Here I was standing on this rooftop upon which the building it covered was abandoned; a personal sanctuary you can say. I was on the well-done side of exhausted from a day that was about as productive as selling bags of sand on a desert planet.
Normally anyone standing on top of vacant, privately owned property would be charged with trespassing, especially if you so happened to park a small space-cruiser on it and use it as an apartment, but you'd be surprised how far favors can carry you. Favors are as much of a currency as credits were, and cops overlooked this blatant violation of aerial parking laws because I helped the chief launder missing stipends and transport off-world military wares once or twice. Sure beats paying the rip-off prices for an actual place around here.
The Amaron System could only be described as nothing less than a beautiful, scenic false metropolis built on top of grime and decay. As I made my way to the edge of the building, the city made for a pretty sight of mighty skyscrapers of stone and metal, brimming with winding curvatures, angular flourishes of seemingly gothic influence, pointed and proud, shining lights of bright neon splendor covering their figure, advertising catching the eye of any passerby, pastel, bold, with painted illustrations featuring flowing, slightly swirled and sleek texted signs and boards forming pretty words of a vapid "please buy me" intent.
It attended a club and wore the brightest dress around to attract the suckers, wanting their time and hard-earned clams. Earth's distant 20th-century past coming back to haunt this world, bringing all the eye-straining colors it can carry in the luggage, dropping it, spilling everywhere. A fancy Art Deco archipelago of alloy where the water was replaced with bustling streets, flying cars and ships, and billions of souls wandering within. A real mood setter. Some say it's majestic; I say it proves unoriginality is universal.
Crime may be tearing the place apart, but such a classy dump lent itself to good opportunities for making a living. Bring a big iron on your hip and some nice insults, you'll do fine so long as you don't take a plasma round to the noggin. Such is the life of a freelancer I suppose.
Got the credits? I can get it done. Rental street cop, detective, escort, bodyguard, interrogator, bounty hunter, tour guide, rental girlfriend even. I've been those things, all except an assassin. If I had any limit, it was that killing for the sake of killing, no matter the price, didn't sit well with me. I stopped counting the times whackos and mafia underlings would come up to me thinking I'd be willing to waste someone from a distance, let alone use my own arms for financial or political gain or even just because one guy looked at another guy funny. Guess you can say I'm a freelancer with standards, whatever those were in a place like this.
Of course, opportunities have been high and dry lately. Another bust today. Either those jobs have been taken up by others, or in an odd twist of fate or destiny or whatever you'd like to call it, things have been more peaceful; unlikely I'd say. It shouldn't be this anti-climactic, not after all that searching.
I went out on the prowl for jobs, visited the Central Station for bounties or tips, listened to the scanners, anything to make me feel like I was relevant to a city that's been so kind to me while digging its heels onto my mouth. As the daylight suffered a chokehold through the seconds, the metropolis skyline stuck out enough to make my eyes want to hurl.
Reaching into my trenchcoat's pocket of miracles, out came my pack of Maranillo cigarettes, my favorite brand, the only Earth-based brand around here that managed to get a foot into alien worlds. Flavor? Erinos aquamint. A nice, soothing inhale after an uneventful day of wasted time and increasingly emptier coffers. I took one out and stuck it in my mouth with the grace of 7-years of experience. As the internal sensor detected my fanged orifice, the tip automatically lit up on its own and I huffed it down nice and deep, feeling a sort of freshness flow down my throat and trachea, filling the lungs, making me feel relaxed, even temporarily, and out puffed a trail of smoke in the next moment.
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The Kitty: From Wives To Wormholes!
خيال علميIn this Neo-Pulp Noir story, on the city planet in the Amaron star-system, Kitty Sugawara works as a local freelancer, a mercenary capable of any job (with exceptions). On an uneventful night, she is approached by the wife of a union leader to inve...
