It was barely an hour later when Puck found himself sitting outside a small bar and grill that tried to make a pretense of fashionability by providing an outdoor seating area. He had abandoned his thoughts of getting something to eat after witnessing the food on the other diners’ plates, and resigned himself to drinking his lunch. The glasses didn’t look any cleaner than the food….in fact, the bartender had given him a dirty look when he’d used one of the napkins to wipe off the rim of his first shot, but the brownish streaks left behind on the white paper made Puck feel perfectly justified in his actions…..but at least he was relatively certain that whatever he was drinking was more than strong enough to kill any surviving germs.
The place had been empty when he’d arrived, but it was late afternoon now, and people were starting to drift in, leaving their work day behind. He’d been nursing his third shot for half an hour now, maybe more; alcohol affected him just as it would any of his fellow diners, and it wouldn’t do to become intoxicated. He could already feel a subtle flush in his cheeks that probably, legally anyway, should have prevented him from piloting a craft, and he definitely couldn’t afford to spend more time here than necessary.
Puck had never been a big drinker. Granted, he enjoyed a good time—what was life if you didn’t live it, after all?—but that good time didn’t always have to involve clouding his mind with booze. He watched a pair of the local prostitutes crossing the street, laughing and giggling with each other as they tried to catch the attention of a group of miners on the other side. There are plenty of other fun vices, after all, he thought to himself with a faint twitch of his lips.
The only problem would be finding one of those vices that wasn’t pock marked, weatherbeaten and worn like those two. It had quickly become obvious that there were two classifications of prostitute here on this colony: the experienced (read: unattractive, to be kind. The scientist in him told him that they were probably in the lifestyle to procure money to feed a drug habit, judging by their general appearance), and the far too young, many of whom seemed to be wearing some kind of government issued uniform, if he was seeing the symbols on their sleeves correctly. There were a few colonies where prostitution was legal; did they require uniforms? Seemed strange, but he knew one thing. If he had to choose between older and unappealing and far too young and at least a little appealing, even if the fact made him feel like a dirty old man, he was going for youth. He still had over two hours to kill, after all.
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I was more than halfway through town when I spotted Amber. She was standing in the alley between the liquor shop and the bank, with some guy in a cloak murmuring something in her ear. Her eyes lit on me, and whatever he said, it sent her into a fit of giggles that left me rolling my eyes and deciding to just pass on by without acknowledging her at all. And I would have done just that, if not for the fact that I was just tall enough to get a decent look at him as I passed by.
He wasn’t human.
I couldn’t help it, I stared as I passed by. I’d never seen a nonhuman in the flesh before; Voltaire was an all human colony. I didn’t dislike offworlders….not like most of the people who lived here, anyway….it was just a shock, something I wasn’t prepared for, to see an alien whispering into my roommate’s ear.
He caught my gaze as I walked by, odd looking copper eyes locking with mine for a long moment. His eyes widened, like something had surprised him, too, but there was nothing strange about me. If anything, I was horribly ordinary looking. Even beneath the hood of his cloak, I could tell that compared to the citizens of this world, he was almost……beautiful. Maybe beautiful wasn’t quite the right word for it, but compared to the people I saw every day, there was an unnatural perfection about him that probably would have stood out like a sore thumb, were he not trying to conceal himself in the shadows. I’d never seen a human with eyes that color before, that was for sure, and even the similar coppery color of the few locks of hair the peeked out of his hood were….
Oh, shit. He was walking towards me. I turned around and started walking again.
I could hear Amber’s voice from behind me, demanding indignantly to know where the hell he was going, I wasn’t even into… I didn't hear the rest of what she said; I started walking a little faster. Okay, a lot faster. He was following me! What was I supposed to do now? Plenty of guys had come up to me and said…stuff….but none of them had ever chased me before! Could I outrun him? What was he going to do if he caught me? Should I go inside one of the bars?
I felt a hand close over my arm, and I was turned around sharply. He was just….staring at me, with those same wide eyes and dumbstruck expression, and he breathed in sharply after a second or two. “Oh….my God.”
