Chapter Six: Tit for Tat — Part 3

As soon as Orchid sensed Bamboo coming out of the Snap, and confirmed with sensors that her brother, though well worn from a hard trip, was still alive and his health recovering, she and Spunky made plans to take a quick visit to the Dark Point Casino. The Dark Point, Pablo’s business and home among the stars, proved to be a powerful money collecting organization. She didn’t talk to Bamboo about where she was going, just slipped into her bender suit and went through the stars. By the time Bamboo had slept off his fatigue, she would be back to help him heal. If everything went smoothly, her brother would be unaware of her absence, and the purpose behind her leaving.

Orchid Snapped straight into the Dark Point Casino. Alarms should have gone off, but Orchid had been planning the entire assault for several days, rehearsing it in her head during the many hours of travel the Snap afforded. She sent a power disruptor ahead of her, destabilizing artificial gravity and the space station’s primary nuclear generator just long enough for her to materialize unnoticed. Such burps in power were rare, but not entirely uncommon on space stations as large as the Dark Point, so none of the staff thought much about it. The gamblers in the casino, of course, cared significantly, as it interrupted their playing — and in some cases, caused their random generator games to reset. Orchid took advantage of the chaos that followed.

“You had twelve thousand nels on that machine before the power went brown. The casino’s just ripped you off.” Orchid said to the loudest complainer she happened to be passing by.

The comment created a chain reaction among the gamblers. She moved calmly through the yelling, fighting, and general ruckus toward her intended goal. The machines would have power and would start back where they left off soon enough. In the meantime, hotel security would be busy keeping the angry gamblers from turning into an angry mob. A tech somewhere would be checking on the generator even as the power came back on line. Orchid figured he would be scratching his head, and would determine it was a hiccup, do some long overdue and generally unnecessary calibration check, and then get back to his or her normal work. The disruptor had already slipped back out of local space, and, under the control of one of Orchid’s many banders, was well on its way home. Armed only with her personal guile and her knowledge of the still powerful and misplaced sexist code of chivalry of the mob, Orchid moved in for the kill. Orchid wasn’t seen as a threat to the guards at Don’s entrance until shortly after they tried to detain her. Before they could even consider touching her, she knocked them unconscious with a neural disruptor pulse.

With a fair shove of both arms, she sent the rigid bodies of the still living men falling in opposite directions — lying on their sides like disheveled statues — their muscles twitching in painful cramping rigors. Orchid kicked the office door open with a snap of her foot, the ball of her foot flexing the door with its force. The door, made of tempered glass, survived the kick, but not without considerable stress fractures and warping along its metal structural supports. The emerald tint of her hair was the first thing Pablo noticed; her savage, sharp eyes captured his attention a moment later. Nothing about Orchid was dim, nor could her motions be misinterpreted as slow-witted or ill considered. The edges of her polished bender suit, the hard feminine cut of her young, dangerous face, and the precise way she held her hands as she walked, all contributed to a sense of crispness. Pablo’s personal defense droid, disguised as a clock and sitting elegantly on his glass desk, exploded the second she stepped into the room, as if her mere presence was more than it could emotionally handle. Its central processors lay on the carpetted floor, unable to act without a body, staring at her through eyes that had at one time been concealed in two of the thirteen glyphs meant to mark the passage of time.

Pablo kept his cool remarkably well, considering the fear creeping its way steadily up his spine. Without saying a word, Orchid set a simple sphere on his desk. It looked like it was woven from thousands of threads of platinum or chrome. Pablo was equally nervous about the small metal sphere, as the woman in front of him was known to have as complete a grasp of almost every law of physics and every principle of quantum mechanics as any hume being ever born. Still, he was relatively certain that it wasn’t a bomb. If it were a bomb, it would have most probably detonated in the Snap, killing Orchid long before she could get it into Pablo’s office. Being well educated in bender technology and the problems of shipping chemically unstable products through the Snap, Pablo knew better than to worry about being blown apart by Orchid. Even magnetic pulse pistols were a little too unstable to be trusted with a charge. An accidental misfire could be devastating to one’s trajectory curve, changing the point of entry to some place unpleasant. His worry was what the sphere might be able to do if it wasn’t a bomb.

As if reading his mind, Orchid smiled for a second, a mute smile with no hint of explanation. She remained absolutely still as every piece of glass in Pablo’s office shattered simultaneously. His window, opening out onto dead space, shattered into millions of pieces, all of which were blown out into the void with the remaining air in Pablo’s office. The metal airlock sealed shut in place of the tempered glass door that had at one time marked the entrance to his office, and which had also shattered to a powder of glass shards the consistency of snow with the bite of a razor’s edge. The metal airlock sealed them in together, locking out the rest of the casino. Drifting slowly away, still glittering in the light of the office, the remains of glass looked like countless crystals of salt drifting into a massive black abyss. Pablo’s appearance sizzled as minute particles of glass bounced off his deflector fields. His business clothes had been holographic in nature, and the lenses producing them had shattered, revealing a high quality bender suit over the body of a well-toned man. If he hadn’t recently issued the orders to kill her brother, Orchid might have actually felt some attraction for him. Currently, that attraction was smothered in a heated rage that she was careful to keep in check.