The Rustboat was not home to what you would call a cautious crowd, but the room went quiet the moment Red Baxter strode through the battered batwing doors. Even as the chatter resumed, the air seemed to frost over as he approached the bar. The bartender met his eyes unflinchingly, her red eyes drilling into the shadows underneath his floppy hat. “You must be from out of town, dressed like that.” She said, shining a polishing ray on a stack of dirty glasses and watching them turn from grayish-yellow to crystal clear in a few moments. “Most people ‘round here dont wear nothin valuable outside the house. Too many sticky fingers” She smiled, raising her eyebrows. Red stared coldly back at her. “It’s funny that you mention that.” he said, keeping his voice just loud enough for her to hear. “I happen to be looking for a pair of thieves. Stole something very important of mine.” The bartender felt a strange intensity when Red spoke those last few words, as though he was attempting to contain an eruption. As she put her hands together in the universal greeting symbol, he saw one of them was a cybernetic copy. “ I’m Ester.” she said “Maybe I can help you.” Warily, Red took his hands away from his waist, where his ray emitter and other weapons sat snugly in their holsters. He didnt have a problem with cyborgs, although a lot of people didnt trust them. It seemed as though out here, in some of the farthest reaches of Known Space, the conflict was far more dispersed. She placed a tall glass on the bar in front of him and it was filled from beneath with a purple and orange slurry from injector hoses mounted into the countertop. Red slapped a pink digital dime on the table and a hole opened up to swallow it up.
Leaning forward, Red gave her the score. “I’m looking for a cruiser called the Spidermonkey. Small, dark ship with a yellow stripe down one side and illegal jet mods. It would have come in two rotations ago.” Ester wrinkled her face, looking down. “I haven’t seen it.” She said thoughtfully. “But if I had to bet, it would be on Scrap Island. Either that, or they took it to the pits.” Inwardly, Red gritted his teeth, but kept the appearance of calm. “If its at their melting pits, I need to get there now. It might already be too late”. He started to turn, but the cybernetic arm grabbed his shoulder. Red’s blood ran cold, and he moved towards his weapon, before taking a breath and turning back to Ester. She didnt know it, but the last time Red had felt a metal hand grab him, he had fought within an inch of his life to escape. As her turned to face her, he saw that she was no longer smiling. Something was wrong. He saw her mouth the words “three”. A gruff voice called out from behind him. “Are you Red Baxter?”. He heard the whirring and clicking of death rays powering up, and he felt Ester push something into his hands. It was small and round, covered with metal blisters and a big yellow button. Red had never seen this particular model before, but he had the feeling that if he pressed the button and lobbed at his assailants, something positive would happen.
The result was better than expected. Ester reached out behind him as the grenade bounced at the three attackers feet, covering Red’s eyes. Seconds later, he saw the room lit up clear as day through the skin of Esters hand as the flare bomb lit off a miniature sun in the middle of the room. In a blind rage, one of the three let off several wild shots, vaporizing one of his partners. Ester helped him duck behind the bar as any of the bar patrons who hadn’t immediately left with Red’s arrival got out of the line of fire. Pulling out his ray emitter, he flicked it on and dialed in a focused beam. Popping up from cover, he scorched the second thug, whose shot’s were beginning to track towards Ester. Taking aim at the second, he let off a shot - just as Ester dug her elbow in a pressure point under his arm, sending his shot wide. He looked at her, fury in his eyes, but with no change in expression. Ester matched his stare with a bitterly cold one of her own. “ We need to take one alive. They could tell you where your cruiser is”. Red said nothing, but hopped on the bar and approached the final enemy, dodging his wild shots. Kicking the ray gun out of the hapless soldier’s hand, Red spun around, sweeping the armored legs of his opponent and sending him crashing to the floor.
The first thing the poor soldier saw as he awoke was Red flipping his beam emitter to cone, creating a small, constantly burning blade of pure energy at the tip of the device. The second thing he saw was that he was hanging upside down from the ceiling. Moments after Red started to threaten him, they realized they had a new problem - they couldn't shut him up. The poor mercenary had told them all they needed to know and plenty more, and Red’s fingers began to itch with frustration. Ester saw his expression, one of total focus from the moment he walked in the Saloon, slip for a moment, and that was the only tell she needed. She called the gibbering mess back behind the bar, and gave him a cocktail that looked repulsive and inviting at the same time. It was hard to get the drink down past his garbled monologues, but no more than sixty seconds after the drink was downed the soldier fell into a sound sleep and quiet settled over the room once again.
