FSL Exchange Fic for: buddikins
Title: Supply and Demand
Rating: PG
Written For: buddikins
Written by: damnedscientist
Notes: Setting: S3, around the time of I Yensch, You Yensch. Aeryn, Chiana and Jool go on a supply run. Warnings for language and violence. Thanks Arevhat and pdsldl for beta-ing
“You broke it, you fix it!” Chiana snapped at Jool. The Nebari tossed the prematurely-worn-out drive linkage onto the deck of the transport pod and stalked towards the door.
“You’re not being FAIR!” Jool shouted after her. “Why do you always blame me?” She added, although her words were more for herself now that she was alone in the pod. She picked up the widget and turned it over in her hand for a few seconds. It was worn and broken, for sure, but it was neither melted nor snagged with her hair. How could Chiana blame her? The Nebari sometimes seemed to make it her special mission in life to be mean to her. Jool had thought that they were growing closer over the last few monens, but once Aeryn had returned to Moya, all of the progress she had thought they were making had seemed to melt away. Chiana had seemed to waste no time in abandoning Jool’s friendship in favour of the ex-Peacekeeper.
Once outside, away from Jool and her constant stream of whining, Chiana could feel her head start to clear and her growing headache recede. She strode up to stand just behind Aeryn. At least Chiana could rely on the ex-Peacekeeper never to complain, no matter how bad things got. The Interion’s and the Sebacean’s different demeanours were probably something to do with the way they had been raised, Chiana briefly thought.
The Sebacean woman was standing on a ridge, 50 paces from where the pod had set down, surveying the surrounding terrain with what she regarded as a hopelessly primitive, poor imitation of her prized Peacekeeper-issue oculars. The same frelling oculars that were probably, somewhat uselessly, currently perched on the instrument binnacle of her prowler, in the landing bay aboard Moya.
“Watcha see, Aer?” Chiana asked. She screwed up her face, lifted her hand so it shaded her eyes and squinted in the same general direction that Aeryn was looking. The shade of her hand didn’t help Chiana to see any further.
“I know she annoys you… she annoys me, too. But it may not have been her fault this time,” Aeryn commented dryly, without taking the oculars from her eyes. “Pod maintenance seems to have been sloppy and inadequate whilst I have been away from Moya.”
Chiana stared at her friend for a few microts, wondering whether to let the implied criticism of HER John pass. Aeryn had been snappy and distant ever since she had returned to Moya without the other John. Although Chiana fully understood and sympathised with Aeryn’s reasons for trying to keep a distance from the surviving Crichton, it didn’t make the frequent criticisms of HER John any easier to bear. Looking at Aeryn now, Chiana could see the older woman’s jaw clenching and unclenching, make out the stressed muscles and tendons standing out on her neck. Chiana decided to let the slight to her John pass, just this once.
“There appears to be some sort of settlement about three motras that way,” Aeryn briefly pointed a finger. She lowered the oculars in order to glance at Jool, who was now making her way from the pod to join them on the ridge, picking her way clumsily across the rough terrain in between. “It’s not the place that we were aiming for when the linkage broke, but it does look like our best chance to get it fixed.”
Their trip to this planet was supposed to have been a simple re-supply run. Indeed, it had been one until the pod had malfunctioned on their final atmospheric approach. It had taken all of Aeryn’s considerable skills as a pilot to get them down unscathed. Aeryn reckoned that at least a hundred metras, probably twice that, lay between them and their destination. Landing at their original objective had not even figured in her thoughts once the linkage had broken. Normally they would have sat tight after such a misfortune, waiting for someone from Moya to pick them up. But the others were busy with the farhbot plan to contact Scorpius and arrange access to the Command Carrier. It would be days before the pod was overdue and even more days before anyone would be both willing and inclined to come looking for them. It would probably be easiest and quickest for them to try to fix their problem for themselves.
Delaying only long enough to collect their bags from the pod, the three females set off for the small town with the hope that someone there might be able to help them repair the broken pod.
‘~’
As they drew closer, Aeryn, Chiana and Jool could see that the settlement was comprised of a few hundred simple buildings, scattered haphazardly around a denser, central area. The buildings were one or two storeys high and mostly made from natural, local materials. It didn’t take a genius to work out that the small town was primarily focused on serving the needs of the local agricultural community, even though the planet’s overall civilization was known to be space-faring. With every step into the town their prospects of finding someone who could help them with their predicament seemed to diminish. The whole settlement was rustic and low-tech. If John had been there he would probably have remarked that it looked like a Wild West theme park.
The three Moyans made their way past the outermost buildings, towards the centre. Although Aeryn remained on edge and even Chiana kept a wary eye open for trouble, they did not anticipate that their appearance would cause too many raised eyebrows amongst the locals. However, there was always the possibility that such an isolated settlement would not welcome strangers. Aeryn stroked the safety catch of her pulse pistol with her thumb as though it were some sort of talisman.
“Something’s not right,” Chiana commented as they took their last few steps down the wide main street and into what appeared to be the town square. Her eyes darted from left to right, her jaw set in a worried jut. Aeryn nodded her agreement, curt and silent as her fingers now openly stroked the pulse pistol riding on her thigh. Shaded eyes watched their every move from the wooden sidewalks in front of a dozen buildings. More eyes watched the three women from behind the net curtains of a dozen more. Words were whispered amongst the watchers, but no moves were made against the visitors.
“It’s a bit rustic to have a Space Craft repair shop, granted, but what did you expect?” Jool snorted. “Still, someone is bound to be able to help us. Come on, let’s take a look around,” she finished as she flounced across the square.
“Are we gonna kill her first,” Chiana snarked to Aeryn. “Or are they?” Aeryn shrugged and grunted non-committally as they both followed Jool into the town square.
“We should go THERE first,” Jool pronounced confidently, twisting her head to look back at the others and with a wave of her finger towards one of the largest, two-storey buildings.
“What makes you so sure, Princess?” Chiana responded.
“We all have our areas of expertise,” Jool replied with a grin. “Shopping happens to be one of mine.”
“She has a point,” Aeryn drawled as they trailed after her. “Well, at least as far as paying for merchandise is concerned.”
“We’d better get after her, before she spends all our credits on stuff we coulda snurched,” Chiana replied, earning the Nebari a nod of agreement from Aeryn as they passed a pair of silently-staring farm hands who were leaning on the wooden rail outside the store.
“Or someone starts shooting,” Aeryn observed as she pushed on the heavy wooden door.
‘~’
Although all the evidence suggested that Jool had indeed picked the best shop in town to visit first, it was nevertheless immediately evident that it was hardly the sort of emporium which boasted a large Transport Pod Spare Parts Department. The shelves, such as they were, divided into sections; but, instead of spaceship parts, they were scattered with farming essentials, basic food and household supplies, and the sort of robust work clothing favoured by the locals they had seen. Although the weapons section was large and diverse enough to merit a second (but not a third) glance from Aeryn, it took only a few microts to determine that there was nothing on display which might have been mistaken for spacecraft components.
Jool pirouetted triumphantly, beaming with a broad ‘told you so’ grin. Chiana largely ignored her, casting her eyes around and trying to assess whether there was anything of sufficient value in the store to be worth the effort of snurching. Maybe even something which they could use to fix the pod. Aeryn marched straight up to the long, wooden counter at the back of the store. Behind the counter stood a single, withered, elderly storekeeper, squinting and frowning in both confusion and suspicion at his trio of unfamiliar customers.
“Howdy,” the man drawled “You ain’t from round these parts, are you?”
“No,” Aeryn confirmed flatly. “We’re not.” The man blinked and pulled his head back sharply half a dench to signify that that was not the sort of answer he had been expecting. “We were headed for the Grohle spaceport when our craft malfunctioned.”
