"Well, hell, lady, if that's your attitude, perhaps you'd better just sew it up, sister, cause there ain't no better stud bull than Curtius Kenne in the whole territory."
Magda laughed. "Ignore him, Jessamyn. He just won the election. The town hasn't had an Official Asshole for too long."
Curtius smiled, and a gem sparkled. "Jessamyn? That's a real purty name. Is that for real?"
"Yes. Excuse me."
She grabbed him by the back of his neck, and scraped her empty glass across his smile. He screeched, and she let him go. He was bleeding from the mouth. She looked at her glass. It was not scratched.
"Paste, huh? I thought synthetic stones were getting better these days."
"Why you…"
He drew his hand back, and she reached out to stop the punch. It was as simple as catching a falling cup. She pushed a little too hard, and Curtius shouted.
"My shoulder."
Doc Threadneedle stepped in, and gave the cowboy's arm a wrench, setting the joint back in true.
"Sorry. Don't know my own strength."
Kenne was mad now. Everyone in the bar was looking.
"You're…you're one of them things, ain't you?"
There was fear and hatred in his voice. "What do you mean?"
"One of the Doc's monsters. You ain't human. Hell, Doc, your packagin' gets better and better, but what you put inside stinks to high heaven, you know. It's gettin' so a fella don't know where he's dippin' it. I take it all back, sister. You're just a sexclone with steel teeth, and I ain't interested."
The drunk in the corner, who wore what was left of some kind of camouflage outfit, came over, pulling a revolver out of his britches pocket. Jessamyn tensed, ready to shear his head off his neck with a karate move.
Magda shook her head, and Jessamyn relaxed. The drunk plonked his gun down on the bar.
"You've got a quarrel, settle it this way. Best of seven."
"This is Jitters," Magda said. "He's British."
The drunk saluted smartly. His hand vibrated. She didn't need to be Sherlock Holmes to know how he had picked up his nick-name. Jessamyn hefted his gun. It was a seven-shot model, a Webley and Scott .38 Bulldog, standard British Army Issue. A toy next to a ScumStopper Magnum, but it could do the job. She broke it, and slid five slugs out, leaving two consecutive bullets chambered. She sighted down the barrel. It was off, but it would do for a round of roulette.
"You game, cowboy?"
Kenne gulped, and looked around for a way out. "Guess I am, Mizz Frankenstein, guess I am."
"Ladies first?" She pointed the gun to her temple.
"Toss you for it."
Magda dropped a one-armed bandit token on the bar. Kenne guessed lemon, and won the first pull.
Click.
He sighed with relief, and passed the gun over. Then, he took a shot of whisky. Magda refilled his glass. It vanished down his throat, by-passed his stomach and stood out on his forehead as droplets of 90% proof sweat.
"The good stuff, huh?"
"Fella deserves Shochaiku if it's gonna be his last drink."
Jessamyn slipped the barrel into her mouth, and sucked it like a lollipop, fluttering her eyelashes at Kenne. His eyes popped.
Click.
"Your move."
"Good thing it's Curtius," Magda said, "if'n he blows his brains out, at least we won't be all day scraping them off the floor. Just my dainty little hankie will be enough to clean up that kind of a smeared speck."
Kenne's adam's apple was bobbing up and down. Jessamyn looked him in the face, smiling pleasantly. Shutting his eyes tight, he jammed the gun against his skull, and…
Click.
"Give it here."
He was reluctant to let it go. She raised the gun, and pulled the trigger.
Click. "Bang," she said. Everybody jumped. Kenne spilled his drink. "No, really, just joking."
Kenne took the gun.
"Have you worked it out, cowboy? Three chambers, two bullets. Short odds."
They'd turned the music off now. Jitters was sucking at a bottle. Only Doc Threadneedle was apparently uninterested in the game.
Kenne looked at the saloon door. The Maniax were standing between him and it. That was his bad luck. The gangboys were in the entertainment mood tonight, and nothing appealed to them more than watching some asshole respray the ceiling with greymass. He looked down at the gun, which must be feeling pretty heavy.
"Two chances out of three, cowboy."
He did it quickly. Up to his head. Pull. Click.
He let out a whoop, and slammed the gun down onto the bar, breaking glasses.
"Whooo-eee, I thought I was gonna fill my britches fer sure, sister. Looks like I win, eh? Unless you want to play on, Mizz Frankie Stein?"
Jessamyn picked up the gun.
"You can go home now, sister. It's all over. Buy us all drinks, and it'll be forgotten. Ain't nobody gonna hold it against you."
She put the barrel to her temple.
"You don't have to do it," said Magda. "That would be crazy. Even Curtius ain't that big an asshole."
Her finger tightened.
"Hold on there," Kenne pleaded. "Two out of two, remember. Them's crazy person's odds."
"Jessamyn…" said the Doc. "Stop it."
Everyone in the saloon was looking at her. Their heat-patterns flared, as if they were blushing all over.
She pulled the trigger.
VI
Cocooned inside the air-cooled cockpit of his DeLorean "Snowbird" SandMaster, Bronson Manolo checked the dispositions of the Holderness-Manolo forces surrounding Dead Rat. Within five minutes, they should all be in place.
Once the spotman reported back that Jessamyn Amanda Bonney was in Dead Rat, Manolo had called in Holm Rodriguez from Denver and Susie Terhune from Phoenix. Terhune was an assault specialist solo who had subcontracted for H-M on several occasions, and Rodriguez was their top Colorado Op, further qualified because he came from the quarry's home turf. When he was with the Denver paycops, he had busted little Jessamyn on some juvie beefs. Truancy, stealing lollipops, pulling PZ brats' pigtails, whistling commie songs in church, assault with a deadly weapon: kidstuff like that.
"One good thing about this action," Terhune claimed, "at least nobody in Dead Rat could possibly be classed as an 'innocent bystander'."
H-M had enough field Ops to handle the sanction, but Manolo recognized his limitations, and had had Rodriguez and Terhune augment his forces with some local soldiers who knew the sand. Most of his full-scale skirmishes had been in NoGos or Urban Blight areas. Out here in the Big Empty, the situation was quite different. Less cover, more miles. This was sandrat heaven. He was quite willing to delegate field command to Terhune until the objective was obtained.
He checked his GenTech digital chronometer against the dashdial. He was synchronized with the machine.
"Ommm," he said to himself, shifting his level of psychic awareness, "ommm."
Gari the Guru had given his blessing on this sanction down at the Pyramid. "You can't destroy, Bronson, you can only convert a thing's form." That was true, converting forms was Manolo's business. He took nasty live people, and turned them into nice dead ones. Bob Holderness would have been proud of him.
When this take-out was over, he was looking forward to a session in the hot-tub with Kandi, maybe a few snorts of cocoa, and some radical waves to ride out in the bay. The pollution didn't kill the ripple, and couldn't get through to you in a skin-tight SCE unit.
Manolo didn't groove to the Big Empty. He was a cityguy. He didn't like to breathe anything he couldn't see.
"In place, Bronson," said Terhune. Her light blinked green on the mapscreen. "Mortars ready to ride. Let's nuke the spook."
"Rodriguez?"
Manolo tapped the screen, and Rodriguez's light flared. "Okay for sound, chief. We're in place."
"The quarry?"
"We tracked her from the Threadneedle site. She's in the Silver Shuriken now. We've given her enough time to get blasted out of her skull."
"Excellent. Judicious. Righteous."
"Thanks, bro."
Manolo pulled his seatbelt across his lap, and plugged it in. The console lit up, and he flicked some buttons. The inboard computer flashed stats at him. The weapons systems gave him some readiness read-outs.