Duck’s Wings
“Where is Goro? What have you done to him?” the girl with chro-colored hair repeated from her ship’s opening. She had a slight Japanese accent.
The barrel of her strange submachine gun slipped, poking Jim’s nose.
“Lady, if you ought to shoot… shoot,” the envoy retorted before dropping his arms. “But if you’d rather talk… we gotta be more civilized. My na’s Slim Jim, by the way.”
Her red iris glowed with anger. A bluish static discharge ran across the gold engravings lining from her cheeks to her black bodysuit’s turtleneck. Under her ear, her carotid pulsed, making the micro-hexagons of her synthetic skin shine under the buzzing ceiling lights. “Why do you—hey! Freeze, robot!”
The young woman swiveled towards Naamah, and pointed her rifle at her. The old android backed away reflexively until she stuck her back against a Blue pump. Trembling, she hid her face behind her wide flaky arms.
“Bullyin’ the chie’s pointless…” Jim intervened, spitting what remained of his jerky stick.
The woman’s furious gaze shifted from Naamah to him, then to his brass Alliance badge. She swallowed, and tapped the flat key in his hand with her gun’s muzzle. “Give that,” she ordered. He displayed the magnetic device she abruptly grabbed with her other hand. “The yakuzas are dead cold, right? You ran into them in town two days ago and frad them. I guess they had it coming.”
The submachine gun’s steel tip danced again over the representative’s nose who nonchalantly shrugged. Despite being at gunpoint again, he stayed put as the girl backed into the gloom of the red security LEDs inside her skiff.
Her step was hesitant. And for good reason. The spaceship’s inside appeared to be as dilapidated as the outside. Between various gleaming oil stains, twisted parts and severed colorful cables littered the rusty floor. As if soone tried to strip the aircraft from within; as if the sa soone tried to escape from it.
Jim then rembered the ship was bolted from the outside.
anwhile, the girl struggled to close the airlock, repeatedly stomping the control pedal. The bleached rubber kept squeaking, but the hatch stayed still. When she tried a fourth ti, the hinges grated. The result, however, wasn’t what she had hoped for. With a loud crash, the door fell on the hangar floor, inches from Jim’s toes, aborting her escape.
“What was the big plan, there?” Jim said, before she gave him another glare. “The ship’s in dry dock.”
“I assu yours would be more suitable.”
He bit his tongue.
“Hand your key,” she resud. “And tell the robot to set up the departure.”
“She’s already set, M’da.”
“Naamah…” Jim had turned his head towards the chanic, but kept an eye on the amateur hostage taker. “Please, stop being nice.”
“Excuse , M’sieur Jim.”
The latter slightly smiled at her. “I don’t have the key. My partner’s still on the ship.” He pointed with his chin to the moored Forlorn Hope—in his alveolus, just behind the Jay. “And, believe it or not, lockin’ him inside for two long days ain’t no habit of mine.”
The woman first followed his gaze. “Well, we will pay him a visit then…” she resud, jumping on the floor. “And he better leave the helm. Because otherwise, he will have your grueso death on his conscience.”
Jim scoffed.
“Quiet!” She ordered him to turn around. “No gun?” she inquired, painfully pressing her strange rifle between his shoulder blades.
“No need. I’m just an affiliated insurance auditor.”
“A what? No. You’re just a bounty hunter. You have a badge!”
“This heavy thing? Oh, well, it balances . Keeps goin’.”
“You are a liar! You look like a hunter for sure with your scars and conceited attitude. Go ahead and stop clowning!”
Deciding to play along, Jim asked Naamah to run towards the nearest radio station. There, the poor android would be safer, and could request the AI in charge of the control tower to prepare the Forlorn for takeoff.
At the sa mont, the spaceport assistant announced the arrival of a new Concordia-class aircraft. Several sirens sounded in the lot as a long black civilian ship slid into its designated bay. The heavy tal doors leading to the void closed behind her engines, and four pairs of cushioned clamps stabilized the spacecraft. Once the maneuver accomplished, the retractable pontoon approached her left side, and the pressures quickly equalized. The second Plexiglas gates leading to the hangar slowly opened, and a ramp with an escalator unfolded towards the maintenance area.
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The first life forms to erge from the forward airlock appeared to be eight top state-of-the-art MK-type androids. The disturbing security robots with a gait as heavy as their arsenal slowly walked in pairs down the moving staircase. A unique glittering purple orb occupied most of their square faces. When one of them landed on Jim and his kidnapper, the cyclops all took aim simultaneously.
The Alliance man growled. The situation went from bad to worse with eldritch bots around. chanical Killers never won fa for their delicacy when it ca to handling ard nutjobs.
