Planetary: Mercury, page 24
Lou Antonelli started writing fiction in middle age; his first story was published in 2003 when he was 46. He’s had 112 short stories published in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, India and Portugal. His debut novel, the retro-futurist alternate history Another Girl, Another Planet, was published in Jan. 2017 by WordFire Press. His short story “On a Spiritual Plain”, originally published in Sci Phi Journal, was a finalist for the Hugo award in 2015. A Massachusetts native, Antonelli moved to Texas in 1985 and is married to Dallas native Patricia (Randolph) Antonelli. They have three adopted furbaby children. You can find his blog at: http://louantonelli.blogspot.com/.
DECEPTIVE APPEARANCES
Declan Finn
I always worry when a bar stops me at the door so I can buy a ticket to enter—I worry even more when everyone has to EXCEPT me, usually because that means I’m the floorshow.
However, on this occasion, I was also worried because I traveled with the most dangerous man in the known universe, Sean Patrick Ryan. Unfortunately, those travel plans typically included having every Therese, Dodo and Dirty Harry attempt to claim the title for his own.
Sean and I entered the spacebar and split up, each with our backs to the wall—myself next to the door, and Sean at the end of the bar farthest from the entrance, and closest to the emergency exit.
We had come for a leisurely drink, and, of course, a bit of information. Sean Ryan was both my friend from college, and my sometimes partner in crime. Well, ok, not crime exactly, but he came pretty darned close. Sean had his own security agency, and I spent my time wandering the stars, and we occasionally end up in the same place. Usually, that same place would be trashed within short order.
Today, that same place was the bar called The Scoundrel’s Refuge. It was a seedy little bar in an even seedier little spot on Mercury. Yes, I refer to the entire Hermes dome as a “little spot.” The dome was barely able to keep out the heat from the sun, and the vents rarely kept the air circulating, causing the entire dome to be hotter, year round. The increased heat made it an eternal summer – and human nature being what it was, summers always saw an increase in homicides. In the case of Hermes Dome, when there was a wind, it was one of those hot dry breezes that came down through the ventilation system, making your hair curl, nerves jump and your skin itch. It created an environment where every night, a booze party ends in a fight, and wives feel the edge of the carving knife as they study their husbands’ necks.
This was, in large part, how the Refuge stayed in business. From time to time, the Refuge would sell tickets to a bar fight, as long as they were announced in advance. One party—sometimes both—declared their intent to the bartender, and within a few hours, most of the furniture was replaced with cheap knockoffs that were easily replaced. The Refuge was aptly named; as long as you gave the bartender enough time to set up for the fight, and make his own cut, you could knock around your adversary in relative peace and quiet without interference from police or patrons. I had never been there for a non-sanctioned bar fight, and every time I ask about one, the other patrons just cringed and turned away.
After we had been in the bar for five minutes, the floor show began—to start with, a little opening teaser before the credits rolled.
Someone approached Sean, coming at him straight on. It was a Zari—think a reptile attempting to mimic a human. Sean watched him approach with his usual demeanor—which seamlessly blended relaxed and amused with “Go ahead, please hit me, I haven’t had enough raw meat today.”
There were raised voices, which were the usual rituals behind bar fights—you stole my seat, I don’t like your face, I don’t like you, all of which would have been summarized in the 21st century as “your momma.” If you want to know what that means, you’ll have to ask Sean, he’s the ancient history expert—it’s the 33rd century, after all. Besides, the Zari didn’t have the concept of mothers… it’s a long story.
And the “fight” ended in the usual fashion, the Zari tried to hit him, and Sean leaned forward—still on his bar stool, mind you— and delivered a short, sharp shock to his face in the form of a left jab, which sent the Zari sprawling on the floor, unconscious before he even left his feet.
Did I mention that Sean Patrick Ryan of “Sean Patrick Ryan & Associates” happened to be two meters tall and one across? Yes, there were his electric-blue eyes, his raven-black hair, but his size was the first thing most people noticed. The second thing they noticed were his eyes, and then his clothing—at the moment, imagine an electric blue jumpsuit… then increase the brightness, and you have the idea.
