Chapter Nineteen

"Stop!" Charlotte giggled frantically, waving her hand in surrender. Her muscular body was utterly drenched in sweat, although the slit between her legs was soaked with an entirely different kind of liquid. She and Sketch had gone at it four times over the last two hours, and while he might have had the strength to rally for a fifth fuck, but the Weaponeer had yielded, her lifted arm still trembling a bit in the captain's quarters cool air. "The mind is willing, but the flesh needs a fucking break, Miles! Warp above, how the hell does that princess keep up with you?"

"She has her P'nox bodyguard to help her," he said with a laugh of his own as he picked up his bottle of water, taking a long drink from it. "Although that also takes some getting used to as well."

"I was going to say," Charlotte said as she rolled over onto her side on the bed, looking at him. "How does that even work? Isn't it like it tossing a torpedo into a ring gate? No offense to you and your manhood, Miles, because that thing's no slouch, but she's like two feet taller than you."

"She's also bonded to me, so as part of that, her biophysiology changed, and her vagina got smaller, more appropriate to my scale," he said to her, noting how enraptured she was in the details. "I mean, I'm sure you'll see it soon enough. Her anatomy's mostly the same as a human's, just generally on the larger scale. The bonding serum shifted just her sexual organs into human scale, which is apparently something the Dominion taught them long ago, so they could bond better with the humans they were protecting in the royal families."

"God, that's right. You're fucking an honest-to-gods Princess, maybe the last human princess alive!" she said with a smirk. "Does that mean you're a prince in waiting? A potential king? King Miles the Furious has a good ring to it."

"Fury King Miles Walker sounds more complicated, I suppose," he said, stroking his short beard a bit. "But no, I don't have any interest in being part of the aristocracy. I just want to live my life, get by and not drag anything down on our heads."

"Restarting the Order's definitely gonna fuck up that last one."

He sighed with a weary smile and a shrug. "Yeah, I'm still coming to terms with that. Before I even think about doing that, I'd need to pass the Trials to become a Fury, and there's nobody really around to do that."

I can do that for you, Storm Walker.

'I appreciate that, Fury Rose, but I do not think I'm ready for that yet.'

You will never think that you are ready. You simply are.

'I'll consider it.'

"For what it's worth, Miles, I think you'd do a great job of it," Charlotte said. "You were always an excellent teacher. All of your students went on to become Storms or Furies after you disappeared, many of whom took up higher roles in the organization. If there was anyone who was on a clear path to Fury, Miles, it was definitely you."

"Let's not run before we walk, but I'll consider it. A Fury with a harem seems..." He started to trail off, but the voice in his head cut him off immediately.

Like the sort of thing many of the Furies did over the centuries. Hells, Storm Walker, many a proud Fury had a harem, both man and woman Furies. We've always encouraged those in our ranks to be fruitful and multiply, to spread our seed wide and deep, any place we think it may find purchase.

"You prepped to deal with the Waverly Syndicate?" Charlotte asked him as she moved to get out of bed and walk towards the bathroom. "They're no casual slouches, you know, and if you think they're just going to let go of a marker they're holding onto, I would reconsider that notion pretty damn quick. Those people are dangerous with a capital D."

"I'm no slouch myself, Shar, so I wouldn't worry too much about it."

A few hours later, they were approaching Breench and Sketch had to admit, he was not all that impressed by the look of it. It was what he would've called a dump but what was officially referred to as a relay station - a stop-over point for long-haul truckers that doubled as a trader's outpost for nearby farming and mining operations within a short distance of the ring gates. The prices were generally higher than farmers and miners would pay at a bigger station, but that would also meant a day or two in travel, as well as ring gate fees, which was time spent not working, and most laborers couldn't afford that time, so they just paid the markups. Normally, relay stations were maintained by either a conglomerate of trading groups, the larger Xchange corporation (which was a sort of trader's guild), or by a nearby planet that had opened up a shop point. A few, however, like this one, were controlled by just a group of people who'd decided to build a waystation and let other people use it.

