R. Garcia y Robertson - Fair Verona

Harpo signaled that he had an infrared contact, bearing ZERO-THREE-ZERO, just shy of a large clearing caused by the fall of a forest giant. Toni headed for the contact, spiraling down through slanting lanes of Prospero light filled with gaily colored day moths.

Pandora had picked a perfect spot for her pick-up. The fallen Goliath had taken out a dozen lesser trees, tearing a huge rent in the canopy. Clear sky showed through the ragged hole, and much of the tangle beneath had been flattened by falling timbers. Toni set down atop a mossy pile of toppled logs. Insects whirred up to greet him.

Pandora appeared, breaking cover to Toni’s left, still wearing her synthetic leopard-skin. Her thigh-length boots were covered in mud, and her lacquered hair had drooping spikes—otherwise she seemed in decent shape. Scrambhng atop the log pile, she leaped from timber to timber toward him.

Toni lifted an eyebrow as she hopped aboard the skycycle behind him, landing on the back half of the banana seat. “Lady Silvia Lucetta Visconti?”

“Sorry about that, I was incredibly desperate.” She sounded as if she meant it, particularly the last part. Her arms looped around his waist, pressing her hips against his back. “Let’s go!”

“You almost got me killed,” he pointed out.

“Might still happen,” she assured him.

As if bent on proving her right, Harpo came crashing out of the undergrowth. Cyborg faces cannot register shock, but Harpo did come to a dead stop, sensors pointed forward. Not waiting for Harpo to recover, Toni kicked the emergency release on the skycycle’s hydrogen bottle.

The cycle’s gas bag ballooned above them, lifting the skycycle off the log pile. Toni backpedaled furiously, keeping them aimed at the hole in the canopy. Harpo dwindled until he looked like a plasti-metal toy abandoned in the clearing.

Pandora pulled them tighter together. Spiked hair tickled his neck. “Smashing. Absolutely smashing,” she purred into his ear—her voice had a rich timbre to it, worthy of a Visconti heiress. Or a beautiful, wealthy young widow, with holdings in a dozen star systems. Obviously on top of the universe, she started giving orders, “Head for the Beanstalk. There’s a gravity-drive yacht waiting on Pair-a-Dice. A Fornax Skylark—fast enough to get us comfortably lost.”

Toni nodded, happy to have somewhere to run to. But at the moment, he had his hands full with the here-and-now, keeping the overloaded skycycle on an even keel while balancing his 3V deck on his lap. No easy task with Pandora holding tight to him, hips and breasts pressed against his spine, her hands clasped just above his groin. He eyed her over his shoulder. “Doing okay?”

“Sure, great. Can’t you tell?” She plainly aimed to make the most of the moment. Passing through the canopy, Toni kept on going, meaning to get all the height he could out of the gas bag. For a laboring skycycle trying to make a quick getaway, altitude is everything.

Trouble appeared almost at once. A silver gleam below them whipped into a quick climbing turn. The Dragon Hunt hovercar. Doc and Ali must have picked up Harpo and were now coming for him.

He shouted to Pandora, “Hold tight.” Releasing the gas bag and the spent hydrogen bottle, Toni put the skycycle into a screaming dive. He had no chance of outrunning a jet-powered hovercar, but the dive would give him airspeed to work with—and the chance to make something happen.

Doc put in a call to him, “Toni, what in hell do you think you’re doing?”

Having no good answer, Toni hung grimly into the dive. Treetops rushed up to greet him. The hovercar did another fast turn and bored after him. “Give it up, Toni, we’ve got the speed to run you down.” That was Harpo.

They had the speed, but not the agility. Spotting a hole in the forest canopy, Toni side-slipped and angled in, dodging between kilometer-tall trunks. The hovercar could not follow without risking hitting its rotors on the foliage or whacking into a tree. They had to throttle down just to draw even with him.

“Come on, Toni, we can make a deal.” That was Doc again, ever the reasonable one.

“I doubt it.” No deals. Toni had them right where he wanted them. He backpedaled, forcing them to come to a complete halt, hovering just above the canopy. Branches rattled in the propwash.

“Nobody cares about you,” Harpo assured him.

Toni smirked. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Give up the woman and we’ll see you get away.” Ah tried to sound like they had his interests at heart.

Toni was not even tempted. Without Pandora, he was just a loose end, waiting to be done away with. “They’re going to kill her,” he reminded them. “Just like they killed Gracchus.”

“That’s not our business,” Harpo protested.

“Too bad, it should be.” Toni hit the control key on his deck, sending out a coded signal.

The Wyvyrn roared out of its hiding place, saber-like mandibles flashing, wing segments beating, spine-tipped tail lashing. Given what had happened, the great segmented beast didn’t need much encouragement from its control collar to fly into a blind frenzy. Toni merely gave its anger direction.

Doc managed to get off an anguished MAYDAY before the monster hit. Imagine a huge hundred-meter centipede, with wings instead of feet, slamming into the light plastic-aluminum hovercar. The ship’s lifting body hull crumpled, and the hovercar flipped over, spinning out of control. It went whirling into the canopy, with the Wyvyrn still clinging to the hull, stabbing at it again and again with its giant stinging tail.

“That will teach you to trifle with the Noble Dog!” Toni couldn’t hang around to enjoy the virtual deaths of Doc, Ah, and Harpo’s cyborg bodies. Putting business ahead of pleasure, he pedaled off between the trees. Soon he was lost among the tourists swarming atop the standing wave at Elysium’s windward rim.

Pandora sat comfortably safe in her yacht, a drink in her hand, her back to the Skylark’s main viewport, looking like she had swallowed the canary. A mobile auto-bar stood moored beside her couch, serving up a frothy blue liquor that misted like hquid oxygen.

Behind her, projected in the viewport, lay Pair-a-Dice yacht harbor, backed by starlit void. Pair-a-Dice had grown in haphazard fashion from the original geosync station and Beanstalk terminus. Pleasure domes and gaming palaces came right up to the harbor edge, sticking out at odd angles amid the repair slips and taxi stands. The whole gleaming jumble ended abruptly in empty space. The “harbor” was merely a parking area around the geosync point. A couple of orbital yachts were clearly visible, and taxis going ship to shore showed up as tiny moving sparks. But most of the parked spacecraft were mere points of light, lost among the stars.

She told Toni, “Gracchus was damned good to me. We married for his money, but that didn’t make me hate him. Trouble was, too many folks stood to make trillions by his death. Like his bitch of a First Wife, and her little fuck-mate Selene. You remember her? Came to the Wyvyrn hunt in a faerie gown?”

Toni nodded idly. Pandora had been doing all the talking, happy to be rich and alive.

“I mean, the guy was worth giga-credits. In Aesir system, he owned his own goddamn moon! My measly 2 percent was worth killing for a billion times over.” Intersystem law made a small but immutable provision for secondary spouses.

She grinned at him. “Without a doubt, you saved my butt. And I’m gonna be grateful. Outrageously grateful. I’m fabulously rich, which is all I ever wanted to be. And I’ve seen way too many assholes stepping on people’s faces to get somewhere, forgetting who gave them their start. Well, that ain’t me.” Pandora laughed provocatively, “Prepare to be rewarded beyond your wildest dreams!”