Carpe Noctem

Posted on Mon Mar 19th, 2018 @ 9:28pm by Amare
Edited on on Mon Mar 19th, 2018 @ 9:28pm

4,161 words; about a 21 minute read

Chapter: Chapter IV: Rezer's Edge
Location: “Smoke n’ Hots” Gentleman’s Club, Nar Shaddaa
Timeline: Three weeks after the Battle of Jericho
Tags: Coda, Saucy Feril, Brent Chesto, Nar Shaddaa

ON

It was the same dream she had almost every night for five years. The same hopeless begging from her father…

“Please, spare the children. We’ll give you anything you want!”

The same diabolical retort and cold-hearted laughter from the pirates…

“We already have exactly what we want, don’t we boys? Bwahahaha!”

The same merciless declaration from the pirate leader…

“Your children are exactly why we’re here. Now that we have them, that just leaves one last problem to fix…”

And the same spray of blaster fire cutting down the last of the adults on that old freighter.

The dream would often turn to a blur, mostly because she was crying that day, and the light from the bridge would be replaced with a place of darkness and terror, stuffed into a tiny cramped cage on the pirates' ship surrounded by metal bars and the other children that witnessed their parents slain moments before.

The dream always ended the same with a hungry trandoshan salivating in front of them with a deep, gurgling reptilian voice…

“Mmm, yesss! I ssmell fresssh meat! I TASTE YOUR FEAR!!”

The monstrous hissing growl from that lizard thing always marked where the dream would end, and reality would reclaim the stage. She had seen it so often, and it had broken her spirit so many times that there were no more tears to be shed…except, that is, by the man that was presently using her shoulder to cry on.

“I think she’s going to leave me, Coda. I really do!” said the portly human man wearing some of the finest of exotic burgundy silk this side of the galaxy.

Coda held him in a compassionate embrace as she stared into space hardly caring at all for the aristocrat’s plight. The dream was in fact a hard-gnawing memory that haunted Coda relentlessly, and for the last year, it started to hit her even while awake, even in the middle of a conversation with a client, but no more than once a day. She was always thankful for those days when it didn’t come to torment her. Those were the best days, even when she had a bad day at work.

“There’s a way to save your marriage, Monty,” she told him softly in his ear, a line she lost count how many times she said it over the years.

Monty pulled away from her, quickly wiping the tears from his eyes. “R-really? But how?”

“You have to tell her everything,” Coda urged him, placing her dainty hands on one of his chubby palms. “Be honest with her. Trust in her capacity to forgive.”

“B-b-but I can’t do that!” Monty stammered incredulously, rubbing his balding head with his other free hand. It was difficult to pull away from Coda, even when he wanted to. Those large deep black eyes, that eerie toothy smile, her cute little blue nose, and those hypnotizing head tendrils that always seemed to be…watching him…somehow. And that was just the allure of her remarkably alien, yet undeniably feminine face. The draw of her wondrous body, on the other hand, was a whole other level of temptation he had to force himself with all his willpower just to keep his eyes off from, or he feared he would lose himself completely with her and forget about his personal crisis with the wifey at home.

“Of course you can,” Coda assured him as she leaned in for a kiss on his forehead. “I believe in you. You are powerful, and king of your domain.” She placed her hands on both of his cheeks cupping his face in front of her. “You will go there and show her how much you love her. Bring something romantic and expensive that will remind her of your best days with her, and take this…”

Monty was almost completely floored by her brief, yet intimate kiss on his lips. His eyes went wide, and they rolled back under his eyelids for a few seconds, overwhelmed with pleasure.

“That is my blessing,” Coda said in a sultry voice as she gently let him go. “Share it with her exactly like that. It will be like the two of you fell in love for the first time all over again.”

Monty stared at her, his eyes lost, his expression anxious, and his breathing rapid. He was almost like a puppy dog waiting for a command.

