Hellflower (v1.1) Read Free

me. I rolled under the table while he was bawling for his hardboys to come smear me into the bedrock.
    I gave the first one that answered a blade through the throat, and by the time I got the blood out of my eyes another one wanted attention. He slugged me hard and I lost my vibro and ended up out in the middle of the floor.
    And suddenly it was very damn quiet. I looked up. There was my bonny alMayne home-ec project towering over me, and the look he gave the general populace would of froze a hot reactor. Nobody moved.
    Then K’Jarn drew down on the hellflower-or maybe it was on me and he didn’t care who was in the way, but afterward K’Jarn wasn’t where you could ask him anymore. Tiggy Stardust blew him away so fast I felt the breeze before I saw the flash.
    K’Jarn hit the floor and I started making like Tiggy was my backup and I’d been expecting him all along. Nobody was looking to avenge K’Jarn against a hellflower, and said so, and that damn near set Tiggy the wonder warrior off again right there. You could tell he was looking to blow them all away and maybe me too for the "lack of honor" of it all, so me and Kevil called it quits real quick no-hard-feelings-eternal-friendship and the late K’Jarn’s faction made itself history.
    Throwing caution to the vectors, I started to tell Tiggy Stardust how glad I was he’d showed up. He just stared at me with those hellflower blue eyes and said, "I do not want your gratitude either, chaudatu," and stomped off again.
    Right. Fine. I got out of the Last Gasp with no trouble and beat it back to the Port and Firecat.
    Somebody ought to do something about Tiggy, I felt. As it turned out, somebody had.
    ###
    I spent the next three days in a sleepsling on Firecat waiting to feel like a member of any B-pop whatever again. I’d passed up Beofox’s fond offer to coke and wire me until I was feeling reet: stardancers ride on their reflexes and I couldn’t afford to scramble mine. Beofox and me’d made sure the RTS implant worked before I left surgery-a transmission check and me damn glad nobody had to take my face off again to see why it wasn’t working.
    Paladin kept me company through the voder-outputs in Firecat’s bulkheads, because every time the RTS took incoming transmission my skull itched. Beofox’d said it was all in my imagination and I’d get over it, but it wasn’t her skull.
    When he did talk through the RTS it sounded like he was standing right behind me, and that was the weirdest thing of all, because Paladin can’t do that.
    Pally’s a real knight in shining armor, and the armor’s my ship. He’s black-boxed into Firecat’s infrastructure, wired into her computers and welded to her deck, so where she doesn’t go, he doesn’t go either. Without computer hookups he’s blind deaf and dumb; drain enough power from his crystal and you can add halt and imbecile to the list. When I’m off Firecat I’m out of his life.
    The remote transponder implant was in the category of aiding and abetting our mutual quest to stay alive. The RTS’d been designed to coordinate Space Marine maneuvers and was reliable for about five kilometers without a comsat, and over an entire planetary hemisphere with one. Me wearing one meant Paladin could hear everything I said even away from Firecat, and talk to me without anybody knowing he was there. And it was real important for nobody to know Paladin was there. Ever.
    My partner Paladin’s a fully-volitional logic. A Library. And the head-price on him-and on me for having him-has been reliably reported to be enough to buy you out of any crime in the Imperial Calendar.
    Not that anybody’d collected on Class One High Book in the last slightly more than so long. Pally and me’d kept the ear out to hear the whistle drop about other Libraries. There’d only been two cases of High Book-that’s Chapter 5 of the Revised Inappropriate Technology Act of the nine hundredth and seventy-fifth Year of Imperial Grace to you