“Lovely shop you have,” Jool sing-songed, grinning and staring around her with child-like joy. The man grunted and nodded thanks for the compliment.
“Well, I’m mighty glad to see y’all don’t seem hurt,” the man drawled back, not entirely convincing in his professed concern for their well-being. Part of his attention seemed to be focussed on peering over Aeryn’s shoulder to try to see what Chiana was up to. Chiana turned her back and continued to browse.
“Can you get us,” Aeryn continued, dropping the gizmo on the counter, the niceties and introductions completed as far as she was concerned, “a Stelnos steering linkage to fit a Leviathan transport pod?”
“Sorry about my friend,” Jool butted in, full of bubbly bonhomie. “Sebeceans, hey?” She grinned in Aeryn’s direction. Aeryn shot her back a frosty glare. “Still, they can’t help how they were raised I always say… My name’s Joolushku…” Jool ebulliently continued, holding out a hand and smiling at the man. “Joolushku Tunai Fenta Hovalis.” Remarkably, Aeryn refrained from Pantak jabbing the Interon or grabbing her outstretched arm and either twisting it behind her back or tossing her across the store. However, Aeryn did make a mental note of the verbal slight for later reference.
The sebaceanoid shop keeper picked up the broken steering linkage, took a pair of wire-rimmed reading lenses from his shirt pocket, pushed them up his nose and picked up the broken part. He slowly turned it over in hands, humming and sucking at his teeth.
“Hmm. Can’t say as we get much call for this sort of thing. Now, if you were in Grohle….”
“But can you get one for us?” Aeryn asked through gritted teeth. The man stared at her, over the top of his reading lenses, and then turned his head a fraction to address Jool.
“I reckon I can get one….” He sucked his teeth again and set the linkage down. “But it’ll cost you…”
“How much?” Aeryn persisted.
“Tsssch,” the old man sucked at his artificial teeth and tapped at a console half hidden under the counter for a few microts. “Probably talking about 800 credits…”
“You must be joking!” Aeryn snorted.
“Plus incidental expenses…”
“You what!” Aeryn nearly exploded.
“Shh!” Jool intervened, trying to hush Aeryn and, preferably, get between her and the storekeeper before she totally blew their chances of making a deal.
“Don’t get much call for this sort of thing round these parts. I reckon it’ll have to be shipped in special from the Deltron Spaceport….”
“Yes, I appreciate that!” Aeryn continued, determined not to be silenced by Jool.
“Shh!” Jool persisted at trying to silence Aeryn.
“So, do you want it?”
“Yes!” Both females confirmed.
“Should take about three days, then,” the man tapped away at his console for a few more microts before giving one final, flourishing tap and looking up to smile at Jool.
“See, I told you this was the place!” Jool crowed as Aeryn clenched her fists, trying to control the strong urge to punch someone.
‘~’
It didn’t take them long to establish that the settlement boasted only one inn. Unsurprisingly, there was evidence from the advertising fliers and detritus outside that the establishment also served as the local meeting place, gambling club, entertainment hall and drinking den.
As the ladies entered the saloon, the buzz of conversation inside seemed to abruptly cease and all eyes seemed to swivel to appraise the newcomers.
“I told you we should have waited at the pod,” Aeryn muttered. She was far from comfortable being the centre of attention and couldn’t help but worry that it would inevitably lead to trouble coming their way. Chiana had relaxed considerably once she had decided that no one was going to cause trouble in the immediate future. Jool, on the other hand, continued to be unconcerned by their surroundings. Both the younger women seemed to be quite at ease with the visual attention from the bars denizens, especially seeing as the majority of it was male.
“That’d be no fun,” Chiana grinned. “Apart from betting on which of us’d murder who first.” And with that she marched brazenly between the scattered tables with their seated patrons towards the polished bar. Aeryn sighed, gritted her teeth and marched after her. Jool brought up the rear, picking her way carefully between the farm hands, trying to predict and avoid any hands which might stray towards her eema as she passed. Jool couldn’t help but wonder at the way Chiana didn’t seem to care about the hands yet still avoided them all whilst Aeryn seemed to radiate some sort of aura which meant that no one even tried to molest her.
Once at the relative sanctuary of the bar, apart from the ongoing and unrelenting staring, the patrons left the three women alone. Chiana wasted little time in securing accommodation for a couple of nights whilst Aeryn and Jool continued to gently bicker, now over what to order to eat.
Soon they were seated at a table near the bar. A filling but unexciting meal followed, remarkable only for Chiana irritating Aeryn and Jool by brazenly checking the cheap baubles that she had liberated from the store whilst Jool and Aeryn had been busy with the store keeper.
‘~’
The next 24 arns passed painfully slowly, as the trio tried desperately to stick together without succumbing to the urge to do each other mischief. Despite the wide open expanses around them, they felt more confined and in each others way than they ever had aboard Moya.
“Store guy says our linkage is on the way,” Chiana informed Aeryn and Jool as they met for second meal in the saloon on their second full day on the planet. Chiana had cracked first and gone off alone about an arn previously, but had found nothing to do except visit the store.
“Great,” Jool chimed in, full of chirpy enthusiasm.
“Did he say when we might expect it?” Aeryn contributed, somewhat more soberly.
“Ah, well, you see, there’s the catch,” Chiana continued.
“What is the catch?” Aeryn asked with a heavy sigh.
“Well, it seems there are a number of… umm… intermediaries who need their cut…”
“You mean their bribes?” Aeryn corrected. She let out a long, weary breath.
“Yeah… y’know… to expedite shipment, that sort of thing?” Chiana continued unabashed, far more used to the oil of commerce than the other two. “Plus… apparently, well, there are other people he needs to speak to to erm… make sure that the linkage doesn’t get lost or damaged along the way.”
“Other people?”
“Yeah. And, umm, they expect to be paid…”
“Their protection money,” Aeryn interjected, with even more world-weariness.
“That’s outrageous!” Jool exclaimed. Even Aeryn found her surprise a little naïve.
“Well, yeah, but…” Chiana continued.
“So, did he say how much ‘extra’ all of this special attention might add to the cost?” Aeryn asked, getting to the point.
“Fifteen hundred credits,” Chiana said as quickly as she could manage, as though saying it quickly might somehow reduce the sum.
“Great. Just. Frelling. Great.” Aeryn commented, thoroughly unamused, but not really surprised.
“Did you try and talk him down?” Jool demanded.
“Course I did, Princess, where do you think I’ve been all morning? Getting my hair done?” Chiana snarked back.
Jool bristled at the barb, not least because Chiana knew full well that that was exactly what the Interon had been doing with her own morning. Jool had found the settlement’s only hairdresser and had retired there, partly because it had been weekens since she had had her hair seen to, but mostly as a reason to spend time away from Aeryn and Chiana.
“Maybe I should go and talk to him?” Aeryn remarked. “Try appealing to his better nature?” She added as she drew her pulse pistol from its holster and casually checked its settings.
“No way!” Jool protested. Aeryn arched an eyebrow whilst Chiana fidgeted and opened her mouth as though about to come to Aeryn’s defence. “I mean, that’s the last thing that would be likely to help: You crashing in there, throwing your weight around with your whole ‘Obey me, lesser life form, I’m a Peacekeeper’ thing. We’ll likely end up having to pay twice as much by the time you’re through!”
“So, what would you suggest,” Aeryn asked, fixing Jool with a beady eye.
“I’ll go, turn on the charm…”
“Charm?!” Chiana snorted. “Shyeah, right!” Aeryn almost smiled in agreement. The fleeting uplift in her eyes and at the corner of her mouth lasted only a couple of microts but was noticed by both of her companions.
Jool harrumphed with indignation. “Why are you always trying to put me down? I’d wager I’ll have more success than either of you! I’m a civilized being, unlike you two! I know how to be nice to people.” Aeryn almost laughed at that. Chiana did laugh. Jool bristled. “Look, threatening him isn’t likely to help and he doesn’t have the linkage yet, so you can’t snurch it.”
