Penny

Bodacious Bounties: Bounty Hunter AU

"A little," Jocasta agreed, her own weapon was out of reach. Several of the dragonfly drones who had been playing at the edges of the cockpit vanished into ventilation vents and crawl spaces looking for all the world like startled birds. In truth they were making their way through the air vents trying to find some kind of advantage. Cygi shifted in a tall biomechanical figure with a dark suit and a red laser sword. Jocasta shook her had imperceptibly. Cygi had used that gambit once before, gassing both Jocasta and her opponent and then dealing with the unconscious bodies, but Neil wouldn't pass out fast enough to stop him from shooting her.

"He is responsible for the smell in the galley," Cygi reported, shifting into a facsimile of Jocasta and wrinkling her nose. There was a slight blur to the side of her face that Jocasta could see. Jocasta shook her head again, that wouldn't work either unfortunately. Cygi flickered back to her own form this time wearing a bulky old flack vest with the runes F B I emblazoned on them and a bull horn in her hand. Jocasta didn't get the reference but now wasn't the time to discuss it.

It was time to be sensible about this. Negotiate now or get a bullet in the stomach later.

"You owe me 5.4 million..." she cast an eye at Cygi who mouthed additional numbers. "Two hundred and twelve thousand six hundred and ninety one credits." Cygi cleared her throat. Jocasta rolled her eyes.

"Fine. Two hundred and six thousand six hundred and ninety one credits," she corrected. Neil blinked in surprise.

"What is the discount for?" Neil asked inspite of himself. Jocasta sighed.

"Cygi apparently feels I should refund your commission on the car," she explained.

"I'm soft hearted," Cygi explained opening up her chest as though it were a cabinet and retriving a heart. She peered at it skeptically for a moment and then hurriedly stuffed it back inside when it began beating.

Bodacious Bounties: Bounty Hunter AU

Jocasta charged up the gangway towards the bridge. The two crewmen guarding the hatch opened fire blasting her with flechettes and las beams. She staggered and fell, hitting the deck and rolling to a stop. One of the guards, a broken nosed man with a shotgun, stepped forward and kicked her in the chest. Or tried to. The boot passed clean through her with a shimmer.

"What..." he demanded as the woman sat up. Despite dozens of hits she bore no wounds, not even damage to her clothing.

"Charge!" Jocasta cried and a dozen Jocasta's came charging out of a side passageway, brandishing pikes and swords. One of them even had a silken standard depicting a emerald dragon fly.

"What the fuck!" one of the guards screamed, and then opened fire, filling the corridor with the flash of gunfire. This time it only took a moment for them to realize that the guns had no effect. The army of Jocasta's crashed over them passing through them harmlessly.

"They are all holograms?" one of the guards asked.

"Not quite all of us," Jocasta admitted, as she stepped out of the crowd and stunned both crewmen.

____

"Where is my gravity?" Jocasta demanded as she came back aboard. Cygi was back in her transfer chip to be uploaded to the main database. She wrinkled her nose. "And why is something on fire?"

Jocasta rotated herself around and disengaged the airlock controls. There was a soft hiss of venting air as the clamps disengaged and the two ships began to drift appart. Jocasta only had her inner airlock left owing to the way the enemy had cut their way in. There was a snap and the lights came up. Cygi appeared beside her, wearing a sleeping robe complete with a cucumber face mask.

"We are back, I do not detect Edwards aboard," she admitted.

"No time to worry about it," Jocasta said, kicking off down towards the bridge. She slipped into her chair and kicked her engines live. Behind her the missile boat was also beginning to maneuver. It sluggishly turned its bow towards the second bounty hunter ship, the converted freighter, that was now only a hundred thousand miles distant. The whole bow of the missile boat lit up as the preprogrammed attack Jocasta had planned on its bridge computer began to launch, hurling dozens of swarm missiles at it would be partner.

"Thirty seconds to jump," Jocasta told Cygi, although the computer knew to the microsecond. She slid more power to her engines, taking ever watt the reactors could squeeze as they spun up.