That was how the Waverly Syndicate had gotten started - they were a bunch of traders who wanted to make things easier for themselves, so they went about building a network of trader hubs before building a criminal empire on the back of them. Sure, they had a handful of legitimate businesses (or barely legitimate), like their loans and debt collections, but that wasn't where the majority of their business was.

Sketch had actually done some work for them via Cola over the years, and so his reputation with them was fairly solid, if cloaked in a bit of mystery, which was how he liked it. He'd done his homework on the Waverly Syndicate very early on in his career and found they were like any other predator - best kept at a good distance and not dealt with up close. But they knew who he was and his reputation for getting things done and delivered, especially when nobody else wanted to touch them.

Breench Station was their main headquarters, and as such, had more than a few heavy defenses scattered around the place. There were two double-barreled slag cannons focused on each of the four ring gates that surrounded the station, so if anything showed up and was providing less than a warm welcome, they wouldn't make it halfway between the gate and the station before imploding. There were half a dozen warships scattered around the fringes, and he suspected most of them were eager for even the slightest bit of action. Of course, he also knew that they were only prepared for the sort of traditional space armada combat that the Starless Dominion specialized in.

That was not how Sketch handled these kinds of problems.

He'd asked Aliara to meet him in the shuttle bay, along with Charlotte and Imogen, and the P'Nox woman was standing alongside her battle dart The Tiny Dancer when Sketch arrived first by himself. "You ready to give her a go?"

"Absolutely bossman," Aliara said with a lofty grin. "All systems five-by-five."

"Including the thing?"

"Especially the thing."

"Good. And you remember what I told you?"

"Yep, only on your say so, and only for a few seconds, then back to black, unless I don't hear from you again in two minutes, and if I don't, do the thing."

"Excellent," he said. "You're pretty good at this pirate thing."

"I've got a family to protect now," she said with a slightly dismissive shrug. "That's something worth fighting for, and that's new to me, so I'm probably fighting twice as hard for it."

"Part of it, maybe, but not all of it," he said, as Imogen entered the shuttle bay.

"You don't really need to do this," Imogen sighed, unwilling to meet him eye-to-eye, as if she knew how hollow the words were coming out of her mouth, but felt obliged to say them anyway.

"The Waverly Syndicate is going to keep turning up the interest rates until either they've made ten times when they paid for your credit marker or until they can collect it by owning you and your brother permanently," Sketch said to her. "Neither of those outcomes work for me, so I'm here to buy them out so they can't keep raising rates. That way, I don't mysteriously lose my staff one day."

"I wasn't aware the Waverly Syndicate sold off credit markers," she said quietly. "I thought they just bought them."

"Typically they do, but they'll make an exception and sell to me."

"What makes you so sure?"

"Because I'm me, they're them and I'm going to be extremely persuasive in my counter-offer, and if they aren't, well, I have a plan for that too."

"You're extremely confident for a man who's supposed to be on the run, Captain Sketch."

"I'm extremely confident because I've gotten very good at being a criminal since I got out of the deep thaw, Imogen," he said with a rakish wink. "I've always been a man willing to do what needs to be done to get things accomplished, but not having to follow any laws that might get in my way has made that even easier."

"You sure you want me with you on this, Miles?" Charlotte asked.

He nodded as he clipped something onto her waist. "Look, I've got my best bruiser in her ship playing a pivotal role that nobody else can do, so I need the next deadliest person in a fight right by my side, in case this goes pear-shaped. So that's you. It's fine. They're gonna bluster and huff and puff and when I call their bluff, they're gonna fold more than an origami paper airplane."

"A whatnow?"

"Don't worry about it," he said before turning back to Imogen, clipping a matching device on her belt to the one he'd put on Charlotte's. "I know you're going to want to do all the talking in there, but I promise you, this will go much better for everyone involved if you simply let me handle it. I am not trying to step on your toes or anything, but this is more my element than yours, and I promise you, when the roles are reversed and you know more than I do, I will let you tell me to sit there all pretty and quiet like, okay?"

"You damn well better when that day comes," she grumbled, as the three of them headed to the shuttle while Aliara climbed into her battle dart.

