

I can’t remember what the man’s face looked like. It seemed obscured, somehow. I remember just his voice, the curt way it sliced through the air.

Then I remember the man pulling a hook-knife, smoothly, and then Faddah had simply punched, there was the sound of a brick, fragmenting, people were gathering, and I watched as the knife hit the ground and spun in a semi-circle, Faddah was upon the man, who lay on the ground, and I could see his fist-

The thuds seemed to echo about us, and Faddah stepped up from the man, kicking him, I realized he was a soldier, there was an insignia of sorts on his chest, and Faddah kicked him while the crowd watched.

Then he stepped back, breathing heavily.

The soldier looked as if he had simple fallen asleep, but he was breathing, a choked, thick sound.

I could see blood in smear and streaks, the train arrived, roaring beyond us.

Faddah stood there, watching, his bared teeth glinting with spit. Then he grabbed my arm.

I remember wondering, stupidly, where the knife had gone. Then the throngs of people gathered themselves and entered the train. A deluge. I could not see the military man, anymore.

Faddah turned and looked down at me.

”You good?”

I looked up at him, dumbfounded, and then I nodded.

”You take care of your brothers. Always remember that. See him?-” He pointed at where the man was, somewhere under the throng of miners, merchants and toughs. ”-He had nobody, so I could land on him. No family, nobody, you get landed on. What you think?”

I looked up at him, and for the first time in my young life I saw it, at the corners of his eyes and mouth, the way he regarded me so small below him.

Compassion.

There was never any police, this far below. As long as the wageslaves paid taxes, the oxygen didn’t get shut off, and the cops didn’t care who wasted who, I guess. The soldier had been down for whatever, and had gotten beat. Maybe the cops arrested someone else, I don’t know. This far down, cops just did not care.

A week later, Faddah beat Aggie. He had come home late and drunk, and she had cursed him for being so. I heard every bit of it. I remember the next day, Aggie rocking back and forth, holding a small green plastic ball that had been Tolio’s, crying with some abandon.

Joe and Oscar had been somewhere else.

She had been feeding Vinscenzi, glumly, and then had picked up the ball, set it in her lap, and put her face in her hands, quaking, making dry, shuddering sounds.

”I am sorry, Aggie.” I had said after too much silence.

She gripped me, then, tightly, and I realized just how miserable this all really was, so little food, so little of anything, even each other. There was nothing down here, nothing. Only rust and rats, steel and plastic, and dead people with long faces. The chemical smell, the sodium burners, the constant rumble of distant mechanics, all of it.

”It’s not that, Otto. It’s…I worry. One day I will not be here. Who will take care of you all? Who will take care of Vinscenzi?”

I didn’t know what to say. I was young.

”I will take care of Vinscenzi, Aggie. I always will.”

She told me what a good kid I was. How I had a soul, even down here, and how God was with me, and that she loved me.

For whatever reason I don’t remember anyone ever telling me that, until that point.

But it wasn’t always a big horror story or nothin’. Faddah got a raise, once, and a bonus of sorts. We took a vacation, to the planet our station orbited.

I remember seeing the station retreat from view, and being on some beach, with sand, water, and the giant blue sky above, with it’s two suns, and the trees. Big, leafy palms swaying cheerfully.

Aggie and Faddah had just watched us as we ran in the wet sand, amused by our play. We spent a week in that little village, I don’t even know where it was or what it’s name is, only that we could not afford anything, but it did not matter. Faddah and Aggie spent money on fish and beer, and we all loved it so.

Tolio and Joe had raced each other, and then Oscar had thrown a ball, it had gone off by the trees, and I ran to catch it.

Some man had been walking by, then stopped to watch us. He picked up the ball and handed it to me.

I took it, looking up at him, an old guy with sad lines around tired eyes, and then Oscar had run up beside me.

”Tolio and Joe are in the water!” he said it with great cheer, because Tolio had been afraid, for the last few days.

I ran, my feet sinking into the sun drenched sand, and looked back at the man, who seemed to wave at us, at the ocean, at all of nature around and above us.

I remember being happy, chasing after Tolio, who stood waste deep in the blue green sea, arms raised like some boy-Poseidon. Happier than can really be compared to, even now.

…

I woke up.

My head was split to the core. Ouch!

Oh, yeah, and I had a hangover. Oh, God.

The other cop had used a dermal stapler for me. Glad I don’t have much hair.

I took a shower and a ton of painkillers. All the pain went away.

I had a bagel with lox and cream cheese, and some raspberries with milk.

A pot of coffee soon followed.

Then it hit me.

Oh, yeah, I was down ten thousand bucks, I still had to do something with Esprenzzio.

But I had a Carrier, you get it? Sent down from God on high to Dragon to me, too bad for the cause of good.

I made some calls and summoned the team. My boys (and one girl), the Sixers.

We met at Cynosure.

Overlooked the downtown section. Exquisite, the streets before you like a Christmas Tree. The ceiling above like the stars past them.

The architecture of Cynosure was that weird white steel, subtle holograms and black alabaster 2200 style, art deco meets Flash Gordon meets retro. Carpet, the color of bronze.

I dressed corporate as a joke. Gloss shoes, black slacks, white long sleeved shirt and a tie the color of titanium. Even styled my hair.

We got a room to ourselves.

The waiter was Han. Mandarin, he could guess your Chinese astrological sign and make a damn good Martini.

They staggered in.

Sorcerer. Flew an Orion. Into computers, has bionic eyes and a bionic hand, intensely political. Had weird pet peeves, like this week, he despised hypermediazation.

Is that even a word?

So, what is hyper mediazation?

”The extent at which the media as we know it will over cover every single aspect of a story drowning us in details so we miss the big picture. It’s a form of crowd control. Can’t trust the media.”

Thanks, Sorcerer. Are the Bora terrorists?

”No, they are freedom fighters. Because they won.”

Wow. I am smaller in your presence.

But Sorcerer was older than I was. He had been around the universe and lived to tell the tale, and sometimes he gave me an insight my young age would not allow. I valued that, man.

He wore blue jeans and a white t-shirt, exposing circuitry tattoos. His hair was stark white, he had a paunch, almost, and he was in his forties. Oh, yeah, he killed a Devil’s Fist pilot, long ago. He doesn’t talk about it.

Machine, next. I didn’t know much of her history, it bleeds out, sometimes. She has a nice ass but she is more like an older sister, to me.

She had a husband. He died. She cries, sometimes, but she won’t tell us why. Or how, or for what, or when, and we don’t ask ‘cause she will kill us.

She loved chess and hated drugs, even the soft ones.

Had two great Danes. Fed ‘em quite a bit. They were fine beasts, about the size of draft horses. They jumped me one time and knocked me down and licked my face and I pissed myself in utter terror.

She could paint, and consumed as much ginko and lecithin as could be safely ingested by a human being. Oh, yeah, she was a black belt in silat. She carried a knife, a nice one, and could carve her initials in your forehead before you got your gun.

She wore a black jumpsuit with Sixer marks. And a leather bomber jacket. Sorcerer was always polite enough to not stare at her butt.

She had long black hair, with a streak of white. She had mature features, but she was only 23.

Hu Jing-De.

He was into Rinzai Zen, Taoism, Bauldelaire, and anything else remotely French literature. He was a master of the kusuri-gami, no, really, he could sling it around and hit an apple on your head from ten feet, he could hit anything the size of a quarter from any conceivable angle around him, even under his own leg.

He was a quiet guy, mostly.

Merc Quarterly had named him, ”…one of the most proficiently deadly Pegasus starfighter in the galaxy.” He had turned down B.C., twice.

Hu Jing-De hated Inferno. But they were both very professional about it.

He was smiling, his pale Japanese features regal and calm. He wore black slacks and a coal gray long sleeved shirt, with a bracelet of platinum. His head was shaved, with a thin layer of black hair.

Dos came in, beaming.

Poor, dumb, friendly, nice Dos. He held doors open for people, he treated women like they were fragile diamonds. He was exceedingly polite. He had a great deal of friends who were women, who thought he was the perfect guy, but would never date him. When you first met him, you were stuck by the notion that this was a guy you could trust your wife, you woman and your wallet with, than it dawned upon you that he was a push over you could piss on, and he’d apologize for preventing the urine from hitting the concrete.

F*cking Dos, he was the best of us. He was.

Inferno loved tearing into Dos. Any way he could. To Inferno, as it was with the rest of the f*cking universe, politeness was equated with niceness, and that was itself equated with victim. So he victimized him. Took his coffee, called him secretary, cut him off in conversation…to Inferno, Dos was the little brother, there to be picked on.

