I sat there, a cigarette in one hand, burnt down to the filter looking at nothing, watching the strange not-labourer. He took his seat, and I decided to quickly grab the ashtray and pull it in front of me with my free hand so I could put out my cigarette and light up a new one. My lighter clicked open and closed, and then I had a brand-new alibi to not talk with the suspicious man who had taken a seat across the table from me.

And so, we waited for four more minutes for the second guest, this time, they were normal people that didn’t hold themselves like they were top-secret assassins in plain clothes here to keep me on my clothes. A man and a woman, more labourers, sat down near the suspicious one and struck up a conversation with him.

I didn’t really pay attention to it; I was too focused on paying attention to everything in the room all at once. The suspect also paid attention to everything but was able to pass himself off as paying attention to the conversation.

The spooky spy mother fucker he was, but he had talent. I did not want to be in a room alone with him, artifact blade or not.

A few minutes later, there were some normal fighting types, like me but more goonish. The type of good, straightforward people who put the infant back into the infantry. They had service tattoos and buzz cuts they wore armour and carried a weapon, all be it, not a gun. One had a spear, and the other, who looked like his first name was Sarge, carried a sabre of some kind.

Then the extras filed in, the random crew that was not normal labour. Engineers, radio operators, one guy looked like he was a chef, but he could have given the goons back on the station a run for their money. And once the room was filled up well, a man in a suit walked in.

He fancifully came in and started explaining that we were going to be stopping by the lighthouse but not going down to the surface. Some crap about delivering stuff and how we would be dropping by for a bit before coming back.

That would explain the ‘don’t tell anyone about going down.’ It would have been hard to hide it if they knew. The sketchy spy guy was one of the people I had been practically warned about, people who wanted artifacts. He might as well have told me he wanted to steal artifacts to deliver back to someone.

It lasted far too long. Way, way too long.

He was some kind of manservant for the Collector. He certainly wasn’t the man himself; his voice wasn’t the same for one, and he was dressed rather humbly in a simple suit, black tie and jacket, with a vest on underneath, a white collar poking out from it.

He looked like a stereotype, but if it worked for him, it worked. Good on him, I guess.

Anyways a bunch of us basically just listen to him and smoke in a room until he concludes the meeting and people start filing out. I wait a bit. I had sat further away from the door and had a line of sight on the mole and the door, and so I was ok with making sure he would exit before me when a woman walked up to me.

I turned to the short woman, she was, strangely, around my height which was decently rare.

She was somewhat familiar in appearance, though I couldn’t place it. The feeling reminded me of like when you spot someone in a crowd so many times their face and form become familiar even though you’ve never met them personally.

“Do I know you ma’am?” I asked, keeping sketchy Steve in the corner of my eye.

“No,” she told me in a voice that sounded familiar. “No, you don’t know me. I just figure I should tell you; this isn’t going to go the way you think it will.”

She said it in a miraculously cryptic way.

“Well. That’s enlightening, Mrs. Oracle. Do Tell.” I told her I tried to both figure out where I remembered that voice from and parse the cryptic fuckin statement.

Was she talking about the mission? Was she talking about Steve the spy? Was she talking about this confrontation? Was she just fucking with me? Was it a warning, advice, or was it just a schizophrenic rambling coming from a person who believed they were helping me, a cryptic line from a person who was a victim of their own mind?

“You're Pallasian? Are you sure I don’t know you? You seem familiar.”

She shook her head and lifted a headset to her head, and turned on a radio in her pocket, not even daring to answer the question. Instead, she walked away while listening to a sound or song that, even dampened by distance, was too familiar. A sound that twigged at my mind a little.

I stood to follow, but she slipped through the crowd and disappeared from sight before I could even reach out to grab at a sleeve.

I blinked a bit in the direction of the mystery woman before returning my attention to the man I had nicknamed Steve. He was following the other man and woman that had struck up a conversation out of the room. Lucky me, he hadn’t disappeared into the crowd.

I did not want that man at my back. Not without armour under my jacket, my guns at my hips, and a way to shoot behind me, and even with those, I would still rather not have him at my back because back biters at a tricky lot, and you could never tell what they were going to do.

I did notice that he didn’t have any noticeable weapons, which just made me wearier of them.

I finished my smoke slowly to let the people file out of the room before putting it out and heading back to the Junker and getting back to readying a whole host of shots.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Giving the ball shot a point to better penetrate armour. Milling out the polymer to make boots just larger than the chamber of the revolvers so they get a proper press fit. I measured out the exact measurements of putty to give the shots their velocity while not shattering my wrist. The optimum amount that I had found after shooting thousands of rounds. Rolling up the putty and keeping it safe in a deposit while onboard and in a pouch in my jacket, a cage of metal around it to keep out possible static formed from thin wire.

The finished bullets went in a similar pouch that way, I could pull them out if I needed it.

I stuck the putty to the bottom of a few of the shots for ease of use. If I needed to shoot, I didn’t want to add an extra ten seconds to each shot. That was two minutes for a full reload of wasted time in a gunfight, and that math done over the course of a two to four minutes encounter meant I would be in a bad spot.

Then I got all my stuff out for plasma, and my body decided now was the time for food, so I found my way to the canteen, which, it turned out, was more of a tavern.

It was located in a nicer segment of the ship. Constant, warm lighting. Constant, hidden ventilation. Real wood panelling. It was like walking on solid credits.

