Chapter 1
"We've been patient enough, Robles. I don't think you're going to be able to come up with what we need."
The slender man sat with one shadow poised across the table, and another hovering at his shoulder. Robles began to tremble. His assailants might have been wearing black-and-tan body-suits, typical uniforms for any citizen of Beta Sector, but the hard, focused intent in their eyes said that these were not ordinary working men.
"Please…I can pay back all of it and interest! I just need more time. Don't take my family!"
Damian Luxe smiled grimly. It had been an uneventful night at the Twin Galaxies until now. The young man cracked his head left and right, loosening up the muscles in his neck and shoulders. He stretched his arms, feeling the metallic exoskeleton hum as the joints slid along the well-oiled combat suit that hugged his body like a second skin. Finally something with a little spice! Damian thought.
He leapt over the nightclub's railing, landing right behind Dirt Bag Number One. The angry man cursed and reached for a six-inch blade concealed at his ankle. Damian's hand curled around the offender's wrist, snapping it like a wishbone.
"AAAGGHHH!!!" Dirt Bag Number Two drew out a sawed-off energy pulse cannon and pulled the trigger. Damian swore, diving for cover as he took Mr. Robles down hard alongside him, aware of the table blowing apart into shards and splinters.
The gun-toting killer stepped over the table's remains, poised to unload point-blank into Damian's chest when the bouncer's left leg cut the man's feet out from underneath. Damian leapt across, grappling for the weapon, but in all the struggling it flew clear. The killer's partner grasped the weapon with his remaining good hand and managed to steady it at Damian's head.
Damian had time to register disbelief. What kind of drugs was this guy taking that he could coolly block out the pain of a broken wrist? And how did that gun slip through entrance security? It shouldn't even have been possible. Possible or not, I'm about to be just as dead.
Damian's disbelief made a sharp turn, though, when a bottle of Lavaburst whiskey – so high in quality that its sacrifice really was a tragedy – broke over the assailant's head in a melee of flying fluid and glass. A young woman, not more than 19 or 20 stepped back and gaped in shock at what she'd done. The dirt bag she felled was unconscious, and blood began pooling around his head.
Damian didn't have time to thank her. He was busy pummeling the ribs and face of the other too-close-for-comfort assailant. Finally, satisfied that the man underneath him wouldn't so much as twitch, Damian stood up and turned to speak to his unlikely rescuer.
She was gone.
Three other bouncers meanwhile had just converged on the scene.
"Son of a—Luxe, you seeing stars, buddy?"
Damian Luxe shook his head free of any disorientation. "No, and no thanks to you, Jenson." Damian turned to glare at Kavrik and Gunther too. All three of his fellow bouncers wore the same B-grade exosuit that he did. Physically they were super-strong, but no amount of strength was any protection against an energy pulse that could make pulverized meat out of your internal organs.
"That looked pleasant," Kav said, palming the fallen weapon. "I'll take this to Yoji." Yoji would just about have an aneurism. He supervised the club's day to day affairs, and would have to report the incident to the Crew Authority. From there they would hopefully follow up to find out which crime syndicate these two pieces of space trash worked for.
But Damian couldn't get one image in particular out of his adrenaline-soaked brain.
She looked terrified, like the last person in the universe who would play hero, he thought. He remembered a small nose and gold-green eyes enshrouded in a mass of dark, shoulder-length hair. Whoever she was, he didn't seem to remember ever seeing her before, and that both frustrated and intrigued him. He always repaid a debt.
"Did you see the girl who smashed her whiskey bottle into that bug-head who was about to make chop suey out of me?" Damian asked.
Gunther and Jenson shrugged. "Sorry, brother, we had a little outbreak of drunken cat-fighting on the dance floor. We didn't see you were in trouble until the crap had already hit the skids and run its course."
Damian sighed, but he couldn't claim to be genuinely pissed. Nine out of ten times, it was the drunken partygoers on the dance floor or at the bar who got out of hand. It made sense that they'd been keeping a close eye there, and responding with overwhelming force. It was so seldom anything serious happened…you had to be stupid or very powerful to carry a weapon into a public place. The Haven's Crew Authority frowned on that…big time.
First offense was temporary detention and psych evaluation. Second offense rated you 'excess organic waste' to be recycled into the maintenance systems or dropped down some forgotten shaft.
A rustling movement caught his eye under the strobe light near the club's back exit, where Damian thought he saw a petite shape slip into the rearmost corridor of Sector G. Is that her? He burned on instinct and bolted for the swinging doors. Three seconds later he burst onto Starview Avenue, a corridor wide as a thoroughfare and teeming with throngs of colonists looking to get their entertainment fix.
Damian saw flashes of dark hair and the back of a head. Not much to go by, but instinct kept urging that there was something familiar to it. One thing that made Damian an effective bouncer was his keen memory for bodies and faces. Once a dumbass got banned from the club, he didn't sneak back in no matter what disguise he wore, not on Damian's watch.
The bouncer shoved his way through the crowd, aided by the exosuit which persuaded everyone to give way. Jenson wasn't far behind him, yelling that he was going to get himself in knee-deep excrement. He didn't have authorization to wear brawling gear outside of his work duties. All weapons in Beta Sector were strictly regulated.
They can bite me, he thought. If he didn't catch this girl now he doubted he'd ever see her again. It killed him that he'd been saved by her random act of courage, and he'd be damned if he didn't at least see the look on her face and offer to repay her for what she'd done.
He darted down two more corridors, flowing past well-lit storefronts and barreling through a moving 3D promo. An exquisitely beautiful woman turned to him, her holographic features shimmering as she spoke seduction.
