Penny

The Pavonis Campaign - Warhammer 40000

It was a battered and bloodied group which filled out of the Mechanicus pump station. Katia led the surviving six. Walking erect and straight as befitted the position of a regimental Commissar despite the dull pain that stabbed along her left side with each step. Two of the survivors were too badly wounded to walk, one having taken a fragment of a bolt round in the chest, the other having lost a hand to an ork chopper before the brute had finally been brought down. Field stretchers had been rigged out of lengths of piping and fertilizer stacks. Not one of them was free of wounds. Actually crossing the causeway posed some problems, the ork’s breaching tactic having blown six feet of the gravel rise away and allowing the pond water to rush in. It took only a minute to throw several beams across and make a precarious bridge.



“Zeb!” Katia called, realizing after she said it that it bordered on improper to call a trooper by his first name in public. The new minted sergeant was waving a greeting even as he spoke into the vox. Positioning his vehicles in a loose line to screen the direction from which the orks had come.



“Commissar,” he responded, clearly relieved to see her alive, though the expression lingered on his face only a hearbeat.

“Are their more survivors inside?” he asked, peering back towards the smoking entrance of the pump station. Katia made the sign of the Aquilla and then twisted her hands to make the cogwheel of the Mechanicus as she shook her head.

“But there was a whole platoon…” Zeb began cutting himself off. Katia turned to order the survivors medical attention but they were already being loaded onto the vehicles, a field medicae already hanging a bag of IV fluid above one of the worst hit.



“Most of them went in the crash, the rest the ork’s did for,” she admitted, pulling herself up and into the passenger seat beside the corporal. Her whole body hurt from bruises and contusions she had taken during the fight and she felt like she might never be able to stand again.

“How did you come to get here so quickly?” she asked, knowing there was no way this fast attack group had arrived so soon after they had gotten through to command.



“Oh you know…” he began but cut off as one of the auspex operators shouted something.

“Frak!” Zeb cursed, looking down at his own unit.

“Incoming…” with shocking suddenness an aircraft burst over the ridge line trailing a vast plume of smoke. It nozed down and dived towards them. Katia had a momentary vision of something red with gold stripes as it streaked towards them. Shells flickered from its wings and ripped up a twin track of impacts in the ground, racing down over the pond where it lifted similar spouts of water. There was a sudden chunking sound and something heavy and black fell into the pond before an explosion ripped through the water lifting a hundred meter plume of water into the sky. The ork aircraft made a half roll and dived down out of line of site as imperial las fire, more hopeful than effective, followed it. No one had been hurt by the inaccurate attack. A haze of prometeum fumes and fisolene hung in the air like summer heat haze.



“Explains what got the dropship,” Katia said, “whomever prepared our tactical briefing somehow failed to mention ork air superiority.”

There's Always a Price: Sci Fi Bounty Hunters

Jocasta snickered at the ruse and took another very careful sip of the Nova Tears, resisting the urge to drain the cup. She wondered how she had missed the lime and salt with the first swig, maybe it had to burn your taste buds out with the alcohol before you could detect the complexities.



“So you are like one of those rich tourists who hunts dangerous creatures?” she jibbed. It wasn’t her way to examine exactly why she did things. Bounty Hunting was a common enough calling among those to whom the short and violent life a hired gun appealed. With her skills she supposed she could have made credits in other lines of work. There was something about tracking down and capturing marks though. At some deep level she felt like she was smarter than other people, and the chance to use guile to prove it held an instinctive appeal. Perhaps she could apply the same logic to industrial espionage or organized crime, but the compartmental nature of hunting avoided the drawn out tedium of planning too far into the future.



“I mean do you need the money? If you are going after these multi-million credit bounties, what are you spending all that on? Fast women?” she asked, waggling her eyebrows.

Penny's Pencils

There's Always a Price: Sci Fi Bounty Hunters

“Four million is good money,” was what Jocasta tried to say. The actual words that came out of her mouth were closer to. “Formsgum.” Ok, so they weren’t actual words. She picked up her cup, glared at it and set it down on the side of the tub. It had been a while since lunch, or whatever meal it had been when you adjusted it for the time zones of two different planets. The bioelectric implants sucked down a considerable amount of calories, and it wasn’t like she had been taking it easy for the last several days. Maybe there was room service, or barring that a restaurant nearby.

