Fiction River: Pulse Pounders by Fiction River

Author:Fiction River [River, Fiction]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: WMG Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2015-11-18T05:00:00+00:00

***

Three months later, Captain Spaulding invited Daisy and Muffy to dinner at the Forbidden Palace. It was an opulent restaurant, very expensive and very traditional in the Terran Chinese mode.

They dined on the Guangzhou Terrace, which overlooked one of Diligence’s many lakes.

Muffy and Spaulding did fine with their chopsticks, but Daisy secretly wished for a way to trade hers in for a knife and fork.

In the three months since the near miss with the Popov, everyone from the heads of the Diligence Space Port Authority down to the janitors at the canteen had been debriefed and cross-examined.

No motive for the attack had come to light, or if it had, the higher-ups hadn’t announced it, not even to the Space Marshals.

Kolya had been hustled off to a prison hospital, never to be seen or heard from again. Brian Fossberger, one of the apparent good guys, had gone missing. For a time. He’d turned up in a water-reclamation plant—very dead and very decomposed. As for the Popov, the port authority, or someone acting in the name of the port authority, had taken possession of her and had ordered her towed off to places unknown.

Capping the list of oddities, not a single word about the affair had appeared in the media, and no letters of commendation had been added to anybody’s personnel file, not to Muffy’s, not to Daisy’s, not to Spaulding’s. Officially, the incident had never happened.

Taking the hint, Daisy and Muffy had moved on. It wasn’t as though they didn’t have cases to clear and bad guys to corral.

And then had come Captain Spaulding’s invitation. He was a good boss, but he didn’t do dinners with his subordinates. Trips to the shooting range, maybe, but not dinners.

Except for this time.

Over their after-dinner coffees, Spaulding lit up one of his heroin-laced cigarettes. When it was about half gone, he took two small black boxes out of his tunic pocket. Handing them across the table, he said, “These are for you.”

The boxes contained Meritorious Service medals, complete with gold stars. They were the sort of awards given to staffers and clerical personnel.

Daisy knew without having to think it through how much effort, how many career risks Spaulding had taken in order to give them these medals. She felt the tears well up, but managed a clear and genuinely felt, “Thank you, sir. It means a tremendous amount.”

Muffy nodded her head in agreement. Her hair, which was as black as interstellar space, shimmered in the restaurant’s soft lighting.

“You’ve earned them,” Spaulding said.

As if on cue, a waitress approached their table. She was in her middle thirties and tall for a Chinese. She was wearing an elegantly cut, black-and-green cheongsam. She was not the woman who had been attending to them throughout their meal.

She had brought three plates. Each held a fortune cookie.

The woman smiled broadly. Her teeth flashed a brilliant ivory white.

Pleasantries were exchanged, and tired jokes about fortune cookies were told, and then, one by one, she set the plates on the table: one for Spaulding, one for Muffy, and one for Daisy.

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