Wings of Retribution (44 page)

“Listen here, worm…”

“Enough,” Rabbit interrupted.  “There will be no fighting on my ship.”

“My ship,” Fairy corrected.

Rabbit glanced at Fairy and made a nod.  “Her ship.”

Howlen got to his feet.  “This is driving me crazy.  Who’s in control, girl?  Is it you or the worm?”

“Stop calling him a worm.  He’s not a worm.”

“Maybe you didn’t get a good look at him when he crawled into your brain the other day.”

“Tommy,” Rabbit warned.

Howlen grunted and turned away from Fairy.  “Anyway, I say I go planetside with the landing party.  I’ve dealt with Odan before.”

“It’s you and Athenais, then,” Rabbit agreed.  “Dallas and I will watch the ship.”

“I’m not going down there,” Athenais said.

Everyone turned to her.

“Why not?” Fairy asked.

“She doesn’t want to, she doesn’t have to,” Rabbit said quickly.  “It’s not important who goes, just that we get the information we need.”

“I say she goes,” Fairy said.  “You too, Rabbit.  I can watch the ship myself.”

“And give that worm a chance to take over and leave us stranded?” Howlen demanded.  “No, Rabbit stays.”

Fairy snorted.  “If I’d wanted to take the ship, I’da turned off the Gs and sent this thing into enough barrel-rolls to decorate the walls with your brains.  You’re all going.  That’s an order.”

“An
order
?” Athenais laughed.  “You better mind who you’re talking to, you little tart.”

“It’s her ship,” Rabbit said.

“Not with my money, it isn’t,” Athenais snapped.

“I used
my
money,” Rabbit replied calmly.  “And I’m giving Dallas
Retribution
, as payment for saving our lives.”

“Oh.”

“So get off,” Fairy snapped.  “All of you.”

Athenais stared at the girl, utterly dumbfounded that her friend could have been stupid enough to give the ship to someone with the mentality of a retarded hamster.  “Rabbit, you can’t be serious.”

Rabbit took Athenais by the arm and led her toward the air-lock.  “Tommy, let’s go.  The captain gave us an order.”

“You mean the
worm
gave us an order.”

Athenais yanked her arm out of Rabbit’s reach, scowling.  “I’m
not
going down there.”  She hated Odan.  It had been in its filthy, crowded streets that she’d been sold as a permanent meat-suit to a
suzait
, and she wasn’t particularly interested in going back.  Ever.

“What’s the matter?” Fairy mocked from the controls.  “You scared,
navigator
?”  Then she tapped her fingers to her open mouth.  “Oh,
wait
, that’s right.  I was gonna make you the
cook
.”

Athenais felt that rush of rage flowering in her gut, and her fists tightened into balls.

“Attie…” Rabbit warned.

“Let’s go,” Athenais growled, turning on heel.  “I’ll buy my own ship planetside.”

“You better,” Fairy jeered.  “That flat ass of yours’ll look like shit in a waitress’s uniform.”

Fingers itching for her Phoenix, Athenais instead led them all to the air-lock.  She waited for clearance from the Odan hub, then hit the Open button on the control panel.

“Get ready,” Howlen said, taking a deep breath as they waited for the lock to equalize pressure with the spaceport.

As the doors slid open, a crush of dark-skinned Odaners pressed in on them with exotic animals and jewelry for sale.  They shouted in a cacophony of uneven Standard that hurt the ears as they jockeyed to be heard.  Men and women holding cages and bundles shoved at each other trying to reach the front, and one fool even accompanied a juvenile three-hundred-pound redcat with nothing but a leash and an electric goad.

“…mistress, only twenty credits.  Finest feathers in…”

“…genuine Earthling rabbit, five credits apiece…”

“…live Derknian redcat, only three thousand credits…”

In her ear as he started pushing through the crowd, Howlen shouted, “…done this before.  You just gotta put up with them until they get tired.”

Athenais nodded, then drew her Phoenix.  In one swift motion, she blew the head off of the redcat, whose fangs were beginning to show in its irritation with the crowd.  The wound sealed almost immediately, but the body still floundered and slashed at air, clearing a wide berth around it.  Athenais went over and shoved the body over, nimbly avoiding the poison claws it whipped back and forth.

The hub went silent.  A space cleared around Athenais and her friends, the vendors’ sales pitches caught dead in their throats.

In the silence, Athenais grabbed the stunned man still holding the frayed leash by the front of his shirt.  Dragging him until they were eye-to-eye, Athenais said, “When your beast regenerates, take him to another hub.  I see him again and I’ll aim for his neural center and then pop a shot off at
your
head, you understand?”

The man, who was looking at her like she’d grown fangs and a bushy tail, nodded numbly.

Athenais threw him roughly aside.  “Listen up, the rest of you!” Athenais said.  “We’re not here to buy tourists’ shit.  We’ve come for the real deal.  Anyone who tries to sell me anything I don’t think is worth three million credits will be shot.  Do you understand?”

“What are you
doing?!”
Howlen hissed at her.

Athenais ignored him, panning her pistol across the silent crowd.  “No one?  Then get out of my way.”  She lowered her gun and started toward the shuttle and the Odaners quickly backed away.  Rabbit and Howlen followed, and Fairy shut the door behind them.