“Of course it means someone can’t or won’t come up with a way to do it cheaper. Local talent varies, particularly with amateurs,” the word had a certain edge of contempt in her mouth. The galaxy was awash with amateur would be thugs, most of them not worth spit, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t get lucky. Jocasta had been in battles before, but she personally found shooting to be a clumsy way to resolve a situation. With a little planning there was almost always a better way.



“People don’t hire me to get kittens down from trees,” Dirk responded. Jocasta blinked, unfamiliar with the metaphor, but Dirk didn’t expand. Jocasta lay back and closed her eyes, letting herself relax. Her hair, a rusty brown, seemed to fade into a silvery blonde.

“Everything alright?” Dirk asked levelly. Jocasta cracked an interrogative eye open.

“Oh… yeah sure, nano enhancement,” she explained and narrowed her eyes slightly. Her hair turned a bright Celtic red and then flowed into a straw blonde before diving into a deep jet before returning to the silvery shade. It had the aspect of a chameleon shifting with its mood, or an octopus giving a warning.



“I can do some other colors too, but I need to prep myself,” she explained. The enhancement could only express pigments that a human could naturally produce, but if you knew what you were doing and you had a decent chemistry kit you could whip up some injectable analogues that could do almost any color. Jocasta had on occasion turned her hair a brilliant green and an electric blue, but artificial pigment only lasted a couple of days and tended to fade out unevenly.



“A useful skill.” Again so deadpan she didn’t know if he was being serious.

“Not as much as you would think, the difference between ‘help! A hundred twenty pound blonde is beating my ass, and ‘help! A hundred twenty pound brunette is beating my ass’ turns out to be largely academic.” She replied.



“Mostly it’s fun, you know that thing that you don’t have time to do because you are too busy not eating sweets and drinking?” she teased. A pair of the dragonflies dived into the water flicking and splashing with their wings in simulated playfulness, renewing the bubbles while they were at it.

There's Always a Price: Sci Fi Bounty Hunters

“What? Does it have a built in tanning bed?” Jocasta asked as she appraised Dirk, noting with amusement and some curiosity that he kept his helmet on. She rolled like a log across the bed and kicked out a leg to hook over the frame pulling herself up by the drink cart. There was a wide selection, little of which was familiar to her, so she took the fanciest bottle, circular vessel of yellow glass that curled up into a pouring spout and splashed some into her mug. One of the drones flitted down and landed on the rim, extending a needle like proboscis into the fluid.



“Hey, get your own,” Jocasta admonished brushing at the insectile machine with the back of her hand. The drone took flight but not before a green response flashed across her optical implants indicating that there beverage was potable. She took a mouthful before reading that it was nearly seventy percent ethanol however.

“Whaaaa…” she gasped in a suddenly parched wheezy voice, narrowly avoiding spraying the burning fluid out her nostrils, eyes watering. Nova Tears, sixty seven percent ethanol, floral flavoring and Terran lime sugar the expanded report read. Jocasta took another, much more cautious sip. If there were flowers and limes in there they were obliterated by the alcohol burn.



