BOB's Bar (Tales From The Multiverse Book 2) Read online

  Rika held up her hand and made a metal fist. “It’s hard not to break stuff when I get into a scuffle—granted, same goes for Barne, with his prosthetic arm…but unlike me, breaking stuff is his favorite thing to do.

  “Anyway, I don’t know where it came from, but I got this crazy idea and screamed, ‘Throw them in the ring!’ At first no one moved, but then I grabbed the guy in front of me—who was still trying to get the grease out of his nose—and heaved him into the ring. No more than five seconds later, the crowd was on their feet, wrestling the other five cloaked dingbats into the ring. One of the goons tried to get some shots off with his pulse rifle, but Barne cold-cocked him in the head, and that was that.

  “As soon as the six cloaked figures were in the ring, all of the previously vanquished fighters from the night appeared out of nowhere and leaped into the pit, which kicked off this crazy free-for-all. The announcer had found his voice, or come back from the can, or whatever, and was trying to call out what was happening, but there was no way he could keep up.

  “Earlier in the evening, I’d spotted a big tank of the grease hanging over the pit, so now I decided to make things extra fun. My GNR—” Rika paused to pat her gun-arm and then the barrel on her back, “—fires depleted uranium rods. I took aim and hit the grease tank with a DPU and cracked it wide open. The shot was a bit loud, but no one really noticed it over the commotion, until a thousand more liters of that glorious, brown goo came pouring dow—”

  “Annnnd that was when the cops showed up,” Niki interrupted.

  “Of course,” Kelsey grumbled. “Right at the good part.”

  “Wait. Weren’t you the cops?” Floribeth asked.

  “Well, sorta. See, the Marauders are mercs who mostly work for the Septhian Government—at least, we did at the time—so when we took over the Politica, we invited the Septhians to come in and run the place, since we’re not really set up to police a populace. The folks who showed up at this grease fight were the Septhian Military Police.”

  “Called by me,” Niki interjected, “as soon as those cloaked party poopers showed up.”

  “Not that it did a lot of good,” Rika continued. “By that point, the entire place was one giant, grease-covered melee and the MPs didn’t stand a chance when everyone there started lobbing grease balls at them.

  “In all the commotion, Chase got to the edge of the pit and helped pull Leslie out. The four of us managed to leave while the fight was still going on, only we didn’t get far. It’s hard to sneak through a station when you’re covered in brown grease that’s sliding off you in big rubbery globs.”

  Rika resisted the urge to look over her arm and check for any residual grease, as Niki spoke up.

  “My favorite part was General Mill just about laughing his ass off while he was trying to reprimand the four of you,” the AI said with a low chuckle. “You all looked so pathetic, standing in the ship’s cargo bay while the crew hosed you down.”

  “Silver lining.” Rika nodded, remembering how hard the general had laughed when Barne had slipped and fallen and the bay chief just kept the hose on him—pinning the man to the deck. “Of course, it took me a day to get the grease out of all my nooks and crannies, which was why I hadn’t wanted to be in the damn thing in the first place. Leslie helped, though—partially because I threatened to cut her tail off—you know, since she was the one who sprayed me down when she attacked those dipshits.”

  “So, who were the party poopers?” Amanda asked.

  “Oh, yeah, those six goons? They were all folks who had been happily trading slaves when Stavros was running things. With the glory days over, they were trying to make a quick buck by selling ‘people of extreme interest.’ Granted, I don’t know why they tried to take Leslie right in the middle of the pit fight. Kind of a dumb move.”

  “No one said they were good at their jobs,” Niki pointed out.

  Rika nodded. “Well, that was a given. So there you have it, folks. A crazy night out, on a crazy station.”

  Interlude

  “I totally want to go partying with you,” Kelsey said enthusiastically when Rika finished.

  “That grease wrestling sounds kinda fun. Sticky and yucky, but fun! Kinda like jello wrestling. I wish I’d been there to see that,” Amanda told Rika.

  “Me, too. Preferably in battle armor, though,” Charline added.

  Amanda laughed. “We could be the Battle-Armor Babes.”