“Go,” she said with a nod towards the door, and Monty quickly obeyed, stumbling over a stray pillow on the floor. He turned, meekly waved goodbye at her, and left to go pay his tab. That was how it always was with the big-spending clients: they showed up, they sometimes acted macho and in charge, and just minutes of talking later she had to suffer their babbling about all their little issues and problems. Most of the time those issues were regarding their wives in danger of catching them with a secret mistress or a female co-worker.

After three years of working in the Smoke n' Hots Gentleman's Club, she had a head full of secrets from a huge chain of men from all walks of life that could afford her that told her way more than she ever cared to know about anyone. She was effectively a dolled-up nautolan young lady just shy of twenty years of life in a skimpy outfit acting as a therapist for people far richer, and more pathetic than even she had thought of herself. She was deeply grateful, however, that none of them wanted to be truly intimate with her. Not one. The furthest it ever went was the occasional striptease and some touching and making out. She always found a way to get them talking about anything or get them thoroughly drunk enough to avoid the humiliating fate that some of the less lucky and skilled girls at the Smoke n’ Hots had to endure each and every night.

Coda fell back into the pile of soft satin pillows strewn on the bed, let out a breath of exhaustion after the nearly hour long kiss and tell session, and took a pink handkerchief from the nightstand to wipe her mouth of the nasty taste of Monty’s alcohol-laced lips.

“Bravura performance as always, darlin’,” came the matronly voice of her supervisor over the loudspeaker that was installed above the door. Coda often wondered where the speck of country drawl in her boss’ accent came from, but she never dared to ask. “But I think you just put a blaster hole or two in his marriage.”

“Maybe,” Coda said halfheartedly with a shrug. “He’ll come back for more either way. They always do.”

“What I’d give to watch him squirm in front of Lady Dhalia,” the boss said, then quickly changed gears as she realized she was betraying a bit too much of her familiarity of Monty's personal life. “Hey, are you still feelin’ raw about losing yer little trinket to Brent last week?”

Coda’s head perked up at that. “My kyber crystal?” She had been utterly devastated when the club’s human co-owner, Brent Chesto, had discovered her crystal under her bed. It was the only tangible link she had left to her family before she was kidnapped five years ago. She went to great lengths over the years keeping it hidden from others, some more painful than she cared to remember. It was, however, breaking the rules of her “employment” to have any personal possessions of any kind other than what was issued to her to fulfill her daily tasks. “Please tell me, Saucy. Does he still have it?”

“Yup! Still in his safe I reckon,” Saucy replied, the stage name Coda’s boss went by. No one, not even Brent who co-owned the club with Saucy, knew her real name. “He stepped out fer a little meeting with some Hutt reps a few minutes ago. Probably to pay the monthly protection fee. Since we’re at peak hour, this is yer chance to sneak in the lazy fart's office while everyone’s sloshed and dancing, so you can do yer little computer magic thingy. Get the code, open the safe, snatch the purty little rock. Easy!”

“Yeah, but I can’t do it without a slicing computer,” Coda said resignedly. She was also surprised at what she just said, and how eager she felt to go against a man that would more than likely hurt her something terrible if she was caught. Brent was not a kind man and was often imbibing more than his fair share of alcohol which never sat well with Saucy and the club’s ledger. He was one of those mean drunks that let the back of his hand do the talking on occasion when he lost his nerve with one of his underlings.

“I thought you might say that!” Saucy said with bit of cheer, like a verbal pat on her own back for being clever. “Check under the bed. I left you a little gift.”

Coda’s anticipation suddenly went over the moon as she rolled off the mattress and spotted a black rectangular plastic box with a company logo on it that bore the name D/Crypt. Coda’s solid black eyes widened with disbelief instantly recognizing the brand. She was utterly speechless.

“Well go on, you silly scrub. Open it!” Saucy pressed her. “Clock’s tickin’.”