Setting the mug of fiery liquor down she turned her back on the bathing area and unzipped her shipsuit, kicking off the soft boots as she did so. With a gymnasts efficiency she pulled the garment down around her hips and kicked it into a corner. Beneath the one piece suit she was nude and even from the back it was clear she wasn’t heavily muscled. Union intelligence was of the opinion that if a spy needed brawn they were a pretty poor spy. The same dictum kept her unmarked by permanent tattoos, though she had experimented with various temporary body art may times. Jocasta’s enhancements were more in the nature of protective coloration, a soft, svelt figure with a slightly pinched waist and broad hips which tapered down to long legs. That very enhancement had allowed her to blend in as a burlesque dancer back in the rad wastes and was surprisingly useful in a variety of settings. It wasn’t always an advantage, but it was usually possible to disguise to some degree with loose clothing when that was the case. Biohackers had a variety of glandular drugs that one could use to provide a sudden burst of strength and power, but all of them had significant side effects and Jocasta was of the mindset that, just this once, Union Intelligence might have been onto something. There was another buzz of wings and when she turned to face the tub a pair of drones were gripping each end of a towel so it draped artfully before her breasts, another a smaller wash cloth spread to preserve the rest of her modesty. The effect was curiously reminiscent of the way certain holodramas used contrived photography to avoid full frontal nudity. She padded casually across the suite and climbed up into the bath, the drones keeping station as she did so. As her hips sank below the water line the dragonfly that had been holding the smaller wash cloth let it fall and worked itself into a bottle of soap with the tenacity of a carpenter bee. It emerged a moment later, covered in a slick layer of detergent. It flicked its wings and dived into the tub, whirring furiously as it whipped up a froth of bubbles a moment before Jocasta’s breasts sank into the water. With the bubbles taking the place of their concealment, the other two hauled away the towel and zipped across the room to retrieve her mug while the third device preened and clicked, shaking off the last of the soap before spreading its wings and soaring back to its concealment on the ceiling.

“Ahhhammm,” Jocasta sighed happily, stretching out her arms to either side of her to grip the side of the tub and luxuriating in the foam of bubbles. Spacecraft were built with efficiency in mind, particularly small ones like the Grasshopper. The goal of any naval architect was to cram as much avionics, sensors, drives and comms system into a metal box as she could, and things like wet showers, much less baths were anathema. Jocasta had opened up a lot of space by replacing the crew with a combination of automation and Cygi, but had faced similar constraints when repurposing the space to suit her needs. The simple sonic shower technically kept you clean, but it never quite gave you the feeling of clean the way water did.

“My last job,” she mused, taking her cup from the two dragonfly drones that carried it across to her without looking in their direction.

“There was this guy on Bartle’ Star, you know Bartle?” she asked. Dirk, who had not moved during her admittedly theatrical entrance, shook his armored head. He was… beyond fit looking, either the result of a punishing exercise regime or as a side effect of living in however many pounds of armor most of the time. Probably both. She felt suddenly hungry but ignored the sensation.

“Well they grow big genetically engineered bison out there, continent wide grazing runs,” she explained. Bartle’s Star had been terraformed in the first few centuries of human expansion and seeded with a monocrop, self sowing grain. The company operating the place had dotted it with huge automated harvesters the size of super tankers that crawled across the surface on treads. Over the years the crop had become so polyploid that its DNA had warped to incorporate nonstandard nucleotides, making it inedible to humans. Worse still the mutant strain had been so aggressive that it had not only wiped out the edible kinds within a century, but it out competed ever attempt to reseed it, all the way up to orbital sterilization. Their profitable breadbasket and expensive tech destroyed, the big agricombine had pulled out and abandoned the place, leaving nothing but flowing fields of mutant wheat and rusting superharvesters. It had mostly been ignored after that, save as the occasional haven for pirates and scavengers, until colonists from the Salines had come along with their bison, bison which could digest the grain without issue. Within two generations the protein rush had made Bartle a rich world, though due religious nature of its founders, a close and repressive one. The Four Churches, essentially the big families, had closed it off to outside immigration and ruthlessly controlled its wealth. Decadence begin decadence however, they found the need to bring in foreign laborers to do some of the actual work, particularly the slaughtering of animals, which was looked down on as an impure task.



“One of the ranch hands, a slaughterman actually, got several of the local nob’s daughters in the family way,” Jocasta explained, gesturing to her own flat stomach with her free hand to emphasize the point.



“The randy bastard managed to impregnate three girls who he shouldn’t have even been permitted to look at,” she continued. Women on Bartle’s Star were normally veiled in gauzy white fabric when in public, though there was a degree of freedom in the family unit.

“When he realized his impending paternity he skipped the planet on the first freighter dumb enough to take him.” In fact he had lied to the captain to get aboard, no commercial captain would risk jeopardizing his relationship with the beef barons by harboring a fugitive.