"In Pick Your Own Reality, no adventure is beyond your grasp. Come. Come. The hero inside you beckons." She smiled, her arm flung wide to indicate the apartment complex where some people would spend a day's creds to live out entire lives in time-dilated artificial worlds. A girl ran inside as the glass doors yawned open, and now Damian was sure. It was definitely her.
Damian launched ahead with more haste than he'd intended. He hadn't intended to be moving so fast that he completely shattered the sliding doors before they could give way. Oops.
He turned left and right, feeling strange to finally be here. Friends and acquaintances had gushed about the place. Anorax's Alter-Reality was every bit as real as anything The Haven could offer…only more so. There you could feel a breeze tickle the skin of your cheek. Here you could feel recycled air.
The exosuit-buffed bouncer clearly intimidated the single employee on duty. He was young and pale-skinned, with a tall blade of hair marching down the middle of a shaved head and a tattoo running under his left eye.
"Yo, brain-dead, any particular reason you feel the need to trash a perfectly fine entrance? Those creds coming right out of your account, fool." Damian was impressed with the kid's bravado, but it didn't fool him for a moment. The bouncer cornered the kid behind his desk and thrust his strength-enhanced hands to both sides, making fist-sized dents in the cheap countertop.
"The girl who ran through here. Which way?"
"You've signed up for all kinds of crazy, haven't you? Just forget I said anything. She went that way." The young man pointed and made a desperate shooing gesture.
"Thanks." The apartment doors which Damian flitted past were probably locked, and he didn't want to barge into one random room after the
next. But he was 99% sure that she hadn't gotten that far ahead of him. Unless she knew this place a hell of a lot better than he did, Damian thought he had a decent shot of catching up to her. He rounded another corridor. The black-painted walls and bluish lighting made it hard to see, and abruptly someone's legs were dropping right on top of him. Those same powerful legs rested on his shoulders and he felt a sharp object being thrust between the joints of his exosuit, ready to prick an artery.
"So much as breathe funny and I will gut you," said a feminine voice.
Not half bad. Damian froze. "Listen, I'm not here to hurt you. I actually wanted to thank you."
"For what?"
"For saving my life. Of course it's kind of ironic since you have a blade to my throat now. Maybe we could take the irony down a notch. How about you slowly remove that knife and get off of me, and we talk like two normal people?"
"I didn't ask for your gratitude or your —"
"Damian. Please call me Damian. Do you have a name too, or should I just call you 'Knife-girl'. Not that it doesn't have a nice ring to it, but —"
"What do you want? Tell me that much and maybe I can see things your way," she replied.
"You saved my life back there, and I want to know why."
"You were just doing your job. Those scum rats deserved what they got. I was just at the right place, at the right time. There's no big mystery, Damian. Just go back to your life, and let me go back to mine."
As she said it, the dark-haired girl slowly leapt backward. Graceful as an acrobat, she landed on her feet and carefully backed away. But Damian had already whirled and taken note of her disheveled looks. Her eyes appeared haunted…every bit as tired as they were fierce. She had bathed recently, which was good. The homeless didn't last long in Beta Sector. The android guards did regular sweeps to clean out the human dregs, and scent was their simplest and easiest criterion to categorize someone as—and it didn't exactly flow off the tongue—'excess organic material.'
The girl's jacket was torn, though, and her body-suit pants were worn in at least half a dozen scrapes. A deep gash across her left shoulder told Damian that she'd probably collided with something inconvenient in her rush to flee the scene at the club. He noticed too, for the first time, how beautiful her face was, how her deeply bronzed skin set off the color of her eyes and a cute nose with very kissable lips.
Damn it, Damian. Keep it in your pants. Don't be an ass. He noticed ruefully that the grime on her face looked like it had been accumulating, and this wasn't normal. Citizens were anal about hygiene. It would take one plague or virus to decimate entire sub-sectors and turn Beta Sector into a giant kill zone. From birth, children were indoctrinated in cleanliness, cleanliness, cleanliness. There was only one reason that a person would look the way she looked…
"You need a place to stay?"
"Me? No thanks. You hard of hearing, Damian? I said—"
"I heard what you said," Damian grunted. He licked his lips and tried to act natural. How did you act natural around a homeless girl whose very existence was illegal? He could turn her in for a small fortune. Never have to work another day in his life.
"Is that a 'No I don't need a place to stay' or a 'No I don't trust you farther than I can throw you?'" Damian asked.
The girl brushed an unruly tendril of hair out of the way, her other hand fidgeting with the knife. She stared at him oddly. She seemed to be sizing him up, but it was more than that.
"And if I did need a place to lick my wounds, what of it?"
"Look…far be it from me to ask you about your business," Damian tried. Careful, dumbass. Don't spook her! "I could just give you the key-print to my place. I can stay with a friend. No harm, no foul. You don't even have to see me again. Just stay a couple days…stay the week if you need to. Come by the club and leave me a note when you're ready to move on. Is that simple enough?"
"And just why would you do this for me?"
"What part of 'You saved my sorry ass back there, and I always help those who help me' seems so unbelievable to you?" Damian replied, sighing as he clenched his fists and wanted to say a few more things about hard-headed members of a certain gender.
The girl fidgeted with the knife again. She bit her lip as every muscle tensed. Seconds ticked by, too damn many, until her body relaxed. She returned the knife to the hidden sheath underneath her jacket and put both hands on hips.
"Slide me the key-print. Then turn around, go back the way you came. Tell your friends at the club that you weren't able to catch me. Deal?"
Damian nodded, suppressing the urge to grin like an idiot. It felt good to be doing her a kindness, repaying the debt. So why was his pulse tap-dancing? Why did it feel like he'd won the lottery to join the elites in Crew Sector? The young bouncer wasn't sure, but his subconscious seemed to know something the rest of his body didn't.
This won't be the last time we'll meet.