An hour later, Ryuuk and I arrived back at the ship to complete chaos.
“You sold us out!” Cash shouted at a red-faced Emery.
She and Cash faced off in the common room. Tall for a female, Emery nearly matched his glare straight on. Kiara growled a warning at her side, clearly unhappy with Cash’s aggressive behavior toward her friend.
“I was trying to help,” Emery nearly shouted at him. “It’s not my fault they move fast.”
“Who moves fast?” I asked, getting everyone in the room’s attention.
The common room’s inhabitants seemed to freeze for a moment, as if shocked to see us. Then they all began speaking at once.
“Where the hell have you been?” Dick asked.
“What happened to your face?” This came from Vomero.
“I told you we should have killed those bastards,” Cash added.
“There’s someone looking for you,” Emery added, her comment sticking out as it was added a second later than everyone else's.
“Wait,” I said. “Someone was looking for me? I don’t suppose it could have been an attractive guy with an Outlaw Mark on his bicep?”
I looked at Ryuuk and he shook his head, shrugging.
“Nah,” he said. “Too soon for him to make it. He was still passed out half-naked when we saw him last.”
Dick’s eyes narrowed slightly, but he said nothing.
“They weren’t looking for you, Skye,” Vomero said. “A bunch of guys showed up at the Desert Dryad looking for Ryuuk.”
“Right after Crazy Cat Lady showed up looking for us, too,” Cash commented pointedly, bringing the conversation back around full circle.
“For the last time, I went there to warn you!” Emery seethed.
“Convenient timing for a known kidnapper and thief,” Cash accused.
“I’m not the one who sells my loyalty for credits,” the Everwyld woman spat back. This had Cash pausing briefly in his tirade, clearly taken aback by her insight into his occupation. He cast a look in Dick’s direction.
“Don’t look at me,” Dick said, raising his hands. “We didn’t tell her anything about you.”
“They didn’t have to tell me what you are,” Emery said. “When my contact with CLOAK told me they had a top-tier operator in town, one with a bionic arm, it wasn’t hard to figure out.”
“CLOAK?” Ryuuk asked.
“It’s what they call a certain organization of assassins,” Vomero answered. He glanced dubiously at Emery. “Not that we necessarily know anyone affiliated with that organization.”
“Why do they call it CLOAK?” Ryuuk asked, seemingly fixated on the name.
“Why does it matter? It's just what they’re called!” Vomero exploded, exasperated.
“Only by idiots who don’t know what they’re talking about,” Cash said. “You’d never catch anyone inside the organization calling it that ridiculous name.”
“I am so confused,” I said. “So, someone from CLOAK was sent after Ryuuk? Someone’s trying to kill him?!”
“Ok, let’s just start over,” Dick tried to calm the situation. “We were at the bar when Emery showed up and said someone was looking for a member of our crew. She described Ryuuk.”
“I remembered seeing him that day during the Collectors’ raid,” Emery added. “I knew he must be part of your crew.”
Dick nodded, continuing his explanation. “Since we didn’t know where you two went, we tried to go find you when a group of people ambushed us outside of the bar.”
“So, you can see why Cash is a little suspicious since we only went out there because of Emery,” Vomero said.
“No, what’s suspicious is that she stopped me from putting my bionic fist through them on sight,” Cash murmured through gritted teeth.
“You can’t just kill people because they come asking questions,” Emery said.
“Correction. You can’t just kill people for asking questions,” he responded pointedly, “which is further proof that no matter how much you think you know about me, you don’t really know me.”
There was a small pause of silence as Cash’s implication lingered in the air. Emery stared dumbfounded around the room, as if pleading for someone to seem reasonable. Unfortunately, she was in the wrong place for reason.
“Yeah, that’s fair,” Dick said, as each of us mumbled or nodded our own consensus on Cash’s character. “He would have definitely blown them away, no problem.”
“And slept like a baby afterward,” Vomero affirmed.
“I feel like Cash never really sleeps,” I commented.
“I feel like Cash was never really a baby,” Ryuuk added.
Emery just shook her head in frustration and tried again to explain.
“Look, I know you guys are new to New Iberia and Rodan in general,” she said. “But despite its lawless reputation, there are certain considerations you want to make around here.”
“How so?” Vomero asked. “Our intel says there’s no real law enforcement here even if there were actual laws to enforce.”
“That’s true, but you don’t know who those men are affiliated with,” she pointed out. “What if they’re associated with one of the factions? Slighting one in such a prolific manner would probably be worse than just breaking the law on another planet.”