Coda did so followed by a gasp and a wide pearly white smile at what she saw inside. It wasn’t top of the line like the bulkier handheld models, but it was a light and rugged arm-mounted model that slipped on the forearm as a bracer and had a tiny holoprojector that showed the user interface, and a keypad and a little status screen embedded next to the projector. There were network cables enclosed with one having a specialized port connector designed to defeat anti-breach network protocols. She'd seen better equipment before, and this particular kit was little threat to military-grade hardware, but now she had a real shot at busting into that safe.

“This is for me?” Coda asked in disbelief. “Mr. Chesto would never let me keep it.”

“Ha! You forget who’s really in charge around here. ‘Mr. Chesto’ owns forty percent of this joint,” Saucy pridefully pointed out with a chuckle. “I own sixty, and I says that gadget’s yours. Five years of wearing that ugly ankle tracker says you earned a little somethin’ fer a change.” Coda glanced down with a blank melancholy look at the tracker she wore. Saucy added, “Brent crossed me by taking that rock from you. Nobody does that to one of my girls. Not even him. I want you to get payback for both of us.”

“Thank you so mu—”

“Bah! Quit yer maudlin’ dawdlin’ and git yer little behind into Brent’s office,” Saucy urged. “Just be yer usual cutesy self and slip in like nothin’s wrong. Now, hop-to!”

Coda threw on a pink robe she had laying around and slipped the D/Crypt box underneath to conceal it. She made her way out past the other private V.I.P. suites and on to the dance floor proper. It was retro music night, and the guest DJ was bumpin’ some old Figrin D’an ditty that was insanely popular on Tatooine and the other Outer Rim colonies centuries ago, but this time with a funkier remix twist that made it more modern and fresh. If it wasn’t for the tight timetable she was up against, Coda would have cut loose to perk up some of the customers with her silky slick moves and try to persuade them to buy more drinks.

She was almost at the bar and Chesto’s office behind it when she was stopped by a surly three-eyed male of the goat-like species known as gran. He was guzzling down a clear mixed drink and smelling almost as bad as a trash compactor with weeks old rotting garbage still in it.

“It’s you!” he exclaimed, bellowing over the ear piercing volume of the music and prodding her chest with a finger that was easily thicker than two of her’s. “Yeah you. The ‘Lone Wolf’! The ‘last chance at happiness on Nar Shaddaa’ they say. Hahahaha!”

“Yeah, heh heh…that’s me, I guess,” Coda said with a nervous grin on her face as she tried to back off and move around him. The gran’s forceful hand firmly grabbed her shoulder to cease her advance.

“Hey! You’re just gonna brush me off like that?! I want to be happy too!” the gran declared, his words growing more slurred with each passing sentence. “Make me happy little lady. Let’s see whatcha got!”

A green hand fell on the gran’s shoulder, catching his attention. “You settlin’ fer a girl when you can dance with a real woman?”

“S-Saucy Feril?!” the gran was startled by the ravishing green twi’lek in the loose and shear silk outfit that left little to the imagination. “I-uhhh…”

“Wasn’t causin’ any trouble?” Saucy finished for him, batting her eyelashes at him, her bright blue eyes captivating the gran’s trifocal vision. “Well ain’t you such a big gentle darlin’! And so handsome too.” She winked at Coda and nodded in the direction of the office. Satisfied her nautolan protégé got the message, she threw her arms around the gran and started things off by guiding him away from the bar and to the dance floor.

Coda found the door to the office slightly ajar, and she quietly slipped inside, no one the wiser. She glanced around the room, heavy with the stench of smoke from traditional plants and other illicit chemicals she was familiar with going back to earlier times that she still regretted having been a part of. She half expected Brent Chesto to pop out of the bathroom, or sleeping on the couch next to his wide office desk, but his absence meant she could get to work.

She setup her wired connections, initialized her arm computer, and got to slicin’. Thirty seconds was all she needed to break the very lackluster and outdated encryption protocol and discover the terrible passcode Chesto used as his only line of defense to his personal server system.