One time, though, a year ago, we had hired another mercenary group to help us with a supply run to some Bora rebels who were getting ready to rearrange the molecules of some Galspan folks in a bad way. We had stood in a vast depot hangar, wide enough to hold a fleet, composed of corrugated iron, filled with armoring machinery. Our voices reflected off discarded beer bottles and exposed and sparking cables.

I remember the whole place smelling like fluorocarbons and dermoplast.

They were a tough group. The macho, in your face, ”I kill everyone” type. Even wore those bad assed aviator sunglasses, the kind that make you look like you have no eyes, and you are a murdering robot head? Well, like those.

So one of ‘em, a bad assed guy by the name of Durolt, had stood with us on a ledge overlooking our ships, back when I still had a Bora Cutlass. It was a thirty foot drop, easy, to the scarred and pitted surface.

It had been Inferno, Dos, Durolt, and myself, all going over the final tactical evaluations for our run. Durolt had pointed out something I can’t remember, something like the range of the lasers on the Capitol Ship we had to go past, and Dos had corrected him, genius for statistics that he was.

So Durolt had told him f*ck you.

Dos had apologized, slightly cowed, and had walked off.

Now, that’s just attitude, no big deal, right?

But something had set Inferno off, the way Durolt had looked in the direction of Dos, as he walked away. The narrowing of the eyes, the clenching of the jaw…this was a guy who put people in the grave the way you bought milk at the supermarket. I had felt the tension just go up.

To Durolt, Dos was low man on the totem pole, because we treated Dos as the low man, get it?

So Inferno goes, you should kill him, teasing.

And Durolt say, I think I will, later. Dead serious.

So Inferno just pushed him off the ledge, no dramatics about it…he shoved Durolt to his demise like you would throw a paper coffee cup into the trash.

He didn’t make a sound, just disappeared. I blinked, thinking Durolt had never even been there. Just like that, presto chango.

Durolt did not even get a chance to make a sound, he was just at the bottom, a look on his dead face like he was going to say something, but now he wasn’t.

Those mercs, can’t remember their names, must not have liked that guy too much. We had already paid them, so it’s not like we had an angle. We told him Durolt just tripped, and they divided the money from Durolt’s share amongst themselves. They even stripped his body before they dumped him into a disintegrator. Calling the cops is not an option for mercs. Bribing disintegrator operators is an old business allocation, easy as pie, no matter how many psych evals they went through.

So, to Inferno, Dos was a second class citizen, he got reamed because he was an easy target. But only by us.

Poor Dos. He was Jewish, loved hardware, really loved to re-engineer complex electrics. He was a writer, mostly business theory, and handled all of our accounts. What a guy. Mellow, he was even a veterinarian. Can you believe that? Most meat was cloned, and here he was, not eating it.

But the guy was a born in the seat Cutlass pilot, and I think between Inferno and myself, we were mean enough to make up for the lack of that specific quality in Dos.

Just ask Durolt.

Dos wore what he always wore, those black mechanic’s jumpsuits. And, as usual, he had that goofy smile, like a dog you had just finishing patting on the head. It made me hate him, and hate the universe that devoured people like him, and the people like me who ate nice guys as appetizers, and the women who wouldn’t bang him because he wasn’t a caustic a**hole like even Sorcerer could be. It made me loathe the negative traits that kept me alive in the business.

Yeah, that was Dos. God bless him, and God damn me.

Inferno came in, his gait casual and as self assured as always. He wore a black business suit, dark steel colored plastisoft shirt, kevlar weave shoes. His hair was in a perfect pompadour, black with cyanic streaks.

He was Bosnian, I think, with sharp features and a forehead that was always smooth with a sort of sociopathic uncaring. His aristocratic eyebrows never so much as knitted or beaded. He kept himself cool, Satan cool, and as clean as a pampered housecat. He was our immoral compass, a constant reminder that ultimately, no matter how much we tried to believe we had a conscience, we existed to make money and kill people, in whatever order it took.

Inferno wasn’t too well liked, by Hu, by Machine, probably not by Sorcerer, certainly not by Dos. But he called me ”Boss” and was very loyal to the group. He knew a Warhammer like nuns know the Bible, and had his finger on the pulse of the anything criminal. People owed him favors, wherever we went.

We had picked him up a year ago along with five others. New faces, all of them, he had been teamed up with a guy called Benzick. Well, everyone else died, including Benzick, and I think it just made him crazy, not in a frenetic way, but in an ice way, like in the way people die in their sleep, quiet.

He made the team uneasy. He used f*ck like a comma, smoked as much as two packs a day, cut you off in conversation and had a tone of voice that could make you feel like an idiot, or a small child. He was abrasive, surly, aggressive-assertive, and as polite as a shark in a feeding frenzy.

But he didn’t make mistakes, bagged girls in the three’s and didn’t care about dying, what you thought of him, or whether or not you even liked him. I envied that, in some way. He reminded me of Konstantin, I guess, and he was a credit to The Sixers, even if half of us wanted to beat him to death with a concrete ash tray. I can’t begin to tell you what he had done to folks who crossed his path in the wrong way in the years I had known him. No, really, I am not trying to sound like I am some hardened veteran in the company of spooky assassin types.

I could tell you stories, man.

He had claimed to come from Old-Earth royalty, or Europe, or somewhere in the Fringe, or on the edge of Sol government, or from Martian politicians, or from Luna. But it hardly mattered, he worked with us, and there is little more else to say. You’ll see the rest.

Inferno took a seat to Machine, who scooted three inches away from him. He lit a cigarette.

I lit the holo of the Carrier, which I had decided to call the ”Time Baby III,” for personal reasons.

It flickered there in the artificial light.

”People,” I said, ”We are now in business for real.”

Moment of silence.

”Is that our next target?” Inferno asked, breathing out a stream of smoke.

”No, it’s ours.”

They froze.

Having their attention, I told them the story.

…

In due time I broke out the holo of our new cruiser. Then, after the ooh’s and ah’s had subsided, I broke out the vid of the sucker, beamed in from outside the station. Sitting there in space, attached to the side of Trilithon’s coppery solar paneled surface, I felt another stab of pride. This was our ship, after all.

Stations are kind of on their own, no matter what, right? Well, all stations have a policy called the Compartment Clause. You set aside room for shipments to the ship, and bring in cargo anually; you get a corporate grant of 100,000 credits. Straight up. Well, I had received it this morning.

Sorcerer summed it up.

”We are high time, now. The big boys.”

”Yup.” I said.

”But that means we have to contend with big players, as well.”

Something in the way he said that made me feel ill at ease.

Hu threw in his bit.

”We can capitalize on this. I got notice of a few jobs this morning, and this changes the stakes, indeed.”

”Don’t get too frisky with the jobs, I just got a call from Dragon, of the Neechi clan, and he is kind of on the A list at this point, dig?”

”What’s the job?” Dos asked, his hands clasped in front of him.

”Don’t know, but the guy didn’t get to the top of the clan because he won it from a sweepstakes. The guy probably is going to want something pretty stiff, and we are all going to devote ourselves, ok?”

”Don’t like the idea of clanners.” Inferno said, his voice low and confident. He hated clans, never said why.

”We call the shots, gang. The paperwork is done, but I owe him, ya know?”

”You’re the boss.” Inferno said.

”About that-” I filled up my coffee cup, then manipulated the smooth plastic controls of the built in holo display.

I broke out some crystal shot glasses and poured everyone some whiskey.

I lifted up my glass, and they followed, looking at me as if I had grown a little strange.

”Gang, The Sixers are now four years old. As you know, my stock is up. But I have since reviewed the articles of corporation on me, split up my share and made you all equal partners. It’s a democracy now, with me as chairman of the board, and you guys are all, well, the board.”

Machine knitted her brows. ”Why?”

I paused as a cleaning ‘bot outside stalked up the building and rinsed the windows with foaming tentacles, domed eyes glinting myopically, it’s body was the green color of old Coke bottles. For a moment, as my back was turned, it felt as if it was raining outside.

”Why? I’m tired of being the boss. Ain’t my style. There’s enough of me to go around, and you guys have been there. On the right of the 6/66 logo you can see how much you all have in terms of the corporation. From here on, we stick together, as we always have. Anyone who wants out can hit the road and give up their shares to the rest. If not, we all sign a five year contract with a retinal pattern scan.”

There was another pause.

”I’m in.” Said Sorcerer.

”Same here.” Dos said.

”Sounds good.” Hu Jing-De reached for the scanner.

”I gotta look at all of your ugly faces for five years?” Inferno said, also reaching for the scanner.

”I feel like I am getting married again.” Machine looked up at me and gave me a tired smile.

I hit a button and summoned Han.

He strode in with a smooth gate and bowed slightly.

