The first thing that hit you was the smell of badly
reconditioned air. The scrubbers just weren’t able to cope with all the bodies
crammed into the space-bar. No one gave a damn though. You soon got used to it.
There were kiosks that sold portable oxygen if you wanted a breather, but
mostly it was the booze people came for. Not the fresh air.
A stage was sandwiched in-between the bar and the men’s
toilet. On it was a naked woman wearing nothing but a deadpan expression and a
synthetic horse tail with no visible means of attachment, galloping in
simulated gay abandon around the edge of the stage at the end of a halter,
twirling her tassels and her tail, trying to titillate the audience of men and
women who cheered her on as if they were at a circus. He was surprised to see
how many women there were. The ‘Thong’ master cracked his whip every time he
wanted the woman to perform a trick: like kicking up her hind legs and waggling
her arse at the audience so that the tail rotated in their faces while they
would lurch forward and try to pull it off. Then, at a crucial stage in the
performance, she would ‘mock’ disobey the ring-master and trot around with her
head in the air, ignoring him, and he, pretending to be angry with her, let fly
with his whip.
Officer Angelo winced as the lash landed on her back. The
whole mood of the audience changed; to a kind of hungry expectation. This was
what they came for. She wasn’t drugged with neuro-suppressants; that was part
of the fun. They knew she could feel the strokes….and they wanted her to feel it. Another lash and the audience began
straining forward. Soon they were whooping and yelling and throwing their beer
bottles at her: some actually caught her a glancing blow, but she soldiered on.
Shouts of ‘giddy-up’ and ‘ride-em cowboy’ rang in the air as the girl skittered
round a stage now slippery with beer, trying to stay on her feet. The crowd
roared their approval as the whip began to open up old wounds under her thick
body make-up.
He felt sorry for these null whores…all the degradation
and pain they had to take without any natural defences. They couldn’t even run
away. He watched as she continued to prance around, the tears streaming down
her face as the blood started to trickle down her legs.
Officer Angelo closed his eyes and turned away.
“Welcome to Station-4,” he said to himself.
Officer Angelo had started off in life as a school
teacher, but had quickly discovered that it had less to do with teaching than
with controlling a crowd of hooligans. The children, mostly ore-belt worker’s
kids, were like animals set free from their cages, and he spent most of the
lesson just rounding them up and breaking up fights. Officer Angelo found he
had a natural talent for calming people down, and from there he progressed to
peacekeeping duties in the town council and finally to law enforcement. He was
unremarkable as a policeman and lacked the natural anxiety and panic that
drives aggressive and ambitious people. In all his years on the force he never
once had to take his gun out of his holster. His secret was that he loved his
job and he liked people. He cared for them. And being born of an Italiate
mother, he could also, when he needed to, like all good chameleons, present to
the world an exuberant, charming and charismatic personality that could talk
its way out of any dangerous situation, from disarming dangerous criminals to
persuading many a potential suicide back from the edge of oblivion.
“Hi honey, looking for some-one?” she asked, seductively
blowing a smoke ring in his face.
He stared at her silently. She was a pretty little girl,
not long past puberty he guessed. But she looked much older. They matured
quickly around here.
“Wassa matta. Pussy got your tongue?”
He laughed at her directness.
“No,” he grinned. “Just dazzled by your…..presentation.”
“You like them do you?” she said, sticking them in his
face.
“Best I’ve seen,” he said and smiled.
“My names Belladonna. Belle for short…..as in ‘you can
ring ma Belle’.”
“Pleased to meet you Belle. I’m……” He had to stop himself
saying the ‘officer’. “Angelo,” he said, realizing that his hesitation made it
sound like a lie.
“Ha! An Angel. So tell me ‘Angelo’, do you live up to your
name then?”
“Not always,” he said, faking a sly smile for her sake.
“Good, otherwise you in the wrong place. So waddaya wan?”
she said getting down to business. “Straight up, sassy neuf, or you just wan’
me to polish your halo?” she smiled.
He liked her sense of humour, and she cheered him up a bit
after the depressing stage show.
“Well, it all sounds absolutely irresistible, but I’m
actually on business here tonight.”
“Well, I can do the
business,” she said, cocking her hip at him.
“I can see that. But, tempting as it sounds, right now I
need some information.”
She eyed him with an exaggerated pout on her lips and a
mortally wounded look in her eye.
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. But I also have to earn a
living you know.” He could see he was losing her, so he did what he didn’t
normally do and jumped in with both feet.
“I’m looking for the Prophet.”
“Oh,” she said, losing all interest in him now. “Dunno.”
Gone was the smile as she scanned the crowded bar for other potential clients,
humming a little tune to herself. The horsy show was over. Someone was wiping
up the mess on the floor of the stage while a couple of scrawny girls played at
being leaping tigers across two platforms suspended from the ceiling. In the
low gravity they could jump enormous distances. Occasionally they would collide
in midair and come tumbling unharmed to the floor, wrestling each other amidst
roars of approval. He remembered his arrival at the docking station, disembarking
through a well-used and rather unsafe looking, extendable poly-Trion tube. This
was where he first came to grips with the quarter-G spin of the station. The
Gravity on G.O.D. 4 was only marginally heavier than that of the earth’s moon.
Every step he had taken had propelled him unexpectedly upwards and forwards in
huge leaps and bounds. After striking his head painfully on the roof of the
docking tube a few times, he soon learned to take easy little steps. He
momentarily wondered what it would be like to make love in this kind of
gravity.
“Listen,” he said loudly over the noise, trying to win her
back. “What you like? Tell me what you like. You like Opera? La Traviata? Huh?
You like musicals?”
“I like musicals,” she said, chirping up a bit. ’Genie
with the red Henna hair’. I like that.”
“Okay. Tell you what. If you tell me what I want, I’ll
take you to a musical at the Apollo theatre on G.O.D. 5. Couldn’t do better
than that now, could I?” He paused to take a sip of wine. She was still staring
half disinterestedly across the room, not quite taking the bait.
“So listen. I’ll pick you up in my space cruiser, any
night, and we’ll go and have something to eat at a fancy ristorante and then go
and see a musical. How about it? You like that?”
“You’re kidding me?” she said looking at him sideways.
“Why should I kid you? You’re a lovely lady; gorgeous in
fact. Why wouldn’t I want to take you to a musical? I’m also flesh and blood
you know. C’mon. It’ll be nice. We’ll have some dinner, a bottle of wine…?” He
left the sentence hanging in the air between them.
“You’re full of shit you know,” she said with a sweet
smile.
“I know,” he said with a deadpan expression. “It’s part of
my charm.”
She turned back to her drink and nursed it for a while.
“I don’t know much anyway; just what everyone already
knows.”
“What does everybody know?”
“Well, they say he lives in one of the Terra Domes. That’s
all I know”
“Which one?”
She looked at him as if he was stupid, and enunciated
carefully. “That’s all I know.”
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AND DON'T MISS NEXT WEEKS THRILLING EPISODE - THE DOOM!
