Wings of Retribution (45 page)

Sighing, Athenais wading into the screaming masses after them.

“There,” Howlen said once they were free of the shouting crowd and walking along a relatively deserted street out of sight of the landing-plaza, “Was that so hard?”  He was out of breath, his normally combed-down hair in conspicuous disarray.

“You lost your wallet,” Athenais commented, smirking.  Rabbit nodded.

Howlen slapped his side pocket, his eyes widening.  Then his face reddened.  Sputtering, he said, “Those disrespectful, uneducated…  I had memchips in there!  Of my
family
!”

“You’re not a colonel anymore,” Athenais said.  “Without a uniform, this is the only thing they’re going to respect.”  She touched the Phoenix.  “Funny you don’t have one…  I’m pretty sure I told you to grab one as we went by the armory.”

“
He’s
not carrying one!” Howlen snapped, jabbing a finger at Rabbit.  “Why didn’t
his
wallet get stolen?”

“Rabbit’s just that good.”

Rabbit shrugged.  “I used to pick pockets for a living.”

“Still do,” Athenais said.

“Oh please,” Rabbit said.  “There is a difference between
espionage
and common thievery.”

“Kind of like the difference between a crimelord and a Buddhist monk, eh, Rabbit?  Or a drug smuggler and a Zen master?” 

Rabbit narrowed his eyes at her.

“Oh, wait.”  Athenais tapped her chin.  “I’ve got one.  A pickpocket and an enlightened Haui-Haui soul-titan?”

Rabbit spread his hands innocently.  “Is the water in a river different than the water in an ocean?”

“Yes,” Athenais said flatly.  “One contains salt.”

Rabbit sighed and picked a piece of fluff off of his silken wardrobe.

Howlen, still digging through his empty pocket as if his wallet would somehow magically appear if he looked long enough, appeared stricken.  “You think someone will turn it in?”

Athenais laughed.  “On
this
planet?!”  She gestured to the filthy, dusty houses and snorted.  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Did you see who took it, at least?” Howlen asked, sounding desperate.

“Yeah, a toothy little rat,” Rabbit said, dusting the sleeves of his suit.  “The one that offered you the snake kebob.  Looked like he needed the money.”  He frowned down at a smudge on his sleeve, then made a disgusted sound when he realized it was a stain.

“That duck-vendor,” Athenais told him.  “Was flinging grease around trying to get our attention.”

“Damn,” Rabbit said.  “That was a nice suit.”  He sighed.

Howlen was staring at Rabbit, looking like he was going to asphyxiate.  “You
let
him steal my wallet?”

Rabbit glanced up from the stain, sighing.  “You got pampered by the Utopia, so we figured you needed a lesson in watching your assets.”  He gestured at the colonel’s pocket.  “How much you lose?  I’ll give you half.” 

Howlen took two steps forward and gripped Rabbit’s shirt with two meaty fists.  “My
life
was in there!  My parents,
siblings
—”  He choked, red faced.

“Grow up,” Athenais said.  “So what if the kid took a few memchips.  You can still remember them.”

“No, he can’t, Attie,” Rabbit said, grimacing.  “Gods, I didn’t realize…  Why were you carrying them around with you?  Don’t you have a vault somewhere?”

Howlen released him, trembling.  “The Utopia confiscated it when they fired me.”

“So what if you don’t remember your parents?” Athenais growled, fed up with the colonel’s whiny bullshit.  “You ask me, it’s a blessing.”

“Easy, Attie,” Rabbit warned.

“Why?  He’s acting like the sniveling Utopian brat he is,” Athenais retorted.  “It’s not our fault he didn’t back up his chips.”

Howlen turned on her and in that instant, her world exploded in a burst of jittery white lights.  She hit the ground without even knowing she had fallen.  Athenais tried to sit up, but the Colonel was on top of her, repeatedly slamming the butt of her Phoenix into her face.  When Rabbit tried to pull him off, he pointed the gun at him.  Rabbit backed away, hands up.

“Why does she deserve it?!” Howlen demanded, shifting so that the tip of the Phoenix’s barrel was resting against Athenais’s bloody nose.  “Why’s
she
had the seven-thousand-year cakewalk?!”

“Careful, Tommy,” Rabbit said.  “She didn’t know what she was saying.”

“She goddamn did too!” Howlen shouted.  “She can’t forget a damn thing!  Her father was the Father of the Utopia, so she’s been the Daughter of Christ for the last seven millennia!”  The colonel pushed the Phoenix further against her shattered nose, and Athenais grimaced against the pain.  Lowering his voice dangerously, Tommy growled, “Let’s see if you can remember this, pirate.  Jonin.  Sixty-seven ninety.”

“Colonies were wiped out by
suzait,”
Rabbit replied.