Wood was rather rare. Faux wood made from dyed plant matter, or the polymer fake stuff, was as close as an average person would often come to a tree.

Most trees needed pesky things like wide open spaces, dirt that didn’t have toxic material, an atmosphere, also sans toxins, and water, also also sans toxins. Then you just… left them there for a really long ass time, and they grew up. And assuming you didn’t give them too much radiation, didn’t burn them by accident, they didn’t get sick, and they grow, twenty to thirty years later, you can get a good harvest on wood.

Now you have spent time and effort on something that actively needs to be cut down and worked on. It needs verification it’s genuine wood. You then need to sell the raw material to someone who will, in turn, ramp the prices up sky-high and make all the money.

If you can do it, you’re rich, you might even be able to support a small family for the time it would take to grow the next generation of trees.

On planets like Gabriel, it was a rare thing indeed. Most of the wood either came from crazy people on a habitat so paranoid of getting stolen from they would gun down everyone who found out where they lived or on Raphael, which had the climate for them to naturally propagate across the entire planet.

Damn empire, with its easy access to water, lush planet, good economy, technology and planning.

I wasn’t jealous.

Not one bit.

Anyway, I found my way to the veritable tavern and found my way to the bar.

I felt like someone who found themselves in the good part of town.

I tried to order food, and the guy at the bar gave me a menu. I confusingly read from it and could barely understand the name of the ‘dishes’ displayed, and instead, I had to figure it out based on the tiny text below that explained what the ‘dishes’ contained.

I had to perform a calculation in my head if I could understand a thing well enough to actually eat it or if it was some kind of advanced obscure golem fuel.

“Can I get you started with a drink?”

The voice startled me, and I looked up at the server, not expecting the service to come to me.

“Uh, what drinks do you have,” I asked tentatively.

He listed off more drinks than I have had drinks and it set me on edge.

“Uh, normal drinks?”

He looked at me, confused, “you have to pick, but if you don’t know what to pick, I can give you recommendations.” he told me, smiling slightly.

I nodded, and he listed off seven beers, and I picked a beer that sounded like a lager. Just deciding made me want a whisky, but I held off, that was for dinner.

I felt small sitting on the stool, but I dealt with it; I was a grown-ass woman and a mercenary, I wasn’t going to be intimidated by a fancy list of food and some wood panelling.

When the server came back, I ordered food, some kind of meat with sauce over rice, and he took the order back, and we ended up striking up a conversation over nothing.

He was a bit of a looker, and I wouldn’t mind a hook-up, but I was on a job where part of my job was keeping a secret, that, and there was an even better-looking girl a few seats over.

I ended up with two strikes, and I decided I was going to step back from that without going for three and just settled down for a normal conversation.

As it turned out, they were already an item, and I ended up stumbling into the conversation in the exact right way to get them to laugh, which may not have earned me any action, but gave me a good time in the bar instead. Frank was tall, a foot and a bit taller than me, with tan skin and big hazel eyes, good-looking overall. At the same time, Mindy looked like she was designed to cause traffic collisions with a bust as big around as my head, a lithe form and stood half a foot taller than me with the Remiel Blond hair and baby blue eyes that I hadn’t inherited from my dad.

“Frank, are you still on shift in four hours?”

“Hmm? Yeh, I’m on until we skip. The bar will be a bit lacking because we have to lock most of it up, but I can still serve. I can even keep whatever you want out a little longer.” He told me.

I blinked, “Wait, we’re going to skip? When?”

“Five hours, just after dinner. That way, we can get buckled up for twenty minutes and not have a bunch of hungry people.” He told me while he was polishing a glass.

The man was a skilled barman, and the way he could get into the cup made me a bit jealous of Mindy. She was hot, she knew it, and Frank was probably getting just as good as he was giving. She definitely had a Pleasurer in her family tree, someone whose job wasn’t operating radios or growing food, but a person who… well… pleasured.

Terrans were kind of degenerate’s, and there were a lot of kinds of people who had that kind of look. Different builds, different looks, and in some cases, different reproductive systems. Some species were all female, and some were all male. But all of them were too good-looking, and most of them were nymphomaniacs.

“That would be nice, keeping a drink out, that is… Uh, do you have whisky? No, what am I saying you do, just keep out some. Are you going to be here, Mindy?” I asked, turning to her.

Her smile could seduce a straight Chronicler.

“Honey, I’m off all day. And unless we’re doing business, I’ll remain off duty. You can call me any time.” She purred.

Fuck me sideways that wasn’t fair. Every time she did something like that, it made me lose my coherency as the unga bunga part of my brain decided that it was immediately required for peak priority to procure a primal act of progeny production.

“Well, I have to get out of here, I have things to do, but I’ll be back, you tease.”

She let out a laugh that made my brain wobble. And I managed to see myself out before whatever she had going on made the lizard part of my brain go haywire and lose a few more wrinkles.

When I got back and let myself in, I wasn’t able to focus on making plasma shots, and instead, I had to settle on fixing my brain chemistry. Because whatever it was Mindy did, it bent my brain over its knee and made sex the only thought that could enter my head.

I could see why she would work as a diplomat; she would skew every negotiation just by sitting nearby. Forget double-d diplomacy, it was more like G for good luck.

I slapped myself on either cheek to get my head out of the gutter and decided I needed a cold shower before I spontaneously transmuted into a teenager all over again.

Whatever she had done to me, she was one scarry, one very good looking woman