”Han here will be the witness.”

We went through the formalities, and I felt an electric buzz in my spine, a familiarity, a realization that I had journeyed so long, so very long to be here…and it was only the beginning of a new jaunt.

I lifted my glass, the 6/66 logo, a gold and black swirling hologram, floated elegantly above us.

”To you all, gang.”

They raised their glasses. Even Inferno resembled something that might have been happy.

”To the Sixers!”

Han watched us all with a cool, impassive wisdom, and then bowed, honoring the ceremony.

Outside, downtown Trilithion station was hued in a thousand colors= golden neon advertisements, emerald rustling gardens of bamboo, the deep cyan of the koi ponds, the champagne hash braziers, the scarlet Indian curtained windows of cafes and shops juxtaposed with the mirrored corporate offices, like steel cubes, black in the station’s faux day.

Above all that the gravitrans and hovertaxi’s continued their days work, beneath the station’s ceiling that was their metal sky

…

Sorcerer noticed the back of my head.

”What happened?” He asked, eyebrows raised.

I downed my coffee and told them the story.

”Geesh, Otto, next time tell us so’s we can give you some back up.”

”I paid off the cops. Besides, it’s just Esprezzio, not Al Frikkin’ Capone…”

Hu stabbed at me with his finger.

”No, boss, Esprezzio is getting bigger, and we need him around. He won’t make a jump to nail you, but we are going to have to at the very least get our munitions elsewhere, until he gets busted or swallowed up by the Yak cartels.”

Yakuza. They’re everywhere, even here.

”Listen, I will take care of Esprezzio, not to worry.”

That being said, we called it a date and agreed to get together later, to party.

”Oh, Machine, Hu, you guys wanna come with me to the meeting with Dragon? One big happy family, ya know…”

”Sure.” Machine said, checking her wrist comm. ”Where at?”

”I told ‘em Ichiban’s.”

Hu looked up from the printouts of our new Carrier.

”See you then.”

…

Part V= ”Variables”

I bought myself a new gyrojet pistol, one of those shiny brass colored Iztech designs, and put it in a shoulder holster. It had a baffler and a silencer, with a digital display, no less. We had our own cache of weapons, but the sucker had been beckoning to me for quite sometime, so I splurged.

They checked over my permit without so much as a murmur.

I footed it up Berthold’s Lane, had an espresso and some pasta, and checked out the latest stock reports.

I made a few more calls at a holobar, watching the crowd around me. Mostly maroon suited station techs, some College students, and more than a few pilot’s. Some looking for jobs. They sipped at glowing drinks in the darklight, looking sidelong for possible future employers.

The walls were crushed dark blue velvet decorated with hammered steel plaques commemorating old fights and awards. I recognized a few faces. The rest of the bar was gold mirrored panels and black leather furniture, the music retro techno with a lot of percussion.

Independent Mercs shared a disjointed relationship with clanners. They don’t like us, we don’t like them, but both sides have a respect for each other. We were on opposite sides of the fence, and the line that separated the merc from the pirate from the clanner was a single atom thin.

To say nothing of your corporate pilot…

But Mercs went to clans and corporations for money jobs, rich jobs. You got well funded and made some good cash. We got the awful jobs, yeah, but after the cordite cleared from the air you had made more than you could ever get from a criminal element or normal citizen who might hire you.

I had a whiskey sour and some pretzels, thinking, watching the holovid project the latest news about the Void Alliance, that hotshot clan centered near the Madoran sector. They were quite an event a few years ago. Movies were made about their exploits. They used to be kind of backwater, located in one small area of space, but then they hit a kind of technological renaissance and were big, now. I occasionally ran into their pilots. Word was they wanted to branch out here, but…

Their leader, RedStorm, had gone into hiding (probably retired), they had gone through a changing of the guard since then, but nothing violent. Word was there was some strife with Iconian Space, but that all passed.

I finished my drink and turned my head away. Holos could make you dumb, staring out at them like a hypnotized dog…

I paid my tab and hit the streets.

It would be evening, soon. Or it’s equivalent, deep in this station. You forgot where you were, sometimes, in space. Floating in orbit, adrift, alone with the stars.

I could see some dealers in plastic business suits shifting in the shadows of alleys. A police hovercar above, ignoring the refuse below. The dermoplast streets cluttered with empty nitrolite cans, a few hubcaps, a severed and eyeless doll head, a broken down street sweeper, the color of tangerines with black striped construction bumpers, left to rot. It’s husk spread a shadow over me. I had walked into the part of the station polite people didn’t go to. In the distance, street walkers, began to peddle their flesh, while high above amidst girders, cables, wiring and piping and electrics did their turn, recycling water and air to the inhabitants of Trilliad, moving information at a billion bytes per nanosecond.

A few bums, hopped up on something deleterious to your long term health, eyed me as they warmed their hands around a electric heater unit. They had plugged it into a receiver somewhere in a wash drain, duct taped it to a moddy, and had given themselves a nice amount of warmth, because down below, where I was, even in the midst of a bounty of technology it got so cold the rats died.

…

Our heater unit was an archaic thing, left over from the former century that had birthed it. A burnished titanium, with a huge cable that was taped up in places, with old station bar code acid etched into it’s surface. I didn’t trust the cable, it sparked occasionally, and when it did the whole burner would shudder, as if it were possessed by some djinn.

Supposedly, you could set the things to whatever heat you wanted, but ours only worked on it’s highest setting, so the top of it glowed with a piss yellow light, it’s radiance drawing lean shadows on the walls of our dwelling.

A few years later, one time, Faddah had taken off, and I think Joe was running out in the streets, maybe stealing something, like he was apt to do, without Faddah around to kick his ass.

Aggie and I were with Vinscenzio and Oscar, and Vinscenzio had been playing with a puppet I had found for him. It looked like a little boxing man, with a bulldog scowl, cartoon like five o’shadow, and big gloves. There were tiny levers inside, and if you hit them the hands popped out, like he was throwing a jab.

I had found an old out of date flight manual by the trains, and was reading it voraciously.

Oscar had been staring at the new toy for about ten minutes.

He groped for it, mouth slightly open, the glow from the heater unit reflecting in his eyes.

”Stop it, Oscar. Vinscenzio is almost done with it.” Aggie said.

Oscar still sat there, staring at the toy.

On the table in front of me was a steaming cup of nitrolite (Joe had stolen it and given it to Aggie, but she didn’t like them) and a wooden dowel we kept for clubbing rats that wandered up from our sink. You could put a grill, there, but they eventually gnawed through it.

Oscar pawed for it again, and Vinscenzio started to cry. He still gripped it, as Oscar finally just held onto the puppet and pushed Vinscenzio down so hard the back of his head hit the floor.

Vinscenzio began to cry, more, and Oscar put the puppet it, grinning at the boxer’s jabs.

Aggie picked up Vinscenzio.

”How DARE you, Oscar!? Give me that!” She reached for it with one hand.

Oscar punched here with it, in the nose, hard. She let out a cry and began to bleed.

Oscar laughed, seeing some joke, there.

I hit him in the back of the head with that wooden dowel so hard I figured the thing would crack. Now his head was bleeding, and he got up off the ground and turned to look at me, blubbering, rubbing his head with the puppet.

”Why you hit me, Otto???”

I looked at him, confused.

”You hit Aggie!” I said.

”But Faddah hit Aggie?” He was drooling, snot dripping from his nose.

”Well, you ain’t Faddah.” I said, still holding the dowel stick like a baseball bat.

He turned from me, took the puppet and threw it into the heater unit. It began to melt, the microwaves agitating it’s molecules.

My logic seemed to work on Oscar. He never hit Aggie again.

I realized that he was a lot like his dad. He didn’t have any real malice behind his violence, it was just something he did reflexively. No evil, no cruel intentions…he just lashed out at that which could not hit back.

People do that.

The boxer seemed to regard me with an infinite sadness as it simmered and melted into the machine, as if I could have saved it, if I had been faster.

We grew older, all of us. Faddah’s company began to sink, and he was reduced to working only a few days a week. But Joe had found a job somewhere, and shared some of his money.

I began to understand the system, then. Education was only for families who could afford it. The entrance exams into higher station levels and better paying jobs were vicious, requiring a lot of money and training. Lacking a higher level education, one could only take deep down station jobs, but you were then in debt to the station, paying stiff fees and stiffer interests. It was a perfect system, keeping the poor poorer, and far down below, while the rich upstairs never saw what went on. Faddah had been a victim of it, Tolio had died from it, and now I was next to put my arm (and soul, along with it) on the chopping block.