  “Works for me.” Rika joined in the laughter. “Especially since I have no other outfits. Sorry if that story was a bit weird. I have a lot of others, but to be honest, the grim battles all blend together. That crazy grease fight is something I’ll remember forever. It’s the stupid shit that stands out, you know?”

  BOB was not programmed to discern truthfulness. Many of the previous species in its missions did not know how to lie. That, or it had never occurred to them. Not so the humans, who seemed to relish the art. BOB could, however, note biological readings and determine the rough probabilities of whether a human was being honest or not.

  Rika’s story did not seem at first blush to have a high probability of having occurred as related, but when BOB ran its biologicals Rika’s readings were normal, indicating that she had been telling the truth. There was something about her that was interfering with its scanners, though.

  Rika, Bethany Anne, Blackhawk, Amanda, Artur—all were outside the human norm. They were all technically human...but not a hundred percent. At least not a hundred percent of the norm. The Collector normally wanted data from a species mean, not the outliers.

  At least all of the remaining subjects, save two, were within normal human ranges, so BOB could reset its scanners to their baselines.

  Of course, as soon as they were reset, it was Bethany Anne who spoke next.

  Bethany Anne’s Sea Story

  By Michael Anderle

  “So,” Bethany Anne said, looking around the table. “This story starts at a point in my life when we were still on our home planet, Earth. I had been trying to get a bunch of idiot public servants, commonly called ‘politicians,’ to do their damned jobs by using logic.”

  “Logic and politics?” Amanda replied. “Not good bedfellows. I can imagine how that went.”

  “Fucking horribly,” she answered Amanda, taking a sip of her drink as she remembered the time. “About as well as selling snow cones in hell. Which is to say, a great idea but impossible to execute.” She tapped the arm of her chair. “In my frustration, I was starting to snap at my guys, who were there to be muscle and stop idiots from doing something that might cause me to accidentally yank off their arms and beat their heads with them.”

  She turned her head as Cain asked, “Is that a normal solution for you?”

  Bethany Anne put up a hand and tilted it back and forth, “It’s my preferred response in my internal dialogue, I’ve been really good about not doing it.” She shrugged, “But the temptation is always there.”

  “You’re my hero,” Kelsey asserted.

  “I’ve actually done that,” Rika told them with a predatory grin. “Yanked people’s arms off and beat them to death with their own limbs. Twice…no, three times. There was also that one time I pulled a woman’s spine out and—”

  “TMI!” Niki interrupted, and Rika clamped her mouth shut and shrugged. “Not as bad as a shit-jet.”

  She noticed more than one head nodding in agreement. Maybe she wasn’t so strange.

  “Have you ever succumbed to temptation?” “ Ridge asked.

  Bethany Anne’s eyebrows drew together in thought as she pulled up her hands to count. Both started as fists, but she had fingers going up quickly. She leaned forward and studied her feet. A moment later, she looked up. “Sorry, not enough fingers and toes.” She smiled. “I’ve lived a long time, and politicians haven’t gotten any easier to deal with. However, my patience during those many years did get worse.”

  She leaned back. “I provided that bit of background to show that I’d been growing fru
strated, more than I’d normally handle, and it looked like I was going to have a negotiations setback when I either pulled the aforementioned arm off or stuck a very expensive high-heeled shoe up their ass. Since I didn’t want to waste a shoe, I decided to play hooky to blow off some steam, and I ditched my security team. After slipping into a store, I grabbed some street clothes including these really cute white pants and a pair of tennis shoes, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to ruin the heels on my stilettos. I tossed my stuff into a bag, hid it, and started walking around. I got bored, so I grabbed a taxi and moved farther out into the suburban area. That was my big mistake.”

  Bethany Anne’s shoulders dropped, “I shit you not—this is the truth—I became an umpire for a kids’ football game.”

  The hands lifting glasses to take a swallow of their drinks stopped and lowered. “Do what?” they all asked.

