I.

"Man, I didn't catch a single word you said."

"Really?"  What the hell did I say?  At the time, it sounded real
badass-like.  I could repeat myself, but that would kill the mood.  Besides,
he didn't get it the first time around, what was the point?  Instead, I
figured I'd might as well jab the butt of my rifle in his side again.  

Sonny went down.  

I suspect that wasn't his real name--after all, I made it up.  Still, it
wasn't a good time for me to go about getting personal.  I had a job to
finish, but I wasn't coming across very executioner-like.  Fortunately, I
came up with another sharp witticism right then and there.  This time he'd
catch my drift.  

I leveled my rifle on his temple and held it there, catching his pathetic
excuse for a face through my eye-sight.

"Listen, shit-stain." Sonny eyes lit up like the Fourth of July; they looked
like little white beads popping out of their sockets, peeling towards the
left side of his face just to catch a glimpse of me.  I could clearly see I
had his complete attention.  

"Let me introduce you to my friend here." I touched the icy-cold muzzle to
his temple.  "This here's a PKG-88-Alpha-1--Mr. Needler for short.  Mr.
Needler fires two-milli' hypersonic flechettes with accuracy up to a
kilometer; that's right out of the box, Sonny.  No telling what Mr. Needler
can do now...except that anything Mr. Needler touches turns to a slump of
flesh, cracked bone, and a enough blood for the wholy family.  Now I've got
this tense muscle ache in my fingers that's been coming and going all week.
I don't even know how angry I have to get before..."

I whipped the needler rifle away from his temple.  My eye-sight homed in on
a paper weight sitting on Sonny's desk.  I squeezed off a three-round burst.
The paperweight disappeared into a mist of shimmering, glassy particles and
shattered the window behind him completely.  That got me
thinking.

Sonny was on his knees, and the flechettes would pierce through the floor,
and anything beneath the floor, until it hit the thermo-crete the habitat
tower rested on.  We were on the fifty-first floor.  That would make for
certain problems.  Mr. Richards didn't want the job to get too messy.

Crucial Scenario.  

No problem.  I made him stand next to the shattered window.  Sonny was
bawling like a baby at this point; he obviously had come to terms with the
gravity of his situation.  Too bad, I thought later on, it came too late.

I never did get what I wanted out of Sonny, so I contented myself with
watching six flechettes tear through his head and midsection before he flew
out of the window, his body falling into the misty, lavender haze.  I
wouldn't see him hit the ground, but someone sure as hell would.  I couldn't
dick around there anymore, so I cut out.  Never really good at math or
physics, I couldn't help but wonder how long it would take for him to hit
the ground.



II.

They tell you on the way out here that Neo Krysho is the Paradise of the
Cassiopeia Cluster.  I guess that'd be partially true if if it was actually
in Cassiopeia .  Aw hell.  Nobody cares about astronomy anymore.  When I was
a kid living in New York (yeah, THAT New York), I liked to look at the stars
and stuff like that.  That was on Earth though, and I didn't know anything
about astronomy out here.  No one did.  That's because people go from star
to star through jump-points, and nobody knows where the hell they coming
from or where there going.  Oh sure, sometimes we can figure out that a
bunch of jump-points are real close together.  Guess that's why they call
'em 'clusters;' they all share the same sky.  It doesn't make any
difference.  Even if the stars looked the same way as they would if we were
where some astronomy guy two hundred years ago said we were, it didn't mean
that we couldn't be somewhere else.  Maybe another galaxy, maybe another
universe.  Maybe the ca'poa's playing with your mind.  No one knows for
sure, because know one knows how jump-points really work.  Yeah, I mean
really, really work.  We just use them.

My name's Junko.  It's Japanese, but there's no Japan anymore.  I'm from New
York.  When that got too expensive to live in, my family moved out to the
stars.  The government was giving out free tickets to any colonist risking
to run through those brand-new jump-points.  They called them wormholes back
then, back when they called contrafermiobosidium 'exotic matter.'  It
doesn't matter, either way, because they're dangerous.  Before they built
the Gates, jump-points were random little things.  A transit point could
disappear within a space of a few minutes, or stick around for thousands of
years.  I guess my great-great-whatever-grandparents found some of the
permanent ones, and they ended up in Neo Krysho.  My great-grandad didn't
like it there too much, so he moved back to Earth.  Like I said, that got
too costly and my Dad packed us up and threw himself at the mercy of his
relatives back on Neo-Krysho.

Bad move.

Dad died ten years before I ejected Sonny out of his four-forty-second-story
apartment.  Y'know, I can't explain it, but I grin whenever I think about
things like that.  Even though I feel like I should be crying or seething or
something like that, I still get running the replay across my glass eye.
Sonny was some of my best work.

Maybe that's because I've changed so much--it doesn't take too long for
Neo-Kay to do that to you.  I suspect it's like that on other colony worlds;
we're all pretty poor except for the Corporates.  If you're Corporate, then
you don't have to worry about being poor or malnourished or going without a
comp--if you're from Verbotica, that's short for 'computer.'  Corporates
live big off colony worlds, selling back to those bourgies on Earth and Nova
Terra in the AC System.  Out on Neo-Kay, people have to scavenge for a life
under the huge, low-income habitat towers and the smog from the Corporate
industrial plants.  Then there are the Richtowns.  Every colony world has
about a million of 'em spread across the face of each planet.  Those
'cities' are where Corporates set up their people--those assigned to work in
the Periphery, that is.  If you want to enjoy the good life, you've got to
go Corporate.

If you can't cut it as a suit, but you still want it easy, you could always
settle for the life of a gangster.  Folks go for Yakuza, Triads, Tongs, or
even the DiFalco.  All you need is the right stuff.

I had the right name, the right almond eyes and a crucial body to boot.

Out here they love that.  I'm one bad little girl.  

They call me Sweetness.

-The Reverend Prez

*  *  *

+-----------------+-<The Badass Reverend of Funk Prez>---+
|    Presley H.   | Political Science / Computer Science |
|    Cannady II   | and Electrical Engineering Undergrad |
|<revprez@mit.edu>| at the Mass. Institute of Technology |
+-----------------+-<Anime Manga Development Group>------+
+     Author of Liars and Dreamers, a Robotech fanfic    +
+-------<http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/1731/index.html>-+
| MIDN 4/c A-2-2 SQD, MIT-Harvard-Tufts NROTC Battalion  |
|_|"The art of war is of vital importance to the state"|_|