“One-two-three-four-five?” she asked herself as she dove into the file directories. “People still use passwords like that?” She shook her head, grateful for Chesto being too cheap to hire an expert to harden the club’s network. That would’ve meant less mooching of drinks from the bar’s stock for him.

There were scores of image file directories filled to the brim with regular adult pornography, strange fetish videos mostly involving feet, and one particularly dark section that absolutely shocked her which involved cadavers from the local morgue. Barely able to keep herself from losing her lunch after glancing at a photo of an autopsied rodian, she found her intended target.

“There you are,” she said at the screen, and her eyes narrowed with irritation. “Really? You used ‘sexyfeet4ever’ for a password? Ugh. Creep.” Now she didn’t feel like simply stealing anymore; she wanted to set the whole office on fire. She shook her head and focused her mind back on the job. She entered the command to pop the safe’s maglock, and heard the noise from the wall behind her. She looked up and saw nothing but solid wall. She turned, entered the unlock command again, and the hidden wall panel slid open revealing the safe.

“Tricky, Brent,” she said as she threw it open and found her father’s yellow crystal along with a heavy antique blaster pistol, three credit chips, and a small action figure of some stupid looking wild gungan with his tongue wagging out and holding a blaster to his own head.

“That’s ‘Mister Chesto’ to you, slave,” said the man she feared most to catch her in the act.

Coda spun around to see the balding man in a long bathrobe worn over his gray whiskey-stained business shirt and vest. His old beard had been shaved down to an ugly mustache, and just below it was a fresh bottle of booze guzzling down his throat. “I shoulda kept the shock collar on you,” Chesto said before wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his robe. “‘The customer wouldn’t like it’, Saucy told me.” He scoffed, “Lousy pain in my rear that woman. All yous females ain’t nothin’ but trouble. My ex, then Saucy, now you. Put the crystal back where you found it right now, and I might not kill you tonight. But I sure as heck am gonna hurt you real bad, that’s for sure.”

Each of Coda’s hearts skipped a beat in unison. Chesto's threat filled her spirit with such a flash of fear and rage that almost on total instinct she spun around and thrust a hand back in the safe to fish out the blaster she found. The bottle Chesto had in his hand smashed against the wall sending a sliver of glass biting into her right arm. Oblivious to her small wound, she drew the weapon from its leather holster. By the time she swung back around to face her slave master, blaster in hand, the drunk man had already closed the distance between them. He slapped the blaster out of her hand and put a vice-like grip on her throat. For a bloated, drunken chubby man who almost never exerted himself physically, Chesto was remarkably strong and quick.

“You wanna kill me, huh?” he spat at her, his toxic breath rancid with a mix of bourbon, vermouth, and the faint stench of puke, “Think you got what it takes? I shoulda made you work with the other whores. Saucy made me treat you like a princess. No...no more. I’m gonna break you down, slap that collar back on where it belongs, and let some broke diseased street punk strip you and turn you into a proper lady of the night.”

With very little effort, he hoisted Coda’s frail body up and off the floor with just one hand, and flung her aside like a ragdoll. She tumbled over Chesto’s desk taking all the datapads and random bits and bobs he had strewn about on there to the floor with her. She gasped with heavy effort for air, trying to keep herself from passing out, and then saw the blaster barely a few feet away from her grasp. Knowing it was her only salvation, she desperately pushed herself to crawl towards it.

“Who put you up to this? What is it Saucy?!” Chesto interrogated her with building rage in his voice. “You think the two of you can just jack me of everything I built here? Do you?!” he stumbled and fell to one knee, but landed close enough to where he could grab her ankles. He had a solid grip on her right foot due to the presence of the tracking anklet there and viciously dragged her closer to him. “This place is mine, you hear?! It will always be MINE!” he shouted just as she started kicking at him. The heel of one of Coda's wildly thrashing feet thrust square into his nose which only stunned him for a scant couple of seconds, but was enough to loosen his grip for her to lunge and grab the pistol.