Once they were on the shuttle, Howlen snarled, “That wasn’t the least bit inconspicuous!  Those fools are gonna tell all their thieving, murdering kin that there’s three spacers onplanet with a few million credits.”

“Let them,” Athenais said. 

Colonel Howlen opened his mouth to object and she raised an eyebrow, waiting.

“Oh,” he muttered.

“I do agree that you could have handled that more delicately, Attie,” Rabbit offered.

“Who asked you?” Athenais demanded, already in a bad mood from Fairy’s bullshit.  “That redcat was gonna turn on that crowd eventually.”

There was a long silence as Rabbit and Tommy exchanged meaningful glances.  Athenais frowned.  “What?  And don’t tell me you actually think he had that thing under control.”

“Derkne engineered a new breed of redcat four hundred years ago,” Rabbit said.  “Totally domesticated.”

“With poison claws?”  Athenais snorted.

“The compound they excrete is no longer toxic.”

Athenais felt her neck start to heat.  She scowled at the seat in front of her.  “Well, they should’ve made it a different color or something.  Looks too much like the ones they used during the Water Rebellion.”

Colonel Howlen’s eyes lit up.  “You fought in the Water Rebellion?”

She glanced at the prude.  “Yeah.  So?”

“Doing what?”  His voice was a bit too sharp for her tastes.

Athenais smiled.  “Why, shooting down Utopian ships, of course.”

Howlen’s face darkened.  “You’re a damned traitor.”

Pleasantly, she said, “I’m sorry, was one of ‘em yours?”

Howlen bristled.  “I spent four years in a Derknian prison camp because of you.”

Athenais shrugged.  “There were other rebel pilots.”

“No,” Howlen snarled.  “It was you.”

“Now you can’t know that,” Rabbit interrupted.  “Attie, how many ships did you shoot down during the Rebellion?”

“All of them.”

Rabbit sighed and leaned back to stare at the ceiling.

“Not
only
are you the reason I lost my job with the Utopia, but I went to that damned POW camp because of you,
too
!” Howlen said, his voice becoming entirely too loud.  Athenais thought it was funny that he was shaking.  She yawned and checked her watch. 

“So how long’s the shuttle ride?” she asked Rabbit.

“You ruined my life,” Tommy managed, obviously barely able to contain his rage.  “
Twice
!”

Athenais looked at him again and sighed.  “So you paid four years,” Athenais said.  “Whoopty-do.  I spent twenty-nine years in a Tercian work camp after the Rebellion.”

“They should’ve
fried
your ass!” Howlen cried.  “You single-handedly kept the whole Rebellion on its feet.”  The poor fool looked like his head was about to explode.  “How could they
not
have executed you?”

Athenais showed him her teeth.  “They tried.  Then, when the first and second attempts failed publicly—and subsequently the third and fourth failed privately—they decided that frying me again would just make them look incompetent, so they sent me to Tercia and forgot about me.”

“They sent you to a
colony
?!” Howlen sputtered.  There were veins sticking out in his neck.  “They can’t kill you, so they sent you to a
colony
?”  He obviously assumed it had been a lot more fun than it was.

“Maybe you’ve got a romanticized version of the colonies,” Athenais offered, “judging by what I saw in your room.  So let me educate you a second.  The colonies are harsh, dirty, unforgiving places to live.  Every day, you’re wondering if you’re gonna be able to put enough food away for winter, or if you’re gonna end up starving come spring like the guy next door.  And of the food we
did
raise, most of it we weren’t allowed to keep.  Utopian tax and all that.  Made for a lot of hungry people.”

Howlen was staring at her like she’d said they’d flown her to paradise and had half-naked men with palm fronds feed her mango slices while protecting her from the sun.  “I would have given my commission to be sent to the colonies,” Howlen managed.

Athenais sighed.  “Maybe you didn’t hear me.  I raised meat for the Utopia under armed guard for fifty-two years.  Cows, chickens, feerat, pigs…  Just about anything that shits and stinks and tries to bite you for feeding it.  Then we got an order for twenty live feerat for a new colony closer to the Second Quad and I got one of the damned things to eat me.  Rubbed a dead one’s gonads all over myself so the stupid thing thought I was a competing male.  I spent the next sixteen days inside that damned feerat, until it died from internal bleeding.  You can imagine how surprised the ship’s cook was when he cut it open and I crawled out.”

Howlen’s eyes narrowed.  “You’re lying.  I used to raise feerat.  Their stomachs can dissolve a skimmer engine.  You would’ve died in there.”

“Never said I didn’t,” Athenais agreed. 

Howlen narrowed his eyes at her and turned to look out the window of the ship.  They spent the rest of the trip in silence.  Rabbit tried several times to nervously strike up conversation, but the colonel simply ignored him.

About twenty minutes later, the shuttle landed in a tourist’s market and they were faced with the same pushy, cacophonic mass of vendors that had assaulted them in the hub. 

Before Athenais could shoot something, however, Howlen started pushing his way through the crowd, leaving her and Rabbit to either follow or lose him entirely.  Athenais was fully willing to let him get himself lost, but Rabbit dutifully fell in behind him like a sheep.