Perdition's Child

Chapter 2

They stopped for a morning drink together. Their bikes were magnetically locked to the extended dock of a modified home platform-turned-café and the plastic explosive stashed in sheriff Darkrei's bike. Mehk's bike had an additional lock on it as insurance for his good behaviour.

The building floated along with the same magnetic engines that powered nearly all vehicles these days, drifting at a leisurely half-mile per hour to keep a steady and unchanging distance from the creeping sunset. Occasionally the integrated navigator on the café detoured sideways or did a slow, gravity-defying hop over obstacles like rocks that threatened to scrape the four feet of clearance it hovered at. Some areas required tracks or seeding, but most of Lequin had enough metal in the sand and dirt to support hovercraft without issues.

The cafe was an intentionally old-fashioned model, built out of realistic light-weight faux wood that was incongruous sitting on space-age superconductor technology. The town of Kraylic sold itself to tourists by pretending to be from the 'good old days', but no one had ever built much with wood even before contact. Way too heavy to drag around, and if you built something in one place who knew how other migrants would treat it. That was more of an alien thing that had somehow seeped into their culture. A pair of muk-mu's sitting on the rail outside softened the off-world ambience with their coos and fluttering wings though, and somehow the whole mismatched mess just felt right.

Inside, Mehk squirmed in his seat and Darkrei pretended to be too involved with the menu projected to his com to notice. His short ears flicked mildly to follow the sound of Mehk's movement, but when he did it the effect was more hard-boiled detective and less twitchy teenager ambience. An actual teenager sat next to him, a young medessian with most of her face covered in bandages from a very recent wound, and ignored them utterly. "The egg special is good, have you had it?" When Mehk didn't answer aside from a jerky shake of his head, Darkrei tapped that menu option twice, then something else presumably for the kid, and finally tapped the pay option. "At least that crime is a simple one to rectify." Their order promptly appeared on a screen near the kitchen and the waiting café owner peered at them from the counter that doubled as a kitchen, nodding to confirm the order.

Only two other customers filled the café. The structure wasn't quite large enough for them to sit out of earshot of one another , but those two were far more interested in each other than in the cop, weird kid, and scruffy vagabond in the opposite corner table. Nonetheless, Darkrei switched from galactic common to the more rarely spoken native Cayhen.

"I'm disappointed, Mehk. This is some deep shit you've gotten yourself into." Darkrei shook his head sorrowfully. "We've know each other for a long time, but I don't think I can overlook this." The malicious glimmer in his eyes belied his tone, and Mehk briefly half-considered taking the court sentence rather than being owned by a cop.

"Five years, minimum, maybe ten." Oh. Nevermind that then, Mehk had thought it was one of those two-week offenses. "That's a big chunk of your life to throw away, pretending here for a minute that a scrawny mix-breed like you would survive more than a week. What did you want so badly that you'd try and fence that?"

"Towing system." Mehk said in common, his grasp of Cayhen not quite up to translating something that didn't properly exist in the language as far as he knew. He offered no more explanation and Darkrei didn't reply aside from flicking one ear in acknowledgement. After a moment Mehk swallowed his pride along with a sip of his tea and asked the question he knew, knew, he wasn't going to like the answer to. "What do you want now?"