Sean sighed and returned to his Guinness, joking with the bartender. The barkeep merely smiled and shook his head—which meant that there was going to be a fracas shortly, and Sean was indeed the target. The bar was also starting to fill up—certainly, there was to be a brawl anytime now, the only question was, with whom?
And how come everyone always knows about these things but me?
I looked next to me at an Erinal, short, stocky, and feathered up to the quills… and the gills, for that matter. I never could figure out the feather-gill combination, or why they had skin like leather under their fluffy down.
The Erinal looked up its long, wolf-like snout at me. “Yes?” he hissed in standard.
“You know who the floor show is today?”
He smiled—or grimaced, I could never tell with these—and glanced at Sean, at the bar, scanning the area. “You mean neither of you have heard?”
I deliberately blinked, and thankfully my deep blue eyes radiated innocence, and not my 200-point IQ. “No, what?”
“Your friend is going to meet with Feeshar Straczyn, the Touri.”
“Oh nuts.”
A Touri was never short. In fact, the shortest adult Touri was noted as being exactly 180 centimeters, or six feet tall, and that made the record books as being the smallest runt of any litter. Some Xenobiologists often claimed Touris had distinctive traits of dinosaurs, while actual paleontologists disagreed firmly, rigorously, and at a level most people would qualify as shrieking.
To a layman’s eye, a Touri had a long, graceful neck, armor-hard scales, vertical eye slits, and laser-sharp claws. No, laser is not a misprint, it’s a statement of experience—one Touri was let loose aboard a ship during the last war, and he shredded bulkheads with nothing but his natural nails…which were retractable.
“And here he is now.”
I looked at the bar, and he was right. This Touri was well over 180 centimeters—more like 205.
And the thing was, I had met him once before, with Sean. Last time I had checked, they were friends.
Then again, I have the urge to deck Sean from time to time as well.
Sean spared me a look with one electric blue eye, looked back to Feeshar Straczyn, shrugged, and reached back for his pewter mug, raising a finger, saying, “Let me finish this, and I’ll be right with you.“
The Touri nodded, putting his whole upper body into it the nod. I took it upon myself to again appreciate his size. God, this guy was massive—his legs were like the trunks of small Akarat trees, his skin the color of liver spots, and his face was like that of every Touri, a Velociraptor on steroids, right down to the pointed teeth and triangular snout going down toward a long neck. His clothes were made out of a substance that looked like leather, but I’m sure was actually the scales of something different—just as I was sure that it hadn’t been processed cloth, it had been home-sewn and skinned.
Crap.
There wasn’t a word exchanged between the two of them, just Sean grabbing the mug, raising it from the bar, and then—
WHAP, the pewter mug slashed across the Touri’s face, leaving a dent in the mug that looked remarkably like the Touri’s profile. He then brought it back around, leaving a dent in the other side of the mug. Straczyn merely blinked, startled, when Sean revealed where his other hand was—grabbing the base of his bar stool, which he ripped right out of the ground, thrusting straight up into the Touri’s chin, snapped its head back with a resounding crack.
Unfortunately, the rest of his body didn’t even totter. Then Sean stood and threw his whole mass into an across-the-body swing, smacking the Touri with a blow hard enough to make him fall back a step.
Feeshar then reached up and slashed through the base of Sean’s bar stool, leaving it on the floor in pieces. “Nuts.”
Sean was sent flying by a single blow, and landed at my feet. “Come on, Sean, stop playing. You can cripple this guy,” I told him in a stage whisper that the entire bar could hear. I think I had figured out what was going on here.
He smiled broadly, and answered in his booming voice, Irish brogue as thick as the bogs. “Peter, this is a bar fight, such things aren’t done. There are rules, you know. Tooth and claw and fists, and whatever else is lying around.”
“Yeah, but that usually doesn’t include the other guy having nine-centimeter talons.”
“And?”