“I’m asking
her
,” Tommy snapped.  “Maybe she was there.  Maybe she helped them kill my family.  Maybe she brought them in on her
Beetle
!”

“She wouldn’t do that,” Rabbit said softly.

“How the hell would you know?!” Tommy snarled.  “She’s fornicating with a goddamn alien!”

“Calm down, Tommy,” Rabbit said.  “She wasn’t there.  Were you, Attie?”

“You heard her,” Howlen said.  “She escaped twenty-nine years after we won the war on Derkne.  That gives her a whole year to collect some of her
suzait
friends and go to Jonin.”

“I was sold in a
suzait
meat-market, you stupid fool,” Athenais snapped up at him.  “Nineteen years with somebody else at the controls—did you know the damn thing bred me so they could use my kids as more hosts?   I don’t like those worms any more than you do.  Hell, that’s why I didn’t want to come to this goddamn planet in the first place!”

Lips pressed together in a grim line, Howlen stepped off of her and handed the gun to Rabbit.  “I’m gonna go find my wallet,” he snarled.  At that, he turned and stalked off.  Rabbit watched him go, then bent to help Athenais.

“Come on, Attie,” he said taking her hand.  “We’d better go after him.”

“To hell with that,” Athenais muttered, wiping her face.  Blood was draining down her lip and dripping onto her jacket.  She grabbed her Phoenix and started walking in the other direction.

Rescuing Tommy

“You!  Boy!”  Tommy broke into a sprint as the toothy kid dropped his skewer of old snake meat and ran.  He chased the kid down an alley, through a gutter, up a flight of stairs, over a roof, and back down into an alley.  By the time the kid disappeared through a hole under a wall, Tommy was completely lost.

But more importantly, his memchips were on the other side of the wall.

Tommy got down on his hands and knees and peered through the hole in the wall.  He could see shadows moving around in the darkness beyond.  “Kid,” he said softly, “Please let me have my chips back.  It’s my family albums.  Only copies I’ve got. 
Please
.  Keep the money.  I don’t care about the rest.”

The kid threw rocks at him and jeered. 

Fury building, Tommy used a rickety escape ladder to climb atop the nearest roof, thinking to jump over the wall, but hesitated at the brink, realizing the drop would probably break his legs.  Frustrated, Tommy scanned the maze of buildings, trying to determine where he was.  He had to be close to the little rat’s lair.  Perhaps he could alert the local authorities.  He’d spent long hours working with the sheriff and his ‘flesher’ crew.  Perhaps a favor, for old times’ sake…

Yet, if there was one course he had resoundingly failed in the Academy, it was Ground Navigation.  Three-dimensional positioning made sense to him, but travel on a gravitational plane with directions based on landmarks and elevations instead of coordinates was incomprehensible.  Tommy peered out over the jumble of buildings, beginning to feel the first tingles of fear replacing the anger from losing the chips.

“The hell you doin’ up here?” a man in the rooftop apartment behind him suddenly shouted, slamming a dust-door open to gesture rudely.  “Get off my porch!”

Relieved for the help, Tommy said, “Some little brat pilfered my wallet.  It had memchips in it.  Ones that were very important to me.  Maybe you could tell me how to—”

“I said
git
!”  The man lobbed something small and white at him. 
An egg?
  When Tommy looked, the man was brandishing a frying-pan, looking like he was about to step outside and use it.

“I just need to know how to get to a main thoroughfare!” Tommy cried, backing towards the ladder.

“
Now
!” the man growled, hefting the pan.  His muscular, tattooed arm bulged with the effort.  “We don’t deal with flesher scum here.” 

“But I’m not…” Tommy began.  Then, unhappily, he realized that he probably looked just like the sheriff’s plainclothes detectives.  What sort of civilian would actually chase down a pickpocket through the slums?

One who used to be a colonel in the Utopian S.O.,
Thomas thought miserably.  Hands up, he backed off of the roof and slid back down the ladder.

Back on the ground, Tommy reluctantly decided to go in the direction of a break in the houses.  He was working his way through the maze when three men caught him in the alley.  The toothy boy was behind them, grinning.  When Thomas’s eyes widened, the kid dangled the wallet between two fingers, taunting him.

“Oh thank God,” Thomas cried, taking a step towards the boy.  “Please.  Just give me back my chips, kid.  I don’t care about the credits.”

He quickly forgot about his wallet, however, as the men rushed him and threw him backwards into the brick wall.  One of them—the frying-pan man, Tommy realized with disgust—punched him in the solar plexus, driving the breath from his lungs in a radiating blast of agony.  The man punched him again and Tommy’s legs crumpled from under him, unable to catch his breath.  He fell on his side, with his cheek against the cold cobblestones.  They surrounded him, kicking him, even the little kid.  When they stopped, someone grabbed his hair and bashed his head into the stone and Tommy lost consciousness.