“She has a point,” Aeryn shrugged. “Maybe we should let her give it a try?”
“There are other things we… I… could try?” Chiana leered.
“I’m not sure if that is such a good idea…” Aeryn replied, sounding genuinely concerned, whilst Jool looked at the Nebari disapprovingly.
“’Kay,” Chiana finally conceded, before snurching the last morsel of food from Aeryn’s plate and popping it in her mouth. “Don’t really fancy him, anyway.” She concluded with an impish grin.
‘~’
Later that afternoon Aeryn found herself sitting alone in the saloon, nursing the end of a thoroughly unsatisfactory beverage and ignoring the looks, lecherous or belligerent, of a number of the other patrons. Jool seemed to be taking an inordinately long time over her bartering expedition whilst Chiana still hadn’t returned from the reconnaissance and intelligence gathering mission she had set out on after her lunch. Sitting still, waiting on others, didn’t really suit Aeryn so part of her was relieved when a couple of the least salubrious-looking patrons in the bar stood up from their card game and began to skulk towards her table.
The two males, farmhands by their soiled clothing, complete with accompanying smell, stopped in front of Aeryn. The looked down at her, sneering and snivelling at something which they seemed to find mutually amusing. Aeryn made a show of ignoring them, whilst all the time assessing the odds and the likely scenarios for fight or flight. Her face displayed no emotion as she noted a svelte figure slip into the bar behind her new and uninvited acquaintances.
"Hey friend, you know you got a face beautiful enough to be worth two thousand kretmars?" the most unattractive of the two local men leered at Aeryn, showing the black rot decorating his broken and stained teeth. Aeryn had no illusions as to the remark being intended as a clumsy compliment: The less talkative of the pair was clutching a Peacekeeper ‘wanted’ beacon in one hand and was toying with an antique handgun with the other. It looked like they had recognised her from the beacon and had foolishly taken the notion that they might obtain the promised reward. Aeryn looked the speaker in the eye, giving him her best, blank, Peacekeeper stare. She allowed herself a small frisson of satisfaction at the sight of him visibly withering beneath her gaze.
"Yeah... but you don't look like the one who'll collect it," Chiana said softly from just behind the man, her head tilted to one side and her small pulse pistol discretely nuzzling his midsection.
“Why don’t you both run along, before someone gets hurt?” Aeryn contributed, smiling ominously as she added, “Someone like you. Oh, and you can leave the beacon. And your guns.”
The two men seemed reluctant for a few microts, eyeing each other and the two women indecisively. Aeryn encourage them by leaning back just enough to allow them to see the pulse pistol in her hand, hidden beneath the table. A further narrowing of Aeryn’s eyes combined with her fingers tightening on her weapon were the last straw, and the two men dropped the beacon and one of their guns on the table before hurrying away towards the exit.
Once the two ruffians had departed, Chiana eased into the chair opposite Aeryn, making sure that, between them, they had all points of view around them covered.
“I can’t take you anywhere, can I?” Chiana breathed, clearly having more fun than at any time since they’d arrived on the planet.
“No,” Aeryn confirmed. She picked up the gun and gave it a cursory inspection. It was dren, almost as likely to harm the shooter as the target. She set it carefully back down, making sure it pointed away from anyone.
Chiana grinned and sat. The smile gave way to a frown as she added. “Where’s the Princess?”
“I’m not sure,” Aeryn, despite also enjoying facing down the two thugs, returned the frown.
“She should have been back by now.”
Chiana nodded, concern growing on her face. “Hope she’s not in any trouble: This place is tinked, y’know?”
“In what way?” Aeryn responded, arching an eyebrow. In her view, the whole place was tinked to the core merely by virtue of being a farming colony.
“It’s like people are too scared to be seen talking to the strangers. Some too scared to be talking at all.”
“I agree,” Aeryn nodded solemnly.
“I thought these little places were s’possed to be nice?”
“Apparently not,” Aeryn replied, nodding at the gun between them. With that she came to a decision. “Come on, my two admirers are out there somewhere. I think we’d better go find Jool.”
‘~’
“Your friend was in here,” the storekeeper supplied. “About an arn ago.”
“And?” Chiana asked.
“Then she left.”
“Is that all?” Aeryn demanded, exasperated. It was like…. It was like… no, she did not want to remember any Crichtonisms right now. She needed a clear head to deal with the situation.
“That’s all I can tell you,” the storekeeper replied. He seemed to be squirming shiftily, as though trying to hide something.
“I see,” Aeryn replied. She narrowed her eyes and stared at the shopkeeper. Aeryn waited a couple of microts and took a deep breath.
“D.. dren!” Chiana stuttered, her eyes darting backwards and forwards between Aeryn and the storekeeper. “Look, if there’s anything else, you’d better tell her quick before…”
Chiana’s words stopped abruptly as, without warning or preamble, Aeryn pinned the storekeeper’s sleeve to the counter top with her commando knife.
“You wouldn’t be holding anything back, would you?” Aeryn enquired, her voice and manner soft, in the same way that the pelts of the giant sabre-toothed cats of the planet Metrex are soft.
“I can’t…!” the elderly storekeeper whined pathetically. “They’ll kill me. Be reasonable!”
“I have been reasonable, Aeryn countered. “With no results.”
“But they’ll kill me…..”
“If you live that long….” Chiana commented. The shopkeeper winced.
“Let me put it this way,” Aeryn explained. “Imagine for a microt that my name is Aeryn Sun, and my Nebari friend here is called Chiana. I presume you have heard of them?” The store keeper gulped and nodded. The Peacekeeper deserter, her Nebari companion and all of their dangerous friends were growing to be the stuff of legends in the Uncharted Territories and beyond. A Peacekeeper and a Nebari consorting together… how likely was it that they could be anyone else but those infamous criminals?
“Even so…” the shopkeeper began to protest.
“Despite those two characters never having visited this system before,” Aeryn continued.
“Whereas we have never heard of whoever ‘They’ might be that you claim to be scared of. Now, based on relative reputations, who do you think you should be more scared of upsetting?”
Chiana cocked her head and stared at him with a questioning and unfriendly smile, all teeth and menace.
The storekeeper gulped once more and came to a decision. “It were Mr. Nathan’s boys: They were in here and followed her outside.”
“And why would they do that?” Aeryn prompted him.
“I dunno!” The man squealed. “Ransom, slavery, just plain low-down mischief? They’ve got their fingers in every rotten glompa fruit around these parts! Take your pick!”
“Frellers!” Chiana hissed. She might not have been best friends with the Interon, but the thought of her being abducted by lowlifes was just too much for her.
“And where might we find these people?” Aeryn asked, maintaining her focus.
“The tralk-house, other side of the square, three down from the saloon!”
“Thank you. Now, you see, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Aeryn asked sweetly as she retrieved her knife, releasing his arm.
The storekeep barely had time to nod once before Aeryn laid him out with a Pantak jab.
‘~’
Chiana edged along the passageway towards the tralk-house, adjusting her grip on her pulse pistol for the third time in a hundred microts. She was grateful for her gloves: Without them, her nervous, sweaty grip would have been even more unsteady. Standing to one side of the door which led inside the tralk-house, she gently pushed it with her hand. It swung open.
She counted to three. Nothing happened. No shots, no shouts. Nothing.
She summoned up her courage, counted to three again, and slipped inside.
Apart from being crowded with overly fussy furnishings, the living room she found herself in was quite empty. There didn’t even look as though there was anything worth snurching in the room.
She heard a crash and a cry from deeper inside the building, roughly in the direction that Aeryn had intended to approach from. Caution now forgotten, Chiana rushed onwards into the building to help her friend.