The resulting brawl was worth its weight in coin, and despite the property damage, the bar made a substantial profit on the entire ordeal. As Sean noted, “whatever else is lying around” could be used as weapons, and he used them—he hit Feeshar with table tops, table legs, chairs, monitors, electrical appliances, beer mugs, martini glasses, plates, spoons, and even the toilet seat when the fracas spent a bit of time in the restroom.
At one point, Sean even ripped out a part of the bar. I don’t mean the bar top, I meant from the base to the water-stained counter top, and torn out from the roots in the floor. This is no mean task, even for Sean, considering that behind the bar, Levin—the barkeep—had installed what was literally the hull from a top of the line flagship, meant to repel rail gunfire and survive fusion missile impacts. He slapped Feeshar with it twice, before the Touri sliced through it with a single swipe of his claws.
Once they had moved away from the discarded piece of the bar, I made certain to move next to it, and prop it up in front of me like a makeshift barricade.
Sean even went toe-to-toe with Feeshar in bare-knuckles fashion. One would automatically think he’d be toast—Feeshar could move with the speed of the quickest Earth predator, which included a human on a skimmer. But Sean was faster… well, not exactly faster, but probably just as fast, and he moved as though Feeshar broadcasted every move ahead of time.
Everyone had to get out of the way at one time or another, of course. The fight took the two of them all over the place, and wrecked everything in sight, and several things under the floor.
Everyone in the bar needed to scatter, except, of course, for old Jeistar. Jeistar was…Jeistar, really, a landmark of The Scoundrel’s Refuge. One day he wandered onto Mercury’s surface, came in, sat down, ordered a drink, then nursed it for five hours. Ordered another, and kept ordering. Of all the people in the Refuge, only he didn’t fit. He was old, sedentary, pudgy, always smiled, always looking like the Buddha of the Bar, and always in that exact same seat—everyone else was a crook of some kind or another, and even the police force knew enough not to come in without bringing a small TASK force (Tactical Assault, Special-K branch… no one asked what the K was for, but on this planet, it was assumed that K was for Kill). But Jeistar was… just Jeistar, part confessor, part jester, part landmark. After a while, the bartender Levin just let him stay, on account that people came in and bought drinks just to talk with the Buddha of the Bar. Because when the dome’s external temperature nearly hit 800 degrees in the day time, talking was the least strenuous activity.
When Sean full-body tackled Feeshar, they both went down in a crash of over 700 pounds that shook the floor and destroyed Jeistar’s table—but the old man had lifted both his mugs up just in time. Which actually made me glad I ordered two myself after seeing the entrance fee.
The fight ended after Feeshar went for a triple-spin aerial kick, mastered by only a small handful of people in the galaxy, taught on an out-of-the-way planet so far off the star charts that just thinking about it made my head ache.
Sean had managed to be out of range yet again, a bar stool in hand. In half-twist, Feeshar had his back to Ryan, his head already snapped around to aim. Sean waited for the next full rotation after the kick, and he leapt forward, slamming the bottom of the bar stool into the back of Feeshar’s head. Feeshar went down, his skull crushed against the floor, and it got worse when Sean sat down on the stool while it was still on top of Feeshar.
Ryan smiled and bent down, smiling at Feeshar. “You want to give up now?”
No one could tell if Feeshar smiled, snarled, or agreed, so Sean just sat there, smiled, and said, “Levin, another Guinness, my good man.”
About an hour later, the three of us left, having had our fill of drinks that people were happy to pay us. Even Feeshar had his fill of the local brew.
Now, you might ask by this point, “What in God’s name was all that about?” Well, I’ll be happy to tell you. Because after the bar population was done with us, and had turned its vastly limited attention span to the resumption of ruining their bladders, Sean and Feeshar staggered out together and I followed behind. I breathed in the recycled air of the dome, and wondered how many trees they had to plant in the dome to make it smell so fresh. Then again, from what I saw of the terraforming efforts, they were really impressive – though without the dome, we would all freeze at night and cook in the day time. Pity they couldn’t move the planet farther from the sun.
Once we were out of sight of The Scoundrel’s Refuge, I stepped in front of them—ten feet in front of them, I didn’t want to get run over by so many pounds of biped. “Why the hell didn’t the two of you tell me you were going to do this?”