Joe got meaner, no doubt. He had found work, like I said, but it seemed to twist and warp him even more. With dad’s sour moods, the only the thing that snapped Faddah out of it was alcohol, and Joe seemed to always have a bottle.

One time, I saw Joe whispering in Faddah’s ear, leering at me the whole while.

I had been reading more books on space flight (I had found a few of them, but one time had just mugged a student for them, thinking he was carrying money. I had gotten bigger, and mugging was just easy).

Joe had always given me a hard time, never where I could see it coming, but from the edges, taking my food, telling on me, stealing from me. It was a behavior he had not grown out of, but had grown more into, you know? Like, whatever he had against me had surfaced all the more.

Faddah had been staring into his glass, and Joe spoke in his ear, looming like a buzzard, hissing like a possum.

I realized that suddenly, I was afraid, so afraid that I felt like I had been riveted to the seat. My hands gripped the book, and I felt a curtain of steel on my shoulders and head, trapped.

His fat head was a ball, and his teeth were gritted, he was a hulking mass of muscle, knuckles scarred from fights, acid, burns, intense work, and they both were clenched into tight fists that lay upon the table.

Joe had stepped back, almost delighted at whatever it was he had done. Faddah was a volcano, seething, he began to shake like one, and then-

Aggie put a bowl of hot soup in front of him.

”Here you go, let it cool, it’s very hot.” She said, oblivious, kissing him on the forehead.

His attention, drunken as it was, wavered, and he looked away from me, seemingly losing interest.

He put the spoon into the soup.

Aggie put a similar bowl if front of me. Not helping myself, I stared at Faddah.

He took a spoonful of the pepper soup and put the steaming liquid into his mouth.

Aggie smiled at me.

Faddah made a choking sound, a chortling, gurgling noise in his mouth and throat, and rose up, holding his face, and then spat the mess of it onto the ground, wailing from the burn he had received.

He stood there, coughing, soup drooling down his significant chin, and we all gaped in horrified silence.

Then Oscar began to laugh, like a f*cking idiot.

Aggie came forward, holding a napkin to his mouth, and his eyes were huge, drunkenly rolling in their sockets, and he hit her.

He had hit her before, and she had always just stumbled back. But this time she just dropped.

Then everything stopped.

No one moved.

Faddah seemed to calm down, the rage draining from him, and crouched down, looking at her.

We all stopped breathing, watching.

He shook here, and then turned her over.

She was breathing faintly, with small, shallow gasps.

He picked her up, his eyes squinting, and set her on the lime green couch Oscar and I had found in the subway tunnels a few months before. Joe has duct taped the portion of it, and it had sat in our living area, ugly, but functional.

Faddah sat on a chair, looking down at her, shaking, rocking, and I realized he was crying, silently at first, the tears rolling down his fat face from his squinting eyes. He was saying something in Russian, I think a prayer, but I could not tell.

Joe looked at me, and then grabbed his coat and left.

I ushered Oscar and Vinscenzio into our room.

We waited, listening, for hours, until the lights dimmed. I fell asleep, drifting off, Vinscenzio and Oscar curled up on a tattered mattress.

Later on, in the shadow of the living quarters, I got up, and crept from my room to the couch where Aggie still lay.

Faddah was still on the chair, asleep, snoring in the dark.

I put my hand on Aggies, and then on her forehead.

She was cold…very, very cold.

…

Have I ever shared with you my theory that mankind is dumb?

We can travel the stars, go light years in a few second, we have mined the moons of Neptune and perfected cybernetics. We cured cancer a hundred years ago, and that used to be a big deal. Hell, there are whales on Pluto because of us (in big aquariums in bigger stations) and it’s not like they were going to get there anytime, themselves.

I mean that no matter how far our science goes, or how fast towards the future it takes us, we will always be stupid in the common sense department.

Take firearms, for example.

In the early days of space travel firearms weren’t really a big idea. If you fired a bullet, it would go through the station’s wall, and then you would die as you and the person you were shooting at and everyone around you would get sucked out into the vacuum. Bye-bye.

Not that it mattered, they were all a bunch of geeky science types, anyhow.

Well, when stations were small it was no big deal. Then stations got bigger. Still no big deal. Then the cops and the military wanted to be up there, probably so they could arrest and start wars with people, so the scientists let them up.

So the cops and the military folks wanted to have firearms, and after the scientists explained that they were kind of a bad idea, what with the vacuum outside and all, the cops and the military dorks went back to Earth to figure out a way to kill folks in space, as if the environment was not dangerous enough.

Back on the Iscariot, after I fell in with some people that I will talk about later, we did not have guns, really. Oh, we did, but they were all in the upper levels, the lower levels did not have guns, because if they did, there might have been a revolution or something, I dunno…at any rate, we were in the Dark Ages, you wanted to whack someone then you had to hit ‘em, or kick ‘em, or stab ‘em, or hit ‘em with something hard and heavy, or garrot them, or whatever. I mean, you had to really work to whack someone, and it wasn’t pretty, afterwards. People bleed and scream and try to crawl away when you whack them (some even have the audacity to fight back…the nerve of those people!) so it takes a little more chutzpah, compared to just point and click.

But the upper levels of the Iscariot, and the rest of the universe, have weapons like you can’t believe, thanks to those cops and military guys.

You’d think that mankind would have just thought, ”Ya know, shooting each other is kind of dumb, and dangerous, so let’s just get along, right?” Yeah, right. Instead military researchers just developed new and more fascinating ways of taking somebody out of the equation= sonic disruptors, neurotoxin sprayers, airguns with little pellets filled with neurotoxin, pneumatic aircannons, rifles and shotguns with ammo that would stop if it hit a station wall, lasers that do nothing to ferroconcrete or plasteel (once they invented that stuff), gyrojet weapons that fire miniature rockets that stops when they hit the aforementioned substances, zap guns that fire electricity that just shuts the poor bastard down, even those masers that fire microwaves that broil off a 6” by 6” section of flesh, fries ya over-easy, but does nothing to surrounding objects, because that would be ”dangerous…”

Don’t get me wrong. Mankind experiments with various alternatives, but it always turns back upon him, our own natures are like our won shadows, you can’t outrun them, they are always with you, connecting to your heals under a distant sun.

Baalbek has a ban on all firearms, period. Only police and military are permitted firearms of any kind whatsoever, and you had better believe they use every tool in the shed to prevent anyone else from using them= code words, DNA locks, chip implants…

Your standard citizen cannot own so much as a crossbow. Ha!

Oh, don’t get me wrong, a few folks tried initially to own guns, despite the heavy customs security. But Baalbek laws are swift and absolute. Illegal possession of any firearm whatsoever is met with the death penalty, three days later, you can set your watch to it. Same with dealers.

There are scanners at every doorway of any major corporate or government building that can locate a pistol from about twenty feet. Cops have similar scanners that run automatically from their units. Satellites overhead do the rest. They can find a gyrojet pistol through one mile of concrete, no matter where you are, it seems.

Someone eventually finds their way around it, for a time. Photo cryptography, anti-scanning EMP chipsets, whatever. But it does not last long.

Because the next day the whole lot of ‘em, plus the dealers who sold them the hardware, all get televised disintegrations.

So here is a whole planet, a complete industrialized society, without any pistols or rifles. Must be pretty serene, right?

Wrong. The crime rate is through the roof. Only citizens get whacked with baseball bats, chains, machetes, swords, knifes, hand held sonic projectors, whatever. Burglary has risen steadily at a %15 rate every years, as has auto theft, muggings, robbery, etc.

What does it mean? I don’t know and I don’t care. We did not have firearms for the most part where I grew up, but that didn’t make life easier. I think a gun is a crutch. It allows you to shoot back, ya know? Well, here is the difference between people who have used guns in a fight and people who have not. Your normal stooge who watches too many vids gets shot at, and pulls his weapon and fires back. Your military man goes for cover, then fires back.

Well, chances are, if you are behind cover, you can probably run for it, too. Most people can’t hit the broad side of a Claymore from distances longer than ten feet.

Yeah, I carry, most the time. But I ain’t stupid…

Think the laws will change on Baalbek? Naw. A disarmed society is an easily policed society, and you had better believe that members of the government get to travel around with their own cadre of police bodyguards, armed with whatever ordinance is chic that year. They argue in Baalbek senate meetings espousing ”…the glory of a free and peaceful unarmed society, and the merits thereof.” Then they walk out with armed guards to armored hoverlimos and fly far above the crime ridden areas below to fortress mansions far in the mountains, as safe as the angels in Heaven.

So that’s Baalbek. But the rest of us in our stations and bases, in our cities and planets, still have our pistols and rifles, thank God. I think.