Chiana popped through a doorway and found herself in a long, wood panelled hallway. It stretched away in front of her, with a red-carpeted staircase at the end maybe twenty paces away. Chiana paused for another microt and listened. She needn’t have bothered, as the next few sounds were loud enough to have been heard by an earless drannit. A pulse shot sounded, seemingly from upstairs, accompanied by the sound of a woman screaming. Chiana comforted herself that Jool’s screams weren’t that quiet and Aeryn didn’t scream. Still, she wasn’t going to wait around here: The scream signified trouble, which likely signified Aeryn or Jool or both.
As Chiana rushed forwards, the two reprobates who had tried to molest Aeryn earlier that day in the bar appeared from a doorway at the foot of the stairs. Each man held a hand gun but fortunately neither seemed to have spotted Chiana yet.
Another shout came from upstairs and the two men checked their guns and began to ascend.
“Hey!” Cried Chiana, ducking into an alcove for cover. The men stopped, turned and, murder in their eyes, began to level their guns towards Chiana. One of them fired in her general direction, but the shot went wide by a comfortable margin.
Chiana’s weapon was already primed and levelled. She squeezed off a handful of shots before running forward. She leapt gazelle-like across their squirming, groaning bodies to land on the third step of the stairs.
She bounded upwards, taking three steps at a time, even as more shouts and shots sounded from above. Chiana tumbled onto the landing, her eyes flitting hither and thither, trying to take everything in. Two bodies, local males, lay on the floor, one in each direction. They were lowlifes or farm hands who’d found themselves on the wrong end of Pantak jabs by the look of them. An ongoing commotion seemed to be coming from her right. She took a step that way just as a trio of tralks burst through a doorway into the hall a few steps ahead of her. Chiana threw herself against the wall and the ladies charged past her, screaming hysterically.
Just then, Aeryn emerged through the same doorway, pulse pistol in hand, but otherwise characteristically calm and composed. She nodded to Chiana then gestured down the hallway. No sooner had Aeryn done so than a door, about 20 paces further on down from them, opened and two figures emerged.
A middle aged, sebaceanoid male, similar to the rest of the locals but much healthier looking and more expensively dressed than most, held some sort of short rifle in one hand and grasped Jool firmly around the neck with the other arm. He was clearly attempting to use her as a shield between him and the other two Moyans.
Jool’s eyes bulged in terror and her hands were cuffed in front of her. Her best attempt at a scream escaped from the gag which was securely fastened to her mouth.
“Stay back!” the man shouted at Aeryn and Chiana, backing away towards the far end of the corridor, keeping as much behind Jool as he could manage.
Aeryn raised her gun. “Or you’ll what?” she challenged, her tone dripping with contempt.
"I… I.. don’t think you want to risk shooting your friend,” the man replied, his thin front of bravado already cracking when confronted with Aeryn and Chiana and a corridor littered with the bodies of his flunkies. “Besides…. when a man with a pistol meets a man with a rifle, they say the man with a pistol is a dead man. Do you really want to see if that's true...?"
“Point of fact, I’m not a man,” Aeryn remarked even as she squeezed off a single shot. Gore from the man’s head exploded all over Jool, causing her gagged screams to reach near shouting-volume as his body slumped to the floor behind her.
Chiana cautiously made her way up to where Jool was having a paroxysm driven by fear and disgust.
“What have I told you about playing with strangers, Princess?” Chiana teased good naturedly and with a friendly smile as she removed the gag. She ran her free hand in a swift, calming stroke down the Interon’s arm before patting her gently on the shoulder.
Jool ignored the teasing remark. “Look at the state of me!” Jool squealed, nearly in tears as Chiana took a step back and shot apart the binder which held the handcuffs together. “Look what that frelling Peacekeeper’s done this time! And I only had my hair dressed this morning!”
“Oh I dunno, it’s not as bad as some of your looks,” Chiana teased with a wink. “And this stuff is probably great for the complexion!” Chiana remarked, flicking a large, wobbly chunk of gore from Jool’s ringlets.
As Chiana freed Jool, unseen to them both, one of the men lying in the corridor near to them stirred slightly, starting, with an unsteady arm, to raise his gun towards the two women.
A flash of pulse energy burst from Aeryn’s pistol and hit him squarely in the torso, even before he had managed to take aim, spattering Jool with yet more gore. By some freak of nature, somehow none of the mess seemed to strike Chiana.
”Argh...!” Jool squealed. “Eating, drinking, killing, that's all you can do, just like the rest of your kind!" she petulantly shouted at Aeryn, stamping her foot.
“You missed out the marching,” sniggered Chiana as she gave the body of her latest would-be assailant a swift kick in the mivonks to make sure that he really was finished.
“And the frelling,” Aeryn added archly, as, using methods a little more textbook than that employed by Chiana, she systematically checked the remaining bodies.
However, it was all over: The will to fight had gone out of any of the hoodlums who had survived Aeryn and Chiana’s assault on the tralk-house, especially now that their leader was gone.
It wasn’t long before the trio was back at the inn, asking for a hot bath for Jool and whether there were any authorities who ought to be notified about what had taken place.
‘~’
“I got the new linkage fitted and it seems to work just fine,” Aeryn explained as they met for third meal the next day. “In fact, I flew the Pod over here and parked it just outside of town.” She left ‘In case we need to make a quick getaway’ unsaid, but Chiana, at least, understood what she was thinking. They might have rid the area of one gang of lowlifes, but that didn’t mean that no one would be seeking retribution, legal or otherwise.
“Looks like no’s going to try and keep us here, or press charges,” Chiana reassured Aeryn. She had spent a great deal of the last solar day either trying to explain events to the local authorities, such as they were, or running interference so that Aeryn could concentrate on fixing the pod. “Seems Mr. Nathan,” she said the name with a contemptuous sneer, “and his friends were behind most of the racketeering in these parts. It looks like Aeryn is the closest thing they’ve had to an actual law enforcer round here in cycles. Most people seem kind of relieved to be shot of him.”
“The storekeeper even let me off some of the extra payments,” Jool added, proudly.
“Well done you,” Chiana remarked, biting back the urge to add that that was hardly surprising, considering that Nathan was no longer about to extort his extra payments. She also resisted the urge to point out that the old man who ran the store was now likely frightened of Chiana but terrified of Aeryn and was doubtless keen to see the back of them as quickly and non-confrontation-ally as possible, even if that did mean cutting his prices.
“So, is there any reason we should stay?” Jool asked.
“Well, we did come here to pick up supplies, if you remember?” Aeryn reminded her. Glancing around to include Chiana in her next remark, Aeryn continued. “Except this time, I suggest we stay together but let Jool negotiate.”
“Yeah, well, let’s do it and then go,” Chiana replied. “I dunno about you two girls, but I’ve had a bellyful of this place.”
Both Aeryn and Jool nodded in hearty agreement.
‘~’
“You’re three days late,” Crichton stated. His manner was dark and cold, angry at the risks he imagined that the three women might have been taking, angry at them for not calling for help, despite the fact that neither Moya nor Talyn could have come to their aid before the assigned rendezvous date anyway. Angry at Aeryn for not being able to be what he wanted her to be.
“What kept you?”
“We had a little trouble with the pod,” Chiana explained.
“Poor maintenance,” Aeryn contributed in a surly grumble.
“Really?” Crichton asked, his hackles now raised at the implied criticism. “Care to elaborate?”
“No. It was nothing we couldn’t handle, Crichton,” Aeryn rounded on him and stated with her odd brand of flat hostility, before brushing past him with cold disdain. “You and Crais can unload the pod. We’re all going to get cleaned up and then we’re going to get some sleep.”
“What the frell?” Crichton remarked to himself as he watched the three women walk out of the bay in silent solidarity. What the frell had gotten into them? He shook his head in incomprehension and touched his comms. “Crais? You free? We gotta pod full of supplies to unload down here.”
