Disclaimer: Cowboy Bebop isn't mine.  Hard Candy is mine.  The crew of The Bebop aren't mine.  The Crew of The Rio are mine.  Faye Valentine isn't mine.  We broke up.

Hard Candy:

World of Two

By

C M Forde

"Amigos!" It always started like that, that same annoying voice with that same annoying word, Sal had never really appreciated the term 'Cowboy', and especially not when it pertained to her.  Zoe was working on something again, it seemed like Rio was always breaking down for some reason or another, and as yet Sal hadn't figured out why, and neither had Zoe, it must just be because the ship was getting old.  She watched the rowdy couple on Big Shots talk on and on about this bounty or the other, but Sal wasn't too interested.  Like the lady without a shirt said, there were three hundred thousand other bounty hunters in the system, what were the chances of Sal actually beating one of them to the punch?  When the last bounty came on though, Sal felt a twitch in the back of her neck, a subtle feeling that this bounty was an important one.

            "Zoe, where are we?" Sal's voice rung out amongst the aging pipe and steel that was the Rio, her only possession of any kind of value.  The younger woman came around the corner, hands on her hips above a pair of loose khakis and a red jacket that hung ill fitting across her shoulders.  Zoe pulled her cap up slightly, her face and hands smudged with grease and oil.

            "Coming up on Ganymede in an hour or so, why?"  Sal couldn't quite name the feeling she had, it was little more than a hunch really, but it was something that she never ignored.  The woman blew a bit of auburn hair away from her gentle brown eyes and pulled herself out of her old rotting recliner and smiled, "Just what I wanted to hear, there's a guy down there somewhere that makes me itch."

            Zoe's ragged golden brown hair stuck out from all points under her cap as she spoke, rubbing her nose once to accidentally leave a trail of grease across the bridge.  "How much is he worth?"

            "Fifty Thousand."  Not much really, but enough to get Rio in working order again.  Sal fished around in the front pocket of a pair of jeans and came up without anything but a handful of lint.  With a frown she looked up at Zoe, "Have you seen the key to the weapons locker?"

            Zoe sighed and pointed at an old beat up safe that had been shoved into the corner.  The door swung lazily open, a key still in the lock, "It's been that way for a week Sal, ever since you cleaned your gun."

            "Well why didn't you do something about it?"  She said as she made her way over to the safe.  Four handguns sat inside of it, strewn about in a disarrayed fashion.  Sal shoved Zoe's .45 out of the way and pulled out a very large .357 revolver.  With a smug grin she grabbed a box of ammo and kicked the door closed.

            Zoe sighed, "Because I'm not the one who made up the rule that the weapons should be locked up."  As Sal started loading her gun, Zoe went back to go fix whatever she had been fixing earlier.  Within a few minutes Sal's revolver was loaded, along with three extra speed loaders.  Trying to reload a revolver manually in a firefight has a slight tendency to get a person shot.  The girl grabbed a belt holster off a hook on the wall and fastened it loosely around her waist before slipping the massive gun into it and heading towards the bridge.  She passed Zoe on her way there, the younger woman mumbling something about a busted valve cap as she buried her head into a mass of pipe.

            The Rio's bridge was about as disheveled as the rest of the ship, where the cockpit chair should have been was a very uncomfortable looking stool, balanced precariously on three and a half legs and a stack of old newspapers.  Sal looked around and smiled, feeling pretty good about this bounty.  Something important was going to come of it, she was sure.