Green Cheese #23, Heavenly Hash #29, FotD: premonish + peaches, pineapples, and chopped nuts
Story: Blaze Mafia Family - Mobsters in Space
Title: Sizing Up the Enemy
Prompts: Green Cheese #23: atmosphere, Heavenly Hash #29: fall through the cracks, FotD: premonish (to warn beforehand) + fresh peaches (This is a chance to take a leap of faith if you’re feeling rather inhibited and need room to breathe professionally) + fresh pineapple (Show me what I’m looking for/Show me what I’m looking for, oh, lord - Show Me What I’m Looking For by Carolina Liar) + chopped nuts
Rating: PG13
Words: 1315
Characters: Gideon Kian, Eladia Kian, Firebird Blaze, Nicky Nails Blaze
Summary: Writing more of the Mobsters in Space AU is part of my Build-Your-Own Summer Challenge so off we go! This piece takes place the morning after Paradise and Hell. Both sides conjecture about their opponents.
“Gideon,” Eladia called softly, mindful that the Captain wouldn’t hear them through the door to the bridge. Captain Teoh and Dev were running system diagnostics on the ship’s software while Eladia had volunteered to help her brother take their temporary warp engines off-line.
Gideon held out his hand. “Number 12. What is it?”
Eladia handed over a wrench then asked what had been preying on her mind since they’d pulled off the heist. “What’s Hell like?”
That made Gideon glance over at his sister. He mulled the question over. “Dangerous. Criminals from three star systems all congregate there to sell their wares or buy services. Most of the people there are low-level scum, but they’ve all got guns and a lot of alcohol so there’s no telling what they’ll do if you piss them off. The ones you have to watch out for though, are the assassins. They don’t carry their weapons out in the open, but boy, when they do decide to use them, nobody in the vicinity stands a chance. Bounty hunters are a problem too, though you can usually pick them out real quick cuz all the scum with a bounty on their head won’t hesitate to throw you to the dogs if it’ll create a distraction long enough for them to get the hell outta Hell.”
Eladia emitted an odd noise that made Gideon glance away from his work to her again. He paused when he saw her terrified stare, the same she used to give him when they were kids and she would follow him everywhere. More often than not, he’d led her straight into trouble, but she’d always been one step behind him no matter how scared she got. And like then, he searched quickly for something to say that would put her back at ease. “It’s pretty clean though. The Blazes have good house-keeping bots.”
That didn’t calm her, but it did distract her. “And the Blazes. Is what people say about them true? Are they really as ruthless as the rumors make them out to be?”
Gideon hesitated. He didn’t want to frighten his baby sister any more than he already had, but it just wasn’t in Gideon to lie or sugarcoat the truth. “It’s best to just stay out of sight.”
“That means yes,” she translated.
“That means we’ll stay under their radar, and we won’t have any occasion to find out whether or not the rumors are true.”
“We just stole the Matealian Savior!” Eladia whispered urgently. “How could we possibly fly under anyone’s radar?!”
“We can do it because we’re going to Hell. The Lower Market is enormous and filled to the brim with the biggest and baddest scourge of three star systems. No one is going to notice a few more thieves.”
Eladia didn’t look convinced. Gideon put his tools down and set his big hands on her shoulders. Joining him on the Bowerbird was not what Gideon had wanted for Eladia. He’d become a thief just so that he could scrape together enough cash to send her to finishing school and put her in a position where she could make herself a better life than the street gutter existence they’d grown up with. He should have known that his little sister wouldn’t stay put, she was too damn stubborn. Still, when Eladia had marched up to him in that dive in the Pushra System, Gideon couldn’t deny that he’d felt a rush of relief that she was by his side. He also couldn’t deny that, when Eladia had flat out refused to go back to school, he hadn’t pushed as hard as he probably should have. He’d spent his entire life keeping his sister close so he could watch out for her, that wasn’t a behavior he could just turn off now that she was old enough to look out for herself.
“Teoh knows what she’s doing,” Gideon assured her. “She’s already got the buyers lined up, and as soon as we get to New Palermo, she’s going to move fast to get the egg sold off. By the time the Blazes even catch wind that the Matealian Savior is missing, we’ll already be long gone and rich enough to buy our own space station if we wanted to. I promise we’ll be fine.”
Eladia bit her lip, still nervous, but she nodded. Eladia had always trusted Gideon’s word more than anyone else in the galaxy. She couldn’t turn off her childhood instincts any better than he could.
- - - - - - - - - -
“The temperature today is going to be 24°C, medium cloud cover. A light shower is expected in the northwestern sector from 3:17 to 4:24 this afternoon.”
Firebird glanced up from the data screens lining her desk. “Edan has a lightball game this afternoon.”
The station’s head meteorologist made a few frantic notes on his pad. “My apologies. I’ll push the rain back three hours. Will that suffice?”
