BOB's Bar Read online

  “I learned later that Cheeky had a phobia of getting too far from the ship. A previous captain had left her high and dry on a station where she’d had to work for a year before Sera rescued her.

  “Anyway, it had turned into a pretty nice girls’ night out. We were gossiping about the people on our ship; Cheeky confided in me that she’d never managed to get into Flaherty’s pants, which didn’t really surprise me. The guy was like some sort of combination of an ancient, kilt-wearing Scot and a ninja.”

  “Why would that combination make someone a grubbing monk? One of my fellow recruits was Scottish and a planetary MMA champion. The bastard broke my arm when we were sergeants. He rarely wore a kilt, but managed to get everyone into his pants.” General Lysander nodded. “And I mean everyone.”

  “Yeah. Flaherty was just like that.” Tanis shrugged. “But completely different. The guy was like a sneaky stealthy Scot that never spoke. Your guy sounds more like Thompson—who Cheeky had taken around the course more than a few times. ‘Rode him like a boar in heat,’ was what she said, if I remember it right.”

  “I think she said that was how he rode her,” Angela corrected.

  Tanis took another drink of her Guinness—that was something she had to get more of.

 

 

  Angela laughed.

 

  Tanis resumed her story. “So Cheeky continued to regale me with tales of her sexual exploits, which really were quite impressive. She’d done things I’d never even heard of, and I was just over two-hundred-years-old back then so I’d heard of a lot. While she was telling me about something she’d done with Sera once, I spotted these four guys enter the bar and watched them make a beeline for a table in the rear.

  “They sat down with this guy who’d been back there when we came in. He hadn’t spoken a word or moved, other than the odd shift here and there. I’d started to wonder if he was an automaton, but when his friends showed up, he seemed normal enough.”

  “She’s exaggerating,” Angela interrupted. “She’d already filled the bar with nanoprobes and knew that guy was fully human.”

  “Ang! Seriously, you’re ruining the story.”

  “Just get to the good part. Everyone gets it; Cheeky is sexy and she’ll screw anything that’s screwable, plus half the stuff that’s not.”

  Tanis couldn’t help but laugh. “That’s very uncharitable, Angela. Cheeky was discerning in who and what she screwed. Her scale of discernment was different than most people’s, but it was there.

  “So, the four new guys sit with their quiet—until now—friend. They dropped a dampening field so that no one could hear what they were saying, but I already had probes on their table, so listening in was no problem. Not that their poor excuse for a dampener would have worked, anyway.

  “ ‘Well, if we hit it today, we can get a sweet load. They’re outfitting some ship with serious beams and shields. Fuck, the batts alone could put us all up for a year.’ That was from one of the guys who had just arrived. He was dark-haired, and it was more than a little greasy. He also spoke with a weird lisp.

  “ ‘Today’s too soon,’ said the guy who’d been there waiting. ‘Besides, we’re not after just those upgrades. We want to take their entire operation and the main warehouse.’

  “It was pretty obvious these guys were planning to hit S&H Defensive Armaments, the outfit that was upgrading our ship. They weren’t the only company selling arms on the PetSil platform, but the other companies were tiny, and none possessed what could be termed a ‘warehouse’.

  “Normally I wouldn’t worry too much about something like this—”

  Angela laughed. “Liar.”

  “OK, fine,” Tanis corrected herself. “I probably would, but given the general circumstances, I wouldn’t have—if not for the fact that these guys were going to mess up my plans.”

  “That’s more like it.” Angela’s tone was smug, but she didn’t speak further.

  “Earlier in the day, I had put the screws to S&H, forcing them to cut some corners on the permits for the work they were doing for me. I was worried that if I alerted S&H, or the authorities about these men, it would set back the timetable for my ship’s upgrades.

  “It had already been a week since Sera was captured, and we were on borrowed time. I could have killed all five of those men where they sat. Their nanotech was all but nonexistent, and their Link connectivity was so full of protocol holes that I could have walked right into their minds and burned them to a crisp.

  “But I was trying to keep a low profile. No one for a thousand light years had tech like mine, and the local cops would have questioned everyone in the place. Not to mention scrubbing someone’s mind is a wee bit on the unethical side of things.

  “So I opted for good ol’ Plan A: beat the shit out of them.”

  Angela made a throat-clearing sound. “This is where I feel obligated to let you all know there were a lot of other ways we could have stopped them without physical violence. Tanis just wanted to get into a fight.”

  Tanis opened her mouth to object, then closed it again and nodded. “OK, fair enough. I had recently undergone a month of torture, and had almost lost the baby I was carrying—don’t worry, the baby was in a stasis pocket inside my body, so I wasn’t getting drunk while pregnant. Well, I was, but you get what I mean. My little Cary was born without any defects.”

  “This future tech of yours is making my head spin,” Amanda said.

  “Yeah,” Bethany Anne agreed, “And thank God for nanocytes keeping poisons away from babies.”

  Tanis shook her head and touched her chest. “This was nothing. You should have seen what happened a week later; I got my heart shot right out of my chest. That was heart number three, too.”

