Don't Touch the Weird Woman!
----------------------------------------
“Quack!”
Without further ado, Jim hoisted himself inside the ship, right next to the loquacious duck. “Quite an understatement, Napoléon…” he said before turning back to the source of all their recent troubles. With his elbow, he pressed a button unfolding a ladder. “Get in, Lady Trouble.”
The runaway glanced at the end of the pontoon over her shoulder. There, a minute earlier, a whole cohort of armed robots had been blown to smithereens by a red drake who got out of bed on the wrong side. Her head down, she let out a quiet sigh. “Step back…” Tightening her fingers around the stock of her futuristically finished rifle, she then ordered: “Get this ship moving at once.”
Jim politely made way for her. He had no idea why he was welcoming this runaway into the Forlorn Hope and thought for a moment about closing the hatch on her pretty nose and dusting off. Picking a quarrel with cyber-murderers wasn’t part of the adventure, but he chose to trust the adrenaline rush provided by flying rockets pumping into his heart.
It had been a long time since he had felt so alive; a wonderful feeling until a bite to the calf brought him back to reality.
He cursed his feathered copilot, before strolling across the narrow corridor separating the hold from the cockpit. Passing the lockers and the empty weapon safe, he manually instructed the onboard computer to disengage the ship from the clamps. After swapping his loose Walkman headset for the one connected to the ship, he jumped in his pilot chair—one of the three creme faux-leather chairs of the cabin. The old dashboard lit up in green, and the Baltimore engine initiated its cycle.
But through the bi-turbines’ roar echoed the ricochet of bullets. Behind the shatterproof ovoid windshield, Jim saw a new squadron of androids making its way up the last few steps of the escalator. At their head, the turbaned suit with an oxygen mask over his nose was firmly strapped to the guardrail, and finished unloading his drum magazine out of anger. As the control console had been damaged, he could no longer ground the Forlorn on Enceladus.
The stranger invited herself into the cockpit before Jim buckled up. “They will chase us through the E ring the moment we leave!” she uttered. “And board us!” As the ship swiftly slid into the void after the outer airlock doors opened, she hung onto the copilot seat’s headrest.
“I ain’t quite sure about that…”
Jim glanced at the telltales on his right side. An audible alarm and a message on the central monitor alerted him a torpedo was being armed as requested. Navigating the multicolored screen where yellow and cyan lines drew the surroundings of the orbital station, Jim skillfully scanned the screen using the joystick of the control panel. Typing a long authorization code with his other hand, he locked his target: the armored doors protecting the black ship’s alveolus.
Space transmits no sound, but the shower of hot particles that plummeted on the left side of the well-armed mining ship while she swung into the sidereal void was an adequate clue of the chaos created. The thrusters shut down at the end of the elusive maneuver.
Both the turbines roared. The nef quickly set sail far from Saturn II to hide in a rocky field between the Ice Sea of Brahe and a little unnamed satellite with a radiation-burnt mantle.
Pleased, Jim swiveled his seat and opened his ultimate jerky purchased on the ice moon. With the ship out of maneuvering mode, the instrument panel slid from its position near the armored windows while the chairs came to rest against the walls. On the former back wall which had become the main footbridge circling the manhole leading to the the hold, the stowaway stood up with difficulty. In the rush, he hadn’t let her take her seat.
“Sorry, about that… Napoléon and I ain’t used to passengers these days.”
Accustomed to maneuvers in microgravity, the duck nestled himself near the coms. He squinted at the stranger before judgmentally shaking his head.
The girl grunted. Her gaze had lost its intensity; but even after a 3g push, she kept her bad temper, her gun and a furious dedication waving it under his nose with a total lack of trigger discipline.
“Can’t kill me, lady…” Jim calmly continued through the jerky. “This ship only obeys to my deenay.”
The young woman coughed and her breathing became heavier. “You’re an ace pilot but an awful liar… Besides, you are not Slim Jim. Slim Jim is the brand of your snack!”
Exposed, the man sighed as he checked the spacecraft’s status. “Observant…” He then rolled the wrapping of his Slim Jim beef jerky into a ball before tossing it towards a cupola on a wall panel. The latter opened in contact with the litter, and sucked it out.
“Who—who are you Jim?” she stuttered. Her red eyes had stopped sparkling. “Who are you to fire a torpedo against a ship moored on a civilian station?”
“Your babysitter, apparently.”
If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
She didn’t laugh. “Take me away—far from Saturn II.”
“Could do that…” Jim stretched his fingers upon the keyboard to enter hypothetical new coordinates. “ …on one condition.” His copilot, who had been silent until now, reacted with a loud quack, and Jim raised his index towards him. “Napoléon’s got a point. What’s wrong with your toy?”
“Napoléon… you mean the duck?” Running her sleeve over her nose, their passenger swallowed with difficulty.
