Fortune's Envoy: A Dystopian Sci-Fi Adventure (Cyber Dreams Book 3) by Plum Parrot

Author:Plum Parrot [Parrot, Plum]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Podium Publishing
Published: 2024-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

28

OLD FRIENDS

What did you fuckin’ say?” Bennet asked as Juliet whirled, recognizing the voice of the thug who’d run away the night before.

“Shut up, ship boy,” the man said, striding forward flanked by two friends, all wearing the same insignia sewn into their jackets that Juliet had noticed before, the snarling hyena with chromed teeth. In the daylight, the big man wasn’t any prettier or friendlier. He had buzzed hair atop a bulbous head resting on an absurdly thick neck that seemed to spread outward into shoulders bunched with muscle. He was a good six inches taller than Bennet, and his gigantic plasteel left hand looked like it could crush the front end of a small passenger vehicle. Purple light blazed from the brilliant, square LEDs that lurked where his eyeballs should be, and his chromed lower jaw was fixed in a perpetual snarl, the metallic lower lip not quite matching up with the fleshy top one.

“Come a little closer and say that again, you shit-eating scrap brain!” Bennet shoved past Juliet, and she felt her heart begin to hammer; she knew these guys played for keeps. As her mind raced and she tried to think of the best move, the cab sped away. She glanced up and down the sidewalk, wondering if any help was at hand. Of course, she didn’t see any corpo-sec nearby—they’d never been around when she or her friends needed them in Tucson, either—and the people walking up and down the sidewalk hurried their steps, avoiding her glances, demonstrating their practiced ease when it came to skirting this sort of trouble.

The two men with Chromejaw were both a good bit smaller and sported a lot less hardware, but they didn’t look friendly. One of them gripped the handle of a baton, the collapsible kind, jutting out of his front pocket. Juliet frowned, not seeing any firearms on display. Was it because it was daytime? Were they worried about the scanners near the docks? She stopped speculating because she knew they could very well have any number of guns hidden under their coats or built into their bodies.

The man on Chromejaw’s left had open sores on his shaved head, red plasteel teeth, and only scars where his ears should be. The other accomplice looked almost normal, like a guy Juliet might have seen at a bar back home—average build, black hair, and a bushy mustache that seemed from a different era. Even with the mustache, he looked almost handsome. He stepped to the right, trying to move around to Bennet’s side or perhaps to get a better angle on Juliet.

Juliet’s brain had been moving a million klicks a minute, opening her mouth to speak just when Bennet was starting to square off with Chromejaw. “Hold up, Bennet. I know this asshole, and he’s got warrants. I’m putting a call into corpo-sec.”

“You know this guy?” Bennet asked.

“Corpos can’t save you, ship rats!” Chromejaw grunted, driving his massive metallic fist forward, but Bennet was no slouch. He slipped

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