“The Four Churches clubbed together to hire me to bring him back. It seemed like good money for an easy job…” Jocasta continued. By now the bubbles around her chest were beginning to thin, and one of the dragonfly drones dived into the water with a plop and a whir to replenish it.

“But?” Dirk prompted. Jocasta sighed and took another sip of her drink. To her surprise it seemed to be improving with time and she could taste the slight hint of lime at the back of her mouth. Maybe there was something to Nova Tears afterall. She swished the liquor around a little experimentally and then swallowed.



“The stupid bastard had gotten himself thrown in an asteroid prison on Camden,” she sighed.

“I had to bust him out before I took him back. He was really grateful until he figured out that I was taking him back to Bartle’s Sun, at which point he begged me to take him back to prison. Yap yap yap yap yap.”



“What did they do to him?” Dirk asked, though it was clear from his tone if the answer was ‘they threw him into a black hole’ he wouldn’t have much cared. Bounty Hunting wasn’t a business that engendered a lot of sympathy on the part of marks. Most people that got a bounty put out on them had done something to deserve it and if not, well it wasn’t really up to the plumber to have a moral position on running water.

"They made an honest man outt'nim," she drawled in her best Bartles' accent.


“They gave him the choice of marrying the girls or having his fun bits removed with a slaughter knife. Seems like an easy choice, but one never knows when it comes to men,” she snickered.

There's Always a Price: Sci Fi Bounty Hunters

“Yeah you know how it is, you meet someone, you see your own reflection and sparks fly,” Jocasta put in, fluttering her eyelashes in melodramatic suggestion.

“Okay, lets go,” Dirk said taking her by the arm and steering her towards a rear access way. She didn’t quite resist but she glanced back over her shoulder.

“Wait, how can you tell. You know, you said he looked good, do you just mean his armor looks good? Because it seems like you can’t really t…” Conversation was made impossible as the thin environmental door snapped open and then snapped shut behind them. Jocasta wasn’t quite certain but she thought she heard the air cycler on the helmet pick up in what might have been a sigh.



The room itself was more than adequate. A large suite with soft carpets and two loosely demarcated sections. There was an impressive hot tub and bathing area done up in a white gold marble veneer that probably covered more conventional fittings. This hotel had clearly been constructed to serve the increased trade rather than one of the original palaces or chalets. Warm planet light streamed in from a pair of French doors which opened onto a patio with a view down to the beach and the waving pink purple foliage of the palmlike trees. Whatever air reprocessor they were using it was clearly of a very high order. Possibly they had some kind of harmless protists or algae in the water that facilitated an actual exchange. More likely they had large environmental tanks buried into the crate wall.



“Shotgun!” she called and leaped onto the bed, her spacers coveralls flapping awkwardly as a trio of thumb sized drones flittered out of the sleeves and hemlines to avoid being crushed as she flopped onto the bed. They buzzed around for a moment before scattering to settle in unobtrusive spots where they could provide data feeds. The bed was harder than she imagined but not uncomfortable. She rolled onto her back and spread her arms, staring up at the diamond pattern molded in shallow bas-relief on the ceiling.



“Sure beats singing and wiggling my rump in that radiation soup from the last job,” she admitted, rolling onto her stomach and wriggling to a refresher unit by the side of the bed. She popped it open and looked inside.

“Hey, your little love nest has no minibar?”

Maverick Malediction

Calliope sat up suddenly and wished she hadn’t as a wave of nausea washed through her. It was only with an effort of will she managed to avoid vomiting. Her hand reached out for the book, fingers literally trembling as they approached the spine. Then they froze, hung for a moment and finally retreated.

“I better not,” she said at last. Even reading the book might be enough to set her spellburn off again, and if it started now she might not be able to stop it before it killed her. The book seemed almost disappointed as Neil slowly lowered it.



“Put it away will you?” she asked, but the thief was already tucking it back into his tunic.

