The Amazing Tales of Wildcat Arrows (5 page)

The sweetest part was that they would never be able to legally track him. Dummy idents meant no prison records.

There weren't a lot of places that he couldn't figure a way out of (or into, for that matter). He had just bided his time until the right way to escape presented itself.

Regrettably, it had taken much longer than he estimated.

Too damn long.

Six stellar months.

On Cretion, prisoners either survived the backbreaking labor or they didn't. Their choice. Wildcat's tall, muscular frame—another ancestral gift from the powerful Scottish Laird of the highlands—had helped him endure the strenuous labor.

But even he could only take so much.

He needed a way off this dung heap.
Fast
.

A line briefly formed in the middle of his smooth forehead as he sized up a potential mark. A Zoltarian captain.

Probably pirate.

She was sitting at a table, surrounded by her crew. Snorting in laughter to the male on her left, she snatched a tankard skin off the rickety bar tray. In an instant, long, pointed fangs pierced the bladder of Cretion hootch.

Down the hatch it went.
Glub, glub, glub
.

While this was going on, the comrade to her right spit three times, then brayed out cusses, sounding exactly like an ass with turrets. He followed up nicely on this set by keeling backwards right over his chair.

Face up, he flopped across the floor and might well have been taken for dead if not for the faint, intermittent twitching in the vicinity of his groin and the occasional hee-haw sound coming from his mouth.

Wildcat cocked his head to the side with a kind of horrified fascination as he watched the floor show.
No mystery now as to why Zoltarians have a real hard time scoring in bars
…

He winced as the captain cracked open a hard-shelled
jub-jub
by using the poor lout's forehead as a nutcracker.

Ouch.
That'll hurt in the morning
.

The pirate's brethren did not appear to notice their mate's semi-demise. By their raucous behavior, the scruffy band had been on the sauce for hours.

Hell, maybe they'd been drinking for days.

With Zoltarians, you never knew.

Their aggressive in your face attitude was only surpassed by their unending capacity for high octane rotgut. Cretion grog fit that bill perfectly. Big punch, little price.

The captain suddenly noticed him by the door and arched her slanted brows in interest.

Oh, hell no.

Wildcat closed his eyes and exhaled as he tried to talk sense to himself. He was stranded on this planet and if he didn't get out of here soon, there was a real possibility that his bed tonight—and every night
forever—
was going to be the stone floor of a six by eight foot cell.

If
he was lucky.

They could decide to just kill him as a thank you for the trouble he caused. This pirate captain might be his only chance.

He cringed. Damn, but he really,
really
hated that thing they did with their teeth!

Zoltarian
? Only as a last resort.

For the time being, he decided to ignore her blatant invitation.

He carefully continued his survey of the murky barroom. In one corner, a Kneph was sketching on the wall with some kind of root vegetable. She loudly extolled the virtues of soup.

He crossed his eyes.

There was no way he was going to wrangle with a Kneph. They were dubbed '
naggers of the known universe'
for good reason. Six co-dependent personalities. All migraine inducing.

Wildcat recoiled as he imagined those six distinct female voices demanding he pick up the pace.
No, slow down
… Harder!…
Deeper
… Stop…
Go
… Pu-u-u-ussssh!

Hell no.

He didn't mind working up a proper sweat for the right cause, but he had never been known as one that did what was demanded of him. Undoubtedly, the Kneph would soon find him more than she bargained for. And one of those irksome personalities might alert the authorities.

Without hesitation, he moved on.

Towards the back of the room, a nasty batch of Taman mercenaries were live-hunting a late snack. As Wildcat watched, the server released the trap door on a cage of
snurts
.

The furry, black beasties scurried across the stone floor in a flurry of feathers and shrieks.

But it was too late for them.

Like a hailstorm of lightening arrows, seven Taman laz-lances zinged through the air. They homed in on their targets, efficiently snuffing and toasting the poor critters in one streamlined maneuver.

With a cool flick of Taman talons, the laz-lances were retrieved and the unfortunate snurts were served up en brochette.