The end
Rating: PG
Written For: buddikins
Written by: damnedscientist
Notes: Setting: S3, around the time of I Yensch, You Yensch. Aeryn, Chiana and Jool go on a supply run. Warnings for language and violence. Thanks Arevhat and pdsldl for beta-ing
“You broke it, you fix it!” Chiana snapped at Jool. The Nebari tossed the prematurely-worn-out drive linkage onto the deck of the transport pod and stalked towards the door.
“You’re not being FAIR!” Jool shouted after her. “Why do you always blame me?” She added, although her words were more for herself now that she was alone in the pod. She picked up the widget and turned it over in her hand for a few seconds. It was worn and broken, for sure, but it was neither melted nor snagged with her hair. How could Chiana blame her? The Nebari sometimes seemed to make it her special mission in life to be mean to her. Jool had thought that they were growing closer over the last few monens, but once Aeryn had returned to Moya, all of the progress she had thought they were making had seemed to melt away. Chiana had seemed to waste no time in abandoning Jool’s friendship in favour of the ex-Peacekeeper.
Once outside, away from Jool and her constant stream of whining, Chiana could feel her head start to clear and her growing headache recede. She strode up to stand just behind Aeryn. At least Chiana could rely on the ex-Peacekeeper never to complain, no matter how bad things got. The Interion’s and the Sebacean’s different demeanours were probably something to do with the way they had been raised, Chiana briefly thought.
The Sebacean woman was standing on a ridge, 50 paces from where the pod had set down, surveying the surrounding terrain with what she regarded as a hopelessly primitive, poor imitation of her prized Peacekeeper-issue oculars. The same frelling oculars that were probably, somewhat uselessly, currently perched on the instrument binnacle of her prowler, in the landing bay aboard Moya.
“Watcha see, Aer?” Chiana asked. She screwed up her face, lifted her hand so it shaded her eyes and squinted in the same general direction that Aeryn was looking. The shade of her hand didn’t help Chiana to see any further.
“I know she annoys you… she annoys me, too. But it may not have been her fault this time,” Aeryn commented dryly, without taking the oculars from her eyes. “Pod maintenance seems to have been sloppy and inadequate whilst I have been away from Moya.”
Chiana stared at her friend for a few microts, wondering whether to let the implied criticism of HER John pass. Aeryn had been snappy and distant ever since she had returned to Moya without the other John. Although Chiana fully understood and sympathised with Aeryn’s reasons for trying to keep a distance from the surviving Crichton, it didn’t make the frequent criticisms of HER John any easier to bear. Looking at Aeryn now, Chiana could see the older woman’s jaw clenching and unclenching, make out the stressed muscles and tendons standing out on her neck. Chiana decided to let the slight to her John pass, just this once.
“There appears to be some sort of settlement about three motras that way,” Aeryn briefly pointed a finger. She lowered the oculars in order to glance at Jool, who was now making her way from the pod to join them on the ridge, picking her way clumsily across the rough terrain in between. “It’s not the place that we were aiming for when the linkage broke, but it does look like our best chance to get it fixed.”
Their trip to this planet was supposed to have been a simple re-supply run. Indeed, it had been one until the pod had malfunctioned on their final atmospheric approach. It had taken all of Aeryn’s considerable skills as a pilot to get them down unscathed. Aeryn reckoned that at least a hundred metras, probably twice that, lay between them and their destination. Landing at their original objective had not even figured in her thoughts once the linkage had broken. Normally they would have sat tight after such a misfortune, waiting for someone from Moya to pick them up. But the others were busy with the farhbot plan to contact Scorpius and arrange access to the Command Carrier. It would be days before the pod was overdue and even more days before anyone would be both willing and inclined to come looking for them. It would probably be easiest and quickest for them to try to fix their problem for themselves.
Delaying only long enough to collect their bags from the pod, the three females set off for the small town with the hope that someone there might be able to help them repair the broken pod.
‘~’
As they drew closer, Aeryn, Chiana and Jool could see that the settlement was comprised of a few hundred simple buildings, scattered haphazardly around a denser, central area. The buildings were one or two storeys high and mostly made from natural, local materials. It didn’t take a genius to work out that the small town was primarily focused on serving the needs of the local agricultural community, even though the planet’s overall civilization was known to be space-faring. With every step into the town their prospects of finding someone who could help them with their predicament seemed to diminish. The whole settlement was rustic and low-tech. If John had been there he would probably have remarked that it looked like a Wild West theme park.
The three Moyans made their way past the outermost buildings, towards the centre. Although Aeryn remained on edge and even Chiana kept a wary eye open for trouble, they did not anticipate that their appearance would cause too many raised eyebrows amongst the locals. However, there was always the possibility that such an isolated settlement would not welcome strangers. Aeryn stroked the safety catch of her pulse pistol with her thumb as though it were some sort of talisman.
“Something’s not right,” Chiana commented as they took their last few steps down the wide main street and into what appeared to be the town square. Her eyes darted from left to right, her jaw set in a worried jut. Aeryn nodded her agreement, curt and silent as her fingers now openly stroked the pulse pistol riding on her thigh. Shaded eyes watched their every move from the wooden sidewalks in front of a dozen buildings. More eyes watched the three women from behind the net curtains of a dozen more. Words were whispered amongst the watchers, but no moves were made against the visitors.
“It’s a bit rustic to have a Space Craft repair shop, granted, but what did you expect?” Jool snorted. “Still, someone is bound to be able to help us. Come on, let’s take a look around,” she finished as she flounced across the square.
“Are we gonna kill her first,” Chiana snarked to Aeryn. “Or are they?” Aeryn shrugged and grunted non-committally as they both followed Jool into the town square.
“We should go THERE first,” Jool pronounced confidently, twisting her head to look back at the others and with a wave of her finger towards one of the largest, two-storey buildings.
“What makes you so sure, Princess?” Chiana responded.
“We all have our areas of expertise,” Jool replied with a grin. “Shopping happens to be one of mine.”
“She has a point,” Aeryn drawled as they trailed after her. “Well, at least as far as paying for merchandise is concerned.”
“We’d better get after her, before she spends all our credits on stuff we coulda snurched,” Chiana replied, earning the Nebari a nod of agreement from Aeryn as they passed a pair of silently-staring farm hands who were leaning on the wooden rail outside the store.
“Or someone starts shooting,” Aeryn observed as she pushed on the heavy wooden door.
‘~’
Although all the evidence suggested that Jool had indeed picked the best shop in town to visit first, it was nevertheless immediately evident that it was hardly the sort of emporium which boasted a large Transport Pod Spare Parts Department. The shelves, such as they were, divided into sections; but, instead of spaceship parts, they were scattered with farming essentials, basic food and household supplies, and the sort of robust work clothing favoured by the locals they had seen. Although the weapons section was large and diverse enough to merit a second (but not a third) glance from Aeryn, it took only a few microts to determine that there was nothing on display which might have been mistaken for spacecraft components.
Jool pirouetted triumphantly, beaming with a broad ‘told you so’ grin. Chiana largely ignored her, casting her eyes around and trying to assess whether there was anything of sufficient value in the store to be worth the effort of snurching. Maybe even something which they could use to fix the pod. Aeryn marched straight up to the long, wooden counter at the back of the store. Behind the counter stood a single, withered, elderly storekeeper, squinting and frowning in both confusion and suspicion at his trio of unfamiliar customers.
“Howdy,” the man drawled “You ain’t from round these parts, are you?”
“No,” Aeryn confirmed flatly. “We’re not.” The man blinked and pulled his head back sharply half a dench to signify that that was not the sort of answer he had been expecting. “We were headed for the Grohle spaceport when our craft malfunctioned.”
“Lovely shop you have,” Jool sing-songed, grinning and staring around her with child-like joy. The man grunted and nodded thanks for the compliment.