“In a couple of hours, maybe a day I can take a look at it, but its too much of risk now,” she told him, though she didn’t elaborate on exactly what kind of risk it posed. Artifacts like that had their own ways to influence the world, and Calliope didn’t much care for being the pawn of some ancient wizard. She picked up the fish and took another bite, chewing mechanically.



“Do you still have the token?” she asked suddenly. Neil reached into a pocket and withdrew a handful of dust.

“Huh,” he said, letting it spill to the ground. The token had taken the majority of the magical backlash of the portal they had traveled. Likely if he hadn’t held it they would both be dead now. Seeing they weren’t dead that meant they had to make some decisions.



“We…ummm…” she paused trying to come up with a politic way of saying what she had to tell him.

“We don’t have any way of knowing where we are, or when, or even if we are in the same world as we started out in,” she admitted. Traveling anywhere by portal was always a risky endeavor, and a portal in collapse could have thrown them nearly anywhere.

“What do you mean when? Or world?” Neil asked, his voice raising in alarm. Calliope held up her hands.



“Relax, the fact that we are anywhere probably means we are on our own world and fairly close in time, otherwise wed have been more likely to be thrown into the black of the void than land anywhere.” Neil arched an eyebrow, picked up his fish and took a bite.

“You know,” he said around a mouthful, “if this is your attempt to reassure me, you are fucking terrible at it.” Calliope sagged back close to the fire, feeling much warmer now that the wood had built it up.

“Well if you want comforting words you should have jumped through a mystical portal with a priest,” she retorted holding her hands out to the flames.

There's Always a Price: Sci Fi Bounty Hunters

“Don’t worry baby, I still love ya,” Jocasta said patting the console fondly and accidentally inducing a slight wobble in their approach vector from which she quickly recovered. Cygi stuck out her tongue, flickered into a metallic outfit with a glowing red eye, saluted and disappeared. To many people in the galaxy AI was a dirty word. It conjured up phrases like ‘the Zin Zhou disaster’,’ the Silicon War’ and ‘Nebula Nine’. Although basic computer assistants were ubiquitous, AI which approached self-awareness were feared, shunned, and illegal anywhere that had enough government to have laws. That was an increasingly small section of the galaxy these days. Certainly plenty of people would be willing to blast the Grasshopper out of space if they knew about her second officers silicon heart. Perhaps Dirk shared this prejudice, or perhaps he just found Cygi annoying.



“A word of advice with Cygi, just make sure whatever you do you don’t…”

“Vessel Grasshopper you are cleared for approach,” a voice said through the comms. Obidently a glowing golden flight path projected onto the view screen. Jocasta made several small adjustments and the ship settled into the designated trajectory.



“Whoa,” Jocasta breathed as they came up over the horizon on Baylan’s only city, also creatively named Baylan. Subconsciously she had expected the kind of run down squalor that passed for civilization on most of the outworlds, but for once she was presently surprised. A geodesic dome spanned a crater a dozen kilometers in width. It was made of bright, transparent, armorcrys that stretched out above a cerulean sea dotted with purplish islands. Here and there sail craft could be seen skipping across the surface of the water. It stood out against the stark lunar surface like a jewel among dingy pebbles.



“I didn’t expect it to be so…”



“Expensive?” Dirk asked, peering down at the dome.

“I was going to go with nice,” Jocasta admitted. The Grasshopper curved down towards landing area, a smaller, shallower crater that intersected the first like a weighted ven diagram. Lights flared on its rim, guiding the little corvette over the lip. Rather than another dome, hangars had been fared into the rock of the crater wall with blast doors which had been styled to look like timber, though the sensors reported them as solid steel.



“One of the Uranium Shieks built this place as a private harem,” Dirk said. Jocasta wasn’t entirely sure if he was reading a data feed from someplace inside that helmet of his. Why hadn’t she thought to hack that? She must be getting soft. Maybe Cygi would be interested in taking a shot seeing she seemed to be in a bit of a mood.



“Supposedly he had a different harem girl for every island,” Dirk continued. Jocasta snorted in amusement.