“Drat…” the Japanese woman reacted half-heartedly. “Them again…”
The first steps of the combat androids hitting the tal floor of the hangar echoed through the hoisting of the ship’s frozen thrusters cleaning themselves.
Raising an eyebrow, Jim glanced back at her. “Those tin cans so friends of yours?” he asked.
“No. But he is.”
Shortly after the chanized vanguard had descended, an organic visitor had jumped from the black spacecraft. A yellow-turbaned square-jawed man took a step forward to join the back of his henchn cohort. Jim felt his eyes fall on him, although he wore unfathomable dark glasses.
“Who’s the an-looking guy in the expensive Borderline suit?” Jim asked.
An almost whispered instruction escaped the newcor’s charcoal-colored lips, and the androids began to circle the maintenance bay, zigzagging between the empty carts and the Blue pumps.
“Quickly! To your ship!” the woman ordered, jostling Jim.
But he remained motionless, rummaging in his back pockets for a missing beef jerky. “It costs to say it, but there is a chance I’d be more comfortable with a corpo, rather than with you and your rifle peckin’ at my spinal cord—”
Jim nearly bit the tip of his tongue as a roaring rocket passed a good three feet over his scalp and entered the Jay’s airlock. The resulting blast knocked him, the young woman and Naamah to the ground. Alas, only the two sapiens managed to stand up amid the smoking rubble.
Wincing in pain, Jim sat up. He sneezed because of the toxic smog filling both his lungs and the surrounding area. “With friends like this…”
The fugitive imdiately grabbed the collar of his sweater. Almost tearing it, she pulled her hostage on his feet. “Don’t just stand there, you clodpoll!” The ricochet of bullets could be heard all around. The MKs started firing blindly, their infrared targeting assistance unable to pierce the curtain of smoke. “Move at once!”
Juiced on adrenaline, Jim bolted towards the cells. Dodging the steel claws of a marauding MK, he quickly reached the motionless escalator leading to his ship.
The Forlorn Hope appeared to be a retired mining sampler from a belter corporation. It is said that she fought during the Red Uprising more than thirty years before, and helped countless Soviets to escape the nerve gas launched on Eros near the end of the revolt. Enhanced by Ringern chanics on Mimas, she resembled a proud flying pelican with deployed wings and could welco up to three oxygen-breathing crewn. Her flaky coat reminded one of a hummingbird’s plumage, as red dots from her glorious past erged between layers of Bonny Blue and previous green paints.
Climbing four by four the stairs immobilized by a power outage inherent to rockets soaring in all directions, Jim reached the high dock with the frightened woman. They hadn’t passed the transparent doors further away, that the warring androids already hit the top of the steps.
“Where is your partner? The airlock is sealed! We cannot get in!” the runaway shouted as she started drumming the side square hatch under the curved wing of the horizontally anchored Forlorn.
“Must be ti for his nap,” Jim replied. He turned around before facing their assailants. “Speakin’ of naps, be ready for a very long one...”
Forming two neat rows, the MKs slowly advanced onto the dock, laying sights on both of them like a firing squad would. Behind their armored shoulders, the sinister turbaned man appeared. He ordered them to stop before walking over to a bulky control console.
But, as his hand split in three to reveal a sinuous hacking appendage, an orange glow caught his attention. A mining flare had just taken off from the bird’s head cockpit of the Forlorn and flew across the width of the round hangar.
“Neat. I didn’t know we had those…” Jim said.
A click sounded behind him and the fugitive. A second after, a flap opened beneath the peeling wing.
“Fuzar—” the woman began before her hostage tackled her to the floor.
The Forlorn fastly opened fire on the MKs. An inexhaustible burst of cupro-nickel and lead mowed them down like ripe wheat, sending torsos and arms flying over the staircase and guardrail before the huge Plexiglas airlock quarantining the ship from the orbital base closed.
Obliterated, the entire squadron joined the Universal Matrix. As for the turbaned-cyborg, Jim couldn’t be sure what had happened to him, and didn’t plan to go check.
When the deafening shooting ended, the Forlorn’s airlock hissed and he helped the young woman getting up as a new alarm warned them from the imminent depressurization.
She panted. “Your copilot just saved our lives…”
Jim awkwardly yawned to clear his eardrums. He could barely hear her voice through the tinnitus. At his feet laid his precious Walkman, unfortunately not nearly as unhard as they were. And it rubbed off on his hitherto unflappable mood. “Don’t be a fool. That damned duck wanted to kill us too…” he ranted.
“Du—duck?” stuttered the fugitive as the harmful fu of the cartridges made her gag.
Disheveled, Jim’s partner and copilot appeared through the haze in the airlock fra. His blank stare lingered first on the young woman, then on the smoking remains of the MKs. Satisfied, he rolled his uniformly red feathers.
With a loud quack, Napoléon made it clear that his nap should never be interrupted again.
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