Chapter Nine. Getting Laid #2
“You pitch close to blasphemy, Emerson,” replied the irascible Mr. Thoreau.
“As we husband our worldly wealth, so do we husband our wealth hereafter. If ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches?” He frowned, deep and sour.
“The four hundredth and no more, lest we prove ourselves unworthy stewards.”
Mr. Emerson appeared to quail before his partner’s weaponized scripture. “We may go, perhaps, to the three fiftieth without imperiling our souls too much?”
“I’d take three fifty,” I said quickly, before Mr. Thoreau and the Father could team up to beat me down to three seventy-five. I felt a lot like I’d been scammed and, worse, like I might have scammed Q into the bargain.
“And a blessing it has been to do business with ye,” said Emerson. “Now, what about your strange friend here?”
“Ye adulteress,” intoned Thoreau. “Know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with the Father?”
“Two are better than one,” I replied reflexively, “because they have a good reward for their labor.”
That made Emerson snap out a sharp laugh. “She has ye there, I’ll swear she does.”
Not, perhaps, expecting to be out-scriptured by a wandering ship’s hand worth no more than the 350th lay, Mr. Thoreau gave a little hrrumph and changed tack. “Even so, she’s a pagan look to her, and evil company corrupts good character.”
“She is a harpooner,” I reminded them. “And I’ve heard a good spear is hard to come by these days.”
I might have been projecting, but I thought I saw a gleam of avarice in Emerson’s eyes.
The facts that Q was clearly an outsider, clearly spoke little Exodite, and potentially had useful skills must all have been adding up to profit in his pious, acquisitive mind.
“And are you?” he asked Q. “A good spear, I mean?”
She nodded, once but deeply.
“Experienced?” asked Thoreau.
She nodded again.
“How?”
Giving a full resume would, I thought, involve more Exodite than Q had readily available and, when I saw her bending down into her bag, I assumed she was going to consult her idol for further instructions.
Instead she fished out the helmet of her environment suit. Unlike the rest of her gear it definitely wasn’t Terran, but then why would Terrans need them when the world made oxygen naturally?
“Watch.” She snapped the helmet into place and strode with more confidence than I could ever have mustered into the airlock connecting the office to the landing platform.
Emerson and Thoreau made their way over to a viewing window to see what exactly this strange heathen interloper was going to do. Q brought a hand to her neck and adjusted her suit to cast broad and local.
“Vides.” Her voice crackled over the office intercom, and she pointed high into the sky above the platform.
For a moment I couldn’t quite see what she was pointing at, but then I noticed that a small maintenance drone was zipping about between the topmost pylons. Having seen it, I quickly worked out what she was going to do and tried not to think about the nine or ten ways it could go wrong.
With an almost casual ease, she shouldered her coilgun, drew a bead on the swift-moving drone, and fired.
An electrodynamic dart flew into the sky, its monofilament cable trailing behind it, and struck the unfortunate machine square in the jets.
The instant it impacted, Q turned her wrist, set the gun to retrieval, and dart, drone, and debris all together reeled back into her waiting hands.
She returned with her prize and set it down on the desk between the two businessmen.
Lying there in front of us, it was larger than it had seemed out the window, but it had still been an impressive shot by anybody’s standards.
I’d have said fuck me, she was amazing, but she already had and already was.
“Precise work,” Thoreau admitted, rather grudgingly.
Emerson frowned and peered at his partner over his half rims. “Heathen or no, we have to take her.”
“If any of them that believe not bid you to a feast,” Thoreau quoted in reply, “and ye be disposed to go; whatsoever is set before you, eat, asking no question for conscience sake.”
Mr. Emerson drew himself to his full height, or as much of his full height as he could manifest while sitting, and fixed Q with his most businesslike expression. “How much do you understand, heathen?”
“Enough,” Q replied, and half smiled at me in a way I found hard to parse.
“Then what do you say to the ninetieth lay?” Emerson asked, and for some reason this time his companion raised no theological objections.
Q nodded for the final time. “Accipio.”
Thoreau looked at me. “I assume that means yes?”
It probably did, but I didn’t want to presume, so I shrugged. “Pretty much. Now, can we board?”
“Very keen, aren’t you?” Emerson sounded suspicious, and to be fair to him I would have been too.
A lot of people who want to sign aboard ship at short notice are running from something.
Any good proprietor or proprietor’s agent would keep an eye out for that sort, not to turn them away, necessarily, but to make sure they were making appropriate recompense.
In any case he’d have been wrong about me and Q. About me at least. There are few things I could say for sure about myself in those days, but I’m certain that I wasn’t running away from anything.
Just the opposite. I was running away from nothing.