The room grew quiet again as we each contemplated her words.
“Fair enough, Emery,” I said. “Offending one of the factions is definitely a complication we don’t need right now.” I directed my last comment pointedly at Cash, who shrugged begrudgingly.
“So...” Dick said, glancing over my face with concern. “You’re telling me that the black eye, split lip, and scratched knuckles on both of you aren’t from being attacked by a group of thugs in bowler hats?”
I shook my head. “This was a bar fight.” He raised an eyebrow critically, glancing over my wounds again.
“And you let them do that to you?” He reached out and tweaked the corner of my mouth to indicate my split, swollen lip. “You’ve gone soft,” he joked.
I shrugged in response. “Ryuuk was handicapping me,” I teased, casting a half smile over at the Avian.
Ryuuk missed the joke, however, too lost in thought to pay attention.
“Did you say bowler hats?” he asked. “Were they dark green?”
Dick paused and thought about it. “Now that you mention it, I guess they were a dark, dark green. Matched their—”
“Three-piece suits,” Ryuuk finished for him, his voice quiet and solemn.
“Ry, you know who those guys were,” I stated knowingly. The Avian man nodded.
“They’re Marshall’s security goons,” he confirmed. Carl Marshall was the man who owned Fable, the role-playing amusement park on Ryuuk’s home world, Avaria.
The man brainwashed Ryuuk and most of his people into servitude, believing the scenarios they acted out were real. A severe bout of stomach sickness purged Ryuuk of the unique, synthetic drug Marshall used to propagate his lie. After naively confronting Marshall for his treachery, Ryuuk fled, earning a million-credit bounty on his head for the trouble.
“So, not more bounty hunters?” Cash asked. “These are his actual employees? Are they drugged up and delusional like you are?”
“Like I was,” Ryuuk corrected. Cash simply shrugged sarcastically. “And no, they’re not on the drug as far as I can tell. They’re paid very well to take care of the shadier side of Marshall’s business.”
“I supposed that includes retrieving your sorry tail?”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Cash’s said it with a joking tone but I could see Ryuuk couldn't help but take it personally. It was a sensitive topic.
“Why would Marshall send his own goons to collect on the bounty? Especially all the way out here? And how did they even find us?!” Vomero fired questions off in succession.
“Those two idiots that kidnapped Ryuuk back in New Horizon must have contacted them to collect the bounty,” Dick said. “Given how things went afterwards, I don’t suppose it would be that hard to track a fugitive here to New Iberia.”
“Perhaps we shouldn’t be discussing that so openly,” Cash said pointedly, glaring at Emery. She had retreated slightly from the group and was leaning casually against the wall. At his implication, however, she stiffened indignantly, her posture straightening.
“Bounties, fugitives, hitmen, Outlaws...” her gaze flicked toward Dick as she trailed off for a moment. “Cursed shapeshifters. None of which concerns me or my people.”
“You want us to believe that a million-credit bounty wouldn’t be helpful for your cause?” Cash asked with great skepticism.
“Look,” Emery said, running a frustrated hand through her hair. “I know you might feel like walking targets all the time, but here you’re just another motley crew of drifters. Throw a rock and you’re bound to hit someone with a bounty or wanted status. If blending in despite your...peculiarities...is your goal, then you’ve come to the right planet.”
Cash opened his mouth to say something but she stopped him short with a raised hand.
“That is until you start making trouble for yourselves with the factions,” Emery continued. “Luckily, you guys came out looking like the victim in that encounter with The Collectors. That was thanks to me.”
“You can’t take credit for helping us out of that situation when you literally made it worse!” Cash exclaimed. Emery shrugged.
“Either way, the heat is on me and my faction, as it should be. As for this big bounty you’re so worried about, it’s clear whoever your crewmate is running from isn’t paying any bounty, not if he sent his own guys to collect him.”
“You think Marshall sent his own guys to avoid paying the bounty now that Ryuuk’s been spotted?” Vomero asked, directing his question to the group, not just Emery. I nodded in response.
“I think that’s exactly what he’s doing,” I said. “In fact, I’d bet that was his plan all along. If we hadn’t killed those two kidnappers, I’m sure Marshall’s goons would have done it for us. He’s not the type to let a thing like morals get in the way of saving money, and a million credits is a lot of money.”
Vomero pulled out his data pad and punched buttons for a few long moments.
“A couple of the businesses near the Desert Dryad have surveillance systems. I may be able to pull an image off it,” he mumbled as he worked. “I wonder if Ryuuk can identify them.”