Don’t get me wrong, it can get a little out of hand, over in Station #542, deep within the worst part of the Fringe, that place is out of control. You can rent a piece for 100 credits and hour, and they sell disposable gyrojet pistols out of vending machines, in designer colors. Go figure…

So, yeah, we didn’t get the hint, we just made weapons to blow each other away in space, rather than just not shooting at each other. Inferno had the right idea. People were really kind of an evolutionary error, for every two steps forward that science takes us, eventually our own nature takes us three or four steps back, sooner or later. Eventually, we pull out weapons and blast, stab, or bash each other, it’s only a matter of time…

…

Why did I mention all that?

Well, I was on the mobile phone, I walked out of bar, ducked into an alley to grab my favorite shortcut to meet with Dragon, and there’s Esprezzio, surprised like me, only he whips out a slim gold gyrojet pistol and holds it to my gut.

You know what it’s like to almost walk into a spear point? You kind of stop, your feet and head move forward but your stomach lags behind, and you do this dumb I-don’t-want-to-get-shish-ka-bobbed dance and waddle back? No? Well neither do I but I bet that’s what it is like because that’s what I did, only I had my hands up and now realized that I was f*cked, perfectly, I couldn’t run away, I couldn’t rush him, and I had holstered my own pistol inside my jacket, and then like the perfect moron buttoned by suit coat up, swell, just swell…

So I stood there, hands up, feeling scared and dumb, but more latter than the former.

Esprezzio was shocked, holding the pistol. He was wearing these black and red sunglasses, his hair slicked back.

The cell phone chimed.

I honestly didn’t know what to do, except get shot.

”Answer it.” He said.

I kept my eyes on the barrel of the pistol and answered it.

The panic in me was making my ears ring, and I couldn’t comprehend who it was or what they were saying.

”I’ll call you back later.” I said, my voice hollow to my ears, and hung up.

We looked at each other.

”Alright, get it over with, I ain’t gonna kiss yer ass.”

Esprezzio blinked, and then put the pistol away.

I looked at his face.

”So…why don’t you?” I still had my hands up, like a total jack ass.

”Because I wanted to do business with you, and because of Inferno.”

Inferno. Oh, yeah. He was the machine, to the underground in Trilliad. You put in a living human being, pushed his button, and ya got a corpse.

”Ok, what do ya want?” I put my hands down, trying not to shake.

”Here.” He threw me a cred card.

”What’s this?”

”It’s the money I owe you for your rockets.”

Man, it was money day.

”Ok, so what?”

”I took out of it for the money it took to patch my guy’s face up and repair my mouth.”

Well, he didn’t shoot me, so…

”Fair enough.”

His lips were a little yellowish, from the healing process. Modern medical science could patch you up quick, if you lived.

”Listen, I need to pick up a weapons shipment, and you have a cruiser, so we should work out a deal…”

”Why should I work out one with you?”

”’Cuz I am the only one who deals weapons here, now.”

Wow. I was impressed. Esprezzio had been a busy monkey.

”So I could just buy them legally.”

”Yeah, right.”

He knew me too well.

”Ok, Esprezzio, seein’ as how you were polite enough not to shoot me in two, I will get the shipment for you, providin’ I get first pick of what you get.”

”Deal.”

He put out his hand.

I shook it, and then he probably had trouble turning his head to the left, because the side of his nose was now pressing hard into the barrel of a gauss pistol held by a gloved hand attached to an arm belonging to Inferno, who was wearing a pair of Armani mirrorshades, his eyebrows beetling behind them, his teeth slightly bared.

”Say the word, Boss.”

Esprezzio seemed shocked by the turn of events.

”No, it’s taken care of.”

Inferno pressed the gun into Esprezzio’s face a little harder.

”Easy, gent, I could have shot him and just left.”

”You would not have gotten far.” Hu Jing-De said, stepping from the other side of the garbage choked two way alley, lightly holding his kusuri-gami in his left hand, his features impassive and dangerous, slightly smiling. They hated each other, but when Hu and Inferno worked together, the results were not bad.

So they had been keepin’ tabs on me. Ok.

I let go of Esprezzio’s hand and backed off.

”Guys, don’t worry, he just set us up with a job, and besides, we have to work with him.”

Inferno seemed to push his face a little with the gauss pistol, and then holstered it behind his back.

I stood there, a little dizzy, and then I remembered something, a half glimpsed shadow of a memory, I had been in an alley, before, looking at Joe, Oscar and Vinscenzio, I had held a pistol, and so had Joe, and he was screaming at me, and then everything-

”Boss?” Inferno asked, knocking me out of it.

”Naw, I was thinkin’, I gotta meet with Dragon. You guys come with me. Hell, I’ll call Dos and Machine.”

Esprezzio rubbed the side of his nose. ”I’m out of here, then.”

”Yeah, Esprezzio, call me about the specifics, and get your hounds off me if they are sniffin’.”

”Ya.”

Inferno stared at Esprezzio, hard, and Esprezzio backed away and walked briskly down the alley, past an old barrel shaped oxygen converter someone had tossed.

”One day I am going to step on him.” Inferno said, his voice quiet.

”You goin’ with us?” I asked.

Inferno looked out into the street.

”Naw, I got a few things to take care of. Call ya later.”

He left.

Hu shrugged.

Above us, the traffic of several hundred hover cars continued on as it had been for fifty years.

…

Part VI= ”Theory and Law”

Here we were, in formation around the Time Baby III.

The Deep Space Cargo Freighter, Soul of Osiris, was en route, I had been told. ETA half an hour.

I was in wing formation with The Sixers, and the Neechi starfighters were to my left= Dragon, Wildfire, Veliceraptor and Princess.

We had set Time Baby III for auto pilot. I doubted if we would have to worry about it, but it’s defense grid proggies would blast away at any unrecognized ships within four clicks around it…

We had made the jump from Baalbeck, and the swirling silver and violet bubble of the Tach gate was a distant marble against the silver specked velvet beyond.

The moon Vaspere was a solitary, grey giant, flecked with quartz, pock marked with craters wide and small from a millennia of asteroid hits.

The powder blue ionized derridium skeletons of half constructed space stations and power relay grids stood slim and black against the reflected solar light from the moon’s surface, silent and alone. Ten years before, Galspan had began construction of the stations, only to abandon the project in their war with the Bora. So now they stood here, unused by civilized space, but a nice drop off point for people who wanted to be left alone.

Another Tach gate stood nearby the, from an unspecified sector of Sol space. That is where we expected our rendezvous.

The Neechi ships were in disguise, their marking painted over, their clan tags encrypted. Outside channel not on our precise frequency would see them as Doves 1, 2, 3 and 4, respectively.

Sorcerer came through on my HUD.

”Automatic, I am getting strong readings from the Tach gate, but I got some signals from behind Vaspere…might be an echo, but…”

”Yeah, I think we know what’s going on.”

Inferno came through.

”It’s going to be a pincer move.”

”Think so?” My pulse was goin’ up.

”That’s what I would do.”

”Dragon, ya hear that?”

”Yes, Automatic, shall we split off?”

”Not yet, but get ready. If we have to, then have your wing protect the Osiris and my wing will hit anyone comin’ out of that base.”

”Copy.”

Then, a silvery-white incandescence, as if an atomic had detonated, the Soul of Osiris, emerging from it’s jump, an old SteelJack, Inc. design, glittering with communications lights, it’s hull an unassuming moon dust gray, it’s surface lumped with redundant systems, navigational mechanics, shield transponders, communication routers, and ablative armoring. I could not see any weapons, but I knew from the rear coupling and exposed turbine arrays that it could take a hell of a beating, good for it because from the looks of it the thing had taken a hell of a beating, some of it’s systems were smoldering, and I could see freshly blackened marring from blast torp detonations…

…

Ichiban’s was a blend of the old and the new, run by Peter Kishii, a stout Japanese fellow who always had a leather cap on his head, tattooed forearms and a cigarette, unlit, dangling from his lower lip.

Peter Kishii had been here longer than anyone, and had two stories for every one you might offer him about Trilithon. Don’t bother trying to guess his age. He looks forty, but people swear he could be 60 or 70. If you ask him too much, he buys you a beer or kicks your ass out, depending on how much he likes you.

I love the place. Koi ponds, rock gardens, paper screens and bamboo growing in great glossy black pots, decorated with golden dragons. Silver Buddha’s looked at you from alcoves, along with those cool-assed money frogs you always see in Asian bars, shops or restaraunts, carved from wood, painted red, with a coin stuck in it’s mouth.

I loved the floor, as well. Solid jade, it’s depths swirled with cool green and subtle quartz. Peter also kept statues of Confucian sages and displays of katana’s and o-yori armor, with occasional engravings of Musashi or Confucious.

