No Shelter Among the Stars

Chapter 12-- The Harlequin

Gypsy watched her new employer, Tasla stumble his way through the crowd. Not for the first time, she considered not following him. She could just let him stagger his way to wherever his ship was docked. She doubted he would even notice, but Luben and Alban were large bridges that she had just burned, and now Dark Colossus was hunting her. She kept her head down and raised the collar of her black and red longcoat. Then she moved forward to keep Tasla from tripping over his own feet. He nearly dragged her to the ground before catching himself. He looked at her with glazed green eyes.

"Wasn't...wasn't you coat a different color before?" he asked, straightening.

"Yes," she said, keeping a hand on his shoulder to steady him. "Do you really know where you're going?"

"I..." he began, then blinked and looked over her head. His eyes dilated in a fraction of a second, and he whipped out one of his pistols at the same time. He cracked off three shots as Gypsy ducked.

Dozens of people around them drew their own weapons, pointing them at Tasla; others simply ran or dove for cover. Gypsy flicked her wrist and slid her finger around the trigger of her own miniature pistol.

"What is wrong with you?" she hissed up at Tasla, eyeing the crowd. "We were supposed to be under the bloody radar!" Then she saw a man clad in black and green staggering forward with a KAZ rifle in his hand. Its systems buzzed as it tried to auto aim. The man had a bleeding graze across his face and a gaping wound on the right side of his chest.

Tasla fired again, punching a hole in a steel crate next to the man's head and missing him completely. Tasla muttered something and rubbed his eyes, trying to aim again. The man wearing black and green, Black Colossus colors, fired twice. The bullets sparked off the angled armor plating across Tasla's chest. A ricochet whisked past Gypsy's nose.

She fired her own weapon five times in quick succession. Four of the microbullets exploded around her target, making him flinch at the bursts of heat and burning bits of diamond hard shrapnel. The third shot went wide enough that a random onlooker jumped back, catching burns across his fingers. One shot miraculously caught her actual target right in the head, sending a burst of dark blood from the back of his skull.

She grabbed Tasla's arm as the man crumpled. "Let's go!" she shouted.

Tasla shook his head, remained still, and said, "Wait, my...blood is up...body...body is purging all the depressant...toxins...I...drank."

"What do you mean?" she asked. She was still looking around warily but, with the fight over, people had more or less begun returning to their respective lives. A man being gunned down in the street was hardly unheard of in Black Mary's. A couple children wandered forward to strip the dead man's body.

Tasla doubled over, vomiting pale liquid in to the street. It sizzled and foamed as it hit the ground. Gypsy stepped back in disgust. The little puddle had a sharp, chlorinated, stink that made her think of industrial grade disinfectants. He coughed another splatter of fluid that gave off trickles of black vapor when it hit the floor and somehow smelled even worse. Just breathing near it caused a stinging sensation in the back of her throat.

Sucking in a couple of breaths, Tasla nodded and stepped over the puddle he had created. His gait was straighter, the drunken stagger vanishing with each step. He rubbed his mouth and winced, wiping his hand against his armored chest. Gypsy could hear a soft sizzling sound, and she wondered if trickles of his leftover vomit had burned his own skin.

"You don't have something to get this taste out of my mouth, do you?" he asked, spitting.

"If I did, I'm not sure how it would help," said Gypsy, pushing past men in combat masks. "Whatever that was coming out of you was burning through the bloody steel floor."