A second later, he was projecting a holographic still shot in the air for our review. The image showed a man of average height and build dressed in a hunter-green suit like two other people in the image. His matching green bowler hat partially obscured his face. There would have been absolutely nothing remarkable about him if not for the giant metal plate that seemed to be holding his over-sized jaw together.
“That’s him,” Ryuuk said. “Marshall’s number two. Slack Jaw.”
Collectively, we turned to stare amusedly at Ryuuk. The hilarity of such an obvious and unimaginative nickname seemed almost farcical.
“What?” Ryuuk asked, confused.
“Slack Jaw,” Vomero prodded, trying to help Ryuuk see the irony. “His name is Slack Jaw...”
“Yeah, so?” Ryuuk answered obtusely.
“THAT guy...” Dick emphasized ironically, gesturing to his chin area, “is named Slack Jaw?”
“I don’t suppose his mother gave him that name,” I observed sardonically.
“Whaa?” Ryuuk breathed, still not seeing our point. “I mean, no his mom probably gave him his actual name, Joey. But he never let us call him that. Slack Jaw is a nickname.”
“No shit.”
“You don’t say.”
Dick and Vomero commented simultaneously.
“So, he gave himself that dumb-ass name?” Cash snorted. “Now, I really wish I’d killed him.”
“Of course he gave himself that name!” Ryuuk said, his exasperation boiling over. “It’s because he has a big metal jaw where his real one used to be!”
“Does he?” I teased, pretending to lean forward and examine the holograph still floating in the air. “I hadn’t noticed it before, Ry, but damn, you’re right.”
“Ya’ll are really slow sometimes, you know that?” Ryuuk said, clearly done with the line of conversation. His expression turned somber as he stared at the image. “He may not look too intimidatin’, but looks can be deceivin’. There’s not a soul on Avaria who’d cross him. He’s devious and cruel.”
Cash shot another glare at Emery. “Sounds like the perfect candidate for a fist-sized hole in his head.” She rolled her eyes in response.
I let their banter fade into the background as I stared at the images flashing on the holoprojection. Vomero scanned through various footage and camera angles, tracing the group of thugs through the streets of New Iberia. It had been hard to tell how many there were at first, but eventually we identified about 10 different people, including Slack Jaw.
“Ten is a lot of people for Marshall to send,” I commented to Vomero.
We were the only ones studying the surveillance footage. Cash and Emery were still bickering in the background with Dick subtly goading them on from the sideline. Light perched on Dick’s shoulder, looking on with interest.
Ryuuk had retreated to a corner near our makeshift bar. He sat on a stool and stared solemnly at the polished surface. He wasn’t a hard one to figure out, and I knew the Avian man well enough by now to guess at his thoughts. The look on his face clearly projected guilt and shame. He was blaming himself for putting us in danger, no doubt.
“Hmm...” Vomero hummed thoughtfully. “I don’t think all of them were from Fable.”
He pointed at a still image on the holoprojector of the men who assaulted our crew. This wasn’t near the Desert Dryad, and the architecture looked unfamiliar. It was sleeker and more clinical looking, reminiscent of the skyscraper cities of New Horizon.
“Is that the western part of the city?” I asked, and Vomero nodded.
“That side of the city is where most of the big corporations like to operate, and this spot is near the headquarters of a corporation called Catalysis,” Vomero informed, pointing at the image. “And that is our green suited goons entering the Catalysis headquarters yesterday evening.”
“There’s only three of them,” I noted. “So, you think they picked up the reinforcement muscle at Catalysis? Why would they be affiliated with them?”
Emery’s attention was diverted from her argument with Cash at the mention of the company’s name as she joined the conversation.
“Catalysis is one of those major factions you want to avoid tangling with,” she said. “Many of the smaller corporate shell companies tend to group together into joint factions, but Catalysis is one of two companies big enough to be its own faction.”
“I’ve never heard of them,” I argued. “How could they be that big if nobody has heard of them?”
Vomero was the one to answer. His knowledge of various intergalactic corporations ran deep because of his proclivity for hacking and stealing from them.
“These labs are located here on New Iberia for a reason,” he explained. “Mainly, they’re tasked with developing products that most in the Pact Worlds would find unethical, using methods that probably aren’t legal in many quadrants of the galaxy. So, they’re not going to use their own name. Hell, they’re not even going to claim affiliation with them directly.”
I thought about that bit of economic information for a moment. “So, you’re saying Catalysis is a ghost lab for a major manufacturer? Which one?”