“That’s some kind of prototype, right? I saw Techno-Marine troops with some of these on Hyperion—I don’t know much about guns.”
She walked over to Jim, avoiding the gap leading downstairs while trying to hold him at gunpoint. “I ignore it—I…” Her breathing became jerky. “The yakuzas bought them from Separatist militias… on Umbriel. Called them P-90—they…”
The following words appeared to be Japanese double Dutch. She seemed to have drained her batteries. Even paler than during their encounter, she slided forward. The machine gun flew out from her fragile hands and landed in his. The Alliance envoy awkwardly cocked it, but a click through the Baltimore’s purring informed him the P-90 had never been loaded.
“You little—”
He looked back at the unconscious woman floating above the hole, eyes closed. Blood bubbled from her abdomen. She had been badly shot on Enceladus, and the recent g bursts claimed their toll.
“Our cute hostage taker’s gonna stain the carpeting, Napoléon…”
The Forlorn pilot gently took her in his arms and climbed down the corridor back to the hold thanks to new rungs coming out of the wall as he progressed. The deployment of the medical module—basically a specialized quilted drawer beneath one of the bed bunks—was ordered on the way down.
The girl delicately placed on the mattress, he grabbed a pair of scissors handed by one of the module’s mechanical claws. Meanwhile, two other spider arms stretched all around. The first was strapping the patient while the second prepared a transparent oxygen mask.
“Quack!”
Unable to fly correctly as the ship twirled, the duck had waddled in the low gravity to the head of the medical bed.
“For real?” He had begun to cut the young woman’s black jumpsuit around her abdomen of synthetic skin. “The last thing she’d want is to wake up naked alongside a stranger and a cranky rooster, you stupid goose…”
“Quack!”
“You’re pushin’ your luck today, ain’t you?” Jim glanced at the module’s screen. Her survival rate dropped to 15%.
“Quack!”
“That’s it! You’re out.”
A red LED lit up and another drawer flapped, kicking the angry duck out of bed. The first mechanical claw grabbed a hypodermic syringe loaded with military-grade painkillers from the drawer while the second took a wide scalpel in hand. An optic at the intersection of its six clamps scanned the three-centimeter-wide wound left to the woman’s navel surrounded by a gold-plated ring. Armed with alcohol-soaked cotton swabs, the pilot struggled to contain the gore flying out through the hold.
“We’ll need plasma bags…” he read on the control screen as the arms performed the dangerous low g-surgery.
The module had enough raw material to synthesize fake but clean Rh-free blood. Alas, the young woman had to accept the antigens.
An individual’s blood type was recorded in the FID, a small ring replacing the first phalanx of the index finger; an encrypted identity card containing most of the bearer’s life, including their virtual wallet. It was also the best way to prove the completion of a contract when you were a bounty hunter. Not owning a FID was one of the most severely punished Techno-crimes.
And, of course, Lady Trouble didn’t carry one.
‘Jim’ let out a nervous laugh. “Being chased by trigger-happy ‘borgs wasn’t enough. Gotta ice the cake with a federal offense.”
Unfortunately, the woman had other problems than the Techno-Court and the turbaned suit. For her pressure plummeted at its lowest, her face glistening with sweat for the mechanical claws dug far too deep in her belly, causing a massive hemorrhage. The red plasma vanished into a flow of white cyber-blood and mercury-tainted fluid.
The Alliance man cursed the inattentive module which shamefully withdrew its arms, and rolled up his oversized sweater’s sleeves revealing many deep scars following his bones.
“When you ought to go, you ought to go…” he coughed.
“Quack?”
“Could use your beak instead, partner.”
“Quack.”
“More a chicken than a mighty swan, eh?” he concluded before holding his breath.
The envoy dived his hand into the injury. He searched for a while, trying not to gag. His much more agile fingers ultimately closed on a large metal piece. Still in apnea, he managed to slowly slide it towards the wound, before wedging it between his middle and index fingers. The shard came out, brushing past a nerve or two on his way. The gold engravings on the girl’s writhing stomach and ribs shone. She jumped but remained in a coma.
Panting, he contemplated the bloody intruder in the palm of his hand. The bullet turned out to be an exploded shell’s fragment the size of a rivet. A piece of metal far too wide to have caused such a small original opening into the artificial skin.
Yet, the shard wasn’t the most peculiar part of this surgery. The wound had closed. The hexagons-adorned flesh started riding up his fingers like a fiendish toothless mouth trying to swallow his whole hand.
He screamed, and stumbled backwards in weightlessness. He had reflexively withdrawn his hand from the creeping lips, triggering a multitude of warning sounds from the medical module. Swearing, he immediately grabbed a floating cotton ball soaked in iodine among the crimson bubbles lost in the hold.
“Well, I’ll be!” he uttered.
Seconds later, as the strong anesthetic miraculously stabilized the young woman, he searched for the widened wound beneath the drying blood. But from it only remained a slightly swollen chrome line.