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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 23: Slade 258
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Kondor 263
Slade considered the door. According to his co-sponsors, on the other side waited a middleman in the Syndicate. The alien had already tried to threaten several of the ranked champions with Slade. Now the fist was coming his way.
Slade entered and five aliens looked up from their meals. Each of them was a dangerous being. Slade smiled, and drew his sword.
“Leave now, if you wish to live.”
Twenty seconds later, the eatery was empty except for the bartender. He had tried to leave, but Slade had pointed a finger at him. The server said, “Whoever you are, you don’t want to do this.”
“The Syndicate attacked me, multiple times, and came after my mate. Yes, I really do want to do this.” Slade spoke softly, his blue eyes hard.
“If I give you the information I assume you want, the Syndicate will kill me.”
“If you don’t, I’ll kill you.” Slade walked toward the bar.
“Ho-hold up. Maybe we can make a deal?”
Slade paused. He stood like an impending thunderstorm considering whether to unleash its wrath on the town below him.
“I’ll give you the information, and you give me some monies to flee and hide.”
“Will ten thousand factory-seconds do?” Slade asked. The startled look on the bartender’s face showed that Slade had overpaid, but he did not care. To him, the money was easily achieved, and did not matter compared to Shella’s safety.
The deal was accomplished, and Slade left. The bartending alien might be lying, but it had to look bad for him as he was not injured. The Syndicate would want to know why, and so the bartender had to hope that Slade caused enough chaos that his own hiding would be ignored in the greater mess. Or so Slade hoped that the bartender had reasoned.
In any case, he had an address to a warehouse where smuggled goods were held under the control of one of the Syndicate’s lieutenants. That was his next stop.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #525: Character Battles. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
