The skittermander at the counter flexed his fingers and grinned. “What’ll it be, nufriend?”
“Nufriend?” Tono smirked. “Every night I come here and order the same thing, and suddenly you ain’t know me, Henig?”
Henig let out a deep chortle, as if it were emerging from his feet and rising out of his body. “No, no! It’s just that…” He leaned over the counter, inches from Tono’s face. “You know how the streets can be,” he whispered. “Funny business afoot, and all that. Don’t want anybody making off with your whereabouts, gree?”
Tono gave a gentle nod, the neon of the night glancing off her chrome dermal plate. She had been working on this side of the surface for only eight months, and even she had made enough enemies to know better than for any of them to know where she slept. If just one of their associates ever knew she also was willing to drive this far into the city just for a bowl of noodles and a conversation in the middle of the night, she’d be face down in the alley beside the shop with a fist-sized gap in her belly. Tono winced at the thought—she hadn’t scrounged enough recent work to pay for another check-up, let alone replace a cybernetic augmentation.
Strangely, her justification for habitually returning was twofold. For one thing, this part of the city was where all her informants were. For another, she grinned wide at the chef and said what she always said whenever he worried about her getting in trouble because of him. “You ain’t gotta worry ‘bout me, Hen… only nice people come by your shop.”
Illustration by Michael Soong from Starfinder Galaxy Exploration Manual.
“Is that right?” He chuckled again. “Then how come you’re here so often?”
Tono nodded in amused agreement before ordering a large bowl of the house special. She tried not to bring her work—or her difficult demeanor—to Henig’s shop whenever she could avoid it, but she knew she wasn’t easy to deal with. He probably didn’t know what she did, but word got around quickly. Which is why she regretted having to ask her next question. “Have you seen Mirai about?”
Henig raised an eyebrow. “Mirai? She in some kind o’ trouble?”
The apertures in Tono’s eyes tensed. She noticed it right away. She always trusted that Henig was smarter than the goofy, kindhearted cook he presented as. “You know something.”
Henig’s lower limbs continued pulling dough into thick noodles as he spoke. He glanced down pensively, and then toward the street, as if worried someone would find him. “Two folks in black came up the block asking for her, but I hadn’t actually seen her come out to the market in days. Made it sound like they’d been to her apartment… didn’t find nothing. If you’re asking for her…” He frowned. “Gotta think she’s on the run for some reason, gree?”
“But why?”
“You really askin’ me?” Henig shot her a wicked glare. “The same reasons you’d run. Is she in trouble?”
“I don’t know. I asked her to check something for me. Just a chat with some folks at Fythe Dynamics for a client… a routine interview with Sepp Yolen. I thought it was nothing…”
“Politely, I’ll ask.” Henig looked right at her. “Is it ever nothing with either of you?”
Tono struggled for the next words and resigned herself to just a shake of the head.
“Exactly.” He lit the stove behind him without looking. “I wish I had more to give you. Just… black suits, cold eyes, no manners. And one of ‘em, a lashunta woman, had a scar across the lip like so.” He made a diagonal downward motion across his own face, then shrugged. “Mean folks. Don’t want to see those two in a hurry again.”
Tono tilted her head. “The suits… d’you figure they were top-notch?”
“Maybe some of the most drift threads I’ve ever seen,” he said, finally casting an eye on the simmering stock pot behind him. “Probably thought I couldn’t tell the duds concealed armor. Figured they were well-paid hired hands of some sort.”
“Any insignias on the clothes?”
“No patches. Just a silver pin on the collar.” He wiped a large blue ceramic bowl and placed it in front of her. “Why?”
Tono smirked. “No reason at all. I’ll be back in a bit. And my food better be waiting.”
“Whatever you say, friend.”
Tono got up and stretched before strolling back down the busy market street beside the shop. This part had to be done carefully, she thought.
People tended to be very alert when they were tailing someone, after all.