  “Four,” Angela corrected.

  Amanda closed her eyes and shook her head in wonderment. “And all this without Magic, amazing.”

  Tanis winked at Amanda. “That’s because magic isn’t real. It’s just more tech.”

  Angela replied privately.

  “And you won’t find any, Angela, but yeah, I mean, ‘any sufficiently advanced tech...’” Amanda began as her body split into thousands of flying insects, and then collapsed into about a hundred talking birds. “ ‘…is indistinguishable…’” Those birds whipped around the tabled and then slammed together, changing into a green gelatinous figure shaped roughly like Amanda with two floating eyeballs inside it, which somehow smiled at Splurt. “ ‘…from Magic,” the gooey figure gurgled.

  “Splurt’s got a girlfriend, Splurt’s got a girlfriend,” Cal sang in a low, somewhat slurred whisper. The little blob on his shoulder squelched as he grew a nub of an arm, then used it to elbow Cal on the cheek, shutting him up.

  With a final thwip, Amanda’s body transformed back into its usual self. “So who’s to say, hmmm?”

  Angela said to Tanis.

  Everyone around the table was slackjawed at what they’d just seen, and Tanis nodded silently for a half-minute. “Orrrr...maybe magic is real.”

  “Space magic,” Cal corrected.

  Bethany Anne tapped her lip, her eyes narrowed having watched Amanda’s display. “I’ve got to figure that shit out!”

  Amanda just smiled and winked, and Tanis decided the best course of action was to soldier on. “Right, well, either way. I needed to get these guys somewhere other than a crowded bar. Lucky for me, I had a secret weapon: Cheeky. Well, not exactly secret—those guys had been ogling her every chance they got.

  “I reached out to her over the Link. with them.>

  “I’d kinda omitted some crucial information, and her response was not so charitable.

  “ The look Cheeky gave me at that point was priceless. One of her eyes was almost entirely closed while the other was wide, so I filled her in.

  “ Cheeky asked at that point. She’d never seen me fight, so she had no idea. Five wasn’t a problem; five quietly was a bit more difficult.

  “ I told her.

  “Cheeky gave me a solid wink and downed her whiskey before sliding off her stool. I was impressed as she sauntered over to the group’s table without even the smallest wobble. For a woman who probably came in at under fifty kilos, she could really hold her alcohol. Granted, she was a pilot—she had mods to help her function under g-forces that would make most people blackout.”

  Tanis laughed at the memory. “It did not, however, help with her speech. She was slurring all over as she tried to pick the guys up. Granted, it wasn’t like Cheeky faced a real challenge. She’d cranked her pheromones up all the way, and I think even the fish in the tank above the bar were salivating.

  Bethany Anne covered her mouth as she laughed, glancing up to see if this place had any fish.

  “The four newcomers were ready to postpone all their plans for a chance in the sack with Cheeky, but the guy who had been waiting for them wasn’t having any of it. Through the course of their conversation, he’d come around to doing the job that day, and seemed to have his heart set on getting the goods and taking them to a nearby system named Gedri.

  “It looked like he was going to win his pals over and send Cheeky packing, so I made a few deductions—wild-assed guesses, really—and walked over to their table. I circled around and bent over next to him.”

  “You stuck your ass right in one of the other guy’s faces, too,” Angela added. “Don’t forget about that.”

  Tanis laughed. “Yeah, I did, didn’t I? Like I said, I was keeping a good buzz going, too.” She looked around the table, her gaze lingering on each of the men in BOB’s bar. “You guys really do make it pretty easy. I’m usually the staid one in a group, but even I like to mess with the boys sometimes.”

  “Only sometimes? When it’s just so much fun?” Amanda said.

  “Yeah, well, I’ve been married for a couple of centuries now. I’m out of practice,” Tanis replied with a self-deprecating laugh. “Either way, I’d guessed the right thing to say to the holdout. It was something like, ‘I bet you like things a bit rougher than you think she can handle—or maybe dish out, if that’s your thing. If you’re not black and blue after a run with me, then we’re not done yet.’

  Bethany Anne burst out laughing. “Oh my God! That’s priceless!”

  Tanis smiled. “Needless to say, that piqued his interest.”

  “Wasn’t all it ‘peaked’.” Angela chortled.

  Tanis let out a commiserating sigh. “Guy had a real douche name, too, ‘Maverick’. Hard to forget—especially because he became the president of a star system later. I really should have killed him when I had the chance.” Tanis shook her head. “Luckily he eventually got what was coming to him. I had a hand in it too, so that was nice.

  “I feel like I should mention at this point, that Cheeky wasn’t much of a fighter. The old ‘lover not a fighter adage’ fit her to a ‘T.’ From what I’d heard, she’d been in a few dock-side shootouts, but her job was usually to provide suppressive fire. So keep that in mind, and don’t judge her too harshly.”