Sketch sat down at the shuttle controls and started to open the bay doors as the Y'bari battle dart shimmered and disappeared, moving into cloaked mode. With the shuttle bay doors open, Sketch waited a good minute or two, giving The Tiny Dancer plenty of time to move stealthily out of the bay with nobody noticing, before he started up the shuttle and moved it from The Praeteritus over to Breench Station, landing it in the designated visitor's bay they'd been assigned. The ship was too big to dock at Breench Station, or that was Breench's excuse, anyway. In reality, it was because they didn't want any ships too big to get too close to the Syndicate's headquarters.

Like most criminal headquarters, all the impressive weaponry and defensive systems were well-concealed and could easily be overlooked if a person didn't know what they were looking for. Given a week, Miles imagined Loz could've found all sorts of things on their station to improve The Praeteritus with, but he was already planning on pissing these people off, so aggravating them further seemed like a piss poor choice to make.

As soon as they disembarked from the shuttle, the three of them were met by a pair of mountains of muscled P'Nox that looked like they'd long since left the Y'bari services and gone as native as possible. They were dressed in heavily ripped clothing, and stood at least two feet taller than Sketch, with their chiseled physiques on display, although they were buried beneath an all-encompassing layer of tattoos that pigmented nearly all of their flesh, even their faces. Each wore a rapier and a pistol on their belts, making it clear they were the muscle.

"What's in the satchel?" the one on the left, with hair the shade of day-old vomit, asked him.

"A giant fat load of none of your business," Sketch said. "I'm here to pay off a debt. What the hell do you think is in the bag?"

"Gonna need to look," the one on the right, with hair the color of very moldy wine, said.

Sketch clicked his tongue then opened the bag to show stacks and stacks of ectash and as soon as one of the P'Nox made a motion to get closer, he closed the bag back up again. "Nuh uh," he scolded. "This ain't for you and you know it."

"What's to say it couldn't just be for us and we could say you didn't have nothing on ya and we had to kill ya?" the one on the left said.

"You mean other than the fact that you're on camera up there and everybody knows it?" Sketch said, pointing towards the corner of the room. Both P'Nox blanched and turned to look behind them before looking back at him. "Seriously? You two morons didn't know you're on camera? Fuck sake. Let me talk to someone with half a brain before I decide you people aren't worth paying off." His tone of voice couldn't have dripped with more contempt if he'd physically ladled some on.

The two P'Nox shrugged and turned, moving to lead the trio out of the shuttle bay. Everywhere they looked, there were mercenaries hanging around. Leaning against walls, seated in rafters, poking out of windows and leering at the two women by his side. They had guns and knives and rifles and grenades and bad attitudes dripping out of every pore in their bodies. All of them wanted to take a piece of Sketch or his crew. Of course, he was pretty sure any one of his people could go through at least a dozen of them before they even felt slightly hassled. It felt like it was meant to be a show of force, a demonstration of how strong and powerful the Waverly Syndicate was, and yet, it somehow just made them look infinitesimally small.

After a few minutes, they reached what looked like it was the equivalent of the throne room or the bridge or the command center, depending on who you asked, with a trio of older people sitting around it, two women and one man, each of whom had more than a handful of scars and visible war wounds that had been replaced by cybernetics and prosthetics. A very large rifle sat on the center of the table in front of them, with a large viewing port behind them peering out into the dark black of space, letting them see the four gates with each, The Praeteritus off in the distance.

"You're Sketch, Cola's top smuggler," the woman on the left said. Her hair was grey and pulled back into a neat bun, with her right eye made entirely of chrome and steel, her nose having been broken multiple times. Her voice felt like a thousand cigarettes lingering in the background of a jazz singer on an old phonograph. "Why are you here?"

"I'm here because of exactly what I said in my message," Sketch said casually as he stepped forward and tossed the satchel onto the center of the table, next to the large rifle. "I'm here to pay off the Howell's marker. They owe twenty-five thousand in ectash for what's left on it, so I'm giving you thirty and calling it good."

"That's not what we would call good," the grizzled old man said, grinning with metal jaws that had sharpened canines like little daggers. "We was gonna collect interest off that for a good long while, and so we would be expecting something more like forty or fifty."

