The Wench– Ch. 3: Surprises

IMAGE CREATED USING ADOBE FIREFLY AI

Hals didn’t recognize the woman, which mean she hadn’t been in the bar when the shooting started. Good thing too, or she would have died there; her shields were garbage. The blast from the Gobbler hit her shield and Hals watched it sizzle and her distributor implants glow orange before they failed totally, and the blast zipped through her skull. The woman attempted a scream as a neat centimeter hole punched through her temple and down into her torso. Then she collapsed noisily, falling down the stairs. Hals could hear the person on the horn screaming, demanding to know what was happening.

There were shouts from below, and Hals rolled back from the edge of the roof. No blaster bolts flew toward her; they hadn’t seen her. Hals flicked the Gobbler open and checked the power cell. It was cracked, emitting the iconic yellow-pink smoke of a Licane GasBat, but she figured she could probably get three or four shots before it needed to be ejected completely. She didn’t carry a spare; but she rarely needed more than one shot. In this case, she regretted that line of thinking. Hals peered over the corner of the building and tried to get a clear count of her enemies. 

“What happened?” someone shouted from below; a deep voiced man. One, standing out in the open above the fresh corpse. Hals craned her neck.

“Marylin is dead! Someone shot her!” Two; this another man, much younger sounding, from around the corner. Out of sight.

“Who? From where?” A third voice, also around the opposite corner. Fifth had guessed that she had six crew, plus her and the captain. If there was someone back on the ship barking orders, that meant there were at least… five, if they were all here.

“I dunno!” Two again. He shifted into view, and Hals saw a spindly blond mustache and a shaky hand holding a too-large knife.

“Up there, the roof!” Four. And, whoops.

Hals rolled back, barely avoiding laser fire. For a few seconds all she heard was the hiss-snap of burning metal, punctuated with purple flashes that lit up the side of the building and flew over the roof. The glows told her a lot about what kind of weapons the pirates were packing. Red lasers were fast and packed less of a punch, while blue lasers were high power and typically slower than their redder cousins. Purple was somewhere in the middle. Something to do with the spectrum of light, a pirate had once told her. While her shield wasn’t cheap, it probably wouldn’t last for more than a few seconds against sustained purple laserfire. Which meant it was time for an upgrade.

Hals raised the Gobbler, got her feet under her and hopped off the roof, landing squarely in front of the doorway to her home. As she fell she trusted her instincts and took aim at the human shapes below her, and she squeezed off a pair of shots. Her move had surprised them, but they still managed to shoot back at her, and she felt her ring heat up as it absorbed a blast. The second her heels hit metal Hals rolled back into her apartment, the Gobbler aimed at chest height. She rolled up into a kneeling stance and did a quick sweep, which only took seconds because the place was so tiny.

Nobody in the building, it seemed. They’d tossed her apartment, but missed the important stuff. She ran over to the bed and flipped the mattress off, revealing the very large, very expensive crate wedged underneath. She entered the code quickly, listening for the sound clanging metal that would let her know the pirates were climbing the stairs. She could hear that they were talking, to each other, which was good; it meant she had scared them. She was going to have enough time.

“Whoever the stars you are, we don’t care. We just want the girl. Give her to us, and we’ll walk away.”

Hals unlatched the crate and flipped up the lid. It wasn’t very spacious, maybe a meter long and about as wide as a backpack, but it held everything she treasured in it. Including her very, very expensive shield ring which she slipped on her right middle finger, and her favorite gun. She put the Gobbler away in its secret slot and hefted her pride and joy: an authentic ZSO-1 slug thrower. It was easily three hundred years old; getting ammunition for it was almost impossible, and it was very tricky to fire accurately. She cranked back the loading wheel and slipped a handful of the uranium pellets it fired into the revolving ammo slots, letting the spring-loaded cover slam shut with a satisfying snap. Shielded and armed properly, she felt a whole lot safer.

“Have it your way then,” the man below shouted. Boots clanged on the stairs. Hals took aim.

She didn’t wait to see them to shoot them. She waited until the shadow of somebody’s head crossed in front of the window by the door and unloaded a five round burst straight through the wall. Pellets punched through the thin metal like it wasn’t there at all, and someone screamed. Hals had bought herself a few extra seconds. She pulled a nanobag out of the crate and snapped it open with a flick of her wrist. She quickly stuffed it with everything else the box contained: a crate of pictures, a holy clipping of Pal’tho’s tree her mother had given her, ammunition and emergency nutrient rations, some clothes, and a sackful of raw reyfinite ore she’d been hanging onto for emergencies. The bag properly filled, Hals tapped the ring on her finger and wove it into the shield she was already sporting. She heard the ring chirp twice to inform her it was protecting her, and she took a deep breath. The kind of hardware she was packing would draw eyes and questions, but this was no time to worry about that.

She hoisted the ZSO-1 and set it against her hip, then threw the nanobag around her shoulders. She moved as quietly as she could toward the window furthest from the staircase and peeked out. The alley below was about twenty feet down, and there wasn’t much to break her fall. The bad thing about this apartment was it only had one exit and one entrance, and men with lasers were waiting for her outside. She considered her options. They weren’t great.

Someone will have heard the gunfire and laser blasts, but there wasn’t law enforcement on the station per-se. There were detectives that you could hire, and security forces you and your neighbors could commission to take care of your area; but Hals didn’t have enough money for either of those. The main way people protected themselves was by belonging to a guild or a pirate lord’s flag. If you were a part of one of those groups, you’d be avenged at the very least. But Hals wasn’t. So she was on her own.