Coda rolled around onto her back to take aim at him, but Chesto was upon her yet again with cat-like celerity, and once again disarmed her by grabbing her right wrist and furiously slamming that hand hard a couple times on the hard marble floor.

“Oh you are so gonna die now for that!” Chesto now had both hands on Coda’s throat, and all she could do as her consciousness slowly started slipping away from her was try to resist his assault with her feeble left hand, and reach out with her aching right hand for the blaster that was so close. She begged in her mind for a miracle to somehow make those few extra inches to take the weapon.

An old memory came back to her again...one she'd nearly forgotten. It was a happier one where her big brother, Capo, was teaching her how to use a blaster on the freighter they were journeying on just days before they were separated by the pirates...

“Do it with one hand this time,” he had instructed her. “Put your other hand behind your back and try again.”

“But don’t I need both hands to steady my aim?” Coda had asked him.

“No,” Capo replied. “I can tell your hands don’t work well together. The closer they are together, the more they shake. See the difference now that you’re holding one-handed? Give it a shot.”

And sure enough, her shots were more accurate on the squishy mannequin target, and she felt calmer. Her left hand, however, felt twitchy on its own at her back, like it was bored doing nothing and being left out of all the fun. Her right hand, free from its dependence on the left’s support, felt solid and firmly in command.

“You’re a finesse shooter, Zara,” Capo declared, using the more personal shorthand of her name that only Capo and their mother was allowed to say. “No one says you have to fight like me. There’s strength in being yourself. Use that. Just be you...”

Coda ignored Chesto and her need to breathe, and simply imagined herself reliving that day. She needed the blaster to practice. She needed to take her single-handed shot. Her chance to show Capo she was a big girl now. She could almost picture her brother's firm blue hand slowly pushing the blaster towards her. It began to spontaneously twitch. She was too exhausted and close to death to be shocked by what she saw. She was operating purely on faith, adrenaline, and the memory of her brother’s love. It bumped and shoved a bit further along the floor towards her hand, and her fingertips started to make contact with the grip. She willed it even further to her hand and with her last ounce of resistance, right as Chesto came close to crushing her windpipe, the blaster went off.

Saucy Feril entered the room in time to see Chesto grip his face in agony and fell off to the side on the floor, screaming into his palms. She went over to check on Coda who dropped the blaster and was struggling for breath again coughing as Saucy helped her into a sitting position. “You okay, darlin’?” she asked with genuine concern. Coda nodded meekly in reply.

Chesto released his hands from his face, and found his palms smeared with bits of blood and the scorched ash of flesh he lost from the blaster bolt that grazed him. It was a horrific wound that ran from the right corner of his lips up to his right temple narrowly missing his eye. Saucy looked up and easily spotted where the bolt made its mark on the ceiling. She knelt down, took the blaster, and stared at Chesto shaking her head.

“You attacked my property,” she calmly noted to him, looking down on his pathetic pained face without a speck of remorse. “Tried to kill her, even. That just won’t do. We had a deal, Brent.”

“You don’t get to say what I can and c-” he was already dead before he could finish his defiant retort.

Saucy blew the tip of the smoking blaster barrel with satisfaction after executing her now former business partner. “Poor drunk feller. Couldn’t take it no more. Up n’ offed himself. Sad.” She turned and looked down at Coda who witnessed the murder, but was too exhausted to be in shock at what she saw. The life & death mark of fear on Coda’s face, however, was still very much evident. “That’s my story, and I’m a gonna be stickin’ to it. You says anything otherwise to anybody, and yer dead to me, got it?” She offered her hand to Coda.

Coda nodded in relieved agreement, and Saucy brought her up to her feet.

“Is he...really gone?” Coda asked whilst catching her breath, still disbelieving of the situation and how it all transpired to end like this.

“Dead as a jawa run o’er by a sandcrawler, I reckon,” Saucy said with a cold, uncaring grin. She spat at Chesto’s corpse and added, “Good riddance.”

OFF and to be continued...

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