“Well, I’m mighty glad to see y’all don’t seem hurt,” the man drawled back, not entirely convincing in his professed concern for their well-being. Part of his attention seemed to be focussed on peering over Aeryn’s shoulder to try to see what Chiana was up to. Chiana turned her back and continued to browse.
“Can you get us,” Aeryn continued, dropping the gizmo on the counter, the niceties and introductions completed as far as she was concerned, “a Stelnos steering linkage to fit a Leviathan transport pod?”
“Sorry about my friend,” Jool butted in, full of bubbly bonhomie. “Sebeceans, hey?” She grinned in Aeryn’s direction. Aeryn shot her back a frosty glare. “Still, they can’t help how they were raised I always say… My name’s Joolushku…” Jool ebulliently continued, holding out a hand and smiling at the man. “Joolushku Tunai Fenta Hovalis.” Remarkably, Aeryn refrained from Pantak jabbing the Interon or grabbing her outstretched arm and either twisting it behind her back or tossing her across the store. However, Aeryn did make a mental note of the verbal slight for later reference.
The sebaceanoid shop keeper picked up the broken steering linkage, took a pair of wire-rimmed reading lenses from his shirt pocket, pushed them up his nose and picked up the broken part. He slowly turned it over in hands, humming and sucking at his teeth.
“Hmm. Can’t say as we get much call for this sort of thing. Now, if you were in Grohle….”
“But can you get one for us?” Aeryn asked through gritted teeth. The man stared at her, over the top of his reading lenses, and then turned his head a fraction to address Jool.
“I reckon I can get one….” He sucked his teeth again and set the linkage down. “But it’ll cost you…”
“How much?” Aeryn persisted.
“Tsssch,” the old man sucked at his artificial teeth and tapped at a console half hidden under the counter for a few microts. “Probably talking about 800 credits…”
“You must be joking!” Aeryn snorted.
“Plus incidental expenses…”
“You what!” Aeryn nearly exploded.
“Shh!” Jool intervened, trying to hush Aeryn and, preferably, get between her and the storekeeper before she totally blew their chances of making a deal.
“Don’t get much call for this sort of thing round these parts. I reckon it’ll have to be shipped in special from the Deltron Spaceport….”
“Yes, I appreciate that!” Aeryn continued, determined not to be silenced by Jool.
“Shh!” Jool persisted at trying to silence Aeryn.
“So, do you want it?”
“Yes!” Both females confirmed.
“Should take about three days, then,” the man tapped away at his console for a few more microts before giving one final, flourishing tap and looking up to smile at Jool.
“See, I told you this was the place!” Jool crowed as Aeryn clenched her fists, trying to control the strong urge to punch someone.
‘~’
It didn’t take them long to establish that the settlement boasted only one inn. Unsurprisingly, there was evidence from the advertising fliers and detritus outside that the establishment also served as the local meeting place, gambling club, entertainment hall and drinking den.
As the ladies entered the saloon, the buzz of conversation inside seemed to abruptly cease and all eyes seemed to swivel to appraise the newcomers.
“I told you we should have waited at the pod,” Aeryn muttered. She was far from comfortable being the centre of attention and couldn’t help but worry that it would inevitably lead to trouble coming their way. Chiana had relaxed considerably once she had decided that no one was going to cause trouble in the immediate future. Jool, on the other hand, continued to be unconcerned by their surroundings. Both the younger women seemed to be quite at ease with the visual attention from the bars denizens, especially seeing as the majority of it was male.
“That’d be no fun,” Chiana grinned. “Apart from betting on which of us’d murder who first.” And with that she marched brazenly between the scattered tables with their seated patrons towards the polished bar. Aeryn sighed, gritted her teeth and marched after her. Jool brought up the rear, picking her way carefully between the farm hands, trying to predict and avoid any hands which might stray towards her eema as she passed. Jool couldn’t help but wonder at the way Chiana didn’t seem to care about the hands yet still avoided them all whilst Aeryn seemed to radiate some sort of aura which meant that no one even tried to molest her.
Once at the relative sanctuary of the bar, apart from the ongoing and unrelenting staring, the patrons left the three women alone. Chiana wasted little time in securing accommodation for a couple of nights whilst Aeryn and Jool continued to gently bicker, now over what to order to eat.
Soon they were seated at a table near the bar. A filling but unexciting meal followed, remarkable only for Chiana irritating Aeryn and Jool by brazenly checking the cheap baubles that she had liberated from the store whilst Jool and Aeryn had been busy with the store keeper.
‘~’
The next 24 arns passed painfully slowly, as the trio tried desperately to stick together without succumbing to the urge to do each other mischief. Despite the wide open expanses around them, they felt more confined and in each others way than they ever had aboard Moya.
“Store guy says our linkage is on the way,” Chiana informed Aeryn and Jool as they met for second meal in the saloon on their second full day on the planet. Chiana had cracked first and gone off alone about an arn previously, but had found nothing to do except visit the store.
“Great,” Jool chimed in, full of chirpy enthusiasm.
“Did he say when we might expect it?” Aeryn contributed, somewhat more soberly.
“Ah, well, you see, there’s the catch,” Chiana continued.
“What is the catch?” Aeryn asked with a heavy sigh.
“Well, it seems there are a number of… umm… intermediaries who need their cut…”
“You mean their bribes?” Aeryn corrected. She let out a long, weary breath.
“Yeah… y’know… to expedite shipment, that sort of thing?” Chiana continued unabashed, far more used to the oil of commerce than the other two. “Plus… apparently, well, there are other people he needs to speak to to erm… make sure that the linkage doesn’t get lost or damaged along the way.”
“Other people?”
“Yeah. And, umm, they expect to be paid…”
“Their protection money,” Aeryn interjected, with even more world-weariness.
“That’s outrageous!” Jool exclaimed. Even Aeryn found her surprise a little naïve.
“Well, yeah, but…” Chiana continued.
“So, did he say how much ‘extra’ all of this special attention might add to the cost?” Aeryn asked, getting to the point.
“Fifteen hundred credits,” Chiana said as quickly as she could manage, as though saying it quickly might somehow reduce the sum.
“Great. Just. Frelling. Great.” Aeryn commented, thoroughly unamused, but not really surprised.
“Did you try and talk him down?” Jool demanded.
“Course I did, Princess, where do you think I’ve been all morning? Getting my hair done?” Chiana snarked back.
Jool bristled at the barb, not least because Chiana knew full well that that was exactly what the Interon had been doing with her own morning. Jool had found the settlement’s only hairdresser and had retired there, partly because it had been weekens since she had had her hair seen to, but mostly as a reason to spend time away from Aeryn and Chiana.
“Maybe I should go and talk to him?” Aeryn remarked. “Try appealing to his better nature?” She added as she drew her pulse pistol from its holster and casually checked its settings.
“No way!” Jool protested. Aeryn arched an eyebrow whilst Chiana fidgeted and opened her mouth as though about to come to Aeryn’s defence. “I mean, that’s the last thing that would be likely to help: You crashing in there, throwing your weight around with your whole ‘Obey me, lesser life form, I’m a Peacekeeper’ thing. We’ll likely end up having to pay twice as much by the time you’re through!”
“So, what would you suggest,” Aeryn asked, fixing Jool with a beady eye.
“I’ll go, turn on the charm…”
“Charm?!” Chiana snorted. “Shyeah, right!” Aeryn almost smiled in agreement. The fleeting uplift in her eyes and at the corner of her mouth lasted only a couple of microts but was noticed by both of her companions.
Jool harrumphed with indignation. “Why are you always trying to put me down? I’d wager I’ll have more success than either of you! I’m a civilized being, unlike you two! I know how to be nice to people.” Aeryn almost laughed at that. Chiana did laugh. Jool bristled. “Look, threatening him isn’t likely to help and he doesn’t have the linkage yet, so you can’t snurch it.”