Sketch offered them his most tight-lipped smile. "Except they don't owe you forty or fifty. They owe you twenty-five. I'm even being courteous and overpaying you, so you can't claim you aren't profiting on the deal. The marker's being paid off outright. That's the way debts work."

"Except it ain't her money now, is it?" the woman on the right said. Neither of her arms were flesh and blood anymore, but they still vibrated slightly, as if the motors in them weren't tuned into a proper resting state. "And that ain't being paid off - it's being bought up, and the Waverly Syndicate don't let other people buy up markers from us."

He offered her the smallest of shrugs, rolling his eyes a little. "You're getting a guaranteed profitable return on investment and you're getting it today. C'mon, don't be stupid. You can't possibly think it's worth the hassle of constantly slowly collecting to make a tiny marginal improvement on ROI. Let this one go. The only people it'll affect are in this room right now. Well, that and the girl's brother, who's on my ship working off his debt as a mechanic."

"You think you get to dictate terms to us, boy?" the old man said, leaning forward to grab the satchel, pulling it back to him, looking through it. "What if we decide just to keep your money as 'emotional damages' and keep the vig running?"

"Well, then you'd be subject to two very big problems," Sketch said, keeping his tone nice and even keeled.

"What's those?" the woman on the left asked.

"First and foremost, it'll get out that the Waverly Syndicate doesn't honor deals or contracts, and that you refused to accept a legitimate payout on a debt owed, which is going to encourage literally everyone who owes you money to stop making small payments," he said as he walked past them towards the giant porthole window looking out into the black. "And you should know that you could try and maintain your iron fist after that, but if you're not honoring deals, why should anyone else do it, hm? You don't have enough time and energy and resources to go after everyone who owes you money, and anyone with half a brain knows that. You're over-leveraged. Hell, if people stopped paying you, you're only about a month out from not being able to pay any of those mercs hanging around out there, and they're not gonna want to live on credit. Can you imagine if I went out there and told them you turned down an offer of hard cash just to give them more busywork to do? They'd storm these offices and rip your heads clean off your bodies. Oh sure, you'd probably kill a few dozen of them before they finally took over, but end of the day, it'd be someone else's syndicate by the end of it."

"Sounds a lot like bullshit smoke and idle threats," the woman with two metal arms said defiantly. "What else you got?"

"That's the thing... the other thing? It's way worse," he said with a laugh. He lifted his hand up and clenched it into a fist, sending the preplanned signal. Just outside of the window, The Tiny Dancer dropped its cloaking and appeared, pressed right up against the glass, the underside of the Y'bari battle dart blocking the view ominously. "That's my muscle there, with her ship, that she snuck up and landed right on your window here. If I don't give her another signal in a minute, she's going to blow the glass and decompress this whole room."

"Killing you and your people with us," the old man laughed.

Sketch turned to look back at them, shaking his head before tapping the small circular device he'd clipped onto his belt, as well as Charlotte's and Imogen's, before they'd left. "Emergency personal shields. We'd be fine against the rigors of open space for three to five minutes, more than enough time for my enforcer out there to scoop us up in her dart. And while your people are panicking, trying to figure out who's next in line of succession, we'll be departing safely and laughing our asses off."

The entire atmosphere of the room changed, and he suspected Charlotte and Imogen's shocked faces were helping sell the threat, which was the reason he hadn't explained it all to them in advance beforehand. The people at the Waverly Syndicate knew Sketch had a perfect track record, overcoming even one job they'd given him with the expectation that he'd fail, but they simply wanted to know how he would end up failing. To their consternation, he'd succeeded.

"Look," Sketch said with a sigh, as if all of this was just a colossal hassle that he wanted to be over and done with. "I'm legitimately paying off a debt in full, overpaying for it so you can save face and tell everyone you demanded I pay 50% over what was actually owed, and I'll neither confirm nor deny it to anyone who asks. I am literally bending over backwards to try and make this as painless for you as possible, and you're giving me shit here."

"It's your attitude," the woman on the right said. "You aren't asking, you're demanding."