Ichiban’s had three levels, but each booth had a clear view from the front stage, where Peter always gave over to local bands. Sometimes it’s jazz, sometimes it’s synth rock, and Peter never tells folks ahead of time, he says it’s like life, unpredictable.

I dug the fish tanks in a big way. Hovering on Void Alliance anti-gravs, only a centimeter of clear plasteel separating the water from the air.

In it’s clear liquid space, above an earth of shimmering platinum sands, upon which sat aqua and ruby hued coral, were fish from earth, some painted like flame, or deep Sargasso greens, titanium purples…

Naw, it’s all about the octopi, their eyes brimming with some cold intellect, lazily waving their tiger colored tentacles with the faux currents. The fearsome blacks and oranges of their bodies stood out in sharp contrast to the fish about them, as if they were royalty, and the rare and precious piscine hoards above them were but paupers to their princedom…

Hu Jing-De arrived with Machine and Dos.

I had called Dos earlier, asking him to go. Why not?

Hu wore a glossy black suit, his tie satin with gold bamboo print.

Dos wore a dark blue jumpsuit, his pockets stuffed with minor electrics and more than a few pins. Almost as if to emulate Inferno, he wore these sharp black ”I-am-going-to-kill-you-and-roll-around-in-your-blood” glasses, but still had this goofy smirk. His boots were military Kevlar weave, and I wondered for a second if he was packin’, like I was…

Machine was…

Wow.

Skin tight leather jumpsuit against sleek curves, she probably did one thousand crunches a day, the front zipped low, exposing some nice, ample territory. She was wearing a perfume-jasmine.

”How are you, Otto?” She said. Her lips were a near black purple.

I’m slobbering on myself.

”I’m good, just waitin.’”

”Good.”

I pushed the vision of Machine’s fine body out of my mind (with a mental hand on her ass, I might add) and looked past the dark and silver neon to see Kishii, smiling, as he shook Hu’s hand.

”Peter.” Peter said, beaming.

”Hu.” Hu answered, smiling.

Old joke, that. Peter Kishii was Chinese, but had a Japanese name. Hu was the opposite; Japanese with a Chinese name. Also, by exchanging names, Hu had told me, it confused evil spirits.

”Business or sport, Automatic?” Peter said.

”Business, we are being contracted, I think.”

”Ah, I will make you look unlike the lazy drunk ass you normally are! Ha!”

”Thanks, Peter, where would I be without you.”

”Sober and hungry, with no place to go when you have money.”

We all laughed.

Peter left us, and drinks were brought to our table.

I looked through the smoke swept dark and saw that Dragon and three of his others had arrived.

…

Faddah came home.

It was far afterwards, after Aggie had…

I was in front of the heater unit.

The others were out, and it was just me.

I had found a job as a coffee vendor, I was just some punk, trying to find my own place. I still crashed at home, but I was older, now. Fourteen, I think.

The place was still the same, we were one family, contained in it’s stained copper walls, the ever constant ozone air enclosing us, deep in the station.

All of Aggie’s things, her books, her pens, her dolls, her cooking utensils, everything that was evidence of her, had been thrown out long ago.

Except for a picture, a small one, no bigger than the palm of your hand, that Faddah held occasionally and stared at.

The electrics had all fallen into deep disrepair, from not being used. We never cooked, I could remember. Just those garish sodium burners above, their salty yellow light coming down on us, on the dusted table, the unused chairs, the threadbare carpet the color of dirt, on all the nothing we owned, and there was less of it since Aggie was gone.

The heater unit was really screwed.

The heater units cord had long frayed, it’s wires starting to show through the rubber, it’s copper ligaments dangerous. I threw tape around that part, meaning to glue it later, and then he was home, and staring at me.

There were stains on his shirt, red and brown, and he had gotten fatter over the years.

His eyes were black and purple pitted things, his spittled mouth a hole that his yellow gray teeth pushed through.

We saw little of him these days, when he wasn’t working, he was drunk, mad drunk, as if he was a beast incapable of sorrow or remorse, but he could find solace in that rot gut piss stuff they found in the lower levels.

He staggered towards me, weaving slightly, and I stood up.

Something was different, this time. It made my gut curl and twist like a snake in it’s own coils.

His right hand held a slim glass bottle of sodiate, for the burners. His left held a larger bottle, probably of alcohol.

”Ottavious.” He growled.

…

”Otto.” Dragon said, in the club, shaking my hand.

…

”Automatic.” Sorcerer came through on the comm., I had been somewhere else, gazing out upon that scarred gray carrier, and then the sleek silver forms of Pegasus Interceptors followed, in pursuit, their hulls burnished violet in the permanent twilight.

”Yes?”

”We have traffic from the remains of the station. More craft.”

”I got my eye on it.” Inferno said.

…

He staggered, seeing me, saying something, I can’t remember, the words are so much smeared greasepaint on the canvas of my memory, it was a non-noise, just white sound, but he was just bellowing, his eyes bleary, his gait like a machine that needed a tune up thirty years ago.

”You think you know!? What’s it’s like!? Seeing your ridiculous faces? I have to work, and work, and then look at you, knowing that you saw-”

…

”Auto? Like in, the vehicle? Or are you Otto, with an o?”

”Eh, whatever. Good to see you, Dragon. Who’s the crew?”

He introduced them.

Wildfire was the first. Amiable looking, with tousled brown hair. He wore a simple flightsuit with a leather flight jacket and =Neechi= tags, platinum with gold rivets.

”Yo, everybody.” He said, half waving to us all as he sat down.

The next was Amia, she wore a military style leather jacket and tight black shorts, with a knife on the side. Probably a monoblade. High boots, Kevlar, with a simple white shirt over a nice bosom. Yummy. I mean, there ya go.

The next guy was Veliceraptor. He wore baggy slacks and striped shoes, like the kind kids wear, and a baggy red shirt with a target on it. How coquettish.

Dragon himself wore leather pants, a titanium mesh shirt and a leather jacket. It was a classic kind, they never went out of style. Some company on earth four hundred years old just cranked them out, over and over…

Dragon himself had a few days growth of facial hair and looked more like a rock star then the leader of an incredibly powerful clan. But then, he was slumming, so I guess he could look any way he wants.

”Have a seat, guys, and we can talk about what’s up. Give me all the angles and I can tell you what shape it’s like.”

Dos looked at Amia.

Amia looked at Dos.

”Hi.” Said Dos.

”Hi.” Said Amia.

The space between them seemed filled with more than the air that was in the place, more than the dark that mimicked the starry void that our business was done in. I wondered what that was like, seeing someone that saw you and…

Wait.

Where am I?

I’m-

…

Staring at my father, he’s yelling incoherently. He’s towering above me, bellowing, I am young again, fourteen again, or whatever age I was. I am holding the tape as if it was a lifeline, and he is holding in his left hand that 40 oz. bottle of gin, and he’s a mess, I feel so small, so…

”I did what I could! But everyday there was this door, far ahead, I wanted to go through it but I was always held back, I stayed, and stayed, and pissed it all away on you brats, I could have been somewhere else…!!!”

He took a draught of the gin, it’s contents cascading out on his chin, on his hand, sloshing on the ground.

He staggered, his pig eyes squinting and red.

”Joe told me, and he was right!!! You! You were always looking at me, as if I did not measure up, like I was an ox or some animal, and it made me miserable! You looked like her, that night that she had you, she looked at me, like you are now, I was scared, like you are scared, because she was so afraid, slipping away like that…”

He sobbed, taking another draught.

There I was, standing in front of him, shaking, afraid, I am there, I am always there-

…

No, I am in space, and the Osiris is barreling down on me.

I feel dissonant, then a voice cuts through my comm. link.

”Automatic?”

”Chimera?”

I knew Chimera from the Dead At Birth War. We’d been on the same side, then, workin’ for the Madorians.

I saw five blips come up from the shattered station. Add eight that were following Osiris and that makes thirteen.

”Jesus, where you been, Automatic?”

”You know this guy?” Sorcerer said.

”Yeah. Who ya workin’ for, Chimera?”

”Auto, you have to leave, now.”

Well, what do you know, everything is getting ugly.

”I’m workin’, Chimera.”

Long pause, farther than the space between the stars around us.

”So am I, Auto, so am I.”

Inferno’s voice, the devil in my ear.

”Punch it.”

No.

”Punch it.”

”Chimera, we don’t gotta do this…”

”He’s charging sols, punch it.”

Chimera afterburned, and then I saw a blue electric flash…

…

”Automatic, are you there?”

”Naw, I feel like I am in three places at once. Tell me the story, Dragon, and then we will all get sushi and get tanked.”