“She has a point,” Aeryn shrugged. “Maybe we should let her give it a try?”
“There are other things we… I… could try?” Chiana leered.
“I’m not sure if that is such a good idea…” Aeryn replied, sounding genuinely concerned, whilst Jool looked at the Nebari disapprovingly.
“’Kay,” Chiana finally conceded, before snurching the last morsel of food from Aeryn’s plate and popping it in her mouth. “Don’t really fancy him, anyway.” She concluded with an impish grin.
‘~’
Later that afternoon Aeryn found herself sitting alone in the saloon, nursing the end of a thoroughly unsatisfactory beverage and ignoring the looks, lecherous or belligerent, of a number of the other patrons. Jool seemed to be taking an inordinately long time over her bartering expedition whilst Chiana still hadn’t returned from the reconnaissance and intelligence gathering mission she had set out on after her lunch. Sitting still, waiting on others, didn’t really suit Aeryn so part of her was relieved when a couple of the least salubrious-looking patrons in the bar stood up from their card game and began to skulk towards her table.
The two males, farmhands by their soiled clothing, complete with accompanying smell, stopped in front of Aeryn. The looked down at her, sneering and snivelling at something which they seemed to find mutually amusing. Aeryn made a show of ignoring them, whilst all the time assessing the odds and the likely scenarios for fight or flight. Her face displayed no emotion as she noted a svelte figure slip into the bar behind her new and uninvited acquaintances.
"Hey friend, you know you got a face beautiful enough to be worth two thousand kretmars?" the most unattractive of the two local men leered at Aeryn, showing the black rot decorating his broken and stained teeth. Aeryn had no illusions as to the remark being intended as a clumsy compliment: The less talkative of the pair was clutching a Peacekeeper ‘wanted’ beacon in one hand and was toying with an antique handgun with the other. It looked like they had recognised her from the beacon and had foolishly taken the notion that they might obtain the promised reward. Aeryn looked the speaker in the eye, giving him her best, blank, Peacekeeper stare. She allowed herself a small frisson of satisfaction at the sight of him visibly withering beneath her gaze.
"Yeah... but you don't look like the one who'll collect it," Chiana said softly from just behind the man, her head tilted to one side and her small pulse pistol discretely nuzzling his midsection.
“Why don’t you both run along, before someone gets hurt?” Aeryn contributed, smiling ominously as she added, “Someone like you. Oh, and you can leave the beacon. And your guns.”
The two men seemed reluctant for a few microts, eyeing each other and the two women indecisively. Aeryn encourage them by leaning back just enough to allow them to see the pulse pistol in her hand, hidden beneath the table. A further narrowing of Aeryn’s eyes combined with her fingers tightening on her weapon were the last straw, and the two men dropped the beacon and one of their guns on the table before hurrying away towards the exit.
Once the two ruffians had departed, Chiana eased into the chair opposite Aeryn, making sure that, between them, they had all points of view around them covered.
“I can’t take you anywhere, can I?” Chiana breathed, clearly having more fun than at any time since they’d arrived on the planet.
“No,” Aeryn confirmed. She picked up the gun and gave it a cursory inspection. It was dren, almost as likely to harm the shooter as the target. She set it carefully back down, making sure it pointed away from anyone.
Chiana grinned and sat. The smile gave way to a frown as she added. “Where’s the Princess?”
“I’m not sure,” Aeryn, despite also enjoying facing down the two thugs, returned the frown.
“She should have been back by now.”
Chiana nodded, concern growing on her face. “Hope she’s not in any trouble: This place is tinked, y’know?”
“In what way?” Aeryn responded, arching an eyebrow. In her view, the whole place was tinked to the core merely by virtue of being a farming colony.
“It’s like people are too scared to be seen talking to the strangers. Some too scared to be talking at all.”
“I agree,” Aeryn nodded solemnly.
“I thought these little places were s’possed to be nice?”
“Apparently not,” Aeryn replied, nodding at the gun between them. With that she came to a decision. “Come on, my two admirers are out there somewhere. I think we’d better go find Jool.”
‘~’
“Your friend was in here,” the storekeeper supplied. “About an arn ago.”
“And?” Chiana asked.
“Then she left.”
“Is that all?” Aeryn demanded, exasperated. It was like…. It was like… no, she did not want to remember any Crichtonisms right now. She needed a clear head to deal with the situation.
“That’s all I can tell you,” the storekeeper replied. He seemed to be squirming shiftily, as though trying to hide something.
“I see,” Aeryn replied. She narrowed her eyes and stared at the shopkeeper. Aeryn waited a couple of microts and took a deep breath.
“D.. dren!” Chiana stuttered, her eyes darting backwards and forwards between Aeryn and the storekeeper. “Look, if there’s anything else, you’d better tell her quick before…”
Chiana’s words stopped abruptly as, without warning or preamble, Aeryn pinned the storekeeper’s sleeve to the counter top with her commando knife.
“You wouldn’t be holding anything back, would you?” Aeryn enquired, her voice and manner soft, in the same way that the pelts of the giant sabre-toothed cats of the planet Metrex are soft.
“I can’t…!” the elderly storekeeper whined pathetically. “They’ll kill me. Be reasonable!”
“I have been reasonable, Aeryn countered. “With no results.”
“But they’ll kill me…..”
“If you live that long….” Chiana commented. The shopkeeper winced.
“Let me put it this way,” Aeryn explained. “Imagine for a microt that my name is Aeryn Sun, and my Nebari friend here is called Chiana. I presume you have heard of them?” The store keeper gulped and nodded. The Peacekeeper deserter, her Nebari companion and all of their dangerous friends were growing to be the stuff of legends in the Uncharted Territories and beyond. A Peacekeeper and a Nebari consorting together… how likely was it that they could be anyone else but those infamous criminals?
“Even so…” the shopkeeper began to protest.
“Despite those two characters never having visited this system before,” Aeryn continued.
“Whereas we have never heard of whoever ‘They’ might be that you claim to be scared of. Now, based on relative reputations, who do you think you should be more scared of upsetting?”
Chiana cocked her head and stared at him with a questioning and unfriendly smile, all teeth and menace.
The storekeeper gulped once more and came to a decision. “It were Mr. Nathan’s boys: They were in here and followed her outside.”
“And why would they do that?” Aeryn prompted him.
“I dunno!” The man squealed. “Ransom, slavery, just plain low-down mischief? They’ve got their fingers in every rotten glompa fruit around these parts! Take your pick!”
“Frellers!” Chiana hissed. She might not have been best friends with the Interon, but the thought of her being abducted by lowlifes was just too much for her.
“And where might we find these people?” Aeryn asked, maintaining her focus.
“The tralk-house, other side of the square, three down from the saloon!”
“Thank you. Now, you see, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Aeryn asked sweetly as she retrieved her knife, releasing his arm.
The storekeep barely had time to nod once before Aeryn laid him out with a Pantak jab.
‘~’
Chiana edged along the passageway towards the tralk-house, adjusting her grip on her pulse pistol for the third time in a hundred microts. She was grateful for her gloves: Without them, her nervous, sweaty grip would have been even more unsteady. Standing to one side of the door which led inside the tralk-house, she gently pushed it with her hand. It swung open.
She counted to three. Nothing happened. No shots, no shouts. Nothing.
She summoned up her courage, counted to three again, and slipped inside.
Apart from being crowded with overly fussy furnishings, the living room she found herself in was quite empty. There didn’t even look as though there was anything worth snurching in the room.
She heard a crash and a cry from deeper inside the building, roughly in the direction that Aeryn had intended to approach from. Caution now forgotten, Chiana rushed onwards into the building to help her friend.