Bodacious Bounties: Bounty Hunter AU

Jocasta felt distressingly alone. The backup generators didn't juice enough to run Cygi's processor and being without her the ship seemed very empty. It wasn't vast and empty of course, because as she sat morosely those bastards were cutting a hole in it! The drones hastily undid her crash harness and she pulled her pistol from her holster. She hurried over to the main reactor cut off and through the emergency switch, starting the spool up on what power she had left in the capacitor banks. There wasn't enough for the weapons but maybe she could get some other stuff running.

The buzz in the corner of her eye whipped he head around a moment before a las bolt blasted out of a hallway, striking her chair and blowing a chunk of plastic to greasy smoke. Jocasta fired back with her beamer, spinning the appature wide so it blasted out in a sheet. It wasn't potent enough to kill that way, but the scream from her attacker informed her that he had just recieved the worst sunburn of his life. One of her drones darted forward and triggered a hydraulic override and the pressure door slammed down sealing the bridge. That was only a temporary reprieve of course. As soon as they got Neil off the ship they would blow the Dragonfly to atoms. She needed to change the game. Pulling open an emergency locker she pulled out a vacumn helmet and pulled it on, powering it up as she vented the bridge air, blowing out a storm of candy wrappers and bottle caps. She disengaged the artifical grav and floated out with it, catching the lip of the cockpit glass and swinging herself out onto the hull. With a leap she launched herself down the ventral spine of the grasshopper to where the attacking missleboat lay clamped like a lion on its meat. She reached the airlock and pulled a small cutting tool from her belt. Carefully she slit the rubber umbilicus open and slid through with minimal spillage of air. The guard at the hard lock gave her a shocked look. She shot him in the chest, this time with her beamer dialed up needle fine, dropping him where he stood. A few moments later and she was inside the enemy ship. She pulled a data chip from a hair pin and plugged it into the enemy mainframe. It only took a minute for military grade counter encryption programs to break in.

"Yuck, where did this mother learn to board?!" Cygi declared as she appeared beside Jocasta. The AI was dressed in a ghillisuit of bright pink fabric. Jocasta grinned.

"I have a plan."

Bodacious Bounties: Bounty Hunter AU

"Oh for Stars sake!" Jocasta snapped, jumping to her feet and pitching the remainder of her beer into the recycler. She gave Neil a sour look.

"If these are friends of yours and they break my ship, I shall be very put out!" She declared jumping into a nearby grav chute. The area of localized gravity made her 'fall' upwards and so she gracefully landed on the command deck. Cygi was already in position, for once she appeared as she was programmed, a featureless female figure of silvery light standing in front of the signals console. Jocasta dived into the pilots chair, grabbing the controls as dragonfly drones zipped around her, fastening her crash webbing. There were six incoming swarm missiles, a full salvo from a converted torpedo boat that was several hundred thousand kilometers behind them. It had been lurking in a line of regular traffic which had caused the sensors to disregard it. A second ship, a converted bulk freighter was pulling out to join it, though it seemed to be armed only with beam weapons.

Jocasta wrenched the controls sideways, putting the Dragonfly into a long corkscrew that slewed it around its central axis. Reaching the edge of PDS range the swarm missiles burst, deploying a payload of a hundred small seeker heads. Six missiles became six hundred. Jocasta fired her PDS. Three rear mounted 20mm beams lit, pulsing gogolwatts of brilliant blue green beams of energized particles backwards like laser lights at a rave. She waggled the Dragonfly's ample nacelles in an attempt to sweeps as many warhead from the void as she could. Each time a beam touched a seeker head it burst into a brilliant brief star far to the rear of the Dragonfly. A counter appeared next to her holographic piloting rig. 823, 761, 503, 255, 190... The surviving warheads hit. Jocasta was slammed forward against her restraint harness as her status boards went red, system after system reporting overload. They had been firing EMP rounds or half the rear engines would have been blown away, but there was still a certain amount of explosive splash from the warheads rocket drivers.