”Excellent, to the point. The consummate businessman. Let me ask you, have you ever heard of the Levitcher Luddites?”

Boy, have I. Remember what I said about cry stories? Those guys are the one’s with the biggest cry story of all. I can , but they got the right to . Hell, they can *, and you gotta buy them a drink. Jesus.

It’s like this but I am going to mess up the story anyhow, but I will tell it to ya and if I mess it up then I will just clear the details up later, when and if I feel like it.

I normally, really don’t give a damn about Luddites. Some mercenary groups, like The Devil’s Fist, won’t attack them, but who cares? They’re Luddites. They still live in the year two thousand some odd, and it’s not like they have ships that are hard to shoot down. Correction, they don’t have ships, they get carted around by freighters, paid by donations.

Who can figure Luddites?

So anyhow, the Levitcher Luddites are an Hassidic Jewish group ran by the Levitcher Rebbi. He’s a pretty big deal, wrote a lot of books, yadda yadda yadda. So they all started out on the planet Reimos, but the place got pretty much blasted during the Dead At Birth war. So the Rebbi says, ”Screw this place, time to go elsewhere, and we’ll come back after the Iconian Knights and Dead At Birth (and everyone else) stop shooting at each other.”

Well, he didn’t say THAT, but you know what I mean.

So him and his people, about a thousand, go wandering around on some sort of Jewish Star Trek until IK and DaB stop blastin’ away at each other, and when they come back to the planet another nation has already claimed it.

So, the Rebbi says, ”Hey, can we live here, again?”

Well, the nation is pretty much a Muslim government, and they say, ”No.”

So the Rebbi attempts to whip up support for his cause, but folks are tired of fighting, so no one helps.

So the Luddites go packin’, dispossessed, nowhere to go.

They wander around some more movin’ from place to place, but there’s really no place for them. Luddites take up a lot of space, they are non-industrialized, they need to farm and move chickens and cows around (these guys are really, really, Luddite, I might add. They don’t even have radios). There’s always a prejudice for these guys, ya know?

Wanna hear a joke?

How many Luddites does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Answer= Why the f*ck are those guys still usin’ lightbulbs?

Why did the Luddite cross the road?

Answer= He didn’t, the whole population died of some advanced disease because the dumb f*ckers don’t believe in utilizing smart nanotech antivirus technology.

You get the point, I’m sure.

So no planet really wants them, and there ain’t a lot of planets in this system.

Finally, they end up going from camp to camp, station to station, Capitol Ship to Capitol Ship, and at one point actually lose about three hundred when a fleet of Cruisers carrying them get’s blasted by Sol government over a horrible miscommunication. Sol thought the Cruisers were carrying biological weapons.

So here they were, Jewish Luddites, far away from their culture or any evidence of who they are, no plowshares, barns, horses or vast fields of grass, surrounded and transported by a cold, unfamiliar technology, which generations of soil and sun had left them unprepared for. Eventually, there was another diaspora, and they were separated here and there, in various pockets across the universe.

I could imagine friends and family embracing each other for the last time, in depots and stations, boarding alien ships to travel, reluctantly, light-years away from each other, for decades…

There is more, but, I can safely say, yeah, I had heard of them.

”What about ‘em?”

Dragon sat back in his booth, smiling enigmatically.

The band started, the guitars backing up whispering vocals, pulsing bass and a synth that kept the pace, weaving in and out of the beat like a cobra; hypnotic, lethal, exotic…

”Theres about fifty of them coming to this base in a cruiser from Bora space. They need protection.”

Protection?

”Why? Who wants to scrag a bunch of Luddites?”

There was a pause. I could tell Dragon was holding back, keeping something concealed, but that’s what clan leaders do, you know.

I looked over at Dos, who was deep in conversation with Amia. Wow, he was really hitting it off, with her. They looked like school kids in the midst of their first crush. How the hell did Dos become a chick magnet?

I downed my Cape Cod and looked at Dragon, who was staring past me, thinking.

Dragon seemed to come to some sort of decision, so I played it cool, like I was scarcely interested. People are weird, like that. You act like what they might reveal is the biggest secret since the Rosicrucian’s inventing space travel, and they clam up. You act like you don’t care, and suddenly they reveal all, some sort of egoism, they want to hold your interest.

There was a game going on, here. Like chess. Not against me-Dragon was playin’ something against someone bigger-and now Dragon was developing his pieces.

”The Lucero Corporation.”

”Why?”

”No one on the planetoid, they get the place. So they want to kick the Luddites off. They can’t really move in and gun people down. But they can prevent more people from movin’ in.”

Damn.

Lucero, Inc., was big, on their own respective block. But this was the Fringe, past the Fringe, and they were new in this place. They were setting up a toe hold, even though I am sure they were already around the Fesbo system, where that planetoid Joshua was.

We could guard the cruiser, once, But we couldn’t go up against a mega corp. Mega corps noticed when small time ops did that, and tended to eliminate the competition in the worst way. But a hit-and-run would reap benefits. Plus, I was still in Dragon’s pocket. I had to play the role.

”Why don’t you Neechi jump in?”

”Because we are currently working with the Sheffeld Industries Corporation on a negotiation for a deal on some starbases. Due to numerous cartels, monopolies that Sheffeld has in place, they are the only company who can build those bases where we need them. Sheffeld is owned by Lucero, and-”

”-and if Neechi causes flak, it will screw the deal.”

”We’re going to be there, Auto, but under alias. We’re also going to communicate through encrypted channels while we are out. But I got a feeling that Lucero is going to use it’s own mercs, for this, to keep their hands completely antiseptic.”

The bands tempo went up a notch, and more drinks were brought to us. The music was rising, now. A wavelength that was picking up, guitars punctuating, the rhythm and synth an electric flash that-

…

-I narrowly avoided, burning and latting, taking my ass out of the path of those craft-killing sols, I rotated the hammer, rockets igniting orange/blue on the edge of the Peg’s shields and the space around are ships, between the mercs, my Sixers and the Neechi became a storm of ordinance and light.

Chimera launched off to the floating ruins on magnetic grav-assisted burners, a silver streak en route to the floating ruins, as a wing of Madorian Class Darts appeared, and I gave pursuit.

”Inferno! Cover that cruiser! Hu, cover him! Sorceror?”

”Copy.”

”Stick to the Neechi. Dos, stay wide and rail the wounded. Machine, follow me.”

”Gotcha.” She said. I could hear additional laser fire through her comm. She was already in the thick. Darts are fast, but they are porcelain. One shot and poof! But you gotta land that shot…

A Dart swung in to me, it’s chassis like an oil slick, lasers igniting my shields. I got him wit a handful of rockets, the rails cutting his cockpit in half a beat later. Missiles coming in, my klaxon screaming like a petulant child, there was the moon Vaspere, then stars streaking by, the wreckage a smear in my vision as I dropped ecms like baby suns and burned left, shakin’ them, then I dove behind some of the wreckage, searching for Chimera.

Beyond those twisted fragments, through the rumbling of my Hammer’s systems, I heard an atomic rumble of blast torps, with the answering drone-scream of Deimos. Machine, doing her part. A Dart flew past, I picked it off with twin rails, a flash of a magnetic propelled uranium slug and then the distant explosion. He probably lost his shields and backed off from the furball to recharge.

There ain’t no safe haven in a combat zone, punk. Look for an exit, and someone will open a door for you, nine outta ten, and it won’t be the door you want…

…

Kishii’s dance floor was a 25’ by 25’ grid of brass colored steel, burnished and glowing in the neon twilight. Small, so it easily got crowded. The band was playing a dance beat, stratocasters picking it up in places, like a dynamo spinnin’, then the vocals from a violet haired hottie in a silver mini skirt, her singing like the chant of seraphim, hypnotic, electro-voodoo, intoxicating, scintillating…not for the audience or upon the audience, but with them. I caught a flash of machine as she whipped her hair back, letting herself go to the music.

Dragon and I had our pocket comps out (his was an admantine deal with a shark skinned cover, a Fiur/Oxico no less, made mine look like a cd player…) and began to set up our strategy.

”They are going to have company.”

”Yeah, the bad guys.”

”So we have to have ships close to the gate.”

”Of course.”

”Think anyone will be waiting where we are?”

”I keep thinking there is an abandoned station nearby, we may have to split off.”

”Yeah.”

Basically, we both knew that the Sixer’s had a mixed contingent of ships (multirole bombers, heavy assault craft, interceptors…) where Neechi’s group were more of the fast variety. They would boogie around and make the most of their mobility; my Sixer’s would stick to the enemy and rock n’ roll.

But the fat truth of it all was that Dragon and I had been in the deepest f*ckfests of combat and knew that any plan was just a list of things that didn’t happen; no strategy survived contact with the enemy.

