Fortune and Glory by John Birmingham

Author:John Birmingham [Birmingham, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SF, RO:SF
Publisher: Pronoun
Published: 2017-10-21T00:00:00+00:00

Fifi led off again. She’d been careful before, of course. The King of Darwin did not issue Royal Warrants of Salvage to any old asshole. The King of Darwin was a righteous dude who paid his bills and suffered no fools. Especially not the sort of fools who went into unlicensed scavenging, picking over the loot and plunder of the dead cities that rightlfully, legally, belonged to righteous dudes like the King of Darwin and his official retainers or agents or Royal fucking appointees or whatever you called them. Which is what she and Jules and Pete were, goddammit, because they had a Royal Warrant and she would bet beans to bullshit chips that the worthless, scavenging cocksuckers who'd built that campfire back there, did not. That meant they were not just stealing from the King of Darwin. They were stealing from her.

And nobody stole from Fifi Lamont. Nobody took anything from her she didn’t feel one hundred percent like giving up.

So as careful as she'd been when leading them to the watchmaker's place, she was doubly vigilant now. Not because she was frightened of running into these worthless thieves, but because she was frightened she might not have the chance of running into them if she missed some crucial sign. Pete and Jules, she understood, were a little more laid-back on this topic, a little more inclined to live and let live. They would be just as happy to avoid any encounter with the scavengers, to execute their Commission, and get the hell back to the boat. She respected that. But she had to be true to herself and if there was one truth you could say of Fifi Brianna Lamont, it was that she had never met a scavenger she had not taken the time to put down like a dog.

Well, almost.

There was one. The one Pete had rescued her from. He'd got away, and she wasn't so foolish or naive to imagine she would ever have a chance to settle the ledger with that particular asshole. But that made it so much more important that she never let a chance slip by to settle up with another one of those assholes. So she crept through the wreckage and over the bones of Sydney, her sharpened steels before her, her senses alive and raw. She stepped ever more carefully, placing each foot where it would make the least noise. She breathed through her nose, sniffing them out, detecting the faint smell of burned flesh as they passed the open alley, almost certainly the remains of some rodent or possum they'd cooked up over the fire for breakfast or even supper last night.

She suppressed a smile at the thought of them being so stupid, gathered around a campfire, staring into the flames, ruining their night vision, probably passing a bottle, roaring and shouting at each other in the dark. If these clowns hadn't brought the Biter clans down on them, then the Biters probably weren't within miles of the CBD.

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