Tiger's Eye (a scifi shortstory)

A week before the end of lunar cycle two I find myself hanging around a dodgy spaceport bar on the other end of a month long coverage of the Earth-Mars war. As my regular readers will know, that adventure took me into a rebel camp where I met, among others, the infamous precious ores smuggler, Hathaway Grimm. Now during that meeting, a few too many Uranian sunspots in for either of us to be the right side of sober, Hathaway got a strange look in her eye and lowered her voice to what passes for a conspiratorial whisper when you're drunk as a skunk around the rebel campfire. She proceeded to ask me whether I was up for something a deal more dangerous for my next assignment and then dropped a name normally reserved for the darkest circles of piracy and plunder. And that, dear readers, is how I find myself waiting in the titillatingly named Titan Uranus watering hole on Europa station to meet a contact who would take me to the far depths of space to meet with the infamous Jones McCoy.

It's 11:15 and the bar is black as the Devil’s armpit on the dark side of the station’s transit. As I'm nursing the same solitary ale I have been for an hour or so my contact, who's late, suddenly plonks down across from me. He is wearing baby pink long johns and a hooded top, the hood pulled low across his face. Without preamble he says:
‘We will need to get through customs. This is your pass and ID,’ sliding a fake holo identity across to me. ‘After that, I'll take you to a shuttle and then it's lights out for you until we get there.’
‘Lights out?’ I ask nervously. ‘What do you mean -’
‘There's no negotiation, take it or leave it. And leave that.’ This last directed at my camera bag. ‘No using it where we’re going.’

With these mysterious words he gets up and heads for the door, not bothering to check if I'm following. I run after, the camera abandoned at the table and within minutes we’re weaving through the customs queue and on the other side he's waiting impatiently to lead me to a grungy dock where a solitary battered shuttle awaits. As we approach, the door swings open and he shoves me roughly inside. As I turn to protest I see the glint of the hypo and a wicked grin on my new companion’s hooded face.
‘Lights out,’ he repeats, stabbing me swiftly in the neck.

When I awake, I discover its twelve hours later. The next thing this man-handler says to me is:
‘Morning Sunshine. Two minutes to docking.’
There is a port window in front of me and as I glance out the word Abalone looms into view, deep red against the gunmetal grey hull. I'm about to board the most feared pirate vessel in known space.

***

On board, I'm surprised by how clean everything is. Not a bulkhead unpolished, not a rivet out of place - McCoy runs a tight ship it seems. My captor, who still hasn't bothered to even offer me a name leads me through a labyrinth of twisting gangways until finally, he deposits me in a dimly lit room. Looking around, I absorb the strangely opulent furnishings. Baroque earth chairs and surprisingly tasteful art all surrounding a wall-height viewing window looking out onto a starscape I struggle to place. The thug behind me grins at my dropped jaw and then becomes suddenly serious as he tells me: ‘Don't make eye contact. Don't ask anything fucking stupid. Don't make sudden moves. The last time some jackass reporter came on board for a chat with Jones we were scraping bits of him off the walls for weeks.’

Ominous warning delivered he turns and exits and I'm left, for all of five minutes, alone with the perplexing view and a growing sense of dread. By the time the door slides back I'm sweating and cursing my journalistic curiosity. Framed in the light from the passage beyond is a looming figure I've only ever seen in over-dramatized holos and wanted listings. Seven feet of hulking, predatory muscle known to the universe at large as Jones McCoy walks in and I immediately avert my gaze, wondering if for the first time in my professional career I'm literally going to wet myself.

From my vantage point staring intently at the carpet, I note the long, striped feet approaching. Watch with morbid fascination the combination of grace and predatory sudden-ness with which they move until they stop, mere inches from my own, delivering their cargo of a massive, feline body to loom over me.
‘You don't look like a hardened war reporter,’ the figure muses in a voice like smooth rum. ‘You kind of look like you're about to shit yourself.’
He leans closer and adds softly, hopefully: ‘Are you?’
‘I came here for an int-,’ I start to say, a bit of defiance entering my voice until he roars. It's the most bone jarring noise I've ever experienced and some small mammal ancestor within me is suddenly demanding I run in any direction to get the hell away from this thing. The more logical portion of my brain retaliates that the last thing you want to do is run from a big cat. Somehow I stand my ground, repeating quietly:
‘You must have something to say otherwise you wouldn't have had them bring me here.’

A noise like booming thunder starts up and I realise McCoy is laughing. Slapping one giant hand into my shoulder he declares:
‘Well at least you're not a complete waste of space! They told you not to look at me didn't they?’
The laughter turns to a playful chuckle and this looming giant bounces over to the nearest couch and looks at me expectantly:
‘What are you drinking? Whatever your poison is I'm sure I have some. I have quite refined tastes, you know!’
Off balance from the sudden change of tone I stammer out: ‘W-whiskey?’
‘Never touch the stuff,’ he quips, without skipping a beat. ‘No you want a rum cocktail I'm thinking. This is a pirate vessel after all!’
As if tickled pink by his own wit, McCoy breaks into another long guffaw and proceeds to pour as I take a seat.

***

‘They called me Jones for that cat in the movie. Alien. 1979.’
‘I haven't seen it,’ I respond apologetically.
‘Too old school for most,’ he replies with a knowing nod. He proceeds to explain the plot to me and branches off into another dozen frivolous side stories until eventually he swings back round to where we started:
‘Jones,’ he shakes his head ruefully, ‘My parents hoped I'd be an ambassador for the reconciliation of humans and pred-splices.’