"Mother fuckers!" Jocasta yelled, ripping open an emergency panel on her control chair. She pulled a pneumatic lever on a telescoping optic fiber. An old fashioned artillery gun unfolded from the hull and rotated around, providing a low tech gunsight view through the optics. Both the enemy vessels were coming on fast, intent on boarding. Jocasta centered the gunsight on the the freighter and pulled the firing lanyard. She felt the gun crash through the hull and saw an explosion blossom on the bow of the overconfident freighter. Its forward section blew out in a spray of escaping air which torqued it sideways and away from the Grasshopper. A low powered beam from the missile boat swatted the old fashioned gun a moment before it's boarding claws clanged against the hull.

Death's Edge: A Warhammer Story

The problem was that I didn't. The moment Schultz showed his face Marco's men would fall upon us like wolves, or, if the Imperials saw him first they would come charging out to save him, causing a bloodbath. What was worse is that we couldn't go back either. Any moment now more troops from one side or the other were going to come up behind us and the whole game would be up. I chewed on my lip for a moment and then ducked into a side room emerging a moment later with a mostly empty wine bottle. I dabbed a little of the content onto my wrists.

"When I call, you run, all of you run right into the Imperial wing," I instructed. Kian gave me a worried look but I was already moving forward. I added a half drunken, half lascivious roll to my hips as I strode down the hall into the battle. Waving the bottle in cheery good humor I began to sing. The tune was a common Tilean folk song, familiar in every tavern and piazza on the city. At first I bawled it out half incoherently, for all the world like a drunk celebrant wandering into the wrong party. The shooting stopped for a moment as all eyes turned to me. I continued to sing, but to the confusion of the Tileans, I didn't sing in my own language. I sang in Reikspiel of which few of the mercenaries would know..

"Make way for Hortiman!
Don't shoot at Hortiman
Ambassador Hortiman
And Sigmar too!"

The tune didn't exactly fit the words, but it sounded vaguely right to Tilean ears. I was willing to bet that while some of the Dogs of War might recognize the ambassadors last name, none of them would recognize his given name. I was also willing to bet that every Imperial would. I continued to drunkenly dance, twirling and dipping in as distracting a manner as I could conspire.

"Make way for Hortiman!
Don't shoot at Hortiman
Ambassador Hortiman
And Sigmar too!"

An evil looking footman with a bloodied short sword took a step towards me and grabbed me by the arm. I giggled and leaned forward as though to kiss him.

"Signoritta this isn't the place..."

"RUN!" I screamed in his face. The footman recoiled back in shock and sudden concern. I brought the bottle around in a whistling arch that cracked him in the side of the head with a musical thonk. His eyes rolled up into his head and he fell bonelessly to the floor.

"Run!" I yelled again and pitched the bottle at the nearest Tilean with all my strength.

Death's Edge: A Warhammer Story

I smiled at Maximo's enthusiasm but the reality was that all the Triumvirs would be forted up by now. Marco had probably sent assassins after both his co-rulers but, for reasons of their own, they had been elsewhere on their own business when the assassins had arrived. That didn't mean Marco wouldn't win out of course, if he had the Imperial war chest, he would be able to sway the condottieri to his side, which meant he would eventually prevail through strength if not guile.

We entered the council room from a side door. It was all but empty, a few courtiers and nervous looking servants clustered about, speaking in low voices. Predictably none of the Triumvirs were present, the thrones were empty symbols of power in Remas, it was in arms that the real strength of the state was to be found.

"I must away," Maximo said stiffly. I gripped the sleeve of this bed gown to prevent him.

"By now the streets are filled with soldiers," I explained. There were no sounds of battle coming from the streets any longer. That meant either all sides were forted up waiting for word from the palace, or one side had won a decisive victory. All sides would be happy to butcher Maximo, if only to lay the blame for his murder on their opponents and court Luccinian help in taking the throne.

"Then what can we do?" Maximo demanded, throwing his hands up theatrically. I nodded to the Imperial Ambassador.

"Herr Shultz has forty men holed up in the east wing, if we can rejoin them, then wait for nightfall, we might be able to slip out of he city."

Bodacious Bounties: Bounty Hunter AU

Jocasta pondered the question. Bounty hunting wasn't a trade for those that were particularly squeamish, the types of people who could afford to have their enemies hunted down were rarely pleasant. There were various ways of justifying the work, few of them satisifying in the long term.