Cretion blue plate special.

The sight made Wildcat slightly nauseous.

It had been a long while since he had last eaten; nevertheless, his Earthboy sensibilities were not yet honed to sizzled snurt. Oh, he supposed he had ingested worse in his lifetime—but he wasn't too keen to test that supposition out, thank you very much.

No one else was in the bar.

Wildcat's focus drifted reluctantly back to the Zoltarian. If one of the Taman meres had been female, he might well have been on his way to his first taste of Kentucky Fried Snurt.

But that wasn't the case.

The pirate captain was his only chance. She had what he needed: an airship. He could not be seen on the streets again. The
sniffers
were closing in on him fast; he needed to act now.

He wasn't just itchin' to get off this planet; he was hankerin' to get at something else.

Before he had escaped he had heard a rumor in the mines.

Word in the gulag was that the Heart of the Merchandiser had been lifted.

Wildcat knew that if there was one thing prisoners usually got right, it was the current state of happenings in the woo-woo world of criminal hijinks. As they say on the ol'homeball, that lil' information highway flowed freely three sixty-five twenty-four seven. And amen to that.

Ah, miadne…

The one substance that could fuel a galaxy-wide circle jerk amongst bandits everywhere.
Beautiful miadne
! It was the main standard behind every currency in the galaxy. And the Heart of the Merchandiser was the largest single chunk of inclusion-free miadne known to exist in the universe.

Wildcat touched his heart and bowed his head in mock homage.

Truth was, Wildcat Arrows had a rep for finding things. Oil. Lost loves. Codes. Secret admirers. You name it;
he
could track it. Of all the things the Cat could find—well, he was simply the best at locating lost 'jewels'.

One could almost say he devoted his life to it.

Funny how that life had turned out…

It hadn't been all that long ago that Earth had been introduced to Tamans, Cretions, Snurts, and a plethora of extraterrestrial surprises that had just been waiting to go '
bugga-bugga
!' to Earthlings.

In a Klein bottle twist, decades of Hollywood foreshadowing about the scourge of alien contact—imax movies of bug-eyed monsters munching Aunt Sue's brain—books preaching a tentacled apocalypse—dire cookbooks with recipes of stir-fried man—never came to pass.

We had seen the enemy and it was us.

Contact came in the form of a simple corporate takeover.

It seemed a mark, a yen, a buck, or a pound made ze universe go round. Earth was invited (absorbed) into the Consortium of Corporate Systems, or Concorp for short.

Nothing adapted as well as a businessman sniffing streaming money on the solar wind. All xenophobia was quickly caste aside in the name of golden opportunity.

The entire galaxy was one big corporate party,
brotha
.
²

Earthlings had shown a potential aptitude for making money for the galactic corporations.

Oh, and Earth had macadamia nuts.

The highly prized seed turned out to be the planet's
only
redeemable export. Mankind's true claim to universal recognition had been embedded in a Sausalito cookie for decades. Who knew?

Stock prices on macadamia commodities soared.

Since 2014 e.t., Earth had been part of Concorp's entry level up-and-comers. As the new toys on the block, Earthlings became a galactic cause célèbre. Sought after for exciting, energetic copulation and not much else.

The musings of pulp science fiction writers of the past turned out to be accurate. Advanced species really were interested in hot sex with the people from Earth.

As luck would have it, Wildcat Arrows was one of the most intriguing of the Earth breeds. Hell-raisin'. Hard-lovin'. Wild-ridin'. He was a rogue who lived for danger, high stakes, and the thrill of the game.

And best of all, he could make love like there was no tomorrow.

An expert at giving satisfaction but not his heart.

Never his heart.

Attracted to these males' fiery dispositions, extraterrestrial females had a name for such men. They called them '
chain lightning'
.

But never to their faces.

Wildcat knew this and was not above using it to his advantage—if he had to. Resolved, he squared shoulders that had become much broader since his forced servitude in the mines. Whatever he had to do to leave here, he'd do.