“That is a lot of disappointed women in one place,” she remarked as she fluffed the forward thrusters and set the ship down on the pad with a gentle thump. The doors began to cycle closed and air began to fill the chamber with a pressurized hiss.

“That’s what the Orion Pirates thought after the Uranium Sheiks lost control of Cabah and Sil,” Dirk continued. Jocasta cocked an eyebrow interested inspite of herself. Such shifts in power were common and usually portended violence and misery for everyone involved.



“So they snatched up all the girls?” Jocasta prompted, Dirk shook his head, his helmet swiveling back and forth.



“Apparently the harem had been so disappointed with the Sheik’s lack of attention that they had decided to start stockpiling guns. When the pirates broke down the doors they all acted like it was party time until the pirates dropped their britches, then they shot the lot of them.” Dirk concluded. Jocasta swiveled in her chair and looked at him askance, wondering if he were joking, but of course his armored face gave away nothing.



It took perhaps half an hour to disembark and find their way along a magnificent concourse to the main docks. Literal water docks rather than space docks. There were apparently no prohibitions on weaponry, thought he place seemed peaceful enough. The dome had been treated so that it was invisible from the underside affording a view out at the fantastic brown purple mass of the gas giant. Reflected light from the great gas ball provided all the light and radiation the place needed apparently. There was a large map made of semi-precious stones laid into the stonework before the docks showing each of the islands. Although nothing was visible to the naked eye, subtle public information software provided information on each to any standard scanner. Jocasta glanced at Dirk.

“Well I guess you won’t meet the dress code for the nude beach,” she teased.

There's Always a Price: Sci Fi Bounty Hunters

Jocasta plopped happily into the pilot seat, the old familiar synthleather conforming to her perfectly. Cygi blinked on in hologram. The AI appeared to be naked, though her modesty was preserved by an artful splash of bubbles at key locations, the outlandish look completed by a shower cap marked with a pink flower print. Jocasta recoiled slightly.

“Cygi, what the fuck?” she asked as her ships AI lowered a long handled wooden scrubbing brush. Cygi was highly idiosyncratic, possibly as a result of running a learning algorithm that most frequently sampled Jocasta herself, as well as a variety of media in the ships rec system.



“I wasn’t expecting you back so soon,” the computer responded as though that explained everything, she turned her holographic eyes to Dirk. “Or you back at all.” The illusion was somewhat spoiled by the fact that the bubbled didn’t pop or dissipate. Jocasta stared for a minute and then returned to the controls.

“Moving on…” she said, “can you put some clothes on and plot me a course to anywhere other than here?” The AI shimmered and was suddenly wearing a version of Dirk’s armor designed by animators more concerned for the titillation of viewers than with practical concerns with a ridiculous swell of breast and unrealistic pinch at the waist. The AI’s dark hair cascaded down her back in a set of braids that, were they unwound, would have dropped her hair to her knees.

“If you are quite…” Jocasta began in exasperation, but three separate courses had appeared in her nav computer as had authorization for departure. Holographic screens flashed up all around her, including a duplicate of her optical feed which showed the last of her drones fluttering down the air ducts and into the Grasshopper’s recovery chutes. The intake ports sealed with a clac and Jocasta held out her hands. Holographic control spheres winked into view around them, centered on the implants in her palms. The repulsor drives lit with a gentle whine and the Grasshopper lifted from the pad. The ships operating budget ticked down a hundred credits as the docking fees were assessed before the hanger doors opened and the blast shield rose behind them. Once it was fully extended Jocasta lit the main drives and the ship leaped out and upwards towards space. Although the sensor board was busy with incoming shipping, there was nothing of particular concern in the orbital lanes. That wasn’t surprising, she doubted a Union warship had been seen here in a generation, and if one did show up the locals would probably wet their collective trousers.

“Ok, lets see,” she said scanning the courses Cygi had prepared. There is habitation on one of the moons of the gas giant. “Some tourism, probably safe enough from your friends.” She keyed in the course and the drive keened, kicking them upwards and looping around the moon in order to blind anyone watching their departure.

“You will have to tell me about the job.”

The Sunday Group

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