  Tanis took another swig of her Guinness before continuing. “Right, so that little spiel got Maverick excited, and he informed his crew that there was no reason they couldn’t get a bit of entertainment in before their work later. Turns out Maverick ran a sex slave…I don’t know what you’d call it…empire, maybe.”

  “A harem?” Amanda suggested.

  “No, thousands and thousands of women. Makes a harem look like a kids’ club. He was in the Silstrand System orchestrating some kidnappings. Hitting S&H was just a fortuitous opportunity that had cropped up.

  “One of the guys looked like he was ready to take his pants off right there, and I knew we had to get them moving. ‘You have somewhere a bit less public—’ I began, and Cheeky interjected, ‘And less sticky.’

  “ ‘I have a ship.’ Maverick wore one of those grins that was supposed to look enticing, but was one hundred percent leer. ‘You’ll like her. She’s called the Penultimate.’

  “At this point, it took all the willpower I possessed not to groan. Luckily Cheeky covered for me; she giggled and said something about how that would be amazing. A minute later, we’d settled up and were heading out of the bar.

  “Cheeky was able to somehow divide her attention between four of the men in a way that had them all entirely captivated. It was amazing, it was like watching an artist paint a masterpiece. Unfortunately for me, Maverick had decided I was to be his company that night.

  “I hit Cheeky up over the Link. She only laughed in response, then told me,

  “I knew how that game went, though, and said,

  “It didn’t take too long to make it to their ship, which was on an external berth—meaning it was big. I pulled up the registries once I figured out which one we were headed to, and sure enough, it was a five-hundred-meter modified freighter.

  “I’m not sure how things go where you folks are from, but in my experience, there are two types of interstellar freighters—well, three, but it’s a small distinction—freighters that haul stuff, and freighters that pretend to haul stuff, but really shoot other freighters and steal the stuff they were hauling. That second group consists of pirates, and freighters with letters of marque. I’m sure you know how it is. Whether they’re a pirate or not just depends on what star system they’re in.”

  “I've retaken more than a few ships from pirates. Hate them, and I don't give a shit if they're supposedly legit from some government. A pirate's a pirate, and they're all scum.” General Lysander said, almost under his breath. “Sorry, didn't mean to interrupt. Go on.”

  Tanis nodded in agreement. “I’m with you there, General. I’ve had more than a few run-ins with pirates. Though I gladly took a letter of marque to let me hunt them a few days later for my rescue op.

  “Either way, the ship was big enough that it had a fifty-meter umbilical. Umbilicals on most stations like that are zero-g, and this one was no different. Cheeky let her shawl loose the moment she was floating through, and with that, she had the undivided attention of those pirates.

  “I remember grabbing her shawl, but I honestly have no idea what happened to it later. I have to admit, I’m not into girls, but the way Cheeky moved in zero-g had me thinking a few thoughts….”

  Tanis’s voice trailed off and Angela took the opportunity to clarify the point. “And by ‘a few’, she means many, many thoughts. Stars, if I had a body, even I would have considered hooking up with Cheeky at that point. I have never—before or after—seen a human bend like that.”

  Tanis nodded emphatically. “Yeah, it was quite the sight. Granted, she was pumping out a lot of pheromones too, so the feelings at the time were…intense. I think some bled over to you, Ang.”

  “Probably. I’ll go with that.”

  Tanis cleared her throat and polished off her Guinness before continuing. “OK,
so the reason why the ship size concerned me was because it was big enough for a crew in the hundreds. A legitimate freighter that size would have a crew of ten or fewer, but I was under no illusions that this was a legitimate freighter.

  “Once we got through the umbilical, Maverick took the lead, grabbing my wrist and pulling me to the front with him. I was pretty sure at that point that the other four men were not from his ship. Though from their banter, I had picked up that they worked on another ship of his. I didn’t find out until years later that Maverick actually ran a huge fleet of pirates and traders—which I completely decimated.”

  Tanis looked at the faces around the table and winked. “That was more fun, but it’s a much longer tale for another time. So, we followed Maverick through the ship, and it was looking like a regular freighter. Crates, holds, the usual stuff. Then he took us up a lift, and we got to what he called his ‘personal deck’.

  “This was an entirely different story. Wood paneling, polished granite floors, the works. At the end of the corridor were a pair of double doors, and he threw them wide like he was some sort of galactic superstar.

  “Inside was a big room, easily forty meters across. The far side was a wall-to-wall window looking out across the Silstrand System. SS Prime was glowing in the distance, it was really quite beautiful.

  “Of course, it was ruined by the three naked people on the floor in the center of the room, two women and one man. They were huddled together, maybe for warmth, maybe safety, it was hard to say. It was a bit cool in the room, but they were shivering more than the temperature warranted.

  “I didn’t spot the chains at first, but I did see the collars. Then they moved and the telltale clinking sound gave it away. Cheeky was pissed; she’d had more than one run-in with people who wanted to possess her. She always said that love should be free, and given freely.” Tanis laughed at the memory. “She also always said that she had more than enough love to go around for everybody, so no one needed to hoard it.

  “ Cheeky said to me over the Link.