  “No shit.” She nodded, taking a swallow as they waited. “Apparently, I looked like one of the soccer moms who was supposed to come from another area and help, so here I am taking a shortcut through a park’s parking lot, minding my own business, when I hear a shout. I look around, and this big white doughy-looking man with thinning blond hair is huffing and puffing toward me. The look in his eyes was one part hope and two parts desperation—never a good combination. I wanted to forget Senator Shit-for-Brains and his stupid request for us to bequeath all of our technology, so I turned in this guy’s direction as a possible escape.”

  “Wait a moment,” Floribeth interjected, her eyebrows scrunched in confusion. “The government wanted what?”

  She nodded. “They wanted my company, which had acquired knowledge of how to create Etherically-powered gravity-warping technology. We used it to do a lot of advanced space travel, among other things. His arguments were all bullshit, and he was threatening to send the full force of the United States military against my companies. Now, they had been based in the country a few years before but had since moved into outer space. Apparently, the asshat didn’t understand the concept that the group at the bottom of the gravity well did not have the stronger negotiating position.”

  A few winces occurred among the group. Ridge looked a little puzzled at all the lingo but sipped from his mug to cover his confusion.

  “I was in a Marine pinnace that crashed and burned because a crazy AI dropped an asteroid on me while committing suicide,” Kelsey told them all, her face a bit drawn. “It sucked.”

  “Planets suck in general,” Rika added. “Surface action always means I’m picking dirt out of my joints for a week. When we fought the Niets, it was mechs who usually got dropped, not rocks.”

  Bethany Anne nodded in sympathy. “Yes, this was the quality of the person who I was dealing with, thus the aforementioned desire to pull off his arms and use them to explain physics.”

  “So,” Standish interrupted, looking surprised, “football?”

  “Yeah.” Her mouth made one of those ‘I can’t believe this’ looks. “This guy, his name was Coach Hildebrand, runs up with a black and white shirt in his hands. “Bethany?” I nodded since it is my first name. “He hands me the shirt and tells me I’m going to be a line-judge referee or some shit and to follow him. I look down at the shirt I was handed as I followed, curious as to where this is all going. My internal pain-in-the-ass AI is starting to tell me what the responsibilities for the role are. By the time the Coach looked back, I had already shucked my top and put on the black and white shirt. I had seen and snagged a hat from a coupe with the top down and left a twenty-dollar bill in its place. He caught me pulling my hair through the little hole in the back.”

  She blushed just a little. “I figured I paid for the hat, and it wasn’t as bad a transgression as ripping off a senator’s arm and beating him with it while he bled to death. On all counts, I was golden, I thought.”

  Her eyes lost focus for the barest of moments as if she were conversing with someone else. “Oh yeah, TOM says to explain the dad I called Asshat McAsshat.” She leaned forward. “So it’s the third quarter, and the guys and the one girl are all panting. I’m pretty sure I’m running on auto-pilot at this point when ADAM, my AI hitchhiker, yells at me to turn my head. TOM takes over, and my head is turned. I’m looking around, but it’s TOM who caught that there was a bad hit on the field. I threw my yellow flag up in the air, which was when Asshat behind me starts screaming. Apparently, it was his boy that threw the bad hit. I helped explain what was wrong to the other referees, with TOM giving me the play by play of the fuckup since I hadn’t been paying attention.”

  She grinned. “Who would have thought a little kids’ football game would have these subtleties?” She took a sip as her eyes became more animated, her body vibrating as she recalled the encounter.

  “We pull the kid and I get the appropriate ruling and yell it out, plus the penalty, and I can hear Asshat’s voice and the spewed spittle landing from the middle of the field. I turn to go talk with the jackass and feel a hand on my shoulder. It was one of the other refs. He tells me that the guy is a jerk and that he works out all the time. A real ‘roid rager,’ he tells me. McAsshat liked to harass the refs when his kid did something bad and got caught.”

  “So he was trying to warn you?” Rika asked.

  “Yup,” Bethany Anne agreed. “However, this asshole was now the focus of my irritation and a way for me to release a little steam.” She pursed her lips. “He was probably six foot three to six foot five inches tall, so he had seven to nine inches at least on me, and at least two hundred pounds of muscle. I honestly couldn’t tell if he had a neck or just went shoulder muscles to skull.”