Finally I see a segue into the subject matter I've been wanting to bring up. McCoy has been bouncing from topic to topic for an hour now.
‘Your parents?’ I venture, taking a long sip of my rum sunrise and using that age old trick of leaving a gap in the conversation.
‘Yes.’ Suddenly his mood grows somber after the ebullience of the past hour. ‘They defied the law when they made me. Basically, I was born a crime.’
He says it with a challenging smirk.
‘There's a reason for the moratorium on predator splices,’ I venture, nervous again. This is a topic that most gene-jobs are touchy about at best and as his golden eyes bore into mine I'm keenly aware of his tiger nature.
‘With good reason,’ McCoy says lightly but with a definite edge to his voice now. ‘Our predator nature often gets the best of us. I can't deny it. I'm a perfect example. I plunder and murder because I like it. The thrill of it.’

The light tone that has dominated our conversation up to this point is utterly gone.
‘It isn't that we are incapable of love. That we have no respect for life. Sometimes an instinct simply kicks in and then in that moment. Well… you've read all the stories…’
McCoy trails off and continues to fix me with that predatory stare.
‘And the stories about you?’ I ask. ‘Are they true?’
He shrugs, stretches one long arm out to refill our drinks. The cocktails are getting to me and I wave off the refill, suddenly aware that I need to maintain some semblance of control.
‘I've crewed my ship with all the outcasts of your illegal gene splicing experiments. They are killers by nature and yes, sometimes blood runs a little high around here.’
‘A little high… McCoy, there are instances on record of your crew boarding ships and gutting their entire crews. The holos…’
I trail off now, an image in my mind’s eye of the gruesome footage from just such an event screened barely a month before on all the news channels. In the aftermath of an attack by the Abalone, a ship with its bulkheads smeared with blood and body parts.

‘The point is,’ McCoy says finally, after a long silence, ‘Nature has made us what we are. And then humanity chose to incorporate some of that fierceness, that bloodlust into itself and burned their collective fingers in the process. The moratorium only came about after the weapons programs that created us failed. After it was realised we were simply too hard to control. What is the real crime that has been committed here, hmm?’

It's a rhetoric I've heard before though never from the source.
‘There are ways to integrate preds-’ I start and he snorts in derision, cutting me off.
‘Drugs to tame us. Would you take a drug for the rest of your natural life to dull what you are? No.’ Decisively. ‘No, the choice you've left us is to carve a place for ourselves in the stars. The only way we can do that is force.’

As I start to formulate my reply a holo opens up in the wall and I see a hulk of a man, part bear I suspect, flash into being beside us.
‘They've found us!’ the figure barks without pre-empt.
Immediately Jones surges to his feet.
‘It appears you're in luck,’ he says to me grinning, ‘looks like we have a StelCor patrol inbound. Now you get to see first-hand what this ship can do.’
With that, he bounds for the door, pauses to ask: ‘Are you coming?’

A blast rocks the ship and I run after Jones to the Abalone’s C n C. A flurry of barked orders sets us on a course to flank the approaching vessel and through the viewport she looms into view, a behemoth twice our size. The Alliance, one of the Cor’s brand new flagships. We are outgunned for certain but if this phases Jones he shows no sign of it, calmly maneuvering his more manageable vessel through a hail of oncoming fire.
‘Get us behind her,’ Jones growls and the Abalone moves in view of the other vessel’s engines. Surprisingly, he winks at me:
‘This will be over in a minute.’
A sickly smile is all I can manage as another blast from Alliance’s rear guns rocks us and I become keenly aware she's going to take us apart. Across the control room, one of Jones’ men smiles at the captain, all fangs.
‘Now sir?’
‘Now,’ Jones responds, and a strange hum fills the ship, vibrating everything into a blur around us. With a jolt, we snap back to normality. In the viewer the StelCor ship stops mid-manouver.
‘Give her everything,’ Jones says calmly. A barrage of blasts rips into the other ship’s engines and within seconds the ship lights up in waves of flame. Crippled.
Jones turns to me, grinning:
‘Disruptor tech - we acquired it from the Rier a few months ago. All her systems are dead in the water. It's time to board.’
As I watch, bodies bleed out into space past the viewport. In less than five minutes, the Abalone has bagged herself another prize.

***

Three weeks have passed and we've reached a civilized port. After Alliance McCoy decided to lay low a while. It was the first test of his weapon against a StelCor vessel and the retaliatory hunt has been in full force ever since. Now, in lawful space, I finally disembark, and at the shuttle gate McCoy claps me on the shoulder.
‘Sorry it took so long to get you back to civilization,’ he grins without a hint of apology. ‘We will never back down,’ he adds, serious again. ‘Tell them that. We've found allies out here and this will soon be war on another of StelCor’s fronts.’ Then, without a further word, he stalks back into his ship, leaving me to the long shuttle ride back to the space-dock, leaving me to ponder the horror of an alliance between Pred’s and the enigmatic, insectoid Rier.

There are moments, dear readers, when you know your life has changed forever. For me it will be posting this feed. As soon as I do, StelCor will come looking. They're going to want someone to tell them everything that happened on that ship. But I'll be long gone by then.

This is an entry for the @tygertyger electric dreams contest here: https://steemit.com/electricdreams/@tygertyger/tyger-s-electric-dreams-short-story-contest-4-winners-of-3-and-a-new-prompt

(Image under Creative Commons from Pixabay)