“Very well. Thank you,” Firebird dismissed him and the rest of the lackeys, leaving her with a handful of her soldiers. She waited until the door slid shut behind the last of the normal everyday Joes that ran the space station before getting down to business. “How was Hell last night?”
Tommy the Angel piped up. “We had a good night. Only seventeen dead, twenty three arrested, no major property damage.”
“Good,” she turned to her Underboss and uncle, Nicky Nails Blaze. “And the Matealian Savior?”
Nicky tapped his cigar in the ashtray at his elbow and shrugged. Nicky Nails had to be the only human in the Hominine System that still smoked tobacco cigars, but Nicky was a connoisseur of traditional human vices. “The boys found nothing on our station. I talked to our contact in the Matealian Sovereignty to try to get a more definite timeline but he was hedging, not wanting to give away too many state secrets. He still wouldn’t say anything other than no more than a week.”
Firebird leaned back in her chair. “I imagine it’s been far less time than that.”
“Me too,” Nicky agreed. “My guess is it got lifted in the last two days. It wouldn’t take any longer than that for us to find out about it.”
“Two days,” Firebird steepled her fingers, thinking. “They haven’t arrived yet then. I want all incoming ships heading for the Lower Market to be screened by humans. Flag any suspicious entries and have them tailed.”
“Incoming ships from all the systems?”
She nodded. “A smart thief isn’t going to stick around in the Mateale System when they just became Enemy Number One in the Sovereignty. Still, check that system in case the thieves aren’t smart.”
“Got it.” Nicky grinned around his cigar then. “Who do you think did it?”
Firebird smirked. While it was in the Blaze Family’s best interest to aid the Matealian’s with this cock-up, that didn’t stop her from being more than a little amused at seeing their reluctant allies being made fools of. The Matealian race was just so damn arrogant that it was nice to see them taken down a notch every once in awhile. “Someone with nerves of steel.”
‘It was a big job. Had to be a huge crew.”
“Or a very small one,” Firebird added. They didn’t have enough details to know how the egg had been stolen but both were viable options. A large group of thieves would run a con game to confuse the Matealians’ small minds while a small crew would sneak right under the Matealians’ considerably sized noses.
“You think it could be Jackster? The King’s boys?”
Firebird shrugged. “Could be. It had to be someone big. A no-name crew would have the stones to pull this off, but not the experience.”
Nicky grinned, not in a nice way. “Well, when we find the bastards, we’ll be sure to have a long talk to get to know them.”
Title: Sizing Up the Enemy
Prompts: Green Cheese #23: atmosphere, Heavenly Hash #29: fall through the cracks, FotD: premonish (to warn beforehand) + fresh peaches (This is a chance to take a leap of faith if you’re feeling rather inhibited and need room to breathe professionally) + fresh pineapple (Show me what I’m looking for/Show me what I’m looking for, oh, lord - Show Me What I’m Looking For by Carolina Liar) + chopped nuts
Rating: PG13
Words: 1315
Characters: Gideon Kian, Eladia Kian, Firebird Blaze, Nicky Nails Blaze
Summary: Writing more of the Mobsters in Space AU is part of my Build-Your-Own Summer Challenge so off we go! This piece takes place the morning after Paradise and Hell. Both sides conjecture about their opponents.
“Gideon,” Eladia called softly, mindful that the Captain wouldn’t hear them through the door to the bridge. Captain Teoh and Dev were running system diagnostics on the ship’s software while Eladia had volunteered to help her brother take their temporary warp engines off-line.
Gideon held out his hand. “Number 12. What is it?”
Eladia handed over a wrench then asked what had been preying on her mind since they’d pulled off the heist. “What’s Hell like?”
That made Gideon glance over at his sister. He mulled the question over. “Dangerous. Criminals from three star systems all congregate there to sell their wares or buy services. Most of the people there are low-level scum, but they’ve all got guns and a lot of alcohol so there’s no telling what they’ll do if you piss them off. The ones you have to watch out for though, are the assassins. They don’t carry their weapons out in the open, but boy, when they do decide to use them, nobody in the vicinity stands a chance. Bounty hunters are a problem too, though you can usually pick them out real quick cuz all the scum with a bounty on their head won’t hesitate to throw you to the dogs if it’ll create a distraction long enough for them to get the hell outta Hell.”
Eladia emitted an odd noise that made Gideon glance away from his work to her again. He paused when he saw her terrified stare, the same she used to give him when they were kids and she would follow him everywhere. More often than not, he’d led her straight into trouble, but she’d always been one step behind him no matter how scared she got. And like then, he searched quickly for something to say that would put her back at ease. “It’s pretty clean though. The Blazes have good house-keeping bots.”
That didn’t calm her, but it did distract her. “And the Blazes. Is what people say about them true? Are they really as ruthless as the rumors make them out to be?”