She unfolded her legible and stretched it out as long and thin as she could, getting it nearly as long as her arm. She bent it slightly and made sure the camera attachment was on the far end, then she eased it up to the window to take a peek out, curling the legible so it looked around the back side of her building and showed her the pirates.

The three remaining pirates were sheltering in the small square below, taking cover behind trash bins and an old, out-of-order crate hauler that had been rusting there for as long as Hals had lived in the apartment. The woman she’d shot was slumped at the bottom of the stairs, and the man she’d caught with the Z was almost cut in half. His top half was slumped halfway over the railing, and below that was nothing but dripping gore. Hals grimaced a bit at the sight of the man. The Z was a great weapon, but it was messy.

“What do we do?” she heard the young mustachioed man ask. Hals adjusted her legible to be sure of the angle, then took careful aim through the floor of her apartment. It was the same cheap metal as the walls, and wouldn’t do anything to stop her next shot. She would have to aim carefully, though. She had the clearest shot at the big man who seemed to have taken charge after the gravelly woman had died. He was using a thin walled garbage disintegrator for cover. She lined up her shot and a rush of adrenaline pumped through her. She knew it was dumb, but she was angry and she wanted to scare them, so she raised her voice.

“What you do next is die!” she yelled. And her slug thrower barked, another five-shot spread. It shook the whole building as it punched through the floors and into the big man. He collapsed, blood spurting from a crater in his face, and the scream from the young pirate was matched by the sound of screaming metal. Hals realized she’d miscalculated. She’d shot through the floor, yes, but also through the support beam that held this room in place. The floor started to tip, and the sound of groaning metal filled her ears.

“Oh shit,” she said. 

She snatched up the legible and tightened the duffel. Below and beside her, she heard shouting. The pirates, and possibly her neighbors. Hopefully nobody would get hurt from this. Nobody innocent, anyway. The floor sank, metal screeched, and Hals slid toward her half open front door. She did her best to keep her balance, but then the floor lurched and her head cracked against the cheap faux-glass plastic of the window and punched it out of its frame. She nearly followed it as the building tipped again. Light filled the room behind her as the ceiling tore away and let in the glow from the street sim lamps. Hals caught herself on the edge of the window frame, nearly crashing through it.

The two remaining pirates started shooting wildly when they saw her, and her nose ring started to heat up as it dissipated the blasts. The room was now at a 45 degree angle, and she was having trouble staying on her feet. Bolts of red and blue laser fire were evaporating small holes in the walls now as the pirates kept firing. She didn’t have much of a choice; if she was still in here when the building fell totally, she’d be in serious danger. She had to get out. She grabbed her ZSO-1 with both hands, took a deep breath, ran for the door, then jumped. She sailed right through the opening and into empty air. Everything slowed.

Hals was flying sideways, and she’d aimed herself well: she was going to land on top of the trash incinerator. It was better than hitting the road beneath, mostly because it was covered in a small amount of snow and typically a layer of trash too. The third pirate, a bald woman who hadn’t yet spoken was hiding there, and her face was contorted in terror as she watched Hals fly at her. 

But Hals couldn’t worry about her yet; she had to take out the fourth man. As she flew she saw the young pirate, just a kid barely older than Fifth, with blood leaking out of his arm. He wouldn’t be able to get an accurate shot off– no threat. The big pirate though, he was going to be a problem. So as Hals fell, she raised the ZSO-1 to her shoulder and aimed. There was only a moment where the man’s leg crossed her sights, but she didn’t hesitate. She squeezed the trigger, and the blast from her slug thrower tossed her back against the alley wall and she rolled down it, straight onto the incinerator. The landing made her vision flash white, and she felt something crack in her side. She heard movement, but the pain was overwhelming her, so she didn’t bother to aim; she just held the trigger down and waved her weapon in the general direction of the pirate who was hiding beneath her.

A dozen pellets punched out and through the machine, and she heard a thump, then a slump. Hals tried to turn to bring her gun up, but something in her body protested shrilly, the pain making her yelp. She tried again, and managed to slide off the incinerator and onto the body of the lady pirate. Most of her was still there, but her hand and part of her face were missing, the open wound steaming in the chill night air. Hals braced her back against the wall and looked down the alley. A dozen meters away, the big pirate was lying on his side. His left leg was just meat below the knee, and he was holding it and screaming. The boy was nowhere to be found. He’d either been turned into red mist, or more likely he’d legged it.

Hals took a step and slipped in the pooling, hot blood of the first woman she’d killed. She retrieved the dead pirate’s blaster, a double barrel hand cannon, and limped her way to the big man. He was still screaming, but managed to stifle it when he saw her coming. He reached for his weapon, and Hals shot his finger off with her borrowed blaster. His shields were gone, then.

“Who the stars are you?” he wheezed. She glanced around, seeing a few of her neighbors peeking out of their windows. She waved at her favorite neighbor Ms. Dunphey before raising the double-barrel and rested it against the pirate’s skull, and fired unceremoniously. Four down. Just the kid to go, plus whoever was on that ship.

She looked down the street, spotting the frantic footprints of the young pirate in the snow. He must have run as soon as he’d seen his friend get shot. Smart kid. She sighed. She wasn’t going to be able to chase anybody. And she’d killed enough people for one day. She took a minute to collect the rest of the weapons the pirates had brought with them, plus a sack full of O-marks, and, on impulse, the ship’s horn. Then she limped away. Somehow, through all the blasts of lasers and slug throwers, her room had managed to stay standing. Or at least, leaning. She wouldn’t be coming back, but she appreciated it nonetheless. It was well built. That was something.