"You know what? You're right; I am," Sketch said, a wicked smile creeping onto his face. He decided the hell with it, and started projecting The Fear into the brains of the three Syndicate crime lords around the table. Now was a perfectly fine time to use his abilities, and he wanted them to stew in the idea that he could destroy them without even trying. "Because I've got you in such a vulnerable spot that I could take over this whole syndicate with the wave of my fingers." He clenched his raised fist again, and Aliara turned the cloak back on for The Tiny Dancer as the ship disappeared from sight. "You can honor your business agreement, or I can salt the soil here with your ashes and become a crime lord overnight. I'm demanding because I have complete and total control of this situation, and because I came to you with a reasonable, generous offer that you're trying to fuck up for no reason other than to be difficult."

As The Fear started bubbling over in their psyches, Sketch could sense all three of them starting to reconsider, and quickly. And, more importantly, they were doing the calculations in their heads - was it worth it, only to realize, they were spending a whole lot more time and effort on a tiny amount of ectash than it was probably worth. The longer they kept Sketch in their sanctum, the more likely he was to blow it up. So, after what felt like an eternity but was likely only a minute or so, they relented.

"The debt is paid, the marker is closed," the old woman on the left said, tapping on her compad, zeroing out the debt from their systems. "The matter is done but your disrespect to the Syndicate--"

"Will be forgotten, unless the Syndicate wants it to be known it does not honor the debts it buys up, and I can't imagine that'll go over well," he said with a slight laugh. "Hell, I imagine your own crew would grow furious if they knew you were leaving money on the table now because you thought you could extract more out in the long run and still pay them nothing."

That hung in the air for a bit before the old woman on the right spoke. "Just... go."

Sketch raised his fist to the empty window again, then unclenched it, letting his five fingers give a polite little wave before he turned and walked out of the room, heading back the way they came.

"You weren't really going to decompress their room, were you, Captain?" Imogen asked him quietly, their trip back to the ship unescorted, as if the guards knew it best to stay where the money was.

"I'd bet he was," Charlotte answered. "Miles is a pragmatist who is always more interested in results than the path it takes to get him there. He will absolutely do the hard things when they need to be done, and he will not hesitate."

"You make it sound like you witnessed me engaging in mass slaughter, Shar," Sketch said.

"Vendemon?"

"That was a couple of dozen fascist soldiers who were hellbent on making sure none of us left to report back that a dictator had taken control of the planet," he said dismissively. "I regret nothing."

"I'm not saying you should've, Miles. What I am saying is that you mowed down those soldiers and didn't lose a minute's sleep afterwards over it," Charlotte said. "Not everyone is built that way."

"And you still feel this was very important, Captain?" Imogen asked him.

He stopped midstride and turned to look at her. "You saw how they were even when I was overpaying them. They would've prolonged this as much as they could, constantly upping the interest rate without telling you. This needed to happen, and I don't regret doing it one bit. Now your debt's all consolidated, under one person, who'll be f--"

He was interrupted by the small woman reaching up and grabbing his face, kissing him hard, blinking away tears from her eyes as she clung to him desperately. He could feel her trembling just a little bit, so he didn't push her away, just wrapped his arms around her and let her kiss him, another snapshot moment that lingered like a plucked guitar string on heavy reverb.

When she finally broke the kiss, she looked up at him with a newly found kindness, her gaze having softened some, her appraisal of who he was having shifted tectonically. "You're a good man, Miles Walker, and I think my brother and I are lucky to have found you..." she said quietly, her hand lingering on his chest, tapping her fingers, refusing to pull back from him before she absolutely had to.

"Whoa," Charlotte said quietly.

But eventually the moment passed, and Imogen withdrew from him, looking down with a shy smile. "At some point, you're going to have to allow me to practice my trade upon your body, Captain, simply so that you can learn I'm quite a capable woman in my own right." She slipped from his arms and moved to walk back onto the shuttle, leaving him and Charlotte standing outside.

"I knew she had a thing for you, boss," Charlotte laughed.

"Not another word," Sketch said, joining in the quiet laughter as the two of them moved back on the shuttle.

All of them couldn't wait to get the hell away from Breench.