Chiana popped through a doorway and found herself in a long, wood panelled hallway. It stretched away in front of her, with a red-carpeted staircase at the end maybe twenty paces away. Chiana paused for another microt and listened. She needn’t have bothered, as the next few sounds were loud enough to have been heard by an earless drannit. A pulse shot sounded, seemingly from upstairs, accompanied by the sound of a woman screaming. Chiana comforted herself that Jool’s screams weren’t that quiet and Aeryn didn’t scream. Still, she wasn’t going to wait around here: The scream signified trouble, which likely signified Aeryn or Jool or both.
As Chiana rushed forwards, the two reprobates who had tried to molest Aeryn earlier that day in the bar appeared from a doorway at the foot of the stairs. Each man held a hand gun but fortunately neither seemed to have spotted Chiana yet.
Another shout came from upstairs and the two men checked their guns and began to ascend.
“Hey!” Cried Chiana, ducking into an alcove for cover. The men stopped, turned and, murder in their eyes, began to level their guns towards Chiana. One of them fired in her general direction, but the shot went wide by a comfortable margin.
Chiana’s weapon was already primed and levelled. She squeezed off a handful of shots before running forward. She leapt gazelle-like across their squirming, groaning bodies to land on the third step of the stairs.
She bounded upwards, taking three steps at a time, even as more shouts and shots sounded from above. Chiana tumbled onto the landing, her eyes flitting hither and thither, trying to take everything in. Two bodies, local males, lay on the floor, one in each direction. They were lowlifes or farm hands who’d found themselves on the wrong end of Pantak jabs by the look of them. An ongoing commotion seemed to be coming from her right. She took a step that way just as a trio of tralks burst through a doorway into the hall a few steps ahead of her. Chiana threw herself against the wall and the ladies charged past her, screaming hysterically.
Just then, Aeryn emerged through the same doorway, pulse pistol in hand, but otherwise characteristically calm and composed. She nodded to Chiana then gestured down the hallway. No sooner had Aeryn done so than a door, about 20 paces further on down from them, opened and two figures emerged.
A middle aged, sebaceanoid male, similar to the rest of the locals but much healthier looking and more expensively dressed than most, held some sort of short rifle in one hand and grasped Jool firmly around the neck with the other arm. He was clearly attempting to use her as a shield between him and the other two Moyans.
Jool’s eyes bulged in terror and her hands were cuffed in front of her. Her best attempt at a scream escaped from the gag which was securely fastened to her mouth.
“Stay back!” the man shouted at Aeryn and Chiana, backing away towards the far end of the corridor, keeping as much behind Jool as he could manage.
Aeryn raised her gun. “Or you’ll what?” she challenged, her tone dripping with contempt.
"I… I.. don’t think you want to risk shooting your friend,” the man replied, his thin front of bravado already cracking when confronted with Aeryn and Chiana and a corridor littered with the bodies of his flunkies. “Besides…. when a man with a pistol meets a man with a rifle, they say the man with a pistol is a dead man. Do you really want to see if that's true...?"
“Point of fact, I’m not a man,” Aeryn remarked even as she squeezed off a single shot. Gore from the man’s head exploded all over Jool, causing her gagged screams to reach near shouting-volume as his body slumped to the floor behind her.
Chiana cautiously made her way up to where Jool was having a paroxysm driven by fear and disgust.
“What have I told you about playing with strangers, Princess?” Chiana teased good naturedly and with a friendly smile as she removed the gag. She ran her free hand in a swift, calming stroke down the Interon’s arm before patting her gently on the shoulder.
Jool ignored the teasing remark. “Look at the state of me!” Jool squealed, nearly in tears as Chiana took a step back and shot apart the binder which held the handcuffs together. “Look what that frelling Peacekeeper’s done this time! And I only had my hair dressed this morning!”
“Oh I dunno, it’s not as bad as some of your looks,” Chiana teased with a wink. “And this stuff is probably great for the complexion!” Chiana remarked, flicking a large, wobbly chunk of gore from Jool’s ringlets.
As Chiana freed Jool, unseen to them both, one of the men lying in the corridor near to them stirred slightly, starting, with an unsteady arm, to raise his gun towards the two women.
A flash of pulse energy burst from Aeryn’s pistol and hit him squarely in the torso, even before he had managed to take aim, spattering Jool with yet more gore. By some freak of nature, somehow none of the mess seemed to strike Chiana.
”Argh...!” Jool squealed. “Eating, drinking, killing, that's all you can do, just like the rest of your kind!" she petulantly shouted at Aeryn, stamping her foot.
“You missed out the marching,” sniggered Chiana as she gave the body of her latest would-be assailant a swift kick in the mivonks to make sure that he really was finished.
“And the frelling,” Aeryn added archly, as, using methods a little more textbook than that employed by Chiana, she systematically checked the remaining bodies.
However, it was all over: The will to fight had gone out of any of the hoodlums who had survived Aeryn and Chiana’s assault on the tralk-house, especially now that their leader was gone.
It wasn’t long before the trio was back at the inn, asking for a hot bath for Jool and whether there were any authorities who ought to be notified about what had taken place.
‘~’
“I got the new linkage fitted and it seems to work just fine,” Aeryn explained as they met for third meal the next day. “In fact, I flew the Pod over here and parked it just outside of town.” She left ‘In case we need to make a quick getaway’ unsaid, but Chiana, at least, understood what she was thinking. They might have rid the area of one gang of lowlifes, but that didn’t mean that no one would be seeking retribution, legal or otherwise.
“Looks like no’s going to try and keep us here, or press charges,” Chiana reassured Aeryn. She had spent a great deal of the last solar day either trying to explain events to the local authorities, such as they were, or running interference so that Aeryn could concentrate on fixing the pod. “Seems Mr. Nathan,” she said the name with a contemptuous sneer, “and his friends were behind most of the racketeering in these parts. It looks like Aeryn is the closest thing they’ve had to an actual law enforcer round here in cycles. Most people seem kind of relieved to be shot of him.”
“The storekeeper even let me off some of the extra payments,” Jool added, proudly.
“Well done you,” Chiana remarked, biting back the urge to add that that was hardly surprising, considering that Nathan was no longer about to extort his extra payments. She also resisted the urge to point out that the old man who ran the store was now likely frightened of Chiana but terrified of Aeryn and was doubtless keen to see the back of them as quickly and non-confrontation-ally as possible, even if that did mean cutting his prices.
“So, is there any reason we should stay?” Jool asked.
“Well, we did come here to pick up supplies, if you remember?” Aeryn reminded her. Glancing around to include Chiana in her next remark, Aeryn continued. “Except this time, I suggest we stay together but let Jool negotiate.”
“Yeah, well, let’s do it and then go,” Chiana replied. “I dunno about you two girls, but I’ve had a bellyful of this place.”
Both Aeryn and Jool nodded in hearty agreement.
‘~’
“You’re three days late,” Crichton stated. His manner was dark and cold, angry at the risks he imagined that the three women might have been taking, angry at them for not calling for help, despite the fact that neither Moya nor Talyn could have come to their aid before the assigned rendezvous date anyway. Angry at Aeryn for not being able to be what he wanted her to be.
“What kept you?”
“We had a little trouble with the pod,” Chiana explained.
“Poor maintenance,” Aeryn contributed in a surly grumble.
“Really?” Crichton asked, his hackles now raised at the implied criticism. “Care to elaborate?”
“No. It was nothing we couldn’t handle, Crichton,” Aeryn rounded on him and stated with her odd brand of flat hostility, before brushing past him with cold disdain. “You and Crais can unload the pod. We’re all going to get cleaned up and then we’re going to get some sleep.”
“What the frell?” Crichton remarked to himself as he watched the three women walk out of the bay in silent solidarity. What the frell had gotten into them? He shook his head in incomprehension and touched his comms. “Crais? You free? We gotta pod full of supplies to unload down here.”
The end