Gideon hesitated. He didn’t want to frighten his baby sister any more than he already had, but it just wasn’t in Gideon to lie or sugarcoat the truth. “It’s best to just stay out of sight.”
“That means yes,” she translated.
“That means we’ll stay under their radar, and we won’t have any occasion to find out whether or not the rumors are true.”
“We just stole the Matealian Savior!” Eladia whispered urgently. “How could we possibly fly under anyone’s radar?!”
“We can do it because we’re going to Hell. The Lower Market is enormous and filled to the brim with the biggest and baddest scourge of three star systems. No one is going to notice a few more thieves.”
Eladia didn’t look convinced. Gideon put his tools down and set his big hands on her shoulders. Joining him on the Bowerbird was not what Gideon had wanted for Eladia. He’d become a thief just so that he could scrape together enough cash to send her to finishing school and put her in a position where she could make herself a better life than the street gutter existence they’d grown up with. He should have known that his little sister wouldn’t stay put, she was too damn stubborn. Still, when Eladia had marched up to him in that dive in the Pushra System, Gideon couldn’t deny that he’d felt a rush of relief that she was by his side. He also couldn’t deny that, when Eladia had flat out refused to go back to school, he hadn’t pushed as hard as he probably should have. He’d spent his entire life keeping his sister close so he could watch out for her, that wasn’t a behavior he could just turn off now that she was old enough to look out for herself.
“Teoh knows what she’s doing,” Gideon assured her. “She’s already got the buyers lined up, and as soon as we get to New Palermo, she’s going to move fast to get the egg sold off. By the time the Blazes even catch wind that the Matealian Savior is missing, we’ll already be long gone and rich enough to buy our own space station if we wanted to. I promise we’ll be fine.”
Eladia bit her lip, still nervous, but she nodded. Eladia had always trusted Gideon’s word more than anyone else in the galaxy. She couldn’t turn off her childhood instincts any better than he could.
- - - - - - - - - -
“The temperature today is going to be 24°C, medium cloud cover. A light shower is expected in the northwestern sector from 3:17 to 4:24 this afternoon.”
Firebird glanced up from the data screens lining her desk. “Edan has a lightball game this afternoon.”
The station’s head meteorologist made a few frantic notes on his pad. “My apologies. I’ll push the rain back three hours. Will that suffice?”
“Very well. Thank you,” Firebird dismissed him and the rest of the lackeys, leaving her with a handful of her soldiers. She waited until the door slid shut behind the last of the normal everyday Joes that ran the space station before getting down to business. “How was Hell last night?”
Tommy the Angel piped up. “We had a good night. Only seventeen dead, twenty three arrested, no major property damage.”
“Good,” she turned to her Underboss and uncle, Nicky Nails Blaze. “And the Matealian Savior?”
Nicky tapped his cigar in the ashtray at his elbow and shrugged. Nicky Nails had to be the only human in the Hominine System that still smoked tobacco cigars, but Nicky was a connoisseur of traditional human vices. “The boys found nothing on our station. I talked to our contact in the Matealian Sovereignty to try to get a more definite timeline but he was hedging, not wanting to give away too many state secrets. He still wouldn’t say anything other than no more than a week.”
Firebird leaned back in her chair. “I imagine it’s been far less time than that.”
“Me too,” Nicky agreed. “My guess is it got lifted in the last two days. It wouldn’t take any longer than that for us to find out about it.”
“Two days,” Firebird steepled her fingers, thinking. “They haven’t arrived yet then. I want all incoming ships heading for the Lower Market to be screened by humans. Flag any suspicious entries and have them tailed.”
“Incoming ships from all the systems?”
She nodded. “A smart thief isn’t going to stick around in the Mateale System when they just became Enemy Number One in the Sovereignty. Still, check that system in case the thieves aren’t smart.”
“Got it.” Nicky grinned around his cigar then. “Who do you think did it?”
Firebird smirked. While it was in the Blaze Family’s best interest to aid the Matealian’s with this cock-up, that didn’t stop her from being more than a little amused at seeing their reluctant allies being made fools of. The Matealian race was just so damn arrogant that it was nice to see them taken down a notch every once in awhile. “Someone with nerves of steel.”
‘It was a big job. Had to be a huge crew.”
“Or a very small one,” Firebird added. They didn’t have enough details to know how the egg had been stolen but both were viable options. A large group of thieves would run a con game to confuse the Matealians’ small minds while a small crew would sneak right under the Matealians’ considerably sized noses.
“You think it could be Jackster? The King’s boys?”
Firebird shrugged. “Could be. It had to be someone big. A no-name crew would have the stones to pull this off, but not the experience.”
Nicky grinned, not in a nice way. “Well, when we find the bastards, we’ll be sure to have a long talk to get to know them.”