"To be honest," Jocasta admitted, "you aren't normally the kind of target I go after. It just so happened that I stumbled across you in the Soak Stack."

"I just happened to be in town when my actual target got hit by a ground car, just bad luck I stumbled across you. I have no idea what you might have done to get such a huge bounty put on you, but I have a ship to run, Cygi to keep in computing power, all that."

"Also you don't know you are going to be executed. No one pays 5.4 millions to have someone brought in alive if they are just going to kill them. It'd be way cheaper to have me shoot you and take a gene sample."

The Enemy Beyond: Warhammer 40,000 Inquisitor RP

I had conducted considerable purification work in preperation. Upon returning from the underhive I had bathed twice. Once a simple cleansing of the flesh, the second a medative bath with sacred ungents, oils, and a thousand strokes of a blessed brush. I had dressed in immaculate robes of gray silk, never worn and never to be worn again. I wore earings, rings, and bracelets of silver, each piece from an inheritance. I had meditated for several hours, attempting to purge the vestiges of my previous ritual from my mind.

"I'm as ready as I can be," I told Hadrian and I moved the two halves of the scroll together. There was no sudden surge of warp energy, no dramatic dimming of the lights. Nothing untoward happened. I fixed my eyes on the top of the text and began to read.

"It appears to be a standard Ministorum tract," I observed, my eyes following the words as they spilled down the page. They were printed in high gothic, there as no giltwork but the style was highly ornate. It was printed but the type face used had been fashioned after actual writing. I had seen such tricks in the past, attempts to pass of printed works as originals by famous poets or authors.

"Printing presses," I realized, "that is what they were destroying with the flamers."

"It is an injunction to follow the teachings of Him on Earth, to obey the consel of true clerics," I continued, deliberately using different words to those presented in the text.

"It says to ob...ob.. ob ... ob..." my mouth worked on the syllable. My eyes told me it was the first part of the word obey, but my mind sought to unpack more from the word. It was as if entire syllogies of meaning were packed into those first two letters. My mind flashed back to the texts we had recovered from the dig site on Havenos.

"ob.. ob.." my mouth continued to work. I could hear Hadrian shouting my name, taste my own blood in my mouth. Pain tore threw me like an electric shock, the very neurons of my brain aflame. It was the Word. If only could get the word out of my mouth it would all be ok. It was a matter of pleasant fraternal confidence. I was in a classroom with dozens of other children, each attractive and well groomed. Stern faced proctors watched us as we recited from plates of etched copper.

I could smell burning, the thick pile of carpet around the edges of the warding circle was smoldering. Hadrian had slapped the scroll out of my hands. I could see the letters O and B had burned through the parchment every place they occurred. It was going to break me. I would not be broken. I could not. Not until I had warned Hadrian of what was buried in the innocuous scroll. My will crystalized in an instant and I smashed at the obstacle in my head with the full force of my psykanna gifts.

"ob..." I gabbled. Hadrian slapped me hard across the face, snapping my head to the side.

"Obey!" I screamed and dropped to the floor, my body shaking with exhaustion and my mind fluttering with images of the dig site. The long hours I had spent trying to decode the mythic cycles. They had learned the word, and the word had made slaves of them. I could see the swamps being drained by blasphemous eight armed xenos with stone tools. Hundreds of them pausing in unison to bay their obedience to their God-King on his cyclopean throne. I knew without a doubt that if it hadn't been for the extensive safeguards Hadrian had put in place, I would have been reduced to a mindless and obedient slave in an instant.

"It's a Geas," I said, my lips split and bleeding from the effort of speaking a word that was not a word.

"A compulsion to serve," I explained as Hadrian helped me to my feet.

"That is why the tribesmen died when their chieftains were killed, why they kept attacking when normal men would have run," I realized, suddenly replaying the attack on Havenos.

"Throne above, they can bind people like insects to a hive Hadrian."

Bodacious Bounties: Bounty Hunter AU

Jocasta slid a can of beer into the chute. It rattled and bumped its way into the cell. Neil picked up the can and opened it, foam bubbled up out of the shaken can and he hastily slurped it down. She opened her own beer, which owing to not being bounced around, behaved itself. She sat down and took a bite of green chewy candy.