His one hope was that Lucky and that pea-brained SpinDrift had the good sense to drydock the
Sugarbabe
and hole up at Mama Bros Almost Used Emporium and Garage.

The last thing he wanted to do was chase around the galaxy after them. Every tracker, thief, purveyor of unusual artifacts and their accompanying squads of goon opportunists would be after that miadne!

He didn't want to lose any time in tracking it.

That jewel was a key to the sweet life.

He only hoped they hadn't been foolish enough to be suckered into something stupid while he was away.

He closed his eyes. A vision of Lucky's trusting innocence and SpinDrift's brainless expression crossed his mind. Add to that vision Clugot—whose name should have been Clueless—and you had the perfect recipe for trouble a la mode.

Oh hell
. He needed to get back to his ship pronto.

Wildcat ground his teeth as made his way to the Zoltarian's table. With no money, no credit, no miadne, no papers, and no transport, he was going to have to do whatever it took to get back to them. He had vowed to protect Lucky and that was one promise he intended to keep.

Several of the Zoltarian's shipmates growled as he approached, but the captain snapped her teeth at them and they quickly shrank back into their pursuit of drink.

"Sit here, Earthman." She patted the seat next to her with fingers that sported remarkably long nails. The manicured set had been done in the french style. Tiny sparkling diamonds were delicately set into each pointed nail tip.

Wildcat had almost convinced himself that the little Asian manicure shop at the end of the street had been a figment of his imagination. While he had stealthily crept by the windows, he had caught a glimpse of a blobish alien having what he assumed was a pedicure. Several diligent manicurists attended the client as her tentacles stretched across several stools. While he had stopped to stare, bright crimson nail polish and tiny white hearts were applied to the end of each tentacle.

Wildcat's eyes had crossed.

Once contact had been made, it hadn't taken long for the nail shops to launch themselves into space. Just like on Earth, they cropped up everywhere.

He took a seat and the Zoltarian graciously offered him a swig of her tankard bladder.

The thought of where that bladder had originated made him hold up his hand to politely decline.

She laughed. "Earthlings are so conventional, so provincial. I find most are afraid to partake of new experiences." She leaned closer to him. "You will never learn if you do not
experience
, my friend." She winked at him.

Truth was, Wildcat had partaken of more new experiences in his lifetime than this Zoltarian woman would ever imagine.

A line of amusement curved his cheek, but he played the role she asked of him.

"Perhaps you could show me?"

The Zoltarian chuckled. "Perhaps. Perhaps. You Earthmen are still quite the novelty. A new flavor to us. Still, I don't wish to upset your fragile sensibilities; I was a bit too much for the last one of your kind that I. . • encountered." Her tongue licked over her incisors suggestively.

Wildcat tried to hide his shudder of revulsion. He really hated that thing they did with their teeth!

Think of Lucky.

He kept repeating that to himself as he set his focus only on her. Long shimmering black lashes shielded his eyes; flickering glints of azure flashed through the dark crescents.

Better to let her wonder what he was thinking. He was having a hard time committing to this.

The Zoltarian sucked in her breath. "I have never seen hair that glistens so. You are utterly beautiful, my friend. Did you know that?"

He didn't. And he had never much cared one way or the other. But he knew what he had to do. If he didn't focus on what Zoltarians did with their teeth, he would be fine.

"I could arrange for you to feel my hair sliding over you." He purred as he gave her a slow smile. "Perhaps you will
glisten
too," he whispered.

It worked. She threw back her head and roared with laughter. "I like you. Come, let us go."

His eyes narrowed. Caution was the rule in these places. "Where?"

"To my ship, of course. I have a nice private cabin; we won't be disturbed."

She started to rise, assuming that the deal was sealed. Wildcat's hand shot out and grabbed her wrist, forestalling her.

"There is one condition."

She looked cooly down at his firm hold on her wrist. Her nostrils flared with annoyance. "There usually is. What do you want?"

He was walking a thin line and he knew it; she was his only ticket out. Still, he held his ground. "I remain on your ship when you leave Cretion orbit. Let's just say I need transport."