  Bethany Anne picked up her glass and waved the empty vessel at the bartender. “Can you make this a double?” she called. BOB nodded, so she returned to the conversation, Artur’s story still fresh in her mind.

  “McAsshat was blowing steam out his ears as I walked toward him. Now, his voice was belligerent, rude, and condescending and that was before I asked what piece of cowshit he grew up under. As his Neanderthal eyes narrowed, I explained that his speech was so ugly, nothing he said made any sense to me.”

  “And?”

  “He grabbed the chain link fence and threatened to rip it apart so I could say it to his face.” The bartender delivered her drink, and she nodded her thanks. “I wanted to flip him off, but I figured that might get me tossed out of the game and I was enjoying it. It took me just a second to run up to the chain link and flip over the top, to drop down about fifteen feet to the ground next to him. “I’m right here.” Bethany Anne pointed to her chest as she recounted the story. “So I ask him, ‘Why don’t I say it a bit slower to make sure you didn’t misunderstand little ol’ me?’”

  Taking a sip of the refreshed glass, she continued, “He leaned down, so I sped up my reactions and flicked him on his nose. Before he could figure out what I had done, his natural reactions made him jerk back and grab his nose. I leaned in and said the same thing, but now all of the parents in the stands were watching the two of us like a tennis match.”

  “He jerks back, cursing. Now, I speak cursing fluently, so I laughed, and I might have alluded to that fact that the quality of his cursing was equal to the size of his salami. Apparently, laughing is not considered one of the top three proper reactions to help lower tensions, and telling a man his dick is small isn’t either. However, since I was looking for a fight, I didn’t care. I think that was the first time it vaguely looked like a human’s head exploded to me. His eyes bulged, his skin went all red, and I wondered if his veins popping out meant I’d see his eyes start bleeding anytime soon.”

  “He didn’t punch you?” Cain asked.

  “No, not at that time. He made me work for it,” Bethany Anne replied. “So I went into explaining how bullying was the lowest form of stupidity possible. How raising a boy to cheat at football was about the most un-American trait I could think of at the moment, and how he should feel about four feet tall for trying to intimidate the referees on the field. I laid int
o him so hard, I wanted his dead great-great-grandparents to flinch. For a ‘roid-boy, he showed a lot of restraint. I just about had decided to give him the benefit of the doubt when he tried to sucker-punch me.

  Several of the group grimaces went around the group. “The dirty bastard. In the guts?” Artur piped in.

  Bethany Anne patted her mouth. “No, he used his right fist, which had been clenching and unclenching next to his pockets, and just shot it straight up, trying to pop me under the chin.”

  “Did he get you?” Amanda asked.

  “I considered dodging, then I considered letting him hit me, but that would have knocked me off my feet, and I didn’t want to get grass stains on my new white pants. Finally, I just slammed my right hand down on his raising fist. I stopped the momentum, then pulled back my right hand and used my left to grab his wrist. Before he knew it, I had him and he couldn’t pull away.” She shook her head, reliving the incident. “He was straining like a man possessed as I calmly held his arm. Then, he grabbed it with his other arm and tried to pull. I had to tweak my energy use to help me stay in one place or risk him lifting me toward him. That was when I might have said something about his ‘roids’ being bad quality. He glared at me and swung his left hand. I leaned into it with my forehead, and you could hear the bones cracking in his hand. His high-pitched scream was fantastic.

  “By then, the other referees had made it through the gates to get into the area with me. One of them threw a flag, said something about attacking a referee, and ejected him from the area. The other parents were pretty incensed by that time and started yelling at him to leave. That was when he made a move. I stopped enough of his momentum to not bowl me over, but I was able to make a solid connection between my upraised knee and his boys. He crumpled to the ground then, hand broken and his nuts on fire. It took three men to help him out of the parents’ area, and one of them took him to the ER. His son was watched by a neighbor, so we got the game moving again. Nothing else was as exciting after that, and no one told me shit. The other refs would glance at me occasionally, and I’d give them the most innocent look I could. They would laugh and go back to the game.”