"It isn't really a gig that does alot for dating. You know how it is, you meet someone fun, then you have to eletrocute them and drag them into the hold of a jump ship," she said philisophically before taking another sip of beer. Cygi transformed from her sexy school teacher into a hulking mass of metal armor and a jump pack. The jump pack lit silently and blasted her into the ceiling, into which she vanished before reappearing from a closet, blowing smoke out from beneath a dented visor.

"Interesting that you were equally worried about cops and clinging women, but not to worry, I gave your notice to your boss and found a home for your goldfish," she assured him.

"I also bought the Callisto. It was a pretty fun ride."

Death's Edge: A Warhammer Story

I will admit to feeling a little bad at this juncture but truthfully terror was the dominant emotion. It wasn’t so much the immediate situation, though that was bad enough, but there were simply so many plots and counterplots going on that my brain was struggling to keep track and that struggle brought with it a fear of being strangled by any given thread. The smart thing to do was to accept Imelda’s gratitude and help her part of the coup succeed. That would be easy, she already had the ambassador and Marco’s men were on their way to attack the Imperial position. She could take them from behind and then, with the aid of Luccini, easily depose Romeo. At a stroke she could take command of Remas and all the blame could be easily laid at the feet of her fellow Triumvirs.

I bowed my head in acquiescence accepting her praise, stepping away from Kian and the Lucinni ambassador, whom posterity requires me to name as Maximo Panio, taking my place to the side of Imelda’s guards. I had no doubt the Convent would be pleased that I had managed to install myself in the court of the Mistress of Remas. I was sure Imelda viewed my assistance as trifling, despite her glowing words, although if she knew Kian as well as I did she might have found greater wells of thanks. Still, I didn’t doubt that I would quickly prove useful to her, rising in her service and increasing my own power and influence.

But why stop there? I could send Imelda to finish Marco and take the Imperial gold myself. With the Luccini ambassador to back me and an alliance with the surviving Imperial troops and a few condottieri, I could probably win a Triumvir’s seat for myself. If things really broke my way, perhaps the sole seat until ‘fair’ elections at an unspecified by distant time. With the help of the Convent I could end the war with Trantio and consolidate my position. Within a year I would be the undisputed Mistress of Remas. A wan smile came across my lips as the thought.

“Wait, we are Imperial…” Kian objected, taking a step back, eyes darting around seeking escape. There was no where for him to go, even if he were willing to abandon his Ambassador to certain death. He cast me a look that was part imploring part reproachful. I shrugged my shoulder with studied unconcern as the soldiers stalked towards him. All eyes were on Kian as I slipped a knife from my sleeve and slashed the rope holding a candelabra aloft. There was a squeal of rope through ungreased pulley as the three hundred pound ring of wrought brass crashed downwards. I snatched the rope and leaped into the air, allowing just the final moment of its descent to yank me another few feet upwards. Two of Imelda’s condottieri were two slow. I heard bones crack as they both went down under the weight of brass and wax. Everyone was shouting in confusion, a crossbow fired and I heard timber split wherever it struck. I reached the apex of my arc and straightened, coming down with the full weight of my body aimed through my heels like a spear. I struck one of the surviving condottieri between the shoulderblades and he flew across the room, smashing himself senseless against a stone wall. The two survivors dodged backwards, carrying Imelda to safety through the doorway. One of them lifted a crossbow but Maximo hurled a marble bust into the man's face, spoiling his shot and breaking the fellows jaw to boot. The uninjured one grabbed for the Imperial Ambassador but Kian brought his staff down with both hands, smashing the man’s wrist. He reeled backwards cursing a blue streak as I kicked the foot of the door. It whipped around despite its weight crashing closed. It rebounded off the frame but Maximo, either sensing my intent, or having the same idea himself, lurched forward, hitting it with his considerable bulk and driving it closed, shooting the metal bolt with a trembling hand.

“Well,” I mumbled, picking up a rapier from where it had fallen.

“Is there a collective noun for a group of ambassadors? If I go back and get du Pounce do I have a Windbag?”