”Just protect the cruiser.” I told him.

”Cool, I am going to drink over at the bar and look for women who can keep up with my alcoholism.”

”Really?” Now THAT was a plan.

”Hey.” Inferno said, standing at our table, as if he had dropped from the sky.

His hair was dyed platinum blond and spiked. He was wearing an ice white suit, gold mirrored sunglasses, and a glowing laser blue shirt. His skin had a shiny plastic quality to it…maybe as a result of some chic designer drugs. He seemed…focused?

”Dragon.” Dragon said, introducing himself.

Inferno.” Inferno said.

”We’re working together, tomorrow.” Dragon stood up.

”Yeah, you’re a clanner.”

”Yeah, ain’t I, though?” Dragon turned to the bar and left.

I looked up at Inferno after Dragon had left.

”Easy, Inferno, we’re working together.”

”Yeah.”

”What are you on, Inferno?”

”The ride of my life.” He grinned, showing lot’s of teeth. ”Living the myth. We’re murderers, we’re rockstars, we’re fighterpilots. We’re the living embodiment of our culture. Young, wealthy, victorious, stainless steel angels, one wing dipped in blood. And if we fail, we die, and are remembered as being eternally beautiful. We’re anointed human sacrifices on an Incan alter to Quetzacoatl, ready to have our hearts ripped out. Ain’t it great?”

”Where’d you go?”

”I met a girl who drugged me up and took advantage of me.”

”My heart bleeds for your misfortune.”

”We got the job?”

”Yeah. Big money, big prizes.”

”So it’s on, tomorrow?”

”Yeah.”

”One more thing…”

”What?”

”How did Dos become a stud?”

I looked over at the guy, who was beaming at Amia, they were dancing close together. I had not even had a chance to talk to her before Dos had swooped. Wow.”

”Uh…someone called a vote?”

”The world has changed. I am sober, now.”

The music accelerated, taking us all with it.

…

No, wait, I am in space, and Chimera is on my radar, finally. It’s all gloss vinyl colored space marked gold and silver by stars, and he is closing fast, laserbolts searing the eternal night, impacting on my shields. I am turning, rockets armed, launching, I am here, I am here, and the Soul of Osiris is on my radar, the blue dots that are our forces mixed with the red dots that are Chimera’s mercs. I can’t tell who is winning…

…

But then I am standing in front of my father.

He had stopped, his eyes twisted cruelly shut, quaking, sweating, pathetic, making sounds like a whining hinge. I loathed him and fear him, hate him and can’t know what to say, how can I?

He was falling apart, tears running down fat cheeks. Like a large, pathetic baby. No, he was a rabid, confused, toothless bear, he began to shudder, to seethe and quake like a pot boiling over, he put both bottled hands to the sides of his head, as if to keep it from cracking apart.

”Faddah…please…Faddah, you…you…”

But I didn’t make sense, either. Call it what you want, I was frozen scared out of my ass. I couldn’t move, only shuffle backward and cry, too. The hoary grip of fear had me by the balls, then.

The slim glass bottle of sodiate gleamed in his clenched white knuckled fist.

…

Chimera twisted and came in, too fast, too fast… My plasma arced past him and I latted around, avoiding a twisted spike of cerramite at the same time.

Then the blue electric of sols, sliding towards me, I am too slow, trying to move this big, big target, but they only graze my shields, I could have died, I could have died…

…

”I hate you.” He said, whining and grunting. Who had he been thinking about?

I had wanted anyone to come home, to break the hex and let my run. I wanted to run, past him, take my ass our of there and go down the corridor. I would have given anything, anything to have had anyone walk in…even Joe. But there wasn’t anybody.

”I hate you.”

”I hate you.”

”I hate you.”

”I hate you.”

”I hate you.”

”I hate you!”

”I hate you!!!”

”I HATE YOU!”

”I HATE YOU!!!”

His eyes opened, the squinty bloodshot beady glared rabies-shine of a maddened boar.

…

My shields were gone, now, his lasers a deadly rain upon me. Chimera was everywhere I couldn’t be. I couldn’t get a bead on his ship, I was the elephant, being stung to lifelessness by a gnat, another flash and sparks ignited the inside of my cockpit. I heard a Dart pilot go to his death with a curse, somewhere beyond, the sound was intense, I was firing randomly, I afterburned back-

…

The sodiate bottle, burning from the light above, he swung it down upon me, it was silver, it was silver-

…

Chimera’s silver peg flitting for an instant in front of me, his lasers-

…

The impact, like a steel spike driven into my face, under my left eye, it was a stunning hit, I had fallen back, almost flat, and there was my blood all over the floor, on my hands, covered in it.

Father was horrified, the broken sodiate bottle falling in slivers to the floor, covered in my blood, most of my cheek and face hanging as I held it up with my hand, I was screaming, crying, I couldn’t see clearly, just one eye as Faddah stepped backward upon the cord, the bottle of alcohol falling nerveless from his left hand, his body soaked in some of the nitrate, a spark-

…

The ignition of afterburners, and then Chimera was bobbing up, without gravity, on magnetic siroccos in the stardust sands of space, his lasers flashing, he was going into my rockets, I had fired them without realizing it.

The detonation, my cockpit flooded with neon yellow light, all my vision white with fire-

…

Faddah went up like nova, one second he was whole, and then the bottle popped, there was the scent of liquor, and dad wasn’t there anymore, just a melting, screaming, dripping, blazing wax creation, it took my eyebrows off and I staggered up, fell back, the oxygen burning from my lungs, sensors screaming with me, Faddah lurched, a burning and charred thing, as if his skin had turned to napalm, he was roasting in front of me, I couldn’t move, I was on my side and people were rushing into the room, my vision had become a single circle with Faddah’s crisping body cackling within it, my face was a numb pane of ice and then he dropped, right before the water hit him I saw his face, burned to the skull, his eyes searing from their sockets, he was crying blood, and then he plopped down onto the metal floor and they doused him with water, I remember the slick fire-proof plastic jackets of black helmeted emergency teams pulling me away, I was staring up, and the circle became a single, floating pin prick, my pain consumed-face pulling away-

…

Chimera was blasted to particles, I could see the night beyond, I remember the beach, I remember Tolio, waist deep in night-blue salt water, a spigot had been opened and I was drained of everything, my sweat beading on the inside of my helmet. Damn, that was fear-

I afterburned towards the cigar shaped spindle that was the Soul of Osiris, plucking off a Dart as I drew in, I saw Dos shoot another one down-

-Wildire accelerated, his lasers falling on their target, another peg, it was a sheet of metal and flame and he flew through it-

-Inferno’s rockets found another-

-Dos’s rails cut a Merc in twain, his screams cut short-

-Blast torps, probably Veliceraptor’s, tearing another pilot to so many flaming particles-

-and then it was clear, the star bright like the Vaspere, and we were alone.

…

Later, all were accounted for. Dos was roughed up, and my ship was pretty banged to f*ck, but all in all, we were intact. We escorted the cruiser, full of it’s human cargo, and back at the station I remember being dazed, Dragon and his crew had flew off to stay hidden, and we had waited while they docked, the hangar-bay too big around me, I suddenly felt aware of the nearness to the killing vacuum of space.

The pilot had shook my nerveless hand, I couldn’t hear him, but he was a young guy, I watched with a vague sense of shock as the Time Baby III, my ship, MY ship, came to a shuddering halt beside the Soul of Osiris’s bulk.

I was led aboard, and there they were.

Children, small ones, some two or three, some almost 12, staring at me, mouths agape, space pale beneath the fluorescents, the dermoplast a mint green, they all wore simple outfits of black, real cloth, hand sewed, the girl in dowdy cotton dresses.

A man got up from amongst them, and the crew was behind me. I remember something in Sorcerer’s eyes, a longing or a memory, making him older. Hu seemed to look at the children in equal amazement.

The scene was surreal, like something in a movie…had we saved these people?

He shook my hand. He was dressed the same way as the boys, austere black and a white cotton shirt. He smelled…natural?

”Mr. Otto, we are in your debt. I am Nyman. Please call me Nyman.”

Huh? What?

”What’s all this?”

He turned from me, and looked blankly down, as if unable to really formulate words.

”Our children, Otto. The Lucero Corp. had taken our children, for tests…but they were not tests…”

I looked at one child’s head, stubbled as if it had been shaved a month ago, with an X of a laser scalpel upon it.

What had we gotten into?

Somewhere beyond, a turbine began to roar, mournful and foreboding in the hollow of the hangar. The echoing plink of a rock, dropping into the well that was my soul.

END OF BOOK I.