I thought my heart was going to stop. I was scared, sure, but I was confused as hell, and suddenly, out of the blue, I was angry. Not even just angry; I was pissed off, and I could feel heat rising in my cheeks. I didn’t even realize that my books had all fallen to the ground when he stopped me; it didn't matter who he was, or even what he was, or what he wanted from me. He was suddenly the embodiment of every guy who'd ever leered at me as I was walking home, every miner who'd whistled at me as I passed by the bar, every drunk bastard who'd ever stumbled up to me on the sidewalk to ask me if I wanted to go have a little fun. “What the hell do you want?” I nearly yelled, shoving at him with both hands. I think the momentum pushed me away from him, rather than the other way around, but either way it had the desired effect. “Didn’t you hear her? I’m not interested! Stay the fuck away from me!” He was still just staring at me, his hand still outstretched as if he wanted to reach for me again, and his mouth was open like he was going to say something to me, but nothing came out. I took my opportunity; I turned around and ran as fast as I could.
I didn’t even make it to the end of the street before the raid began.
The small, individually piloted crafts darted down from the colony's engineered atmosphere, raining down small, explosive shots that knocked away pieces of building, gouged holes in the sidewalks, turned the air around them into smoke. They didn't want to destroy the colony, after all. They only wanted to steal what the miners had worked so hard to glean from the asteroid's rocky bowels, so they could sell it at a ridiculously inflated price on the black market. So their strategy was simple, but effective: attack the town, attack the mines. Terrify the populace into running for shelter, after they saw a few of their friends and neighbors killed off by ricocheting shots or crushed under collapsing buildings, and then send down their huge mother ship to pick up the abandoned ore from the mines. Pirate attacks seldom lasted more than fifteen or twenty minutes, but they were frighteningly effective; the entire city scrambled for hiding, the few shelters quickly filling up and leaving people fighting to get inside, to get anywhere before being crushed by falling debris or picked off by a random explosive.
I knew better than to try to make it to a shelter. There was no point in it; by the time I got to the nearest one, nearly half a mile away, it would be packed full, with everyone else in the vicinity beating each other bloody to try and get inside. There was an abandoned storefront on the corner, not the safest place....but it had an underground floor, I used to go down there all the time when it had been a bookstore, and the shopkeeper had kept all his used and discount books down there (Yeah. As you might imagine, a bookshop didn’t really rake in the money on Voltaire.). I ducked inside, where the side doors used to be…it had been damaged pretty bad in the last attack….and made a dash for the stairwell. It was dark, and I had to pick my way down the stairs carefully, but finally I felt solid ground under my feet, and I breathed a sigh of relief. There was no way that stupid alien sleazeball was going to find me down here.
Almost right away I felt guilty for the thought. I wasn’t prejudiced….at least, I tried very hard not to be. The nonhuman races enjoyed full citizenship status just as much as any human, and from what I knew, it was just backwater colonies like mine where prejudice ran rampant. I’d never met anybody from a nonhuman race before today, but I didn’t really think that they were different from anybody else.
Then again, he was making out with one high school girl in an alley, and then chasing after another. That pretty much constituted a sleazeball in my book, so I recanted my guilt about that particular thought.
When my eyes finally adjusted to the darkness….at least as well as they were going to, it was very close to pitch black down there…I made my way to behind the stairwell, where the oversize books used to be housed. There were still a few scattered books on the shelf that was still there in all its dusty familiarity, and I smiled a little, very briefly forgetting about the thundering explosions and screams above my head. I missed the bookstore, it had been familiar and comfortable, and the shopowner had let me come in there and spend hours just sitting and reading the books. But after his first pirate raid, he’d closed up shop almost overnight and headed off for parts unknown. I couldn’t blame him. If I’d had a choice in the matter, I’d have done the same thing.
Footsteps from overhead jerked my attention back to reality. I froze, in the hopes that it was just someone else looking for shelter.
“Hey.” I almost didn’t recognize the voice, laced with amusement as it was (amusement that, by the way, irritated me to no end without my really knowing why). “You’re not too good at hiding, you know that…?”
