Empire 5: Loose Ends...
21 Oct 2018Tarm Wallunga
Ford Orbital, Satio System20th October, 3304
“So,” Johnny says to me as he sits down across from me, plunking a freshly opened bottle of beer in front of me – swear to God it feels like a peace offering of some sort – and I take a little off the top.
“So,” I saw when I swallow.
“Might big elephant at the table, you know.”
Christ, not you, too? I suppose it was only inevitable; everyone else has already mentioned Luther. Might as well join the fucking party, Johnny-bird. The thought makes me drink down a good bit more of the proffered beer.
Johnny keeps staring me down, just sitting there and staring. Fucker. He’s waiting for me to name the elephant, I guess. I sigh deeply and choose my next words carefully.
“I don’t wanna say he’s gone,” I start slowly, “but he sure as shit ain’t come back, either.”
Johnny seems to chew on that, nodding and nipping at his own beer. Finally, he relaxes, though the thousand-yard stare remains firmly in place. “Known Luther a good long time,” he says at first, like an engine starting at a low idle and gradually progressing through the gears. “Like an older brother or something.” He takes another drink and I can see him starting to loosen up a bit more.
“I thought he was…”
Johnny lifts a hand, stopping me mid-sentence. Because it’s just me and him in my makeshift office, I let him have his piece. Anyone else, I might have just kept saying whatever I wanted to say.
“You sent him because, other than Britte, and even that much I’m not too sure about, he was the right one to send on such a wild ass goose chase.”
I light up some O while he takes another pull from his bottle, puff a couple times before passing it to him. “His connections across half the damn Federation was why I sent him.”
Johnny shrugs absently and takes a good long drag from the joint, passes it back to me. “And because you and Britte were…” He trails off, the look of a man who just stepped in some dogshit blazing on his face.
I shrug that off. Truth be told, she was a great lay, but that really wasn’t the reason she stayed behind and Luther ventured off. Whether or not Johnny saw that, or believed me when I say – well, that’s a different matter.
“And you still haven’t heard anything from him yet, either, eh?” I ask to keep the silence from getting awkward.
He shook his head. “And that’s not good. It’s been far too long. Six months?”
“Or near enough to not matter,” I answer. Another sigh works its way out of me. “High time to hang it up?”
Johnny takes a stupid long time to answer, and I’m pretty sure that if he can’t see straight, its not the booze or the O causing it. He takes a really long hit from the joint, snuffs it out, then kills the beer to wash out the funky taste.
“I guess it is,” he says at something just above a whisper. He was up and moving, leaving the office with his head low, a couple fingers swiping at the corners of his eyes, before I could even acknowledge his response. The door closes behind him, a strange sound amidst the awkward quiet.
“Get Ohen in here,” I growl, more harshly than I meant to, into the comms link between me and whoever was running the bar right then.
Halfway, and then some more,
across the Bubble
Li’ao crouched before the fire, poking at it absently with a stick the length of his arm. A grumbling sound came from one side, low and quiet to keep from disturbing the child sleeping on the cavern floor beside him. Liao looked over, his left eye slipping into low light vision, and easily outlined the lumped form of the man he had knocked out and dragged down here hours before.
“Rise and shine, shit stain,” he muttered under his breath as he rose to his full height and crossed the scant few feet between them. As the man in the wrinkled and once upon a time impeccably tailored charcoal suit struggled against his bindings to sit upright, Liao crouched before him, and with the still hot end of the stick, tilted the older man’s chin upwards, locking both synthetic eyes onto the bound man. He watched him a moment, one eye spewing trails of biometric data into his field of view, the other simply outlining the man’s form in a gray-white line. In his defense, the old man didn’t even flinch to the feel of the hot stick pushing into his flesh.
“What…what is the mea..” He was silenced but the added pressure of that stick, digging into the soft skin beneath his chin.
“Shhh,” clicked Liao. “All in due time, my friend.” Liao offered a cold, predatory smile. “All our answers will always come out in the wash, yes?” He smirked a bit before pushing the old man back against the cavern wall. Somewhere between them and the fire, the small child stirred. “Shh…don’t wake Seamus. Growing boy needs his sleep.” That smile returned, broadened, and then Liao stood and sauntered back to the fire.
The sound of pebbles reacting to exterior forces echoed through the cavern, followed by faint, slightly echoing footfalls that gradually grew louder. A beam of light, off-white and catching countless dust particles, grew brighter as the figure holding her drew closer into the cavern from the tunnel that lead into it. Seeing the fire, the light was extinguished and then slipped into a pocket inside the long, tan duster the man wore.
“The duster gives you away,” Liao said, having watched the man approached from the very entry way. “Spacers use it a lot, sure, but yours…” the bounty hunter chuckled. “Yours has very, very unique markings.”
“If you know the markings, you know what they mean, then.” The man just entering the cavern countered in a smooth, cool voice. The rustling of leathers in the dark indicated a shrug of shoulders, but Liao saw the move for what it was, the retrieval and subsequent aiming of a pistol.
“Oh, I know a lot, that, that I can’t deny,” Liao smiled, turning his body directly towards the man coming into the light of the campfire. He also sidestepped a pace or two, placing the child, still sleeping, directly between him and the newcomer. “I also know, for instance, that you are Luther Reid, who had been at one time tasked to retrieve this child.”
The duster wearing man simply nodded. He didn’t see a point in replying to that.
“You Gunslingers are pretty precocious, I’ll give you that,” Liao said, lifting his hands to rest them on his hips. “Put your gun away, and come sit with me by this fire. It’s odd,” the hunter smirked at this, “that in this day and age, no one just sits to talk about a fire anymore. Always too many things to do, too many places to which to go.”
Luther stopped a few feet short of what otherwise might have been a good spot to sit by that fire, and didn’t put his gun away. “I’m good right here.”
Liao shrugged. “Suit yourself.” In less than the time it took to tell, Liao snaked one hand from his hips, pulled out a pistol, and barely without looking in that general direction, fired off a single round into the forehead of the man tied up behind him.
Luther’s own gun raised, shoulder high and level with the bounty hunter. “What the fuck?” he said. The report of the gun was loud, amplified by the close cavern walls, and the child was screaming now, so utterly rudely awakened by the gunshot. Blood rain down in a thin streamer from a small hole in the front of the old man’s head; the cavern wall upon which he now slumped was a much messier story, however.
Liao sighed, holstered his pistol. “Put the damn gun away, Gunslinger,” he said coldly as he stooped to pick up the screaming child. By the time he straightened back up again, he saw that Luther had very specifically not done what he had been requested of. He sighed again, even added in an eyeroll to add to the expression of his disappointment in the Gunslinger. “I don’t think you understand just what is going on here,” Liao said, adding a few calming sounds to his voice to console the child.
“And I think you’ve been mistaken into believing I give a shit.”
Liao squatted down and then took a seated position on the cavern floor, cradling the child with one arm and his torso while the other fished something out of a backpack that was right there beside him. “For the love of …well, whatever you believe in, I suppose, sit the hell down, put the gun away, and then we can talk. Because while you may not believe it just yet, this whole arrangement here – us meeting here, I mean – has been done just to provide you with that which you seek.”
That something Liao pulled from the backpack was a bottle, prefilled with formula for the boy, and while totally disregarding the Gunslinger before him, Liao stuck the nipple of the bottle into the boy’s mouth, and continued to console him back to sleep.
Stunned, Luther found himself holstering his sidearm, and stepping closer to the fire, and eventually he sat down.