“ChemPact,” he answered simply.
At the mention of that name, eyebrows around the room raised, and Dick let out a low whistle. We all knew the name ChemPact. It was printed on the med-packs currently stored in our first-aid cabinet. They’d produced the most popular pharmaceutical brands for everything from sleeping pills to Stasis serums.
“Why would a big name corporation like ChemPact have any connection whatsoever to Carl Marshall?” Vomero mused thoughtfully aloud. He was flipping through network searches on his datapad trying to figure it out. Meanwhile, Ryuuk had stopped sulking and wandered closer to the holo-projected image from the surveillance footage.
“I’m sure it’s got sumthin’ to do with this,” Ryuuk said, pinching the image in the air with his index finger and thumb and then expanding it to zoom in on the photo.
It was a neon logo emblazoned through the fiberglass of the sliding door. The Catalysis logo looked like a diagram for a chemical bond in the shape of a C.
“When I was escaping Fable, I had to hide in one of the storage warehouses for a while,” Ryuuk recounted. “Most of the crates stored in the warehouse had this symbol on it. Those crates contained different forms of the memory drug Marshall forced upon us. Pills, gummies, additives for our drinking water. You name it.”
We stood in shocked silence as we realized the enormity of what we were dealing with. The people sent to retrieve Ryuuk were backed by one of the largest chemical-medical corporations in the galaxy, or at least one of its shady subsidies.
Given the clandestine nature of these shell corporations, the drug enslaving Ryuuk’s people was most likely developed and produced right here on Rodan. What were the odds? After everything we’d been through, I’d stopped believing in the concept of coincidence.
I thought the mystery of “How did we all end up here?” was solved after Matthew’s betrayal. He was looking for Light, for what purpose I could only imagine. But perhaps I had been a little too short-sighted. Matthew was tasked with retrieving an egg containing a powerful member of an Ancient race. In doing so, he transported us to this part of the galaxy, seemingly to avoid dying in a space battle. But now we knew he had ulterior motives to begin with. So, why did he choose this part of the galaxy? Why the one planet with a ship and two Ancient relics practically stashed there for Light to use?
Dick had also been manipulated to try and recover that same specimen to save his sick and dying brother, a brother most likely being treated using drugs produced by the same company that also developed the mind control drug on Ryuuk’s planet.
I looked at Vomero. He used to hack and expose corrupt corporations just like these in the Pact Worlds. Finally, my gaze landed on Cash. Were he and I the only ones with no ties whatsoever to this spider’s web of intrigue? Or was it just me? Cash had proven himself an ally time and time again, but I couldn’t wipe from my mind the idea that he’s exactly the type of person a corrupt corporation would hire to eliminate a threat to their multi-billion credit company.
“So, Emery is right,” Dick said, breaking me out of my reverie. I looked at him thoughtfully, not catching his meaning. “We can’t afford to pick a fight of this proportion with one of the local factions, especially being unaffiliated ourselves.”
“None of this is on ya’ll,” Ryuuk said. “I can move on to another planet alone. There’s no need for ya’ll to go making powerful enemies when you’ve got something to go home to. I don’t.”
His tone wasn’t self-pitying, it was resolute. Ryuuk meant it. He’d leave and face the consequences of his actions alone rather than endanger any of us. I knew just telling him no wasn’t enough. The certainty in his voice told me we’d wake up one morning, and he’d just be gone. Instead, I tried another approach.
“It won’t do any good, Ry,” I said firmly. “I’m starting to think we’re just pieces in a game we don’t even comprehend, but whoever is pulling the strings, I think we’re exactly where they meant for us to be. If you left, you’d just be leaving us with one less person we could trust and one less gun on our side.”
He held my gaze for a long time contemplating his choices and the validity of my words. Eventually, he nodded and took a seat on one of the sofa benches.
I'd never tolerated being manipulated. People who tried were always left wondering if the battle was worth the outcome in the end. That wasn’t about to change.
“So, what are you going to do about Slack Jaw and his affiliates?” Emery asked warily.
“You mean the guys threatening my friends? Or the amoral assholes supplying those guys with a drug to chemically enslave an entire planet’s worth of people?” I asked, nonchalantly, pulling my Gemini blaster out of its holster and checking the settings.
“Both,” several people around the room answered in strained unison.
I finished checking my blaster and re-holstered it, meeting every person in the room’s gaze one-by-one so that they’d know my next words weren’t an idle threat.
“I’m going to do what any Outlaw would do. I’m going to blow them the fuck up.”