“We need a plan.” Red insisted, as Ester stood impatiently by the door. “We have a plan!” Ester counter-insisted, lowering her hand to the control panel for the 5th time. “Sneak in and blow something up is not a plan.” Red said, putting his hand in front of the controls to block her. “We know that Scrap Island is surrounded by miles of electric fence, not to mention an acid moat. Once we’re in there, we have dozens of cameras and a fleet of drones scanning the place the whole time.” Ester narrowed her eyes. “If you were listening, you would have figured it out already.” she said coldly. “ We get in through the pipes that transport water for cooling into the Island. That will get us past the electric fence and the acid, and most of the cameras, too. Once we’re in there we’re going to blow up the radio frequency tower. That way, the drones and the rest of the cameras won’t be able to give or receive any new information.” Red gazed into her eyes, looking for betrayal, but saw nothing. “There is still one unanswered question.” He said, one gloved hand stroking his grizzled chin. “Why are you doing this?” Ester didn’t look away, but he could feel a shadow pass over her eyes, obscuring something to him. “I have my own stake. That’s all I’ll say. Now let’s go.” she said grimly, and opened the door.
Framed in the doorway, stunned expressions on their faces, stood three more toughs, donned in the same patchwork brown armor as the mercenaries Ester and Red had previously dealt with. The two groups just stared for a moment, caught completely off guard. Then in a flash, Red and the mercs went for their weapons, and Ester slammed the controls, shutting the door. Red had already left two perfect burn marks on the closed door where the nearest two enemies had stood before he realized that a barrier had been put in between them. Ester engaged the locking mechanism before smashing the controls with her mechanical hands. “Quick! This way! ”she said, pulling him back to the bar. Interfacing with the bar for a moment, she seemed to input some code and the bar sank down below the floor. As stairs began to form leading down, Red could see a circle on the shut door glowing white-hot, and begin to collapse inward. “We’ve got to go!” he said, pointing. As she lead him down the stair to a tunnel, an arm forced its way through the molten hole in the door, holding a beam emitter with some bulky attachment mounted on the front. “Get down!” Ester warned, pulling him down below the surface as two beams streaked above their heads. “It’s got a camera. They can see right around corners.” She stepped off the bar-stair and started to input a command into a control panel on the wall. “You cant use your fancy quickdraw tricks on just someone’s arm, can you?”. I reckon I could, thought Red, but he said nothing.
The stink in the air burned as he breathed, and as he looked around, he saw why. They were in a sewer-pipe, complete with green slime and the crusted remains of refuse that hadnt been cleaned in, probably a thousand years? The station’s been operational for three thousand, so that would be generous, actually. He looked back at the way they had come down. The stairs were closing the gap, but not fast enough. He saw an arm peek around the corner, and pulled Ester away from the panel just in time, as beams started raining down at them. It had not been how Red had expected to spend the day, running for his life through giant sewer pipes.Although, that wasn't exactly out of his wheelhouse, either.The strangest thing that had happened today was that he had met a stranger, and they hadn’t tried to kill each other yet.
When Red and Ester finally reached the exit - a ladder leading up to an open porthole - they hadn't heard or seen their pursuers for a good few minutes. Ester mentioned that they were probably lost in the labyrinth of pipes that made up the waste disposal network. “Anyone who don’t know the way is bound to wander down the wrong pipe. They probably got flushed away, along with all the other crap”. That didnt stop Red from looking back over his shoulder as he grasped a rung of the ladder . Ester opened the porthole above and climbed out, out of view. As he climbed, a wave of familiarity washed over him. The situation itself was something he had been doing for as long as he learned to shoot an emitter, but from experience, the outstretched hand of a stranger usually led him into nothing but more trouble. Trust was a useful word, Red knew, but it was little more than a word, the sum of which means little to the void of space. Trust...no, there was no trust among our types, thought Red, pulling himself out of the sewer, into the bright sunlight, and felt himself being pulled to his feet by strong metal hands. “Let’s move.” Ester said quietly, and Red saw as his vision resolved that a small crowd had gathered around the sewer port where they had emerged. Lowering his hat to conceal his face from the growing group of city-dwellers, Red moved out of the crowd with Ester, who led him to a side-street. After a series of turns down smaller and smaller alleys, Ester led him to a path that ran past a nondescript gray barricade wall. By the soft glow of the dark orange hazard lights, Red could see the only thing in the alley were some refuse bins and an old rotting mattress. “Did we take a wrong turn?” he asked, eyeing her suspiciously as she approached the mattress with confidence. “When are you going to learn to stop doubtin’ me?” she said, smiling a little. Sliding the mattress aside, Ester revealed a huge hole in the ultracrete barricade, with a dark path between buildings and machinery that lead out of site. “Right this way.” she said, crawling through the hole and along into the dark pathway. “This leads to one of my hideouts. We’ll be able to get some supplies there.” “Can I get cleaned off?” said Red with a grunt, ‘If we come across any people, they’ll smell us from a mile away.”
Red stepped into the antibac-pod and let the blue light vaporize any impurities on his body, allowing the pod to do a full bioscan. The computer made some creaky processing noises and multicolored mists began to fill the chamber, providing Red with a cocktail of vitamins and medication tailored to Red’s DNA, down to the last genome. Letting his body absorb the medicine, Red took a deep breath, and exited the pod as it slid open.
To be continued...