Even the Feral Jacks, the zhee street gang that ran the H8 trade for all of ZQ, got the alert that it was hunting season.
Social media channels that catered to the zhee’s message boards and hoof scratch language immediately switched over from their litany of threats and repeated holy writs from the Prophecies of Mhugga the Blind, to location pings of Bowie’s last sighting.
Boom Boom Killah had once, not too long ago, a proper zhee name. Something with three identifiers and chosen according to traditions that wanted a martyr’s name, a prophet’s formal name, and a tribal bray in every moniker. That kind of thing. But when the old zhee colony ship had flown her last approach into the beach at the then newly developing Diplomatic Zone that was Soob City, the zhee males of family headship age had had to scramble to make a living and get established. Providing first, places for the zhee priests to live and lead worship, and then jamming three tribes to an apartment floor in the worst districts just to get their broodmares off the streets and out of the tents they’d been living in on the beach under the shadow of the skeleton of the old cargo hauler that had been their colony ship off Ankalor.
A one jump scow that shouldn’t have even made the trip. But they did, and as was oft repeated across the galaxy ad nauseam, fortune favored the zhee despite the zhee’s best efforts to annihilate themselves.
Boom Boom Killah ran a crew of street enforcers on Division and Excelsior just inside ZQ. He was busy with a mare when the alert came across his smart device and because business was business, he pushed himself up from the panting jilly and threw himself into his street rags. A combat harness blinged out with human teeth, glittering gold jewelry, and playing cards that had been covered in hyperplastic, the edges shaved to a razor’s sharpness. This was the ultimate rejection of the formal ways of their zhee elders. Razor-sharp playing cards to replace the traditional kankari knife every zhee was supposed to carry.
Hitting the already blazing street, the donkey street tribe chief shrugged on his harness and beat his young, muscular, furry chest with one cloven-clawed fist, signaling to the crew already gathering near their souped up sleds that they were mounting up to “do some circus.”
“We gotta KTF a brudda rightquick, my donkety-donks!” he brayed aloud.
The disaffected youth of the zhee had embraced the derisory slang that even the Repub military had tried to outlaw as politically incorrect. Wearing the slur now and referring to each other with a sense of pride in the insult, they loved calling themselves “donks.” Speaking in Standard was yet another affront to the traditions of the parents that brought them to Kublar.
Gaggling and cackling loudly, snorting and braying, the dangerous young zhee sporting blasters that had been skinned in all kinds of traditional curses, or in the case of Boom Boom Killah… plated in gold to match his two large gold front teeth, each encrusted with a diamond, piled into the tricked-out low riding sleds and roared off on an intercept course for the fleeing Jack Bowie.
19
“Hi, Jack,” said a strong yet feminine voice in his ear. Warm and confident. The comm he’d just placed in his ear was receiving, after a short chitter of quantum encryption burbles. “Call me Elektra, Jack. I’ll be your shot caller for this operation. Keep moving on your current track and enter the Prominence Shopping Arcade one hundred meters ahead on your right. We have a team standing by to intercept your immediate pursuit.”
Jack Bowie was busy ducking from luxury black sled to luxury black sled in the valet circle in front of the Grand. He had yet to return fire on the five black suited zhee deploying subcompact auto blasters and firing wildly at everyone and anyone to clear a path to their target. With little mercy they shot down customers and staff alike. But Jack saw an opportunity and rectified that with the holdout he had in the hand. He popped up over the gleaming hood of the freshly polished limo sled and shot one of the donk security thugs a car length away. Twice. Two quick blaster shots.
Hot bolts burned into the suit and fur covered body beneath as the zhee went down snarling in death. A fusillade of blaster fire raked the limo just as Jack ducked and scrambled for the next limo, not stopping there but moving behind a massive ten-foot-tall terra-cotta urn holding a carnival spray of lush topiary.
More blaster fire chased Jack and now nothing but open ground, in the form of a high-end shopping district’s high street, lay between him and where the shot caller, Elektra, was telling him to head.
“Good to meet you,” gasped Jack as he ran for all he was worth, briefcase flying in one hand, holdout blaster pulling him forward with the other.
“Solid move, Jack,” said Elektra over the comm. “Put some distance between you and the zhee security team. They’re using Baarac subcompacts… good for violent room clearings, bad for anything beyond fifteen meters.”
They must be watching me via drone, thought Jack while wild blaster fire shrieked after him. Zhee hooves struck the pavement as they thundered down the street. Braying calls to one another as they hustled to catch the infidel, sensing the kill at hand.
Jack made the door of the Prominence Shopping Arcade and shoved himself inside. Both door security men had watched the disturbance at the Grand Hotel down the street, saw the dead bodies in the turnabout, and then the running firefight heading their way. They did