Sean looked at Feeshar, who merely smiled.
“Now where would be the fun in that?” Ryan began, his brogue only a faint accent now. “Ya see, Peter, we wanted to keep it a shock, so your reaction would be appropriate to a total surprise.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re just lucky I’m brighter than both of you put together. I saw Feeshar and knew you two were the distraction.”
“Fe’eshar,” the Touri hissed as he corrected me. He wasn’t angry that I could tell, his hiss was part of his accent.
“Sorry, we met so briefly, I didn’t even catch your name. I heard it again from an Erinal in there and—”
“Did you get the target from that bastard Levin?” Sean cut me off.
I sighed. “Of course I did.” I raised the info-diamond. It was the size of my two thumbs, with enough data to fill a large library. “When you hurled that section of the bar at Fe’eshar, I maneuvered behind it to it, picked up the diamond from the compartment, and replaced it with a blank. Do you know how hard it is to cut up one of these things so it looked like a Touri did it, especially when I have to do it behind my back in the middle of a crowded bar?”
Sean chuckled.
I continued “Our friend the barkeep will be quite put out with us, I suspect, when we blow his weapons cache to hell.” I pocketed it again. “It’ll teach him to sell tickets… and be an arms dealer.”
Fe’eshar smiled. “Is good when a plan comes together, yes?”
Ryan laughed. “Come, we have to ruin his day.”
“And you should have least told me what you two were going to do. I used to write scripts for the Interstellar Wrestling Federation.”
I trailed after the two of them with a sigh. There were three things that made Sean Patrick Ryan dangerous. He’s: highly intelligent; creative; absolutely insane. He’s not clinically insane, but, well…you saw his idea of a plan. He rejected other ideas of mine because they weren’t “fun.” And he couldn’t have been bothered to tell me what he was doing. Probably because that would have taken the fun out of it.
Put all of that together, add his build, a hobby with high explosives and his familiarity with every major form of martial art known to members of the Society for Creative Anachronism—which included races from most of the known galaxy—and you have a very deadly package.
All of this is why Levin was in serious trouble. Fe’eshar was a friend of Sean’s from years back, and when the Soivan government started funding and supporting anti-Touri terrorists via Levin’s arms dealers, Ryan volunteered to “fix” the problem.
As we approached the storage facility later that evening, I was still confused. “I still find it hard to believe that Levin is the one behind the arms-smuggling,” I muttered. “Middle-man, yes, he’s got the charisma for it. Mastermind? Please, that man needs a cheat sheet to mix drinks.”
Sean’s eyes stood out in the darkness as he looked back at me. He had thankfully traded in his eye-bleeding blue outfit for a dark green (black is a problem, it’s typically darker than the night itself). Both eyes glinted with mischief, which told me nothing—Sean’s Irish eyes were always smiling, because he was always up to something.
The entire area radiated an electromagnetic field that played havoc with most modern weapons. Unless one knew how to counter the field, lasers wouldn’t work, and SHP guns exploded. Superheated Hydrogen Pistols worked by launching hydrogen plasma within a magnetic field. When the field hits a target, the field collapses, then, the plasma mixes with the oxygen, and boom, you are quite dead. The facility’s magnetic field would collapse all SHP bursts as soon as they left the bubble—unless, of course, your magnetic field had the right frequency, like in the SHPs the guards carried.
The perimeter guards were easy. I used my intricate knowledge of human anatomy and martial arts training to ambush my guard, judo throw him to the ground, and put him in a rear naked choke that put him to sleep. Fe’eshar and Sean, on the other hand, calmly walked up to their targets, asked for directions, and promptly pummeled them unconscious.
The perimeter was a solid, impenetrable wall. The front gate was protected with more security on a single lock than I had ever seen. There were retinal scanners, iris scanners, and a touchpad that not only took a ten digit code, it could also scan the fingerprints of the person punching in the code, as well as a sample of DNA, not to mention measured the blood pressure in each fingertip.