Tono was paranoid, to be sure, but the more precisely Henig described this lashunta woman, the more obvious her presence became, just a few dozen feet away, watching them talk the entire time. She may have followed Tono the whole way, in fact, or even watched her leave her apartment. Without making eye contact, Tono sized the woman up. Slim, tall, lithe—the kind she figured made her coin in close combat rather than a gunfight. Even more careful, then.
Tono strolled toward where the agent stood—against the wall of a nearby bookstore—and squinted against the window. The lashunta didn’t flinch, but Tono knew better. Silence lingered in the air between them, mere inches apart. In that moment she knew they were both playing a calmness that would ready them for conflict at any moment. From that close, she could make out the vague imprint of a pair of blades under her jacket. She knew her appearance gave away her own game, as well: the quickdraw pocket in the right leg of her pants, wide enough for a sidearm, stored a static arc pistol specifically for moments like these.
“See something you like?” the lashunta said casually.
Tono didn’t even glance up at her. “So far, nothing seems especially interesting.”
“Oh, yeah?” The lashunta’s voice rose—the telltale sign that Tono had the slightest upper hand. “Hoping to find something in particular?”
“A challenge would be nice.”
Before the agent could react, Tono reached for the agent’s arm and twisted it behind her back, pinning the lashunta against the wall. Tono drew her pistol and aimed it at the small of the agent’s back, right beneath where her trapped fingers curled into a fist.
“What is wrong with y—”
“A great deal, actually,” Tono said. “But at the moment, the fact that I’m being tailed has me particularly on edge.”
“You’re being silly, lady!”
“Yeah?” Tono only needed to lift the agent’s arm for the tension and pain to increase. “Let’s check, then. Walk.”
They slowly made their way back to Henig’s counter, their demeanors strangely calm for the circumstances. When Henig saw her again, his eyes widened. “Yeah…” he said meekly. “That’s one of ‘em.”
“Was she nice to you?”
It took him only beat to pick up on the game Tono was playing. “Not one bit,” he said.
“See, my friend Henig here seems mild-mannered,” Tono said, nearly as low as a whisper. “But people tend to forget that he cuts his meat with the same sword that sears it, so I wouldn’t annoy him.”
“And what happens if I annoy you?” the agent said with a smirk.
“Scary part is, even I don’t know yet. Now talk.”
“I got nothing to—”
Henig slowly drew a skyfire sword from a drawer beneath the counter and brought it an inch from the lashunta’s face, just beneath the eyebrow. “Fine by us either way,” he said, igniting it just enough for a brief flicker of heat to grace her skin. “I hope you hate your face as much as we do…”
“Wait.” Tono sensed the faintest shift in the agent’s mood from composure to fear and back, but Henig would never see it.
“Fythe sent you?”
The agent hesitated before nodding. “The girl. She asks too many questions. We just had to nab her, make her afraid, you know? But…”
“You haven’t seen her either. So why are you following me?”
“Because…” The agent sighed. “The chairman asks us to do his wetwork when he doesn’t want to think about something. When he wants it to disappear. But Mirai? He won’t stop asking about her. He wants a meeting now, to ask for a job.”
It was Tono’s turn to be afraid. If Sepp Yolen wanted to meet, it could only mean trouble.
“You have a cruiser?” Tono growled in the agent’s ear.
The lashunta nodded.
“Good. We’re gonna take a ride. But first…” Tono reached into the woman’s jacket pocket, pulled out a credstick, and tossed it on the counter. “You’re gonna pay for my dinner.”
“That would be the nice thing to do, gree?” Henig said. “And only nice people come here.”
About the Author
Brandon O’Brien is a writer, performance poet, teaching artist and game designer from Trinidad and Tobago. His work has been shortlisted for the 2014 Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing and the 2014 and 2015 Small Axe Literary Competitions, and is published in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Fireside Magazine, and New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean, among others. He is also the poetry editor of FIYAH: A Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction. His debut poetry chapbook Can You Sign My Tentacle? is forthcoming from Interstellar Flight Press.
About Tales from the Drift
The Tales from the Drift series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into the setting of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. Written by members of the Starfinder development team and some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction, the Tales from the Drift series promises to explore the worlds, alien cultures, deities, history, and organizations of the Starfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.
